Bookclubz online book clubs are shaping the future of the Nobel Prize. Surprised? Don’t be. Here’s part two of Bookclubz’s prizes series.
Welcome back. Your curiosity for literary prize knowledge clearly remains unquenched. Forge on.
But I’ve made a discovery in my research for this piece too: Bookclubz’s book clubs are already responding to literary prizes to make their clubs more cohesive and their book recommendations better.
In part 1, I argued that in our contemporary world, prizes help us choose books intelligently. They’re the best ranking system for literature we have, even in an age of algorithms.
Today’s topic, the Nobel Prize in Literature, inaugurated this practice of ranking reading material. It was the first recognizably modern "book award." Moreover, its values are even more central to what we think "literature" is than we recognize. But many of you apparently already knew that. Come see.
Dynamite and Ambiguous Guilt: Nobel Origins
The origin story for the Nobel Prize is quite dramatic. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish explosives magnate, endowed a “gift to mankind” after he read a false obituary of himself. It celebrated that “the merchant of death” was finally gone.
Faced with such a moment, Alfred left a will behind a few years later when he did die. Five prizes: physics, chemistry, medicine, peace, and literature. 94% of his total assets, worth over two hundred fifty million dollars today. A million per award, every year until the end of time.
Incredibly, the will was upheld. The Norwegian parliament even agreed to its demands that it award the Peace Prize. Literature, on the other hand, was and is the responsibility of the Swedish Academy: an elite group of eighteen, bending their gaze from the North since 1901.
An Ode to Joy: The Ideals of the Nobel
Perhaps you have heard of this piece of music.
Like the Nobel Prize, the Ode to Joy is the most famous example of a certain category of thing: classical music. But they have more in common than fame.
The Ode to Joy announces that “all people will become brothers”; that the beauty of its music can cause us to peer over the top of our fence-like divisions to find unity. It believes some force exists to shelter our best interests and reward our best impulses. Our ideal looks down at us from the stars in the night sky.
The Nobel Prize in Literature agrees, at least in theory. It is open to submissions in all the languages of the world. Alfred Nobel himself proposed that the prize belonged to the author “who had conferred the greatest good upon mankind,” and to the piece of literature that led its readers, and humanity as a whole, in an “ideal direction.”
The best art, they say, ought to make you proud to be human. Or even slightly more than human.
An Ode to Europe: The Reality of the Nobel
But the problem with the stars is that we don’t live there. We barely live in the world. Even in the prize’s first year, the Swedish Academy objected that it was unqualified to read the thirty languages the nominations required. It wasn’t wrong.
In 2014, after a relatively obscure French author named Patrick Modiano won, Anna Altman noted in The New York Times that since 2004, eight of the last eleven laureates had been European. Since 2014, there have been four Europeans, and two Americans.
Then came this year’s laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah, one of five Africans to win the prize, ever, compared with sixteen from Scandinavia.
The Ode to Joy, incidentally, is the anthem of the European Union.
The Crimes of Jean-Claude Arnault
If the ideals of cosmopolitanism never quite held true, allegations that surfaced in 2017 reveal that the humanitarian ideals never quite did either.
A Swedish newspaper published statements by eighteen women accusing Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of Swedish Academy member (and Nobel prize voter) Katarina Frostenson, of serial sexual abuse. The Academy, allegedly, had known since 1996.
Sara Danius, leader of the Academy, severed ties with Arnault, then a fixture of Swedish cultural and artistic life, and hired a law firm to investigate the Academy’s relationship with him. Three academy members resigned in protest. Shortly after, Danius did too. It’s arguable she was ousted for not silencing the affair.
In an email correspondence with me, literary critic and prize historian James F. English attests to how brutal the Arnault affair was. “It called attention,” he writes, “not just to the cozy and corrupt qualities of the inner sanctum of literary Stockholm, but to the Academy’s unrepentant misogyny, its all-whiteness, its ethical bankruptcy, its obvious ineligibility to represent the values of the literary world in the 21st century.”
Where most scandals, English says, increase the value of a prize by raising public consciousness of it, the last several years hold the potential to destroy the Nobel Prize in Literature forever.
You Are Shaping the Future of the Nobel Prize
And yet. In 2019, Olga Tokarczuk received the 2018 Nobel, for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
The date is not a typo. For the first time since the depths of the Second World War in 1943, no prize was awarded in 2018. Only a year later did they decide to award one retroactively.
“A Book Club of One’s Own,” one of thousands of online and in-person book clubs you can find through Bookclubz’s Join a Book Club portal, read Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Their club description specifies a “love of literature and respect for fellow members” as the only membership requirements.
The name of the club, the description explains, comes from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own.” One of the most important essays ever written, it concerns the creative legacy of women. Woolf delivered it to the first all-women’s colleges at Cambridge University in 1928.
Among the many truths it will never stop teaching: “to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”
A Book Club of One’s Own, by contrast, opens a “space where you can share your reading experience with others and feel comfortable expressing your opinion or asking questions.”
Virginia would have wished them well; she hoped her Cambridge undergraduates would find the resources “to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
And, in a more defiant tone, she would agree: “there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
(If dreaming, letting lines slip deep, or not setting bolts interests you, you can join a book club here).
What Your Club Means
A Book Club of One’s Own isn’t the only club to have tried Tokarczuk’s book. Federal Way Book Club, convened to “read books we might not have otherwise picked up by ourselves,” did too. So did sixty private clubs on Bookclubz.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t spoken to any of these clubs about their experience, and, for all I know, they hated Drive Your Plow.
That’s not the point. The point is that the future of the Nobel Prize in Literature is still being shaped by you, the readership. The very values of the prize--inclusivity, compassion, imagination--are the values of book clubs. You are living what they’re only preaching.
You assemble yourselves from different backgrounds for the sake of “literature”--an intimidating and stodgy word that does evoke headmasters and professors, but a true one nonetheless. In a book club, “all people" do "become brothers,” and sisters, and kin. You know that better than the Swedish Academy.
A Final Word with Help from Bob Dylan
Before the crisis in 2018, the Swedish Academy took one hopeful step, one that was roundly criticized. They gave Bob Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize.
Bob Dylan isn’t an “author,” he’s a gifted, popular songwriter. That is the beauty of his selection. It shows that even the judges might let down their gates, and embrace their responsibility to an ideal.
As English wrote to me: “Dylan was a great choice, a towering figure in America but not one whose national stature depended in any way on the literary gatekeepers. And Dylan’s predictably bad behavior around the award generated more publicity than the prize has attracted in decades.”
Dylan ignored the prize announcement for two weeks, told a journalist he’d be at the Nobel ceremony “if I can,” and then skipped it (Patti Smith went instead). He posted his mandatory Nobel lecture to the Nobel website just days before the deadline to collect his award. Maybe he sensed something not quite yet apparent.
Dylan writes, in the lecture: “our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read.”
But literature is vocal too: it’s meant to be discussed. Freely, and among friends.
So keep reading; try Louise Gluck (Nobel 2020) and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Nobel 2021) for your next book club book, even if it seems intimidating. A prize legacy is in your hands.
If you enjoyed this article, create a Bookclubz account to stick around for more like it! And make sure you're subscribed to our blog. Also, if you want to know everything possible about how prizes function in society, check out James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value, an invaluable source for this article. (Any errors are mine, not his.)