The Nobel Prize Is Not a Competition — Literature, Judgement and the Limits of Prestige

I have long believed that the Nobel Prize is not a competition, a ranking, or an Olympic-style contest in which a champion emerges from the same event. It is a judgement made by a small group of evaluators within particular nomination procedures, rules and historical circumstances. The process is rigorous and the prize carries considerable prestige, but winning does not mean that someone has been ranked first among everyone in the field, much less that all their ideas have received authoritative endorsement. The year of the award is not necessarily the year in which the recognised work was produced. Scientific achievements may be acknowledged only after years of scrutiny, while the literature prize often assesses a writer’s body of work over a long period.

The standards and methods of evaluation differ considerably across the prizes. Achievements recognised in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine generally have a clearer basis for empirical testing. Whether an experiment can be repeated, a theory can explain observations, or a discovery is supported by later research places real constraints on judgement. I therefore tend to think that the risk of a major error concerning the validity of a scientific achievement is relatively low, and that subsequent research is more likely to expose such an error. This does not mean that science prizes are wholly objective. There is still room for judgement about the importance of a discovery, the relative contributions of individuals, and the timing of an award.

The literature and peace prizes are different. Disagreements about them cannot always be reduced to whether the committee was simply right or wrong. Literary evaluation involves aesthetic preferences, cultural context, creative traditions and interpretations of a work’s significance. The peace prize also involves political positions, historical circumstances and value judgements about actions and outcomes. Neither prize can disregard facts, but facts alone often do not yield a single evaluative conclusion. This is not to say that literature and peace have no standards. Their standards are fundamentally different from empirical verification in the natural sciences.

Of these awards, the literature prize seems to attract particularly broad public interest. I suspect an important reason is that literature appears to lack the obvious technical barrier associated with physics or chemistry. Someone who cannot understand a complex scientific paper can still read a novel or poem, discuss its characters and plot, and describe a personal response. Yet understanding a story does not necessarily mean being able to assess accurately what a writer has contributed to literary history.

Judging literature is not only a matter of what a work says, but also how it says it. Language, narrative structure, point of view, rhythm, genre and technique are integral to literature. Some contributions have the character of literary inquiry and experimentation, exploring new ways to represent experience, organise narratives and create aesthetic possibilities. By ‘research’, I do not mean that a writer is conducting a natural-science experiment, but that literary creation can itself be exploratory and innovative. Nor does this mean the prize rewards form while neglecting content. What matters is often how form and content work together, and what that combination contributes to a literary tradition. Bob Dylan’s 2016 award is a useful example: the Swedish Academy emphasised his creation of new poetic expressions within the American song tradition.

This brings me to another question: how do laureates understand the honour they receive? Some remain modest before and after winning, with a clear sense of where their research or writing stands. Others become more frequent public speakers. Still others keep their distance from the honour, or even refuse it. These different responses deserve attention.

What I find difficult to accept is not the fact that a writer gives public lectures. It is the transformation of literary achievement into a kind of general authority over life, as though winning the Nobel Prize in Literature entitled someone to teach everyone else how to succeed, how to live wisely, or how to settle social questions beyond dispute. A writer may indeed understand life deeply, but an excellent writer is not necessarily its most reliable interpreter. Writers are first and foremost expressers of lived situations, experiences and emotions. The ability to portray human circumstances with complexity and emotional force is different from the ability to make sound judgements about life’s problems. Literature can reveal questions without supplying answers; even when it supplies answers, those answers still need independent scrutiny.

My criticism here is not a moral judgement on a category of people. It concerns the expansion of authority beyond its proper bounds. Because the literature and peace prizes involve substantial aesthetic, ethical and historical judgement, laureates and their audiences may mistake recognition within a particular field for confirmation of a person’s overall judgement, as though a prize were a gold medal in a competition about life itself. This is a structural risk worth recognising, not evidence that literature or peace laureates are generally more self-important than scientists. Nor is frequent public speaking, by itself, evidence of empty rhetoric. What matters is whether the claims being made exceed what their arguments can support.

Actual cases help distinguish the honour from a recipient’s attitude towards it. In 1964, the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre voluntarily refused the Nobel Prize in Literature. His opposition to writers accepting official honours was not a position invented for the occasion. Boris Pasternak did not ultimately accept his 1958 literature prize either, but his circumstances were quite different: he initially accepted it and then withdrew under pressure from the Soviet authorities. In 1973, the Vietnamese negotiator Lê Đức Thọ declined the Nobel Peace Prize because, in his view, peace had not yet been established in Vietnam. All three cases involved a refusal, but the reasons should not be conflated.

Other cases show that absence from the ceremony is not the same as refusing the award. Bob Dylan did not attend the 2016 ceremony in Stockholm, but he accepted the prize and submitted an address. In his Nobel lecture, the 1987 literature laureate Joseph Brodsky spoke about being more accustomed to private life and feeling uncomfortable suddenly appearing before a public audience. Such differences show that laureates can understand the relationship between recognition, public identity and creative work in very different ways. We should not equate visibility with arrogance, nor assume that reserve or refusal is necessarily noble. But these cases do remind us that the meaning of a Nobel Prize is not as simple as winning a sporting gold medal.

I do not oppose the Nobel Prize, nor do I deny the achievements of its recipients. What I reject is the mystification of the prize: turning a judgement made within a limited institutional process into a certification of a person’s entire intellectual ability, philosophy and wisdom about life. Literary works should be judged by their qualities as works; scientific achievements by the research and evidence behind them; and a person’s claims about philosophy, politics or life by the strength of the arguments offered. Prestige may make someone’s voice easier to hear, but it cannot make that person’s opinions true.

Sources (official Nobel Prize website)

Sartre and Lê Đức Thọ’s refusals, and Pasternak’s refusal under pressure: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/nobel-prize-facts/
The citation for Bob Dylan’s 2016 literature prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/press-release/
Bob Dylan’s Nobel banquet speech: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/speech/
Joseph Brodsky’s 1987 Nobel lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/