Over the past two years, every magazine in this country—all seven of them—has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to the ever-present and all-important subject of men and why they are failing. They have provided dozens of possible explanations: the decline of manufacturing, unions, and the American middle-class; the feminization of American culture; the rise of wokeness; the existence of women; fluoride.
Krasznahorkai’s victory should hardly come as a shock. He is, by the meager standards of contemporary literary fiction, a global superstar. Serious young men, it seems, are everywhere and, while their cumulative student debt varies from country to country, they are pretty much the same (glasses, a Letterboxd account, an almost staggering inability to talk to women) whether you’re in New York, Budapest, or Seoul. To the extent that it’s surprising, it’s only because there was a general expectation that the Academy would first reward Péter Nádas, Hungary’s other author of challenging, exportable fiction, because he is older. But it turns out that every copy of Parallel Stories in Sweden is being used to stabilize wobbly Ikea tables. And Krasznahorkai’s eventual victory has been treated as all but assured for years. Why wait?
So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in Literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer.
This was the Nobel Prize’s weird era and it was exciting. It was easy to project all kinds of political and cultural arguments onto the Swedish Academy’s decision-making (high art vs. popular art, inclusiveness vs. whatever it is Peter Handke represents, Eurocentrism vs. internationalism, poets vs. normal writers)—because the Swedish Academy itself was a site of insane contestation.
That the Swedish Academy was routinely beset with scandal, infighting, and controversy only drove the point home: What business does a group of people from a country whose lone contribution to global culture over the past century is ABBA Gold have deciding the global literary canon? (To be fair, that is also the greatest contribution to global culture over the past century.) Sure, the winners were usually pretty solid, but it was hard not to feel that they were less interesting than the processes, decisions, and controversies that got them the, uh, gold.
Sadly, a close or even distant reading of the past few winners suggests that the Nobel’s weird era is over. After the batshit run of Alexievich, Dylan, Ishiguro, Tokarczuk, and Handke (the latter two awarded in a single year because of a #MeToo/gambling controversy that embroiled the Academy in 2018—a combination of factors that in retrospect stands in for much of what ails the world today), things have been normal, solid, and respectable. No gripes with Glück and Gurnah, no errors with the choice of Ernaux, no fault with Fosse, all kredit to Kang and, now, Krasznahorkai. How respectable! How solid! But—crucially—what are two unprofessional Nobel commentators to do?
Not only that, the Nobel Prize has become almost predictable. There are still surprises, sure—no one saw Han Kang coming—but on the whole you can presume that if a writer’s book is wrapped in a dust jacket with the word “visionary” somewhere on the flap and a silver medal on the front cover (a lesser prize, like the Man Booker), you’re dealing with a future laureate.
After that it will be another man. Call it the Lijenstrad Theory: a woman and then a man. Usually a European man. “Every other year or so it has to be old, male, European and laundry-list,” Lijenstrad said—referring to the rapidly diminishing list of canonical writers the Academy regularly plucks from. In this sense, the Academy is honoring tradition: The Nobel Prize “continues to be basically [devoted to] European Pride, with varying degrees of curiosity regarding the rest of the planet.”
Before you freaks start posting about us on Reddit, however, we will be pedantically clear: We are you. We love Krasznahorkai and his hypnotic gloom. He has far more range than he’s given credit for (by us). He’s funny. The Béla Tarr alliance was an extraordinary moment in culture. OK? Happy? Now we can address more important subjects, like how you live in a basement and spend more time watching pornography than reading books. The basement is owned by your parents, who are worried about you. They’re not thrilled about the OnlyFans bills, either. And, ugh, what’s that all over your copy of Seiobo the Below? Is it mold? We hope it’s mold ...
If you asked ChatGPT nicely, it could write a single sentence that stretched on forever. But it couldn’t produce the disorienting effects that Krasznahorkai’s winding, restless sentences generate with total consistency. This the right moment for “reality examined to the point of madness.” It’s hard not to feel immensely grateful for Krasznahorkai’s ceaseless examination, and hard not to feel grateful to the Nobel for endowing it with visibility and credibility. It is, first and foremost, a victory for men: No one can say we don’t read books again! But—and it certainly doesn’t work out this way most of the time—it is a victory for all serious readers as well.
This is how bad life in the early days of the ChatGPT Era is: Even we have to admit that the Nobel Prize is good for something.
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