Nobel lettres 10/12/2004 Today, in a grand ceremony in Stockholm, the 2004 Nobel Prizes will be awarded, following the Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. It is an arena in which Jews have excelled, notably in the scientific categories. Literature laureates include Saul Bellow, I. B. Singer, S. Y. Agnon, Elias Canetti and Imre Kertesz. But, argues Gabriel Josipovici, the literature prize, mysteriously conferred, often says more about the judges than it does about the recipient… Anglo-American literary opinion was shocked this year to learn of the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. What about John Updike, asked the papers. What about Philip Roth? Or Margaret Atwood? No one who cares for literature would ever wish to defend all the decisions of the Nobel Literature Prize Committee. After all, it has in its time awarded the prize to John Galsworthy and Winston Churchill, hardly likely to rank on anyone’s list of great 20th-century writers, whatever their other qualities. And they have overlooked most of those we would put in such a list: Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Mandelstam, Auden, Celan, Borges… It must be said, in partial mitigation, that its brief is to honour writers who, in the judges’ opinion, have “produced the most outstanding work in an ideal direction,” whatever that means, not those who have written the best books. Yet the award of the prize to Samuel Beckett in 1969 suggests that, in recent times at least, the committee has interpreted its brief in the widest possible sense. The award of the prize to Bec-kett did in fact lay down a marker for future awards, make of the prize an award, in fact, for an author the committee felt had, in the course of his career, proved himself to be a great writer. Despite this, there is no doubt that the prize is rarely given purely on merit. Political considerations also seem to come into it. Notoriously, it is suggested, Graham Greene never won the favour of the committee because of his anti-American sympathies; and it is accepted that the prize must be seen to be shared out among the countries of the world. (Alfred Nobel’s will specified that “no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.”) Thus the award of it to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 made it unlikely that another Egyptian writer would be honoured for a decade or two, even if a string of great Egyptian writers were queueing up for it; and it may explain why, Agnon having been awarded the prize in 1966, Yehuda Amichai, considered by many to have been the greatest poet of the late 20th century, should never have received it — Israel, too, will have to learn to bide its time. Even the award to Beckett had a certain predictability to it, given his massive standing: he was the most famous unread author of the time. On the other hand, no one expected the committee to be so responsive to genuine literary quality. But while, by the late ’60s, Beckett’s reputation was not in doubt, the same cannot be said for Dario Fo, the surprise recipient of the 1997 prize. Even Fo’s most fervent admirers can never have thought that he would win it. His plays, many written in collaboration with his wife Franca Rame, many the result of improvisation with the cast, are wonderfully anarchic, comic and punchy — but Nobel Prize material? Not, surely, when writers of the stature of Pinter, Havel and Mamet were around — if indeed it was felt that it was time to honour a playwright. That award did suggest, though, that the committee, that mysterious body of Swedish academicians who have always zealously protected their anonymity, had got fed up with playing safe and was prepared to make interesting and eccentric choices. And the award this year to Elfriede Jelinek, a disturbing and humourless Austrian writer in her 50s, caused a similar surprise. Many, if not most, readers of contemporary literature would have thought that, if it was to be Austria’s turn, Peter Handke was the natural choice, now that Austria’s greatest post-war writer, Thomas Bernhard, was dead (the prize cannot be awarded posthumously). Born in 1942 and already famous in his 20s in avant-garde circles for his radical plays and puzzling novels, Handke has gone on to establish his reputation with a dazzling series of novels, essays, poems, reportage and film scripts that tread a narrow line between the mannered and the inspired, but are always searching for a voice in which to speak with authority in a world where the noisy and the predictable have become the norm. Jelinek, by contrast, and despite the Nobel committee’s citation, is relatively uninterested in formal experimentation. Her work belongs to a different tradition, running from Sade through to Bataille, which sets up a stark contrast between bourgeois conformism and the individual (usually feminine) self, and which seeks to shock the bourgeoisie by its use of narratives of violence, pornography, self-mutilation, sadism and masochism. In Jelinek, this is combined (making her sound often like a feminine version of Adorno) with a steely disdain for the clichés of society — love, honour, respect, etc — which are exposed as the half-understood screens for lust, hatred, greed and despair. Thus, in her best-known novel, “The Piano Teacher,” the eponymous heroine is the victim of society in the form of a possessive mother but is also complicit in her own repressions. In despair, and out of a queer spirit of revenge, she takes to mutilating herself with razor blades and eventually finds herself involved in an affair with a pupil in which anger and the desire to be in control are the dominating emotions of both parties and out of which both emerge the worse for the experience. The Nobel committee made the point that, in awarding her the prize, they were honouring a radical tradition of Austrian writing, and specifically mentioned Bernhard. But that is typical of the misleading generalisations committees are prone to make. Bernard has nothing in common with Jelinek except a hatred of post-war Austria. His masters are Montaigne and Beckett, not Bataille and Adorno. His greatness stems from his ability to give voice to a wide variety of marginal figures, to harness comedy and vitriol, and to accept that he, too, is implicated in his own criticism, like another of his masters, Kafka (“In your quarrel with the world, back the world”). For Jelinek, as for Adorno, on the other hand, all are rotten and guilty — except the observer/writer. Interestingly, Jelinek, with a Jewish father, seems much further from the great tradition of Austrian-Jewish intellectuals and artists such as Kraus, Freud, Wittgen-stein, Schoenberg and Can-etti, than does the totally un-Jewish Bernhard, whose last great novel, “Extinct-ion,” ends with the half-ironic transfer of the hero’s recently inherited estate in the countryside to Vienna’s Jewish community — for, as Bernhard has said again and again: what is present-day Austria, which first lost its Empire and then deliberately cleansed itself of its Jews, but a small, landlocked island of prejudice in a new, multi-ethnic Eur-ope? I don’t think Jews should rush to celebrate the award of the prize to Jelinek as a Jewish triumph, and, to be fair to her, she would be the last person to want that. Growing up in post-war Austria (she was born in 1946) with a Jewish father must have marked her, but she has never, to my knowledge, made much of the fact. Her situation today reminds me of an incident which occurred a few years ago in the German town of Franken, which boasted a new Jewish museum. Its director, Bernhard Purin, invited a young Berlin Jewish artist to exhibit there. In a style typical of young Berlin artists, she chose to display work that centred on one theme — herself. And the point she made again and again was this: Why, just because I happen to be Jewish, do people feel the need to ask me for my views on the Holocaust and the conflict in the Middle East? I’m a young woman growing up in Berlin, and an artist, and my interests are those of young women and of artists everywhere in the developed world. The Jewish community of Frank-en was outraged and the director was told in no uncertain terms that an artist of this kind, with these views, had no place in a Jewish museum. He countered by saying that, in his opinion, museums were places of contestation as well as history and that, as long as he was in his job, he would go on putting on exhibitions of this kind. Publishers like prizes because they sell books. Writers, too, are obviously pleased when their books sell, and winning prizes gives them the freedom to write what they want in the knowledge that it will be published. But all artists know that prizes tell you more about the committees that award them than they do about the recipients. “Quelle désastre!” exclaim-ed Beckett when he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize, and he promptly went into hiding, before donating the money to charity. Sartre and John Berger, notoriously, refused the Nobel and Booker prizes. But neither ac-ceptance nor rejection alters the quality of the work. As Stravinsky wickedly remarked on hearing that Ravel had turned down the prestigious Prix de Rome: “He rejected it but his music accepts it.” As so often with Stravinsky, that says it all. Gabriel Josipovici’s latest book is “Goldberg: Variations” (Carcanet).