Nobler in the Mind

            I am not “on” Twitter, as they say, or might say, one is “on” crystal meth.  One would think that artificially enforced economy of space would stimulate clarity of thought and elegance of expression.  Brevity being the soul of wit, one would suppose that the Land of Twitter would sparkle like a Restoration comedy.  It is the purpose of artificial literary constraints, as in the sonnet or the clerihew or the double dactyl, to encourage ingenuity.  But the twittered obiter dicta of our celebrities, and especially our presidential celebrity, do little to confirm such an expectation.

Twitter was involved in the first of two “free speech” incidents that caught my attention in the last week or so.  The first was the flap caused by Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets in the National Basketball Association, who, with regard to the political demonstrations in Hong Kong, tweeted a poster image reading “Fight for freedom—Stand with Hong Kong.”  Unfortunately, “fighting for freedom” is not merely meaningless but a losing business plan if your real goal is to extract as much money as possible out of China, as Mr. Morey soon discovered.    He immediately—though still too late—hit the delete button.  “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offence to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” Morey wrote in a Twitter post on Monday morning. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”  One of those perspectives came from the basketball superstar LeBron James.  James’s opinion is that Morey is insufficiently “educated” on the complex issue of political discontent in Hong Kong.  James himself is very well educated on that score.  He knows exactly which side of his bread is buttered.  This is an observation, not a criticism.  American citizens still have the right to express themselves as they wish, if they are prepared to face the possibility of reactive twitter storms themselves.  And as our President has apparently decided that our State Department professionals are useless to him, basketball professionals may be as satisfactory substitutes as are available for the articulation of foreign policy.

The other episode was more strictly literary.  In fact, it was very literary, as it involved the Nobel Prize in Literature.  As you may know there is a bustling industry devoted to the manufacture of fancy cultural “collectibles”—presidential plates, busts of movie stars, flasks and decanters celebrating the world’s great vintages—that sort of thing.  They are usually sold through magazines catering for “seniors” with the suggestion that they “can only increase in value,” though one generally finds them resurfacing not in museums but in flea markets along the interstate.   There is also a bibliographical dimension to this trade, finely made books (often of English or American classics) offered by the Folio Society or the Franklin Mint at a considerable price.  And a couple of times in second hand shops I have come upon a large collection of fancy books called the “Nobel Prize Library” or something like that.  Each of the many volumes contains the best-known or most plausibly representative work of a Nobel laureate in literature.  Several things struck me as I rapidly surveyed the post- War volumes.  The first is the achievement of American writers, which has been considerable.  The second was that there were many winners whose work was quite unknown to me, and even several of whom I had never heard.  My ignorance was a bit awkward.  I am, after all, supposed to be a professor of literature.  I am afraid the same thing happened this year, when the recently  announced winners (there are two) were Peter Handke and Olga Totarczuk.  Olga who?  I should have known, but I didn’t.  Actually Totarczuk’s prize was a kind of “make up” for 2018, when a scandal among the Nobel judges aborted that year’s deliberations.

But my unfamiliarity with these authors did not last long.  Indeed I first heard of the prizes from an outraged statement protesting the judgment of the Nobel committee by the current president of PEN America, Jennifer Egan.  PEN stands for something.  It originally stood for “poets, essayists, and novelists”—or “creative writers,” as we used to call them, before it finally sunk in that the phrase creative writer is a pleonasm like power politics or food nutrition.  But PEN also stands for something in an ethical sense: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write.”  I can go with the flow.  It is all the rage these days for scholars, academic disciplines, critical approaches, and literary theories to “stand at intersections”.

Peter Handke is an Austrian writer of conservative political cast.  Olga Totarczuk, a Polish writer of fiction and a public intellectual.   The main complaint concerned Handke, who had defended the actions of the disgraced Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic.  Handke had gone so far as to offer a eulogy upon Milosovic’s death.  While I share the conventional view that Milosevic was a bad hombre, the man did die of natural causes during the protracted course of a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, presumably while still enjoying the assumption of innocence.  The criticism that has been leveled at Totarczuk is apparently based on her willingness, indeed stated pleasure, of sharing the prize with Peter Handke.  Jennifer Egan, a fine American writer and the current President of PEN, issued the following statement: “We (that is, PEN) are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide.”   Now, remember that the motto on the PEN website is “Freedom to Write.”   Remember also that PEN admonishes us to “defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.”   Finally, remember, as the Nobel committee itself was provoked into pointing out, the Nobel Prizes in Literature are given in recognition of literary achievement, not on the basis of political orthodoxy or heresy, let alone conspicuous zeal for the intersection of literature and human rights.  Time was you could be a Stalinist toady and gulag pooh-pooher and a prize-winner.  And as far as “historical truth” is concerned, truth is that no small number of the world’s great writers have been swine—swinishness, alas, being a not uncommon feature of the “human condition” that is the subject of great literature.