Issue 40 / January 2012
EU say what?
Thursday's announcement of the winners of the inaugural European Union Prize for Literature went largely unremarked. Hopefully this won't dampen the spirits of the twelve novelists from Austria, Croatia, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Sweden who will be looking forward to the official ceremony at the end of September where they'll receive their €5,000 cheques from Henning Mankell, the Prize's newly-appointed ambassador.
The lack of attention paid to the prize so far is no reflection on the winners, but more on the antiseptic aura surrounding this brain-child of the European Commission, which aims 'to promote cross-border mobility of those working in the cultural sector, to encourage the transnational circulation of cultural and artistic output, and to foster intercultural dialogue'. (The bold type, like the jargon, is theirs.)
To this end, the prize - part of the Commission's €400m cultural programme - is open to any recently published fiction title by an author who has published between 2 and 5 books. Winners from each of the EU's 34 countries are selected by national juries over three years; this year's winners are merely the first batch.
Ján Figel, the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, is almost uniquely enthusiastic, noting with a lack of imagination befitting a man of his position that 'the fact that [the prize] will be awarded in 2009 is excellent timing, since 2009 is designated as the European Year of Creativity & Innovation', the latter pasteurised phrase supplying one clue as to why nobody else is making much of a fuss.
Had the Prize been established last year, during the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, no doubt Mr Figel would have said something similar. Let us hope he sees the irony in inviting next year's novelists to the Flagey Theatre in Brussels, along with '600 interested parties from the field of culture' during the European Year of Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.
It may be seen as churlish to denigrate an initiative which puts much-needed cash in writers' pockets and helps them to get their works translated, but it seems worth drawing attention to the possibility that the European Prize will do more harm than good.
True, the national juries that decide the winners are made up of fellow-authors, booksellers and publishers ('according to the synergies of the various countries' - make of that what you will), but the overtly political agenda of its sponsors could well detract from the books themselves or, more likely, promote those authors whose political outlook either chimes with that of the Commission or is entirely absent from their work.
It's difficult to find anything inherently wrong with the Article 151 of the EU treaty, which 'requires that the Union take culture into account in all its actions so as to foster intercultural respect and promote diversity', but it is a great deal easier to abhor the rhetoric surrounding the Commission's attempts to follow it: those tell-tale phrases 'the field of culture' and 'artistic output' suggest that it sees this slippery concept of culture as something akin to economics and politics that can be 'taken into account' and, by extension, quantified and controlled.
Even the president of the Federation of European Publishers, Frederico Motta, is full of praise for the Commission's role in highlighting 'the fundamental role of all players in the book value chain [and] transforming wonderful acts of creativity by individual citizens ... into works ... that contribute to increasing the diversified European cultural heritage.' He too, it seems, sees culture as a discreet entity that can and will be contained, promoted and bent to certain ends.
It will sound like perverse hyperbole to call the European Prize for Literature the product of totalitarianism, but I use the word in the sense that Norman Mailer did when he called 'the modern, statistical democracies "totalitarian"... not implying that the artist is bound and muzzled and circumscribed as he would be in a dictatorship [but] that mass democracy, mass morality and mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at a cost of at least a partial perversion of his insights and instincts.'
I can only hope - and it's a reasonable hope - that the national juries ignore the stipulations of the European Commission and elect winners whose insights and instincts are subtle enough to evade the bureaucrats' radar and strong enough to withstand the ignominy of association with the Prize's sponsors.
James Pryor
Tuesday, 21 July, 2009
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