10/10/2025
The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.
Many of my Facebook friends have enthusiastically noted this, which is a delightful thing. Some have even used AI to post summaries about Krasznahorkai’s literary contributions. Yet, these friends have missed one important question: the qualities that the Nobel Committee praised in Krasznahorkai’s literature — do those qualities convey any message to Gujarati writers?
The Nobel Committee said that Krasznahorkai was chosen for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”
What should we make of this statement? And what should we learn from it?
One friend jokingly remarked that if we wrote in English — or if our literature were translated into English — we too would win the Nobel Prize. Many people believe this.
The Committee’s reasoning rests on two significant phrases: “in the midst of apocalyptic terror” and “reaffirms the power of art.”
The Nobel Committee acknowledges that we are all living amid an apocalyptic terror. The word apocalyptic has both religious and secular meanings. The Committee probably intended both, but to me, the second meaning feels more relevant — we are living in the midst of destruction.
We hardly need to explain what kind of destruction this is. Look around — without the lenses of extreme ideology — and you’ll see it everywhere. Or, as in the Hollywood film They Live, put on those special glasses and you’ll see the destruction more clearly. Interestingly, in that film, those glasses are found in an abandoned church!
So, what can art do in the face of such destruction?
The Nobel Committee says that art can reaffirm its own power even in such times. And Krasznahorkai’s literature does exactly that.
Evidently, art that floats on the waves of conferences, academies, wealthy patrons, literary festivals, launches, and other self-promoting spectacles cannot do this task. Such art always walks the path of surrender.
Much of contemporary Gujarati literature floats on such waves. Some of it is even stuck in the sand but pretends to be afloat. It neither sees what’s happening around it, nor is it seen by others. In such circumstances, writing in English doesn’t make one ‘great.’ Writers who cannot write well even in Gujarati but believe that if they wrote in English, they would at least have won a Nobel or two — what can one say about them?
But one question remains: what does the power of art mean?
Krasznahorkai doesn’t write realistic novels. His works do not serve as witnesses either. In recent years, many Nobel Prizes have gone to writers who emphasize memory. But Krasznahorkai doesn’t deal directly with memory.
He works with language. He tries to make language as autonomous as possible. But that autonomy itself resists the apocalyptic terror — it emerges from that resistance.
When we read him, we constantly hear the sound of that terror.
Krasznahorkai fights against that sound through long sentences, through punctuation (at one point, he even connects the full stop with God), and by preventing language from becoming overly referential.
Some Gujarati writers have constructed an easy equation: realism versus formalism.
Between these two poles, and even today, many cling to a naïve, provincial understanding of realism and promote literature accordingly. They act like village heads — no feast begins without their presence.
Unfortunately, literature is not that simple.
Formalism, after all, prevented literature from becoming a pizza slice. We should not forget that.
I do not see literature of resistance as pizza slices either. Gujarati literature has also produced such works, but the so-called heads and officials of Gujarati literature — along with their clerks — have pushed such works aside. It is time we rethought ourselves.
Some Gujarati writers complain that they cannot understand formalist works. How could they?
Such works are defined precisely by their resistance to easy interpretation. A book on modernism begins by noting this very point. At that time, analytical philosophy looked at the ambiguity of natural language with suspicion. Some thinkers proposed creating artificial languages; others suggested purifying language. Modernism, in contrast, made meaning depend on form or structure rather than society. That was no small achievement — but who will understand that?
If a writer like Kishor Jadhav writes stories that challenge interpretation, critics should ask: what kind of turns has he built into his stories that make them resist interpretation? And if a story cannot be easily interpreted, can it therefore be called useless?
Even Indian poetics speaks of arthavilambana — the delay or suspension of meaning — which can be used for literary, cultural, or political purposes. But we rarely think along such lines.
In short, Gujarati literature should not treat Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize as merely an event happening abroad or in the West.
Instead, we should analyze it and learn from it.
Writers who stop learning may become popular quickly, but…
— Babu Suthar
