What do you think of when you hear the words “Nordic welfare state”? Government-run health care, with reasonable fees for regular check-ups but long waiting lists for certain life-saving treatments? Free university education, the proviso being that there may not be an opening in your chosen field of study? Rules that make it almost impossible to fire even the most incompetent employee? The ease with which some people — including immigrants who’ve never even tried to learn the language or find a job — are able to collect social benefits throughout their adult lives? Or the high taxes that are needed to pay for the whole shebang?
All of these are indeed major aspects of the Nordic welfare state. But in Norway, where I live, there are other aspects to the system that you may never have heard of. You might imagine, for example, that freelance writers operate more or less outside of the system. Au contraire, mon ami. In the lives of a great many novelists, poets, and playwrights, the welfare system plays an absolutely crucial role. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Those Who Move to a Different State)
I was reminded of this the other day when a quite extraordinary letter to the editor appeared in Norway’s largest newspaper, VG. Signed by several dozen of the nation’s critically acclaimed, prize-winning authors and headlined “The future of Norwegian literature is at risk,” it was identified as an opprop — meaning “proclamation” or “announcement.” But I’m going to call it a manifesto, because that’s what it reads like. Think Declaration of Independence, although it was more like a Declaration of Dependence. You’ll see why in a second.
On the paper’s homepage, the story was promoted this way: “Great unrest in forfattar-Norge.” “Forfattar-Norge” literally means “Author Norway,” which, yes, sounds odd in English. A proper translation would be something like “in literary Norway” or “among Norwegian authors.” But neither of these, especially the latter, really captures the corporate — or (better) communal, or (even better) collectivist – flavor of the original.
You see, in some countries, writers and other creative types actually think of themselves as individuals. I imagine some Norwegian writers do, too. But among a great many of them, something like the medieval guild mentality still reigns. You may recall from history class that in the Middle Ages, workers in various fields formed guilds to keep outsiders from practicing their crafts, thereby reducing competition and keeping prices high.
You’d think that knowing they’re living on handouts would give these highbrow scribblers a touch of humility. Nope.
Such a mentality is utterly different in kind from merely being active on a literary scene. When I lived in New York, I went to book parties, took part in literary panels at bookstores, sat on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and so on. But did I think of myself as part of “Author America” or “Author New York”? Hardly. I didn’t think of myself as part of anything. I felt like I was out there on my own, struggling to make ends meet by getting up every morning and spending the day banging out prose.
And I felt lucky — positively exhilarated — to be able to do so. Those book parties and such? They were just an occasional excuse to consort with my fellow free souls. The struggling writer or artist is one of the oldest clichés around, but when you’re starting out, especially, there’s definitely something exciting and romantic — and terrifying, too — about making that leap into the unknown, and trying to find out if you can pull it off.
In Norway it doesn’t work like that. Allow me to quote the subhead of the VG manifesto: “There is great unrest among Norwegian literary authors. We fear that the unique literary system in Norway, which even produced the most recent Nobel Prize winner in literature, will disappear. Now we ask that the politicians straighten this matter out.”
As noted, that’s just the subhead, but you may already have a question or two. What, for example, is this “unique literary system”? And what is it that’s threatening it? (READ MORE: Imperfect Criticism, Great TV: Remembering Siskel & Ebert)
First, as to the “unique system”: in Norway, a certain cohort of literary-type authors make their living, in very large part, through sizable grants from state-funded organizations. Some of these writers have to apply every year for their payouts. Others get guaranteed lifetime subsidies.
In short, if these literary folk have a medieval guild mentality, the way that they make a living is right out of the medieval and Renaissance-era system of patronage. The difference is that today the Medicis who foot the bills are the workaday slobs who actually have to get up early, drag themselves from their modest homes in Nowheresville to some hated workplace, and scrape together enough mazuma to support their families — while also coughing up more than a third of their income in taxes, part of which ends up buying pinot noir for layabout littérateurs residing in the tonier parts of Oslo.
Of course, those uncouth, semi-literate slobs whose taxes cover the costs in this scheme don’t get to decide which writers get their money. Who does? The writers themselves. Who else, after all, is more qualified? Here’s the deal: this year writer “A” is on the Writers’ Union board, and he votes for a stipend for his beloved mentor, writer “B”; next year “B” is on the board, and okays a subsidy for his brilliant protégé, “A.” One hand washes the other.
These progressive literary elites, then, may claim to bleed for the great unwashed, but their “system” exists solely to squeeze cash out of the proles and share it among themselves — and make sure that none of it, not a single krone, is ever spent on a book that one of those poor louts might ever want to read.
Anyway, on to question #2: what’s the point of the manifesto? What are all these VIPs upset about? Well, apparently the Norwegian government wants to alter the stipend process. What’s amusing is that, for all the vaunted literary genius of the manifesto’s many signatories, it does a surprisingly lousy job of explaining precisely what changes the government is calling for. All that the manifesto gives us to go on is a quoted passage, its provenance unidentified and its contents patently disdained by the manifesto’s signatories, which argues that the recipients of literary grants should not just be chosen by writers but also — gasp! — by readers. And not just readers of the refined and récherché; no, all readers. While literature must “provoke, be difficult, set the agenda, and challenge conventional frameworks,” reads the quoted passage, these goals “must be balanced with offerings that are widely viewed as accessible and attractive.”
For the manifesto’s signatories, those are fighting words: they “simplify” reality; they reflect “a neoliberal disdain for considering and treating literature with an eye to quality”; and if set into system, they will lead to “a devaluation of the artist” and endanger the kind of literature “that can’t make it on its own in a marketplace.” The signatories go even further than that: they also oppose granting money for specific writing projects; they want “artists’ stipends, not stipends for text production.” Got that? Not only shouldn’t a grant recipient have to have (ugh!) readers; in theory, that exquisitely delicate artistic soul shouldn’t even have to write anything. They are artists too, after all, who, instead of banging away at a computer, sit for hour after hour in this week’s cool café exchanging profundities with their equally idle literary compeers. (READ MORE: The Glittering Cast of Vienna’s Postwar Émigrés)
In the end, the manifesto could well have consisted of two sentences: We know what great writing is, because we’re the ones who produce it, you philistines. So shut up, cough up the dough, and let us, your betters, pass it out among ourselves.
You’d think that knowing they’re living on handouts would give these highbrow scribblers a touch of humility. Nope. Instead, they radiate arrogance and superiority. And audacity. They even claim that the work of Jon Fosse, the highly unconventional playwright who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, wouldn’t have been possible without Norway’s “unique literary system” — the idea being that such offbeat stuff would never make it in the marketplace. But even before Fosse’s prize, he was widely published and produced. I’ve read profiles of him that make it clear he’s doing more than OK financially. Why should my tax money go to him? Why, for that matter, should I support manifesto signatory Linn Ullmann, daughter of Ingmar — ka-ching! — Bergman? Or signatory Dag Solstad, an old Commie propagandist? I’ve seen pictures of these people in their elegant living rooms and gardens and on lavish vacations. Why should I be underwriting their luxuries?
There’s one last factor here. I’d suggest that part of being a truly interesting and worthwhile writer is having known some degree of suffering, or at least some tough times — i.e., exactly the kind of existence that a life lived on a stipend is intended to insulate you from. Which is why most of their writing, far from being remotely fresh or challenging or provocative, is instead deadeningly familiar: each publishing season in Norway brings a new crop of grim novels about the inner lives of brooding, sedentary intellectual types. Particularly in a time of crippling financial hardship for Norwegians (among other things, insanely high electric bills), it seems the height of gall for self-styled literary artists to be informing the proles that it’s their duty — to those very artists! — to foot the bill for their unread masterpieces.
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