2005 Nobel Literature Prize

[ACPlayer]

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What did Alfred Nobel himself think? His guidelines to the Swedish Academy were, IMHO, sufficiently balanced between the specific and the vague, thus enabling the award to change with the times and the personalities (of the Academy) : The candidate should have bestowed "the greatest benefit on mankind" with "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" (the latter term being the cause of much debate ever since).



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In Nobel's will he also writes (emphasis in mine):

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the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.

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Even though his will states that the interest is to the person who makes the contribution in the given year, it appears that for the most part, the prize for lit, medicine etc is given to people for a lifetime of work (some of which may be dated).

Even though I am a big fan of Stephen King, I cant imagine agreeing with his, proposed, winning the prize. Compared to such authors as Gordimer or Coetzee (both of which I have read as well) both contribute to the field in a more "ideal direction" IMO -- what ever those two words are supposed to mean.

[bobman0330]

Some of you might be interested in this:

OpinionJournal 10/17/2005 (subscription required, i think, and highly recommended by me):

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The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
October 17, 2005; Page A18

Harold Pinter's early writing for the stage was correctly described -- with no objection from him -- as "the theater of the absurd." But it has been left to the selectors of the Nobel in literature to make that definition postmodern and thus to drain it of all irony. Their choice of Mr. Pinter is a selection of absurdity quite detached from drama: a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque. "I have no idea why they gave me the award," said the playwright when the news was brought to him. This justified incredulity showed a brief flash of his old form.

But in point of fact, any thinking person knows precisely why he was this year's Laureate at a moment when a person of even average literacy might have lit upon Rushdie, Roth or Pamuk. Just as with the selection of Jimmy Carter for the "Peace" Prize, where the judges chose to emphasize the embarrassment they hoped thereby to visit on the Bush administration, the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq.

Mr. Pinter's work, according to the clumsily-phrased Nobel citation, "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Let us agree that his early plays -- he has not produced anything worth noticing since the 1960s -- do indeed show an uneasy relationship between the banal and the evil. But let me offer you a stave from a poem he wrote in January 2003, titled "God Bless America": "Here they go again,/ The Yanks in their armored parade/ Chanting their ballads of joy/ As they gallop across the big world/ Praising America's God."

This, and other verses like it, were awarded the Wilfred Owen prize by a group of English judges. When re-reading Owen on "the pity of war," I invariably find that it is difficult to do so without tears. When scanning Mr. Pinter on the same subject, I cannot get to the end without the temptation either to laugh out loud or to throw up. The sheer puerility of the stuff is precisely a combination of banality with evil: a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity. (And scrawled, I might add, by a man who helped found the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic.) One has had more enlightenment, and been exposed to more wit, from the walls of public lavatories, such as those featured so morbidly in Pinter's early effort "The Caretaker."

The Nobel committee allowed Borges and Nabokov to go to their graves unrecognized, while choosing writers who it is difficult to remember without wincing. Last year's selection, of a mediocre Austrian Stalinist named Elfriede Jellinek, caused a few winces even in Stockholm. And Dario Fo? What can one possibly say -- except that the theater of the absurd is apparently always on the road. Jose Saramago can certainly write -- just as Frau Jellinek can certainly not -- but one is compelled to suspect that without his staunch post-1989 membership of the unusually degenerated Portuguese Communist Party he would not have been considered. As with the Peace Prize, the award of the laureateship for literature has come to approximate the value of a resolution of the U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights. The occasional exceptions -- I would want to instance Sir Vidia Naipaul in spite of his own toxic political views -- only throw the general sinister mediocrity into sharper relief.

And sinister mediocrity has become Mr. Pinter's stock-in-trade. Is it really believable that a conclave of righteous Scandinavians should have honored a man who said, in loud terms, that the mass murder in New York in September 2001 was a justified "retaliation"? A man who described the genocidal war-criminal Milosevic as the true leader of the "Yugoslavia" he had subverted and cleansed and destroyed? A man who said that George Bush and Tony Blair were "terrorists," while Saddam Hussein was not?

Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy. His useless play "Mountain Language," extruded about a dozen years ago, drew attention to the plight of the Kurdish people but lost interest in them as soon as the subject crossed the border of the NATO alliance: Turkish Kurds were fine but Mr. Pinter would fight like a madman against any attempt to liberate their brothers and sisters in Iraq. Mildly rebuked by the American ambassador in London for "calling the U.S. administration a blood-thirsty wild animal" (I quote from Mr. Pinter's own narrative here) he replied: "All I can say is: Take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made." All he can say? Alas, yes. I have my own differences with the secretary of defense but this rhetoric is pathetic and nasty at the same time.

A luxurious literary/political salon, established by Mr. Pinter and his noble wife Lady Antonia Fraser to protest the Gulag-like character of the Thatcher regime, is often said to have dissolved because of unkind media ridicule. To the contrary: I know many people who used to attend that "salon," and I can tell you that it dissolved because of the irrational rages and hysterical harangues of its host, now garlanded for his services to the high calling of letters.

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Is this depressing? I happen not to think so. The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature -- two matters that ought to concern all serious people -- the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool's-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005).



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[nicky g]

" Not meaning to overly toot my own horn here"

Er... right.

"ut if the author in question was writing in German or Russian, they wouldn't need to receive translation in order for me to recognize them. I'm fluent in both languages and can read them in the original."

Indeed no, but my point was that being a bookshop manager doesn't qualify you, as many important foreign works won't get translated or sell well if they do.

"Or so you assert. Counterexamples would help to bolster your case some. Non-English language authors who have not previously won the Nobel Prize whose oeuvre is comparable to that of Roth, Pinter, Oates and/or Atwood. Chinua Achebe I'll give you, perhaps, and what has he really done other than _Things Fall Apart_ and _Anthills of the Savannah_?"

You want a list of all world class non-English language writers, because you think none of them are of the quality of the four writers you mention? That's a ridiculous task based on a ridiculous premise. I could understand if you thought there were proprotionally more English language writers, but no non-English ones? Be serious. I'll give you one perfectly worthy nominee: Amin Maalouf. I'm sure there are dozens.

:his is the same sort of assertion I hear from "lit snobs" practically every other day, and the reason they use it is because they know they probably won't be called on it because it's based on opinion, not fact. They SAY that Melville's stories have more "intelligence" in them than King's, but yet they fail to PROVE that to any reasonable person's satisfaction."

It's all based on opinion ultimately, and it's impossible to prove. But I challenge you yo find any work that teases out the range of literary and philosphical implications and underpinnings in King's work that is present in Melville's. I'll also wager you that in 50 years time, King will not have entered "the canon", if you fancy getting back in touch then.

"There have been plenty of years when a foreign-language author (or multiple foreign-language authors) has been one of the 4 or 5 most deserving potential recipients of the Lit Nobel. This is not one of those years."

Maybe this is the crux of our disagreement; I don't belive that in any one year deserving writers can be narrowed down to four or five. There will always be more deserving writers than the prize can hounour. But if there were, I still say it's impossible that they all write in English and unliklely that you'd have heard of all of them.

"No less an authority than Jorge Luis Borges, who counted Melville among his favorite writers, alluded to it in an interview with William F. Buckley, Jr. on the -Firing Line_ TV program."

And what did he have to say about King?

[Boris]

sorry. someone beat me to the Hitchens editorial.

[Boris]

Hitchens is the man.

[Cyrus]

That was a truly bad piece of writing by Hitchens. His (more and more desperate) political stance regarding Iraq makes him go overboard.

As usual, politics get in the way of art.

Harold Pinter is a great writer, no matter whether he is a fanatic supporter of the war in Iraq or a fanatical opponent. Ezra Pound was a great poet, despite his overt sympathy for fascism. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a collaborator of the German occupiers of France but he nonetheless wrote "Voyage au bout de la nuit". T. S. Elliot wrote some odious anti-semitic tracts but he is still magnificent. Mario Vargas Llosa has been denounced by every lefty in South Americe yet he is among the solid writers of the continent. A heapload of "leftist" writers are crap, despite being consistently, honorably against the war in Iraq.

The liver of Hitchens is long gone, by most accounts. His brain cells cannot be far behind.