The Ig Nobel Award
The Ig Nobel awards had been established as a reaction against the
Nobel Awards. The aim was “to first make people laugh, and then make
them think”, probably because the Nobel Awards make us wonder if we
should laugh or cry. Ig Nobel is organized by the bi-monthly magazine
‘Annals of Improbable Research’. The Ig Nobel for literature had been
awarded in 1999 to the British Standard Institute for its six-page
specification of ‘the proper way to make a cup of tea’. In 2009, to
Ireland’s police force for writing 50 traffic tickets to a Polish driver
‘Prawo Jazdy’. Prawo Jazdy is the polish term for driving license, as
reported by BBC.
If Alfred Nobel had not been called “a merchant of death”, by a
French newspaper, publishing his obituary before his death (mistaking
the death of his brother Ludvig), and had he not read his own obituary,
would he have altered his will to create the Nobel Awards?
Nobel stipulated in his will that most of his estate, more than SEK
31 million (today approximately SEK 1,688 million) should be converted
into a fund and invested in “safe securities.”
The original citation of this Nobel Prize has led to much
controversy. In the original Swedish translation, the word idealisk can
mean either “idealistic” or “ideal.” In earlier years the Nobel
Committee stuck closely to the intent of the will, and left out certain
world-renowned writers such as Tolstoy and Ibsen for the prize because
their works were not deemed “idealistic” enough. In later years the
wording has been interpreted more liberally, and it is claimed that the
prize has been awarded for lasting literary merit. (New World
Encyclopedia)
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Albert
Camus |
On December 10th 1913, when the Nobel prize was awarded to
Ravindranath Tagore, the presentation speech by Harold Hjarne, Chairman
of the Nobel Committee, had begun with the words, “The Anglo-Indian
Poet, Rabindranath Tagore”, even though in terms of Nobel’s will, “no
consideration should be paid to the nationality to which any proposed
candidate might belong”. Thus there was no need to attach the “Anglo” to
his nationality, or to insult him further by saying, “Tagore has been
hailed from various quarters as a new and admirable master of that
poetic art which has been a never-failing concomitant of the expansion
of British civilization ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth.”
Tagore did not attend the award ceremony. The award had been accepted
by a British official which was later presented to Tagore in Calcutta.
If Tagore was aware of these insults, why did he accept it?
In 1964, Sartre said “Literature functioned as a bourgeois substitute
for real commitment in the world” and declined the Nobel Prize for
Literature, stating that “It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul
Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must
refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if
it takes place in the most honorable form.” He was the only person to
ever decline a Nobel Prize.
Boris Pasternak at first accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature,
but was forced by Soviet authorities to decline it because the prize was
considered a “reward for the dissident political innuendo in his novel,
Doctor Zhivago”. Nobel Foundation had later awarded the medal to his
son.
The Prize in Literature has a history of controversial awards and
notorious snubs. Major authors have been ignored by the Nobel Committee,
including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, John Updike, Garcia Lorca and so
many others, often for political or extra-literary reasons, while
“inconsequential or transitional” writers won the prize.
Albert Camus when he won the prize in 1956, believed that Andre
Malraux was more deserving. According to Burton Feldman, the Nobel
committee sometimes “was against honouring too well-known writers....why
bother to celebrate the celebrated?”
The 1974 prize was denied to Graham Greene, Vladimar Nabokov and Saul
Bellow in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and
Harry Martinson who were unknown outside Sweden, but happened to have
served as judges of the Nobel committee. Bellow won it two years later,
but neither Greene nor Nabokov took home the prize. There were also
other members of the Swedish Academy (Which picked the Nobel Prize), and
also won the prize, Verner von Heidenstam (1916), Erik Axel Karlfelgt
(1931) and Par Lagerkvist (1951).
Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 “for his
mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for
brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values” and he was “a
Caesar who also had the gift of wielding Cicero’s stylus”. Who the other
nominees for the 1953 Award were, have not been officially revealed yet,
even though it could be held secret for 50 years after the award. That
is transparency by the Nobel committee. Among authors shunted aside to
award Churchill this prize probably were many giants in the literary
world like Bertolt Brecht.
The ‘impartiality’ of the Nobel Awards for literature is evident from
their own published data that out of 107 winners to date, 80 have been
from Europe (including Russia 5), raising the question, which is the
real ‘Ignobel’ prize.
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