Over the last decade the Nobel Prize for Literature has alternated between a proscriptive award and a descriptive one. A proscriptive award takes little known but worthy authors and presents them in a bow and wrapping to the world, telling everyone to read. A descriptive award honors the authors that have, to a large extent, already won the accolades and critical honor, and the Nobel is mere icing on an otherwise heavily iced career.
Look at the last ten winners. Six had already received international notoriety:
- Mario Vargas Llosa (2010)
- Doris Lessing (2007)
- Orhan Pamuk (2006)
- Harold Pinter (2005)
- J.M. Coetzee (2003)
- V.S. Naipaul (2001)
Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics had been right all along.
But the remaining four were relative unknowns:
- Herta Müller (2009 — a huge dark horse)
- J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008 — collective response from U.S. — “who”?)
- Elfriede Jelinek (2004 — a head scratcher)
- Imre Kertész (2002)
Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics still didn’t have the lowdown on the truly valuable writers, and that the Nobel committee retained enough power to steer tastes.
I admire the variety of selection, even if I wish some perennially favorites would be crowned (Murakami especially). Most prizes use a singular mode of logic to determine who should receive the prize — a judgment of quality — but the Nobel committee seems to vary among a whole host of considerations, none of which ever remain predominant for any number of years.
Supposed considerations of the Nobel Committee?
They want to get a writer from a particular geographical region, usually Africa. There are never enough women laureates. There are too many fiction writers and not enough poets. It won’t be an American because Americans are too “provincial, too isolated, too insular.” They won’t pick a European because Europeans have dominated the prize (now who’s acting provincially, my Swedish friends?). They don’t want someone who is spread too widely (I’m looking at you, Haruki Murakami). They want to capitalize on current events. (Arab Spring has been bandied about with enough frequency to make it seem as though an Arabic writer was guaranteed to win.)
All of these are nonsense. Or at least all of them are changed so frequently it does you no good to use them to narrow down your selection. There is only one common factor in the Nobel Prize for literature, and that is political engagement. If a writer hasn’t been involved in political action, both personally and in their writing, they don’t stand a chance. Which is why Thomas Pynchon always seems a far-fetched selection. Why would the committee ever choose a recluse?
