Nobel Prize Announcement 2016

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016:

'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'

Oh boy.

At least one reviewer, namely me, will have to eat their words (a strange taste, if you ask me), having previously dismissed Dylan as an impossibility, but then, this is 2016 where, apparently, the laws of the earth need not apply.

I'm not the best person to comment on Dylan's songwriting abilities.  I've only listened to one of his albums, the one that has 'Tombstone Blues' on it and it was alright.  I've no complaints or real problems with the choice but, it has opened up a small floodgate.

What is literature?  Is now a good question.

What is it now to the committee?  Will Pink Floyd now have a chance of getting it?

What the committee have done is put the cat amongst the pigeons as there was not a critic alive that would have seriously expected this.

But in the sense of goodwill I congratulate Bob Dylan for his achievement, and will have to do something for the first time for this blog.  Buy some vinyl.

Accidental Death of a Playwright

Dario Fo has died earlier on today, coincidentally the day of the Nobel Prize Announcement, in a hospital in Milan.  He was 90 years old.

Known for his satirical farces his love for the jester imbued his writing.

I watched 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist' in the Aberstwyth Art Centre Theatre and very much enjoyed his fast-paced wit and knockabout jokes, including the joke about Noah and the fish, of which I have forgotten the punchline.

He leaves a legacy of 80 plays.

Each His Own Wilderness by Doris Lessing

TONY:
              Do you know what it is you've created, you and your lot?  What a vision it is!  A house for every family.  Just imagine- two hundred million families- or is it four hundred million families?  To every family a front door.  Behind every front door, a family.  A house full of clean, well-fed people, and not one of them ever understands one word anyone else says.  Everybody a kind of wilderness surrounded by barbed wire shouting across the defenses into the other wildernesses and never getting an answer back.  That's socialism.  I suppose it's progress.  Why not?  To every man his wife and two children and a chicken in the pot on Sundays.  A beautiful picture- I'd die for it.  To every man his front door and his front door key.  To each his own wilderness.

Even in Tony's own family they are shouting at each other and never getting an answer back; non-communication isn't simply between neighbours but it is within families; even, sometimes, within the people themselves.
  If you thought the 50s was about bland conformity then have another look at Doris Lessing's play 'Each His Own Wilderness', where, as we see, it was charged with debate, disagreement and discussion.
  Tony, a returned soldier back from his stint of national service despairs at the mess and chaos of his mother's life, an activist campaigning against the H-bomb.  He yearns for the order of the army and begins to make plans to order the house.  His mother, Myra, is uninterested in her son, being wrapped up in her own plots and schemes to wind up the government.  And her love life is becoming unmanageable.
  The long suffering Mike Ferris, a left-wing politician, becomes yet another victim to Myra's long list of love-victims, a consequence of her irresponsibility.  In many ways Tony is the maturest out of all the characters.  He is a steady man with a level head who merely wishes to re-decorate the house.  Rosemary is the innocent, the babe in the wood, about to marry middle-aged architect Philip Durrant.:

ROSEMARY:
                           What's the matter with being safe- and ordinary?  What's wrong with being ordinary- and safe?

  The conflict between son(s) and mother(s) is given the drawing room treatment, but it isn't a gathering of professionals having cocktails as in a T.S. Eliot drama speaking in high verse, but of socialists and soldiers digging into each other with cutting remarks.  The usual spikiness of Lessing's writing comes through like sharp little daggers and is perfectly put to good use in a drama such as this.
  The political details etch this piece in a place and time and Lessing does a good job of recording the feelings of people during this time.

TONY:
                  One half of this lot are bogged down with the emotionality of the Spanish Civil War, and the other half came to a sticky end with Hungary.  If you'd cut them open you'd find Spain or Hungary written on their soft hearts- but not Britain.  Certainly not poor old Britain.     

  It is a play about the different generations, 50's politics and domestic squabbles.  Yet for the period details it has aged well.  The dialogue is sharp and the relationships between each characters develops satisfyingly, which has a hot kick to it as few come out of this without some critique on their personality.
  I was lucky enough to be in London when The Orange Tree theatre was putting it on.  Lessing only wrote two or three plays so a staging of one was quite the event.  It is a shame that her playwriting output was so small, as it is evident that she can 'do' them, and it is the type of mature drama that can often be lacking.  She is very much writing as a modern Virginia Woolf or George Eliot.

A Note About Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco has died in his home in Milan.  He was 84 years old after having written popular intellectual thrillers such as In the Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.  Although not a Nobel Prize Winner I feel I ought to note him here.  If an obscure blog can attract so many readers with his name than that indicates the scale, and depth, of his popularity, which should be recognised.

In his advice to aspiring writers he says: "Go step by step.  Don't pretend immediately to win the Nobel Prize, because that kills every literary career".

The Wind Blows Away Our Words by Doris Lessing

The Afgans keep teaching the lesson that no army against it seems to learn.  Written in the great year of 1987 this account of the Muhjahadin, by Doris Lessing, one wonders what could stop military intervention in Afganistan as the growing history of defeats and failures makes no dent to imperial enthusiasm for domination of that land.

 As a professional underdog and fighter for life Lessing is the ideal writer to be able lend a sympathetic ear to those under resourced warriors while being clear eyed enough to describe their situation without undue romance.  They are a people who are born into the struggle of life taught to fight and defend themselves from birth.  At the time it was the Russians who were trying to invade.  Their aircrafts destroyed with home made grenades by the resourceful Afgan Resistance.  It was of their ongoing survival through winters, of which some lose toes to frostbite, and famine, managing for long periods on nothing but grass, that impresses Lessing.   They fight continually against all that attacked them on not much more than determination to retain their freedom.

An unnamed military man in the Afgan army of some superiority explains the motivation of the fighters:  "You will have heard, I am sure, more than you need of Jihad, but in my view Jihad is too simple a concept, used as the West tends to use it.  The Afghan fights first of all for himself, his family, his village, his own people.  He fights for a combination of these reasons, and he fights for his religion.  When you hear the word 'Jihad', and you will have heard it a thousand times a day, remember how complex it is, this Holy War"               

It is a short book that goes straight to the people involved in the day-to-day battle, the 'most independent people in the world', composing a clear picture of the difficulties of their life in permanent fight.  There is beauty and heroics in the background of ongoing suffering recorded with control and strength.

Lessing's part in the war is her fight against the media portrayal of Afganistan in such moments as this, which I will quote in full:

"Two years ago I was in Toronto, and the Wall Street Journal asked to interview me.  The young woman who came said she would like me to talk about what interested me.  Impressed by this novel approach by a journalist, I said I would like to talk about Afganistan, which had been fighting the Russians for five years, with little or no assistance from the outside world.  Her face showed she was already losing interest.  I said it was unprecedented for a war to be fought for five years by virtually unarmed people against a super power, while the world took virtually no notice.  She murmured, at once, 'Vietnam'- as I expected she would.  I said that the Vietnamese had been armed, equipped.  I said that a million Afghan civilians had been murdered by the Russians.  There were five million Afghans in exile- it was as if a third of the population of the United States had taken refuge from an aggressor in Canada.  At this she announced that it was all very hard to believe.  The interview then continued on all too familiar lines.  When it was printed, there was no mention of Afghanistan.  Since then, the Wall Street Journal has been, as we say, 'very good' about Afghnistan.  But anyone involved in this business knows that there is a wall of indifference, both in Britain and in the United States, and this is so strong, so irrational, one has to begin asking why"    

Cassandra is invoked at the beginning of the book and Lessing imagines a scene:

'It is amusing to imagine (because the thing is so unlikely) a secret conference called by the nations, who have agreed to set aside all the slogans and battle cries and the circling for better positions just for the duration of the conference, which will discuss: "What is the matter with us, what is wrong with mankind, that we can't listen to Cassandra?  It is as if the world, as if we, were being dragged along by some undertow of stupidity too powerful to resist, and all the sharp, frantic, desperate cries of warning are like gulls glinting as they wheel over the scene, and then dip and vanish, screaming, If you do this, then that must follow- Surely there must be something we can all do, together; perhaps we can learn to listen..."'  

For one curious to understand what refugees go through and how they face the demands of life this is a good starting point to deeper reflection.