THE PLANK DECEMBER 9, 2008
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I just got around to reading Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, and, well, look. I know, as an American, I can't be expected to appreciate the level on which such a cosmopolitan mind operates. But really: "If there is one virtue which the writer's pen must always have, it is that it must never be used to praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings." Really? In my humble experience, sometimes powerful people can do great good--i.e., Franklin Roosevelt--and poor people can do great evil. And vice-versa--the world is a crazy, complicated place. Most people I know gave up such reductive, proto-Marxism in their late teens.
But the real strangeness of the speech comes when Le Clezio name-checks American authors. First, he cites a passage from Jack London: "I remember the first time I experienced just what literature could be--in Jack London's The Call of the Wild, to be exact, where one of the characters, lost in the snow, felt the cold gaining on him just as the circle of wolves was closing round him. He looked at his hand, which was already numb, and tried to move each finger one after the other. There was something magical in this discovery for me, as a child. It was called self-awareness." Um, to be exact, that's from Chapter 1 of White Fang, not The Call of the Wild. But hey, this is only the most important speech of his life, right?
He also name-checks his fellow Nobel awardee, William Faulkner, citing how the Mississippian revealed the absurd cruelty of the world in Sanctuary. Now, Sanctuary is a pretty brutal book--but then so are most of Faulkner's. But Sanctuary is also by most accounts one of his worst, a pot-boiler about a kidnapped debutante who turns out to be not so innocent. Faulkner himself wrote, in a 1932 edition of the book, "To me it is a cheap idea, because it was originally conceived to make money." He even tried to block further reprinting of it. It's perfectly possible that Le Clezio loves Sanctuary and thinks it is a much better evocation of the world's cruelty than, say, Light in August or Absalom, Absalom! It's also perfectly possible that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
--Clay Risen
19 comments
Yeah, but you know . . . he also gives an honorable mention to Henry Roth, J.D. Salinger, and Peter Mattheissen, along with many other authors from all over the globe. I don't think it's such a bad speech. It's not an Obama policy statement, true, but it's doing different things (and writers always mess up references to other books -- they leave it too late to find a copy to check, and then wing it because you want to get that ref in there)
And perhaps even FDR, crippled by the polio he tried to hide for twenty years, was in some ways a powerless man too.
- ironyroad
December 10, 2008 at 12:35am
I think we all know by now that TNR is pissed of that no American won this year either and that Engdahl does not understand the superiority of Roth, but come on its all getting a bit childish.
- joelandersson
December 10, 2008 at 1:57am
It does bother me, like it seems to Clay, when writers don't really think about what they're writing.
"If there is one virtue which the writer's pen must always have, it is that it must never be used to praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings."
This is not only a silly idea, but is easily refuted by his own speech. He praises Dante for writing The Divine Comedy. Apparently, God is not powerful enough to never be praised in writing.
- bigfish
December 10, 2008 at 7:55am
joelandersson: For purely selfish reasons, I am very happy to see non-Americans win. I don't need someone to tell me that Roth, Ashbery, Rich, et al. are great writers. What I do appreciate is the boost that foreign-language books get when the Nobel Committee picks someone like Le Clezio. I'm eager to read a few of the forthcoming translations; I certainly enjoyed the piece the New Yorker ran a few weeks ago.
That said, a stupid speech is a stupid speech. (And yes, ironyroad, it's not entirely stupid; there are some very lyrical, moving passages. But there are also a lot of self-serving, childish riffs, and the general theme is so minor in its import.)
- Clay Risen
December 10, 2008 at 8:57am
The necessary implication of Le Clezio's view on writers and praise of the powerful is that both Virgil and Shakespeare were unworthy writers. I wonder: does his moral imperative apply also to other arts, or just fiction? Because a lot of great painters, sculptors, and composers have done their best and most lasting work in service of the powerful.
(Also, this is a prize that has been awarded to both Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, so it's a little late to decry literature that even faintly praises the powerful!)
Speaking of Virgil, I finally read the Fagles translation of "The Aeneid" this year, and for the first time in a long time I finished a book feeling that I had read the work of someone who deserves the Nobel in literature. Certainly the first time I've ever had that feeling about the work of a translator. A shame that Fagles is an American, chiefly known for his translations, and dead, all three of which would seem to disqualify him.
- rhubarbs
December 10, 2008 at 9:07am
This reminds me of the smug, vapid comments that Tony Kushner is prone to making about the relationship between politics and art. For example: "Good politics will produce good aesthetics, really good politics will produce really good aesthetics, and really good aesthetics, if somebody's really asking the hard questions and answering them honestly, they'll probably produce truth, which is to say progressive politics."
This quote begs all sorts of questions, but here's the one I'd ask Kushner if I got a chance: Mr. Kushner, have you ever run across an obscure 19th century Russian scribbler by the name of Fyodor Dostoyevsky?
- Androscoggin
December 10, 2008 at 10:00am
With extreme presumption, I offer this analysis of the choices for the Nobel in Literature. This is NOT a measure of the writers' merits:
Won because they were Scandinavian: Björnson, Lagerlöf, Heidenstam, Gjellerup, Pontoppidan, Hamsun, Karlfeldt, Sillanpää, Lagerkvist, Undset, . Jensen, Sachs, Laxness, Johnson, Martinson
Chosen for geographical balance: Tagore, Spitteler, Mistral, Soyinka, Mahfouz, Walcott, Angel Asturias, Andric, Aleixandre, Gao Xingjian, Kawabata
Chosen for political reasons: Bunin, Churchill, Agnon, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Pasternack, Neruda, Fo, Pinter, Jelinek, Morrison, Lessing, Gao Xingjian, Sartre, Saramago, Kertesz, Gordimer, Cela
Too prominent to ignore: Mommsen, Kipling, France, Yeats, Shaw, Mann, Pirandello, Faulkner, Hemingway, Eliot, Russell, Camus, Steinbeck, Sartre, Garcia Marquez, Paz, Beckett, Bellow, Heaney, Grass, Naipaul, Coetzee
Have to give it to someone from this country because it's been awhile, so we'll pick an odd choice: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, John Galsworthy, William Golding, Kenzaburo Oe.
Some dude on the jury really digs Greek poetry: Elytis, Seferis
We're not ready to give it to Grass so we'll give it to this guy: Boll.
No reason that I can think of other than perceived merit: Mistral, Echegaray, Rolland, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, O'Neill, Hesse, Jimenez, Quasimodo, Perse, Montale, Simon, Canetti, Szymborska, Milosz, Brodsky, Seifert.
(I think I left out a few.)
- drozenson
December 10, 2008 at 11:57am
I didn't realise people actually read Nobel Prize speeches.
I have read only one book by Le Clezio - Wandering Star. I found it an interesting book although by no means the best book by a living French author I have ever read. That would be pretty much any book by Annie Ernaux. Anyway, Wandering Star being about the life of a Jewish girl surviving wartime France and escaping to Israel might be of interest to many TNR readers.
- ndmackenzie
December 10, 2008 at 3:56pm
drozenson writes:
-- We're not ready to give it to Grass so we'll give it to this guy: Böll.
I don't think so. Böll may not have had a popular hit like The Tin Drum but his books are consistently BETTER than those of Gunter Grass - who went through a pretty dreadful few decades from the mid 60s to the early 90s. Who reads Local Anasthetic? The main reason why someone today might think Grass is better is because he is still writing books while Böll has been dead for more than two decades.
Anyone seeking a non-literary introduction to Böll should watch the film of "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" starring the magnificent Angela Winkler and directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta.
For my money, the most deserving German non-recipient is Christa Wolf whose limited output is easily a match for Grass and even Böll. Indeed it is easily a match for the writers on Rozenson's list of Nobel prize winners.
- ndmackenzie
December 10, 2008 at 4:10pm
The most deserving German non-recipient (because she was in the GDR?): Christa Wolf
The most deserving American non-recipient: Robert Penn Warren
The most deserving Brit non-recipient: Iris Murdoch
The most deserving Irish non-recipient: Thomas Kinsella
The most deserving Canadian non-recipient: Margaret Atwood
- ironyroad
December 10, 2008 at 4:39pm
Rozenson, don't forget Toni Morrison in your list of Americans.
After she won the prize, TNR penned some very snarky essay about how she didn't deserve it. It more or less said that she got it through affirmative action, ignoring the fact that she's a good writer. It's been a long time but I'm thinking that essay must have been written by the likes of Bell Curve sympathizers Charles Krauthammer or TNR's then house conservative Fred Barnes.
- satyendra
December 10, 2008 at 4:48pm
ndmac, ya got me. I knew nothing about Böll other than he wasn't Grass. I'm going to give him a try.
satyendra, I did list Toni Morrison under "chosen for political reasons", though this was not meant as a criticism of Morrison. I think she was a reasonable choice. Heck, even some of the Scandinavians seem like good choices-- Undset, Laxness, Hamsun. (Has anyone out there read any Gjellurp, Pontoppidan or Sillanpää???)
Much as I gnash my teeth when my favorite writers don't win, I'll admit that the prize has made me aware of some great writers that I probably wouldn't have otherwise known.
- drozenson
December 10, 2008 at 5:36pm
satyenda -
Toni Morrison absolutely should not have gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Beloved is one of the most painful novels I have ever been forced to read. When I later learned that she'd won a Pulitzer Prize for it, I was ashamed for our country. Her getting the Nobel Prize just makes me ashamed for humanity.
Then again, I loathe Hemingway. Perhaps I am just too much of an anti-snob.
- janus
December 10, 2008 at 5:42pm
ironyroad -
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin - and, like Joyce and Beckett, hoofed it as soon as she could. Although, unlike Joyce and Beckett, she probably didn't have much choice in her exile as she was a child when it happened.
- ndmackenzie
December 10, 2008 at 5:58pm
Hmm, I thought the most deserving American non-recipient was Mark Twain, the most deserving Brit non-recipient was Thomas Hardy and the most deserving Irish non-recipient was James Joyce. Come to think of it, the most deserving Russian non-recipient was Tolstoy.
- nbarry
December 10, 2008 at 6:54pm
Though I by and large agree with Clay Risen's derision of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio's acceptance
- Anonymous
December 10, 2008 at 6:59pm
ndmack -- yes, well spotted -- I'd forgotten about that, that Murdoch was born in Irealnd. How does the Nobel committee handle birthplace as opposed to country of citizenship/long residence?
- ironyroad
December 10, 2008 at 7:19pm
ironyroad -
I don't think the Nobel committees bother too much with nationality - the US complaints about writers not getting a prize are echoed in other nations. The nationalist hoopla comes from the media fomenting nationalist pride. Remembering back to the announcements in October I believe this was a very good year for Japan.
- ndmackenzie
December 10, 2008 at 7:39pm
The Nobel committee identifies a prizewinner by the country of citizenship, with a parenthetical reference to birthplace if the winner is an immigrant. Thus, Saul Bellow is identified as USA (b. Can.).
- nbarry
December 11, 2008 at 2:59pm