Gerald Warner: Ideological bias demolishes Nobel intentions

THE Nobel Prize for Literature for 2008 is awarded to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio 'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation'." Thus the press release issued last Thursday by the Swedish Academy.

Although it is not quite a joke in the category of the Turner Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature is rightly regarded with scepticism. The selection process is formulaic and restricted: this is no fertile territory for the politically incorrect. This flaw has been inherent in the award since its inception in 1901, due to the instructions set out in the will of Alfred Nobel that it be given to the author who has produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

That endorsement of utopianism, by implication, rules out the writings of those of a conservative or sceptical character. For political or diplomatic reasons, writers such as Tolstoy, Chekhov and James Joyce were passed over, while Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing were honoured. Jorge Luis Borges was excluded because of his sympathy with right-of-centre governments in Latin America. Such ideological bias demolishes the pretensions of the Nobel Prize to be the supreme arbiter of literary talent.

Britain has more than 20 major literary awards, of which the Booker is the most notorious since the judges selected a novel by James Kelman that contrived to incorporate the 'f-word' more than 3,000 times, thus establishing the Booker's claim to be the Turner Prize in print. Authors collaborate with the awards system, for two obvious reasons: some of the prizes are quite lucrative and even those that are not can generate publicity that promotes sales; but there is no reason for the reading public to lend the slightest credence to these narcissistic public relations exercises.

This year's Nobel winner, Clézio, might have been computer-generated to receive the laureateship. Franco-Mauritian by origin, married to a Moroccan, preoccupied with pre-Columbian American civilisation, he typifies the progressive, anti-colonialist mentality that ticks all the boxes in Stockholm. In corollary, there are first-rate writers who would never be considered for the prize, on ideological grounds.

Consider another French writer with a consuming interest in early Indian society in both North and South America and a lifetime's experience of exploring remote wildernesses and embracing communities that live in pre-industrial conditions: Jean Raspail. If the Nobel Prize had been the universal yardstick of literary talent it aspires to be, it would long ago have acknowledged the genius of Raspail. It is true Raspail has not gone unrecognised: in 1981 he won the Grand Prix of the Académie française and in 1998 he was awarded the TS Eliot Prize in America.

It is not despite the numinous character of his writing, his exceptional imagination and the spirituality of his work that higher prizes have eluded Raspail, but precisely because of those qualities. A Catholic, royalist traditionalist with an uncompromising contempt for the corruption of modern secular society, he is calculated to send shudders down spines in Stockholm.

Yet the Raspail canon is a wonderful achievement of the imagination. Though he is now 83, it is arguable that some of his best novels were written in the 1990s, such as Sire, a mystical thriller in which the young man who is rightful King of France journeys covertly through his realm, pursued by enemies, to be secretly anointed in a nocturnal ceremony at Rheims. There are also the adventures of the various members of the Pikkendorf princely family, one of his richest inventions. All these books are dominated by youthful characters, despite the author's age, and he has an especial rapport with the young. Raspail, however, has committed the unpardonable offence of writing a prophetic novel: The Camp of the Saints (1973), which envisaged the overthrow of a low-birth-rate Europe and Christianity by an invasion of millions from the Third World.

For some commentators, the emerging realisation of a demographic prediction aggravates their state of denial. In 2004, John Sutherland wrote an intemperate denunciation of "Raspail's loathsome novel" in the Guardian (where else?), ludicrously bracketing the work of this consummate writer with neo-Nazi literature. Yet this bilious buffoon who, at the time, was about to embark on the scholarly task of translating summaries of classical literature into text-messaging shorthand, holds a chair of English literature at University College London. The following year, he was appointed chairman of the judges for the Booker Prize. Q.E.D.