by Tim Parks
My brother, the middle child, was the rebel. In his bookshelf, among sundry science fiction by Asimov and Ballard, not even hidden, was a paperback called Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, published in 1954 (the year I was born). Paperbacks were new to me. There was a photograph on the cover that promised sensual not spiritual bliss. I understood at once that only certain sections of this volume need be read. They were already well thumbed.
It will seem all too easy, this fusion of topography and attitude, but it’s true: my room was sandwiched between my brother’s and my sister’s. It too had a bookshelf. There were no rosy historical romances, no girls clutching a last shred of clothing to their modesty. There were no concordances, no innocent children’s books. Way before I could possibly understand them, there were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov and Flaubert and Zola. These books were foreign. Out of it. They never gave me the crasser joys I craved, but then again they never made me feel I was merely indulging, or merely provoking; I wasn’t locked in a fight with my parents, as it seemed to me my brother was. Neither good nor bad, they were good and bad, there was adventure and debate. If my parents made the whole world black and white, these books were colored and immensely complicated.
Over the past year or two I’ve realized how much this organization of the books in my childhood home still influences my reading and reviewing. When I negatively reviewed a book like William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters, it was because it seemed to me an exercise in literary exhibitionism; intellectuality as an end in itself, self-indulgent performance whose main intention was to encourage the reader to concede that the author was smart, rather as if those biblical concordances had been rewritten by Agnar Mykle. When I admired aspects of Dave Eggers it was because I recognized his constant division of the world into good and evil, and when I doubted him it was because in the end it seemed to me he was preaching. The analyses I offered of Fifty Shades of Grey and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy were very much operations in understanding their position in the geography of our old family bookshelves. Funnily enough, their immense success immediately makes sense when described in this way. They are both books that allow you to read a little hard violent sex while siding with a hero or heroine eager to eliminate such things from the world. Anyone turning to my piece on Peter Matthiessen in The New York Review of Books will now understand both my attraction to his novel In Paradise and my reservations.
Will I never escape from this? Is it a miserable limitation? Should they stop commissioning reviews from me? We all have our positions. Identity is largely a question of the pattern of our responses when presented with a new situation, a new book. Certainly the idea of impartiality is a chimera. To be impartial about narrative would be to come from nowhere, to be no one.
The challenge, I suppose, is to be aware of one’s habits, to be ready to negotiate, even to surprise oneself. Perhaps it’s the books that very slightly shift an old position, or at least oblige you to think it through again, that become most precious. I still recall my perplexity, then growing pleasure, when I read Peter Stamm a couple of years ago: first a sense that his novels were truly different; not the fireworks of would-be experimentalism, but a voice I hadn’t heard before. I had to struggle to place it, to find where I stood in relation to it. Essentially, Stamm constructs stories that my background leads me to think of as moral dilemmas—as in the case of a long extramarital affair in which the mistress falls pregnant—but that his characters understand entirely in terms of fear and courage, dependence and independence. The writing is, if I can put it this way, comically serious, in its simultaneous awareness of and refusal to engage with the moral side of events. In the end I was fascinated.
II
The Book in the World
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE NOBEL?
SO THE SWEDISH poet Tomas Tranströmer wins the Nobel Prize. Aside from a couple of long poems available on the Internet, I haven’t read Tranströmer, yet I feel sure this is a good decision in every way. Above all for the Nobel jury. Let me explain.
There are eighteen of them, members of an organization called the Swedish Academy, which back at the end of the nineteenth century was given the task of awarding the Nobel. At the time two members suggested it was a mistake to accept the job. The Academy’s founding brief, back in 1786, was to promote the “purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language.” Was this compatible with choosing the finest oeuvre of “an idealistic tendency” from anywhere in the world?
All members of the Academy are Swedish and most of them hold full time professorial jobs in Swedish universities. On the present jury there are just five women, and no woman has ever held the presidency. Only one member was born after 1960. This is partly because you cannot resign from the Academy. It’s a life sentence. So there’s rarely any new blood. For the past few years, however, two members have refused to cooperate with deliberations for the prize because of previous disagreements, one over the reaction, or lack of it, to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the other over awarding the prize to Elfriede Jelinek, a writer whom the dissenting member felt was “chaotic and pornographic.”
How do these people decide who are the greatest novelists and/or poets of the day on the international scene? They call on scores of literary experts in scores of countries and pay them to put down a few reflections about possible winners. Such experts are supposed to remain anonymous, but inevitably some have turned out to be acquaintances of those they have nominated.
Let’s try to imagine how much reading is involved. Assume that a hundred writers are nominated every year—it’s not unthinkable—and that the jury starts by reading one book from each of them. But of course this is a prize that goes to the whole oeuvre of a writer, so let’s suppose that as they hone down the number of candidates they now read two books of those who remain, then three, then four. It’s not unlikely that each year they are faced with reading two hundred books (this on top of their ordinary workloads). Of these books, very few will be written in Swedish and only some will be available in Swedish translation; many will be in English, or available in English translation. But since the English and Americans notoriously don’t translate a great deal, some reading will have to be done in French, German, or perhaps Spanish translations from more exotic originals.
Remember that we’re talking about poems as well as novels and that these works are coming from all over the world, many intensely engaged with cultures and literary traditions of which the members of the Swedish Academy understandably and forgivably know little. So it’s a heterogeneous and taxing bunch of books these professors have to digest and compare, every year. Responding recently to criticism that in the last ten years seven prizes have gone to Europeans, Peter Englund, the president of the current jury, claimed its members were well equipped for English but concerned about their strengths in such languages as Indonesian. Fair enough.
Let’s pause for a moment, here, and imagine our Swedish professors, called to uphold the purity of the Swedish language, as they compare a poet from Indonesia, perhaps translated into English, a novelist from Cameroon, perhaps available only in French, and another who writes in Afrikaans but is published in German and Dutch, and then a towering celebrity like Philip Roth, who they could of course read in English, but might equally feel tempted, if only out of a sense of exhaustion, to look at in Swedish.
Do we envy them this task? Does it make much sense? The two members who a century ago felt the cup should be allowed to pass from them were worried that the Academy would become “a cosmopolitan tribunal of literature.” Something they instinctively felt was problematic. They were not wrong.
Now, let’s imagine that we have been condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and nearly impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance. How do we go about it? We look for some simple, rapid, and broadly acceptable criteria that will help us get this pain out of the way. And since, as Borges himself noted, aesthetics are diffic
ult and require a special sensibility and long reflection while political affiliations are easier and quickly grasped, we begin to identify those areas of the world that have grabbed public attention, perhaps because of political turmoil or abuses of human rights; we find those authors who have already won a huge level of respect and possibly major prizes in the literary communities of these countries and who are outspokenly committed to the right side of whatever political divide we’re talking about, and we select them.
So we have the period when the Nobel went to Eastern-bloc dissidents, or to South American writers against dictatorship, or South African writers against apartheid, or, most amazingly, to the anti-Berlusconi playwright Dario Fo, whose victory caused some bewilderment in Italy. It was an honorable enough formula but alas not every trouble spot (Tibet, Chechnya) boasts its great dissident writer, to which we might add that since the prize is perceived as going to the country as much as to the writer, it’s not possible to give it to writers from the same trouble spot two years running. What a conundrum!
Sometimes the jurists clearly get their fingers burned. Having received so many major literary prizes in Germany and Austria, the left-wing feminist Jelinek seemed a safe choice in 2004. But her work is ferocious, often quite indigestible (she’d never win a literary prize in, say, Italy or England), and the novel Greed, in particular, which appeared shortly before her Nobel was awarded, was truly unreadable. I know because I tried, and tried again. Had the members of the jury really read it? You have to wonder. Not surprisingly, after the controversy caused by Jelinek’s victory, the jury fell back on obvious choices for a couple of years: Pinter, politically appropriate and half forgotten; then Vargas Llosa, whom I somehow imagined had already won the prize many years before.
What a relief then from time to time to say, the hell with it and give it to a Swede, in this case the octogenarian acknowledged as his nation’s finest living poet and a man whose whole oeuvre, as Peter Englund charmingly remarks, could fit into a single slim paperback. A winner, in short, whom the whole jury can read in the original pure Swedish in just a few hours. Perhaps they needed a sabbatical. Not to mention the detail, not irrelevant in these times of crisis, that the $1.5-million-dollar prize will stay in Sweden.
But most healthy of all, a decision like this, which we all understand would never have been taken by say, an American jury, or a Nigerian jury, or perhaps above all a Norwegian jury, reminds us of the essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously. Eighteen (or sixteen) Swedish nationals will have a certain credibility when weighing up works of Swedish literature—so we can feel assured that Tranströmer really is an excellent poet—but what group could ever really get its mind round the infinitely varied work of scores of different traditions? And why should we ask them to do that?
A GAME WITHOUT RULES
IN 1904, THREE years after the first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French poet Sully Prudhomme, the English Football Association chose not to participate in the formation of an International Football Federation (FIFA). Members could not see the point. Nor, in 1930, the year in which Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel, did the English participate in the first World Cup: they objected to the prospect of a ten-day ocean crossing to Uruguay to play teams that meant nothing to them. The first international football game, they pointed out, had been between England and Scotland, in 1872—a time when Alfred Nobel was still focused on improving his dynamite. Who needs Argentina or Brazil when you have Scotland to play?
I am not the first to draw attention to parallel processes of internationalization in sports and literature. As with many analogies, it is the combination of similarity and difference that is illuminating. For all the different styles of play in different countries and continents, football is a game whose rules can be universally applied. North Korea plays Mexico with a Swedish referee and despite one or two contested offside decisions a result is recorded and one team can pass to the next round without too much discussion. But can we feel so certain when the Swedish referee judges poems from those two countries that he will pick the right winner? Or even that there is a “right” winner? Or even a competition? The Mexican did not write his or her poems with the idea of getting a winning decision over the North Korean, or with a Swedish referee in mind. At least we hope not.
The interesting thing, then, about the English refusal to participate in the early World Cups is that, although there was no real obstacle to measuring themselves against teams from far away, they did not feel that this competition for notional world supremacy was what the sport was for. What mattered was familiar communities confronting each other in the stadium—that would give meaning to the game.
Vice versa, what is fascinating about international literary prizes is that the obstacles to choosing between writers coming from different cultures and working in different languages are so evident and daunting as to render the task almost futile; yet such is the appetite for international prizes and for winners that people do everything possible to overlook this. So what is the underlying purpose of these prizes? To what extent are novelists—like athletes in the Olympics, or soccer players in the World Cup—being asked to contribute to the building of a vast and for the moment largely imaginary global culture? In what way does this change the kind of literature that gets written, and the way it is written and talked about?
These questions were the subject of a conference on global literature that I and my colleague, the Milanese poet Edoardo Zuccato, organized at IULM University in Milan in 2012. In the opening presentation, David Damrosch, head of comparative literature at Harvard and founder of the World Institute for Literature, rather unexpectedly focused on the work of Rudyard Kipling. Based in Lahore, the twenty-year-old Kipling had started out writing for the local Anglo-Indian community, publishing his short stories in the city’s newspaper. Later, as he became aware of a wider readership in England and the United States, he developed all kinds of strategies for making his fiction more accessible to readers who would know little of India; gradually, Damrosch suggested, discovering and “explaining” India became a central part of Kipling’s work.
Thus begins the development of a kind of literary fiction that is largely detached from debates internal to a nation and presented instead as an opportunity to discover a distant community and a sense of our place in a larger world. One important stop along this road was the explosion of South American magical realism, which enjoyed its defining moment with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the work of Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, magical realism offered Americans and Europeans an account of South America in which it was honestly hard to see much difference in spirit or atmosphere between the dozens of countries and communities of this vast continent.
The Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi, who is very much in favor of internationalization, nevertheless points out how difficult it had become at the height of magical realism for South American writers to get themselves published if they didn’t subscribe to this highly stylized vision of literature. At the conference he explained how in the 1990s a group of Chilean writers formed the so-called McOndo group (an ironic reformulation of Macondo, the central location in One Hundred Years of Solitude), complaining that by gaining the approval of powerful readerships abroad, magical realism was preventing South American writers from recounting the more prosaic truths about the continent.
Magical realism was not, of course, confined to South America. Among others, a number of Anglo-Indian authors used their own versions of the style to create a new vision of India for international readers; one of those authors was so spectacularly out of touch with the nation he was supposedly presenting to the West that the violent reaction to his Satanic Verses after its publication in India caught him entirely by surprise. Francesca Orsini, a scholar of Hindi literature (and an Italian academic working at the University of London), posed an interesting question: There are many impor
tant books written in the languages of the subcontinent and then translated into English, among them Bhalchandra Nemade’s Cocoon, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s The Servant’s Shirt, Geetanjali Shree’s Mai, and Krishna Sobti’s The Heart Has Its Reasons. Why do they not have the same international success as works by Anglo-Indian authors like Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy? Translation, she remarked, could make a novel available, but the real exoticism of the truly foreign text remained a barrier to most readers.
Zuccato, the Milanese poet, might have been answering her when he made an impassioned attack on the whole concept of postcolonial literature. He suggested that those postwar writers in Africa and India who had chosen to write in English and French for the international community have not only given us a superficial and easily consumed exoticism; in doing so they have made it less likely that a Western public will make the effort to read those working in the local languages and offering something that would be genuinely “other” from the Western novel package we are used to. The Milan-based literary agent Marco Vigevani rather confirmed this when he pointed out the situation of Arab-language writers such as the Lebanese Hassan Daoud and the Egyptian Makkawi Said, who work in traditional genres that mix poetry and prose and that have no Western corollary. Prominent in the Arab world, these writers get almost no attention in the West because nobody has any idea how to read the kind of works they write even when they are translated.
What I found fascinating, as this discussion bounced back and forth, was that no one seemed to accept the idea that it might be enough to address one’s own community, that perhaps it was not strictly necessary to appear in this global space or contribute to its formation. Why should the literary world allow itself to be hijacked by this larger project?