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Monday, October 15, 2007
J. K. Rowling Wins Nobel in Universe Gamma-Q782
Posted by Bill Benzon on 10/15/07 at 07:33 AM
Ted Goia has imagined an alternative universe in which this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to J. K. Rowling. Some other years: 1901 Leo Tolstoy (vs. Sully Prudhomme); 1906 Mark Twain (vs. Henryk Sienkiewicz); 1916 Sigmund Freud (vs. Werner von Heidenstam); 1932 Zane Grey (vs. John Galsworthy); 1950 Ludwig Wittgenstein (vs. Bertrand Russell); 1959 Cole Porter (vs. Salvatore Quasimodo); 1973 Lionel Trilling (vs. Patrick White); 1979 Philip K. Dick (vs. Odysseus Elyltis); 1989 Theodor Seuss Geisel (vs. Camilo Jose Cela); 2000 Haruki Murakami (vs. Gao Zingjian).
Have we suggestions for Universe Epsilon-Z042?
One can only imagine what either Wittgenstein or Freud would have made of being awarded a prize for literature.
No stranger, indeed considerably less strange, than giving a prize for literature to Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchil, surely.
Adam, I’m quite happy to see Russell get a literature award. Back when I was studying philosophy it was always a pleasure to read Russell because he wrote so well. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was a far more important thinker, but a much inferior stylist (unless you go for an endless diet of aphorisms).
But that just shows the ridiculousness of this alternate list. The Nobel Prize has made more than a few blunders in its time (mostly the omissions we all know: Tolstoy, Greene), but they are as as nothing compared to the sins of commission in this alternative list. Can anybody seriously imagine that Agatha Christie, one of the most incompetent stylists in the entire history of crime literature, deserves to (a) be linked with the author of ‘Death and the Compass’, and (b) replace a very fine poet like Sachs?
Freud in fact said he would refuse to accept it. He wanted the Nobel in medicine.
How strange the giving is has no bearing on what the recipients’ reactions might be.
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