I amused myself yesterday by briefly getting apoplectic over a Guardian article: Tolkien was dismissed by the 1961 Nobel prize jury as a second-rate storyteller:
The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his "advanced age" – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet's years were "a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state". Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author "a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health".
Durrell, meanwhile, "gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications", while Italian novelist Alberto Moravia "suffers from … a general monotony".
Greene, who never won the Nobel, was 1961's runner-up, with Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, coming in third.
It seems to me that the Nobel Committee confused 'prose' and 'storytelling'. Both, of course, are vital in a great novel. My favourites--for example, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sequence--combine sharp but generous prose with particular characters, vivid setting and riveting plot. It's that combination that creates the story. And the very best stories have a clear, tight, and inevitable arc.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the best novels I know. It's not perfect. I admit that in the first hundred pages or so the prose wobbles--and occasionally lurches--here and there, enough to make the blue pencil in my head twitch and to make me turn away to allow a decent pause for the prose to collect itself. But it improves, and later passages can be very fine. And, oh dear me, yes, he could have lost quite a few chunks of song. And, no, he doesn't do women fully--he doesn't do them horribly, he just doesn't do them enough--but all writers have their weak spots. His storytelling, however, is without peer. Tolkien's arcs--for Frodo, and Sam, and Aragorn--are graceful and strong, elegant as Chinese cabinetry: pared down to the essential, perfectly balanced. The result is a story so compelling that, at age eleven, I read the entire book in one two-day marathon. And I've read it roughly every fifteen months since. I know I'm not the only one.
The Nobel Prizes are awarded for "achievement." I wonder how the Nobel Committee defines that.
The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature fifty years ago was Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić. I have no doubt that he can write, but I had never heard of him. I wonder how writers he has influenced? I wonder, How many people are reading and rereading him today?
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Speaking as someone who has re-read Tolkien almost every year for 20+ years, if Andric won for "The Bridge on the Drina" it was much deserved. I think his work was lost because it wasn't widely available in translation and we had that whole problem with relations with places like Yugoslavia for so many years. Shit just didn't come out from behind the iron curtain.
ReplyDeletewillamettestar, thanks for that. It looks as though Bridge on the Drina is available right now from UChicago and is selling well. I wish there was a Kindle edition so I could look at the first chapter myself right now.
ReplyDeleteThe reviews, though, indicate the novel has no hero but centres instead around a bridge and a village. I'm curious as to how he can create real story without a protagonist to follow. Readers are people. People are social animals; we need other humans at the heart of our drama.
Have you read/reread this novel often? How does it work, emotionally?
Awards are nonsense. Tolkien is a byword, a shibboleth for a certain kind of person. Speak friend & enter. So some jerks spending a TNT tycoon's money had their heads up their behinds. It is their loss. Tolkien will always matter more, because Tolkien MATTERS.
ReplyDeleteI read The Lord of the Rings when I was 16 years old. When I got to the scene where the nazghuls were searching for our brave little band, it scared me so much that I put the book down for two days before I gained the courage to go on reading. As for Doris Lessing, I always wondered what took them so long.
ReplyDeleteMaybe prize committees just can't win.
mordicai, awards matter. They can make the difference between being read and not. Being published again and not. Eating and not. Sometimes. I think the Nobel is currently worth north of $1m. That buys a lot of health insurance. But so many awards are never given to 'popular' writers. Sometimes it's because they're not very good. But sometimes it's sheer...hmmn, snobbery/elitism or whatever other term you choose for those with a high pucker factor.
ReplyDeletebarbara, I think you're right: prize committees can't win. Because hindsight makes fools of us all. And, honestly, all those people shortlisted for the 1961 prize were pretty damn good. In the long term, prizes are relatively arbitrary. In the short term, they matter to the author because they can make the difference, financially, between remaining a writer and not.
Nicola, I worry that in their desire to defend Tolkien, people are dismissing Ivo Andrić because they've never heard of him. I haven't read his books either, but it's very, very difficult for writers in Eastern European languages to get noticed, translated, etc. The fact that a writer doesn't have popular acclaim says nothing about quality.
ReplyDelete"The reviews, though, indicate the novel has no hero but centres instead around a bridge and a village. I'm curious as to how he can create real story without a protagonist to follow. Readers are people. People are social animals; we need other humans at the heart of our drama."
I'm not sure I would agree with this, but also, Andrić may have won the prize precisely because he was showing different ways of writing a novel. The thing for me is, if you're choosing between Tolkien, Dineson, Forster, etc., the choice is basically meaningless anyway. They are all brilliant and all completely different. I do agree with your basic point, though: Tolkien is a master story-teller, better in my opinion than most of those guys. In terms of prose, I would give it to Dinesen, personally.
The quoted passage was presumably written in Swedish, so one wonders what word was actually used that inspired the translator to write "storytelling." It may have been something that, in the original, emphasized his prose style rather than his plotting.
ReplyDeletetheodora, Dineson's fantastic. Yes. Forster could be great--but he could also be so oblique his prose seemed diffident and sideways. Very frustrating.
ReplyDeleteIt's difficult to know whether Andrić succeeded in truly expanding our notion of storytelling without reading his work. Given that it has been translated, I wonder why--if he did succeed--I haven't heard of him. I'm not surprised I haven't read him, but I'd never even heard his name. So something, somewhere, isn't working as the Nobel Committee would like. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that it's me, or the educational system in the country I grew up :)
James, that's a fair point. Though I'm guessing the Committee is very, very careful about its translations. Also, if I had to make a bet, it would be that most of the Committee speaks pretty good English--now, anyway. Then, who knows?
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone out there know what language the press releases are written in? Then and now?
Press releases from the Swedish Academy (the body which actually selects the literature Nobel laureates) are issued in several languages, of course including English. But the Guardian story is not based on anything translated and so okayed by the Academy itself; it's based on a Swedish newspaper article by a writer who during the last several years has written about what is revealed about the awards deliberations of the Academy when the Secretary's notes are made public after 50 years. So here, it's really a journalist translating something quoted in Swedish. What Anders Österling wrote about Tolkien was that ”resultatet har dock icke i något avseende blivit diktning av högsta klass”, which is actually difficult to translate. Literally, I might try: "The result, however, has in no particular turned out to be 'diktning' of the highest order", but the problem is the word "diktning", which is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it means "literary creation, poetry, poetics"; as a verb it means "the creation of poetry, the act of literary creation" etc. Make of it what you will; as a Swede, I'd say that the sense isn't really that Österling (himself a poet and literary critic, in his late 70s in 1961 though he remained active until around 1978) isn't primarily complaining about Tolkien's prose, but of the totality of his literary creation: what he says is that as a whole, TLOTR just isn't up to par.
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, sure, by now the members of the Academy probably are reasonably fluent in English. Maybe not as much in 1961; remember that Sweden was primarily influenced form Germany during the later 1900s and until WWII. The first and obligatory foreign language taught in Swedish schools was German, until and including the Spring term of 1944; since the Fall term that year, it's been English. Which means that Swedes older than around 30 in 1961 didn't necessarily study much English in school.)
John-Henri, thank you so much for the detailed info. It's great to have some insight into the process.
ReplyDeleteCompare:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.librarything.com/author/andricivo
https://www.librarything.com/author/tolkienjrr
This goes to point out the proof of the prose is in the reading and rereading, not in the awards and critiques. I love reading and rereading the runner-ups you mentioned, but perhaps you do the Yugoslavian writer an injustice. He could have been all the rage for the past 50 years in Yugoslavia, but who would know? And do Yugoslavian readers know of Tolkien? I suspect so. The Hobbit was translated into Serbo-Croatian in 1975. It took until 1981 before The Lord of the Rings was translated into one of the three languages spoken there, and translations for the other two languages weren't done until 1995. I suspect though that pitting a fantasy novel of epic proportions against a novel that was more about the history of Bosnia than a true novel, was unfair from the beginning. Given that Tolkien was busy popularizing an entire genre of literature that has grown into something that dominates many bookstore's linear feet, perhaps the near-sightedness of Osterling is understandable. Tolkien was busy creating an entire universe of his own making, a creative endeavor beyond the scope of some people's imagination.
ReplyDelete"Tolkien was busy creating an entire universe of his own making, a creative endeavor beyond the scope of some people's imagination" which is why in my estimation the filmed versions are so pale in comparison. Tolkien's words create images, create a world that I can only accept when I read. On film its just another computer game. My niece, who fancies herself a student of literature, has, like most of her contemporaries seen the movies. She can't understand why each summer I pick up "The Hobbit" ready to go there again.
ReplyDeleteThis is the reason why I have never seen the LOTR movies, not even a preview. I didn't want my images to be overwritten. Every reread I see something different and I find that enchanting.
ReplyDeleteBeth, I'm guessing both Tolkien and Andrić were being prodigiously imaginative in their own ways--expanding the story, expanding the techniques for telling the story, respectively. I honour both of them for that.
ReplyDeleterhbee, engagedbliss, I think books are the ultimate interactive medium. Novels are like house blueprints--the design from which the homeowner/reader builds her own customised palace.
I should say that in hindsight, awards fade. You are right that the Nobel can bring attention...but I admit, that for me it is often a hallmark of the middlebrow! The contrarian in me dismisses it...though eventually I went against it & found out that Gabriel Garcia Marquez kicks butt. I guess with Tolkien I just feel like history has condemned the judges comments far more succinctly than anything else. What Tolkien wrote MATTERS.
ReplyDeleteMordicai, yes, Tolkien matters...
ReplyDelete...and what's your favourite Márquez?
Tolkein was my sister's author. (Mine were Bradbury and Asimov and Poe and Chekhov and Shakespeare and Flaubert.) LotR bored me to tears: it read like a travelogue. The Hobbit was a modicum better. I far more enjoyed Bored of the Rings -- the Harvard Lampoon parody.
ReplyDeleteYou may now banish me. ;D
Hmm, I've only read Drina twice. Once as a requirement in college (I was Central European studies major) and once again about 15 years after to see if it was what I remembered it being (it was). I've been pondering this since I first read your post. When I close my eyes and think about Tolkien I instantly go to the whole universe he created, to land of escapism and heroes filled with many prosaic nooks and crannies. When I close my eyes and think of Drina I immediately go to all the people in the history of the world and how like me they may have been and how little and how much things change as time goes on. I instantly picture certain scenes in the book and the geography of land I've never been too but surely know intimately from this book. Whereas Tolkien remains in my mind and somehow is partly my own creation in a way that Andric's story very definitely remains entirely to the people of the land he writes about and I'm only lightly touching.
ReplyDeleteI actually know next to nothing about Nobel prizes and how they are given (and I'm too lazy currently to look it up) but I imagine it's voted on by board not normal folks who debate merits based on whatever criteria they personally think speaks to the time, era and moment they are voting in. So perhaps 50 years ago they were people with out the imagination to intuit how much prose, fantasy storytelling would matter to a range of people than were represented by the Nobel voters. Perhaps they were older and didn't create, nor grow up in a generation that championed creativity and was taught it was okay to escape from the starkness of every day into fiction and prose. Perhaps they were merely looking to reach out to a writer who had a achieved something, and may never achieve anything else, as he was trapped in strange and isolated country that had a history that was more visible to people 50 years than to people that became politically and geographically aware in the subsequent 50 years.
This is delightful, this is the most critically I've thought about anything for weeks. It's like the holiday cobwebs are coming off!
Dianne, hey, everyone's different. But, y'know, I *pity* anyone who doesn't like LotR--which I find infinitely superior to The Hobbit.
ReplyDeleteWillamette, yes, for me Tolkien is a whole universe: a time and place and people that never were. But I think the most important thing for me is the whole notion, made utterly real for me as a young person, and again and again when I reread, that one can never go back. That decisions and experience can't be unmade. That we're the sum of our choices. Without that, LotR would just be like a (damn good) role playing game. And it sounds as though Andrić did a brilliant job of *recreating* in prose a time and place and people that were real. Two different skills. Both vital (I think) in terms of literature's role as the extra-somatic keeper of the human record.
It perhaps should be remembered that opinion generally at the time the LOTR was making its initial splash was that it was a lesser work because it was labeled "escapist." This prompted one of Tolkein's famous responses (that every prisoner of war's first duty was to escape) but may also explain why the Nobel committee would not have granted it top marks. There has always been a tension over this question at the academic level (and how much higher up the academic pyramid does one get than the Nobel)---it always reminded me of the similar qualification at the other end of the spectrum, that for pornography not be banned it needed to show "socially redeemable values (!)" In other words, the work is required to meet the criteria considered worthy even when such criteria fails to include the work in question.
ReplyDeletePeople of a certain mindset have always had trouble with SF/F because it deals with things that "aren't real." As if that has anything to do with what happens between text and reader in the first place. To make a broad comparison, in what way is Tara from Gone With the Wind any more "real" than Rivendell? What makes the one apparently more relevant is its association with events that occurred, but as a literary device (and a subsequent vicarious experience for readers) neither place is any realer than the other. It's only prejudice that separates them.
But that prejudice, as we've all discovered, is powerful.
The kinds of works that get Nobel Prizes are those that deal with things which can be identified as Real in some other sense than what is on the page. Even if in certain specifics said work goes off toward Oz at times, the anchor points are This World, This Reality, Us.
Of course, LOTR is about us---but you have to be able to see yourself as a Hobbit to get it.
BTW, I've only read it once. I tried again when the Peter Jackson movies were about to come out, but just couldn't suspend my reaction to a certain "preciousness" latent in the prose. (Not the bad preciousness, just a kind of delicate nostalgia that I found too...clean...for my taste.) I take full responsibility for my own tastes, though, and suggest no shortcomings on Tolkein's part. :)
ReplyDeleteI first read Tolkien when I was a kid; loved the Hobbit and LOTR and I also read them at least once a year. You might ask my daughter about her name? (heh) The thing is that quite often a committee's selection process (if any) is based upon snobbery or cultural elitism if you will. Being lazy, I goggled elitism;
ReplyDelete"Elitism is the belief or attitude that some individuals, who form an elite, are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight; whose views or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern."
But then, I often think that, "Oh yeah? Screw you!" should sometimes be considered a valid critique defense. I also once heard Garth Clark pontificate to a group of ASU Ceramics MFAs that, "If it's functional, it's not art." One of whom then asked him if he had made that statement to Warren MacKenzie and he moved on past that rather quickly. I own 3 small pieces by Warren MaKenzie, but I own nothing by Garth Clark. I wonder why that is? Oh right, Garth Clark merely talks about art, he doesn't actually create anything. A critic in other words. Sorry, once I get going it seems that everything relates to Ceramics. NCECA is in Seattle this year, so I will be visiting the kids again in March.
In any case Tolkien is great and also my traveling companion when I fly.
Mark, I've written an essay with Tolkien's remarks on jailers at its heart: "Living Fiction and Storybook Lives."
ReplyDeleteRandall, the essay, above, can also be addressed to 'critical elites', as can another essay, "Brilliance and Beauty and Risk."
curious to know if people are influenced/continue to read *any* Nobelist in literature.
ReplyDeleteas to awarding of the prize, from examples I've read, it's as political as anyone with prize experience would expect. the examples also show it's easy to be blackballed if one particular committee member doesn't like you.
ladyjanegray, oh, yep. Awards are as much about belonging--being on the right side of the us/them line--as anything else. More, probably.
ReplyDelete'Awards are about belonging' -- often what's fashionable. A couple of comments:
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that Tolkein was one of the people responsible for us now considering Beowulf as a serious piece of literature. In his time, it was considered a silly monster story. Amusing too that Nobel laueate Seamus Heaney did a translation of Beowulf ( to my taste an extraordinaryly powerful one)
A recent article that Nobels really only go to literature that translates well into the main European languages. Bringing up impish curiosity as to how LotR sounds in French (as one scholar notes, part of Tolkeins project was to eliminate the effect of the Norman conquest on the English language)
ladyjanegray, I've attempted something similar with Hild: taking the language back. It wasn't always possible, but where it was, I made that choice.
ReplyDeleteWhat you say about women in Tolkein resonates with me. They aren't put down (as they are in so much fiction of that time); they're just missing.
ReplyDeleteI've often wished that Edith (his wife) had published a diary or memoir or some such, telling how she saw the man. But I imagine she would have considered that wish impertinent, just like a Yank.
TomV, I'd love to see a memoir!
ReplyDeleteIt might be too easy to say "A Hundred Years of Solitude" but I think that might actually be it! I'm a sucker for alchemy.
ReplyDelete