2018.05.04 #MeToo冲击诺贝尔奖

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#MeToo Hits the Nobel Prizes
There will be no prize for literature this year, while the Swedish Academy that chooses the winner reckons with a sex-abuse scandal.

By Rachel Donadio
People sitting in a ballroom
The Swedish Academy's annual meeting in Stockholm (Jonas Ekstromer / TT News / Reuters)
MAY 4, 2018
SHARE
PARIS—Somewhere, Philip Roth must be laughing. For years, his readers reckoned he’d probably never win the Nobel Prize in literature since his sensibility is hardly in line with that of the Swedish Academy, whose 18 members select the prizewinners and thereby wield outsized power in the international world of letters. Their mandate is to pick idealistic works and their taste, the stereotype goes, tends toward social justice, egalitarianism, and an austere, humorless feminism. That cliché officially ended Friday, when the Academy—its credibility destroyed by a nasty sexual harassment scandal—announced it wouldn’t even award a Nobel Prize in literature this year.

The scandal is complex but centers on the husband of one of the Academy’s members, who happens to be French, and who for decades has had a powerful role in Stockholm literary life. He’s an amateur photographer and, with his Academician wife, ran a club and literary salon that received funding from the Swedish Academy. There, he surrounded himself with lovely young women and is alleged to have made more than passes at more than a few of them. Apparently you can get away with a lot in Sweden if you have a French accent. Or could. That seems to be over, too. Maybe the times they are a changin’, as the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature might put it. (That Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize caused a smaller scandal of its own among Nobel watchers, whose reaction ran along the lines of “Really?” In The New York Times, the novelist Tim Parks reinforced a growing sense that the prize had become silly. “As the Swedes squirm with embarrassment, the real butts of this farce are the critics who insist on taking the Nobel seriously,” he wrote Friday.)


The scandal has been unfolding since November, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Back then, Matilda Gustavsson, an enterprising 31-year-old culture reporter at the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, published a damning front-page investigation in which 18 women accused an unnamed man—now widely identified as Jean-Claude Arnault, he of the literary club—of varying degrees of sexual harassment and even rape over many years. (An abbreviated English-language version of the story is here.) Arnault has denied the allegations. He was later accused of having harassed even Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria. And of leaking the names of Nobel winners for years—a hot commodity not least because people actually place bets on them.

The report in Dagens Nyheter—which featured pictures of the 18 women on the newspaper’s front page, some only showing the backs of their heads—prompted national outrage. So much so that Sara Danius, a scholar of French literature and theory who in 2015 became the first woman to lead the Swedish Academy, brought in a law firm to conduct an internal investigation and broke the Academy’s ties with Arnault’s literary club. But the housecleaning didn’t go over well with some members of the Swedish Academy, who reportedly sided with Arnault. In response, Danius stepped down—inasmuch as one can leave a lifelong sinecure—her supporters in the Academy quit in solidarity with her, and the body was left with only a handful of members, ones who seemed to represent the old ways.

More outrage ensued, to the point that thousands of people took to the streets in Stockholm last month to protest the Academy’s dysfunction and opacity. Some pinned “pussy bows” to their shirts in honor of Danius, who is known for wearing blouses with the unfortunately named embellishment. It had come to that.

In its statement calling off this year’s Nobel for literature, the Nobel Foundation, which underwrites the prizes whose winners the Swedish Academy selects, was blunt. “The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution and that the Academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.” It added: “We also assume that all members of the Academy realize that both its extensive reform efforts and its future organizational structure must be characterized by greater openness towards the outside world.”

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I spoke to Gustavsson Friday and asked if she would ever have imagined her story would result in the Nobel Prize in literature not being awarded for a year. She had mixed feelings. “It’s bad because the Nobel Prize is supposed to be something very big and beautiful,” she said. But she said the women she’d interviewed for her story had at first been terrified to speak out, and as writers, terrified they would never get published again in Sweden. It is after all a small country where the man they were accusing had tremendous clout and used his affiliation with the Swedish Academy—and its financial support to writers—as a source of power.

“To testify against powerful men is something that has always in history come with a price for women. And they’ve been ignored or their testimonies have been turned against them or they’ve been shamed or exposed in different ways,” Gustavsson told me. “It’s a big thing that women are speaking up like this and doing this and can change the world and shake the foundation of the strongest cultural institution we have in Sweden. That’s something.”

It’s darkly ironic, and actually kind of amusing, that a Frenchman was at the heart of this Swedish scandal. Everyone seemed to be playing to type. Gustavsson said Arnault’s place in the culture—his dashing image as a European intellectual sitting around drinking Bordeaux—derived in part from his going against the grain in Sweden. “He represented something that was maybe a bit rebellious against the political correctness and something that was more dark and interesting,” she said. “He had this so-called French behavior—being too physical with women and always commenting on women’s bodies; that was his default setting,” she said. The default response, she went on, was often “’Oh, he’s just a Frenchman.’” She had been surprised, she said, when the stories that came out were far worse.

Little is known about the inner workings of the Swedish Academy. Its criteria for membership are somewhat mysterious. Members are said to have access to excellent real estate in Stockholm, and to an apartment in Paris—where some of Arnault’s escapades are said to have taken place. In an interview with Gustavsson in 2014, one Academy member, Kristina Lugn, described the Academy as a kind of utopian community, a family that supported its members for life.

And then, of course, they vote to select the Nobel laureate for literature. That’s why it’s a running joke in literary circles that the most beautiful words in the English language are “my Swedish publisher.” Being published in Sweden of course raises your chances of catching the Academy’s eye. (Note to aspirants: Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner for literature, had a regular column in a Swedish newspaper for many years; she also writes masterpieces that in my view fully deserved the Nobel Prize.)

Alexievich herself recently weighed in on the scandal. “Those who have broken the rules should be scrutinized,” she told the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet. Dostoyevsky, she added, taught “that human beings are unreliable creatures, so laws and rules are needed to ensure that this does not repeat itself.”


The Academy didn’t respond to requests for comment about what comes next or what its precise ties to Arnault were; its acting director told Swedish radio it was taking measures to clean up in the wake of the scandal. But the biggest question is still unanswered: Who will choose next year’s Nobel laureate in literature? Sweden has a reputation for a civic life based on transparency and trust. That’s a national cliché the Swedish Academy might want to preserve.

Rachel Donadio is a Paris-based contributing writer at The Atlantic, covering politics and culture across Europe.




#MeToo Hits the Nobel Prizes
There will be no prize for literature this year, while the Swedish Academy that chooses the winner reckons with a sex-abuse scandal.

By Rachel Donadio
People sitting in a ballroom
The Swedish Academy's annual meeting in Stockholm (Jonas Ekstromer / TT News / Reuters)
MAY 4, 2018
SHARE
PARIS—Somewhere, Philip Roth must be laughing. For years, his readers reckoned he’d probably never win the Nobel Prize in literature since his sensibility is hardly in line with that of the Swedish Academy, whose 18 members select the prizewinners and thereby wield outsized power in the international world of letters. Their mandate is to pick idealistic works and their taste, the stereotype goes, tends toward social justice, egalitarianism, and an austere, humorless feminism. That cliché officially ended Friday, when the Academy—its credibility destroyed by a nasty sexual harassment scandal—announced it wouldn’t even award a Nobel Prize in literature this year.

The scandal is complex but centers on the husband of one of the Academy’s members, who happens to be French, and who for decades has had a powerful role in Stockholm literary life. He’s an amateur photographer and, with his Academician wife, ran a club and literary salon that received funding from the Swedish Academy. There, he surrounded himself with lovely young women and is alleged to have made more than passes at more than a few of them. Apparently you can get away with a lot in Sweden if you have a French accent. Or could. That seems to be over, too. Maybe the times they are a changin’, as the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature might put it. (That Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize caused a smaller scandal of its own among Nobel watchers, whose reaction ran along the lines of “Really?” In The New York Times, the novelist Tim Parks reinforced a growing sense that the prize had become silly. “As the Swedes squirm with embarrassment, the real butts of this farce are the critics who insist on taking the Nobel seriously,” he wrote Friday.)


The scandal has been unfolding since November, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Back then, Matilda Gustavsson, an enterprising 31-year-old culture reporter at the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, published a damning front-page investigation in which 18 women accused an unnamed man—now widely identified as Jean-Claude Arnault, he of the literary club—of varying degrees of sexual harassment and even rape over many years. (An abbreviated English-language version of the story is here.) Arnault has denied the allegations. He was later accused of having harassed even Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria. And of leaking the names of Nobel winners for years—a hot commodity not least because people actually place bets on them.

The report in Dagens Nyheter—which featured pictures of the 18 women on the newspaper’s front page, some only showing the backs of their heads—prompted national outrage. So much so that Sara Danius, a scholar of French literature and theory who in 2015 became the first woman to lead the Swedish Academy, brought in a law firm to conduct an internal investigation and broke the Academy’s ties with Arnault’s literary club. But the housecleaning didn’t go over well with some members of the Swedish Academy, who reportedly sided with Arnault. In response, Danius stepped down—inasmuch as one can leave a lifelong sinecure—her supporters in the Academy quit in solidarity with her, and the body was left with only a handful of members, ones who seemed to represent the old ways.

More outrage ensued, to the point that thousands of people took to the streets in Stockholm last month to protest the Academy’s dysfunction and opacity. Some pinned “pussy bows” to their shirts in honor of Danius, who is known for wearing blouses with the unfortunately named embellishment. It had come to that.

In its statement calling off this year’s Nobel for literature, the Nobel Foundation, which underwrites the prizes whose winners the Swedish Academy selects, was blunt. “The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution and that the Academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken.” It added: “We also assume that all members of the Academy realize that both its extensive reform efforts and its future organizational structure must be characterized by greater openness towards the outside world.”

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I spoke to Gustavsson Friday and asked if she would ever have imagined her story would result in the Nobel Prize in literature not being awarded for a year. She had mixed feelings. “It’s bad because the Nobel Prize is supposed to be something very big and beautiful,” she said. But she said the women she’d interviewed for her story had at first been terrified to speak out, and as writers, terrified they would never get published again in Sweden. It is after all a small country where the man they were accusing had tremendous clout and used his affiliation with the Swedish Academy—and its financial support to writers—as a source of power.

“To testify against powerful men is something that has always in history come with a price for women. And they’ve been ignored or their testimonies have been turned against them or they’ve been shamed or exposed in different ways,” Gustavsson told me. “It’s a big thing that women are speaking up like this and doing this and can change the world and shake the foundation of the strongest cultural institution we have in Sweden. That’s something.”

It’s darkly ironic, and actually kind of amusing, that a Frenchman was at the heart of this Swedish scandal. Everyone seemed to be playing to type. Gustavsson said Arnault’s place in the culture—his dashing image as a European intellectual sitting around drinking Bordeaux—derived in part from his going against the grain in Sweden. “He represented something that was maybe a bit rebellious against the political correctness and something that was more dark and interesting,” she said. “He had this so-called French behavior—being too physical with women and always commenting on women’s bodies; that was his default setting,” she said. The default response, she went on, was often “’Oh, he’s just a Frenchman.’” She had been surprised, she said, when the stories that came out were far worse.

Little is known about the inner workings of the Swedish Academy. Its criteria for membership are somewhat mysterious. Members are said to have access to excellent real estate in Stockholm, and to an apartment in Paris—where some of Arnault’s escapades are said to have taken place. In an interview with Gustavsson in 2014, one Academy member, Kristina Lugn, described the Academy as a kind of utopian community, a family that supported its members for life.

And then, of course, they vote to select the Nobel laureate for literature. That’s why it’s a running joke in literary circles that the most beautiful words in the English language are “my Swedish publisher.” Being published in Sweden of course raises your chances of catching the Academy’s eye. (Note to aspirants: Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner for literature, had a regular column in a Swedish newspaper for many years; she also writes masterpieces that in my view fully deserved the Nobel Prize.)

Alexievich herself recently weighed in on the scandal. “Those who have broken the rules should be scrutinized,” she told the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet. Dostoyevsky, she added, taught “that human beings are unreliable creatures, so laws and rules are needed to ensure that this does not repeat itself.”


The Academy didn’t respond to requests for comment about what comes next or what its precise ties to Arnault were; its acting director told Swedish radio it was taking measures to clean up in the wake of the scandal. But the biggest question is still unanswered: Who will choose next year’s Nobel laureate in literature? Sweden has a reputation for a civic life based on transparency and trust. That’s a national cliché the Swedish Academy might want to preserve.

Rachel Donadio is a Paris-based contributing writer at The Atlantic, covering politics and culture across Europe.




#MeToo冲击诺贝尔奖
今年将没有文学奖，而负责挑选获奖者的瑞典学院则在考虑性虐待丑闻的问题。

瑞秋-多纳迪奥报道
坐在舞厅里的人们
瑞典学院在斯德哥尔摩举行的年会（Jonas Ekstromer / TT News / Reuters)
2018年5月4日
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巴黎--在某个地方，菲利普-罗斯一定在笑。多年来，他的读者估计他可能永远不会获得诺贝尔文学奖，因为他的感性认识与瑞典学院的感性认识几乎不一致，瑞典学院的18名成员负责挑选获奖者，从而在国际文坛上拥有巨大的权力。他们的任务是挑选理想主义作品，而他们的品味，据说是倾向于社会正义、平等主义和朴素的、无幽默感的女权主义。这一陈词滥调在周五正式结束，当时学院宣布它甚至不会颁发今年的诺贝尔文学奖--它的信誉被一桩讨厌的性骚扰丑闻所摧毁。

丑闻很复杂，但集中在学院成员之一的丈夫身上，他恰好是法国人，几十年来在斯德哥尔摩的文学生活中一直扮演着强有力的角色。他是一名业余摄影师，与他的院士妻子一起经营着一个俱乐部和文学沙龙，并得到了瑞典学院的资助。在那里，他与可爱的年轻女性为伍，据称他曾与其中的几位有过多次交往。显然，在瑞典，如果你有法国口音，你可以逃脱很多事情。或者说可以。这似乎也已经结束了。也许时代在变化，正如2016年诺贝尔文学奖得主所说。(鲍勃-迪伦获得诺贝尔奖在诺贝尔奖观察者中引起了较小的丑闻，他们的反应是："真的吗？" 在《纽约时报》上，小说家蒂姆-帕克斯(Tim Parks)强化了一种日益增长的感觉，即该奖项已经变得愚蠢。"他周五写道："当瑞典人尴尬地扭动身体时，这场闹剧的真正受害者是那些坚持认真对待诺贝尔奖的批评家。）


自11月以来，在#MeToo运动的影响下，这一丑闻一直在展开。当时，瑞典日报《Dagens Nyheter》31岁的文化记者Matilda Gustavsson在头版发表了一份令人震惊的调查报告，其中18名女性指控一名不愿透露姓名的男子--现在普遍认为是文学俱乐部的负责人Jean-Claude Arnault--多年来有不同程度的性骚扰甚至强奸行为。(该报道的英文简略版本见此。)阿尔诺否认了这些指控。他后来被指控甚至骚扰了瑞典的维多利亚王妃。还有多年来泄露诺贝尔奖获得者的名字--一种热门商品，至少是因为人们确实在他们身上下了赌注。

Dagens Nyheter》的报道--该报头版刊登了这18名女性的照片，其中一些只显示了她们的后脑勺--引起了全国人民的愤怒。以至于在2015年成为瑞典学院首位女性领导的法国文学和理论学者萨拉-达尼乌斯(Sara Danius)请来一家律师事务所进行内部调查，并打破了学院与阿尔诺文学俱乐部的联系。但是，瑞典学院的一些成员对这一清理并不满意，据说他们站在阿尔诺一边。作为回应，达尼乌斯下台了--就像一个人可以离开一个终身职位一样--她在学院里的支持者退出以声援她，该机构只剩下少数几个成员，他们似乎代表了旧的方式。

更多的愤怒随之而来，以至于上个月成千上万的人在斯德哥尔摩走上街头，抗议学院的功能失调和不透明。一些人将 "阴部蝴蝶结 "钉在他们的衬衫上，以纪念达尼乌斯，他因穿着带有这种不幸名字的点缀的衬衫而闻名。事情已经到了这一步。

诺贝尔基金会在其声明中取消了今年的诺贝尔文学奖，该基金会为瑞典学院选定的获奖者提供资金支持，并直言不讳。"诺贝尔基金会假定瑞典学院现在将全力以赴恢复其作为颁奖机构的公信力，并假定学院将报告所采取的具体行动。它补充说："我们还假定，学院的所有成员都认识到，其广泛的改革努力和未来的组织结构都必须以对外部世界的更大开放为特征。"

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我周五与古斯塔夫森交谈，问她是否会想到她的故事会导致诺贝尔文学奖在一年内无法颁发。她的心情很复杂。"她说："这很糟糕，因为诺贝尔奖应该是非常伟大和美丽的东西。但她说，她为报道而采访的那些妇女起初很害怕说出来，作为作家，她们很害怕在瑞典永远不会再出版。这毕竟是一个小国家，她们指控的那个人有巨大的影响力，并利用他与瑞典学院的关系--以及学院对作家的财政支持--作为权力的来源。

"对有权势的男人作证，在历史上对妇女来说一直是有代价的。她们被忽视，或者她们的证词被用来对付她们，或者她们被羞辱，或者以不同的方式被曝光，"古斯塔夫松告诉我。"这是一件大事，妇女这样说话，这样做，可以改变世界，动摇我们在瑞典最强大的文化机构的基础。这是件大事。"

一个法国人成为这起瑞典丑闻的核心，这具有暗讽意味，实际上也有点好笑。每个人似乎都在按类型行事。古斯塔夫松说，阿尔诺在文化中的地位--他作为一个欧洲知识分子坐在那里喝波尔多酒的潇洒形象--部分源于他在瑞典的逆反心理。"她说："他代表了一些可能有点反叛的东西，反对政治正确性，以及一些更黑暗和有趣的东西。"她说："他有这种所谓的法国人的行为--对女人过于肉体，总是评论女人的身体；这是他的默认设置。她继续说，默认的反应往往是"'哦，他只是一个法国人'"。她说，当传出的故事更糟糕时，她感到很惊讶。

人们对瑞典学院的内部运作知之甚少。它的成员标准有些神秘。据说成员可以获得斯德哥尔摩的优质房地产，以及巴黎的一套公寓--据说阿尔诺的一些出轨行为就发生在那里。在2014年对古斯塔夫森的采访中，一位学院成员克里斯蒂娜-卢恩（Kristina Lugn）将学院描述为一种乌托邦式的社区，一个支持其成员终身的家庭。

然后，当然，他们投票选择诺贝尔文学奖得主。这就是为什么在文学界流传着这样一个笑话：英语中最美丽的词语是 "我的瑞典出版商"。在瑞典出版当然会提高你吸引学院注意的机会。(有志者请注意。2015年的文学奖得主斯维特拉娜-阿列克谢耶维奇（Svetlana Alexievich）在一家瑞典报纸上开了多年的定期专栏；她还写了一些杰作，在我看来完全值得获得诺贝尔奖。

阿列克谢耶维奇本人最近对这一丑闻发表了看法。"她对瑞典报纸《Svenska Dagbladet》说："那些违反规则的人应该受到审查。她补充说，陀思妥耶夫斯基教导 "人类是不可靠的生物，因此需要法律和规则来确保这种情况不会重演"。


学院没有回应关于下一步行动或其与阿尔诺的确切关系的评论请求；其代理院长告诉瑞典电台，它正在采取措施在丑闻发生后进行清理。但最大的问题仍未得到解答。谁将选择明年的诺贝尔文学奖得主？瑞典以透明和信任为基础的公民生活而闻名。这是瑞典学院可能想要保留的一个国家陈词滥调。

雷切尔-多纳迪奥是《大西洋》杂志驻巴黎的特约作家，报道欧洲各地的政治和文化。