2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

UPDATE: Alice Munro (1931-) was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "mastery of the contemporary short story." Brava! As I wrote below, she is one of the best writers today, and as the Nobel Committee notes, has achieved utter mastery with the short story form. 

Alice Munro (AP/Peter Morrison)

If you haven't read any of her fiction, you can find some free online examples here on Open Culture. Among these, "Free Radicals" and "Runaway" are favorites. One of her earliest stories, "Boys and Girls," is also available at the link.

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According to the Swedish Academy, tomorrow it will announce the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Every year, usually a week or so before the award announcement, I post my annual blog entry about this award and the writers I hope will win, in the process tossing around a few guesses and suppositions, before concluding that no one I would be championing would be considered. (I have read that if one is a literature professor one can officially nominate writers, but I also think this comes with the proviso that one must be invited to do so, literature professor or not, by the Swedish Academy. I am officially a literature professor, among other things, but I would want to chance harming the possibility that a writer I admire might be cooled out because an unknown was writing letters on her or his behalf.)

Haruki Murakami

Last year the literature award went to Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan, someone whom I don't think I'd ever mentioned. I don't read or speak Chinese and cannot vouch for Mo's work at all, though the English translations do not appear to elevate it, at least in my opinion, outside the ordinary.  The year before that the poet Tomas Tranströmer received it. I repeatedly broached his name, in 2005, 2006, and 2009, not so much because I was a huge fan of Tranströmer's, but mainly because it kept popping up in online shortlists, he was a widely known and internationally renowned poet, and he was fairly prodigious in his output. 

Not that that matters; some Nobelists (T. S. Eliot, Elias Canetti, etc.) have produced relatively little, while others (Doris Lessing, J. M. G. LeClézio, etc.) have produced quite a bit. Quality is not the same thing as bean-counting; ultimately it should come down to the sustained quality of the work, though Alfred Nobel, a multimillionaire dynamite executive, stressed idealism. This has kept a few potential Nobelists away from Stockholm, though given some of the recent winners, like Mario Vargas Llosa, a politically conservative author whose works include a great deal of controversial material, and Elfriede Jelinek, one of the most unreadable fiction writers of the late 20th century whose novel The Piano Teacher is a model of anti-idealism, it's probably fair to say that the Swedish Academy is not following the letter of Nobel's will. (Which is a good thing.)

Ladbrokes' betting agency annually draws up an odds list of potential winners. I've cited these before too. Topping this year's list is Haruki Murakami, a leading Japanese writer and one of the most inventive contemporary novelists. Japan's Nobelists include two quite original figures: Yasunari Kawabata, the 1970 winner, whose prose demonstrates almost gnomic compression and who committed suicide not a few years later; and Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 winner, who primarily writes about his developmentally disabled son, though he has managed to transform this narrative constant in several works of great originality. Murakami, whose work can be divided into more straightforward realist fiction (Norwegian Wood is an excellent example of this) and work that incorporates speculative elements, sometimes very successfully (the stories in The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake exemplify this, as does his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and he has written several masterpieces, as well as extremely ambitious giant works that demonstrate a writer of tremendous skill and daring, so the Nobel Committee could do far worse.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Also high on Ladbrokes' list are Canadian Alice Munro, one of the best short fiction writers of the late 20th and early 21st century (and a huge favorite; whenever I have the opportunity, I teach her work); Svetlana Aleksijevitj (Alexievich) a Ukrainian author and journalist whose work I once assigned in a "Situation of Writing" course some years ago at Northwestern; Joyce Carol Oates, about whom I'll say nothing, out of decency; Peter Nadás, a Hungarian novelist whose books look enticing but which, at least the ones I've seen translated, are as large as my living room; former Swedish Academy member and playwright Jon Fosse, who probably should not be rated this highly; Ko Un, the highly ranked Korean poet whose name is a perennial (and whom I featured in my poetry month posts a few years ago; Assia Djebar, the very gifted Algerian feminist author who used to teach at NYU and became the first woman of Arab descent, I believe, to gain a seat in the Académie Française; Thomas Pynchon, an author I once avidly read and enjoyed, though I have not been able to bear his more recent work, but who would at least have to emerge from hiding in plain sight, I surmise, to receive the medal and speechify if he were honored; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the great Kenyan fiction writer and thinker who would be a first for his country and Eastern Africa below the Sahara; and Adunis, the highly lyrical Syrian author who also would be a great choice for a number of reasons.

It very well could be any of these writers (please, Swedish Academy, not Joyce Carol Oates if you are going to pick an Anglophone fiction writer; you have Munro and countless other authors to choose from, so please, just don't do it, and if it must be an American writer, there are so many others who don't just churn books out, but actually have created art), or some writer who is far lower on Ladbrokes's list, like Nuruddin Farah, or Yves Bonnefoy, or Michel Tournier, or Duong Thu Huong, or Leila Aboulela, or Juan Goytisolo, or Mia Couto. Any of them would be very deserving. (They also have Junot Díaz, Jonathan Franzen, Shyam Selvadurai, Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, and other unlikely winners--this year--in the mix too.) 

Several authors I always advocate for--Wilson Harris, Jay Wright, Adelia Prado, Maryse Conde, Kamau Brathwaite, etc.--are not even on Ladbrokes' list. Then there are writers that I am completely aware of who very well could emerge as top choices. Herta Müller strikes me as someone along these lines, but certainly there are many others. Perhaps they will surprise us all and give a joint award, something that should have happened more often, so that Nicanor Parra and John Ashbery, or Alexander Kluge and Ama Ata Aidoo, or Prem Ananda Toer and Elena Ferrante, an author whose work engraves itself on the inside of your consciousness. Another good choice among younger authors would be Alain Mabanckou. He is really one of the best Francophone and African authors writing today, and each of his last four books has been very good to exceptional. (Broken Glass is, I think, the finest of them.) In general poets and dramatists are selected less frequently these days, it appears, though this could be either genre's year. The streak of Europeans also ceased last year, so that's something too. And then there are newer literary genres; will the committee decide to do something radical and award the prize to a graphic novelist? Someone working in hypertext, since this year's Chemistry prize went to three researchers who work heavily with computers. I doubt so, but I guess we will see. 

Adelia Prado

As I type this, I have on the table beside me a novel by the late Robert Bolaño, one of the great figures in contemporary literature, who wrote more and better and far more original work than many people on Ladbrokes' tally, but who died too young--too early--to merit consideration. He joins the ranks of quite a few major authors, writing since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded, who were completely overlooked, including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, César Vallejo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Raja Rao, Jorge Luis Borges, and many more, were totally passed over, for various reasons. I think Philip Roth is going to join this group too, though who can say? I used to think it might be the great Mozambican writer José Craveirinha, one of the finest in his language and a major figure in African poetry, as he had already received the Camões Prize, the most esteemed award for a Lusophone author, and published quite a bit, but he passed away in 2003. There is the problem of translation, of course, but perhaps someone will bring the most deserving authors' work into Swedish, or English, as I once read that most of the Academy members do read English. (In Craveirinha's case, I hope to rectify that one of these days.) 

On a final note, ccording to the Nobel Prize site, the most popular literature laureates, in order, are John Steinbeck, Rabindranath Tagore, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel García Márquez, Winston Churchill, Pablo Neruda, William Golding, and Albert Camus. The site unfortunately does not clarify what "popular" means. Sales? Website hits? Queries? Books about them?  Does anyone know?

Bad News/Good News/Crazy News/Great News

By now the dreadful news from California is widely known: by a vote of 6-1, the California Supreme Court upheld the will of last fall's voters who enacted Proposition 8, an initiative which amended California's state constitution to declare that marriage could only legally exist between a man and a woman. The Prop 8 vote, which passed by a margin of 52% to 48% and which has sparked tremendous commentary and opposition, including public protests all over the country. The California Attorney General, former California governor and Oakland mayor Jerry Brown then challenged by the vote, leading to yesterday's eagerly awaited decision. The decision did include the following semi-positive note: the 18,000 same-sex couples who had gotten married before Prop 8 were legally recognized, thus negating the initiative's potentially retroactive power. Yet the overall result is newly denied rights for countless Californians and a court ruling that suggests that the California Constitution does not equally apply to all residents of that state.

To put it another way, for thousands of couples in California, there are no options for legal marriage at the present time beyond leaving the state. The California legislature has twice passed same-sex marriage bills, only to have them vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will be out of office in a year, so there is some possibility that with enough of a push, California voters could get the legislature to once again pass a same-sex marriage bill that would be signed into office by a new, progressive governor. At the same time, the threat of yet another referendum always looms, which suggests that the initiative process might perhaps be the better route: a popular referendum, organized by a much broader and more proactive coalition, with specific outreach to non-LGBTQ people of all to overturn Prop 8, written in such a way as to ensure its validity against a range of challenges.

Both of these options, as well as the current financial crisis and political gridlock in California, point to another pressing issue, which is the need for a new state constitution, which might include a limit on popular referenda and the power of such initiatives to make and change laws, including amending the state constitution. (I use to think that splitting the huge state into two smaller states, a Northern California, geographically larger in size but smaller in population, liberal state and a Southern California, geographically smaller in size, larger in population, and slightly more centrist, would be a good option and make both more governable, but both would constitutions that improved on California's current one if they came into being.)

While there have been peaceful protests since the panel's decision, I sincerely hope, however, those some of those in California supporting Prop 8 have come to realize the damage it has done and those opposing it recognize how crucial it is to have an effective, appealing and relentless, broad-based campaign that cuts across racial, ethnic, gender, orientation, and class lines. Here the politics of representation are important. It is not enough any more to follow the popular LGBTQ media's usual modus operandi of depicting only upper-middle-class white couples, especially in a minority-majority state, nor will it work to bury the issue of homosexuality and avoid using controversial terms like "gay" and "lesbian"; showing the true diversity and breadth of those who would benefit from having equal rights in the state and speaking with candor about how people's lives will be positively affected by repealing this odious constitutional amendment will go a long way towards ensuring a better situation for all there and, I predict, in all the other states that still have not enacted or do not permit same-sex marriage.

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Somewhat counterbalancing this awful news was the announcement yesterday morning of President Barack Obama's first nomination for the Supreme Court, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor. (Photo at left, Lynn Schultze/CNN) If approved by the Democratic-controlled US Senate, which is very likely, Justice Sotomayor would be the first Latina, the first Puerto Rican, and only the third woman to join the nation's highest court. I admit to getting choked up as I listened to her life story yesterday on the radio. The daughter of Puerto Ricans who came to the US mainland in the 1950s, she was born and grew up in the South Bronx. Her father had a third-grade education and passed away when she was 9; her mother then sometimes worked multiple jobs to ensure that she and her two siblings received the best education and lives possible. Justice Sotomayor, who is 54 and has lived with diabetes for most of her life, graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School, Princeton University summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa (and second in her class!), and Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Review. This is one obviously brilliant woman. She went on to serve an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan under Robert Morgenthau, before serving in private practice as an international corporate litigator. Nominated in 1992 by the first President Bush (ugh!) to the District Court of the Southern District of New York, she was then nominated in 1998 by President Bill Clinton and confirmed to the 2nd District Court position she now holds. She's written hundreds of opinions, some of which are summarized by The New York Times here.

Before Obama even selected Sotomayor, the GOP had begun gunning for whomever he picked, and, with the help of "liberals" like Jeffrey Rosen and the media, began smearing her. Rosen in particular deserves to be called out, because he launched a campaign in the New Republic against her using anonymous sources, which both the right-wing and the mainstream media (cf. Gwen Ifill's question on last night's News Hour with Jim Lehrer about Sotomayor's "temperament") latched onto. Mike Tomasky and Glenn Greenwald have written about this mess perhaps as thoroughly and persuasively as anyone. So it redounds to Obama that he did not allow this waxing, toxic Beltway consensus to sway his selection, which is a smart tactical move any way you assess it. It's an history-making gesture, it affirms the importance of Obama's Latino and female supporters (why on earth in 2009 is there only one woman on the US Supreme Court?), it replaces an unexpectedly moderate liberal with an expectedly centrist-liberal, and it creates a difficult challenge for the GOP and the numerous Congressional conserva-Dems.

In fact, despite the GOP's and media's characterizations, Obama apparently has chosen a judge who is truly centrist-liberal in her adjudication (as opposed to a progressive-leftist, unfortunately), It's likely she will vote and write rulings along the lines of the person she's replacing, Associate Justice David H. Souter, though some of her views, on issues such as executive branch power, abortion and same-sex marriage, are unknown. As current commentary about her judicial record shows, she generally has written rulings generally in the liberal vein, but has occasionally sided with businesses or the government against plaintiffs, including plaintiffs of color. While a few of her statements, such as the 2005 comment about appellate courts being the place where "policy is made" (which she immediately retracted) or her ethnic background and gender providing her with a powerful lens to understand the effects of the law in the everyday world will certainly spark conservative concerns, her overall profile strikes me as quite uncontroversial. (Nevertheless, Republicans are already uttering their usual extremely offensive, racist claptrap.) I hope that she moves further to the left the longer she's on the court, though having left-leaning allies, as opposed to the strong right-wing quartet now in place, might help this along. If the President gets another opportunity to appoint a justice, and I hope he will (2-4 would be great), I would love for his next nominee to be a solid progressive or even a liberal visionary, someone whose ideas and writings could serve as an intellectual and foundational counterweight to the likes of Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, Jr. Anyone got any names to send forward?

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And then there's the bizarre. By which I mean the "furore," to use the British form of that the word, surrounding the Professor of Poetry position at Oxford University. If you're a not a literary person or somehow happened to have missed this, here's a recap. Three poets--Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, 79, British poet Ruth Padel, 63, and Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 62--were finalists for the prestigious but low-paying 5-year position that requires its holder to do little but give 3 talks a year and be a poet at Oxford. Prior holders of the chair include W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Matthew Arnold, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Shortly before Oxford graduates and academic staff were scheduled to vote up a winner a few weeks ago, a number of them living in and around the university received anonymously mailed photocopies of a book excerpt from The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, detailing a 1982 claim of sexual harrassment against Walcott by a female Harvard College student. (This occurred the year before I started my freshman year, at which point Walcott had moved across the Charles River to Boston University, where in 1996 he was sued for harassment by a female graduate student; that case was settled out of court. I should note that I did meet him several times many years later when he read at the Dark Room Writer's Collective, and several other times after that.)

Once this anonymous campaign came to light, Walcott withdrew his candidacy, stating that

I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election, and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role, or to myself....

and went to say that

I already have a great many work commitments, and while I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it.

Hermione Lee, head of Oxford's Wolfson College and a Walcott supporter, urged Padel to dissociate herself from the sleazy campaign, as did others, and Padel did so, stating that she was not involved in the shenanigans and praising Walcott's work.

And then Padel, facing only Mehrotra, was duly elected, becoming the first woman to hold the post since it was created in 1708, and replacing critic Christopher Ricks. And then...the news emerged the other day that in fact, Padel had contacted two reporters via email last month to highlight Walcott's past transgressions. When confronted with the news, Padel had the gall to blame an anonymous student for pushing her to do it, before finally resigning from the post on Monday. The chair is thus empty. Supposedly Oxford will enter a period of reflection, before finding someone else to hold this now radioactive position.

I think it was perfectly fine for Padel and anyone else to publicly express concerns about Walcott's behavior. He is, without a doubt, one of the finest living poets and, as everyone knows, a Nobel Laureate, but his past record concerning the harassment charges do provoke legitimate questions and concerns. I imagine that Padel didn't just openly voice her concerns for fear that in doing so, she would appear spiteful, petty and competitive; yet such commentary did arise among some critics at the time that Walcott received the Nobel Prize in Literature, which in any case has gone to several writers with serious personal foibles (T. S. Eliot, Elias Canetti, etc.). Yet the subterfuge of Padel's actions is digusting, on top of being unethical and, worst of all, amateurish. There was no way that she was going to get away with this, so her actions also reflect badly and baldly on her judgment. Are there really people out there today who do not grasp that if you send someone an email, particularly someone in the media, it's easily traceable? To top things off, what ever led her to think she could trust the British media, who are known for their volubility and scandal-mongering? (On the Times of London online site, the uproar was described as a "sex row.")

I have to ask, is such a position really worth this level of skullduggery? I understand the prestige and any poet's desire for the acclaim it might bring (though if I had my druthers I would much more like to be appointed to the Collège de France), and the fact that the competitive element was already part of the process, but really, it is worth destroying one's reputation to get it? But I know that answer to that; I seriously doubt Padel is the first to have engaged in such behavior, which have surely occurred in the past and in other fields, and she won't be the last.

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On a better literary note, congratulations certainly must go to a writer whom it required maturity for me to appreciate, Alice Munro. During my late high school and undergraduate years I would see her name and stories, and for whatever reason, did not read them, and when I found little to interest me; the plots, the characters, the structures, the language of the stories themselves simply did not stick. Around the time I was deciding about going to graduate school, I started to read her work again, and it was if I'd pulled back a heavy curtain. Now her deft portrayal of characters, her ability to push plots to places I didn't anticipate, her careful and often unexpected play with time, and her seemingly simple but apt and often subtle use of language all drew me in. I haven't ever looked back, and have joined the legions of Alice Munro fans out there. She is without question one of the major living short story writers in English, and one of the finest short fiction artists ever. Yesterday she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction, earning about $95,000 and further international acclaim, and joining an august list that includes Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and Albanian fiction writer Ismail Kadare. She certainly deserves it.