There’s something especially satisfying about the Nobels awarded this year, the 100th anniversary of the prize. The science is comprehensible; the literature is crisp and relevant; and the Peace Prize was given to the organization–and its plain-spoken director–that may have the best chance of bringing some to our fractious world.
Peace Kofi Annan and the U.N.
One day last summer, as Kofi Annan sipped a beer and watched the sun set over Ghana, the land of his birth, he began reflecting on the men he had encountered in the palaces, fortresses and official homes that hold the leaders of the world. On the whole, he observed, they weren’t particularly nice people. There were exceptions, of course–and he listed a few favorites–but by and large the act of rising to a position of high political power, he said, demanded a willingness to put ambition before humanity. Annan stopped for a moment and stared off into the pink sky. “Perhaps,” he said, “this explains an awful lot about the world we’re in.”
The United Nations has always been an ambitious organization, and Annan, in a quiet way, an ambitious man. But in the decade since the end of the cold war, it has been an organization that has time and again put humanity ahead of ambition. Instead of pursuing the path of diplomatic agreement–a path where much gets discussed and nothing really changes–the organization has tried to stop some of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the day. Generally, it has failed. In Rwanda, Srebrenica, East Timor, Kosovo and elsewhere, its influence was not great enough to stop genocide, ethnic cleansing and other horrors. Too much at odds to act in concert, the nations of the world were content to let the founding ideal of the U.N.–universal social justice–shatter.
Increasingly, the U.N. has been there to pick up the pieces. And when the organization and Annan won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, it was as much an acknowledgment of what they have done to repair the mistakes of the past decade as a recognition of how they had tried–and failed–to prevent those mistakes from unfolding. In Kosovo and East Timor, the U.N. has begun to turn nation building into a science, learning how to construct functioning governments and societies in countries torn apart by hate. It is a skill the U.N. may soon be called on to apply in Afghanistan, a land where its efforts have been repeatedly–and sometimes brutally–thwarted by the Taliban.
Even before the announcement last Friday, preparations were under way at U.N. headquarters for the possibility of a Nobel. Annan had been in the running once before, in 1998, but U.N. officials had been worried that an award then, while Annan was still in his first term as Secretary-General, would have made him too “saintly” to stand a chance at a second. But this year the stars seemed perfectly aligned.
U.N. wags sometimes call Annan, who is married to a Swede and likes to vacation in Scandinavia, the “second Swedish Secretary-General.” It is interesting to contrast him with the U.N.’s first Swede, Dag Hammarskjold, the only other Secretary-General to win a Nobel. Hammarskjold skillfully lubricated the cold war shifts among the U.S., Soviet and nonaligned camps. Annan has to worry about the clash of whole civilizations. It says something that Annan and the U.N. would win the Nobel Peace Prize as they face what may be their greatest challenge: healing the rift that has opened up between extreme Islam and the West over grievances that date back to the Middle Ages. Putting humanity ahead of ambition will be both more difficult and more important than ever before.
–By Joshua Cooper Ramo
Literature V.S. Naipaul, Trinidad
Throughout their history, the Nobel Prizes have gone to some odd and controversial figures. In 1997 the Literature award was won by Dario Fo, the Italian satirical actor who, by most conventional tests, was hardly a writer at all. In 1992 the Peace prize went to a previously unheard-of Central American leftist named Rigoberta Menchu, who turned out to have invented some of her “autobiographical” account of her family’s suffering and exploitation among the campesinos of Guatemala.
Had the judges lost their wits, along with their taste, in pursuit of political correctness? Not altogether, it turns out; behold the laurels placed on the much assailed brow (and the $943,000 in the pocket) of novelist, essayist and travel writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, 69, of Indian parentage, born and raised in Trinidad, resident in England since 1950, knighted by the Queen in 1990 and winner by now of just about every literary prize open to writers in English. The Nobel judges pointed to his “incorruptible scrutiny” of the postcolonial world, to the “unrelenting image” of its loss of European values.
In fact, they were in part rewarding him for what his detractors most hate in his work, a corpus which extends to 12 novels and 14 books on travel and other reportage. His writings on Islamic fundamentalism (Among the Believers, 1981; Beyond Belief, 1998), on political misrule and social decay in Africa (A Bend in the River, 1979) and other postcolonial topics have made Naipaul “a marked man,” according to Edward Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. In the Third World, says Said, Naipaul is seen as “a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him, though that doesn’t exclude people thinking he’s a gifted writer.” A previous Nobelist (1992), the great St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott (Omeros), has praised Naipaul’s stylistic elegance without reservation, while decrying his “repulsion toward Negroes” and the “self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity.”
Pitilessly astringent, formally exact, observant, pessimistic and skeptical of “progress,” Naipaul can also be, at times, intolerably nasty: Who but Naipaul, when asked what the red dot on a Hindu woman’s forehead signified, would answer, “It means My head is empty”? Naipaul doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and to him the world is full of fools. Fuller, perhaps, than it really is. But he has been known to hit targets that few others would touch at the time: witness, for instance, his scarifying treatment of the ugly pretensions of English “black power” in the 1960s, in The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad, 1980, a piece of reportage that says what good liberal opinion considered unsayable about the posturing and murderous Michael X.
It is one of the nicer ironies of postcolonial English writing that the most evident heir to that great and fearsome archconservative Evelyn Waugh, who famously despised every civilization that had not been subjugated by Rome, should be from the Caribbean. Naipaul is also one of the very few writers to have a whole, book-length cruise missile of a memoir fired at him by a fellow writer. In 1998 Paul Theroux, in a striking fit of Oedipal peevishness, published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, painting his former friend and mentor as a self-obsessed, avaricious, pathologically snobbish brute. Perhaps he is. If so, he is not the first major writer to be one. Generally, nice guys don’t do too much for world literature.
The last half of the 20th century brought a remarkable shift in the center of gravity of English writing. So much of the new, best stuff was coming from what once had been the periphery of Empire: from Africa, India, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia. Naipaul’s work was a major part of this process, as was that of an earlier Nobelist, the Australian Patrick White. Naipaul wrote with piercing insight and even tenderness about ignored areas of experience (lower-middle-class Trinidadian life, for instance, in A House for Mr. Biswas, 1961). What was more, when he decided to leave Trinidad, separation gave him a great theme: the condition of being an expatriate, a stranger to places, a wanderer, an outsider, undeluded by local loyalties, always looking in.
And yet nothing disgusts him more than to be called a Caribbean writer. “Nothing was made in Trinidad,” he said; but in a deeper sense, a number of his own books were, and what made them was the unappeasable desire to see the world as a release from what he believed to be his stunted and provincial origins. In retrospect, he despised Trinidad so much that he couldn’t bring himself to mention it in his thank-you remarks on learning he’d won the Nobel. “It is a great tribute,” he announced in measured terms, through his publisher, “to both England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors.” Well, among other places.
–By Robert Hughes
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