The power politics of the prize: the Nobel for literature is about more than literature.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

AFTER AWARDING THE Nobel Prize for Literature to the mediocre (Elfriede Jelinek), the talentless (Dario Fo), and the hugely overrated (Harold Pinter), the Stockholm jury has now presented the award to the very deserving Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. In doing so, it praised "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

The committee's typically clumsy, jargon-slathered justification for its choice offers an insight into how the Scandinavian cognoscenti view the political importance of literature. Jelinek, Fo, and Pinter (along with previous winners Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Heinrich Boll, Pablo Neruda, et al.) were united by politics, a worldview that could be summarized as a deep hostility to capitalism and the United States. And like Vargas Llosa, all were viewed as championing a very narrow brand of "resistance" to the "structures of power." (This usually means opposing American power. Pinter, for instance, very much supported Slobodan Milosevic's "structures of power," and Garcia Marquez is a slavish Castro sycophant.)

Can one be a great writer, in the eyes of the Nobel committee, by choosing not to satirize the bourgeoisie? If not, could that be why Evelyn Waugh--one of the great reactionary novelists of the 20th century, a writer of colonialist prejudice who both celebrated and ridiculed upper-class pretensions--was never rewarded by the Learned Elders of Sweden? It's unlikely that Martin Amis, whose politics are often (wrongly) characterized as right-wing and whose best novels have little to say about "resistance," would ever be considered. And it was long true that if a writer's politics offended the Stockholm presidium, he could expect, regardless of the quality of his work, to be black-listed.

The only thing shocking about Vargas Llosa's award is that, though once a man of the left, the writer long ago embraced classical liberalism, an ideology frowned upon in Stockholm. The Nobel Prize for Literature has always been a political award, a fact demonstrated not just by those who receive the prize but by those who are denied it.

Take Jorge Luis Borges, a great Argentinian writer who had a fondness for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. According to Borges biographer Edwin Williamson, the Nobel committee forever banished him from the short list after he paid Pinochet a call. "For the remaining years of his life," Williamson...