NOBEL JUDGE QUITS IN DISGUST – A YEAR AFTER ‘PORN’ WINNER
>>From Charles Bremner in Paris
The Times, UK
Oct 12 2005
MYSTERY surrounded the resignation of a member of the Nobel Academy
yesterday, 48 hours before the prize for literature is due to
be awarded, amid speculation of a split over whether to honour a
dissident Turkish writer.
Knut Ahnlund said that he had resigned in protest over the award
last year to the little-known Elfriede Jelinek, of Austria, whose
work he described as “violent pornography”. Mr Ahnlund, 82, did not
explain why he had waited almost a year before lodging his protest,
increasing talk of a rift among members over the award for this year.
The announcement of this year’s literary honours had been delayed for
a week after the academy was reported to have disagreed on whether
to anoint Orhan Pamuk, 53, who has upset authorities in his country
by campaigning for official recognition that Turkey had carried
out genocide against the Armenians after the First World War. He
has been charged with “public denigration of the Turkish identity”,
and a prize for him would be certain to anger Turkey.
Mr Ahnlund wrote in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that Jelinek’s
work was “a mass of text that appears shovelled together without
trace of artistic structure”. The 2004 prize, he said, “has not
only caused irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has
(also) confused the general view of literature as art. After this
I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy.” Jelinek is
known to the right-wing Austrian media and political parties as
“the red pornographer”. The conservative US Weekly Standard said
that the academy had given the prize to “an unknown, undistinguished,
leftist fanatic”. In making last year’s decision, the academy cited
the “musical flow of voices and counter-voices” in her writing,
which draws heavily on sexuality and violence.
The Nobel Academy will announce this year’s winner tomorrow. In
addition to Pamuk, other writers tipped for the £760,000 prize
include Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, of the United States,
Margaret Atwood, of Canada, and Nuruddin Farah, of Somalia. Some
Swedish insiders believe that the academy may award the prize to a
non-fiction writer. Two British precedents for this exist: Winston
Churchill, in 1953, and Bertrand Russell, in 1950.
Yesterday Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the academy, played
down Mr Ahnlund’s resignation, saying that he had not taken part in
the academy’s work since 1996.
The debate over the 2004 award has been in keeping with the disputes
that have often erupted around the sometimes quirky and politically
correct choices of the academy, whose 18 members are appointed for
life. Mr Ahnlund’s withdrawal reduces the active membership to 15.
Two other members, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, left in 1989
in protest at the academy’s failure to express support for Salman
Rushdie after the fatwa against him by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
the late Iranian leader.
The academy, which has been awarding the prize since 1901, has often
honoured mainstream authors such as Gabriel García Marquez and Rudyard
Kipling. It has also courted disfavour with governments by elevating
anti-establishment writers, and perplexity by anointing figures
little-known in their own countries. Boris Pasternak, the author of
Dr Zhivago, was forced by the Kremlin in 1959 to reject the prize,
which it deemed to have been motivated by anti-Soviet intentions.
Mr Engdahl said that criticism of the academy came largely from the
Englishspeaking publishing world. “A French or a German reader, or
writer or critic, is more likely to have access to the great dialogue
of literatures that Goethe called Weltliteratur,” he said.
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