Throughout its history,
the Swedish Academy has certainly made a number odd choices
for the coveted honor of the
Nobel Prize for literature. One thinks, for example, of
Dario Fo, the Italian communist-anarchist playwright who
scooped up the prize in 1997, or José Saramago, a Portuguese
communist who got it in 1998. Sure, there have been plenty
of worthy Nobel laureates—Rudyard Kipling, W. B.
Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Thomas Mann for
starters. But an equally impressive list could be made of
those who did not get the prize, beginning with Henry James, Marcel Proust,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Wallace Stevens.
In recent decades, the prize has often been
more a badge advertising political—that is, politically
correct—virtue than a recognition of literary
accomplishment. There have been exceptions—we still
remember the gasp of amazement in 2001 when it was announced that
V. S. Naipaul had won. More and more, though, the Nobel
Prize has gone to a person who has the correct sex,
geographical address, ethnic origin, and political
profile—“correct” being determined by the commissars at the
Swedish Academy. So it was no surprise when a distinct
mediocrity like Toni Morrison got the prize in 1993: an
American, yes, which was a drawback, but at least Morrison
was the right sex, the right color, and spouted the right
opinions.
Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago
cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the
Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946),
marks a new low. It is likely that you hadn’t heard of
Jelinek before—or, if you had, it was probably only because
her sadomasochistic fantasy The Piano Teacher (1983) was
made into a movie with Isabelle Huppert in 2001.
Other titles by Jelinek have been translated into
English—Lust (1989), for example, an unrelieved carnival
of sexual and physical brutality culminating in a woman’s murder of her
son. Jelinek is
a radical left-wing fantasist. She was a member of the
Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991—a period when,
as Stephen Schwartz pointed out in The Weekly Standard,
the organization “was little more than a KGB network.”
With the fall of the Soviet Empire, support for its
satellites dried up, so Jelinek left the party. But she
didn’t abandon her left-wing animus. Her most recent work is
Bambiland (2003), a stream-of-consciousness anti-American
effusion masquerading as a play. Most of her work is a
species of arty pornography. The Nobel judges rhapsodized
about Jelinek’s “musical flow of voices and
counter-voices
… that with extraordinary linguistic zeal
reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their
subjugating power.” But what the reader actually finds is
not the revelation of but
a shameless wallowing in clichés.
The Swedish Academy has made plenty of mistakes. In choosing
to honor Elfriede Jelinek it has made itself a laughingstock.
