Nobel Prize: Don’t Feed Swedish Trolls
By: F. R. Foksal
Tags: Nobel Prize In Literature, Literature, Culture, Books, Nobel Prize

CULTURE

Nobel Prize: Don’t Feed Swedish Trolls

If you think the phenomenon of trolls — and of trolling in general — largely originated with the advent of the current political turmoil and has since then become the strictly Russian preserve, that trolls mostly operate in Cyrillic, that it’s a relative novelty and a byproduct of the burgeoning popularity of smartphones and too easy access to the internet by people devoid of access to their brain cells, you’d better think twice. Or thrice even.

After all, none other than the Swedish Academy responsible for giving the world the next Nobel Laureate in Literature has been a precursor and a daring pioneer of this dubious pastime, and has proudly been trolling legions of readers, critics, scholars, and, above all, writers, across the globe for more than a hundred years now. Its learned members have been doing it with a masterful touch and enviable finesse long before trolling became a thing — if not THE thing — and before the now-ubiquitous word “meme” was coined in the uncharted depths of the web.

The controversies and scandals surrounding the highest laurel in the literary world are not unique to the Nobel Prize. In fact, they’re an inseparable side effect of such enterprises, like satellites orbiting a celestial body. The prize itself is affected and marred by every ailment and affliction known to torment this kind of accolades, as if it were following some arcane blueprint to the letter, to the bluish full stop even.

Even though it’s considered a crowning achievement of every career in fiction writing, it’s not an impartial and objective assessment of writers’ accomplishments and artistic output, and, what’s more, it was never meant to be.

After all, it’s a virtually impossible task to please everyone, to satisfy every expectation, to pander to every single bookish taste there is — and, mind you, that’s the most charitable explanation of the prize’s tremendously divisive nature. And even though it’s considered a crowning achievement of every career in fiction writing, it’s not an impartial and objective assessment of writers’ accomplishments and artistic output, and, what’s more, it was never meant to be. It suffices to take so much as a cursory glance at Alfred Nobel’s last will, which has been posted on the Nobel Committee’s website for one’s convenience, if not irritation, for it knocks the smoking gun — if not a smoldering stick of dynamite, this being Nobel’s legacy — out of the hands of its sworn detractors. For it’s there that the belated benefactor himself left detailed instructions on what kind of writing should be honored with the prize established in his name.

Here it is:

The interest is to be divided into five equal parts and distributed as follows: … one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.

You can find it at the very end of this sentence: who … produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction. It’s as unclear and equivocal a guideline as you can get, and to become any vaguer it would have to be soaked in water until the ink became all blurry and the writing indecipherable. Nonetheless, the Swedish Academy (let’s call it “the Academy” for short) used to adhere to it quite faithfully, if not blindly, in the earliest years of its functioning, that is, its prize-related infancy. And to it — or rather to the Academy’s glaring misconstruction of this already imprecise directive — we owe several infamous omissions and egregious snubs, only a handful in the long and rich history of that literary jury’s lapses of judgment.

Thus, the members of the Academy have their backs well covered by the ambiguity of Nobel’s will, and can very much do with the prize as they please. That’s why it reflects the subjective tastes and opinions of those bookish judges (which turn out to be rather quirky and unorthodox, to put it mildly), and that’s why it doesn’t have to — and it rarely does — converge with the critical evaluation of a writer’s oeuvre by the academia or with the passions and sympathies of the reading public.

Thus, the members of the Academy have their backs well covered by the ambiguity of Nobel’s will, and can very much do with the prize as they please.

The unarguable fact is that the Academy is more notable for its notorious omissions than for the deserving individuals it managed to reward for their artistic excellence and contribution to world literature. For this reason, there’s a prevailing opinion that when it comes to the Nobel Prize in Literature, you’re in a much better company when it passes you over than when you actually get it. Had it not captured the rare birds like Toni Morrison, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, or William Faulkner, its track record would have been extraordinarily poor and littered with unremarkable names who were forgettable even at the time of their travelling to Stockholm — all perfumed and tuxedoed — to receive the coveted award. For one is tempted to ask: What’s the Academy’s excuse for having failed to recognize the illustrious likes of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Mark Twain, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and August Strindberg (to name just a few), who are nearly unanimously hailed as the greatest of the great and enjoy firm places in the pantheon of 20th-century literature? Or what should we make of the prize’s earliest, if not original, sin: The outrageous snub of Tolstoy who was intended to be the first recipient inaugurating the prize’s long list of worthy laureates? Now, after many decades and countless torn-off calendar pages, it seems that this initial mistake keeps haunting the prize by attracting and attaching to it an unending string of mediocrities and second-rate scribblers who litter its over 100-year-old history. The curious thing is: If, in the middle of the night, you get an urge to compile a comprehensive list of the 20th- and 21st-century literary nonentities, don’t bother, for it already exists. It’s called the list of the Nobel Prize winners in Literature.

Naturally, after a series of embarrassing misfires and outrageous missteps, there usually comes a time to recognize a few well-deserving nominees, as if the Academy, yielding to the backlash they unleash every now and then, hoped to assuage the wrath of the book-reading community and make up for its recent transgressions. But this period of atonement and making amends does not last long, and, more often than not, after one or two peace offerings the Academy is once again back on track of doing what it does best, that is, shamelessly trolling us, the readers.

But its gravest sin, drawing such ire of readers and critics alike, lies not in its subjectivity and succumbing to various trends — because everyone is perfectly entitled to their sympathies and beliefs — but in its endless and unabashed pretending that it’s impeccably objective as well as unbiased, that its verdicts are cleansed of even a modicum of personal preferences and safely insulated from the typically human emotions as antipathy and dislike. It lies in the fact that the Swedish Academy is masquerading as the ultimate fair judge and unprejudiced final arbiter, as a sterile and germ-free god and the guardian of the realm of letters, merely presiding over the literary judgment day. Worst of all, hardly anyone dares to call its bluff.

So, the main problem here is not what the Academy is, but what it professes to be.

But its gravest sin, drawing such ire of readers and critics alike, lies not in its subjectivity and succumbing to various trends but in its endless and unabashed pretending that it’s impeccably objective as well as unbiased.

That’s why Americans are rightly enraged when they’re being deprived — after the Academy openly declared war on the authors coming from across the pond — of the chance of winning the prize in the foreseeable future on the basis of the Academy’s unconcealed prejudice against American writing in general. It takes no Swedish gumshoe to deduce that there certainly are other ulterior motives (of a more political nature) underlying this policy as well. But all the time the Academy states that it isn’t American politics or supposed imperialism — or whatever they call it in Swedish — that is the root cause of the unprecedented snub of the entire country, but that it’s a fair-minded and just assessment of the alleged inferiority and insularity of American writing, free of even a single political blemish. Here’s another example: Not that long ago, the Academy solemnly vowed to pay more attention to — if not start noticing at all — literature coming from outside Europe, in particular from Africa, only to, once again, unsurprisingly, nominate two Europeans for the 2018 and 2019 prizes. And here’s yet another one: In the wake of the sexual harassment allegations that rocked the Academy, they chose to create a diversion by awarding the prize to Peter Handke, the long-time apologist for Slobodan Milošević, thus sparking outrage and prompting letters of protest from all over the world. After all, nothing takes the heat off you better and faster than creating a brand-new crisis in place of the original one.

Is there a pattern to be found here? Or is there none? Is the Academy contradicting itself, has it lost its bearings, or is it merely trying to frustrate its critics and cover its tracks? Does it have any ethical line to follow? Or does it prefer to settle for a total and unmitigated mess of a worldview? Or perhaps the members of the Academy just love making headlines and being controversial for the sake of creating controversies?

Unfortunately, such and similar fickleness situates the Academy on the fringes of respectability and robs it of wider support. Above all, it undermines the gravity of the Academy’s statement, whenever its members feel obliged to make one. For it’s hardly surprising that after so many of these exasperating blunders and follies it’s increasingly difficult to take the Academy seriously when it intends to be serious.

Sadly, this inexplicable volatility does more harm than good to the often-noble and laudable causes advocated by the politically engaged authors who invest their time, effort, and talent in various forms of activism to make an actual difference. For what’s the relevance of the award for the dedicated feminist and passionate animal-rights activist Olga Tokarczuk if the next year’s prize went to the above-mentioned Peter Handke and his troubling, to say the least, political baggage?

This penchant for sparking controversies also provides easy ammunition, and lots of it, for the opponents of the views espoused by a given Nobel Prize winner.

This penchant for sparking controversies also provides easy ammunition, and lots of it, for the opponents of the views espoused by a given Nobel Prize winner. For they can always say — and they avail themselves of this opportunity quite often and rather willingly — that the prize was politically motivated, that it was a purely political assault on their side of the barricade (whichever side this may be), and that, other than sharing the same views as the current members of the Academy, the laureate didn’t deserve it and the prize wasn’t merited in any way. Moreover, he or she wouldn’t have won it if the Academy had taken solely the quality of the writing into consideration and left out the extraliterary aspects.

And doubts abound. For would Boris Pasternak have won it had not the CIA intervened and orchestrated it as a cunning flick on the nose of the Russian — if not Soviet — Bear? What about the already-mentioned Tolstoy whose anarchistic beliefs apparently didn’t sit well with the Academy, and, after years of postponing it, the prize was awarded to another, and less controversial, novelist from Eastern Europe, a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz? What about Salman Rushdie who, reportedly, according to the prize’s judges, shouldn’t hold his breath while waiting for a chance to join the ranks of its winners due to his being “too predictable, too popular”? What kind of twisted argument is that? And what about the award that went to Bob Dylan? Was it a joke devoid of a punch line but with us serving as its punching bags? Is it a new trend? Are, from now on, the Grammy Awards going to be presented to the people of letters as well, as a perverse gesture of reciprocity?

To add another insult to yet another injury right before rubbing a pinch of salt into it, this capriciousness bears all the hallmarks of contempt — of profound and undisguised contempt on the part of the Academy — for the opinions of readers, critics, let alone writers themselves. And I’m not trying to imply that the Academy should, all of a sudden, start catering to the expectations of every single person out there with enough money in their pocket to acquire a book, for that’s fairly impossible and rather undesirable. But when the Academy unapologetically ignores the towering literary figures who are revered by critics and beloved by readers only to start playing a cat-and-mouse game with the book-reading community for the sake of catching everyone off guard and getting a chance to yell: “Hah! You thought you would guess the winner this time? Not today, pal!” then there’s something gravely wrong here.

To complicate matters further, the media, caught in the grip of some unspeakable frenzy and insane pursuit of empty clicks, let themselves be drawn into this puerile charade. They trip over one another to divine from the Academy’s erratic choreography of moves its next choice for the nominee for the most esteemed and prestigious literary prize. As a result, they lend credibility to the entire process to the point that one may get the impression that his or her own future depends on this year’s verdict. In their devotion to this grotesque farce, the media are disturbingly reminiscent of a child-obsessed parent trying to guess in which direction their cute little offspring may crawl this time. This one? Or rather, that one? No one knows, least of all the little one itself.

Wouldn’t it be fairer and more honest if the Academy openly admitted that it’s staunchly Eurocentric, dismissive of American culture, and of African culture as well, that, in general, it doesn’t care about literature from outside Sweden?

There’re also other disquieting questions: How many more truly worthy candidates will have to give way — and thus pass away unhonored properly despite having dedicated their lives to the art of writing, the very thing that this prize should be rewarding people for, at least according to its carefully cultivated image — to those who happen to tickle the Academy’s fancy at the particular moment in history? Which caprices — as caprices usually do — are quite volatile and change every few years, and so no one can feel quite safe as to have its unflinching backing. And what should we think of those whose prizes were indubitably stained by the Academy’s confusing shenanigans — or seemed to be — even if such authors themselves were highly deserving of the thus-received praise? Should we say that the honor was merited or not? Should we dismiss the author or the controversies accompanying his or her triumph? Should we overlook that perturbing background and the machinations that led to the verdict and simply enjoy the writing? And wouldn’t it be fairer and more honest if the Academy openly admitted that it’s staunchly Eurocentric, dismissive of American culture, and of African culture as well, that, in general, it doesn’t care about literature from outside Sweden, and about many other things that its acolytes strive desperately to read into its decisions?

Although speculating which virtually unknown writer is going to scoop the prize this year has become our most cherished indoor sport, one thing is certain: It would be much easier for us and far healthier for the legacies of the recipients of the prize if the Academy’s choices were free of such suspicions, or, at least, tried to be. Otherwise, it will always look as if it were all about trolling.