The dig against Handke is unnecessary. Feeding into a perception of him as some fire-breathing ideologue of Slavic Identity is only setting up chuds for disappointment when they read his books and find out they're all about guys picking mushrooms in the woods and thinking about their parents.
Agreed—in fact it was not meant as a dig against him: Repetition (a fantastic book) IS about an obsession with hi (his hero’s) Slovenian roots… nor do I think there is anything wrong with it. The point was that such investments are a function of the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. So if it came out as negative / dismissive—not what I meant to say.
Yes it's fascinating how the prize changed so distinctly in the post WWII period! But we should consider that our own judgements are also time-bound. It's not impossible that we might someday come to a moment when Sinclair Lewis--fresh-faced, open-hearted, vital--is considered a superior writer to, say, worn-out, world-weary Faulkner. Sometimes I don't think it would be a terrible thing if the Nobel Prize recognized authors who were closer to the center of their culture: if it started awarding, say, James Michener instead of William Faulkner. Might be good for us to recognize that it is more possible than we think for writing to touch people, and that part of our sense of literature's exhaustion is that we have defined "literature" as precisely that which does not touch most people.
Yes! I didn't mean to suggest that post-WW2, people began to see the truth. They just shifted to a new perspective that seemed compelling enough to a bunch of people, and now seems very much a product of its age.
The one argument to be made for Faulkner's superiority over Lewis is about the formal influence Faulkner had on mid- to late-20th c writing. (There would have been no Toni Morrison without Faulkner.) Not sure the same can be said about Lewis. But in terms of enjoyment value: I can totally see that a Lewis revival could happen.
20th c. literary culture was about a tension between commercial value and aesthetic quality. This was an ideology, and a powerful one. But its dominance was also a historical phenomenon, not to be taken for granted.
(Let me say in passing that the comment of mine that you mention is gone because Naomi Kanakia deleted it. It wasn't inflammatory, and was the product of a certain amount of reading—it included a short bibliography—so it's a pity she did that. I'm just learning things here at Substack. From now on I'll keep copies of posts, and I'll know that not everyone's interested in dialogue.)
The reading you propose can, I think, account for a large portion of the decisions made by the committee over the years. The vicissitudes of nationalism—from the promotion of nation-states, to the acknowledgment of "nations without a sovereign state," to the inclusion of ethnicities and cultures that are perceived as marginalized or endangered—has the same history in my own field of art history.
In the 19th century, art history was a nationalist enterprise, and it has grown into a complex of national and regional practices that actively seek overlooked practices. When German art history developed the idea of Weltgeschichte in the late 19th century, the logic of the texts made it clear that it was Germany's mastery of the discipline that enabled it to write the history of world art. In the late 20th c., with the rise of massive single-volume textbooks in North America, the manifest international reach of the US underwrote the unspoken obligation to represent the world's art in a book.
The anomaly of the Swedish Academy, as you point out, is that it has been a marginal participant in the power structures of Europe, giving it an irreducible double obligation to represent itself and the larger world. (The extreme of that pendulum swing was 1974, when the prize went to two Swedes—although I have to say that I'm grateful for that preposterous decision because it introduced me to Harry Martinson.)
This is to say that your analysis could be extended to other arts and other prizes. If you do that, it would be good to include a history of ideas of literature that are not tied to nationalism. It was Nobel's own stricture that the prize go to a writer who worked "in an idealistic direction" ("i idealisk riktning"). The general sense of that requirement—which as you know caused a lot of confusion—was that the work not be symbolist or realist, but would espouse and expound on humanist ideals. It was that understanding that initially blocked Joyce and other modernists.
The common observation that avant-garde authors couldn't win can go too far toward reinforcing the self-affirming cliché of the rebarbative, difficult modernist writer. But as the committee drifted away from Nobel's criterion, they became more beholden to the evolving ideas of national and ethnic identity. To tell the history of the committee's ideas about literature, it would be necessary to read between the (few) lines of their official citation statements. Some wholly support your reading in terms of nations:
Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”—a perfect formulation of the recent awareness of ongoing diasporas.
Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."
Others, however, show remnants or slivers of literary values:
Jon Fosse for his novels and plays "which give voice to the unsayable”—an inheritance of Beckett and other existential mid-century modernists.
Annie Ernaux for her work that "uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory"—an echo of the ideal instituted for modernism by Proust.
Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”—a faint echo of Camus's The Stranger there.
And so on: there aren't many tea leaves, but they're there. The cup isn't clean.
As a schematic account, I would argue for three Nobel "regimes": the romantic-nationalist, the humanist-universalist, and then the current pluralist, which of course has traces of both, and of other ideologies as well, but ultimately fails to cohere into any vision of what literature should be doing. Which is I think consistent with your suggestions.
One could elaborate this argument by extending to other prizes, literary and other: that would be a book. As I recall, James English's book about *The economy of prestige* doesn't have much to say about the aesthetic etc. rationales of prizes, and it is very much focused on the American present (of the 1990s).
And of course, if the process of globalization is going to stop and reverse, as it now might, the logic of world literature, and with it, the logic of prizes will also change.
The three "regimes" is a good idea; from my perspective those are stages in the imagination of the nation and its successors, and the different ways of acknowledging that the subject is literature (since awards based on criteria of national and ethnic representation could be given to work in any field) are a separable subject. In art history, the fact of the art being visual is sometimes ancillary to the political message the artist or critic wants to convey: i.e., the medium is in that sense arbitrary. The division, in art history, is called the "aesthetic" (modernism and its successors, attention to medium and materiality) and "anti-aesthetic" (politically-oriented art since the 1960s). There is no consensus, in my field, about how to think about bringing those together. Hence the brief nods in the Nobel citations. (About that post, by the way: she blocked me—apparently I'm the one who can't see my own response!)
What is not clear to me whether the Nobel Prize as an institution was ever thoroughly modernist / aesthetic-centered / medium-specific. (Just to be fully explicit, I understood the three regimes as a historical sequence, obviously overlapping but each dominating a different period.)
The mid-century citations are often (although definitely not always) about humanity / humanism and ethical values.
Of course there was formalism in literary criticism: but the public discourse about literature was always tinged with some sense of the heteronomy of art. The Nobel's values are only partially and indirectly reflective of what professional criticism was doing / saying (and that professional criticism was also always plural of course.)
I wonder what this looked like in public discourse about art? (In art, what venues or statements would be comparable to the Nobel citations?)
But the crucial point is: historically, both in literature and art, the inherently pluralistic anti-aesthetic impulse wins out, without settling on any particular point of orientation. Art is not seen as autonomous or autotelic--but the telos is a moving target, indeed it is its mobility that becomes the one constant factor...
This is really interesting. Personally I think the Nobel is a useful prize simply because it gets people reading good books. Most readers are going to read what’s recommended to them from prizes or The NY Times or wherever. Of course you can quibble over certain winners, but it can only be a good thing that you can walk into a book store and pick up someone like Jon Fosse in English. You couldn’t do this without the Nobel.
The dig against Handke is unnecessary. Feeding into a perception of him as some fire-breathing ideologue of Slavic Identity is only setting up chuds for disappointment when they read his books and find out they're all about guys picking mushrooms in the woods and thinking about their parents.
Agreed—in fact it was not meant as a dig against him: Repetition (a fantastic book) IS about an obsession with hi (his hero’s) Slovenian roots… nor do I think there is anything wrong with it. The point was that such investments are a function of the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. So if it came out as negative / dismissive—not what I meant to say.
Ah, okay. Sorry, no intention of starting a fight.
Yes it's fascinating how the prize changed so distinctly in the post WWII period! But we should consider that our own judgements are also time-bound. It's not impossible that we might someday come to a moment when Sinclair Lewis--fresh-faced, open-hearted, vital--is considered a superior writer to, say, worn-out, world-weary Faulkner. Sometimes I don't think it would be a terrible thing if the Nobel Prize recognized authors who were closer to the center of their culture: if it started awarding, say, James Michener instead of William Faulkner. Might be good for us to recognize that it is more possible than we think for writing to touch people, and that part of our sense of literature's exhaustion is that we have defined "literature" as precisely that which does not touch most people.
Yes! I didn't mean to suggest that post-WW2, people began to see the truth. They just shifted to a new perspective that seemed compelling enough to a bunch of people, and now seems very much a product of its age.
The one argument to be made for Faulkner's superiority over Lewis is about the formal influence Faulkner had on mid- to late-20th c writing. (There would have been no Toni Morrison without Faulkner.) Not sure the same can be said about Lewis. But in terms of enjoyment value: I can totally see that a Lewis revival could happen.
20th c. literary culture was about a tension between commercial value and aesthetic quality. This was an ideology, and a powerful one. But its dominance was also a historical phenomenon, not to be taken for granted.
Thanks for that very well-informed essay.
(Let me say in passing that the comment of mine that you mention is gone because Naomi Kanakia deleted it. It wasn't inflammatory, and was the product of a certain amount of reading—it included a short bibliography—so it's a pity she did that. I'm just learning things here at Substack. From now on I'll keep copies of posts, and I'll know that not everyone's interested in dialogue.)
The reading you propose can, I think, account for a large portion of the decisions made by the committee over the years. The vicissitudes of nationalism—from the promotion of nation-states, to the acknowledgment of "nations without a sovereign state," to the inclusion of ethnicities and cultures that are perceived as marginalized or endangered—has the same history in my own field of art history.
In the 19th century, art history was a nationalist enterprise, and it has grown into a complex of national and regional practices that actively seek overlooked practices. When German art history developed the idea of Weltgeschichte in the late 19th century, the logic of the texts made it clear that it was Germany's mastery of the discipline that enabled it to write the history of world art. In the late 20th c., with the rise of massive single-volume textbooks in North America, the manifest international reach of the US underwrote the unspoken obligation to represent the world's art in a book.
The anomaly of the Swedish Academy, as you point out, is that it has been a marginal participant in the power structures of Europe, giving it an irreducible double obligation to represent itself and the larger world. (The extreme of that pendulum swing was 1974, when the prize went to two Swedes—although I have to say that I'm grateful for that preposterous decision because it introduced me to Harry Martinson.)
This is to say that your analysis could be extended to other arts and other prizes. If you do that, it would be good to include a history of ideas of literature that are not tied to nationalism. It was Nobel's own stricture that the prize go to a writer who worked "in an idealistic direction" ("i idealisk riktning"). The general sense of that requirement—which as you know caused a lot of confusion—was that the work not be symbolist or realist, but would espouse and expound on humanist ideals. It was that understanding that initially blocked Joyce and other modernists.
The common observation that avant-garde authors couldn't win can go too far toward reinforcing the self-affirming cliché of the rebarbative, difficult modernist writer. But as the committee drifted away from Nobel's criterion, they became more beholden to the evolving ideas of national and ethnic identity. To tell the history of the committee's ideas about literature, it would be necessary to read between the (few) lines of their official citation statements. Some wholly support your reading in terms of nations:
Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”—a perfect formulation of the recent awareness of ongoing diasporas.
Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."
Others, however, show remnants or slivers of literary values:
Jon Fosse for his novels and plays "which give voice to the unsayable”—an inheritance of Beckett and other existential mid-century modernists.
Annie Ernaux for her work that "uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory"—an echo of the ideal instituted for modernism by Proust.
Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”—a faint echo of Camus's The Stranger there.
And so on: there aren't many tea leaves, but they're there. The cup isn't clean.
(When I now checked, your original comment was still there, the link in my post works. Here: https://substack.com/@jameselkins/note/c-104253331?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=6yydt So whatever glitch you were experiencing has now been resolved. )
As a schematic account, I would argue for three Nobel "regimes": the romantic-nationalist, the humanist-universalist, and then the current pluralist, which of course has traces of both, and of other ideologies as well, but ultimately fails to cohere into any vision of what literature should be doing. Which is I think consistent with your suggestions.
One could elaborate this argument by extending to other prizes, literary and other: that would be a book. As I recall, James English's book about *The economy of prestige* doesn't have much to say about the aesthetic etc. rationales of prizes, and it is very much focused on the American present (of the 1990s).
And of course, if the process of globalization is going to stop and reverse, as it now might, the logic of world literature, and with it, the logic of prizes will also change.
The three "regimes" is a good idea; from my perspective those are stages in the imagination of the nation and its successors, and the different ways of acknowledging that the subject is literature (since awards based on criteria of national and ethnic representation could be given to work in any field) are a separable subject. In art history, the fact of the art being visual is sometimes ancillary to the political message the artist or critic wants to convey: i.e., the medium is in that sense arbitrary. The division, in art history, is called the "aesthetic" (modernism and its successors, attention to medium and materiality) and "anti-aesthetic" (politically-oriented art since the 1960s). There is no consensus, in my field, about how to think about bringing those together. Hence the brief nods in the Nobel citations. (About that post, by the way: she blocked me—apparently I'm the one who can't see my own response!)
What is not clear to me whether the Nobel Prize as an institution was ever thoroughly modernist / aesthetic-centered / medium-specific. (Just to be fully explicit, I understood the three regimes as a historical sequence, obviously overlapping but each dominating a different period.)
The mid-century citations are often (although definitely not always) about humanity / humanism and ethical values.
Of course there was formalism in literary criticism: but the public discourse about literature was always tinged with some sense of the heteronomy of art. The Nobel's values are only partially and indirectly reflective of what professional criticism was doing / saying (and that professional criticism was also always plural of course.)
I wonder what this looked like in public discourse about art? (In art, what venues or statements would be comparable to the Nobel citations?)
But the crucial point is: historically, both in literature and art, the inherently pluralistic anti-aesthetic impulse wins out, without settling on any particular point of orientation. Art is not seen as autonomous or autotelic--but the telos is a moving target, indeed it is its mobility that becomes the one constant factor...
This is really interesting. Personally I think the Nobel is a useful prize simply because it gets people reading good books. Most readers are going to read what’s recommended to them from prizes or The NY Times or wherever. Of course you can quibble over certain winners, but it can only be a good thing that you can walk into a book store and pick up someone like Jon Fosse in English. You couldn’t do this without the Nobel.