Skip to main content

A Surprising Recipient of The Nobel Prize in Literature

Image result for Handke

Two literature prizes were bestowed in this years' Nobel season. One was the deferred prize for last year, 2018: it went to Olga Tokarczuk,for a body of work that includes Flights and Books of Jacob.  

So far so good. I hadn't heard of her but I' m not well informed about contemporary Polish fiction so that fact isn't suggestive of any limitation in her merits.

What was a bit more surprising was the prize that was bestowed for 2019 itself. That one went to Peter Handke, the above pictured author of a variegated body of work including novels, plays, and screenplays. The latter category includes Wings of Desire.

What the prize committee may have missed, though, were Handke's politics. He spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milosovic, in a eulogy often seen as an apologia for far-right Serbian nationalism.

Relatedly, back in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian civil wars, Handke (an Austrian) wrote an essay on the subject that struck many as absurdly naive at absolute best. One author, Miha Mazzini, has put the point this way:

"I'll never forget the cold winter when Yugoslavia was falling apart and there was nothing on the shelves of the stores. We were a young family and my daughter was a toddler and it was bitterly cold. I’d spent the whole day in the queue for the heating oil and in the evening, almost frozen, I started reading Handke's essay about Yugoslavia. He wrote of how he envied me: while those Austrians and Germans, those westerners, had fallen for consumerism we, Yugoslavs, had to queue and fight for everything. Oh, how close to the nature we were. How less materialistic and more spiritualized we were! Even at the time, I found him cruel and totally self-absorbed in his naivete." 

One could of course defend the award by drawing a sharp line between artistic merit and moral issues. An author may be a jerk, even a kisser of the butt of dead tyrants, and still be a great writer. 

I'm not sure I'm interested in drawing such a strict line 





Comments

  1. Why not? Would you reject only giving awards to artists with offensive views (Knut Hamsun, Emil Nolde, and Richard Wagner also come to mind), or would you also refrain from putting on concerts, exhibitions, or other presentations of their work? Would it make a difference to you if the award to Handke were posthumous?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Henry,

    I'm fine with continuing to display Handke's books in book stores, staging Wagner concerts. etc. It will in general only happen to the extent there is a market demand for it Even subsidized orchestras don't enjoy playing to empty auditoriums, after all.

    The Nobel Prize? A long dead man refined an instrument of destruction, then decided that he wanted to be remembered for something else, so he created these awards, which are given each year by a committee subject to no market constraint at all. Except of course the extremely mild constraint of the carping of such cockroaches as I.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't understand your objection to the lack of a market constraint on the Nobel committee. Would you have the likes of Steven King and John Grisham win the award each year?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gad, no.

    What I mean by a market constraint would operate on another level. The closest think to "competition" for the Nobels themselves (in Literature) might be, say, the Pulitzers. Do the respective committees that award these prizes have an eye on each other? Are there Scandinavians who say, "dang, the Pulitzer's prestige as measured by scale X, has increased -- that means we're losing ground!"

    Presumably there is a finite amount of the-world-gives-a-damnness for literature awards. The Nobel and the Pulitzer both have sizeable chunks of that pie.

    I'd like there to be a scale X, in the expectation that there would be a competition, and thus a market constraint, but I'm not sure how it could be worked out.

    The idea is that the prestige of an award should follow from the perceived value of those upon whom it is bestowed, not the other way around.

    The Nobel is free to give an award to Handke, but I'd like to think that somewhere in offices with the word "Pulitzer" on the door someone is popping the cork on a bottle of champagne when that happens!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...