Review: The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature

Hindustan Times

07-06-2025

We might consider the Nobel Prize for Literature to be a holy pulpit that canonises a writer. It ordains the pantheon of all-time greats who have attained literary divinity and is where 'industrial money is gilded with royal glamour, scientific benefits, and cultural sophistication'. But the intimate connection between the 'the cultural capital of high-brow literature… dynamite money from the donor and…the feudally rooted status of the old Swedish monarchy' has meant that the Nobel Prize has always been under scrutiny. However, most of the books on the subject have been rich in myth but poor in scholarship. The process of the selection of laureates and how that has shaped the idea of 'universal' literary values and defined literary quality across languages and cultures has rarely, if ever, been discussed. But what mechanisms made it possible for 18 Swedish intellectuals – 'randomly chosen persons in the remote town of Stockholm' – to become the world's most influential literary critics with a power to exert an almost godlike influence on the literary world? Paul Tenngart's well-researched book The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature scours the history and future of the prize to explain the complex alchemy of how the Nobel Prize in Literature has shaped (and continues to shape) the world literary canon.
Apart from fame, the Nobel Prize comes with a larger sum of money than most prizes. Alfred Nobel donated more than 30 million Swedish crowns, which is the approximate equivalent of 245 million US dollars in today's currency. Having money makes one earn more money, not only through interest and other capital gains, but also through the social and cultural attraction of economic success. This is how Nobel's generous donation empowered 'an outdated and elitist closed circle of cultural power' to judge the excellence of human endeavour.
The cultish effect of the Nobel Prize for Literature has led other well-known prizes with a fundamentally international perspective on literature to be modelled on it – the Formentor, the Neustadt Prize, and the International Booker Prize, a spin-off of the Booker that, from 2005 onward, has awarded literature originally written in any language but available in English translation. That Rabindranath Tagore received the prize in 1913 because of the English translations of his Bengali poetry confirms Heilbron's notion of Anglophone hyper-centrality in literary traffic across markets and languages and accounts for English being the most awarded literary language.
The book raises questions about what constitutes world literature that the donor, Nobel himself, probably had no means to answer. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary theories and methods, this multifaceted history of the Nobel Prize questions how the Swedish Academy has managed to uphold the global status of the prize through all the violent international crises of the last 120 years. It also looks at the impact the prize has had on the distribution and significance of particular works, literatures and languages.
Over the years, in its strenuous attempt to 'recognize true and durable literary quality', the Swedish Academy has often awarded writers who have soon become outdated. The weighing and ranking of the literary merits of contemporaries is an almost hopeless undertaking. As a result, the Swedish intellectuals have missed the chance to award literary giants like Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Looking at the back list of laureates, in 1951, Henri-René Lenormand concluded that 'it is disturbing to have witnessed the disregard for universal geniuses like Joseph Conrad of England, Ibsen and Strindberg for the Scandinavian countries' and 'Chekhov, Tolstoy, Andreiev and Gorky of Russia'. The subjectivity of the selection process, and its propensity to be run by high-minded literary cabals has raised questions, laying the prize open to criticism of oversight and bias. Admittedly, canonization points readers to authors whom they might not have cared to read without the Nobel tag. Tagore's literature prize sparked the most intense reactions in The New York Times to any single Nobel Prize until the outbreak of the First World War. But it did also lend widespread expediency to the act of reading him. Many writers have been 'discovered' by readers, not on account of the epiphany of their greatness, but because they had been awarded the Nobel.
As many deserving writers have been ignored, the Nobel Committee has been accused of holding Eurocentric attitudes toward literatures produced in non-European and non-Western contexts, resulting in authors and texts from such 'remote parts' not being 'consecrated'. 'The academy is often reproached for thus neglecting the literatures of Asia and Afric. Artur Lundkvist, an influential member of the Academy, infamously said in Svenska Dagbladet in 1977, 'But I doubt if there is so far very much to find there.' It was a comment as prejudiced as Thomas Macaulay's statement that 'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'.
Not that the Nobel committee is unaware of this, but diplomacy has a role to play amongst languages, cultures, and nations 'struggling for recognition and dominance'. From 1901 to 2022, of the 119 laureates, more than 80 have been born in or have been long-standing residents in European countries. Thirteen of the awarded authors have been US citizens, and nine of them have been born in Africa or have lived in African countries.
Interestingly, sitting on the northern fringes of Europe, Stockholm and Sweden (its language is spoken by only 0.1 percent of the world's population) do not enjoy a central position in the world, either politically, economically, or culturally. Yet, in 'awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, the semi-peripheral Stockholm is the middle sibling of world literature, a space of compromises between self-sufficient firstborns and defiant lastborns,' writes Tenngart. He believes the Nobel will 'always' be a European prize that will never be able to 'balance out the hierarchy between cultures, languages, and literatures,' reinforced further by its 'international importance'. He adds that the Swedish Academy is fundamentally an 'elitist' and 'undemocratic' assembly.
In its zeal to remain politically neutral, in the wake of the death-edict issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, the Swedish Academy decided not to condemn the fatwa and thereby not to officially and univocally support Rushdie. In protest, three Academy members – Kerstin Ekman, Werner Aspenström, and Lars Gyllensten – refused to continue their work in the Academy. It is impossible to officially resign so Aspenström's and Gyllensten's chairs remained empty until their deaths in 1997 and 2006. Kerstin Ekman's chair remained empty until the rules were changed in 2018.
Interestingly, an intense political controversy ensued in 2019 when Peter Handke was awarded. The Austrian writer was accused of being sympathetic to Serbian nationalism, and denying the Srebrenica massacre and was strongly criticized for speaking at Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's funeral in 2006.
Over the years, the Academy has also drawn flak over its selections of Gao Xingjian, VS Naipaul, Imre Kertész, Orhan Pamuk, Herta Müller, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Mo Yan – all of whom have been accused of painting a false picture of their home countries. Many believed that their consecration reinforced the authors' assumptions. And that's not all. Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was disqualified due to his 'negativity' in relation to traditional institutions; Ezra Pound's 'fascist' opinions during the Second World War disqualified him. It is clear that moral and political considerations often gained precedence over merit. Language often has been a barrier. During the first three decades of the prize, no Russian author was awarded, because none of the early twentieth-century members knew Russian.
The book tries to prise open an institution that has been overshadowed by its cultish culture of secrecy ('a leftover from the cultural practice of closed circles of power'). One of its rules is that critics and scholars have to wait for 50 years until committee discussions of nominated authors are made public. Tenngart believes the origins of this great secrecy is firmly rooted in 18th-century Freemasonry. While it ushered in Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali, Sinclair Lewis' American, Gabriela Mistral's Chilean, and Yasunari Kawabata's Japanese moorings, besides including politically entrenched writers like Winston Churchill, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Gao Xingjian in the World Republic of Letters, the Republic was built, Tenngart reminds us, on western liberal ideology.
Prasenjit Chowdhury is an independent writer. He lives in Kolkata.