Politics of the Nobel Prize

Venturing into adult literature, which is somewhere I rarely go (there’s just too much good kid lit out there). But this is an issue that turns over and over in my mind.

Peter Handke, who won the Novel Prize for literature this year, is…a pretty awful person. An apologist for genocide. A defender of a murderous dictator. They say he’s a very good writer and I’m not arguing; I’m sure he is. But should someone like this win the very highest prize we can offer?

Two editorials in the New York Times offer two different views. I was entirely convinced by both of them, which is kind of impossible.

Bret Stephens laments that “we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics” and affirms that Handke’s “art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” And I find myself nodding. Some people with vile beliefs have written excellent novels. I keep Roald Dahl’s work on my shelves, despite his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. I appreciate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s perfects turns of phrase and eye for landscape, even while I wince away from her views of Native Americans.

Aleksandar Hemon points out that a writer who denies genocide enables and upholds it and makes the next mass murderer that much easier. He asks us to consider whether “a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives.” How can I argue? Handke did not just vote for policies I dislike. He lied about slaughter. He lied about guilt and innocence. How can a man with no grasp of moral truth be even a decent writer, let along a great one?

If there’s a middle ground here, it’s a shaky one that I feel uneasy standing on. But let’s say there’s a line between censoring a writer’s work (nobody is advocating that, by the way, Bret Stephens, and you shouldn’t have implied it) and giving him the higher honor we can award. There also a line between being (say) a grumpy and unpleasant human being and enabling and applauding mass murder.

Those lines must cross somewhere. We won’t ever agree on exactly where. But it’s always my belief that there are multiple books and multiple authors, every year, who could win awards. The idea of the single best book of the year, of any year, is a fantasy. There are so many good books; there are so many great writers.

Do we have to give our highest award to one who can’t acknowledge that truth exists?  That genocide happened? That Muslims died?

Really, there wasn’t anybody else?