What if the Nobel Prize in Literature crowned two winners?

While the prize will be awarded this Thursday, the professor at the Collège de France William Marx proposes to crown two to three authors per year, in order to inject more diversity into the list of winners. For “Télérama”, the president of the Nobel committee responds to him.

LThe Nobel Prize in Literature, a prize for white men? Before being an accusation, this is a reality that sociologist Gisèle Sapiro supports with two damning statistics: only 14% of women were crowned between 1901 and 2022, and barely 10% of laureates come from the “Global South”, we read in his recent What is a global author? (ed. du Seuil). Among the most spectacular anomalies, we can cite the only Nobel Prize given to an Arabic-speaking author (Naguib Mahfouz, 1988) or the only Indian laureate (Rabindranath Tagore, 1913).

Faced with this reality, a French personality from the world of letters tried to shake up the Academy. The holder of the Comparative Literature chair at the Collège de France, William Marx, was one of the personalities consulted around the world by the Nobel committee in 2022 to suggest candidates. He took the opportunity to make recommendations. “The Nobel has a determining role in the constitution of the world literary canon, it is important to point out the problems to them,” he pleads.

In this letter that we have consulted, the professor does not mince his words. The price “generates too much injustice and resentment”, wrote William Marx, who proposed awarding the Nobel to “two or three” authors per year (as is often the case in physics, chemistry or medicine), because “too many writers in the world seem worthy of the prize”. Too many writers, and too many languages ​​too. “The most important thing is not geographical diversity, but linguistic diversity,” explains the professor, who wants to fight against “the unification of human thought and writing under a single world language”. The debate was notably relaunched in 2021, when the Academy chose to crown the little-known Abdulrazak Gurnah (Paradis), Tanzanian writing in English, which was seen as a way of not rewarding Africa’s perennial favorite, Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Child, don’t cry)who writes in Kikuyu.

Stockholm never responded to this letter. Never, until today: we submitted William Marx’s arguments to Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee, the body of the Swedish Academy responsible for the nomination process. The academician admits lucidly: “We are aware that we have a major linguistic problem and that it will persist,” because it is linked to the need for the jurors to read the work. This condition, giving rise to a de facto hegemony of English, French and German, the committee attempts to stop it by making “considerable efforts” to broaden its spectrum – consulting, for example, experts in African or Asian literature.

It seems that the romantic myth of the solitary writer and the ivory tower has a hard life within the Nobel committee!

William Marx, professor at the Collège de France

To make up for lost time, would the Academy be ready to crown several authors? In theory, nothing prohibits it. Four times the prize has been awarded to two winners (in 1904, 1917, 1966 and 1974). But for Anders Olsson, “this decision was never considered a happy one.” He therefore finds “preferable that the prize be awarded to a single writer each year”. For William Marx, it is precisely the exceptional nature of the decision which led to seeing it as a bargain price.. “If the division took place every year, this negative dimension would quickly disappear,” he wants to believe. While regretting the conception underlying this approach: “It seems that the romantic myth of the solitary writer and the ivory tower has a hard life within the Nobel committee! »

William Marx argues, on the contrary, a literary history made up of “social and aesthetic communities”. But agrees with Anders Olsson on one point. The professor would like to see one last diversity triumph, that of literary genres, such as the essay. In his 2022 letter, he proposed the candidacy of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. If Bertrand Russell (1950) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) were once Nobel Prize winners, “this happens too rarely”, admitted Anders Olsson, qui “regrets a lot” that the Swiss historian Jean Starobinski (1920-2019) has never won an award. And promises: “I will do my best to change that!” » Stockholm is still moving.