The Prize-Bearers: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

The Prize-Bearers:A Brief Introduction Dominik Zechner [H]e refused all awards and degrees,declined membership in all honoraryinstitutions, granted no public interviews,and chose not to be photographed, asthough to associate his face with his fictionwere a ridiculous irrelevancy. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (11) Saying “thanks,” and meaning it, is quite a hard thing to do. That may be why the German version of the acceptance speech is called a Dankesrede—to make things difficult. The great poet, writer, or thinker must offer thanks to those who grant recognition. Yet, the obligation to thank, infantilizing the one impelled to show appreciation, marks a moment of powerlessness, the restraint of distressing passivity. Stating one’s gratitude nonetheless takes guts, all the more so if it happens publicly, vor den Augen der Welt. Words of thanks, no doubt chosen with care and a sense of exposure, can sting or linger as rhetorical time bombs, and constitute an instance of deferred retaliation in response to the violence of being called upon, urged to assume the pose of gratitude. Acceptance speeches have hardly ever been the object of study. We can provisionally view them as constituting a kind of rogue or sub-genre, barely determinable according to normative standards of critical discourse. Hent de Vries, in his contribution to this dossier, designates the lecture that frames the reception of an award as a [End Page 1155] “public spiritual exercise.” He continues: “It exemplifies and raises the very stakes and tasks of critical thinking and the discerning judgment with which it must come.” Situated on the murky intersection among literary effort, philosophical reflection, commentary, and political statement, the Dankesrede coaxes the summoned writer out of his or her comfort zone, placing him or her on a tentative pedestal as signatory of a recognizably distinguished oeuvre. Prompted to respond to a nomination and accept the award, the writer stands before a decision. Not everyone is overjoyed by a token of external recognition. On the contrary, a number of recipients were tempted to decline the honor. Perhaps a greater number very often refuses to refuse the prize and chooses, despite a swell of resistance, to deliver a speech. An invention of the 20th century, literary prizes have prompted a rich dossier of public Rechtfertigungen, an outlandish prose of hesitant gratitude crossed over with aggressive defiance. How do we situate the acceptance speech in relation to the literatures it presumes to defend and speak for? If we believe the rhetoric of its most prestigious recipients, the prize was not sought and represents rather an embarrassing, if not traumatic intrusion, an unwelcome imposition of institutional branding. Often unwanted and sidelined, in many cases a mere nuisance, it is not more than a kind of roaming supplementarity. Floating in-between discourses, the characteristic attributes of the acceptance speech hover at the margins of established categoremes and classifications. Yet, the archive comprising the prose of acceptance remains rich and multifaceted; it proves deserving of scholarly attention and invites hermeneutical spunk: Freud’s Goethe lecture, Paul Celan’s seminal “Meridian,” Jacques Derrida’s Discours de Francfort—to name but a few instances—acceptance speeches have innovated the ways we read texts, if not the way writers read and review their own works and worlds for which they are in part responsible. Acceptance speeches have accounted for massive discursive disruption and impact, in many cases they have taken on considerable canonical weight and interpretive authority. A striking case in this respect, “Der Meridian” has become something like a password, a shibboleth, opening up a royal passage into Celan’s oeuvre, performing a perhaps unwanted centering of the work. The acceptance speech allows the work to showcase itself in terms of a heightened readability—it offers a toolkit, an ensemble of philosophemes that may appear to unlock the hermetic seclusion of a given set of texts, serving the imperatives of schoolbook intelligibility and easy-to-grasp mnemonic jingles, catchphrases, and quasi-theoretical buzzwords. Hence, it may well be the case that the [End Page 1156] acceptance speech unwittingly endows a literary work with the curse of ultra-legibility, as though the obscurest literary endeavor were to become...