How do people who didn't win the Nobel Prize in Literature whine?
Today is a somewhat special day.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced tonight (19:00 Beijing time). As Márquez is blunt, this time of year, a ghost disturbs a group of great writers.
How are the results of the award selected, and what investment does the generous prize come from? Writers who were shocked when they learned that they had won, writers who missed out on the grand prize, writers who won awards but couldn't accept them... Many mysteries, anecdotes and complaints about the Nobel Prize in Literature, after you read it, you may have a new understanding and opinion of the Nobel Prize.
The following is an excerpt from García Márquez's collection of essays, Back to the Seeds.
The Ghost of the Nobel Prize
Every year on these days, a ghost disturbs a group of great writers: the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jorge Luis Borges, one of the greatest writers and one of the most frequent candidates, protested in a newspaper interview about the two-month anxiety caused by various predictions. This is inevitable: as the most artistic Spanish-language writer, it is impossible to exclude Borges from the annual forecast, even if it is to show compassion. Unfortunately, the final result does not depend on the qualities of the candidates themselves, or even on the impartiality of the gods, but on the unfathomable will of the academicians of the Swedish Academy.
Not once in my memory can I guess correctly. In general, it is the winners who are most surprised. In 1969, when Irish playwright Samuel Beckett learned of his award over the phone, he exclaimed, "God, that's terrible!" In 1971, Pablo Neruda learned the top-secret news from the Swedish Academy three days before it was published, when he was in Paris as Chile's ambassador to France. The next night, he invited a few friends there to dinner, and none of us understood the origin of the meal until the news was published in the afternoon newspaper. "Whatever it is, I would never believe it if it wasn't written on paper." Neruda later explained to me, with a big smile on his face.
A few days later, we were eating in a noisy restaurant on the Avenue Montparnasse, when he suddenly remembered that the award ceremony was due in Stockholm forty-eight hours later, but his speech had not yet been written. So he turned the menu over, ignored the people around him, and wrote his wonderful coronation on the spot with his usual natural demeanor and the green ink of writing poetry on weekdays.
The most popular saying among writers and critics is that the academicians of the Swedish Academy agreed in May when the snow began to melt and then studied the work of the finalists on a warm summer day. In October, under the baking of the southern sun, they made their verdict. There is also a rumor that Jorge Luis Borges was selected in May 1976, but was not elected in the final vote in November. That year's literary prize was finally awarded to the outstanding and oppressive writer Saul Bellow, who was hastily selected at the last minute, although the winners in other categories that year were all Americans.
The truth is that on September 22 of that year, just a month before the vote, Borges did something that had nothing to do with his masterful literary creation: he visited General Augusto Pinochet on a solemn occasion. "It is a great honor to be received by you, Mr. President," he said in that unfortunate speech, "and in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, freedom and order are being saved." He continued completely on his own. He concludes with an unusually cold remark: "All this happened on an anarchic continent that had been eroded and destroyed by communism. "It's not hard to imagine that there is only one possibility of saying so many ridiculous things in a row, and that is to have fun with Pinochet. But the Swedes do not understand the humor of the people of Buenos Aires. Since then, the name Borges has disappeared from various predictions. Now, after this unjust sanction, his name is back in place, but the most desirable thing for us like us who are both his greedy readers and his political opponents is that he is finally freed from his annual anxiety.
Two of his most threatening competitors are two English-language writers. The first one didn't make much of a splash in previous years, but is now particularly praised by Newsweek magazine as a master of fiction on the cover of the August 18 issue—and rightly so. Forty-seven years old, Vidiada Suleprad Naipaul, born not far from Trinidad, to an Indian father and a Caribbean mother, he is considered by some notoriously harsh critics to be the greatest English-language writer today. Another candidate was Graham Green, five years younger than Borges and an accomplished writer who, like Borges, was belatedly crowned in his twilight years.
In the autumn of 1972, in London, Naipaul did not seem to realize that he was a Caribbean writer. I reminded him at a gathering of friends that he was still a little at a loss; After thinking for a while, a smile appeared on his melancholy face. "Makes sense." He said this to me. Graham Greene, who was born in Berkhhamstead, didn't hesitate when a reporter asked him if he realized he was a Latin American novelist. "Of course," he replied, "I'm very happy about that, because Latin America has some of the best novelists today, like Jorge Luis Borges." "A few years ago, when we were talking together, I said to Graham Green to my face that I was puzzled and displeased that a writer like him, who has written so richly and extremely originally, has not been awarded a Nobel Prize.
"They're never going to give me this prize," he said to me with a very serious look, "because they don't think I'm a serious writer." ”
The Swedish Academy was only responsible for awarding literary prizes, and when it was founded in 1786, it did not have much luxury, but just wanted to do it like the French Academy. At that time, no one could have imagined that with the passage of time, it would have the supreme power of canonization in the world. It is made up of eighteen senior lifelong members selected by the Academy itself from among the most prominent figures in Swedish literature, including two philosophers, two historians, three experts in Nordic languages, only one woman. But its machismo syndrome doesn't stop there: in the eight-year history of the awards, only six women have won awards, compared with sixty-nine men. This year's award will be an odd decision, because fifteen days ago, just on September 3rd, Professor Lindros Stern, one of the most prestigious academicians, passed away.
How this body operates, how it reaches consensus, and what the criteria for deciding who to choose are one of the best-kept secrets of our time. Its judgments are unpredictable, contradictory and even completely undisturbed by predictions, while its decisions are made in secret, unanimous and unjustifiable. If it weren't for this solemnity and seriousness, it is even conceivable that it deliberately joked with those predictions, inspired by its playful heart. This is really a unique resemblance to the Grim Reaper.
Another well-kept secret is where to invest a sum of money to get such a huge dividend. Alfred Nobel (emphasis should be on the "o" instead of the "e" of "Nobel") founded the prize in 1895 with a capital of $9.2 million, and its interest was divided among the five laureates by November 15 each year. Therefore, the total amount of the prize is also a variable depending on the annual earnings. When the prize was first presented in 1901, each winner received SEK 30,0160. In 1979, the interest for the year was very rich, and each person received 160,000 kroner (2.48 million pesetas).
Some fiddlers say that the money was invested in South Africa's gold mines, so the Nobel Prize was nourished by the blood of black slaves. The Swedish Academy has never publicly clarified this or responded to this insult, but it can defend itself by saying that the controller of the money is not itself, but the Swedish Bank. And all banks, as you can tell by name, do not speak of conscience.
The third mystery is which political standards prevail within the Swedish Academy. On several occasions, its awardees led to the suspicion that these academicians were liberal idealists. One of its biggest and most honourable setbacks came in 1938, when Hitler forbade Germans to accept the prize for a ridiculous reason: because its proponent was a Jew. Richard Kuhn, who was supposed to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, had to refuse to accept it. Whether out of self-confidence or caution, no Nobel Prizes were awarded during World War II. However, as soon as Europe recovered from the devastation it made, the Swedish Academy made what was perhaps its only sad dirty deal: to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Sir Winston Churchill, and simply because he was the most prestigious man of his time, it was impossible to give him any other prize, let alone the Nobel Peace Prize.
The hardest time with the Swedish Academy should be the Soviet Union. In 1958, the award was awarded by the very illustrious Boris Pasternak, who refused to accept the prize for fear of being barred from returning to his country. The Soviet government saw the award as a provocation. However, in 1965, the award was won by Mikhail Sholokhov, the most official of the Soviet writers, and the Soviet authorities warmly praised it. By contrast, when the prize was awarded five years later to the most famous dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet government furiously accused the Nobel Prize of being an instrument of imperialism. But then again, I can be sure that when Pablo Neruda received the award, the warmest congratulations he received came from the Soviet Union, and several letters of congratulations came from fairly senior leaders. "For us," a Soviet friend said to me with a smile, "when the Nobel Prize is awarded to a writer we like, it's good, and conversely it's bad." Such an explanation must not be as simple as it seems. In fact, in the depths of each of us, we have the same standard of judgment.
The only person at the Swedish Academy who could read fluently in Spanish was the poet Arthur Lundkvist. It was he who knew the writings of our writers, proposed candidates and fought secret battles for them. Despite his reluctance, this made him an unreachable mysterious deity, and in a sense the fate of our literature in the world depends on him. But in real life, he is a childlike old man with a Latin sense of humor, and lives in a simple house, making it difficult to imagine that he can decide anyone's fate.
A few years ago, after a typical Swedish dinner in the house – warm beer and cold meat – Lundkwest invited us to his study for coffee. I was shocked by what I saw. There are an incredible number of books written in Spanish, both good and bad, almost all of which have inscriptions by the author, some alive, those who are dying, and those who are dying. I asked the poet to see a few inscriptions, and he agreed with a smile of complicity. Most of the inscriptions are written so intimately that I feel as if I would have been presumptuous to sign my name.
What a hell is this complicated human heart!
October 8, 1980
El País, Madrid
Two years after the publication of this article, García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature.