The Mumpsimus

And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine — "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)"  First, some axioms. Points. Nodes. Notes. (After which, a few fragments.) From Alfred Nobel's will: "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: ...one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction..." Even if every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature were universally acclaimed as worthy, there would still be more worthy people who had not won the Prize than who had. Thus, the Nobel Prize in Literature will always be disappointing. The history of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a history of constant, repeated disappointment. The Nobel Prize in Literature's purpose is not to recognize the unrecognized, nor to provide wealth to the unwealthy, nor to celebrate literary translation, nor to br...

I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year, so perhaps I'm more sensitive than normal to pundits carping about award results, but something about awards brings out people's desire to complain, and they don't usually come out looking very good by doing so. The ones people always complain about get complaints again this year -- the Nobel and the National Book Awards. The two articles I've seen linked to most frequently are Tim Parks on the Nobel and Laura Miller on the National Book Awards . The Parks piece isn't terrible, but I'd agree with M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon that it's "somewhat careless" . (Parks has written a bit more thoughtfully about the Nobel in his essay "The Nobel Individual" .) I certainly agree that the Nobel is inevitably in a tough position because it's supposed to be so international and definitive, and people give it almost mystical reverence, but its track record really isn't tha...

I had just finished reading this note about the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 List with its prejudice toward youthful fictioneers when I headed to the NY Times website to read the day's headlines and discovered Jose Saramago has died at age 87 . I nearly screamed out, "Too young! Too young!" It's been a few years since I last read Saramago, simply because other things kept grabbing my reading time, but I will forever be grateful to the Nobel Prize committee for bringing him to the world's attention, because I doubt I would have encountered his work otherwise. I read Blindness soon after it was released in the U.S. to see if the latest Nobel Prize winner was my sort of writer, and it was a shattering experience. Because I came to it with only basic expectations and knew little about it, I was in just the right frame of mind to be shocked and awakened by its visceral power. No other book had ever so powerfully made the fragility of human civilization so clea...

I love it when the Nobel Prize for Literature goes, as this year, to a writer whose name is unfamiliar to me. I'm woefully ignorant of French literature in general, and contemporary French literature in particular, and so Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is not a byline I'd noticed before. Given how few of his books are currently available in English translation, though, I expect I'm not alone in my ignorance. This is one of the great values of the Nobel for American readers, and perhaps one of the only things that makes it, unlike most other awards, culturally valuable. Its profile is high enough that, in the right circumstances, it can propel writers into view who would otherwise remain at best only barely visible. Of course, this is not mainly what it does. As often as not, the Nobel goes to writers who are already prominent. This is much less interesting, although I will admit to celebrating when it goes to writers who are or have been particularly meaningful in my r...

I've spoken of my admiration for much of Doris Lessing's work , but I have remained silent on her writings about Africa and her thoughts on that, the continent of her birth. Mostly because I've felt that her perspective on Africa was an important one for a while, but that she is also very much a product of her time and situation, as are we all. I liked parts of her Nobel lecture very much, and the overall thrust of it -- which I perceived as a call to recognize the systems and luxuries that allow literature to be written -- is one I think deserves to be raised more often, and I was glad Lessing did. I didn't even mind her disparaging comments about the internet, because I never expected her to be very familiar or approving of it, anyway. But some of what she writes about Africa bothered me quite a lot, in that she seems to be nostalgic for colonialism. Ramblings of an African Geek now has a post addressing this : Never mind the damage colonization has done and still...

There are few awards that much interest me these days, but I look forward to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, not because I think it's more legitimate than any of the others, but because it's so often weirdly surprising, and now and then it goes to a writer I quite respect. The choice of Doris Lessing this year surprised me mostly because she's been rumored for it so long that I was sure her time had passed, especially since most of her work since her autobiographies hasn't gained much acclaim. As for me, I can't claim to be devoted to Lessing the way I am to Coetzee and Pinter , but I did go through a Lessing phase eight or nine years ago, and read many of her books. Which doesn't mean I'm an expert, by any means -- she's so prolific I don't think I read even half of her novels. Maybe a quarter. (I gave a lot of them away, and the ones I kept are in a box in New Hampshire, so I don't have any at hand. Thus, ...

Soon after Harold Pinter won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature , I thought about writing something about his films, because I've seen quite a few, and read many of his screenplays. But I hadn't done any of that recently, so I wanted to refresh myself before spouting off in public. I decided to start reviewing Pinter's film work with some of his earliest movies: the three directed by Joseph Losey . I own an old VHS tape of The Servant , and was able to borrow a now-out-of-print DVD of Accident and a VHS of The Go-Between . I watched them in the order they were made, and then read the scripts (in Five Screenplays ). Each film is based on a book, but of them I have only read Nicholas Mosley's Accident . The Servant may be the best introduction to Pinter that exists. Apparently, both Pinter and Losey had separately thought of adapting Robin Maugham's novella to the screen, and through various negotiations, were able to bring their efforts together and ge...

I expect I'll have more to say about Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize , because I have admired his plays for a long time, but for now I just want to make a quick note about his politics. Pinter is an aggressively political man, though, and his controversial statements have made it relatively easy for some of the more ignorant and illiterate denizens of the American right wing to proclaim that Pinter won the Nobel for his political views. Pinter himself seems to think this could be true . And it could be. But it's irrelevant, because even if Pinter were a neo-Nazi, the fact is, he's one of the two or three most influential and enduring playwrights alive. There are no irrefutable, objective ways to judge a writer's worth, and there will always be dissenters, because tastes vary. But the tests of time and influence are useful ones -- a writer who influences the work of other writers, and whose own work survives for multiple generations, has made a valuable contributi...

REBECCA: Guess where I went after tea? To the cinema. I saw a film. DEVLIN: Oh? What? REBECCA: A comedy. DEVLIN: Uh-huh? Was it funny? Did you laugh? REBECCA: Other people laughed. Other members of the audience. It was funny. DEVLIN: But you didn't laugh? REBECCA: Other people did. It was a comedy. There was a girl...you know...and a man. They were having lunch in a smart New York restaurant. He made her smile. DEVLIN: How? REBECCA: Well...he told her jokes. DEVLIN: Oh, I see. REBECCA: And then in the next scene he took her on an expedition to the desert, in a caravan. She'd never lived in a desert before, you see. She had to learn how to do it. Pause. DEVLIN: Sounds very funny. --from Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter , Nobel laureate