Another country
Carla Carlisle defends the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
GARRISON KEILLOR has announced that he’s off lingonberries, Volvos and flatpack white furniture from Ikea. Even the meatballs are off the menu. America’s bighearted writer is on a Swedish no-go because he’s had it with the humourless Swedes who have given yet another Nobel Prize to a writer whose contribution to literature is incomprehensible, pretentious and bleak. His only consolation: ‘At least they didn’t give it to Joni Mitchell.’
I think that’s pretty hard on Kazuo Ishiguro. When I heard on Today that he’d won, I felt a wave of happiness. Not because I’ve read all his books, but because he’s a British writer and I thought: ‘A triumph for the English language!’ My husband’s response was more prosaic. ‘Who is this Ishiguro? He doesn’t sound English.’
He was even more mystified by the Nobel committee’s praise of the Japanese-born English Ishiguro as a writer who ‘has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. ‘What on earth does that mean?’ he asked.
I am married to an Englishman who believes that the high calling of literature is to lead people out of the abyss. I’ve never wandered to my desk without hearing his wistful plea: ‘Try to make people feel better.’
Although Mr Keillor and I share politics, music and poetry (I begin every morning with him on www.writersalmanac.com), I can’t give up my Volvo just because the Swedes reward hard and often dreary writers. I come from the poorest state in the Union and our greatest source of pride was that we had a Nobel Prize winner.
Admittedly, when William Faulkner won in 1949, no more than 10 people in the state of Mississippi had read a word he’d written. He was deep in debt and out of print everywhere except France, a country that believes pretentious and incomprehensible rhymes with intellectual. But for nearly seven decades, Mississippians have been grateful that Faulkner’s prize hitched their mule and wagon to the wider world and showed that, along with cotton, catfish, imbeciles, ringworm and lynching, we were a land of storytellers. Without that Nobel Prize, I reckon Mr Faulkner would still be out of print.
When Nobel created his legacy in 1896, he wanted it to go to the writer of ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. His family fought the provision in his will, so the awards were stalled until 1901, when the first prize went to French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme.
The names of Nobel Laureates whose workshop is the English language— Rudyard Kipling, who, at 41, is still the youngest ever winner, Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Churchill, Hemingway, Beckett, Golding, Heaney, Pinter, Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Alice Munro and last year’s surprise winner, Bob Dylan—reads like a roll call of writers who have put their heart and soul into the written word.
Britain’s newest literary Nobel Laureate, known as Ish by friends, is a worthy member of the club. He was born in Nagasaki in 1954; his mother, still alive and very proud of her son, survived the atomic bomb. His father, an oceanographer, moved the family to England in 1959 and settled in Surrey. The family planned to go back to Japan someday, but, when he was 15, they decided to stay in England. In 1983, aged 29, he became a British citizen.
If you’re born nine years after the atom bomb has levelled the city of your birth, you could be forgiven if some existential darkness seeps into your writing. Faulkner’s most famous quote, ‘The past is never dead, It’s not even past’, often omits the next line: ‘All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born.’ If ever a writer was destined to labour in those webs, surely it was Ishiguro. The first two of his eight novels are set in Nagasaki as the city was struggling to recover.
Restless times back then. Restless times now. Scenes of floods, forest fires, terrorist attacks, ancient cities reduced to rubble, millions in refugee camps, worldwide debt and two unpredictable men with the deadliest weapons known to mankind at their fingertips. It would take a partially deaf writing genius to sidestep this manmade abyss.
‘All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born Without the Nobel Prize, Faulkner would still be out of print
When Faulkner accepted his prize in Stockholm in 1950, he was painfully aware that the bombs that had fallen five years earlier had replaced the artists’ concerns of the spirit with the basest fear: ‘When will I be blown up?’ Faulkner, however, urged the writer to fight against his fear, that it’s the writer’s ‘privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice’. He believed that the writer’s voice should be one of the pillars ‘to help him endure and prevail’.
And now I’m worried that I haven’t made you feel better. Go and buy Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Mr Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, his first novel about a Japanese family coming to live in England. Three continents, two Nobel Prize winners, one great language and worth the journey.
Put a log on the fire. Join Mr Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Serve meatballs with lingonberries—they go together like readers and writers. And say a quiet prayer of gratitude for a prize that ensures writers like Faulkner and Mr Ishiguro will prevail and readers will endure.