WHEN SMART PEOPLE SAY SILLY THINGS

Two surprising displays of foolishness from two normally smart and thoughtful sources.  First, there's NPR's look at forgotten Pulitzer Prize winners of years gone by:

It's sure to win a bit of immortality for the author, right? Well, not necessarily.

We're going out on a limb to say there are a bunch of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels you've probably never heard of — unless you're some kind of literary wunderkind.

Were these books great in their time, but only in their time? Were the Pulitzer jurors simply out to lunch? Or maybe the literary pickings are just slim some years.

There are so many fatuous assumptions here it's hard to know where to begin.  It presumes, first of all, that the relative obscurity of the titles is a reflection of a book's quality as opposed to more likely causes of institutional memory and/or cultural amnesia, scarcely unfamiliar phenomena in contemporary America.  It also assumes that awards are somehow intended to handicap posterity, which couldn't be sillier.  Why should any Pulitzer judge's crystal ball be presumed to be any better than anyone else's?  Lasting greatness is all too often overlooked in real time.  (See Van Gogh, Vincent; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus.)  Incidentally, the comments box suggests the some of the books are not as forgotten as NPR proposes.

Then there's Marie Arana's shrill and silly squib suggesting elimination of the Nobel Prize for Literature, particularly disappointing coming from this generally acute critic.  Yes, there has certainly been some rococo writing singled out for honors over the years.  But recent winners also include Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Harold Pinter and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  That scarcely suggests an award that should be done away with.  Then there's this:

Often, the Academy lionizes those in line with its own left-wing beliefs: Sinclair Lewis, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, Pablo Neruda or Jean-Paul Sartre. The native-born Americans who have wrested the laurels make for a motley crew: the merely average and flagrantly anti-capitalist John Steinbeck, for instance, and the mediocre but multiculturally earnest Pearl S. Buck.

Does politics influence our Swedish friends?  Hard to deny, although no one would consider Nobel Laureate Winston Churchill a leftist - but political motivations notwithstanding, a legitimate literary counter-argument can be made in defense of every author on this list except Buck.  (Pinter's Nobel is another example, a politically motivated choice, perhaps, but a deserving author, nonetheless.)  And unless Arana has enough German to read the likes of Jelinek in the original, she's on shaky ground delivering such high-handed pronouncements.

Instead, because a number of worthies have never won, Arana suggests doing away with the most internationally visible literary moment of our calendar year.  Until 2007, Martin Scorsese had never won Best Director.  Should the Oscars have therefore been ditched?  Following Arana's closing paragraph logic, such as it is, there's not a single award anywhere that should be left standing. 

Comments

[Matt]

Yeah, but Crash won best picture. So that's game over right there.

[Pete Rooke]

You might, or might not, want to listen to Coetzee talk about prizes as part of some obscure panel at an Australian university:

http://www.nobel.uts.edu.au/programs/coetzee.html

[Niall]

I think protesting prizes is a silly thing to do. After all, setting up a literary prize is as easy as 1-2-3, and if you don't like the way the Nobels or the Bookers are handed out, just start your own.

I will say, though, that it's odd the Pulitzers have ceased to be a bellwether for taste in literature, whereas the Booker has retained that cachet.

[a new nadir]

Any argument against the Nobels is usually based on an American dislike for the haughtiness of the selection committee. But what's so wrong with that? I'm sure the same complaints are leveled against awards that are typically awarded to Americans (the Oscars comes to mind, but there are others, I'm sure). That Steinbeck, Buck, and Faulkner are the only Americans to have won the prize seems to suggest that the only kind of American literature that's permissible to European sensibilities is a quaint primitivism that doesn't make any claims on the direction of Western culture or imagination.

[TEV]

Nadir, you need to do a little more homework. Plenty of other Americans have won the prize - Morrison, as noted above. Also Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway.

[M]

That anyone thinks of Faulkner's work as "quaint primitivism" that "doesn't make claims on the direction of Western culture or imagination" strikes me as- not just misguided- but actually kind of freaky.

[Michael Larson]

Why can't a legitimate literary counter-argument be made for Pearl S. Buck? She did publish some middle of the road work, but so have many Nobel winners (Steinbeck comes to mind). Buck wrote two or three of the best novels about China ever published, at least five novels that can be considered great, a host of amazing short stories, as well as numerous quality essays on China and Asia. A writer's mediocre works shouldn't overshadow their great ones, especially when those achievements are truly unique works of literature (I don't think anyone will again capture pre-modern China in a novel the way Buck did).

If one is going to argue that her achievement was lessened because she was a westerner writing about China from an internal perspective, then consider that she was raised in China, tutored by a Confucian scholar, and spoke Chinese as a first language. If the problem is that she is writing about China in English then I suppose Ha Jin's Waiting didn't deserve the National Book Award that it won (which I don't believe, Waiting was also an amazing book). I really don't see the argument that so many contemporary writers and critics are referring to when they condemn Buck out of hand. If I had to speculate I'd say that the recent demise of Buck's reputation has more to do with the contemporary trend of only allowing authors to write about their own ethnic groups, sexualities, etc (and often pigeon-holing them as writers that must always about these inherent traits). If anything, Buck's works show that the ethnicity of our authors need not play the imposing role that it currently does in our literature.

[Luchy]

Awards are perfectly imperfect. I love watching the Oscars, knowing it's all self glorification, and that often the movies that are highly praised don't deserve to be, that they were just lucky to be screening during a bad year for creativity and originality.

[doug worgul]

"rococo"

Nice.

[esaúl]

I just have one thing to say:
Borges.

The Swedish Academy can suck it.

[Clarity]

Sinclair Lewis was a genius and to call Steinbeck mediocre is beyond belief. All hail mediocrity in that case.

I hate to disagree with you but Scorsese's Oscar triumph was primarily due to "Infernal Affairs"'s Director and started off the pillaging of the Asian Film Industry.