The Swedish Academy and the Illusions of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is broken. On Friday, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, announced that it will not name a laureate this year, a decision that results from a scandal within its ranks—a "sex abuse" scandal, as the Times push alert, which broke the news to me early in the morning, put it, though that salacious phrase both overplays and underplays the confusing turn of events that has led to this remarkable impasse.

Here is an attempt at a summary. In November, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that eighteen women had accused a man connected to the Swedish Academy of sexual harassment and assault, behavior that apparently began at least twenty years ago. The man, it emerged, was Jean-Claude Arnault, a French photographer, whose wife, the poet Katarina Frostenson, is a member of the academy; together, they own and operate Forum, a prestigious cultural club in Stockholm that received funding from the academy. In light of the allegations, Sara Danius, the academy's permanent secretary, swiftly cut ties with Forum and hired a law firm to investigate the academy's relationship with the club. "Financial irregularities" were discovered. The firm also found that the Nobel's strict secrecy rules had been broken; it seems that Arnault repeatedly leaked the names of winners, presumably with Frostenson's help—not an insignificant matter when you consider the frenzied betting that takes place before the prize is announced each year. (Arnault has denied all allegations. Frostensen has not commented publicly on the scandal.)

The academy began to fall apart. Three members resigned after the body declined to expel Frostensen. So, eventually, did Danius, who was elected to her post in 2015 and is the first woman ever to hold it. Many people felt that it was wrong for a woman to take the fall for a man's egregious misdeeds, particularly in the age of #MeToo; crowds of protesters, most of them women, gathered in the square outside the academy's headquarters to voice support for Danius. More members resigned, including Frostensen. And yet members of the academy, who are appointed for life, cannot technically resign. Empty seats remain vacant until their occupants die, though King Carl XVI Gustaf, the academy's patron, has said that he will change that rule. Perhaps as a signal of what might happen if he doesn't, the current recommended reading on the literature prize's Web site is "Lord of the Flies," by the Nobel laureate William Golding.

But new members can only be approved by a twelve-member quorum, and the shrunken Academy now has ten active members instead of its usual eighteen: a Catch-22 if there ever was one. To make matters even more convoluted, the academy could have awarded the prize this year, if it chose to. Only eight members are needed to constitute a quorum for voting, which operates by a simple majority. But the academy deemed it wise to postpone the proceedings until it gets its house in order—the first time it will have done so since 1949, when the academy decided that no nominee met its criteria. (William Faulkner was eventually chosen, and received his prize a year late.) To compensate, two winners will be announced next year, which raises the possibility that Philip Roth will at last receive the recognition that he and his fans have long craved and still manage to not quite get a full piece of the pie.

A man manipulating his cultural prestige to sinister ends, a scapegoated woman made to take the fall, literary squabbling and backstabbing galore: the Nobel scandal is truly a story for our times, though details like the flummoxed king and the arcane quorum procedure give it the sheen of fiction. It seems inevitable that all this chaos will damage the prestige of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maybe the bigger surprise is that it has managed to maintain its lustre for so long. Why, after all, do we get so worked up about which writer a committee of Swedish intellectuals chooses to anoint in any given year? For people who care about books, the Nobel announcement day is like a secular Christmas. First there is the pleasure of speculating about what gift we might be given. Preferences are expressed; bets are placed at Ladbrokes; the odds are discussed and argued over, without the slightest shred of evidence to give credence to any particular hunch over another. Then the announcement finally comes, and is greeted with joy (Alice Munro), bemusement (Patrick Modiano), rancor (Mo Yan), or a mix of the above (Bob Dylan). The Dylan situation was particularly instructive. Partisans celebrated his win as the pinnacle in a lifetime of achievements, the ultimate halo for their trickster saint. Detractors questioned whether he had the right to be considered a writer at all, let alone a great one. It was October, 2016; with the Presidential election looming, you wouldn't think that any of this would matter in the least. But it felt like it did, and the feeling was wonderful. Arguing over the Nobel made art briefly seem just as important as politics—which, sometimes, it is.

Now we have been reminded that behind the mystical Nobel curtain is a small, fairly homogenous group of fallible Swedes who have taken it upon themselves to arbitrate all of world literature, and that reminder punctures the aura of supreme election that the prize has accrued. Writing about the academy's scandal for the Opinion page of the Times, the novelist and critic Tim Parks called the prize "nonsense." Dylan himself might agree with that—recall his ghosting of the academy, which culminated in the now lesser scandal of his possibly plagiarized acceptance speech—and so, for that matter, might Doris Lessing, who enraged her critics when she refused to accept the prize with gratitude or grace. Parks takes issue with the whole conceit of literary prizes, and he has a point. Literature is not like a sport, in which rank can be determined by contest, nor is it an entity that can be weighed or measured like a handsome squash or a blue-ribbon pig. Parks has scorn for writers who lust after the prize as if it were an objective validation of their life's work. "Literary style distinguishes itself by its distance from the other styles that surround it, implying a community of readers with a shared knowledge of other literary works, of standard language usage and cultural context," he writes. "What sense does it make for a group from one culture—be it Swedish, American, Nigerian or Japanese—to seek to compare a Bolivian poet with a Korean novelist, an American singer-songwriter with a Russian playwright, and so on?"

It doesn't. Still, the prize serves another real function: exposure. I confess that I had never given any thought to Patrick Modiano until I woke up one October morning and saw that he had won the Nobel. Reading him became one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. In the United States, where translation is heinously undervalued, there are few ways to bring international writers to prominence, and no better way than the Nobel. This is why the academy's choice of Kazuo Ishiguro, last year, felt, to me, fairly or unfairly, like a bit of a wasted opportunity—and why others would say exactly the same thing about Dylan.

But that doesn't explain why we root for the writers we love to win, or why we celebrate what we deem the academy's good choices and decry the ones we find bad. Part of the paradoxical fun of the Nobel Prize—of any prize, really—is in finding it trivial, baseless, and stupid in some years, brilliant, inspired, and revelatory in others. We invoke its authority when we agree with it, and dispute its authority when we don't. In other words, we need literature prizes to remind us that literature is above prizes, a point that Louis Menand made in a 2005 article for the magazine. Parks's characterization of the inconsistent, fundamentally incoherent nature of the Nobel Prize and its laureates makes me feel excited about it all over again. There is no reason to compare writers of wildly different genres, styles, backgrounds, and experiences—aside from the fact that they are all inhabiting the earth at the same moment, writing in whichever part of it they find themselves. The unwieldy, utopian impossibility of the Nobel's fundamentally flawed project may be the most exciting thing about it.

There is nothing normative or definitive about the Nobel Prize and its winners. There is no guarantee that the Swedish Academy's choices will stand the test of time. But we already knew that. What makes the prize relevant is our belief that it is. The academy's scandal is a reminder that it owes its legitimacy to us readers. The prize only matters if we care about it, and, on that front, the academy has a lot of convincing to do before 2019 rolls around.

Measure

Measure

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