2014 Nobel in Literature Predictions

Every year when Nobel time rolls around, people in say America's Last Top Novelist Philip Roth should get it. Sometimes, those people are Philip Roth. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner quotes him today: "I wonder if I had called 'Portnoy's Complaint' 'The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,' if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy."

The main reason that Philip Roth has not won the Nobel so far seems to me obvious: there is a whole wide world of great literature out there, much of it not written by Americans, and much of it not lesser for not having been written by Americans. So, for example, when the gambling website Ladbrokes says that the top three choices by British gambling houses are as follows (I am quoting Garner but have punctuated and numbered his description for list-making purposes):

1. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o;
2. the melancholy Japanese surrealist writer Haruki Murakami; and
3. Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian investigative journalist.
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These writers, whose bodies of work you may have varying familiarity with, may be in your personal opinion greater or lesser writers than Roth. I admit I myself do not know enough about Thiong'o or Alexievich to properly pronounce their names. And I wouldn't personally hand this to Murakami, not necessarily. But those are my subjective opinions, and the award of the Nobel will come from a mix of a bunch of other people's subjective opinions.

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Creative writing courses are killing western literature, claims Nobel judge

Grants cut off writers from society, whereas past greats worked as ‘taxi drivers and waiters’ to feed their imaginations, says Horace Engdahl

Western literature is being impoverished by financial support for writers and by creative writing programmes, according to a series of blistering comments from Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl, speaking shortly before the winner of the Nobel prize for literature is awarded.

In an interview with French paper La Croix, Engdahl said that the “professionalisation” of the job of the writer, via grants and financial support, was having a negative effect on literature. “Even though I understand the temptation, I think it cuts writers off from society, and creates an unhealthy link with institutions,” he told La Croix. “Previously, writers would work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters to make a living. Samuel Beckett and many others lived like this. It was hard - but they fed themselves, from a literary perspective.”

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The Nobel Prize in Literature has a deservedly sketchy reputation among journalists, professors of literature, and professional critics. For every Samuel Beckett, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Gabriel García Márquez, whose Nobel triumph has thrilled book lovers and theater-goers, there is a Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, and Frans Eemil Sillanpää, whose shocking literary deification has left readers puzzling over an unfamiliar name and wondering whether it's time to once again change the prescription of their reading glasses. No doubt the regional and linguistic biases of the Swedish Royal Academy committee that select the annual winner explain a parochial impatience among Anglophone readers with obscure Nordic winners, instant literary celebrities with far too many syllables and diacritical marks in their names to generate veneration for their as-yet un-translated works.

If it's Quixotic for Thomson Reuters to predict with confidence winners of the Nobel prizes in the sciences, dismal or otherwise, then it seems utterly mad for anyone who reads novels, poems, plays, and memoirs, even professionally, to forecast the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. (Even predicting the winner of the Peace Prize seems by comparison a rational enterprise: simply identify a former or potential war-criminal, terrorist, or would-be authoritarian leader who has lately made nice with the world press). To be sure, we are sometimes pleasantly surprised by the Royal Swedish Academy press release. The stunning announcement last year that Mario Vargas Llosa had won the Nobel Prize for literature is a case in point. A Peruvian novelist possessed of precocious and extraordinary talents, Vargas Llosa was not considered a likely winner by journalists and literature professors. His controversial reputation as one of Latin America's leading champions of "neo-liberal" economic and political reform, his very public criticism of fundamentalist Islam, and his unstinting denunciation of the authoritarian government of Fidel Castro and his brother appeared to disqualify him as a serious candidate for the Nobel laureate.

And yet, is it so terrible that the committee members who select the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature annually exercise such predictably fickle, even perverse judgment? After all, it's been some time since any serious mind publicly claimed that literary criticism was a science, much less a predictive one. Since the rise of "aesthetic philosophy" in late 18th-century and earl 19th-century Europe, formidable attempts have been made by the likes of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and G.W.F. Hegel, as well their Scottish and English counterparts—Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—to articulate an objective theory of literary value and artistic taste. But their theories fell under the skeptical gaze of later philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche who dismissed the notion of scientifically and objectively verifiable literary value, indeed of all objective values. Rendered silent in 1889 by a debilitating stroke brought on by self-prescribed medicines to treat his stomach ailments, Nietzsche never saw the immense influence of his aesthetic and moral critique of objective ethical and aesthetic values. He never learned before his death in 1900 of the "marginal revolution" in economics begun in England, Austria, and Switzerland in the 1860s and 70s by William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras. We can only speculate on what he might have thought of this epochal shift in our understanding of economics, a seismic event that the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises recast as a more general "subjective theory of value" in the early 20th-century.

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Every October, some unsuspecting writer gets a phone call from the secretary of the Nobel Prize committee. And overnight, an averagely respected author is turned into a global literary celebrity. Quite the fairytale.

Rushing from radio interview to prime-time TV appearance to public event, this year’s laureate will certainly feel the motors of celebrity firing through their life and work. The real writer is invariably pushed to one side as multiple media-generated images pop up in his or her stead.
Suddenly the paparazzi are everywhere.

Schooled in the art of fictional self-projection, many bear this with good grace, and some relish it. But ultimately it is celebrity “lite”: people are interested in the stories of success, the tale, rather than the writer as a serious producer of literature. And so the spotlight, like most others, fades.

This is exacerbated in the case of the Nobel because, unlike other literary prizes, it builds on a tradition of rewarding people, not books. For many cultural critics, the focus on the “human interest” is an occupational hazard of the 20th century – the genesis of the celebrity as we know it. This has been amplified by the social media of the 21st century. And so, for many academics, it sits uneasily with the notion of “serious literature”.

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kuwisdelu said:

That's an awful lot of words to say "fuck it all".

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And the winner is ... Patrick Modiano. He’s 69 years old and the 11th French writer to win. He hasn’t been published in English as far as we can tell. There is nothing yet listed in English on Amazon.co.uk

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The real scandal of Patrick Modiano's Nobel win is that Philip Roth is a huge loser – again

What if literature’s ultimate prize is a secret plot by the judges to make a curmudgeonly old man yearn for even more awards? What if he’s not alone?

For years, the story goes, Roth would actually make the trip into New York to wait in his agents’ office for the call, a rough publicity schedule ready to be printed and activated. There he would sit, in a meeting room presumably prepared with refreshments, and at the end of the day, make the long, sad trip back to Connecticut. Charlie Kaufman could get a terrific movie out of this.

It’s puzzling as to why Roth’s failure has been singled out so frequently for this kind of attention, among the handful of other Great American Novelists who might have equal claim to Nobel aspirations – primarily Pynchon and De Lillo – except that he is delightfully incapable of not rising to the bait and, if asked, will respond in gratifyingly grumpy terms about the injustice of his Nobel exclusion. He has won every other literary prize in the book, including the Man Booker International, the Prix Medicis Etranger, the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, a position of dominance that, in line with European-held stereotypes about his countrymen generally, only leaves him wanting more.

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Anyway, Modiano won. Good for him and his many fans around the world. Now on to the more important question: Who becomes the next Philip Roth, champion novelist whose once-a-year loss we can all get behind?

Mmm, is there anyone out there, a white, male literary novelist, frequently on the receiving end of sharp commentary for the bufferish range of his interests, his excessive self-absorption, general snobbishness and high self-regard, who might, 10 years from now, translate into an annually frustrated expectation of a Nobel Prize for Literature?

Step forward Jonathan Franzen! Your new role awaits!

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