Changing perspectives: France’s post-war laureates and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Introduction

This study sprang from a chance comparison of the acceptance speeches for the Nobel Prize for Literature given by Patrick Modiano in 2014 with that given by Albert Camus a half-century earlier, in 1964. The quality of discourse in both instances led us to examine the speeches of other French laureates, which in turn brought us to the awareness that the speeches form a corpus that seems thus far to have been neglected by literary historians. ¹ They in fact constitute a highly orchestrated ritual practice defined by their delivery, ² on an explicitly international platform, by writers from a particular national, cultural and linguistic tradition. Further specificity of this corpus lies in its theatrical setting, which instils a performative element into the prize-giving ceremony. The strictly controlled format, of which the laureates are all inevitably aware, forms the stage on which their acceptance monologues are delivered. For each individual, the piece is preceded by a presentation speech given by a representative of the Swedish Academy, ³ and is followed by the formal bestowing of the prize by the King of Sweden. Such choreography could lead one to anticipate predictable or formulaic content from the acceptance speeches. But, as will be seen, this does not turn out to be the case.

Our work focuses on the nine French writers ⁴ to have won the Nobel Prize since the end of the Second World War. This timeframe is by no means arbitrary. Rather, it recognises the profound changes in France’s position in the world order following the war, and acknowledges the extent to which the war experience impacted on French society and culture, including its thematic importance in so much post-war French literature. From the First World War, if not before, there was increased urgency around questions of nationalism and European alliances, pushing many to embrace various forms of nationalism. The break provoked by the Second World War in its European dimension is distinct but ambiguous. On the one hand, there was a revitalising of the push for pan-European structures that had been launched in the wake of the First World War; on the other, there was increased suspicion about Europeanism that had had as its most recent manifestation Hitler’s fascist model. Amid this tension between ideas of what a united Europe should be – Monnet-Schumann’s model or de Gaulle’s Europe des patries – there is a resurgence of strong nationalist thinking.

The war also led to a renewal and reorientation of the Swedish Academy under Anders Österling, by which a greater emphasis in the awarding of the prize was placed on innovation and on a less Eurocentric selection of candidates. Of the 35 prizes awarded before the Second World War, only two (i.e. 5.7 per cent) were awarded to writers of non-European languages (Tagore in 1913 and Bunin in 1933). But in the post-war period, of the 74 prizes awarded, there have been thirteen (i.e. 17.6 per cent), a threefold increase. ⁵ In light of the post-1945 embrace of international literatures, one might expect France’s share to have declined; but statistically France, as a nation, has maintained its pre-war eminence. The picture is, however, totally different if language rather than country is counted, with prizes awarded to writers in English more than double, and those in Spanish equal to those in French. This linguistic factor will be a vital contextual element for our discussion, English having emerged not just as the dominant language of international communications, but as a defining factor in what we are calling a transnational literary paradigm.

This article is not an attempt to assess the value or the achievements of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Obvious anomalies include the mostly forgotten Pearl Buck, the selection of Winston Churchill so soon after the war, and most recently the genre-breaking choice of Bob Dylan, as well as many famous omissions. Since its inception in 1901, the prize has almost always been the subject of controversy, and the winners exposed to vigorous debate about their merits as compared with other writers deemed more worthy. ⁶ Validity, merit and public reception, though they are not unimportant issues, are not the focus of this discussion. Equally, the intricacies of the nomination and selection processes, which remain arcane and secretive (the nomination lists are not made publicly available for 50 years) will remain outside this article’s remit. Rather, taking as our point of departure the ceremonial prize-giving process, considered literary events in themselves, we are investigating how the acceptance speeches, together with the presentation speeches, can serve as prisms through which to examine the ways each individual author, at a particular historical moment, positions himself (they are all male ⁷ ) in relation to his own trajectory and sense of literature as a transnational phenomenon. In addition to considering the speeches as a discrete corpus, we are treating them, perhaps not quite as a complete series, but as reflectors of an evolution in the laureates’ expression of literature’s transnational scope. This moves from an idea of literature as an unselfconscious national artefact to a literature which, while still emanating from France, expresses quite differently the relationship between the national and the international. The changing mode of relationship reveals increasing tension with the conception of literature presented by the Swedish Academy, which also changes over the period, but with a noticeable time lag. While the Nobel Prize ceremony is conducted on a manifestly international platform, the prize winners have been, until relatively recently, embraced as representatives of their national literary (and linguistic) heritage, however problematic or summary this might turn out to be.

We have distinguished four groupings among these laureates, which to a large extent follow their chronological occurrence. Gide and Mauriac, although awarded their prizes after 1945, belong in many ways to the pre-war era in French literature, not only because the bulk of their work was published in this period. Although writing in different forms, Camus and Perse share the theme of exile; Camus entered the French tradition and patrimoine from the outside, whereas Perse spent the war years not only in exile in the United States but stripped of French nationality. Their works – and their Nobel speeches – demonstrate a movement away from simple and strong national confidence and an increasing complication of the national paradigm. The next pair contrasts the cacophonous scandal of Sartre’s refusal of the prize in 1964 with Beckett’s brilliant and utterly congruous silent acceptance of his in 1969. The Sartre case is a pivotal moment, and we shall see that it constitutes a kind of synapse – a locus of the meeting of the key themes and concepts which are our principal concern here. The last grouping consists of Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano, who are bound thematically and personally by the World War II experience, and reveal literature’s multiform relationship with the national and transnational in a post-colonial, post-national context. Simon seeks to use national history to communicate a universal sense of horror of war; Le Clézio’s sights are manifestly set at a transnational level, shedding light on France’s post-colonial dimension and on French as a post-national ‘world’ language; Modiano, though writing some of the most classical French prose, has often described himself as apatride. And although his fictional setting is overwhelmingly Parisian, there is never any confident expression of Frenchness, but rather a sense of pan-European, post-war malaise. While the Swedish Academy presents a comparably unerring expression of nationhood, we see through the laureates’ speeches that they are differently aware of the role of the nation and ‘national’ culture, and literature’s position in relation to those notions.

It is acknowledged from the outset that ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ are problematic terms, caught up in the geo-political shifts of the post-war world. It is precisely the complexities and ambiguities surrounding the terms, and the authors’ awareness of tensions between the two dimensions, that our study seeks to tease out and elucidate. Where it is helpful for the discussion, secondary critical sources are drawn upon, including press reactions, ⁸ to expand and support elements of interest in the unexplored corpus of the acceptance speeches themselves. In general, reactions in the French press reiterate the way the choice of a French laureate honours the whole of France and French literature, taking the opportunity to recall the fact that French laureates weigh in above those of all other nationalities. The New York Times toes a basically reverential line, trusting the good judgement of the Swedish Academy and explaining rather than critiquing the choice of laureate.

As Espmark (1999) observes in his history of the literature prize, the post-war period coincides with a significant shift in the Swedish Academy’s interpretation under the new Permanent Secretary, Anders Österling. The emphasis he put on innovation was to have started with Paul Valéry in 1945, but he died the summer before the prize could be awarded. Despite his valorisation of innovation, Österling demonstrates a decidedly traditionalist approach in his presentation speeches for the authors and their works (not only the French laureates), underscoring how the writing is representative of a given literary tradition. Academician Sture Allén (1997) notes that by far the most common element in the prize-giving announcement or presentation speech is the mention of the writer’s native country, making more of the writer’s nationhood and national literary tradition than the writers themselves do. It seems to serve as an initial anchor around which to build the inherently laudatory presentation speech. As we shall see below, this tendency has become more muted since the 1980s.

Unquestioningly French: Gide and Mauriac

In 1947, André Gide was the first French beneficiary of Österling’s new outlook, and the presentation speech is a good example of the ambivalence noted above. Although Österling evokes Gide’s geographical mobility, most of the reference points and comparisons he uses are within the French tradition: Montaigne, Racine, Balzac, Rousseau. Gide himself, on the other hand, underscores the international aspect of the prize, and his literary references are much more far-reaching, citing Keats, Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard among his guides. Although he could not attend the ceremony, he wrote a letter of acceptance (Gide 1947a) published in the Svenska Dagdladet and then in Le Figaro; and he composed a text (Gide 1947b) to be read at the presentation ceremony by the French ambassador to Sweden, Gabriel Puaux. In the letter he makes it clear that he considers the international context to be a key factor for his acceptance of the prize. At this stage we are dealing with a relatively Eurocentric notion of the international context, particularly from the Nobel Committee’s point of view, a kind of Euro-centrism that looks outwards to continental Europe and, for Gide at least, embraces those territories in which European countries exercised colonial power. Gide believes that he has been awarded the prize because he represents ‘l’esprit de libre examen, d’indépendance et même d’insubordination, de protestation’ (1947a), which is at the heart of European civilisation. He sees this spirit as seriously threatened by the ambient totalitarian ideologies, on the right as well as the left, and hence there was an urgent need to preserve these values, a struggle which looks to greater unification rather than division: ‘Il ne peut plus être question ici de frontières géographiques ou politiques, de races ou de patries’ (1947a). The Nobel Prize, in his opinion, is a powerful ally in the battle of culture against barbarity; it is through the international aspect of the prize and institution, as well as through his deep belief in the salutary capacity of art, that Gide envisions humanity’s progress.

Gide’s cosmopolitan stance is one of great openness to the world; yet it comes from a privileged place which takes as given that French is a lingua franca and that French literature has pre-eminent status. Inherent to this position is the universalist vision and mission civilisatrice of France’s colonial empire and the belief that the French will to cultural rayonnement is inherently a positive thing. Although in his later years he adopted a more anti-colonial stance, and in Voyage au Congo he criticises some practices and conditions, Gide never unequivocally denounces France’s colonial presence; indeed, in many ways he benefited from it. France’s nationhood as the seat of an empire along with its colonial charge and the confidence in French as its linguistic medium go more or less unquestioned.

Mauriac shares Gide’s belief in art and faith in universality, although he remains more strongly attached to the French literary environment and heritage. Bloc-notes, Mémoires intérieurs and Nouveaux mémoires intérieurs are filled with his reflections and with criticism of the works he was reading and re-reading. Mauriac’s is a markedly French reading list, with Catholic classical writers like Bossuet, Pascal and Racine taking pride of place. Of course, he reads some other European writers – his speech mentions George Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Strindberg – but it is a much narrower choice than the one indicated by Gide’s highly diverse and omnivorous literary appetite. Österling has an easier job tying Mauriac to his national tradition, describing him as a natural heir to such seventeenth-century French moralist writers as Bossuet, La Bruyère and Pascal.

Mauriac’s idea of the novelist’s art is bound to a quest for universality, but his way of accessing and making resonant a universal experience is through the particular and provincial: ‘Le don du romancier se ramène précisément au pouvoir de rendre évidente l’universalité de ce monde étroit’ (1952). Österling too stresses the universal scope and humanism of Mauriac’s work, based on the same assumption we noted in relation to Gide: that of the universal reach of the French tradition. As with Gide, Österling gives voice to the explicitly Christian (Catholic this time) dimension of that tradition: Mauriac is ‘a writer who bases his whole concept of the world on grace and sees man’s supreme recourse in God’s love’ (1952). As the epithet of his memoirs suggests, his cultural gaze is an inward one, embracing a concept of universality that is of the soul rather than of the world, even the world of literary art.

Even before the Second World War, with secularism becoming a more broadly accepted social value, Mauriac’s voice, along with those of Bernanos and Claudel, was one of a decreasing number lamenting spiritual loss in a society increasingly driven by forces of material progress. Gide and Mauriac, thematically at least, begin to question France’s imperialist impulse, while still safe in certain assumptions and confidences about the nation as a strong literary and political centre and the French language as a universal instrument. Such certainties were rooted in a sense of stability that had not yet been dissipated. In contrast, the post-1945 period is characterised by a growing sense of dissociation in which even the value of humanism is brought into question. The extent and capacity of man’s cruelty to man become more recurrent themes and the degree of bleakness intensifies, at least partly, we would argue, because of the confluence between a growing knowledge of the impact of the war itself, and an increasing awareness of events going on around an increasingly connected and globalised world.

Blurring national frontiers: Camus and Perse

Anders Österling begins his presentation speech for Camus stating that ‘French literature is no longer linked geographically to the frontiers of France in Europe … Camus is aware of this great French overseas territory, and the writer in him is often pleased to recall this fact’ (Österling, 1957) – a rather affable and sanitised reference to France’s colonial interests, given that as Camus was receiving his prize in 1957, French control of the ‘great overseas territory’ was being violently contested. Österling weaves Camus into the European classical tradition as inheritor to France’s literary heritage, a point with which Camus agrees: ‘J’ai le sentiment profond de me rattacher, avec naturellement mes limites, à la tradition classique française’ (1957b). But, unlike the two laureates before him, he made his way into the canon as an outsider coming in.

Camus embodies fundamental humanist values and an international outlook that is inextricably linked to his notion of the role of art. In an atmosphere of heightened self-awareness and interrogation about literature’s place in society, Camus is still concerned, like Gide and Mauriac, with literature’s universal reach and connection, stating in his speech that, ‘Cet idéal de la communication universelle est en effet celui de tout grand artiste’ (Camus, 1957b). Yet, he was actively engaged in a kind of rift that was beginning to appear in France and around the world, which was encroaching on the very possibility of universal reach. His generation was living through the erosion of the notion of a strong, united French empire, having in recent living memory the First World War, the rise of Hitler, Socialist revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, and the devastation of the Second World War. They had the sense of imminent global nuclear holocaust and, closer to France, had seen the fall of Indochina and the fractures of the Algerian War. In such a climate, the artist, in Camus’s view, is impelled to implicate himself in the struggle: ‘Il oblige donc l’artiste à ne pas se séparer … le silence d’un prisonnier inconnu, abandonné aux humiliations à l’autre bout du monde, suffit à retirer l’écrivain de l’exil’ (Camus, 1957a). The artistic and intellectual climate was such that the question of engagement was practically impossible to ignore; but in contrast to Sartre’s model of engagement, in which every expression is inseparable from a political act, Camus would not relinquish art’s freedom or consent to it being subjugated to purely political ends.

Herein lies an important difference. With Camus we are dealing with the persistence of an underlying belief in the value of art as something outside history and nationhood, yet bound to them. This accompanies the belief in art as a transformative power, which approaches a metaphysical conception. Gide and Mauriac, writing in a time of greater certainty, were able to take this for granted; but Camus’s speech betrays an awareness of the brittle nature of such certainties. He sheds light on France’s shifting place in the world order, and while he confronts and seriously questions the imperialist impulse, he still assumes that the French language is a means through which to access the universal. Camus’s faith in literature as a metaphysical universal phenomenon sits neither at odds with nor entirely harmoniously with its more concrete humanitarian obligation to raise the plight of the oppressed and voiceless to global consciousness.

While Camus’s position in France and French literary genealogy was that of an outsider moving in, Saint-John Perse was in some ways making the journey the opposite way. Stripped of French nationality by the Vichy government and forced into exile, he lived out the Second World War in America and remained there long after it ended. Perse occupies a position of deliberate openness to otherness, a trait shared by Gide and Camus. Perse too recognises the great global changes underway and France’s shifting place, yet his poetic stance is leagues from the maelstrom, seeing such changes as part of larger, universal tides and global cycles.

France’s poet-diplomat took the prize in 1960 and accepted it on behalf of poésie itself. His acceptance speech for the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1959, gives a brilliant impression of his conception of poetry – echoed in his Nobel speech – as the quintessential source and eternal guardian of all things:

Poésie, sœur de l’action, mère de toute création, initiatrice en toute science et devancière en toute métaphysique: elle est l’animatrice du songe des vivants et la gardienne la plus sûre de l’héritage des morts. Qu’elle hante, parmi nous, le tumulte du siècle et elle jouera aussi son rôle, à notre insu, dans cette rénovation humaine où la France est active. (1972 [1959]: 572)

We note Perse’s patriotic/nationalist assertion of France’s continuing presence in world renewal. Anders Österling (1960) once again underscores the continuity Perse presents as heir to the French tradition, making the point that he ‘perpetuates a majestic tradition in French poetic art’ by using the quintessential French poetic metre, the alexandrine. The Permanent Secretary also recognises Perse’s grand vision, as one who identifies ‘with all the races who have lived on our stormy planet’, and noting that in delivering his ‘universal’ message, ‘he takes his metaphors from all disciplines, from all eras, from all mythologies, from all regions’. Indeed, Perse’s poetic framework encompasses the sum of the universe:

c’est d’une même étreinte, comme une seule grande strophe vivante, qu’elle embrasse au présent tout le passé et l’avenir, l’humain avec le surhumain, et tout l’espace planétaire avec l’espace universel. (Perse, 1960)

Perse’s vision is of a totalising poetic universe that incorporates all time and creation, and within it the rise and fall of civilisations and nations. Yet he maintains a deep connection to France and the French literary tradition: ‘Il n’est pas pour moi d’écriture internationale, et nulle œuvre française ne saurait prétendre à quelque universalité, qu’elle n’en tienne la grâce d’une vocation plus étroitement française’ (1972 [1959]: 572). Like his French Nobel predecessors, Perse assumes the possibility of communication of a universal message through the medium of the French language. His avowed commitment to this language points up a curiosity, which may not be a discrepancy as much as a complexity: that Perse was writing poetry with such extra-national scope, stripped of his French nationality and living in exile during a war that was erasing and redrawing national frontiers, all the while asserting the primacy of the French language. The tumultuous conditions perhaps created a desire for rootedness, which he found through language. Whatever the case, his stance as regards French has more in common with Gide and Mauriac, with whom he was more contemporaneous, than with Camus, and he is the last of our group to profess such primal attachment to the French language.

Points of no return: Sartre and Beckett

Sartre marks the chronological midpoint of our group and is pivotal in a number of ways. Most strikingly, he remains the only laureate ever to voluntarily turn down the prize. ⁹ Rather than signalling a moment of rupture in doing so, he in fact highlights a current of continuity. His refusal of the prize in 1964 reveals the extent to which his whole project had become one-dimensionally political and, perhaps most importantly, he is the only one to divide the post-war world into two blocs, the West and the East, and as such offers the most reductive and absolutist worldview.

Anders Österling delivered an exceptionally short announcement where a presentation speech would normally have been given, in which he glossed over this embarrassing moment for the Academy by praising the ‘individual freedom’ that Sartre’s work embodies. In lieu of a formal speech, Sartre’s refusal message was published in Le Figaro on 23 October 1964. It outlines two kinds of reasons for declining the prize: personal and objective. The personal reasons are chiefly to do with his fear of being essentialised, being ‘embaumé vivant’ (Cohen-Solal, 1985: 574). For Sartre, a writer must ‘refuser de se laisser transformer en institution’ (Sartre, 1964); to accept the award from the institution of the Swedish Academy would compromise his subversive credibility, and mean his rebelliousness would be overlooked, or worse, forgiven. ¹⁰

His ‘objective’ reasons reveal the degree to which his refusal and conception of the prize was reduced to its political aspect. In Sartre’s view the cultural combat taking place was between two parties: ‘celle de l’Est et celle de l’Ouest’ (1964), referring to Western capitalist democratic nations as opposed to Eastern socialist or communist states. His criticism of the prize as ‘une distinction réservée aux écrivains le l’Ouest ou aux rebelles de l’Est’ (1964) identifies the prize as an instrument of the bourgeois West, and therefore impossible to accept. He insists, however, that he would refuse on principle a prize awarded by any institution and there is more than a little hubris – as well as contradiction – when he says he would have accepted the prize had it been awarded four years earlier at the time of the Manifesto of the 121. ¹¹ In this light, it is tempting to see the refusal as simply another iteration of the publicly aired animosity between him and Camus.

As we have seen, the setting and platform of the Nobel Prize constructs an environment in which the categories of national and international interact in quite a complex way. In contrast, Sartre’s view is entirely reductive. His socialist sympathies meant that he positioned himself antagonistically with regard to France and he used the opportunity of the Nobel Prize and its international platform to score a point. In 1964, Sartre was the French public intellectual, at the height of his influence and power and with the world’s spotlights turned on him. To decline the prize was an emphatic political act of international significance and his refusal surely aggrandised his status, albeit fleetingly and not for the better: Le Monde’s writers unanimously castigated his behaviour (Simon, 1964; Escarpit, 1964; Frank, 1964). In retrospect, and with the fading urgency of those particular political tensions, his refusal appears dogmatic, and ultimately futile. From today’s perspective, his refusal seems to emanate from a narrowly ideological vision – in contrast to those writers who preceded and followed him, who demonstrate more nuanced awareness of the prize’s national and transnational elements. Michael Scriven sees Sartre’s outlook as ‘originat[ing] in a sense of alienation, of separation and of difference … [he] retained an outsider’s view of France’. Scriven concludes, ‘the defining quality of Sartre’s vision, in other words, was his rootlessness. It should come as no surprise that the original title of his autobiography was Jean sans terre’ (Scriven, 1999: 37). Sartre was certainly non-nationalist, but this did not translate to a transnational vision of literature.

Compared with the general conception of literature as a transnational enterprise that emerges through our writers’ speeches, Sartre represents a singular perspective. His radical articulation of littérature engagée is unmatched by any of the other laureates. In this respect his refusal represents, once again, only a seeming point of rupture, since those who come before and after share a belief, albeit differently articulated, in literature as something that stands apart, and partially, if not wholly, outside of its socio-political dimension.

In stark contrast to Sartre’s clamorous absence, Beckett’s non-attendance at the ceremony was merely an extension of his taciturn demeanour with the media in general. With characteristic derisive humour, he expressed his relief that the prize was to be accepted on his behalf: ‘Lindon is very kindly facing the turnips in my stead on that Nobloodybeldamday’ (see Knowlson, 1996: 507).

Compared with his fellow laureates, Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the prize in 1969, does not present any straightforward national lineage. ¹² It is tricky to say which country he represents or to which national literary tradition he is heir, highlighting the non-binary international/national relationship, a complexity identified in the presentation speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow: ‘one man, two languages, and a third nation, itself divided’ (1969). For some, Beckett is an adopted or honorary Frenchman, but we have no evidence that he became a French citizen, and although he wrote principally in French and made France his home, the French do not necessarily claim him. ¹³ The Nobel Committee classifies laureates by country of residence at the time of the award, and erroneously records Beckett as resident in Ireland. It was not, however, the Irish ambassador who collected the prize on his behalf, but his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon. ¹⁴ The presentation speech pays tribute to the dual lineage of Beckett’s literature, linking him to Proust, Jarry and Joyce and identifying his philosophical forefathers as Pascal and Swift. Gierow also mentions his debt to Kafka and Schopenhauer’s scepticism, drawing him further away from a nationally defined background.

Beckett’s choice to work, for the most part, in his second language is an interesting one, which reveals, like his plays and novels, an underlying distrust in language, and perhaps a form of liberation through self-imposed constraint. However, distrust of language does not subvert belief in literature. It is fitting that several of the avant-garde writers who were associated with the French Theatre of the Absurd – Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Michel de Ghelderode – were fellow self-exiled foreign playwrights. That the Parisian scene was the site for this renewal of theatre and the French language was the medium for their form of experimentation is surely evidence that Paris held continuing magnetism as an international centre for artistic experimentation and creativity in the post-war period.

As already mentioned, Beckett’s novels and plays do not tie in neatly with any single literary tradition. Similarly, although his work is unmistakeably of the contemporary world, bearing the dark echoes of war and its devastation, he is not concerned with the plight of a particular individual or nation’s history, but that of humankind. His characters are victims of universal existential trials rather than personal tribulations. Their names are often not names as we know them and are free of national connection (Watt, Estragon, Pozzo, Clov), are derisory (Krapp, Worm, Hamm), are all-embracing (Mahood), or are distinctively Irish but impersonal and interchangeable (Molloy, Mrs McGlome, Moran, Malone, Murphy, Winnie and Willie). The one thing they have in common is their home, ‘cette putain de terre’ (Beckett, 1952: 49). Beckett’s more porous and fluid sense of identity situates him at an intersection of cultures and nations looking out on all humanity, his work rising like a ‘miserere from all mankind’ (Gierow, 1969). Although we see great formal innovation in Beckett’s work, it displays the same universal will and reach as that of any of his predecessors.

Polyvalent francité ?: Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano

Claude Simon’s acceptance speech in 1985 is the lengthiest of our group and includes an extensive list of artists and authors, indicating a broadly international self-positioning. Simon evokes a feeling of pride on behalf of France as a country where ‘une certaine vie de l’esprit’ (1985), still exists, though greatly under threat in all corners of the world. Simon uses the framework of the acceptance speech to deliver a history of the novel, closely linked to that of painting, posited as a story that transcends national boundaries.

In his presentation speech (1985), Lars Gyllensten links Simon to the nouveaux romanciers, reiterating the Academy’s inclination to affiliate laureates with a national school and tradition. While Simon shared that group’s highly self-conscious relationship with writing, his association with it was quite ambivalent, and in any case, by 1985, it could be argued that the nouveau roman was on its way from avant-garde to literary history. Simon’s subject matter and formal and linguistic experimentation are shared by other post-war writers, and in these aspects we can consider Simon as an exemplar of the way in which certain experiences of the war were reproduced and reflected in literary form: ‘comment l’imagination romanesque de Simon fonctionnait par rapport au domaine des faits historiques’ (Pugh, 1991: 100). ¹⁵

Simon’s novels are essentially a telling of France’s recent national history, in which the Second World War is positioned as the determining event. Yet this was a war in which the undoing of certain foundations that underpinned the concept and existence of the nation became manifest. While Simon confronts national history in terms of subject matter, there is a simultaneous turn away from traditional narrative and literary forms. Godard (2003) and Viart (2010) describe the twentieth-century crisis of the novel ¹⁶ in which the wider and deeper crises of the World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the discovery of concentration camps challenged modernity’s belief in the virtue of untrammelled progress. Modernity’s progress gave way to postmodernity’s entropy and the ideological infrastructure informing literary forms broke down, resulting in diverse and unpredictable effects on writers and their art. Several years after his Nobel Prize, Simon described history’s influence on his art: ‘the abominations that have marked this century – Auschwitz, the Gulag – have shown that human life counts for exactly nothing, and that a “humanist” discourse is no longer acceptable’ (1992). Simon’s work seems to voice the impossibility of histoire both as a branch of knowledge and in the sense of traditional narrative. Nationhood and national literatures are by no means eradicated, but they have been shaken; we see the reflection of a fragmenting empire in fragmented literary forms.

Renunciation of conventional form coincides with a kind of retreat into language, perhaps in an effort to reclaim and redeem it. In his speech, as in Orion aveugle (1970), he celebrates the self-generativity of words and a writing process that follows its own internal logic using sensorial linkage: ‘Chaque mot suscite (ou commande) plusieurs autres, non seulement par la force des images qu’il attire à lui comme un aimant, mais parfois aussi par sa seule morphologie’ (1970: preface). Although this kind of writing prompted Sartre’s accusation of sterile formalism, Simon understood it as a form of political critique of realist literature, subverting dominant ideology by transforming norms and accepted structures. In an interview, asked what he thought the role of the writer in society is, Simon replied that it is no less than to change the world (1992). Indeed, as he states in his acceptance speech, he saw his works as ‘rangés parmi les instruments d’une action révolutionnaire et déstabilisatrice’ (1985).

Le Clézio took the prize in 2008, and through his acceptance speech, ‘Dans la forêt des paradoxes’, terms that have already been raised by previous laureates, such as ‘universal’, ‘intercultural’ and ‘global’, acquire more precise consciousness of post-colonial issues and the problematic nature of Western relations with the rest of the world. Even the most summary biography of Le Clézio is a good indicator of the openness to the world expressed through his literature. ¹⁷

In the presentation speech (2008), Horace Engdahl cites Le Clézio’s early work as heir to Lautréamont, Michaux and Stig Dagerman, and with the latter the national cast projected by the Nobel system is finally broken, albeit tentatively; Le Clézio is still drawn into French literary genealogy through his connection to the nouveau roman and into the national tradition of ‘critique of civilisation’ of which Chateaubriand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Montaigne and Artaud are named as the forefathers. Moreover, the difficulty presented in confidently weaving him into the French tradition demonstrates Le Clézio’s occupation of a space outside of national boundaries, as does the pithy quote produced by the Academy for each laureate: ‘l’explorateur d’une humanité au-delà et en-dessous de la civilisation régnante’. The French tradition is by no means irrelevant to Le Clézio: his positioning of his own work, and his conception of literature as a mechanism of intercultural communion acknowledges national parameters, but carries a desire to transgress them. Similarly, like other members of our group, Le Clézio identifies World War II as the origin his writing. Yet while others like Simon and Modiano remain largely absorbed by the French specificities of the war experience, Le Clézio’s creation takes him beyond this zone. There is a particularly linguistic element to this shift.

Engdahl remarks that ‘Le Clézio gives us a French that has stepped down from the pedestal of purism and that is permeated by the consciousness of other languages’ (2008). Extending this notion of consciousness, ‘Dans la forêt des paradoxes’, outlines a vision of language as a medium through which global inequality may be challenged and countered, of language unhinged from the national framework. How far he succeeds in his project to ‘rompre le nœud mythique qui lie langue, identité ethnique et nationalité’ is explored by Vogl (2012: 221). Although Le Clézio acknowledges French and English as languages of the conquerors and is aware of the uncomfortable reality of cultural dominance, he sees this as surmountable. As Dutton (2012: 251–61) clearly shows, ‘Dans la forêt des paradoxes’ is coloured by a degree of utopianism, which is in line with the Nobel Committee’s general movement in favour of writers demonstrating greater ‘idealism’, in a reversion to Nobel’s original testament. His novels on the other hand reveal his sensitivity to the more insidious side of the global village, describing the failures of post-colonial Western societies, while portraying unspoiled communities of South America and Africa. Thibault highlights this characteristic at work in Le Clézio’s project, noting that ‘on ne peut s’empêcher de noter à quel point la critique du monde occidental colonial, dominateur et destructeur, s’accompagne d’une idéalisation du monde amérindien ou africain’ (Thibault and Moser, 2012: 25).

In a press conference held on the Saturday before the ceremony, Le Clézio used the international platform afforded by the prize to announce himself, ‘un militant de l’interculturel’, comparing the prize to a great ‘microphone’ that he intended to capitalise on to amplify his message in support of intercultural exchange. In line with this effort, a year before the Nobel Prize, Le Clézio added his signature to the ‘Manifeste pour la littérature-monde en français’ (2007) ¹⁸ with the aim of challenging the France-centric mentality in the French-language publishing industry. Other writers hold more abstract notions of literature as a transnational phenomenon, but Le Clézio is unique in addressing its more practical aspects. He outlines the responsibilities of readers and publishers to increase both the demand for and supply of literature in translation and to improve access to books. Similarly, Engdahl sees translation as providing a means to a more egalitarian form of universality. In an interview with Florence Noiville shortly after the 2007 ceremony he commented: ‘L’anglais est une langue importante, mais ce n’est pas la langue universelle. La seule langue universelle de la littérature, c’est la traduction’ (Engdahl, 2007).

Beyond the national framework, Le Clézio occupies a complex relationship with the realities of globalism. While its disgraces and failures are depicted in his novels, there is always the possibility, and the hope, that there might be some elements of good to be found. In his acceptance speech he suggests that the internet’s instant virtual communication would have prevented Hitler’s rise to power and can now be harnessed to preserve the world’s cultural heritage, enshrined in literature and art. It is a view that both acknowledges and reveres the national or sub-national group while striving for equitable exchange and dialogue between them on an international level: ‘toutes les cultures doivent communiquer entre elles, il ne doit pas y avoir de culture dominante’. In this way, literature offers the potential to bring a redemptive element to globalism, a view that carries the inspirational moral uplift and optimism that is at the heart of the Nobel Prize ethos.

Like Perse, who accepted his prize on behalf of poetry, Le Clézio names dozens of writers, both famous and less known, from all around the world to whom he dedicates his prize in a demonstration of the kind of intercultural literary exchange he wishes for.

When we come to Modiano in 2014, for the first time among our group there is no mention in the presentation speech of belonging to the French tradition or being the heir to particular French writers or schools – aside from a mention of his ‘little music’, consciously or unconsciously referencing Céline. ¹⁹ Instead, he is connected to France through the geographical specificity of Paris, and through his articulation of the particularly French historical experience of the Occupation years. Modiano’s own sense of national belonging remains equivocal, having a feeling of being ‘étranger, ou du moins Français de hasard’ (1981: 19). This lack of national rootedness is a clear factor in the diffuse, pan-European resonance of his work.

The change in presentation seems to be situated within a gradual shift on the part of the Academy towards greater recognition of the transcendence of literature over any national cast, an awareness the laureates themselves have always conveyed. The intention set in 1945 under Anders Österling to open up the prize to writers from around the world and correct its Eurocentric beginnings gradually merges into the way laureates are presented. The increase of writers of different backgrounds (for example, Wole Soyinka in 1986 and Naguib Mafouz in 1988) and whose literary traditions are young or unfamiliar to the Academy, coupled with the Academy’s inclination to provide literary references or antecedents, means that writers are increasingly drawn into transnational heritages. With the French writers, this shift seems to have taken place between Le Clézio and Modiano, which is later than other nations. The reasons for this are unclear, although it could be that French literature, by virtue of its long tradition, continues to bear the weight of a certain stereotyping on the part of the Academy, who have been inclined to see aspects of this tradition represented by each new laureate.

Reactions in France to Modiano’s win celebrated French literature being re-established on the world scene. Jean d’Ormesson declared, ‘La littérature française n’est pas morte!’ (in Dargent and Larmiant, 2014) perhaps with Patrick Besson’s 2013 essay, ‘La Littérature française est-elle morte?’ in mind, ²⁰ and Bruno Le Maire took to Twitter to acknowledge his (and the French language’s) victory, ‘Modiano en pleine lumière et la langue française avec lui’ (2014). Despite Le Clézio’s win in 2008, there seems to be a feeling of sliding importance of French literature and perhaps French culture in a general global context. The ebb of confidence is alluded to in a wry comment from Bernard Pivot: ‘Le prix Nobel de littérature de Modiano a redonné confiance aux Français le temps d’un weekend’ (2014). Hazareesingh (2015) argues that declinist strands of thinking have long characterised the French outlook, but have deepened and widened in the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century and have spread their anxiety and pessimism into the realm of literature. He points out that although Proust, Dumas and Flaubert are firmly part the international literary canon, contemporary French writers, even those who have been ‘Nobelisés’ remain relatively little known outside France.

To be sure, French literature is in today’s world just one of the many pieces that make up a multi-layered literary landscape and although its legacy still holds a certain cachet, it is no longer so immediately authoritative by simple virtue of being French. There is a Beckettian quality in Modiano’s intimations of a certain futility or at least irony in the act of writing, and of the diminishing certainty that to write means to be read. He commented even at the beginning of his writing career, ‘la forme romanesque semble de plus en plus périmée’ (1981: 18), and again in the opening sentence of Quartier perdu (1984) this uncertainty is reiterated: ‘C’est étrange d’entendre parler français.’

For the world in which Proust or Gide wrote, there was faith both in the capacity of art to transmit some form of universal message, and in the potential of the French language as its medium. In contrast, Modiano’s world belongs to a later, more dispersed and precarious phase of civilisation, where too many things have been broken or have broken down for art to have such confidence, as he identifies in his acceptance speech: ‘la recherche du temps perdu ne peut plus se faire avec la force et la franchise de Marcel Proust’ (2014). This does not equal a loss of faith in the power of literature, but the realisation that the world into which it is offered has changed to such an extent that notions of time and memory in particular can no longer be understood under the same framework or with the same conviction.

While Modiano does not profess any particular attachment to France, there is equally no mention in his speech of universal communication or international reach. The ambition of writing to change the world is no longer either a priority or an assumption. Rather, Modiano’s is a desire for basic communication of a personal message; as he outlines in his speech, part of his motivation to write is so that ‘[les adultes] sauront une fois pour toutes ce que vous avez sur le cœur’ (2014). Yet from this modest ambition comes a more transcendent literary experience. Modiano sees the writer’s responsibility in the unveiling of that which lies hidden below the surface of things: ‘C’est le rôle du poète et du romancier, et du peintre aussi, de dévoiler ce mystère et cette phosphorescence’ (2014), which requires almost hypnotic concentration and a state of ‘demi-sommeil’. In contrast to Sartre’s notion of l’homme total, or Camus’s argument for the artist ‘à ne pas se séparer’ (1957a), Modiano requires a degree of separation in order to ‘atteindre à un degré d’attention et d’hyper-lucidité vis-à-vis du monde extérieur’ (2014). ²¹ Indeed his conception of the novelist is of one who keeps to the side-lines, at a distance, in order not to be consumed by life. As to the distance a novelist should keep, he concludes: ‘En marge de la vie pour la décrire, car si vous êtes plongé en elle – dans l’action – vous en avez une image confuse’ (2014).

Detachment does not imply turning our back on our era, since our date of birth and era shape us ‘d’une manière indélébile’ (2014). Yet, while unmistakeably a product of his specific historical setting, Modiano sees great literature as always carrying something ‘intemporel’, a notion expressed time and again in various ways by the Nobel laureates.

Conclusions

Identifying and researching the neglected corpus of the Nobel Prize ceremonial speeches offers significant and new insight into an evolution within literary history. It provides a clear and anchored framework that reveals a major paradigm shift, as well as contributing to the wider history of national and international literary prizes. The authors we have studied are at once witnesses of that change, and to varying extents agents of it. Our analysis has sought to provide a more fine-grained understanding of a transformation that has profoundly affected notions of national belonging and international understanding. Studying the corpus from our perspective confirms just how profound the impact of the Second World War has been for the French. From Gide and Mauriac, who were naturally highly aware of its impact given its proximity, but to whom the full scale of its horrors had not yet been revealed, right up to the most recent winners, each of the laureates gives voice to the major effects of the war on his writing.

The speeches demonstrate their respective views on the national, international and transnational aspects of the prize and of literature. Taken in isolation, the speeches do not always tell us much that is new about the individual authors themselves; but as a group they provide a context in which conceptions of national, international and transnational can be more acutely analysed. The particular case of Sartre is anomalous. His refusal appears, in retrospect, to have made a short-lived point at the cost of writing himself out of the illustration of the larger paradigmatic change that has taken place.

Within the genealogy of French laureates from 1945, we have identified a shift from an unquestioning sense of national and literary identity to degrees of pluralism and uncertainty. Similarly, we have noted a movement from self-confident attitudes about French literature and France’s place in the world to more self-conscious and tentative notions around nationhood and greater awareness of the problems and complexities of the country’s post-colonial legacy. Within these shifts the term ‘universal’ itself is displaced and reinterpreted, from the earlier assumption that great literature is inherently universal to a more nuanced notion of the literary act reaching out to more diverse expressions of a broadly human experience. Such movements seem to follow general trends of globalisation and geo-political shifts in the post-war setting. The same pattern in the presentation speeches can be illustrated, albeit at a certain lag behind that identified in the laureates’ speeches, moving from a setting in which national characteristics and achievements are rehearsed to one in which transnational perspectives begin to emerge.

It would be of great interest to map the convergence of Nobel Prize laureates with other signs of literary prestige such as the attribution of national literary awards like the Prix Goncourt or Prix Renaudot and appointment to national academies. It would also be revealing to see how national academies and eligible individuals have used their right to nominate candidates for the prize, since it is not always the case that nominations come from a nominee’s home country.

Modiano’s case demonstrates just how potent, and how necessary, the Nobel Prize still is. Prior to 2014, Modiano was virtually unknown in the Anglosphere, with just a handful of his novels translated into English, and fewer still in print. Since the prize, all of his novels have either been published in English or their rights purchased, and many major literary journals have devoted special issues to him. His long absence from Anglosphere reading lists shows that even highly prized French writers cannot command the sort of automatic attention that existed in the time of Gide, Mauriac and Perse, but his trajectory since the Nobel Prize demonstrates the bridging role played by the prize in his passage from national to transnational readership. The role of good translation in this process, as Le Clézio and Engdahl stressed, is obviously vital. At the same time, we can hope that knowledge of Modiano’s work in this expanded readership will also lead to an awareness of the French specificities of the original texts. This points to a notion of globalism defined less by hierarchical economic or political power than by exchange and increased intercultural understanding.