The BS column: The Nobel over the century

(Published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2010, three days before the Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa.)


This Thursday, the next Nobel Laureate in Literature will be announced. Salman Rushdie, alas, is way down on Ladbroke’s list of betting odds along with Mahasweta Devi, but some would consider 66/1 a sporting chance — in honour of his new book, Luka and The Fire of Life, I’ve put a small punt on him. Most commentators think this might be the year of the poets, with a small group betting on the African writer Ngugi wa Thiongo. (MA Orthofer at the Complete Review covered the pre-announcement speculation in detail, here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd1; his comprehensive Vargas Llosa links page here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd8.)

Setting aside the merits of an individual laureate in any given year, though, a century and a bit is a good time to look back at Nobels past. The evolution of the Nobel, from a small European prize fuelled by a dynamite-maker’s fortune to perhaps the world’s most influential literary gong, is a remarkable story.

1900s to the 1930s: The first 30 years of the Nobel was a time of evolution, as the literature prize sought to define itself. The first prize went to Sully Prudhomme, no longer read or remembered, but famous for his poetry at the time. Over the next decade, the Swedish Academy’s fondness for poets, and its occasional partiality towards Europe’s writers, were both strong. Kipling was an early recipient of the Prize, and so, five years after Kipling got his gong, was Tagore. The post-World War I years were somewhat insular, and except for William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann and G B Shaw, few Nobel laureates from that period have stood the test of time.

1930s-1950s: The 1930s saw an earnest attempt by the Swedish Academy to broaden the Prize. Alfred Nobel’s will had stressed that the Nobel in Literature was for the “most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; by the 1930s, the Academy had broadened this to mean “body of work” rather than an individual book, and had decided to interpret “ideal direction” to mean works of universal popularity and interest. That accounts for the laureates of the 1930s — from Galsworthy to Pearl S Buck, Eugene O’Neill to Pirandello, Nobel Prize winners were increasingly recognisable.

The 1940s, disrupted by World War Two, saw the Academy reaching, again, for “ideal work” — but returning, with prizes bestowed on T S Eliot and William Faulkner, to the idea of literary quality and power as the driver behind the Prizes. Andre Osterling, the new secretary of the Academy, was responsible for persuading the Academy to applaud the pioneers of modern literature, from Hesse and Gide onwards. Many of the laureates of the 1940s had been discussed and rejected by a more conservative Academy in previous years. Osterling’s correspondence shows his discomfort with the Academy’s refusal, in the 1930s, to recognise such writers as James Joyce, and his determination not to repeat their mistakes.

1950s-1970s: Over the next two decades, the Prize looked outwards, acquiring a much broader frame of reference. With Churchill, Hemingway, Mauriac, Camus and Pasternak awarded in the same decade, the Nobel was becoming far more international than it had in the first two decades. Pasternak caused the first Nobel scandal, when Russian authorities forced him to decline his Prize — in 1964, Sartre would turn down his Nobel for loftier reasons, and in subsequent years, the Academy has carefully checked to see if authors will say aye or nay.

The 1960s and 1970s were golden years, with Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Kawabata, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer among those awarded. Few women made the cut — Nelly Sachs was the only female Laureate in all these years. And in the 1970s, the infamous Graham Greene rumour began circulating: gossip to the effect that Greene’s amours with the wife of a member of the Academy cost him his gong. True or not, it was a good story.

1980s-2000: Correspondence for these years is not yet available — the Academy releases its working notes with a 50-year time lag — but it is clear that the Prize was more aware of its powers. The Nobel now had the ability to make or break writers, and Garcia Marquez, William Golding and Wole Soyinka balanced then-unknown writers such as Elias Canetti and Claude Simon.

The 1990s was the decade of the poets, with awards going to four stalwarts — Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, making three of them world-famous rather than local heroes. It was also, very much so, the decade of gender equality, as the Nobel recognised Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and Szymborska — three women in one decade. This would be matched in the 2000s, with the Nobel going to Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Mueller and Doris Lessing, but it may be argued that the 1990s had the superior list.

2000-2010: The 2000s have alternated between the obscure — Jelinek, Le Clezio — and the safe anointing of the already famous — V S Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee. The 2000s, going by the list of laureates, reflects the back-and-forth as the Nobel goes to a worthy but obscure European writer, then to a better-known “world literature” figure. Perhaps the greatest challenge the Swedish Academy faces is the challenge of growing out of its Eurocentrism and opening its doors to the whole world of literature.

The BS Column: The unbearable heaviness of the Nobel

(Published in the Business Standard, 12 October 2009)

Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has been a fierce critic of Ceauşescu's regime in Romania. She is highly regarded in Europe's academic circles. She had received over 20 literary awards, including the IMPAC, before winning the Nobel this year. And I must confess an unliterary complaint: having read only two of her books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, I have about as much enthusiasm for reading her as I do for swimming through a pool of cold porridge.

The Nobel Prize in literature is administered by the Swedish Academy, the process of selection is rigorous, and the shortlist of candidates will usually begin at about 25 names and then be whittled down to roughly five, before a winner is chosen. In a recent interview, Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee, revealed that an author's name will often come up for consideration for several years before a nomination finally finds acceptance. All of this is imbued with gravitas; but none of this explains why the Prize should be taken as seriously as it is, except for the fact of its longevity.

The Prize's track record over the first thirty years of its inception, from 1901 to 1930, was dubious at best, with a smattering of the Yeatses, Kiplings and Shaws making up for a score of now-forgotten writers (Mommsen, Hamsun, Spitteler—names no longer read, even in their home countries). It redeemed itself somewhat between the 1940s and the 1980s, yielding at least a reasonable reading list of authors whose works have endured the passage of time. In the last two decades, the Prize seems determined to make political points and to shine a light on the obscure.

An uncharitable critic might detect the undertow of an anxiety that Europe might be losing its influence, that the great writers who are undiscovered by the British, the Americans (and a handful of Indians) will sink into obscurity, taking part of the history of Europe with them. What else might explain recent awards to Imre Kertesz, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and now Herta Müller? And there's a sense of drift with some other choices: Dario Fo and Doris Lessing, for instance, may have deserved their Nobel nods, but both received the laurel long after their respective works had ceased to exert a once-powerful influence.

It is not that these are writers of no merit: truly bad writers don't make it to the shortlist. In different ways, Le Clezio, Jelinek, Kertesz and Müller have made their contributions to literature and literary history. Consider this, perhaps, evidence of this critic's poor taste and judgement, when I say that reading their works has not convinced me that these are writers who will last, or whose works I am astonished and pleased to discover. Perhaps pleasure is a frivolous thing to want from the Nobel Prize; perhaps its august list of writers is prescriptive, a judgement handed down from a great height to us lesser mortals, an injunction to go forth and have our minds improved. It is frivolous to complain, as I do having read two of Müller's books and all that is available of Le Clezio, Jelinek and Kertesz in translation, that they bring me no enjoyment as a reader. And yet I find that enjoyment is important to me, personally, as a reader, and that in the last two decades, I have had little of that from the Nobel.


The Nobel in literature has now been awarded for over a century; the Man Booker International has made just three awards since 2005. The Nobel is administered by the venerable academicians of the Swedish Academy, a committee that rarely changes the composition of its members. The Man Booker International has a shifting list of judges, chosen from among contemporary writers every award season: it is peer-driven, with all the benefits and faults this entails. The first of its three awards went to Ismail Kadare, whose works found a new and newly loyal readership; the second to Chinua Achebe, opening up his work to readers who were beginning to forget him, and the culture he came from; and the third to Alice Munro, establishing the worth of the short story as a literary genre in its own right.

If the Man Booker continues in this vein, it will outstrip an increasingly insular Nobel literature award in the next decade as the prize to watch. Until we get there, though, I have to locate and find the remaining works of Herta Müller. Perhaps reading her will be a voyage of discovery and wonder, but I suspect this will be more like trying to read the Wodehouse-created authoress so admired by Bertie Wooster, Lady Florence Craye, author of Spindrift. That book, says Wooster, went down “like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads round Bloomsbury way”, but he, like this critic, had a plebeian soul and remained unmoved by her craft.

The BS Column: A Nobel for Mr Dylan

(Published in the Business Standard, September 29, 2009. I wrote this yesterday, unfortunately before someone sent me the link to this piece today-but it's nice to know we had the same idea.)

How many roads must a poet walk down before he is awarded a Nobel? The odds on the Swedish Academy announcing in a week’s time that Robert Zimmerman is the 2009 Nobel Literature laureate are low-25/1, according to Ladbroke’s.

That gives the tambourine man little leverage over this year’s best bets. Amos Oz, Philip Roth, the poet Adonis, Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon make it to the top of the betting lists each year, with many saying Oz might get the nod. Given the Academy’s penchant for awarding the Nobel in literature to the obscurely erudite, Ladbroke’s and other Nobel-watchers always add in a handful of sternly literary contenders, just so that the rest of us can say “Le Clezio (or Jelineke) who?” when Nobel hour rolls around.

But Dylan’s stock, Nobel-wise, has been rising over the last decade—the current odds place him ahead of Salman Rushdie (80/1, and if they give him the wreath, can we please unban the Satanic Verses in celebration?), on par with Alice Munro (who’s already picked up the Man International Booker), and a hair ahead of Chinua Achebe, Carlos Fuentes and Mahasweta Debi (all at 50/1).

Dylan’s Nobel chances are often treated as a joke; it’s assumed that the austere guardians of the universal literary fame would never unbend far enough to award the Prize to a song-writer. Especially a successful one. And there’s the question of how Dylan, with his twin aversion to formal dress and formal speeches, would react to receiving the Nobel.

The reason why Dylan deserves the Nobel has nothing to do with his popularity, or the fact that his works are actually still quoted, discussed and in wide circulation today. Doris Lessing and Dario Fo, for instance, are classic examples of writers who earned their Nobels in terms of literary merit, but received the accolade perhaps a decade late, at a time when their best works no longer have the same impact as they once did.

The argument for Dylan would rest squarely on the quality and influence of his work over the years, and the fact that they have now become classics of modern poetry, decades after they were first composed. It’s not just that Dylan wrote great songs—he wrote songs that were deeply rooted in the history of his times, and in a musical and verbal folk tradition that goes back for decades.

The only reason he’s been kept out of contemporary compilations of world poetry is because of a kind of cultural blindness, a refusal to see that a song, however popular, however well-known, however frequently hummed, can be poetry as well. This is in many ways a bizarre barrier: poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Dylan’s fellow versifier, Adonis, have, like him, recited their verses in front of massive gatherings of fans, and have heard their lyrics chanted by thousands of voices.

Not convinced? Consider these two examples:

“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind…”


And:
“Now in the final act,
disaster tows our history
toward us on its face.
What is our past
but memories pierced like deserts
barricaded by what we see,
marching under clouds that move
like mules and cannon.”

The first is written by Dylan (from ‘Chimes of Freedom’), the second by Adonis. Both are poems that ask, in different ways, for justice and revolution—and you could argue, on the basis of metre and imagery, that both are equally powerful.

Try two more examples:
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread…”


And:

“I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.”


The first is W B Yeats, the second Bob Dylan—but the Irish poet and the American troubadour reach for a similar rhythm, a similar rhyme scheme and achieve the same effect of intimacy. Both are excellent poems; currently, only one of them is written by a Nobel laureate.

I know, it’s knocking on heaven’s door to ask that the Swedish Academy take Bob Dylan seriously, but you could make the case that he remains one of the most brilliant and enduring chroniclers of our times. It could happen. All it would take is a simple twist of fate.

Orhan Pamuk's furious flame

(For the Business Standard, October 16, 2006)



"I don't want to be an artist," I said. "I'm going to be a writer."

That is the last line of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk's haunted tribute to the city where he has lived for the last fifty years. The book is the biography of a city, written by perhaps the best-known of its citizens, and an exploration of the early years of a writer, but Pamuk closes the door gently before he comes to the works that made him famous. He was only a little past fifty when he finished writing Istanbul , and it may have seemed premature to look back when he had so much ahead.

When the Swedish Academy announced that Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, many assumed that the timing of the Prize was influenced by political considerations. At 54, Pamuk is a young Nobel laureate, and several pointed to older, equally suitable authors—Philip Roth, Adonis, Mario Vargas Llosa, for instance.

But there's a reason why Pamuk's name has come up for the last decade every time Nobel season comes around. There are many twenty-somethings who make the same pronouncement Pamuk did; there are very few who can live by his creed.

At 23, Pamuk had already tried and rejected several professions. He came from a family of well-off engineers, but declined to join the profession; studied to be a journalist but dropped out; studied to be an architect and dropped out. He dismayed his family by announcing he would be an artist—"we're not rich like we used to be," his mother said during one of their many arguments. He escaped from the endless rounds of supplication and arguments into the "mournful streets" of Istanbul: "The sublime, dizzying, pure anger I felt…would leave me after an hour of wandering…wherever I went, as I got colder and colder, I'd be warmed by the furious flame of my brilliant future."

The one book by Pamuk I have never read is his first, widely considered a masterpiece in Turkey. Cevdet Bey and His Sons spans three generations of an Istanbul family, and is astonishing in its ambition according to those who have read the samizdat English translation. (Pamuk refuses permission to have this translated into English.) It reminds Western readers of the masters of the 19th century novel; from the few excerpts I’ve read, Indian readers would settle comfortably into Pamuk’s style, so close to that of Tagore and Premchand. He finished the book when he was 26; it was published when he was 30 and established his reputation immediately in Turkey.

Over the next two decades, it seemed that Pamuk had set out to rediscover—and, like Haruki Murakami, to transform—the modern novel. His second novel was Sessiz Ev, or The House of Silence , and instead of the sprawling canvas of Cevdet Bey , this spanned just a week in the riot-torn Turkey of 1980 and is seen from the perspective of three siblings mired in their grandmother’s crumbling house.

His third, The White Castle , was as different from his first two works as they were from each other. Pamuk had left the 19th century behind him—now he was operating in the realm of Kafka and Borges, with a nod to Cervantes. Set in the 17th century, The White Castle featured a captive Italian who is sold as a slave to a Turkish scientist who looks just like his doppelganger. This was followed by Kara Kitap , or The Black Book , in which a man roams the streets of Istanbul in search of his missing wife, ransacking her brother’s cryptic and brilliant newspaper columns for clues to her whereabouts. Pamuk was barely forty by the time he had finished these four works, and many contemporary novelists would give an arm to have written just one of them.

The books that made Pamuk famous in the West—the willfully obscure My Name is Red, Istanbul, and the unsettling Snow--were written over the next 14 years, and he is finishing yet another novel.

For those of us who discovered Pamuk in the same way that we discovered Murakami, with astonishment and delight, it doesn’t feel as though the Nobel Prize was bestowed on him prematurely. It’s just that Pamuk is a rarity: a writer who, having announced his intention to write at an early age, didn’t discuss the matter any further. Instead, he roamed Istanbul for inspiration and found it; he weathered controversy, and suspicion at his early success; he sat down in that famous study facing the Bosporus, the stretch of water where Europe meets Asia, and he wrote as though his life depended on it.