The Nobel Library

[Ben Jackson]

Nice post, thanks for sharing the write up (and for giving me a little shout out ?)!

Two small things: I don’t think the 2018 prize really counts for her tenure, as I think all the nominations, deliberations, etc, for Tokarczuk’s win took place in 2019 after she’d left. And with a few exceptions, I’d be quite wary of assembling shortlists based off of this library stuff.

Thanks.

Actually, the assembling of shortlists was meant to present an idea of the kind of writers that we'll expect on the final stages; that's why I said we were 75 percent correct. Of course I can't be 100 percent, thus far I don't have direct access to the documents. Even some of the years I listed the writers in wouldn't even be entirely correct, but few, I believe, tick the boxes. The Nobel Library was a strong indicator for Laureate and it showed during the current Malm/Olsson era. Sometimes, and if you read the Academy Press Release and Award Ceremony Speeches closely, they make implicit references to laureate's other main competitors.

Concerning Tokarczuk, if you go back to candidates like Hamsun, Jensen, Neruda, Seifert, Naipaul and Aleixievich they are sometimes considered transition laureates. Hamsun appealed to policy of Neutrality criteria of Hjarne, but also humanity criteria of Hallstrom, who succeeded Hjarne as permanent secretary in 1921. Jensen was chosen as bold and freshly creative writer, innovator of modernism in Scandanivian literature (Pionner of Osterling era), but also appealed to accessible style of Hallstrom, who left his post for Osterling. Neruda appealed as pioneer in Latin America's poetry (Osterling), but also the pragmatism of Gierow, who came after the former. Seifert also was a linguistic regenerator in Central European poetry (signalling criteria of linguistic/geographical pioneer 1985--1989), but also appealed to pragmatism criteria. Naipaul was innovator in regards to travel writings, but also appealed to Witness literature phase that would dominate the early years of the century, and Aleixievich pushed boundaries of literary structures, aspect of Danius Laureates but also applies to documentary style writing that characterized Englund's time. However, I wouldn't go in depth in the case of Tokarczuk currently because I'm looking at articles concerning Mats Malm and Anders Olsson. When I'm done, including researching if there's correspondence in the discovery, and I do hope I finish before the Nobel speculations begin in May, then I will carry out my observations. So I'm going to write about Tokarczuk along with other laureates from Malm-era.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Finally finished the articles concerning Mats Malm and Anders Olsson. But first let me introduce both members of Swedish Academy, who are Permanent Secretary and Chairman of the Nobel Committee.

Mats Malm's essays tends to look at Swedish Baroque poetry and investigation into views on aesthetic pleasure as potential social threat and conception of sensuous language. His essays tends to ask questions like what happens to a text when the context it was written in disappears and how can a modern reader return to how it was meant and experienced at the time it was written. In one of his famous work of criticism Minerva's Apple, he presented what he believed to be the literary philosophy: the philosophy of mimesis as discussed by Aristotle and Averros among others (more on that latter). He was elected as Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy in 2019, replacing Sara Danius.

Essays of Anders Olsson, on the other hand, tends to reflect on intertextual connections with Gunnar Ekelof, a notable Swedish Poets and former member of Swedish Academy, fundamental questions in development of modern literature such as death of God and poetical nihilism, art of writing in fragments, modern exile literature and role of time, space and memory playing in this context, with references to Proust. He was working in the newspaper Kris, where he met Academy member Horace Engdahl, and was one of the earliest critics to introduced post-structualism and deconstruction into Swedish literary circles. He, along with Engdahl, introduced writers like Herta Muller, Jelinek, Maurice Blanchot, during their time in the aforementioned newspapers into Swedish literary criticism in the late 1980s. Anders Olsson became the Chairman of the Nobel Committee in 2019.

Since the Academy reshuffled in 2019, one could detect that both Malm and Olsson are both leaders of the Academy. Unlike in the past when Permanent Secretary seems to be the leader of the Academy, with his understanding of literature acting as the interpreatation of Nobel Testament, influence of Olsson and Malm in the choices of the Laureates can't be neglected. It seems both have deepest influence in the Academy and not the sole ideology of the Permanent Secretary as it was in the past.

Under this current era, I would say that the criteria is what I called Era of Mimesis. Let me list the features of this period, and of course citing examples:

-- Presentation of the self, individual making his experience universal, exploring personal and collective memory sometimes interpreted through social context
Annie Ernaux, Louise Gluck, Gurnah
--Represenation of art: the struggle to create works of art, in particular, correspondence to physical world understood as model for beauty and truth as discussed by Aristotle and Plato
Peter Handke (Afternoon of a Writer) Fosse (Septology), Gluck
-- Objects and nature as emphasizes and experience of reality: maps, photographs, body, road as adventures of experience, self-discovery and memory:
Tokarczuk (Flights), Handke (Repetition) Gurnah, Ernaux, Fosse (path's to divine and uncertainity's progressive relation to divine)
-- Role of Time, Space and Memory in one's existence
Handke (Repetition, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Moravian Night), Fosse, Ernaux
-- Drawing strength from oral storytelling and mythologies
Gurnah (absorbing generational narrative's traditional patterns by combing Arabian Nights and Conrad, Shakespeare and Chaucer) Gluck (classical myth)
--- Celebration of beauty of everyday life and nature
Handke (Don Juan), Fosse, Gluck

Summary of Mats Malm essays: Minerva's Apples, Souls of Poetry Redefined and Voices of Poetry:

Representation, which's chief principle of all arts.

Question of sublime and symbol, compression of space and excavation and archeology of mimesis as history of poetics situated within the broader picture of aesthetics and evolution of aesthetic concepts in relation to Averros.

Disappearance of a text's context and how modern reader returns to how it was meant and experienced at the time it was written and how nationality and literary presentation linked to one another at the time.

Aesthetic pleasure as potential sexual threat and conception of sensuous labague as unruly, contagious and lecherous.

Questions of composition of art through representation.

Voices of literature pursuing question on how the voices coming from literature written in a more orally based context can later be experienced differently and how literature changes its meaning through transmission.

Literature seen with harmless and beautiful nuance-- ironic or controversial.

Cultural policy: tradition of national patriotism of political nature-- theoroectical consist of shifts in conception of poetics and aesthetics-- imagery in relation between allegory and symbol.

Imitation: assimilation of himself to another either by use of voice or gesture: the writer in the narrative speaks for himself/herself (auto-fiction).

Rhetoric: adapting and reworking a source text by an earlier author and imitation of other authors and representing everyday life.

Art and language representing reality, perfection and imitation of nature with its changes, decay and cycles but art can search for what's everlasting and first causes of natural phenomena. Mimesis shows rather than tells by means of directly representing and enacting action.

With these analyses, it's very obvious that, and I must reiterate my hearty congratulations, to all members of the forum because we were, again when the Nobel Library was still accessible (2019--2022), we were 80 percent correct concerning the shortlist. In my next post I'll let you guys know how brilliant we were.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Let me present how the Nobel Library was during the first week of September between the years 2019-2021. Remember the reading of the shortlisted candidates was between April and August of the year aforementioned. I stated this because in an interview I read about three years ago, Anders Olsson mentioned that the shortlisted writers has been pushed back to April so as the Academy members could have enough time to read the candidates. In the same interview, Olsson mentioned that the formal shortlist for 2019 prize was 8 names, combining the shortlist for both 2018/19.

September 2019
Peter Handke 13
Peter Nadas 12
Can Xue 10
Olga Tokarczuk 8
Anne Carson 8
Gerald Murnane 9
Louise Gluck 8
Jon Fosse 8
Javier Marias 8
Enrique Vilas-Matas 7
Margaret Atwood 6
Marilyn Robinson 6

We can confidently say that from Marias upwards made the cut.

October 2020
Charles Simic 16
Louise Gluck 13
Frederike Mayrocker 12
Annie Ernaux 11
Jon Fosse 9
Michel Houellebcq 9
Botho Strauss 9
Anne Carson 7
Can Xue 7

Mayrocker wouldn't be in the shortlist because Handke, her compatriot won the Prize the previous year. And the rules is that a writer from a country with an awarded recipient the previous year can't make the shortlist the following year, so we should cancel her name and replace it with Gurnah who had 7 books checked out.

August 2021
Annie Ernaux 18
Jon Fosse 11
Mia Couto 11
Michel Houellebcq 8
Ivan Vladislavic 8
Steve Sem-Sandberg 7

Again, Gurnah wasn't mentioned, but he had 8 books checked out in first week of September. Ngugi has 7 books as well around September, with Xue, Aridjis, Hua, Wicomb and XiXi all having 6 books.

As of March 2022, few days before I joined the forum, I decided to check out some writers. This was few days before the librarians decided to rebrand their website into the current state it's in. At this period there're not strong indications because the committee's working on the long list, but this list's kind of strong indications:

Karl Ove Knausgard 15
Dag Solstad 10
Ernaux 11
Helene Cixous 8
Peter Nadas 6

Jon Fosse had 4 books checked out, but with him wiining the following year, there are strong indications that he was in the shortlist. Another indication is Per Wastberg talking about Knausgard and Rachel Cusk been worthy candidates in near future. Now this might mean that there have been on the shortlist.

I want to explain why I said earlier that Tokarzcuk's a transition Laureate.

If you look at Tokarczuk's works, her works combine the pasticheur of post-modernism that pervaded Danius era: maps and letters in Flights and the journeying experience of Malm era. Her works also employs fantasy or magic realism of Ishiguro's Buried Giant and her desire to push narrative structures and boundaries. There's also the dense descriptions of Polish manor houses which display manifestation of ideas and things in Books of Jacob.

Thus, with the changes in Academy, the Nobel Prize for this decade means two things: either this decade will be a Euro-centric or it will signal dominance of non-European laureates; not like the example we saw in the early 90s when the committee was trying to braoden the horizon, but because of the signs of decline of quality in European literature. We can also conclude that with the criteria currently in place, neither Krasznarhokai nor Cartarescu has ever been shortlisted, for both writers writings aren't clear and accessible, a style which feature prominently from Gluck to Fosse (if you listen to Anders Olsson interview, he emphasized on spare and accessible language).

With these analysis, I believe that the candidate for this year will be among those that has been fairly consistent in the Library. I have already jotted five names, but not going to say anything the speculation begins next month.