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In a week, it will be revealed who will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Readers around the world will receive the message with curiosity and will get the books. In the newspapers we will contribute with inserted texts about the winner’s work.
Is that commitment still relevant? What price do we use each year to make literature an event?
I become more and more reflective when I read what the author and critic Kristoffer Leandoer writes in Svenska Dagbladet under the title “Why I left the Nobel Committee”:
“In hindsight, think I understand that even a really controversial award was deemed desirable, which would lead to additional jubilation: here Handke and we are at the alpine peak of pure literature, that the dogs are kept there in the dunes between the Forum receipts and the funeral speeches in the Balkans ”(SvD 29/9).
It seemed particularly festive for several members of the Academy to present the award to someone who was accused.
Bottom line: Handke was featured prominently in the work of the Nobel Committee as a middle finger to the Academy’s critics. It seemed particularly festive for several members of the Academy to present the award to someone who had been indicted after defending an alleged war criminal and relativizing genocide since the Balkan war.
The leandoes express the feeling of having been used as a pawn in the game and support the French expression that whoever eats with the devil must have a very long spoon. In retrospect, he realizes that the external Nobel Committee, no matter how seriously they took the task themselves, was at the mercy of entirely different interests than rewarding exceptionally good literature.
That such interests many were already suspected last year. For example, Magnus Ullén, professor of English at the University of Stockholm, wrote that “this is how the choice to award the 2019 Peter Handke Nobel Prize in Literature should be understood: as part of the ongoing debate post The Crisis Gang in the Academy has been working since Forum went to his grave. ” (Aftonbladet 10/28 2019).
DN’s cultural director, Björn Wiman, noted that “the award’s decision is the result of a vision of art and life that is still deeply ingrained among many of its members, more specifically those in relation to the scandal surrounding the cultural profile Jean-Claude Arnault believed that the Academy should be above both the judiciary and the norms of civilized society ”(DN 7/12 2019).
Instead, the Nobel Prize seems to have been reduced to a mockery of critics of the Academy and the “media.”
It must be said that the feeling of Ullén and Wiman that something in the choice of the award winners was clearly manipulative has now been confirmed. It was about, Leandoer writes, “asserting a vision of literature that made what was performed in public, all the blasphemy and curses, completely irrelevant, because everything important was drawn into a higher and purer sphere than just it was strengthened by the gaze of the media and the public. ” .
It is possible that both defend and reject Handke’s award with withheld intellectual honor. Or that had It could have been significant if official comments from Academy members when the award was criticized had recognized that the mix of aesthetics and ethics is a distinctive pain point in literature and something that definitely cannot be ruled out with permanent expressions of the kind “It is necessary to distinguish between authors and works.”
Judging from Leandoer’s testimony, it was not advanced discussions of the role of ethics in aesthetics that primarily guided Handke’s choice. Instead, the Nobel Prize seems to have been reduced to a mockery of critics of the Academy and the “media.” How to choose Nobel laureates with the emotional and intellectual ambition of an online role.
Read more: “Handke was the reason I left the Nobel Committee”
