jccamp: I’m trying to envision someone making this exact speech at, say, the Academy Awards…

Not possible. It contains words longer than four letters.

In the same year the awarding of the Austrian National Prize was the occasion for Bernhard’s giving an acceptance speech that provoked the first of the many public controversies that were to follow both himself and his work throughout his life. In it, he declared that “The state is a structure permanently condemned to failure, the populace is a structure incessantly condemned to infamy and to spiritual weakness. Life is despair to which philosophies look for support, philosophies in which everything is, finally, pledged to insanity” (qtd. in Porcell 43-44). Bernhard’s own account of this awards ceremony, which appears in Wittgenstein’s Nephew, is as amusing as it is implausible: “The encomium delivered by the minister in the audience chamber of the ministry was utter nonsense, because he merely read out from a sheet of paper what had been written down for him by one of his officials charged with literary affairs. He said, for instance, that I had written a novel about the south seas, which of course I had not. And although I have been an Austrian all my life, the minister stated that I was Dutch. He also stated that I specialized in adventure novels, though this was news to me. More than once during his encomium he said that I was a foreigner, a visitor to Austria” (70)

It’s not meant to be a rational argument.

Also, while it’s a quote from a fictional character, it probably accurately reflected Bernhard’s views. It can’t be understood without reference to Bernhard’s political beliefs and love/hate relationship to his home country of Austria. By the way, Bernhard actually did say something similar to this when he won Austria’s top literary prize, along the lines of “[thanks, but] everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death.”

Awards serve an important social function: they tell us who to esteem. They are one among many credentials we use to facilitate this function, including for example titles and diplomas. Their value lies in their efficiency: knowing the credentials of an individual helps me decide to what extent I should trust him, sparing me the labor of performing a full investigation into his past. Because people like esteem, awards motivate those who seek prominence.

Now it is true that some people/groups attempt to hijack this utility, because it doesn’t cost much to hand over a plaque but at the same time this could in principle convey a valuable credential. This is not unlike obtaining a diploma from a degree mill.

This is why I think a monetary prize is an important component of an award. Monetary prizes, of course, cost money. This constrains the awarders ability to award prizes, and presumably the awarders respond by giving more care to their selections. The incentive of the awarders, presumably, is to elevate their own status, by affiliation with the successful award winners.

a) Another Holocaust
b) Another Hurricane Katrina
c) Another World War
d) Another MTV Music Awards ceremony

Sometimes hyperbole is justified–and sometimes it’s just silly.

$ 1,000,000 buys a whole lot of ‘getting over it’ time :-)

Somehow working my buns off for several years and finally earning my Eagle Scout badge doesn’t fit this category.

Neither do the National Federation of Press Women communications awards my wife and I have won over the years, judged by our peers.

Of course there’s no cash attached to either of them.

For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient.

I disagree. I recently won a prize at my workplace, and it was given by very talented people while I was the incompetent one. No p***ing was involved.

Ingratitude is an hateful thing, even among those whose list of thanksgivings is far shorter than my own.