Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

In a 2013 weblog put up, the good Ursu­la Ok. Le Guin quotes a Lon­don Instances Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment col­umn by a “J.C.,” who satir­i­cal­ly professional­pos­es the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writ­ers throughout Europe and Amer­i­ca are flip­ing down awards within the hope of being nom­i­nat­ed for a Sartre,” writes J.C., “The Sartre Prize itself has nev­er been refused.” Sartre earned the hon­or of his personal prize for prize refusal by flip­ing down the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1964, an act Le Guin calls “char­ac­ter­is­tic of the gnarly and counter-sug­gestible Exis­ten­tial­ist.” As you’ll be able to see within the quick clip above, Sartre ful­ly believed the com­mit­tee used the award to white­wash his Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal views and activism.

However the refusal was not a the­atri­cal or “impul­sive ges­ture,” Sartre wrote in a state­ment to the Swedish press, which was lat­er pub­lished in Le Monde. It was con­sis­tent along with his lengthy­stand­ing prin­ci­ples. “I’ve all the time declined offi­cial hon­ors,” he mentioned, and referred to his rejec­tion of the Legion of Hon­or in 1945 for sim­i­lar rea­sons. Elab­o­rat­ing, he cit­ed first the “per­son­al” rea­son for his refusal

This atti­tude is predicated on my con­cep­tion of the author’s enter­prise. A author who adopts polit­i­cal, social, or lit­er­ary posi­tions should act solely with the means which can be his personal—that’s, the writ­ten phrase. All of the hon­ors he could obtain expose his learn­ers to a pres­certain I don’t con­sid­er desir­in a position. If I signal myself Jean-Paul Sartre it isn’t the identical factor as if I signal myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize win­ner.

The author should there­fore refuse to let him­self be trans­fashioned into an insti­tu­tion, even when this happens underneath probably the most hon­or­in a position cir­cum­stances, as within the current case.

There was anoth­er rea­son as nicely, an “objec­tive” one, Sartre wrote. In serv­ing the reason for social­ism, he hoped to result in “the peace­ful coex­is­tence of the 2 cul­tures, that of the East and the West.” (He refers not solely to Asia as “the East,” but additionally to “the East­ern bloc.”)

There­fore, he felt he should stay inde­pen­dent of insti­tu­tions on both aspect: “I ought to thus be fairly as unable to just accept, for examination­ple, the Lenin Prize, if some­one need­ed to present it to me.”

As a flat­ter­ing New York Instances arti­cle not­ed on the time, this was not the primary time a author had refused the Nobel. In 1926, George Bernard Shaw turned down the prize mon­ey, offend­ed by the extrav­a­gant money award, which he felt was unnec­es­sary since he already had “suf­fi­cient mon­ey for my wants.” Shaw lat­er relent­ed, donat­ing the mon­ey for Eng­lish trans­la­tions of Swedish lit­er­a­ture. Boris Paster­nak additionally refused the award, in 1958, however this was underneath excessive duress. “If he’d tried to go settle for it,” Le Guin writes, “the Sovi­et Gov­ern­ment would have immediate­ly, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly arrest­ed him and despatched him to eter­nal silence in a gulag in Siberia.”

These qual­i­fi­ca­tions make Sartre the one writer to ever out­proper and vol­un­tar­i­ly reject each the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture and its siz­in a position money award. Whereas his state­ment to the Swedish press is full of well mannered expla­na­tions and gra­cious demur­rals, his filmed state­ment above, excerpt­ed from the 1976 doc­u­males­tary Sartre by Him­self, minces no phrases.

As a result of I used to be polit­i­cal­ly concerned the bour­geois estab­lish­ment need­ed to cov­er up my “previous errors.” Now there’s an admis­sion! And they also gave me the Nobel Prize. They “par­doned” me and mentioned I deserved it. It was mon­strous!

Sartre was the truth is par­doned by De Gaulle 4 years after his Nobel rejec­tion for his par­tic­i­pa­tion within the 1968 upris­ings. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” the French Pres­i­dent sup­pos­ed­ly mentioned. The author and philoso­pher, Le Guin factors out, “was, in fact, already an ‘insti­tu­tion’” on the time of the Nobel award. Nonethe­much less, she says, the ges­ture had actual imply­ing. Lit­er­ary awards, writes Le Guin—who her­self refused a Neb­u­la Award in 1976 (she’s gained sev­er­al extra since)—can “hon­or a author,” during which case they’ve “gen­uine val­ue.” But prizes are additionally award­ed “as a mar­ket­ing ploy by cor­po­fee cap­i­tal­ism, and a few­instances as a polit­i­cal gim­mick by the awarders [….] And the extra pres­ti­gious and val­ued the prize the extra com­professional­mised it’s.” Sartre, in fact, felt the identical—the higher the hon­or, the extra like­ly his work could be coopt­ed and san­i­tized.

Per­haps prov­ing his level, a brief, nasty 1965 Har­vard Crim­son let­ter had many, much less flat­ter­ing issues than Le Guin to say about Sartre’s moti­va­tions, name­ing him “an unsightly toad” and a “poor los­er” envi­ous of his for­mer buddy Camus, who gained in 1957. The let­ter author calls Sartre’s rejec­tion of the prize “an act of pre­ten­sion” and a “moderately inef­fec­tu­al and stu­pid ges­ture.” And but it did have an impact. It appears clear no less than to me that the Har­vard Crim­son author couldn’t stand the truth that, provided the “most cov­et­ed award” the West can bestow, and a heap­ing sum of mon­ey apart from, “Sartre’s huge line was, ‘Je refuse.’”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­males­tary College Trainer (1957)

Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus: Their Pal­ship and the Bit­ter Feud That Finish­ed It

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian primarily based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness