Nobel is not noble

America is under attack again. Not by terrorists or a foreign nation, but by pedantic Swedish intellectuals.

On Oct. 9, after the Swedish Academy awarded the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, they confirmed the end of their credibility.

Although Le Clézio is a renowned author who deserved to be a candidate for the prize, the real controversy is about who did not win.

In the weeks leading up to the conferral of the prize, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, proclaimed that American authors are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” and “insular and ignorant.”

Obviously whenever someone makes such a sweeping generalization, one should discount the speaker and whatever he or she said. Also, both the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize should be discounted.

First of all, should the Nobel Prize be a big deal in the first place? No.
The Swedish Academy, which decides the laureate, is financed by Nobel’s will. In 1895, Alfred Nobel’s last will donated a large sum of his wealth to the Swedish Academy to establish the Nobel Prize.

Where did Nobel get all of his wealth? Nobel was known as a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and pacifist. In actuality, he was a war profiteer who effectively traded lives for money.

Nobel primarily gained his wealth from his dynamite patent. He spent many years experimenting with nitroglycerine before he finally created dynamite. While carrying out trials, Nobel accidentally killed his brother and many others. These tragic deaths taint the Nobel Prize, which is awarded for excellence, with a history of blood money.

The military’s and mining industry’s use of dynamite is responsible for an unknown number of deaths. It is becoming clear that Nobel was racked by guilt by the time he established the prize.

The Nobel Prize, which consists of a medal, personal diploma and a cash award, is not worth the number of deaths caused by Nobel’s hellish dynamite. It’s a sick joke.

Second of all, if one ignores the Nobel Prize’s bloody beginnings, it’s obvious the Swedish Academy overlooked superlative writers who affected the entire literary world.

Some of the unrecognized greats include James Joyce, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabakov. Although each of these authors deserved the award, Joyce’s denial is unforgivable. Joyce’s writing helped shape and influence subsequent Nobel Prize laureates like Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott and J.M. Coetzee.

It seems like the Swedish Academy knows they made a mistake and are trying to make up for their catastrophic failure.

The Swedish Academy is nothing more than a cabal of bickering eggheads pontificating from their ivory towers. They have trouble agreeing in the first place. One member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund, forsook all of his duties to the Academy after a storm of controversy surrounded the award given to Elfriede Jelinik. Ahnlund described Jelnik’s work as chaotic and pornographic.

So it seems like the Nobel Prize is more like the pornographic AVN Adult Movie Awards rather than an award that should be taken seriously. Both are shallow and vulgar.