A Case of Two Nobel Prizes

I'm very happy for Anne Carson, and even happier for Canadian literature. A Nobel Prize certainly helps. It's an accolade that generates attention and confers legitimacy.

But I have to admit I'm scratching my head. It's the second time I've scratched my head about the Nobel Prize in Literature in recent years. The first time was when it was given to Bob Dylan.

I can't think of two more different laureates than Dylan and Carson.

Dylan is inarguably the most influential American songwriter of the last sixty years. Whether he qualifies as a "poet," or however else they tried to squeeze him into a definition that would make him eligible for a literature prize, is a matter of conjecture. I argued at the time that he didn't qualify and shouldn't have received it. A Grammy, sure. But not a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anne Carson, on the other hand, indisputably qualifies. She has devoted her entire career, as a writer, teacher and translator of Classics, to perhaps the most arcane area of literature. Fortunate for her, then, that Classics appear to be having a moment in popular culture these days. Think of Christopher Nolan's recent smash hit film The Odyssey. It even inspired me to read Homer, which is quite a feat.

One might suppose that this cultural moment factored into the Nobel Committee's decision. In the same way that Dylan's award appeared, at least in part, to be an effort by the Committee to keep the prize culturally relevant, Carson's award might be seen as an effort to bring a highly respected but relatively obscure writer to a much wider audience.

And that raises a larger question: What exactly is the Nobel Prize in Literature trying to accomplish? What does the committee represent, and what does it believe literature ought to be?

When Dylan got the prize, I argued that if the committee wanted to give it to a beloved and respected singer, Leonard Cohen would have been more appropriate. At least Cohen was also a respected poet and novelist before he wrote songs and started singing them.

The Carson choice makes me think of Margaret Atwood. I'm not suggesting that Atwood is necessarily a "better" writer than Carson, or that Carson is undeserving. 

But if part of the Nobel Committee's mandate is to recognize writers who have had an enormous cultural impact, Atwood would seem like the most worthy Canadian recipient. She has been nominated multiple times in the past, has been internationally influential for decades, her work has reached an enormous readership, and she has become one of the defining literary figures, not just in Canada but around the world.

Which makes the Carson choice even more of a head scratcher. The committee didn't choose the Canadian writer with the greatest cultural reach. It chose a writer whose reputation is much more concentrated within literary and academic circles.

So, again, is the Nobel trying to recognize writers of great importance and influence, or is it trying to tell us which writers we ought to be paying more attention to?

In Dylan's case, they seemed to want to leverage his enormous popularity and reputation to make the prize more culturally relevant. With Carson, they appear to be doing almost the opposite: leveraging the reputation of the prize to raise a writer out of relative obscurity.

And they've done that many times before. In fact, that may be the more typical MO of the Nobel. Can you name the writer who won it last year? It was László Krasznahorkai, from Hungary.

Dylan didn't need the Nobel to make him culturally important, and that was part of why I thought it was an unnecessary choice. It seemed a bit too much like a marketing move to me.

Carson is the reverse. Her work was already highly regarded, and she had been winning major prizes in Canada for decades. But the Nobel suddenly gives her a vastly larger audience. I like that idea. According to one critic, Carson has more fans than readers, so she can use the boost.

Oddly, one might argue that choosing Carson, because she is so unknown, risks being a step backwards in terms of the Nobel's cultural relevance. Could it be that giving the Nobel to Carson, exactly 10 years after Dylan got it, is a way of atoning for his?

I've tried to read Carson's work a couple of times over the years and found it heady and dry. That's not a criticism of its literary merit, just an expression of taste. Maybe the Nobel will make me give it another go.

The more interesting question to me is why this writer, this year.

As I say, one theory is the renewed popularity of Classics. Another is that the Nobel Committee, like every cultural institution, is conscious of its own relevance. 

And then there's one more theory about this year's prize which always seems to play a role: Politics.

Canada is having a moment on the global stage, thanks to the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney. Our defiance of trump has suddenly given Canada an unusual amount of international attention and enhanced prestige. Could the Nobel committee also be acknowledging this new political leadership? There's even talk of Carney being nominated for the Peace Prize.

Wouldn't that make a nice set of Canadian Nobel bookends?

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PS. Carney didn't win the Peace Prize. I'm actually relieved. Carney winning would have made trump even harder to deal with for Canada. Maybe the Swedes (or is it the Norwegians) understood.