Since the Nobel Prize for Literature is always something to scoff at and be like "Really?", I'm excerpting what seems to be a gross over-simplification of Alice Munro's prose and personality. She's the 13th woman to receive the Nobel; that's not the only reason to declare "Really, Sweden?"
"Munro is one of those writers who, no matter how popular her books are, is our
writer. This may have to do with the frank intimacy of her tone, which
is stripped of ornament and fuss, yet also, in its plainness, contains
huge amounts of terrible, sublime, and contradictory feeling. It may
have to do with the fact that she writes mostly about women who want to
escape some kind of confinement, who are hungry for experience above all
else, and who attain it at a dear price, so that we can read about it.
They are elegant, wry, determined women. They are also subversives, and
because they allow us into their lives, we’re dusted with their secret
glamor" (Sasha Weiss; 10/10/13).
Munro is our WRITER. (WR)
FRANK intimacy of her tone and PLAINNESS
Writes mostly about WOMEN (WO)
ELEGANT women.
SUBVERSIVE and DUSTED with secret glamor.
(F + P) + WO
E
S + D
---------
WR
The argument here is all over the place. It also doesn't help that Weiss starts her sentences with "this may" and "it may" because she seems to be just throwing possible supporting facts in there. Does anyone see salvation here?
I think the difficulty here is that Weiss is not really putting forth a logical argument. It does seem as though she is asserting "Munro is our writer" to be the case. However, she then just seems to be searching for an explanation for why this is so. It is as though she is saying that this is how Munro makes us feel, but, instead of offering a clear argument in defense of that claim, she simply speculates as to how this could be.
ReplyDeleteI think Sean's right, maybe they're just meant to be possibilities instead of actual claims or arguments? Or the argument's more buried than that?
ReplyDeleteThe implicit premises that to be our writer, an author has to fulfill the other items..
ReplyDeleteTo be charitable, a couple of &'s and a --->WR would make it into a provable, standard form argument.
Indeed, that would work. But notice that the putative conclusion "Munro is our writer" has to mean something about how we, her readers, resonate emotionally with her work and by extension herself. But that emotional response, which Christopher evidently does not share, is precisely the sort of subjective response for which we would give possible explanations, but NOT an argument. This seems to me to be what the author is doing.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little disturbed by the suggestion that Munro's being the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature is somehow cause for suspicion. Were this year's winner the 97th man (or however many there have been), would you say the same?
I think gets some of the readers' supposed reaction as theorized by Weiss: "It’s often said of Munro that her stories are so packed with emotion and incident that they are like novels—generations playing out their compulsions and longings across a few pages. Writers study her work with devotion, trying to figure out how so much can happen in so little space. With Munro, it’s easy to pick out examples of miraculous economy: there are many, many stories and most of them are perfect.... There’s self-knowledge and self-deception, the heat of argument and the coolness of time passing, sorrow and sarcasm, devastation and worldly indifference, all in half a page." I think Sean is correct; Weiss isn't trying for a logical argument here; it's an argument made more by throwing in whatever seems to support the claim. I keep my eyes out for these but I thought there might've been something in this one.
ReplyDeleteYeah. The whole Nobel for Literature debacle is really icky. People on either side make accusations. Given that I don't know every waking detail of people in this debate, I'm under the impression that if a man had won then people would be able to sweep it under the rug as another man because the tradition has had that turnout with more frequency than with women. However, Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian novelist, claimed that she felt she'd been given the Nobel for being a woman. And I'm not even sure how messy the debates are over Nobels for science.
To fault an explanation, which intends no argument, for being a poor argument is like saying "bad dog!" to a cat. Of course, a cat generally does make a very bad dog, but that doesn't prevent it from being a fine instance of its own species.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to know what Jelinek's grounds were for thinking (or feeling?) that she had been awarded the prize on such an irrelevant basis. I notice, however, that unlike Jean-Paul Sartre she did not turn the award down, so perhaps her suspicions were not so compelling, after all.