| | |  Editorials | Issues | October 2008 
1990 Laureate Octavio Paz and the Politics of the Nobel Prize for Literature
 Ed Hutmacher - MexicoBookClub.com
On an early October morning eighteen years ago, Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz finally got a phone call from Stockholm telling him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Though he had been a staple of the much-floated short list of candidates to win, Paz's selection still came as a surprise — he had been passed over so often and for so long, literary critics suspected a dark plot was afoot, that a mysterious conspiracy had permanently sabotaged his candidacy. Now, at last, Paz's legacy would be permanently enshrined in the pantheon of Nobel laureates.
Recently, on October 9, the Swedish Academy once again announced the winner of its annual Nobel Prize, this time bestowing the award to French novelist and philosopher Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio.
For his part, Le Clezio seemed aware that whispers and second-guessing circled his selection. He told reporters "Many other names were mentioned, names of people for whom I have a lot of esteem. Luck or destiny, or maybe other reasons, other motives, had it so that I got it. But it could have been someone else."
Without taking anything away from Le Clezio, surely a distinguished man of letters, maybe there were other reasons, other motives behind the Swedish Academy's decision to award the granddaddy of all literary awards to a relatively unknown French bard.
Most troubling to outside observers is the Academy's long history of snubbing world-renowned writers in favor of, say, an obscure Polish poet or Egyptian novelist. Such authors as Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene never won the Nobel. One could make a pretty good award out of just that list.
In light of the Academy's sins of omission over the years, more than a few literary critics are convinced something fishy is going on in Stockholm, and nowhere are suspicions stronger than in the United States. In the months leading up to this year's announcement, critics renewed old charges that an anti-American bias was blocking literary figures like Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oats, John Updike and Don DeLillo from winning the award.
The Academy didn't help itself when Nobel judge and permanent secretary Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that an American author was unlikely to win because "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular" and its writers "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture…. You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States."
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, returned fire: "You would think the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures…. Many [American] writers, old and young, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English, don't seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."
Even the cantankerous playwright Edward Albee chimed in: "All prizes are peculiar. There's politics in everything, and some judges just don't know what they're doing."
Engdahl tried to downplay the brouhaha, saying that the angry reaction from across the Atlantic surprised him and admitted that his comments had been "perhaps a bit too generalizing." The Nobel Prize for Literature, he said, "is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors." But when asked if he thought the choice of Le Clezio would be an affront to Americans, Engdahl replied with a straight face, "I'm not aware that there are today any anti-French sentiments in the U.S."
In a reminder that politics and culture are closely intertwined, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Le Clezio's award "an honor for France, the French language and the French-speaking world." The sentiment was seconded by Prime Minister Francois Fillon who said that the Swedish Academy's selection "consecrates French literature."
National pride isn't an uncommon response once a favorite son or daughter is recognized for their achievements. On that October day in 1990, after learning that Octavio Paz had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mexico City newspapers proclaimed his award in banner headlines while President Carlos Salinas de Gortari extolled "His work, his qualities, his profound Mexican and Latin American vision..."
For his part, Paz appeared unbothered by the hubbub. When asked if the Nobel Prize was for him or for Mexico, he said, "A writer has two loyalties. First, he belongs to the special tribe of writers. Then, he also belongs to a culture, to his own country. Mine is Mexico."
The Nobel Prize can reveal more about society's collective obsessions with honorifics than it does about honoring the world's great writers. But it's still good to know that, sometimes, the Scandinavian judges get it right.
Ed Hutmacher is Editor in Chief of MexicoBookClub.com. For more information on these or other books with Mexico-related themes, please visit the website. |
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