George Rafael: Other prize winners than Gunter Grass have disgraced themselves too
... If you put faith in prizes then the Nobel does matter, not for its literary merit, which seldom counts, but for what it has come to represent. Factors such as which country's turn it is to win, being at the right trouble spot at the right time and, above all, gravitas -- the right tone as it were -- on the burning issues of the day weigh more. Certain writers, like Seamus Heaney (Ireland 1995), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa 1991) and Gao Xingjian (China 2000), are tailor-made for the Nobel. (Much the same can be said for such bruited laureates of the future as Orhan Pamuk, Ismail Kadare, Margaret Atwood, Elias Khoury, David Grossman, Philip Roth, Cees Noteboom and Mario Vargas Llosa. Maybe Hans Magnus Enzensberger or Christa Wolf will win this year, say, to make up for Grass' disgrace?) Now and again, though, the committee members get it right in spite of themselves, as with V.S. Naipaul (U.K. 2001) and Harold Pinter (U.K. 2005); never mind their widely different and highly controversial sociopolitical viewpoints, which enraged their detractors on the left and right respectively, they were chosen for their undeniable literary gifts.
Naturally, any fall from grace is writ large and reflects on the judgment of the committee. This isn't about the sometimes obnoxious or offensive or even indefensible opinions uttered by past laureates -- where do you start? -- but about actual deeds, or sins of omission. And by deeds I mean writers that, in either an official or a semiofficial capacity, have brought their character into disrepute or caused harm to others, however indirectly. Grass is hardly alone in this respect. For instance, the decision taken by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria 1986) to ban Peter Hall's production of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at the Theatre of Nations Festival in Baltimore in 1986, for fear of offending that great bastion of cultural freedom, the Soviet Union, is a good example of the former. It shows up Soyinka, a victim of censorship (and worse) himself, as a hypocrite, or at the very least a practitioner of double standards, for one couldn't imagine him banning an Athol Fugard play for fear of offending apartheid South Africa. This was months before he picked up the prize! What were they thinking?
Then there's guilt by association. Playwright Luigi Pirandello (Italy 1929) joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and tried to ingratiate himself with Mussolini, envisioning for himself the role of national bard, Virgil to his Augustus. Later, after he came to realize that Il Duce was no Augustus, and tired of the party's heavy-handed interference in his theater company, he referred to the jut-jawed one as "an empty top hat that by itself cannot stand upright." His unfinished last play, "The Mountain Giants," is in part an allegory on the illusion of artistic autonomy.
With poet Jacinto Benevente (Spain 1922) and novelist Camilo José Cela (Spain 1988), the charge of guilt by association is more ambiguous. Both were on the "wrong" side of the Spanish Civil War (Cela actually took up arms), but Cela's case is tempered by the fact that his novels were frequently censored and banned under Franco. He also founded and edited Spain's leading literary magazine, which not only took a strong line against the regime but also published many writers who'd fled into exile. By contrast Benevente, a coddled señorito, was afraid that he'd lose his privileges in a representative democracy.
Knut Hamsun, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pablo Neruda scraped the lowest depths. A lifelong Germanophile whose pathological antipathy to modern life and much of Western civilization informed his oeuvre, Hamsun (Norway 1920) became a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Norway. His enthusiasm was such that he gave his Nobel Prize medal to that prime specimen of the master race (and failed novelist), Joseph Goebbels; he also met Hitler. Unlike his infamous friend, Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, Hamsun escaped the firing squad after the Second World War; he was judged insane.
According to scholars, notably Roy Medvedev, huge chunks of Sholokhov's prize-winning "And Quiet Flows the Don" (USSR 1965) were lifted from the works of Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik writer who died of typhus in 1920. His victory was the crowning glory of a Communist Party toady whose rise in Soviet literary officialdom, as witnessed by dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov, was nothing "other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities."
The most shameful (and least known) episode, however, concerns Neruda, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. During his stint at the Chilean Embassy in Paris dealing with asylum applications from Spanish Civil War refugees, Neruda is said to have heavily favored those who shared his hard-line beliefs when it came to issuing visas. One wonders how many of the rejected perished in concentration camps or wound up as slave laborers under Nazi and Vichy rule. There's also the little matter of Neruda's aiding and abetting under diplomatic cover an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, an action he defended his entire life.
So Grass is in good company then. Since Hamsun and Neruda are still read and well thought of, it's a good bet that in the long run his cultivated self-image will survive largely intact -- his conscience is another matter....
Read entire article at Salon
Naturally, any fall from grace is writ large and reflects on the judgment of the committee. This isn't about the sometimes obnoxious or offensive or even indefensible opinions uttered by past laureates -- where do you start? -- but about actual deeds, or sins of omission. And by deeds I mean writers that, in either an official or a semiofficial capacity, have brought their character into disrepute or caused harm to others, however indirectly. Grass is hardly alone in this respect. For instance, the decision taken by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria 1986) to ban Peter Hall's production of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at the Theatre of Nations Festival in Baltimore in 1986, for fear of offending that great bastion of cultural freedom, the Soviet Union, is a good example of the former. It shows up Soyinka, a victim of censorship (and worse) himself, as a hypocrite, or at the very least a practitioner of double standards, for one couldn't imagine him banning an Athol Fugard play for fear of offending apartheid South Africa. This was months before he picked up the prize! What were they thinking?
Then there's guilt by association. Playwright Luigi Pirandello (Italy 1929) joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and tried to ingratiate himself with Mussolini, envisioning for himself the role of national bard, Virgil to his Augustus. Later, after he came to realize that Il Duce was no Augustus, and tired of the party's heavy-handed interference in his theater company, he referred to the jut-jawed one as "an empty top hat that by itself cannot stand upright." His unfinished last play, "The Mountain Giants," is in part an allegory on the illusion of artistic autonomy.
With poet Jacinto Benevente (Spain 1922) and novelist Camilo José Cela (Spain 1988), the charge of guilt by association is more ambiguous. Both were on the "wrong" side of the Spanish Civil War (Cela actually took up arms), but Cela's case is tempered by the fact that his novels were frequently censored and banned under Franco. He also founded and edited Spain's leading literary magazine, which not only took a strong line against the regime but also published many writers who'd fled into exile. By contrast Benevente, a coddled señorito, was afraid that he'd lose his privileges in a representative democracy.
Knut Hamsun, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pablo Neruda scraped the lowest depths. A lifelong Germanophile whose pathological antipathy to modern life and much of Western civilization informed his oeuvre, Hamsun (Norway 1920) became a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Norway. His enthusiasm was such that he gave his Nobel Prize medal to that prime specimen of the master race (and failed novelist), Joseph Goebbels; he also met Hitler. Unlike his infamous friend, Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, Hamsun escaped the firing squad after the Second World War; he was judged insane.
According to scholars, notably Roy Medvedev, huge chunks of Sholokhov's prize-winning "And Quiet Flows the Don" (USSR 1965) were lifted from the works of Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik writer who died of typhus in 1920. His victory was the crowning glory of a Communist Party toady whose rise in Soviet literary officialdom, as witnessed by dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov, was nothing "other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities."
The most shameful (and least known) episode, however, concerns Neruda, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. During his stint at the Chilean Embassy in Paris dealing with asylum applications from Spanish Civil War refugees, Neruda is said to have heavily favored those who shared his hard-line beliefs when it came to issuing visas. One wonders how many of the rejected perished in concentration camps or wound up as slave laborers under Nazi and Vichy rule. There's also the little matter of Neruda's aiding and abetting under diplomatic cover an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, an action he defended his entire life.
So Grass is in good company then. Since Hamsun and Neruda are still read and well thought of, it's a good bet that in the long run his cultivated self-image will survive largely intact -- his conscience is another matter....