Ben Anderson the Unrewarded

new left review 80 mar apr 2013 99

benedict anderson

THE UNREWARDED

Notes on the Nobel Prize for Literature

The decision to bestow the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature on the Chinese novelist Mo Yan raises once again the ticklish question of the patterns of distribution for these laurels at the global level. In almost every country, of course, the awarding of literary prizes has typically been contaminated by national politics, the formation of literary cliques, religious convictions, racial prejudices, double standards and the ideologies of the period. Is this the main rea-son why, over the 110 years of announcements of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, there has never been an awardee from any country in Southeast Asiawhile every other region has had its turn?

The history of the Prize can be divided into three parts: the era of world domination by Western European powers, the Cold War and the contem-porary era of globalization. During the first period, between 1901 and 1939, almost all the prizes went to writers from Western Europe, ranked in the following order: six for France; five for Germany; and three each for Sweden, Italy, Norway and the usa. Britain, Spain, Poland, Ireland and Denmark had two apiece, and there were solitary representatives of Belgium, Finland, Russia, Switzerland and India (see Table 1, overleaf). Regional favouritism was then quite clearScandinavians took one third of the prizes. But among them only Norways Knut Hamsun was a world-class author. Tagore from colonial India was an interesting oddity, the only prize-winner (1913) ever to represent a colony, and Asias soli-tary star until 1968, when Japans Kawabata was successful. Americans only began to win in the turbulent 1930s, two of them after Hitler came to power, and their calibre was quite low. At the same time, one impor-tant European country was spectacularly discriminated against: Russia/

100 nlr 80

No. of laureates

Country Laureates

19011939

6 FrancePrudhomme, Mistral, Rolland, France, Bergson

5 GermanyMommsen, Eucken, Heyse, Hauptmann, Mann

3 Sweden / Italy / Norway / usaLagerlf, Heidenstam, Karlfeldt / Carducci, Deledda, Pirandello / Bjrnson, Hamsun, Undset / Lewis, ONeill, Buck

2uk / Spain / Poland / Ireland / Denmark

Kipling, Galsworthy / Echegaray, Benavente / Sienkiewicz, Reymont / Yeats, Shaw / Gjellerup, Pontoppidan

1Belgium / Finland / Russia / Switzerland / India

Maeterlinck / Sillanp / Bunin / Spitteler / Tagore

19441991

6 FranceGide, Mauriac, Camus, Perse, Sartre,* Simon

5 usaFaulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, Singer

4 uk / ussrEliot, Russell, Churchill, Golding / Pasternak, Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky

3 Sweden / Germany / SpainLagerkvist, Johnson, Martinson / Hesse, Sachs, Bll / Jimnez, Aleixandre, Cela

2 Italy / Chile / GreeceQuasimodo, Montale / Mistral, Neruda / Seferis, Elytis

1 Poland / Denmark / Ireland / Iceland / Yugoslavia / Israel / Guatemala / Japan / Australia / Bulgaria / Colombia / Czechoslovakia / Nigeria / Egypt / Mexico / South Africa

Miosz / Jensen / Beckett / Laxness / Andric / Agnon / Asturias / Kawabata / White / Canetti / Garca Mrquez / Seifert / Soyinka / Mahfouz / Paz / Gordimer

19922012

3 uk Naipaul, Pinter, Lessing

2 Germany / China Grass, Mller / Gao, Mo

1 St Lucia / usa / Japan / Ireland / Poland / Italy / Portugal / Hungary / South Africa / Austria / Turkey / France / Peru / Sweden

Walcott / Morrison / O_

e / Heaney / Szymborska / Fo / Saramago / Kertsz / Coetzee / Jelinek / Pamuk / Le Clzio / Vargas Llosa / Transtrmer

Table 1: Distribution of Nobel Prizes for Literature, 19012012

* Sartre, awarded the prize in 1964, refused it.

anderson: Nobels 101

ussr. Prior to Lenins revolution, the discrimination was based on Swedens traditional rivalry with, and dislike of, imperial Russia; after 1919, Communism became the key factor. Characteristically, the only Russian winner, Ivan Bunin, lived in exile in Paris. In the last years of Tsarism, the ancient giant Tolstoy was ignored, maybe because of his radical anarchist political stance, along with Chekhov and the poet Aleksandr Blok. Later on, the great playwright Bulgakov, the poets Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, and the novelists Gorky, Andreev and Zamyatin were all passed over.

The Nobel Committee is made up of five members of the eighteen-strong Swedish Academy, a self-perpetuating body of royal creation whose members serve for life, with the primary duty of enhancing the purity, vigour and majesty of the Swedish language. The Committee prepares a shortlist drawn from the nominations of relevant academic and pro-fessional literary bodies around the world, and from the Academy itself and its living laureates, for an eventual majority decision of the eighteen members in plenary session. Unsurprisingly, then, the Academys liter-ary taste was usually conservative. Its members had no time for Surrealist poets or great experimental modernists like Proust, Joyce, Musil, Brecht, Rilke, Cafavy, Benjamin, Roth (Joseph), Woolf, Lorca, or Swedens own shocking playwright August Strindberg.1 Nobels testamentary dedi-cation to work of an ideal or idealistic leaning disqualified some of these, and others such as Ibsen or Zola, Hardy, Lawrence or Dreiserand at the same time helped to shape one of the most mediocre genres of twentieth-century literature, the Nobel citation itself, with its vapid humanism rendered in accumulations of clich that would disgrace the literary pages of a self-respecting provincial newspaper. In addition, one has also to reckon with the fact that in those years the Committees lin-guistic competence was quite limited, and translations of modern literary works from non-European languages were very few. This structural hin-drance surely explains why China (Lu Hsn, for example, or Lu Ling)

1 Popular feeling in Sweden ran directly counter to the Academy, and in 1912 Strindberg was awarded what came to be known as the Anti-Nobel Prize, a sum of 50,000 kronor raised in small contributions through a public appeal to honour the playwright, an ardent anarchist who in 1884 had sketched out a plan to assas-sinate the countrys king. The award was made by the Swedish Social Democratic leader, Hjalmar Branting, following a massive torchlit procession of workers to mark Strindbergs sixty-third birthday. (See Strindbergs Letters, vol. 2, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, London 1992, p. 790.)

102 nlr 80

and Japan (Soseki, Akutagawa, Tanizaki) were not plausible candidates for the prizes.

The Cold War era exhibited quite different patterns. No prizes were awarded between 1940 and 1943, the decisive years of the Second World War. But from 1944 on, the Committee was inevitably affected by the collapse of European imperialism and the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States for world pre-eminence, which divided Europe into two hostile blocs. Colonies could be ignored, but independ-ent new nation-states, seated in the un General Assembly, could not. Europes pride in its cultural superiority over the provincial usa, in the new era of its own political and economic decline, led to a greatly enhanced desireespecially in London and Parisfor the transla-tion and publication of important literary texts from outside Europe. Meanwhile Swedens position and outlook were quite different from the pre-war years. The country had stayed neutral between the Axis and Allied powers, while Denmark and Norway were occupied by Nazi armies, and this neutrality earned the contempt of the Allied victors of 1945. The horrors committed by Hitlers regime in the name of racism and Aryan superiority greatly undermined the prestige of right-wing nationalism (including right-wing literature) all over Europe. During most of the Cold War, Sweden redesigned its neutrality in important new ways. The country developed the most advanced social-democratic society in the world and tried to present itself as offering a third pos-sibility between ruthless American capitalism and ruthless Soviet state socialism. Approaching the Third World states was a good way to build Swedens new reputation as a moderately left-wing, peace-loving country, especially productive of top officials for the un.

Between 1944 and 1991, fifty Nobel Prizes for Literature were awarded, and their distribution was quite different from that of the previous era. Fifteen countries had won prizes between 1901 and 1939, but twenty-eight were successful during the Cold War. France, with six winners (though Sartre turned it down), was still Number One, but only nar-rowly. Next came the us with five, the uk and the ussr with four each; Sweden, Germany and Spain with three; and Italy, Chile and Greece with two. Single champions came from Poland, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Yugoslavia, Israel, Guatemala, Japan, Australia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico and South Africa. In this listing one can see that the pre-war Scandinavian bloc had drastically declined.


On the other hand, Stockholms gaze now extended to East Asia, the Middle East, South and Central America, Africa and Australiaonly Southeast Asia was still invisible. The Committees politics had changed in some important ways. The first thing to notice is that it discriminated against right-wing authors: Cline and Malraux in France, Borges in Argentina, Mario Vargas Llosa (only forgiven in 2010), Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, for example. The ridiculous exception was Winston Churchill. On the other hand, independent leftists such as Sartre, and even communists like Neruda, were all right, just so long as they didnt come from the ussr or the prc. Sholokhovs was an isolated case, com-ing just after the relative thaw of the Khrushchev years: the other three Russians were dissidents and/or exiles.

The other major change was the comparative status of languages. In the pre-war world, German, French and English were the prestige languages in real life and in world literature. But after 1945, Germany was split in two, and Germanophobia was everywhere. The linguistic prestige of France was in a slow decline. English in its various forms was becoming the overwhelming world-hegemon. It is striking that although France remained the top prize winner, none of its champions came from the ex-French overseas empire in Indochina, West Africa, the Maghreb or the Caribbean. On the other hand, the British dominions and former colonies did very well: White for Australia, Beckett and later Heaney for Ireland, Soyinka for Nigeria, Nadine Gordimer (and later Coetzee) for South Africa and ultimately Derek Walcott for the British West Indies (Saint Lucia). Writers who went into exile in, or migrated to, the us and the uk also wrote in EnglishMiosz, who had defected to the West thirty years before receiving the prize; Brodsky; Canetti, who had left Bulgaria for Britain at the age of six; and so on. One continuity with the previous era, however, was the overlooking or ignoring of authors whom todays critics from many countries greatly admire: for example Japans Abe Kobo, Russias Nabokov and Akhmatova, Anglo-Americas Auden and the uks Graham Greene.

In the almost quarter-century of the post-Cold War era we can see some interesting novelties. First, the end of French authority (one prize), American hegemony (one prize), Russian prestige (no prize). One-time winners have been the Anglophone West Indies, the us, Japan, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, South Africa, Austria, Turkey, Ireland, France, Peru and . . . Sweden. The exceptions are a revived Germany

104 nlr 80

(two prizes: Gnter Grass and Herta Mller, though not Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and China (two, with Mo Yan and Gao Xingjianthough the latter, winner in 2000, had settled in France by the late 1980s). The uk was in the lead, with three prizesbut of the British winners, only Harold Pinter has been a native, while V. S. Naipaul hails from the West Indies and Doris Lessing grew up in Rhodesia.

Odd one out

And Southeast Asia? Structurally, the region has been exceptionally variegatedno dominant language, no religious unanimity, no political hegemon. In the colonial era, sections of it were ruled by British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and American imperialists. Gabriel Garca Mrquez could stand for largely Spanish-speaking, Catholic South and Central America, Walcott for the (ex-British) Caribbean, Tagore for (ex-British) South Asia, Naguib Mahfouz for the Islamic Middle East, Wole Soyinka for Africa (where British imperialism was the most powerful) and perhaps Orhan Pamuk for Turkey-in-Europe. But no Southeast Asian writer could count on being a symbol of the region as a whole. During the Cold War, Southeast Asia was unusually torn in ideologi-cal and military terms. Almost all of its states experienced long periods of armed conflict between communists and anti-communistsleading to right-wing or military dictatorships in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Burma, and three successful communist-governed states in Indochina.

There was also serious big-language loss in the region over the twentieth century. The us made sure that Spanish largely disappeared in the Philippines, Indonesia quickly dispensed with Dutch, mili-tarized Burma got rid of English and Indochina set French aside for two generations. The contrast with Africa is striking: most ex-colonial states in that continent kept up the colonial languages as languages of state, even when promoting local languages as symbols of particular nationalisms. For this reason, Southeast Asian writers were unlikely to have energetic allies in Europe, the Western hemisphere or even in the Islamic world. One final curiosity is worth noting: Indonesia, by far the largest nation-state in Southeast Asia, was colonized by the Netherlands, the smallest and least significant of the European imperialist powers, with a language used only by its own citizens. Worse, or better, still, Holland has never won a Nobel Prize, putting it on a par with Europes


other permanent losers, Albania and Romania (if we count Canetti for Bulgaria). Thus The Hague was in no position to lobby hard for Indonesia, even if it wanted to.

One might have expected that big colonial powers would support writers from their former possessions. But Paris was more interested in ex-French West Africa, the ex-French Maghreb and still-French Caribbean than in remote Vietnam which had defeated France in a long and deadly war of liberation. The usa, always with a cultural inferiority complex towards Europe, preferred to count as American prize-winners those exiles whose literary credentials were already very high and who had taken on us citizenship (Miosz from Poland, Brodsky from Russia). The Philippines was completely ignored or looked down on, even though the dominant language there was American. London had too many other options because of the size and spread of its former empirethe many ex-dominions (Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand) as well as sites like Nigeria, Ghana, India, the Caribbean, Pakistan, etc.so that Malaysia and Singapore, which kept English as a state language, were not seen as important.

What about the effects of linguistic nationalization in Southeast Asia? Most of these nationalizations were carried out in order to achieve national solidarity, but almost always the decision on which language should become national had the effect of favouring the power of partic-ular linguistic-demographic-political groups. Burmans and Vietnamese had every card in their handssheer numbers, geographical density, higher education, political powerso that the decision to nationalize Burmese and Vietnamese was natural, even if it meant marginalization of many minority groups. Bangkok had no such natural dominance, so that the imposition of Bangkok Thai could only be achieved by authori-tarian means. At the end of American colonization, the largest linguistic group in the Philippines spoke various dialects of Cebuano, but Tagalog, spoken by people in the national capital and surrounding regions, had to be imposed by coercion, with mixed results. Resistance came from many quarters, in favour either of Cebuano or American English as a lingua franca. In Malaysia, Malay also had to be forcibly imposed by the politically dominant Malays, but has been resisted by Chinese, Indian and North Bornean peoples, who speak either languages of alien origin (China, India) or a lingua franca (English).

106 nlr 80

The only country to achieve an uncontested national language that is also the lingua franca is Indonesia. In literary terms, it is hard to find any important Indonesian writer who does not automatically use this bahasa Indonesia, albeit with local inflections. The language does not favour any particular group. Hence the variety in the ethnicity of the national literary lineup: Kwee Thiam Tjing (Hokkien Chinese), Iwan Simatupang (Toba Batak), Chairil Anwar (Medan Minangkabau), Amir Hamzah (Malay), Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Javanese), Eka Kurniawan (Sundanese), Putu Widjaja (Balinese) and so on. From my limited experience, I believe that Indonesia is, in literary terms, the most creative country in Southeast Asia precisely because it has merged lingua franca and national lan-guage in an uncoercive manner. By contrast, coercive imposition (by philistine politicians and bureaucrats) encourages a stupid type of neo-traditionalism as well as hostile rejection. Hence significant minorities prefer to write in English, with the intent of rejecting neo-traditionalism, but also of reaching a perhaps friendly international audience.

But nationalization of whatever sort also means a kind of seclusion. None of the national languages of Southeast Asia has any transnational aura. The global system makes sure that Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Thai, Khmer, Tagalog and even Malay are for local users only. Even in the case of bahasa Indonesia and bahasa Melayu, which are close cousins, Indonesians rarely read Malay literaturewhich they think of as pro-vincial and old-fashioned, as well as ethnicwhile Malays in Malaysia tend to think of Indonesian Indonesian as a chaotic amalgam of many languages. So no likely solidarity in the face of Stockholm. Seclusion also means that any chance of a Nobel Prize requires translation into the big languages the Swedes can handle. But nationalist-philistine ruling elites typically dont read good literary works, and rarely think about training really good translators. Translation is not understood as an art, but simply as a technique. One reason why great Latin American writers get Nobel Prizes is that there is a first-class group of bilingual (SpanishEnglish), professional translators who are widely honoured. Southeast Asia, as a region, and as a group of individual countries, has nothing like this.

Contenders

Were there ever plausible Southeast Asian candidates for Nobel Prizes? I am not competent to say anything decisive about this. The national hero of the Philippines, Jos Rizalsurely the greatest literary figure


produced by his countrywas executed by the Spaniards in 1896, five years before the Nobel Prizes started to be awarded. If he had lived till he was sixty, would he have had a chance? I think not, even though he wrote in one of the important languages, because no seriously anti-imperialist writer from any colony was acceptable until after the Second World War (the Nobel Prizes are given only to living writers). The mar-vellous, mystical-Islamic poetry created by the Medan Malay aristocrat Amir Hamzah in the 1930s would never have been taken seriously in Stockholm, and he was quickly gone, murdered by criminal revolution-aries in the first year after Indonesias declaration of independence. His work is exceptionally difficult to translate, not least because of its religious bent, andso far as I knowhas never been professionally translated. Neither the Dutch colonial state nor the Republic of Indonesia did much to recognize him. But it is possible to imagine that, translated effectively into French or English, the poems might, in principle, be winners in the post-Cold War eraif only he were still alive.

The final possibility is surely Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose name started to be canvassed by his supporters in Europe from the 1980s on. No one concerned will deny the fact that Pramoedya is easily the greatest prose writer in bahasa Indonesia, with an astonishing output of nov-els, short stories, plays and essays in literary criticism over a forty-year period, roughly 19481988. If one tried to explain why he was repeatedly passed over by the Stockholm Committee, one could offer a number of arguments. First and foremost was his political stance as an activ-ist in the Indonesian revolution for independence, and later on as an independent leftist who wrote mostly in the vein of socialist realism. During the early 1960s, he regularly attacked conservative and liberal fellow-Indonesian writers and intellectuals for their reactionary politics and their attachment to the West. A number of his writings were fairly quickly translated into Chinese, Russian and some lesser languages in Eastern Europe and the ussrs non-Russian components. But even if he had then been translated into English, he would never have been accept-able to Stockholm, not least because the Communist Party of Indonesia (of which Pramoedya was actually not a member) was the largest such party outside the Communist bloc.

One might have thought that Pramoedyas chances would have been improved by 1980, since he had spent the years 1966 to 1979 in the archipelago of prisons created by the Suharto dictatorship following

108 nlr 80

the vast massacre of communists and communists in 196566. All the more so, in that he managed to write the famous Buru Quartet of novels during his years in the concentration camp on the remote island of Buru. In fact, all of his many works were banned during the entire thirty-two years of Suhartos rule, and even today they are still technically proscribed, though the ban has only rarely been enforced. But, so far as I can tell, there has never been a Nobel winner who has spent many years in prison (without ever being tried for a crime). It is also probable that Pramoedya was ill-served by old friends who decided to rush out an English translation of the Buru Quartet, essentially for political and human-rights reasons, by an Australian activist who was not competent for the task. Pramoedyas prose style is unlike that of any other Indonesian writer, and his black laughter is especially diffi-cult to turn into English. Furthermore, the greatest of his writingshis collections of extraordinary short stories from the 1950swere left largely untranslated. After the end of the Cold War, he won a Magsaysay Award (1995) and the top Fukuoka Prize (2000), but both awards were met with unforgiving hostility by Indonesias ruling class and many of its anti-communist littrateurs and intellectuals. Only after his death did he become accepted as his countrys grandest modern writer. Too late for Stockholm . . .

This is an expanded version of the Foreword to Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf and Mohammad Quayum, eds, Imagined Communities Revisited: Critical Essays on Asia-Pacific Literatures and Cultures, Kuala Lumpur 2011.

Documents

Ben Anderson the Unrewarded