Should McCarthy win the Nobel?

As of this morning, Cormac McCarthy is the betting favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. [Update: The final odds of his win, which he did not get, were three to one.]

The question is not whether he will take home the Prize, to be announced tomorrow, but whether he should. (I don’t think there is much of a chance of his winning. His reputation for violence, although it might accord with many Europeans’ image of American culture, would probably be enough to disqualify him.) Does he deserve the award?

According to its official website, the Nobel Prize in literature was originally intended, in Alfred Nobel’s bequest, to honor “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency [idealisk rigtning].” It is not clear from the context of his will what Nobel meant by “idealistic tendency.” In the nineteenth century, idealism seems usually to have been counterposed to realism, especially when discussing the arts. Wagner, for example, held that realism was ruining art: “the slaves had revolted.” Idealism signified the restoration of an ideal order, the upholding of the higher ideals (not found commonly in reality) for which men should strive.

The first Nobel Prize in literature was awarded in 1901 to Sully Prudhomme, whose poetry “gives evidence of lofty idealism.” Eight years later the Swedish fiction writer Selma Lagerlöf was also recognized for her “lofty idealism.” So too Paul Heyse the next year, Romain Rolland in 1915, Karl Adolph Gjellerup in 1917, George Bernard Shaw in 1925, and Grazia Deledda in 1926. Although Europeans might have become suspicious of the term during Hitler’s war against humanity, it was revived when the Nobel Prizes resumed after a three-year moratorium in 1944. Gabriela Mistral, Hermann Hesse, and even Bertrand Russell were praised in the name of idealism.

Although the word has not been used in a citation since 1950, its spirit haunts the Prize. Albert Camus “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”; in Samuel Beckett, “the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “ethical force”; Eugenio Montale “has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions”; Vicente Aleixandre “illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos”; Isaac Bashevis Singer “brings universal human conditions to life”; Jaroslav Seifert “provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man”; Camilo José Cela “forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability”; Octavio Paz’s “humanistic integrity”; Nadine Gordimer’s writing “has—in the words of Alfred Nobel—been of very great benefit to humanity.”

While each on its own is little more than wind, the phrases taken together do begin to flap in an idealisk rigtning. The question that I have never been able to answer about Cormac McCarthy is whether he belongs to the same universe of thought as these phrases. In “his anguish [a man] may rage,” Holden says in Blood Meridian, “but rage at what?” The only ideals in McCarthy’s world seem to be geological shapes. “For the earth is a globe in the void and [in] truth there’s no up nor down to it,” Holden says.

But is this the final word about the human experience, according to McCarthy? Or is this where man hits bottom, from which he must rise again in a tentative but defiant expression of faith? Isn’t McCarthy’s absorption with language itself an idealistic profession, finding solace in a human creation against the void?

I confess that I have never been able to make up my mind about McCarthy, and perhaps the readers of A Commonplace Blog have some ideas. If he is merely the dazzling chronicler of man’s lack, he does not meet the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will. But if the bleakness of his narrative landscapes is not the human end but the point of its necessary renewal, well, then, Cormac McCarthy deserves a Nobel Prize just as much as Samuel Beckett did.