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
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?
ReplyDeleteHenry,
ReplyDeleteI'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.
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?
ReplyDeleteGad, no.
ReplyDeleteWhat 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!