True refuge issue less: Beckett and The Nobel

I. Literary Prizes

*Awardees sometimes decline awards. This is not so uncommon as we might think. Because of the frequency of this we may come to believe that accepting a prize that has been awarded is not obligatory; accepting seems to be a free act, a decision. The simple fact is that a prize can be refused. But what does refusal do and mean in such a case? Does the refusal of a prestigious prize, say the Nobel, mean that the prize has not been consummated, that the person has not received something of the prize anyway, despite refusing? Jean-Paul Sartre, after all, who declined to accept the prize for literature awarded him in 1964, was nevertheless still awarded the prize. The award was undeterred by his refusal. The Swedish Academy recognize this strange fact in their acknowledgment of his rebuff. “The fact that he has declined this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award” (“Nobel Prizes and Laureates, 1964”). In what does the “validity” of the award consist then, such that, although the most famous intellectual of the decade declines it, what’s more in an open and public way, with a letter published in Le Figaro (“Jean-Paul Sartre refuse … ”) quickly translated into other languages (“Sartre on the Nobel”), in the eyes of the bestower, and undoubtedly also of the public, the validity of the award is not the least affected. No doubt the double sense of “award” is partially at fault here. An award is the thing given, an object that has to be transferred, a bit of money passed over, and so a good that has to be accepted in order for the transaction to be valid. It also names the honor and the mark of distinction that do not inhere in the physical thing. In responding to Sartre’s unprecedented reaction, the Swedish Academy takes the view that despite the author’s assumption, the act of conferral of this mark is self-sufficient, closed, and complete unto itself. The awarding has already been accomplished. In deference to the author qua writer, they make note of his words in reaction—although they do not reprint his letter on their official website. He has been cited for distinction but they will not quote him. And this tells us a little of what this kind of prize does. It does not “engage” with the words or the work they do, “engage”—to use a Sartrean term out of its proper context. On the contrary, the work has been read in order to make a total claim about it as a totality, and now it will be cited, pointed at, and symbolized in the language of the prize committee. The body of the writer, her face and hands, a smile and a handshake, are important too, as is the name of the prize that winners can carry after their names. These may look like merely the symbolic face of an underlying economic transaction, where the author gets money and maybe better publishing contracts, and where her audience will be expanded and her name will fall from the lips of the cultured. But this is not true. These are not mere symbolic trappings of a material transaction. The symbolic transaction is of the highest importance. It is accomplished without the writer’s consent or participation, either before or after, and without the participation, we could also say, of the writing. The symbolic transaction takes place between a mystical collective and its image of itself symbolized in the cultural producers it takes to represent its essence. In being awarded a prize, the writer, already the symbol of the writing for most, becomes a cipher for the “corpus” or the “work” and then, as a person, marvelous or mundane, the writer is superseded and replaced by the act of elevation, which radiates its light onto the collective. It is not even the writing or the writer, but something else that receives the award—a spirit, ideas, a movement or flow of grace. “This year the Nobel Prize in Literature has been granted by...