As of now, we're less than a month from the next round of Nobel Prizes. I'd talked in my last post about a few of the trends that the Nobel committee has followed in the recent past. But today I ask you: What trends should the people behind the Nobels be following? What is the standard that should determine who does, and doesn't, get the Nobel?
Stylistic or artistic influence, perhaps? This is a standard that, as far as I can tell, has guided some very wise Nobel selections. Samuel Beckett, who won the award in 1969, introduced a new, spare, absurd style to modern theater. And where fiction is concerned, everyone from Donald Barthelme to Salman Rushdie learned something or other from him. The problem, though, is that "artistic influence" is something you need hindsight to really appreciate. After all, Borges and Nabokov have rivaled Beckett in influence, and maybe surpassed him. But alas, they don't have Nobels.
Or should the Nobel, instead, serve mainly as a way of recognizing authors who make bold social statements and take courageous stances? In fact, the award has gone to several outspokenly political writers, from Winston Churchill (1953) to Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Yet here too things are a bit askew. German author Thomas Mann, for instance, made brave and intelligent criticisms of Nazi Germany. The problem is, Mann won the Nobel in 1929. For a book he'd published in 1901. Well, so much for that criterion.
That said, please, let me know what standards you think the Nobel committee should be following. And don't take it too hard if the authors you admire continue to come up empty-handed. Plenty of the authors I admire-from Tolstoy to Proust to Kafka to Calvino-never won Nobels.