by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Poets, Essayists, and Novelists
For two days I’ve wondered how to think, and how to write, about the controversy over PEN’s awarding its “courage” prize to Charlie Hebdo; and then this afternoon the answer came in the mail, in the form of a big book of literary criticism: Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows.
Bloom’s book is subtitled Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, and to judge from the flap copy and the first few pages it has everything and nothing to do with the controversy – and with why I, although a member of PEN, a past PEN prize winner, and a judge of one of this year’s book prizes, feel, or am made to feel, something other than competent to express an opinion on the Charlie Hebdo controversy.
Why? Here’s why. PEN, as I understand it – I haven’t gone to Wikipedia or whatnot – originally stood for Poets, Editors, and Novelists. That is, it was a literary organization, not an organization devoted principally to the defense of free expression in all its forms.
Of course, it has always had an extraliterary dimension: as I recall, some great literary critic drily derided Stephen Spender for his PEN Club activities, which the critic saw as detrimental to Spender’s writing. And of course the question of what writing qualifies as “literary” writing is even harder to answer than the questions about Charlie Hebdo that various people are trying to answer.
But just now, it seems to me, the free-expression dimension of PEN is trumping the literary dimension. So while five of us judges consider the literary merits of 140 books among us and deliberate about which one deserves the Galbraith Prize, the organization’s leaders, by processes I don’t understand, decide to award one prominent prize to Charlie Hebdo, which isn’t a literary publication and was never intended to be. And then one of PEN’s members – Deborah Eisenberg, a genius of short fiction – writes a letter to dissent from the choice, and offers a slate of alternative candidates: Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poltras, and Chelsea Manning: heroes all, and most of them heroes of mine, but none of them Poets, Essayists, or Novelists, and only Greenwald a writer in the common sense of the term.
Meanwhile, I am saying to myself: alas, I don’t read French any better than I did in college; didn’t know Charlie Hebdo till the controversy; am far from expert on the situation of Muslims in France or the current forms of French secularism and anticlericalism; and have only a developing understanding of the relationship between satire, visual forms of free expression, and Muslim scruples about the depiction of the Prophet. I am a writer . . . can it be that, even in PEN, the international writers’ organization, I am “just” a writer …? In the case of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the manifest literary greatness of the book scotched all other arguments. But here? …
I’ll leave it to somebody else to weigh in on whether we the members of PEN ought to have been consulted about the recipient of the “courage” prize, the way we are asked to vote for slates of candidates for the PEN leadership every couple of years. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences roots certain of its awards in the votes cast by members; why shouldn’t this particular literary society?
Meanwhile, PEN might take a cue from Harold Bloom. For sixty years this polymath has practiced literary criticism – sometimes in the broadest sense, sometimes more narrowly, but only rarely (I am thinking of his book on the Mormons) as anything but literary criticism, as writing about other writing.
It seems to me that PEN, while remaining firmly committed to free expression, might focus its gaze a little more tightly on literary expression – on written texts that can be read, evaluated, and judged on their merits as written texts, the way the five of us judges are reading, evaluating and judging the books for the Galbraith Prize.
The image is of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris in 1924 after Anglophone publishers decided it was too risky to publish.