Vol. 9, No. 13 November 15, 2005

The Contrarian turns to a strange event that occurred just before this year's Nobel Prize for Literature winner was announced. Knut Ahnlund, a member of the Nobel committee, abruptly resigned. He did not depart over this year's winner, British playwright Harold Pinter. Mr. Ahnlund resigned over last year's winner, Elfriede Jelinek.

Mr. Ahnlund told the Swedish press that Jelinek's writing is "whining, unenjoyable, public pornography," and," a mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure." Giving Jelinek the prize, he said "has done irreparable damage to the Nobel Literature Prize, both to those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who come after her.…Artistic ability has been set aside simply to play lackey to ideology.''

In selecting Jelinek, the Nobel committee was exploiting a woman to make a political point. Both the author and the committee denied this. Last year Jelinek told reporters that the committee "assured me that I received the prize because they value my work, not because I am a woman." Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, denied that the selection of Ms. Jelinek amounted to political commentary.

The circumstances of Ms. Jelinek strongly suggest otherwise. She is a militant left-wing feminist openly hostile to the Bush Administration, and her play, Babel, deals with Abu Ghraib prison. Jelinek joined the Austrian Communist Party, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, in 1974. This is something nobody committed to democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech could possibly do. Recall the travails of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of the Gulag Archipelago, right about the time Ms. Jelinek joined up. She remained a member until 1991, the same year USSR ceased to exist. It takes a special kind of person to show such staying power when Eastern Europeans were fleeing to the West at any opportunity.

Readers can judge for themselves whether someone of this profile, who is also a bad writer, belongs in the same league as the other nine women who have won the Nobel Prize for literature in its 103 years.

As for Mr. Ahnlund, his protest and resignation should not be seen as a move against women. His protest focused upon the merits of Jelinek’s work. He is hardly the first Nobel committee member to quit: in 1989, academy members Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten quit because, in their view, the academy had failed to support Salman Rushdie against death threats issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. So let diversity ring.

Despite the resignation of Mr. Ahnlund, it would not surprise me to see future prizes go to other left-wing feminists such Margaret Atwood, who hails from my native land.

On the other hand, as we have recently observed, radical feminists can no longer expect special treatment from critics simply because of their gender and politics. Consider Peggy Drexler Ph. D., a "gender scholar" at Cornell University. Drexler's new book, Raising Boys Without Men, argues that boys raised by women without men are better off than boys raised by mothers and fathers. As New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan states in the November Atlantic Monthly, Raising Boys Without Men is a chronicle of bad dads that compares men to "wounded rhinos." This book, writes Flanagan, is "as much a work of advocacy as objective research." It also holds consequences for personal responsibility and civil society. As Flanagan puts it, if you "[b]elittle men's responsibilities to their families [and] raise boys to believe that fatherhood is not a worthy aspiration….the people who will suffer are women and children." That strikes me as a fair assessment, and it does me good to see Caitlin Flanagan, without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment, demolish what she describes as a "preposterous book."

Literature, like ideas, has consequences. Nobel Prizes and good reviews should be handed out on the basis of merit, not politics or gender.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.