Nobel who?
When the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced in a matter of hours, it will be received, no doubt, with the usual storm of platitudes and recriminations, along with the inevitable global chorus of “Huh?”s. It's hard for the Nobel committee to make a right choice. One wonders whether they deliberately seek out controversy for the sake of publicity, or just can't avoid it. In any case much of the discussion will likely revolve around the rightness or wrongness of the winner, or that of some other slighted candidate. But what about the rightness of the prize itself?
I wanted to revisit Jean-Paul Sartre's famous refusal of the prize in 1964. Sure, it's old news, but there's no cure for media frenzy like old news. In his open letter to the Nobel committee, Sartre wrote:
A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.
To which his publishers replied, “Sure, just take the food directly out of my starving baby's mouth.” To Sartre, prizes and honors were coercive; they turned a writer into an “institution,” and interfered with the direct, person-to-person contact that writing was supposed to entail. They were not simply distractions from, but fundamentally opposed to, his writerly vocation.
Does anyone believe this anymore? Or, more to the point, does anyone believe that there can be any writing these days that isn't subject to interference from one angle or another? The betting circus around the Prize makes me wonder, is all this hoopla just like so much interfering radio static - or is it essential to what literature is? To put it in Sartre's terms, what does it mean for a writer to have a "signature" these days? Does any author sign their name simply as Jean-Paul Sartre - simple, direct, unambiguous? Or does the noise surrounding literature mean that there is always some kind of post-comma?
