The Nobel Prize Ritual - Time to Read Again

By: Hans Bool
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:25:23
Print this article | Tell a friend | For publisher |

Rating:

 

The Nobel Ritual in selecting a new candidate is interesting as a cultural process. But it is also a trigger to start reading again ...

First the process. The process to select the next Nobel Prize winner must be very difficult. There are so many prestigious candidates, that requires the selection to be very thorough; “what criteria should the jury use,” is an simple question, but hard to answer at least not by using some kind of objective criteria.

Therefore it is not unlikely that politics will influence the selection process, like is the case of selecting a new pope. At one moment in time we can see the white smoke out of the chimney, but that is the only visible part of a process that is highly nontransparent.

On one hand, power plays a significant role in politics, on the other hand, the anxiety to control whatever process. And this latter factor seems plausible when explaining a Nobel Prize Assignment, also when it is about literature and not even about Peace.

A candidate from Turkey – the first ever to receive a Nobel prize (for literature) – does not come out of the blue if we consider the above; Turkey is for more than one reasons interesting at the moment, not only about the issue of entering (or not) the European Union, but also because of its strategic bridging position between the west and the east. And not in the last place because of his support for the Armenian genocides which is controversial in Turkey, but widely accepted outside. If control and power are influencing forces, the outcome of the Nobel for literature seems quite reasonable already.

Than the candidate itself. A Nobel Candidate is obviously already a personality before receiving the Nobel. Only yesterday the Spanish Television showed a little incident about Camille Jose Cela, who received the Nobel in 1989. Cela was interviewed beside his pool by a woman. And we witness him pushing her into the pool after she had asked him a question he didn’t like. She crawls her way back to the border he helps her to get out of the water and then, when we watchers think that the incident is over, he pushes her in the pool again; “that’s what we do with people who ask those kind of questions ...” is his reply.

According to the newspaper SUR in “a Nobel between east and West,” the new Nobel Prize Winner -- Orhan Pamuk -- is chosen amongst other things for “the combat and mix of cultures that is a constant in his work.”

Whatever the final reason and whatever the influencing forces, there is a new Winner and the work of Pamuk will receive a fair amount of attention the coming months. We could already read something about his work in today’s paper, “the continuous tension between modernity and tradition,” is an ingredient that is fascinating. It is a good trigger to pick up a book again. “Go for it,” I would say, even if you think this Nobel stuff is about politics or whatever, any new Nobel laureate (for literature) should be a good read.

© 2006 Hans Bool

Article source: Expert Articles