I don't want to aggravate the gender debate further than it has already developed, but I think the question of quality is one that is worth bringing up whenever the Nobel if awarded. To that end, I think it is worth pointing out that the Nobel remains an incredibly conservative organization when it outlines who writes works of quality and what shapes those works are expected to take. I think, though, that it is important to note that we are in a historical period where there are efforts to recognize the accomplishments of women, and the accomplishments of people from around the world. I say this as a historian, which is my profession, and as one who studies the shift in cultural values among Europeans and North Americans through the 20th Century. Certainly, if Munro had been writing in 1906 she would not have been awarded for her accomplishments. While this is not because she is a woman, this would have played a particularly important role. I say this not because the Nobel Committee itself was opposed to recognizing the incredible accomplishments of female writers during this period, but because they were perhaps less aware of them. Just as now I am less aware of the (I am sure) dozens of female authors in the world that are worthy of the Nobel.
But, if I were asked to name who I would hope to win next years, I could list off a good 5 or 6 men that I think are worthy of winning the award. Hell, I could do that with just American men (McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon, Ashbery, Roth, Johnson). Women, though? Ummm... no. This is because the production, promotion, and consumption of literature often works in favour of male authors, for plenty of (mostly bad) reasons, and not because I am relatively new to reading astounding (rather than simply good) literature. Women, in 1906 and now, have a hard time in an already ridiculously hard field to get notice - particularly if they write literature instead of simply good books that can be promoted and may in fact sell well.
All of this, though, is perhaps tangential to what I am really wanting to say. Which is that, if women are now being recognized in a higher amount because of a historical moment in which we are trying to recognize their accomplishments more evenly with men (and this is, indeed, a politically motivated change in behaviour), then the failure to recognize women prior to the last few years was also a historical moment when women, despite writing some of the most intelligent and impressive literature of the period, were not seen as producing works of the same value as men. If we are in a historical moment where "quality" (however it is to be judged) is no longer the deciding factor in how the award is given out, then we would be foolish to suggest that, prior to this moment when women are being recognized (whenever it began, somebody earlier in this thread noted that only 6 of the last 23 have been awarded to women), they were not in a historical moment when "quality" was less a deciding factor and politics were more of one. It isn't as though the Nobel has ever been, or ever can be simply about quality because the ways in which we measure quality and the people whose quality we recognize are themselves historically determined. Ever since discovering Lu Xun's work I have been unable to figure out how he did not receive the Nobel. He certainly had the talent, and an awareness of his surroundings, and was a master with the pen. So why not? Well, only history can explain it. Not some naive desire to have a ridiculously objective category of "quality" constructing our notions of the Nobel Prize, then and now.
That said (and here I get to the point of this thread rather than what has come to define it, sadly), I must use this word when describing Munro's work. I find it to be of the highest quality, but perhaps this is because I find that she speaks to me in some way. She writes about people beautifully. Her characters of full of experience and history, pain, sorrow, and sometimes even joy. Robust is perhaps the best word. But her characters are also never alone. The relationships they have with others are, themselves, full of experience and history, pain, sorrow, and sometimes even joy. They are never simple and yet they take so few words, sentences, commas, and paragraphs to develop into somebody that you can see and watch and feel breathing in the space around you.
Munro also writes with a careful awareness of the world she inhabits and watches with a philosophical eye. Her characters make discoveries. Her characters wrestle with these discoveries. Her characters run away, make new relationships, break old ones, returns to old ones, runaway again, grow up, grow old, grow weary, decide that they hate the one they married, discover that they love the one they are with... they discover in every moment that the world is less beautiful than we ever want it to be, and then they make concessions to live with it anyways while keeping an eye open for a way out - a new beginning or a return back to happier times. Munro does this in every story, in a way that is unfamiliar and surprising, and when "it" hits you, it hits you hard. I remember the places I have been when I have finished a story or a collection by Munro because they were deeply troubling, deeply arresting moments in my life.
Munro also managed to turn me on to Short Stories, which is an impressive feat seeing as I hated studying them in high school or during my undergrads. It was only in coming back to her, years after, because of my mother's suggestion, that I got it. She is brilliant, and all the more so when you are reading her at the pace that she must be read at. Slowly, carefully, wrapped in the warmth of her perfect sentences. And this is something that I find particularly important about Munro's accomplishments. Her structure is exactly as it should be in every single word and sound and comma and paragraph. And her sentences always have more than one story hidden in it. It is as though, somehow, her work is preparing you for the collapse of the world, and you just don't know that it is coming. Tension builds up in you throughout the story, but you don't feel it (and I have no idea how she manages to accomplish this).
Clearly, I have a deep affinity for her work. But she amazes me. She writes about ordinary people, in ordinary circumstances - on the same adventures we are all on in our day-to-day experiences - and manages to explain so much with so little. I look forward to reading her in ten years. Twenty years. Forty, fifty, sixty years, and passing her on to my one-day sons and daughters. If people deserve the Nobel for the quality of their accomplishment, then Alice Munro is one of those people that has been properly awarded. Of course, people don't deserve the Nobel for that reason, but she is, regardless, a more than deserving author.
(That said I do think there are many other living authors who are also deserving. So, perhaps it is not their chance today, and perhaps they will never have their day in the Nobel sun because today was not their day, but that does not diminish their accomplishments either. Faulkner's star may be brighter because of his Nobel Prize, but the actual "quality" of his writing is not better or worse for it. He was a talent before and after he received the prize, and would have been a talent without it. After all, we still talk about Borges and Calvino, non? I do hope that next year Ngugi gets a good shot at the prize, though.)
