Nobel prizes and world literatures

marginalia that got out of hand

Part III. of our Krasznahorkai post is still forthcoming…

In the meanwhile, check out parts I. and II. And enjoy this post about what the list of the literary Nobel laureates tells us.

Making the case pro or con about the usefulness of the Nobel prize in literature is a curious exercise, but it can be clarifying, and I am glad

James Elkins

posted this comment on

Naomi Kanakia

’s note. It is fun to see two people with such markedly different preferences, approaches, interests, and backgrounds circling around each other.

They take care of at least outlining the argument about how useful the prize is to a reader as a recommendation, how reflective it is of literary greatness, whatever that may be, and how many of the greats were missed—ultimately raising the more fundamental question: what are we to think about the products of a prize machine that feeds off multiple levels of pre-selection and canonicity?

People have written about the “Nobel-effect” on translations, about the sudden boost many recent laureates get in sales, translations, and global visibility. In fact, we have long been planning to write up our findings about that problem. One may also wonder how this advertising function evolved over the 20th century—this would require research we have not done yet.

So this post is about something else. Glancing at the list of laureates, everyone notices how it moves from a list of people by whom most educated readers in the 21st century will never read a single line, to famous people we at least remember seeing on the display tables at the bookshop. While this registers the Nobel’s current role as a shaping force of the body of writing sold as world literature, it also reflects larger changes in taste, in canon formation.

Here, I want to touch upon two even broader, conceptual shifts: first, a change in what even counts as literature, and second, and perhaps more interestingly, a change in the Swedish Academy’s perception of what makes an author an appropriately world-literary figure.

The history of “literature”—and of “history”

The list of the laureates reveals something about the subject we are thinking about: literature, and how what can count as literature has changed since 1901. Among the recent laureates, there is Alexievich and Dylan: people have made “is this even literature?!” noises about both. Among the earlier ones, there are the philosophers Rudolf Eucken, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell. There is also Winston Churchill, whose historical writing and oratory apparently made him a plausible candidate as late as 1953.

And there was Theodor Mommsen—the 1902 Nobel laureate for literature. Mommsen was one of the greatest historians of the 19th century, and perhaps one of the greatest narrative historians writing in a European vernacular ever, and he was helpfully still alive in 1902. I strongly suspect that his history of Rome, whether in the original, in translations, abbreviations, and condensed versions, might have been among the most widely read works of narrative prose written in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. (Don’t quote me on this though.) It certainly reads like a novel. It defines the kind of Roman history that fascinates 16-year-old boys.

One may point out with Elkins that Mommsen’s laureateship is suggestive of the conservative bent of the Swedish Academy and the prize in general. But the impossibility of imagining the Nobel going to a professional historian now: not just a conservative one, but any historian—who would that even be? Ginzburg? … Harari?!—also says something about the fate of historiography in the 20th and 21st century and its relationship to literary writing.

Mommsen’s case is useful to bear in mind because it reveals that the implicit definition of what may count as literature (in the sense of worthy of a Nobel for literature) at a particular historical moment may be elusive to us.

The nationalism of the periphery defined world literature

Then there is the problem of a bias that I have only seen discussed in terms of the limitation: as the conservatism of the prize, and then only casually. That problem is often expressed along the lines of “why did Woolf, Joyce, Rilke, Kafka, Proust, and Musil not get the Nobel prize in literature, and what’s even the point if they never got it”?

This is an important question, but to me, asking it merely as a rhetorical one, as a gesture at the conservative taste of the Swedish Academy, does not seem very interesting or even productive. Instead we should take it to be a genuine question about the notion of world literature. What do the lists of inclusions and omissions suggest about the idea the Swedish Academy had of world-literary greatness, and of world literature more broadly?

A passport-style evaluation of the winners of the Nobel prize (i.e. checking their gender and ethnic identity), and then drawing the obvious conclusion, viz. that in the first half of the 20th century, the Nobel was usually given to white, male, metropolitan authors,¹ is not only unsurprising: it also does not do enough to understand the logic of how the laureates were actually selected. The litanies of overlooked early- and mid-20th c. authors, after all, tend to be lists of white men from Europe. But if their exclusion is not explained by 21st-c. identity categories, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a function of some vaguely defined conservatism of taste.

If we look at the award speeches given by the Secretary of the Academy, we quickly realize how profoundly cultural geography, an ideology of culture and representation born in the semi-periphery shaped the list of the laureates.

The Nobel Prize is given out by the Swedish Academy—not by an abstract organ representing Euro-Atlantic values, but an institution of the Kingdom of Sweden, which in 1900 was still a semi-peripheral European country. And the cultural ideology of the semi-periphery: the understanding of literature as the foremost expression of national identity, thoroughly informed their decisions.

Up until the mid-century, the Swedish Academy clearly sought to recognize writers who could be seen as major representatives of some national literature. It was the work of national representation that admitted a writer to world literature, which they understood the sum total of national literatures, or perhaps the representative sampling of national literatures. The writer’s representative relationship to a nation, to a locally, culturally, maybe ethnically defined community was central to their prize-worthiness.

The award speeches make this abundantly clear. For example, in 1903, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson is described as a writer who “reveals himself as a man of the country and of the old saga; indeed it has been said, not without reason, that he describes the life of the peasant in the light of saga. … the peasants whom he knew so well … preserved the laconic and reserved manner of talking which the poet has reproduced with such felicity. Although this reproduction is idealized and profoundly poetic, it is nonetheless faithful and true to nature.”

In 1904, we learn that Frédéric Mistral “devoted himself to poetry and painted the beauties of Provence in the idiom of the country, an idiom which he was the first to raise to the rank of a literary language. … the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production … faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people.”

There are three museums in Poland dedicated to the life and art of Henryk Sienkiewicz. This is the sign on the one in Poznań. Photo: Péter Király.

The 1905 award ceremony speech might be the fullest statement of what informs many other awards: “… in every nation there are some rare geniuses who concentrate in themselves the spirit of the nation; they represent the national character to the world. Although they cherish the memories of the past of that people, they do so only to strengthen its hope for the future. Their inspiration is deeply rooted in the past, like the oaktree of Baublis in the desert of Lithuania, but the branches are swayed by the winds of the day. Such a representative of the literature and intellectual culture of a whole people is the man to whom the Swedish Academy has this year awarded the Nobel Prize. He is here and his name is Henryk Sienkiewicz.”

All three of these writers were representatives of nations without a sovereign state. That situation makes their cases paradigmatic of the motivation of the (semi)peripheral cultural nationalism that is underpinning these citations. The ideology, shared by the national Academies of Sweden as well as of Hungary and by other, similar institutions, prioritizes the experience of the people of the land. Rather than focusing on the symbolism of central political power, it idealizes peasant life as the foundation of national culture, so much so that a lot of the laureates are celebrated for writing about peasants. The Academy did give the prize to other writers as well, yet throughout the period, there remains a peripheral nationalist family resemblance among the majority of the laureates.

Yeats’s 1923 Nobel prize fits perfectly in this context. He is cited for “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

The logic of representation is made especially powerful where literary or cultural representation serve as a substitute for the political, but its scope is broader. After all, the Swedish Academy itself was the organ of a proud Scandinavian kingdom… National independence does not make the model or the rhetoric go away. The 1928 laureate Sigrid Undset’s writing came to its own “as soon as she abandoned the disunified and uprooted beings of the present time who had attracted her attention, in order to dedicate herself to the life of a distant past. She was destined by birth to do pioneer work in this area … from childhood she had lived in an atmosphere of historic legend and folklore.”

Such is the power of this mode of thinking that writers can get the treatment “writer as representative of the nation as a land and a community” even if they represent a country where the status of “historic legend” is seriously complicated by the settler majority. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis is celebrated for being “an American. He writes the new language—American—as one of the representatives of 120,000,000 souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence. The new great American literature has started with national self-criticism. It is a sign of health. Sinclair Lewis has the blessed gift of wielding his landclearing implement not only with a firm hand but with a smile on his lips and youth in his heart. He has the manners of a new settler, who takes new land into cultivation. He is a pioneer.”

Another way Americans can be seen as making literature the expression of an emergent national identity is if they go and write about peasants elsewhere. Pearl Buck (1938) is celebrated for “the peasant epic which has made her world-famous, The Good Earth”: “her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China.”

If with this in mind we now look at the roll of the great who did not get the Nobel prize, the omissions start making sense. Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses or The Trial would pose some difficulty for the romantic jargon of national authenticity that was normally underpinning the rhetoric of the Nobel citations.

After WW2, things change. The award rhetoric switches to gestures at universal human values, a humanitarian focus, etc. This mid-century turn to a post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima humanist rhetoric also combines with an emerging awareness of writers of Asia, and then of the global south more broadly. We could write more about this—maybe next time.

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For now, a further look at how the omission of specific authors can be made sense of with reference to the nationalist matrix of world literature. Call it nit-picking—with the aim of clarification.

Empires and metropoles: the list of Nobel laureates as geopolitical allegory

Take the following excerpt from a list of complaints and omissions, quoted by Elkins from an essay about the limitations of the literary Nobel prize:

In Jeffrey Myers’s words, aside from the relative lack of winners from outside Europe and America, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire has been the most egregiously ignored. “None of the major writers… Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Broch, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, and Georg Trakl… ever won the award, which finally, and absurdly, went to Elfriede Jelinek in 2004.”

This is very effective as an angry rehearsal of someone’s “Austro-Hungarian” favorites, but the Nobel Prize must go to a living author with some visible output. Trakl and Kafka were only minimally known, their most important works not yet published at the time of their death. In his lifetime, Wittgenstein only published one obscure philosophical pamphlet and an elementary school textbook—the former of course admired by some of the greatest minds of his time (most famously by the 1950 Nobel laureate in literature, Bertrand Russell), but it was hardly the belletristic success that would have justified any literary prize.

There remains a long list of omissions, of course. But is the former Austro-Hungarian Empire really missing from among the awardees? Depends on your definition of the Austro-Hungarian empire. If you mean Austrian authors writing in German—as the mention of Elfriede Jelinek seems to suggest—maybe.

However if you include people writing in some of the other languages of this large, multi-ethnic territory that was decisively shaped by the shared experience of having been governed from Vienna, then you might note that Ivo Andrić got the prize in 1961, S.Y. Agnon in 1966, Elias Canetti in 1981. Although not born in the K.u.K. lands, Canetti even wrote in German, and did so in and about Vienna, making him the quintessential cosmopolitan Viennese if that’s what one is after. (And that is what people tend to be after when talking about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A touch of Klimt, a bit of Freud—the stuff of Janik and Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna.) On the other hand, Jaroslav Seifert (Nobel laureate of 1984) was born as a subject of Franz Josef, even though his poetry was decidedly not about Viennese cafés. Imre Kertész (2001) lived in what used to be the Austro-Hungarian empire, no more and no less than Jelinek. (In the name of pedantry it is perhaps worth noting that Auschwitz, Kertész’s central subject, is also in former K.u.K. territory.) So what or who is being most egregiously ignored here and by whom?

Of course I am not proposing this list of Nobel laureates from the former K.u.K. to deny that there were a lot of great writers who could also have been perfectly appropriate laureates. Although Jaroslav Hašek died the year his not-exactly-idealistic masterpiece was published (Elkins points out the requirement of idealism as an apparent limitation on who or what can get the Nobel) and thus had no chance, among the Czechs there was also Karel Čapek, as world famous as a Central-European author writing in a Slavic language could get in the 1930s. Then there was also Miroslav Krleža, the multilingual Croatian modernist.

On the other hand, we can also add some names to the list of those German-speaking writers from K.u.K. territory who were born much later and did get the prize—if Jelinek’s prize is the belated recognition of the lands of the empire, then even more so are Herta Müller’s—whose fiction is set in a part of Romania whose multi-ethnic reality was created by the Hapsburgs, and Peter Handke’s, whose (shall we say) fascination with Slovenia in Repetition, not to mention his various political interventions, are also about the aftermath of the dissolution of the Empire.

Empires are tricky things. They include more than the metropole.

But based on the peasant-nationalist matrix that dominated the prize before 1945, we can maybe also reconsider the omission of the writers of the imperial center. Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, and others, were writers of an urban, cosmopolitan modernism. What is more, they were writers of an urban, imperial, cosmopolitan modernism. Their work participates in a flourishing of culture at odds with emergent nationalisms. Musil and Kraus and Rilke and Zweig as expressions of the rooted identity of their nation? The problem posed by these writers for how the Nobel prize conceived of world literature and literary greatness has to do with their identity linked to the Empire rather than to a national entity. More bluntly: the great German-speaking writers of the K.u.K. lands who were active in the early 20th century had no real Austrian nation in the cultural sphere to connect to, even less to represent. They were an impossibly bad fit for the concept of world literature as national representation that was embraced by the Swedish Academy.

Interwar modernists, whether from Vienna or Bloomsbury or elsewhere, not to mention writers of the avant-garde, were less likely to appear on list of the Nobel laureates because they were writing outside, or against, the model of national literature the Nobel Prize primarily—although not exclusively—sought to honor during the first four decades of its existence.

Once you see the pattern of inclusions and omissions, the examples are inexhaustible: of Polish writers, the next laureate after Sienkiewicz is Władysław Reymont (1924), “for his great national epic, The Peasants”—not the great idiosyncratic modernist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. It is not bad taste, not even a conservatism of taste: it is a larger division of cultural ideology that organizes the list of the Nobel laureates. This also serves as a reminder of the true stakes of modernist and avant-garde writing—the extent to which it was inscribed in the tensions between the eruption of urban modernity and the emergence of nation states in the periphery.

Periods of world literature

After WW2, it is precisely the writers who would not have a chance pre-1945 for a Nobel who constitute the core of an emerging new world literature, one organized under the aegis of universal humanism. Until that model of world literature also faded, and gave way, around the end of the 20th century, to yet another model, the model of neoliberal globalization—both in terms of the prizes awarded and in the circulation of books more generally. Which model seems to be ending as we speak: one metric is how Chinese and Russian purchases of rights to German books have imploded over the past few years.

Back-projecting expectations dating from the post-war universe onto what the Nobel prize was doing before WW2 is a pretty pointless exercise. Trying to understand it historically on the other hand does make good sense.

1. Yes, there was Tagore, and a couple of women, still.