Nobel Prize of literature

The Nobel Prize of literature reward annually since 1901 of sound living an author, writer, man or woman of letters being brilliantly illustrated in the field and whose work is supposed to have brought a durable and remarkable contribution to the fields of the knowledge and culture.

The price was created by will by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel. According to this will, the prize winner was “to have worked out a literary work making the demonstration of an impressive idealistic force” (quotation in Swedish: " den Sam inom litteraturen har producerat det utmärktaste idealisk riktning "). This term: " idealisk" , can result in " idéaliste" or " idéal". This semantic turning was determining for the policy of the jury of the Nobel at the time of the first years having followed the creation of the price, which started several polemics. The committee indeed stuck to the definition strictly speaking given by Alfred Nobel, thus drawing aside from his prize lists good number of writers, whose work however major, was not sufficiently judged " idéaliste" to be put at the honor: although having appeared on the list, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and Leon Tolstoï for example were never rewarded.

Reward regarded as most prestigious and most media in the world, the Nobel clarifies an author and his work, which it ensures a planetary promotion, an international repute, an abundance of cash and a certain freedom in the act of writing. This honor also brings to its holder the insurance of comfortable pullings, although the sales figures, consecutive with the attribution of the price, always do not seem to play in the favor of commercial profitability.

In all logic, the Nobel Prize honoured before all the representatives with a " Literature " with the direction where it is attested as of 1764, namely l'" together of an ascribable work to a author, fictional or not, mimetic or not but whose value first is esthetic and formelle". Novelists, essay writers, poets and playwrights thus was the principal ones rewarded even if one counts, in the list for the prizes winner, three philosophers (Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell) and two historians (Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen and Sir Winston Churchill, also distinguished for its political discourses).

The oldest personality to have obtained this distinction is Doris Lessing (born in 1919), rewarded in 2007 at eighty eight years. The youngest prize winner is Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), crowned in 1907 at forty-two years.

Nominations and operating process

Each end of the year, to the autumn, the Nobel Prize is allotted by the Swedish Académie. The Academy, to constitute its nominations, is based on several great authorities or figures of authority in the field of the Lettres among which other members of academies and national or foreign literary companies, formed university circles of eminent professors in Littérature, Langue or Linguistique, former prizes winner of the price, presidents of national associations of writers representative of the literary production in their countries. Each one proposes a list of several names, detailed, explained and argued, why it is supposed to communicate in the precise term at the committee of the Nobel. He is interdict with each person solicited to vote for itself. Thousands of proposals are submitted annually to the committee which keeps only three hundred and fifty names that it prunes, to keep only fifteen to twenty candidatures sent then to the Swedish Academy. As of on April 1st, the academicians fix among those a final list of five names. After having studied, during the summer and in detail, the work and the biography of the authors in string, sworn several meetings and discussions organize where each one defends that which, according to its criteria, deserves the supreme distinction. In conclusion of these debates in October, the members of the Académie proceed to a vote with one or two turns, with the uninominal majority poll. The person who will have obtained more half of the voices will see indicated like holder of the Nobel Prize. A third turn can possibly be organized. The jury can also derogate from the rule following an unanimously made exceptional decision or by the vast majority of the speakers, as in the case (very rare) of attribution of a price doubles or unites. This operating process is similar for all the other categories. The identity of the récipiendiaire is revealed by the permanent secretary of the Academy in the current of the month of October, at the time of an official press conference in the building of Börshuset besides (where are held all the meetings of the academicians), located in the old city of Stockholm. The contents and the course of the deliberations as well as the final list of the five indicated personalities have been kept secret for more than fifty years, even if inevitable escapes feed good number of comments. Certain nominations were made public besides and are even used like sales point by the editors.

Even if the amount of the sum inherent in the price evolved/moved during its history, it is fixed today at ten million Swedish crowns, namely approximately a million of Euros. Each rewarded personality is seen decreeing by the king of Sweden, during the Ceremony of handing-over of the Nobel Prize, on December 10th with Stockholm, the gold medal and the diploma penmanship of the Fondation Nobel (conceived since a score of years by the artist Annika Rücker). Each diploma contains the name of the prize winner, the certificate of his statute lately conferred but also the definition or artistic justification data by the Academy on its literary company. Gaining must then make a solemn speech, in its native language or of adoption, before the assembly. It defines its own work, declines in it its vision of the Littérature, then states what, for him, constitutes the esthetic main issues, formal, structural, poetic, philosophical, cultural, ethical or policies of contemporary creation.

Criticisms and polemics

Many critics, specialists and circles of readers think that the quality of the contributions poetic, esthetic, set of themes and philosophical of a work to the field of the Lettres is not only the " impartial" criterion; on which the Swedish Académie centers to allot the Nobel Prize. One reproached much the committee his Eurocentrisme (which recovers reasons before very cultural and historical) but also the primacy granted to " authors; idéalistes" , cantors of a purely Western optimism but in conformity with the representations of Alfred Nobel. This ideological posture was the main cause of the lapse of memory of writers as important as Leon Tolstoï, Emile Zola, August Strindberg or Henrik Ibsen. It is only during the First World War that the Swedish Academy posted a line of neutrality, rewarding for the authors of country not having fought or for the more critical authors.

In 1958, the attribution of the price with Boris Pasternak started the anger of the Soviet authorities. Boris Pasternak, considered as a " agent of the Occident capitalist, anticommunist and anti-patriotique" the reward was forced to decline, being saved him like with its close relations of heavy sanctions.

In 1961, Wystan Hugh Auden would have says one refers, at the time of a Scandinavian conference (which included/understood a great exposure being devoted him), with the homosexuality of its Swedish translator: the diplomat Nobel Prize of peace Dag Hammarskjöld because it would have badly received the translation of one of his poems. This definitively drew aside it from the list of the member elects.

In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize which, according to him, was " much too turned towards the Occident ".

The Nobel Prize 1970 Alexandre Soljenitsyne, dissenting Soviet, did not want to go to Stockholm of fear of not being authorized to turn over in Soviet Union where it was assigned with residence and where its work, setting with the index, circulated clandestinely. But after the refusal of the Swedish government to honor Soljenitsyne by a handing-over of the price with public reading and speeches at the time of a ceremony organized with the embassy of Moscow, the writer was ready to decline the reward and money, rejecting the Swedish conditions which, according to him, were " an insult with the Nobel Prize him-même". It could perceive its distinction only after deposed of its Soviet nationality and being excluded from U.R.S.S in 1974.

In 1974, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow were quoted to be simultaneously rewarded but the Swedish Académie refused this possibility with the profit of a joint price allotted to the two Swedish writers Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both members of the Academy and thus sworn Nobel Prize. Bellow was finally honoured two years later in 1976, but neither Greene nor Nabokov was preceded.

The prize awarded to Dario Fo in 1997 was judged " well léger" by some critical. Indeed, the challenge of the author was to have disenclosed in Italy the contemporary national theater to make it available to a public not specialized and less favoured. Also it had known, according to same criticisms, to give to the last style the satirical receipts of the Commedia dell' arte. Its artistic and theatrical contribution was recognized indeed more on the visual, scenic level or on that of interpretation and orality that on the purely textual and literary level (on the register written). Many times censured by the Roman Catholic church the designation of Fo, in addition militant of Extreme left, was a true surprise. According to the British editor of the playwright, Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller, in string this year, had the appearance of big favorites. But the jury would have regarded their possible victory as " much too prévisible" , emanating from a " choice; too much populaire".

The choice of Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 did not only divide the press. It was the object of violent one debates to the center even of the Swedish Academy. It was besides the cause of the resignation of Knut Ahnlund of its station of academician in 2005. He considered the honor made with the Austrian écrivaine being a " shock of an extreme gravity, successor in title of the irrevocable damage to the literature in a general way and the reputation of the price in particular. "

In August 2006, following the media uproar caused by the revelation of voluntary engagement within the Waffen-SS in 1944 of Fatty Günter (rewarded in 1999), the Fondation Nobel had to intervene vis-a-vis the part and German line summations of the press which requested the writer to return his reward and the amount of money being correlated him. The president of the committee stated that " the attribution of the prices was irreversible because no Nobel Prize had been withdrawn with whoever by the passé".

Although its name was retained many times on the lists, Jorge Luis Borges was never rewarded, as its biographer Edwin Williamson affirms it, because of its political opinions and its ambiguous behavior vis-a-vis the Argentinian dictatorship. Also Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Ezra Pound they were excluded by the committee from any prize list following political standpoint sulfurous.

Many still reproaches the committee its generosities with respect to the German literature at a certain time. Heinrich Böll for example, whose historical importance is not to disparage (it was the head of prow of the German literature of post-war period and the pioneer of the Groupe 47) but whose work innovated forever, neither on the level of the form, the language, from the structure, nor on the plan of the contents and the set of themes, received the price in 1972 but not Bertolt Brecht which thus undoubtedly paid its engagement near the East-German mode.

One can note that plethora of great names of the literature at the 20th century or the turning of the 19th century, men or women, whose writings are the subject of the most pointed interpretations in the academic world and who for are recognized much like angular stones of the literary History, do not appear among the prizes winner although the majority of them several were named with the title: Alfred Jarry, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Guillaume Apollinaire, To groove Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaiéva, Constantin Cavafy, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Alfred Döblin, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Back Passos, Carson McCullers, George Orwell, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Andre Malraux, Rene Tank, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille, Emil Cioran, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, Julio Cortazar, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Witold Gombrowicz, Sadegh Hedayat, Lao She, Yukio Mishima, Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, Danilo KIS, Paul Celan, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Zbigniew Herbert, Ernst Jünger, E.E. Cummings, William S. Burroughs, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Tennessee Williams, William Styron… Nevertheless, it seems easy to draw up a comparative assessment of preceded and forgotten a posteriori . Being a late dedication and not a valorization of promising talents, the role of the Nobel Prize is logically subjected to the controversy. It is difficult, for some, that sworn are visionaries and can predict posterity left by a work, the more so as it appears impossible to slice and make a decision completely impartial if the respect of the testamentary memory of Alfred Nobel and the technical materiality are included, historical, political, ideological which justifies each choice. One should not, in addition, not neglect the possibilities and means of diffusion of books at a certain time or the accessibility to certain works. In this direction, one can include/understand the omission on the lists of many Soviet poets whose writings circulated only clandestinely. It was, moreover, also impossible to distinguish from their alive of the personalities such as Fernando Pessoa which published under various pseudonyms and of which the poems in essence were not assembled in collections and were published, afterwards many adventures, which in a posthumous way. The same applies to Franz Kafka which died prematurely and work in its greater part was discovered and put forward only after its death. For others, on the other hand, camping a position more sartrienne, it acts to see in these lapses of memory the vacuity of the large institutional machines engoncées in their intellectual posture as inept as recalcitrant, without those carrying out what is the literature in its gasoline.

However, one reproaches from now on sworn of the Nobel to want to exploit the political controversy with business ends and media following the example his last three choices (Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and Orhan Pamuk). Among the writers of first order who yet were not honoured by the Swedish Académie although it mainly named them, one counts in particular: Milan Kundera, Michel Bittern, Aime Césaire, Carlos Fuentes, Erri De Luca, Aharon Appelfeld, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Hugo Claus, Pierre Mertens, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Gift DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Dag Solstad, Edouardo Menzona, Old Sven Madsen, Botho Strauss, Monika Van Paemel, Lioudmila Petrouchevskaïa, Jordan Radickov, Tadeusz Konwicki, Ismail Kadare, Einar Karason, Arto Paasilinna, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Martin Walser, Peter Handke or Christa Wolf. The offer of Fatty Günther concerning directly the latter, namely to reward at the same time an author for the Germany of the Is and of the Western as cultural symbol of the Réunification was declined by the committee.

As for the least favoured areas of the world, force is to note that the assessment is largely poor in spite of real efforts. The Latin America and caribéenne is the only one to draw about its pin from the play by adding up seven Nobel Prize (even if the case V.S Naipaul seems separately a little: West-Indian British of Indian origin). Asian side, one counts only one single Chinese Prix: Gao Xingjian (naturalized French) and an Indian of the Bengali Raj of language : Rabindranath Tagore . Even the rich person Japan counts in all and for only two prizes winner (Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe). One in addition notes a total absence, in the list of the member elects, writers of language Persian. Nevertheless, the Africa is without question the continent more been sulky by the Académie: if one excludes the two anglophone South-Africans Nadine Gordimer and John Maxwell Coetzee (rewarded respectively in 1991 and 2003), one notes that only one anglophone African black author: the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, in 1986, and only one writer Arabic-speaking person: the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, were distinguished. Other authors of premium importance like Ngugi wa Thiong' O, Chinua Achebe or Nuruddin Farah, quoted several times by the Academy on its lists, must still have patience.