The 2018 Nobel Prize For Literature Has Been Cancelled

For the first time since World War II – an event which, understandably, shook the continuity of most European institutions – there will be no Nobel Prize in Literature awarded this year.

This stems from an ongoing sexual harassment scandal surrounding French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, who in November 2017 was accused by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyhete of using his stature in the arts world to pressure women into sex, and of groping women – including Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria. Apparently no stranger to these backdoor shenanigans, Mr. Arnault has subsequently also been accused of leaking the names of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature ahead of time.

Mr. Arnault has extensive links to the Swedish Academy, the body which decides the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Most obviously, his wife, the poet Katarina Frostenson, is herself a member, and the two are co-owners of Forum, a Stockholm cultural centre funded by the Academy – which is itself claimed to have been the setting for some of Mr. Arnault’s acts of abuse, some of which date back over twenty years.

Oil was poured on this troubled fire when, following an unsuccessful vote to dismiss Ms. Frostenson from her position with the Academy, Sara Danius, the Academy’s permanent secretary since 2015 (and the first woman to hold that position) was forced out last month for having severed the academy’s ties with Mr. Arnault, and beginning a legal investigation into the Academy’s relationship with Forum. Ironically, Ms. Frostenson was expelled from the Academy alongside Ms. Danius after a three-hour meeting on the 12th of April.

It was this that plunged the Academy into open civil war, with some members (and a good chunk of public opinion) seeing this as a straightforward case of a woman taking the fall for a man’s misdeeds – meanwhile, former permanent secretary Horace Engdahl argued it was unfair to dismiss Ms. Frostenson on the basis of Mr. Arnault’s alleged wrongdoing, and publicly described Ms. Danius as the worst permanent secretary the Academy had ever seen.

Three other members walked out in protest as a result – I say ‘walked out’, as members of the Academy are appointed for life, and there is no formal means by which they could resign. In the wake of the scandal, those involved are scrambling to change the rules, a process made more difficult by the fact that, with only 10 active members, the Academy is one short of the 12-member quorum required to elect new members to vacant seats. And while only 8 members are required to decide upon a Nobel laureate, the situation is very clearly beyond simply making do with those remaining.

The convention in the Swedish press is to not name criminals or suspects, which has likely played a part in allowing this scandal to bubble along under the surface before finally bursting out into the light via furious back-and-forths in international newspapers. The Academy has always been, if not outright secretive, then certainly a closed-door sort of institution, with all the prestige one might expect of such a body – the nearest one might get to the mythical smoke-filled room, formally patronised by Sweden’s King Carl Gustav XVI himself.

Yet now we have writer, journalist and academy member Per Wästberg describing the scandal as ‘a stain on the Academy’s reputation which cannot be cleaned off’, and Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Dagens Nyheter, stating ‘the public’s trust for the academy is perhaps below rock bottom…With this scandal you cannot possibly say that this group of people has any kind of solid judgment’. Even King Carl Gustav XVI, usually as rigidly neutral in public as you’d expect a symbolic European monarch to be, has weighed in, formally denying the charge from an unnamed member of the Academy that it was he who okayed the explusion of Danius and Frostenson. As Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker once said of institutions which cannot leak, ‘dark shit builds up – and then, it bursts’.

Previously, the biggest public scandal the Academy had faced was failing to publicly support Salman Rushdie, the novelist who received death threats over his book The Satanic Verses – small fry by comparison, considering that greater and more moralistic bodies than the Academy, including the Church of England, went so far as to blame Mr. Rushdie for having incurred the wrath of (and a fatwa from) Iran’s then-Ayatollah Khomeini.

Chairman of the Nobel foundation Carl-Henrik Heldin gave an online statement asserting that the awarding of Nobel prizes could be postponed ‘when a situation in a prize-awarding institution arises that is so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible’ – and, with the Academy at each other’s throats and the institution itself in turmoil, this is very much the case.

Naturally, cultural commentators have drawn comparisons between this scandal and Hollywood’s ongoing #MeToo problems. And it is perhaps to be expected that of the various bodies which award Nobel Prizes, a sexual harassment scandal would kick off in a body which is (as with Hollywood) concerned with the arts, with their informal systems of patronage and back-scratching, rather than, say, regarding the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, in which one either has developed cryo-electron microscopy or one has not.

Despite Academy member Kristina Lugn’s comments that ‘we are still capable of awarding the prize…we have a short nomination list with five candidates left. If we can’t do this then I think everyone should resign’, the consensus now seems to be that confidence in the Academy has been shaken far too badly to award the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. Instead, two winners will be named in 2019, though make no mistake, this is no panacea – when 2019 rolls around, the Academy must have at least papered over its now deep and obvious divisions, or we can expect history to repeat itself, and Ms. Lugn’s assertion that everyone should resign may just find itself vindicated.

Still, if this has shaken the Swedish arts scene, then one must imagine that Hollywood’s various prize-giving bodies – almost invariably as closed-shop, self-perpetuating, and greasy-palmed as the Academy – are surely nervous. If the Swedish Academy’s current firestorm can erupt over a single harassment scandal, then Hollywood’s sorry history of clutching well-known abusers to its bosom probably merits a full-blown purge of the industry – not to mention some serious soul-searching and introspection, which will hopefully go beyond a simple hashtag campaign.