It is to my ultimate chagrin that I never checked out Alice Munro before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Now my interest feels petty, or feigned; the bandwagon wobbles with my desperate hop aboard. Better late than never?
In the long run, yes.
Although it will be later, instead of never. Though I strive to do plenty of “for fun” reading in my life, I don’t know where to start with Munro. Her career doesn’t really have any shape for me—rather, I’ve never looked for it, always running towards other horizons in other climes. There is no obvious starting point. There is a paucity of material behind my opinions on Alice Munro.
Perhaps what I can talk about is what the Nobel Prize means and what it means for it to go to Alice Munro.
I wrote a column about the Prize last year, when Chinese author Mo Yan received it. Like with Munro, I rushed to the library to try and find some succinct example of this author’s genius. The book I found, “Explosions and Other Stories,” was good (and parts of it were riotously funny), but I’ve been rather derelict in that I haven’t read anything else of his since that one October.
At this point, I see that rush for validation in and of itself short shrifts Mo Yan, Alice Munro or anyone who would have won the award. Though I’ll still take the Prize as “a sterling recommendation,” (my words) for Munro and Yan, I’ve had a bit of time to mull over the whole prize business.
One of the biggest grievances aired against the Nobel Prize in Literature is that it doesn’t seem to give the award to the people who “deserve” it. Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon form a quadrumvirate of American contenders for the prize, who will be tirelessly championed until they all respectively croak—or perhaps even after that. Ngugi wa Thiong’o merits consideration. A personal favorite of mine, Haruki Murakami, seems like a shoe-in, though it hasn’t been his year yet.
I can think of plenty past authors who, I guess, deserved it but didn’t get it: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Thornton Wilder, Wallace Stegner, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman…
The list goes on.
A common theme of all these picks (as you’ve probably noticed) is they’re all old. Maybe the Nobel Committee thinks by waiting they’ll get a better vintage. Or they may end up with bottles of ruddy vinegar. That’s the Academy’s gamble though.
At any rate, therein lies some of the rationale behind the Nobel Prize in Literature: It’s given out for a career, not for individual works… per se. Sinclair Lewis, the first American recipient, was given the award in 1930, after a pretty heady string of great books in the 1920s (“Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry”). That spree, I might add, was bookended by a pretty solid career before 1920 and a pretty unremarkable one after 1930.
Another considerate grievance (besides the long, long, long list of unacknowledged, merited writers) lies behind the aim of the award itself. Alfred Nobel set up the award with the intentions of giving it to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Those are some pretty rigid criteria, and most of the Nobel Laureates to date wouldn’t fit that criteria, in a social science sense.
But what is “ideal direction” though? An aesthetic ideal? A moral ideal? A political ideal?
If you read the list of laureates who’ve won the prize, you’d be amazed at their diversity. Writers as antipodal as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway have won the prize. Some prizes capped the careers of their recipients (Andre Gide, 1947, who died in 1951, after a 60-year career). Others came at their seeming beginnings (Albert Camus, 1957, who died in 1960 at the age of 46).
Therein lies much of the appeal for the Nobel Prize, despite whatever grievance you may have. Its diversity. Its range. Its transnational reach. And, perhaps most importantly, its gaps. Because the award is only given out once a year, there’s a great deal of prestige attached to it. Winning the prize can mean anything from affirmation to validation to recognition. And there is so much literature to affirm or validate or recognize in the world that the Prize necessarily falls short. But it’s still worth trying.
What do you think of Nobel’s intentions? Let Sean know at sreichard@wisc.edu.
