Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THE UNREWARDED
Notes on the Nobel Prize for Literature
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Country
Laureates
19011939
France
Germany
uk / Spain / Poland /
Ireland / Denmark
France
usa
uk / ussr
19922012
3
uk
Germany / China
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and Japan (So seki, Akutagawa, Tanizaki) were not plausible candidates
for the prizes.
The Cold War era exhibited quite different patterns. No prizes were
awarded between 1940 and 1943, the decisive years of the Second World
War. But from 1944 on, the Committee was inevitably affected by the
collapse of European imperialism and the struggle between the Soviet
Union and the United States for world pre-eminence, which divided
Europe into two hostile blocs. Colonies could be ignored, but independent new nation-states, seated in the un General Assembly, could not.
Europes pride in its cultural superiority over the provincial usa, in
the new era of its own political and economic decline, led to a greatly
enhanced desireespecially in London and Parisfor the translation and publication of important literary texts from outside Europe.
Meanwhile Swedens position and outlook were quite different from
the pre-war years. The country had stayed neutral between the Axis
and Allied powers, while Denmark and Norway were occupied by Nazi
armies, and this neutrality earned the contempt of the Allied victors of
1945. The horrors committed by Hitlers regime in the name of racism
and Aryan superiority greatly undermined the prestige of right-wing
nationalism (including right-wing literature) all over Europe. During
most of the Cold War, Sweden redesigned its neutrality in important
new ways. The country developed the most advanced social-democratic
society in the world and tried to present itself as offering a third possibility between ruthless American capitalism and ruthless Soviet state
socialism. Approaching the Third World states was a good way to build
Swedens new reputation as a moderately left-wing, peace-loving country,
especially productive of top officials for the un.
Between 1944 and 1991, fifty Nobel Prizes for Literature were awarded,
and their distribution was quite different from that of the previous era.
Fifteen countries had won prizes between 1901 and 1939, but twentyeight were successful during the Cold War. France, with six winners
(though Sartre turned it down), was still Number One, but only narrowly. Next came the us with five, the uk and the ussr with four each;
Sweden, Germany and Spain with three; and Italy, Chile and Greece with
two. Single champions came from Poland, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland,
Yugoslavia, Israel, Guatemala, Japan, Australia, Bulgaria, Colombia,
Czechoslovakia, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico and South Africa. In this listing
one can see that the pre-war Scandinavian bloc had drastically declined.
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On the other hand, Stockholms gaze now extended to East Asia, the
Middle East, South and Central America, Africa and Australiaonly
Southeast Asia was still invisible. The Committees politics had changed
in some important ways. The first thing to notice is that it discriminated
against right-wing authors: Cline and Malraux in France, Borges in
Argentina, Mario Vargas Llosa (only forgiven in 2010), Evelyn Waugh
and Anthony Powell, for example. The ridiculous exception was Winston
Churchill. On the other hand, independent leftists such as Sartre, and
even communists like Neruda, were all right, just so long as they didnt
come from the ussr or the prc. Sholokhovs was an isolated case, coming just after the relative thaw of the Khrushchev years: the other three
Russians were dissidents and/or exiles.
The other major change was the comparative status of languages. In the
pre-war world, German, French and English were the prestige languages
in real life and in world literature. But after 1945, Germany was split
in two, and Germanophobia was everywhere. The linguistic prestige of
France was in a slow decline. English in its various forms was becoming
the overwhelming world-hegemon. It is striking that although France
remained the top prize winner, none of its champions came from the
ex-French overseas empire in Indochina, West Africa, the Maghreb or
the Caribbean. On the other hand, the British dominions and former
colonies did very well: White for Australia, Beckett and later Heaney for
Ireland, Soyinka for Nigeria, Nadine Gordimer (and later Coetzee) for
South Africa and ultimately Derek Walcott for the British West Indies
(Saint Lucia). Writers who went into exile in, or migrated to, the us and
the uk also wrote in EnglishMiosz, who had defected to the West
thirty years before receiving the prize; Brodsky; Canetti, who had left
Bulgaria for Britain at the age of six; and so on. One continuity with the
previous era, however, was the overlooking or ignoring of authors whom
todays critics from many countries greatly admire: for example Japans
Abe Kobo, Russias Nabokov and Akhmatova, Anglo-Americas Auden
and the uks Graham Greene.
In the almost quarter-century of the post-Cold War era we can see some
interesting novelties. First, the end of French authority (one prize),
American hegemony (one prize), Russian prestige (no prize). Onetime winners have been the Anglophone West Indies, the us, Japan,
Poland, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, South Africa, Austria, Turkey, Ireland,
France, Peru and . . . Sweden. The exceptions are a revived Germany
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(two prizes: Gnter Grass and Herta Mller, though not Hans Magnus
Enzensberger) and China (two, with Mo Yan and Gao Xingjianthough
the latter, winner in 2000, had settled in France by the late 1980s). The
uk was in the lead, with three prizesbut of the British winners, only
Harold Pinter has been a native, while V. S. Naipaul hails from the West
Indies and Doris Lessing grew up in Rhodesia.
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Contenders
Were there ever plausible Southeast Asian candidates for Nobel Prizes?
I am not competent to say anything decisive about this. The national
hero of the Philippines, Jos Rizalsurely the greatest literary figure
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This is an expanded version of the Foreword to Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf and
Mohammad Quayum, eds, Imagined Communities Revisited: Critical Essays on AsiaPacific Literatures and Cultures, Kuala Lumpur 2011.