The Amphibium, pt. 9
This is Vol. 9 of the Amphibium.
People Make Choices
Today the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes for Literature were given out, to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, respectively. Most of you are probably at least vaguely aware of why the awards for the past two years were being conferred at once, but, briefly: last Spring, the husband of a member of the Swedish Academy, which gives out the prize, was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, and in the fallout, the 2018 prize was canceled. (He was later convicted of two counts.) The process by which the misdeeds not even of one Academy member but of the spouse of one Academy member led to the prize's cancellation is fairly baroque, but a good summary of the whole thing can be found here.
Once it was decided by whatever metric that the Academy's credibility had been restored, they decided to give out a 2018 prize after all, and to announce it along with this year's. There was also some suggestion that the Academy would go about their business a little differently from now on. For starters, they would be improving their gender balance (14 of the 114 winners had been women); they would also attempt to correct their "Eurocentric perspective on literature" by "looking all over the world."
So, having looked all over the world, they've given the prize to a Polish novelist and an Austrian novelist (admittedly, one of them is a woman). Both are very much in the typical, pre-Dylan Nobel-winning mode: European novelists whose works announce their literary seriousness. That's not meant as an insult; on a strictly aesthetic basis they both seem worthy of the award to me.
I say "strictly aesthetic" for a reason. The Academy is often accused of taking extra-literary factors into account. It's commonly understood that a number of deserving writers, Borges and Nabokov among them, were denied the prize for political reasons, and Philip Roth once joked that if only he'd called Portnoy's Complaint "The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism," he would have gotten the prize long ago. So it's notable that Peter Handke has easily the worst politics of any writer who could have plausibly been chosen. He gave a eulogy at Slobodan Milosevic's funeral, and he has floated the theory that Bosnian Muslims massacred themselves in order to blame the Serbs. If not actually a right-wing ethno-nationalist, he is certainly an apologist for right-wing ethno-nationalism. (Josh Cohen did a nice round up of his politics in this review of a recent Handke novel.)
Whether any of this ought to disqualify him from the prize is another question. No one would really argue that his body of work is not otherwise deserving. Most of Handke's important works--including the three of his books that I've read--were written in the '70s and '80s, and if he'd been given the prize in, say, 1990, it would have seemed entirely justified.
But the fact that they could have given him the award at any time over the past 30 years only makes the Academy's decision stranger. At a time when they are trying to make the prize skew less male and less European, while also getting over recent controversies and restoring credibility, they gave the award to a European male who also happens to be the most controversial pick they could have conceivably made, and the one most likely to raise questions about the Academy's judgment. What's more, they had to have known this is what they were doing, since Handke has received a number of major literary prizes in the past twenty years, and every one has been the cause of major outcry. It's difficult not to read the award as some kind of message, though it's hard to parse exactly what the message could be.
Moving Right Along
I haven't said anything about the other pick, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk. It would be a shame (though perhaps typical) if Handke's award overshadowed Tokarczuk's. I've only read one of her novels, Flights, but I liked it very much, and I already had another, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, on my pile. Both of these novels were originally published in English by the small British press Fitzcarraldo Editions, which makes Tokarczuk the second recent winner (after Svetlana Alexievich) they were already publishing at the time she received the award.
I mention this because, amid all of the press about the Swedish Academy's efforts to regain "credibility," what has been left mostly unquestioned is why a panel of a dozen Swedes--no matter how much work those Swedes have done to address accusations of clubbishness and self-dealing and the covering up of serial rape--should be in any position to determine who is or isn't a major world-literary figure in the first place.
When the absurdity of the whole thing is pointed out, the usual response is that, well, yes, awards of this kind are fairly silly, but they have the effect of introducing readers to worthy writers.
Needless to say, this response does not really apply to Bob Dylan. But more to the point, it seems to me that the people who are really doing the work of introducing writers like Tokarczuk to readers are the translators bringing them into various world languages and the publishers (almost always small, independent presses) who are supporting those translations and publishing them.
I'm currently reading a wonderful novel, Anniversaries, by the German writer Uwe Johnson. I hope to write more about it after I'm done, but what's relevant for our purposes is that it's enormous--1600 pages; that it has been recognized as a major work in Germany since it was published in four parts over the course of the 70s and 80s; and that it had never appeared in its entirety in English until last year, when a translation by Damion Searls was published by New York Review Books.
Johnson died pretty soon after the book was completed, and perhaps if he'd been awarded the Nobel, it would have been brought into English sooner. In any case, I'm reading it now because of heroic work by Searls and his publishers, just as I have read Tokarczuk because Jennifer Croft translated her into English and Fitzcarraldo published her.
Every time the Nobel gets awarded, it always seems to me to be more about the pretensions of the Academy than it is about literature, and I've frankly experienced a good deal of schadenfreude in watching the Academy implode. On the other hand, when works like Flights and Anniversaries are translated and published by presses like these, it seems to me entirely about the work, and if it makes sense to confer on anyone the role of arbiter of literary importance, I'd give it to those responsible for this.
So, three cheers to Olga Tokarczuk, and (maybe) a half cheer to Handke, who is unquestionably a very powerful writer even if he's a political moron and a bizarre pick for this moment. And if the award makes it easier for outfits like Fitzcarraldo to keep doing what they're doing, that seems like a credible enough reason to keep giving them out.
Entirely about the work
If someone you know is looking to have a pre-fab opinion about the Nobel Prize sent directly to their inbox in time for this afternoon's water cooler discussions, please forward this.
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