Welcome Readers of Kos, Hunter Division

You are legion and have busted my Site Meter .... but I invite you to look around.  But be careful.  The china's expensive and the cats bolt for the door.  That said, the house recommends the posts to your immediate right labelled "Would That They Were Representative."  If you prefer a drubbing of a different sort, let me suggest Michael Berube's entry on Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and his nearly depleted wrong reserves. 

UPDATE: Alright, I know that you and I agree that "conservatives" (however "we" define the term, i.e. despite our differences) are the Devil, but I'm more than a little disappointed that 3,719 people have reconnoitred these environs and not a single person has taken issue with anything I wrote.  Stop the self-congratulatory applause.  No one here will pat you on the back.

Surely you know that while the statement the committee made with the Pinter decision is a strong one.  But if they've at all been influenced by his recent poetry then they've compromised their standards and have degraded the legacies of previous award winners.  Again, not to say that I disagree Pinter's position on the war in Iraq, but given the quality of his work since he's "retired," sound reasons for criticism abound.  As Scott McLemee (someone you all should read) said:

This award makes sense only as a foreign-policy editorial disguised as a literary prize.

McLemee's as snugly left as you or I, but he has the balls to be honest about the decision.  I only say this because, while I appreicate the link and the overwhelming amount of traffic accompanying it, there's an annoying sense of rallying 'round the banner to the criticism of conservative criticism of Pinter's selection.  He wrote brilliantly about contemporary issues thirty years ago.  But since he's "quit" the literary business for the pundit racket he's been hit-or-miss: "hit" on the Iraq debacle, yes, but "miss Miss MISS!" on Milošević.  And the quality of his work of late, as I indicated when I mocked both LGF commenter "Carolyn" and Pinter for the substance of and response to "American Football."

In other words, those on the Left (Old, New, Radical, Über-Radical, or what-not) need to not wear the blinders of their brethren on the Right; they need to differentiate between legitimate criticism of artist's work and the stupidity of those who would pride themselves on reading naught but Dan Brown.  The Left is as impotent as ever, and no amount of self-congratulation will change that.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I don't get the point of your update, Scott. Everyone knows that if Pinter had written poetry and no plays, he would be a complete unknown and would not be winning a Nobel. But briefly skimming the Kos thread, I didn't see defenses of the quality of Pinter's poetry. What I saw was the exact same kind of thing that you wrote: mockery of conservatives using many of the same tropes that Mencken pioneered. You didn't write that Pinter didn't deserve the Nobel, so what were they supposed to take issue with?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rich,

I can hear the applause but I can't see any faces. In short, I suppose what I wrote in there's a bit crafty, but I thought the shots I took at Pinter hit their mark. In other words, the update's about my own failure to communicate the complexities of the position I espoused. As someone who teaches three days a week...that's disturbing. I ought to be able to replicate on my blog what I produce in the classroom, no?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, if you think that Pinter shouldn't have gotten the prize, then you should be criticizing his plays, not his poetry. Assuming that you're just worried that the Nobel committee is making the Nobels look bad by an appearance of political influence, then why should anyone from Kos care? They care primarily about politics.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

His plays are worthy of the award, but I can't help (hence the McLemee cite) but think this selection was less about his stellar work in decades past and more about his recent renunciation of "the arts." I think what we've witnessed a literary award based on conveniently political retrodiction; had Pinter been wrong about the war (i.e. if we lived in a world in which our leaders didn't lie before they thought to speak) I don't think he would've been awarded the Nobel. In short, I'm not attacking the committee for choosing a worthy candidate, I'm attacking what I believe are their motivations for choosing this worthy candidate over other, equally worthy ones. For example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o deserves it as much as Pinter, but he's not a convenient candidate...no greater statement can be made through his selection. That's no knock on Pinter's work, mind you, and I realize as I write this that I'm falling into some fairly familiar traps, foremost among them the assumption that everything everyone else in the world does constitutes a political statement aimed at the US; but I still think that Pinter's selection's more suspect than many of the people who're clicking from Kos assume, and that's what compelled me to update this post thus. (And you're right: people from Kos shouldn't care about this positive press, no matter how the ideological opposition spins it; but that doesn't mean I can't help refine the delicate gradations of aesthetic distinction employed here, does it?)

[Ahistoricality]

A lot of blog-lanches are like that. I've never gotten an Instalanche or Kos-wave, but the smaller volume traffic I've gotten from places like CoV and Sideshow have rarely translated into comments. Spam, yes; comments, not so much.

[SimoneDB]

If the Nobel Prize in literature is about political commentary, Ngugi wa Th'iongo does deserve a Nobel more than Pinter. Ngugi makes me shiver, and his writing has occurred under such repressive conditions that the fact he managed to write all, and so eloquently and powerful, is just extraordinary. I've heard Ngugi speak twice, once in the late 80s and once in the mid-90s.

Although I've got one of those useless doctorates in English lit and don't dislike Pinter, he's someone I didn't think much about when I went to grad school (even though I did 20th century British and postcolonial lit). As an undergraduate, I thought his work was clever--read him in the context of Beckett, the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, and also folks like Tom Stoppard--and brutal, but I can't recall anything after Betrayal that caught my eye and gave me pause.

That said, since it's been 20+ years since I've read The Dumbwaiter, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, etc., perhaps I ought to revisit Pinter with more jaded eyes.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, you write about his plays being worthy and stellar and so on. I'm a bit confused at this point. I realize that you may an anomoly, but isn't evaluative criticism supposed to be defunct? I thought that no one was still supposed to be able to make statements that said that one work was great and another was not. Yet strangely, whenever Nobel time rolls around I don't see literary studies people complaining about this. I guess I'll file this along with the mystery of how those who believe in the lack of privilege of authorial interpretation always seem to forget this when one of their favorites or their own writing is "misinterpreted".

Basically, I think that contemporary literary studies is so far away from considering issues of quality that I don't see any grounds for complaint that the Nobel choosing process is political. How could it not be?

[Stephen]

What's striking about Pinter winning the prize is that yes, his recent political writings probably affected the choice, but at the same time he's a very typical pick. I.e., Nobel Prizes typically (although there have been notable exceptions) go to writers' whose best work is behind them, but who have done something recently to make them newsworthy again. It's meant to be a capstone to a career, which seems appropriate in Pinter's case given that he's in his mid-70s and has cancer. Think of Hemingway - he received the award in the mid-1950s, right? All of his best work was done in the 1920s and 1930s; by the 1950s he was writing crap like The Old Man and the Sea - bleh!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Simone,

My choice of Ngũgĩ's homerism on my part, since he runs UCI's International Center for Writing and Translation; I hadn't read him before my wife took his translation seminar in Winter '04. I know he's been "short-listed" for the Nobel (it's standard introductory fare whenever he speaks), but before I read his work I too thought he would've been a purely political selection...but he writes mighty powerful stuff, informed by his politics, certainly, but by no means of the "quality" of late Pinter.

Rich,

You can see where I'm headed with the above: yes, I certainly think there's an evaluative critic in every literary scholar; I just don't think you can mistake your own interests for what you find interesting. For example, the evaluative critic in me is very (and increasingly) lukewarm about Jack London, but I find his work interesting for the greater intellectual problems I'm tackling, so I'm writing about him. There's also the idea that he's an important figure, literary evaluations be damned. I don't think I'm unusual in this respect, as everyone I know separates the work they do from what they enjoy; sure, sometimes those overlap (although when they do, the "enjoyment" becomes increasingly beholden to the "work"), but generally speaking, I don't think it's unusual to find medievalists reading Pynchon or Americanists reading George Eliot.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, I think I understand where you're headed, but isn't a major part of current literary studies the idea that if "there's an evaluative critic in every literary scholar", that this is a false conciousness? I thought that was what all of those old-style culture wars about canon formation were about; that nothing is really objectively "better" than anything else, that _Ulysses_ and any issue of Superman had the same literary value. Sure, some texts are more historically important than others, but that's just the remains of old politics. So why not use current politics to pick the Nobelist? If you look at e.g. Matt's blog, that's certainly the approach he uses: what he says about Pinter is not how good or bad his work is, or indeed anything about his work, but "A great big wooden beam, stuck in the eye of the liberals".

I thought that everyone pretty much assumed that the Nobel picks were political. That's why Scott McLemee can declare that "This award makes sense only as a foreign-policy editorial disguised as a literary prize" without saying anything about how good a playwright Pinter is and have everyone nod. That's why the mockery of the wingnuts focussed on their lack of literary coolness, interest, and technique, rather than on the fact that they thought that the award was political; you also think it was political.

So let me turn the question around a little. How would you defend your contention that Pinter's poetry isn't very good? Most evaluative judgements seem to basically be an appeal to authority; i.e. when I said that Gene Wolfe was second-rate and gave my reasons, Jonathan wrote "And averse personal reactions to a book are fine and interesting to hear about, don't get me wrong. It's just when you make value-judgements based upon them that it becomes difficult", but he didn't hesitate to list a number of well-known critics who thought that Gene Wolfe was great as his only evidence that he was great.