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Jury report Grand Prize for Literature for Tom Lanoye

On 1 October, Tom Lanoye was awarded the Grand Prize for Literature, a prestigious triennial award recognising authors of significant literary contributions in the Dutch language area. King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium presented the award at the Royal Palace in Brussels, followed by several speeches and performances. Read the full jury report.

Juryvoorzitter PNL
Prof. Dr Yra van Dijk, chairwoman of the jury of the Grand Prize for Literature © Bas Bogaerts

Ladies and Gentlemen! Roll up, roll up! Murder and fun! Tragedy and tears! 

We’d love to write this whole report in that tone. Because how could anyone write in dry, professional jury language about an oeuvre that is so theatrical, so lively, so earthy? That whirls back and forth between genres, themes and linguistic registers? But there’s not even any need for wacky recommendations, since the reading public has known for a long time that novels by Tom Lanoye are books truly to be read, and that his theatrical work should immediately be seen. Forty years after his boisterous entry into the world of letters, Lanoye has become ‘inescapable’ as it’s known. As if you’d want to escape him! His work and his appearances in the public realm stimulate discussion, reflection and change.

Theatre

Lanoye’s writing is as flamboyant as the author himself; he makes his presence felt in different genres and captures attention with rich language and striking standpoints. His novels, and indeed his poetry, polemic, columns and plays, convince and overwhelm. This writer is no fan of minimalism. He prefers big (a poem the size of the Boerentoren in Antwerp), bombastic and ambitious (a Monster trilogy, a Shakespeare marathon). Or as the narrator of his novel Speechless (2009), puts it:

I’m terribly sorry, but I say no to neat, sparse writing. Not even because of a calling or doctrinaire impulse. I say no because anorexia in writing would signify a betrayal of my subjects and their environment. In this regard I sometimes even find that I’m up against myself, given the temperament I was born with. I see no benefit to contrived stillness as a way to render a storm or a symphony, I’m not wild about baldness as an expression of luxuriance, and I don’t give a damn about pastel tints and fragile aestheticism as a depiction of real flesh and blood.

‘Fragile aestheticism’ is indeed not a characteristic of this oeuvre, not on any page. Lanoye’s work is full-fat in language and meaning. Shakespeare’s history plays became topical again in the nine-hour performance ‘To War’ an incisive dissection of political power. The classic characters express themselves in contemporary human language: “What a spineless, uncouth bungler I am,” thinks Lanoye’s Hamlet in ‘Hamlet versus Hamlet’. Not just the script of these tragedies but the characters become meaningful again in our day, even when they speak in fluent iambic pentameters as Medea does in Lanoye’s adaptation of Euripides, ‘Mamma Medea’. And that’s not the only great female role that he’s rewritten; recently Lady MacBeth was given new depth by his script.

Without treating the originals frivolously, Lanoye takes the creative liberty of bending them to his will. As in a palimpsest, his own lines are written over those of the classics, an approach he applied in ‘The Russians’ to the early work of Anton Chekhov. His influential works for the stage have often been translated. ‘Mephisto For Ever’, ‘Atropa’ and ‘Blood and Roses’, all three directed by Guy Cassiers, were performed at the Avignon Festival. ‘The Third Marriage’ was filmed in French. ‘To War’ opened the Salzburger Festspiele and was then staged for three seasons in Germany. ‘Queen Lear’ was showered with prizes in its South African version.

Sparkling dialogues give the dramatic work its power, and each play itself emerges out of a dialogue. Lanoye consistently points out that his theatrical oeuvre is a matter of collaboration, and furthermore he supports new young creative artists and sets up projects with them. While writing for the theatre he enters into conversation with the director and actors, and he ensures his scripts stay receptive to their vision. “You must write sentences that remain open to interpretation,” he says, “so that actors can breathe extra life into them.”

Literary engagement

Lanoye knows what it’s like to stand on the stage himself. He seeks out publicity. That eagerness for a public platform also explains his love of theatre (and vice versa); after all, the audience is a factor not to be underestimated in either case. This theatrical writer is a performer who likes to shape his own performance, and indeed his own image. He made his debut in 1980 and was immediately a rocker: unpolished, pure, energetic. He still likes to step onto the stage in order to get involved in social debates and expose injustice. It may be a matter of same-sex marriage or Covid-19, wartime collaboration or the nationalistic cultural demands made of newcomers to integrate, and especially opposition to Vlaams Belang and right-wing extremism.

Lanoye has always opposed the kind of writing that is too closed in on itself. Even in his very first columns and performances he attracted attention with provocations aimed at the literary world of his time, deploying a sense of humour and grotesque exaggeration. His columns gradually became more explicitly engaged and political. Lanoye registered the shocks that passed through the country at the time of the Dutroux affair. He excoriates hypocritical and narrow-minded politicians. He adopts a political stance, especially with regard to ‘Belgian’ issues.

In doing so he uses art, without denying its unreality. In fact quite the opposite. Lanoye shows us what art has to say precisely because of its pronounced artificiality. “I regard literature as sublime mendacity, a compromise between beauty on the one hand and insincerity and manipulation on the other.” Many of his characters are artists or actors themselves, and they appear in stories in which the theatre and literature are subjected to investigation, as in his recent The Turntable (2022). Art proves incapable of operating in a vacuum. At the same time he warns against deploying it too instrumentally.

If you put art into a political straitjacket, you’re on the verge of fascism.

Russian literary critic and scholar Michael Bakhtin claimed, however, that the novel is in itself a political genre in which many voices or ‘discourses’ can be heard simultaneously without any of them monopolizing the conversation. This is certainly true of the many roles played in Lanoye’s novels and the many voices to be heard in them, which together unmask the social status quo. Carnivalesque is the first word that comes to mind in relation to Tom Lanoye’s work. Not because it’s frivolous, but because of its subversive nature: the established order is turned on its head.

Lanoye’s oeuvre is therefore a hall of mirrors, inexhaustibly engaged but also perpetually reflecting the question of what engaged art can look like. That question is crucial in an era in which acquired basic rights and the agreed conventions applied to citizens are being violated in many places. “There is only terror, someone who suffers from it and someone who enjoys it,” thinks one of the characters in Fortunate Slaves (2013).

Antjie Krog
Tom Lanoye performing with South-African writer Antjie Krog © Bas Bogaerts

Emotion in the novels

Lanoye has compared his role as an author with that of a seismograph, just like Louis Paul Boon: sensitive to vibrations in society. In novels like Cleansing (2017) or Fortunate Slaves current events are far more than mere decor. The characters and their companions in fate are part of an investigation into the effects of migration, neoliberalism, capitalism or surveillance. At the same time, these figures are defined by their background in little Flanders, which also places their story in the tradition of the regional novel. This is especially true of the personal and autobiographical ‘Wase’ trilogy. His most recent novel, The Turntable, touches upon the twentieth-century Flemish intergenerational trauma of collaboration with the Nazis, which has become more open to discussion as a result of that book. And in the hugely ambitious ‘Monster’ trilogy, Lanoye has the great Belgian tragedy firing on all cylinders in the background while small human tragedies are played out in the foreground.

His style is that of the grotesque, full of hyperbolic descriptions and rhetorical and dramatic effects. He excels at tragic twists, filmic opening scenes, tense narrative arcs and cutting repartee. From the grandiloquent to the churlish, from slang to high poetry: the repertoire is endless and dizzying. Associating, concocting, he shows how lively, vibrant, coarse and enchanting our Dutch can be. His resonant use of words, quotidian one minute, antiquated the next, shows the language in the full breadth of all its registers, in its vivacity. He speaks strikingly and convincingly, never shrinking from the vulgar and the banal. Lanoye advocates the hackneyed and the ‘ugly’, the language as a utensil rather than as a topic of contemplation. The world is grubby, and Lanoye is not planning to conceal that fact from us. What you can do is to give it words: “Never be silent again, always write, never again speechless. Begin,” is how he ends the novel Speechless.

But the jury was unable to find the ‘ugliness’ he has in mind anywhere. Lanoye has written particularly beautifully about loss and death, about the search for a ‘travelling companion’ too, and about his mother as she fell silent. In his first, autobiographical novel, Lanoye called himself ‘a butcher’s son with glasses’. The butcher’s son: accustomed to a role in the public sphere, to always standing ready because there are folk at the door who need pleasing. Aware that food needs to be put on the table and that the writer is a ‘commercial traveller’ as he put it in ‘Sold’ (1989).

But this butcher’s son ‘wears glasses’: he is also a sensitive artist, who works not with meat products but with language and texts, in which he explores and describes intimate worlds. This author creates warm stories like Cardboard Boxes (1991), a novella in which “all the treasures and rotten apples of existence lie side by side for the taking”. A universal story about an ill-fated youthful passion, only this time with queer central characters. Readers’ responses show that Lanoye’s work gives not just intellectual pleasure but emotional satisfaction. “I’ve just read this cover to cover in two days and I’m weeping on the beach,” writes a reader on Goodreads. Another notes, “Absolutely a mirror for me, with much to recognize from my own unrequited adolescent love.”

Uitreiking PNL
King Philippe presenting the award © Bas Bogaerts

Conclusion

With creative freedom, Tom Lanoye whirls his way through Dutch-language literature. His work is impressive, influential, inspiring. His bibliography now contains sixty-five titles, but it’s not for quantity that the jury has chosen to give him the Grand Prize for Literature. The award goes to an oeuvre that is impressively diverse in form, genre, language and subject-matter. Tom Lanoye uses the theatricality of literature in all its guises to express his thoughts about the world. It is for this baroque, linguistically virtuosic, but for all that never less than serious brand of literary engagement that we have chosen to award the prize.

To conclude. At the end of Cardboard Boxes Lanoye asks the reader to think of their own intimate memories and “hook them up” with those of the author. This is characteristic of his dialogical authorship, continually in open connection with the public. He goes on, “If you do that, reader, then by heaven, be aware that I thank you wholeheartedly. And that I admire you. For your collaboration and your patience. For your willingness to read. Far out.” To the laureate the jury would like to say simply: write on, we are and remain exceptionally willing to read. Far out!

Jury members Grand Prize for Literature 2024: Prof. Dr. Lars Bernaerts (Belgium), Guinevere Claeys (Belgium), Dr Annika Johansson (Sweden), Moenisha Hiwat-Mahabiersing, MA (Suriname), Dr Reza Kartosen-Wong (The Netherlands), Max Temmerman (Belgium) and Prof. Dr Yra van Dijk, chairwoman (The Netherlands).

Oct 28th, 2024