Opinion

Jean-Paul Sartre, ever the rebel, refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. This year, another French writer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, has won the prize. Whereas Sartre was a global celebrity – a kind of rock star for the intelligentsia – Le Clézio is relatively unknown outside of France. As of today, however, all this has changed.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of prizes and the institutions that award them. The titular character in Saul Bellow’s 1975 novel, Humboldt’s Gift, remarked that the Pulitzer Prize is ‘just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are “Pulitzer prizewinner passes”’. In spite (or perhaps because) of this charge, Humboldt’s Gift won the Pulitzer Prize, and Bellow picked up the Nobel in 1976.

Fear of becoming a walking ad might have been on the mind of the media-savvy Sartre, who reacted to the Nobel announcement thus: ‘It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.’

Nor is everyone overjoyed to win the Nobel. When Doris Lessing learned from reporters that she had won the award last year, her reaction was as memorable as it was abrupt: “Oh Christ,” she said, “I couldn’t care less.”

She went on to say, ‘I’m eighty-eight years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.’

Thankfully, Lessing is still with us, as is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which continues to be an annual source of surprise, outrage, envy, appraisal and argument.

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