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Literary Review
Centenary of Prix Goncourt
Andre Malraux
THE Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, will complete one hundred years in a few months' time. As the centenary year opens shortly in 2003, literary and educational institutions have started to hold lectures and symposia on various themes generated by the Goncourt prize.
The Prix Goncourt, given annually in November, was established by the 19th Century naturalist, novelist, diarist and historian, Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) in his name and that of his brother Jules de Goncourt (1839-1870). The two brothers were well-known names in French literature and had extensive art and book collections on their estate.
Edmond Goncourt's will called for the founding of the Academie Goncourt, a panel of 10 judges who were themselves to be writers.
From the prize fund set up through the sale of Edmond Goncourt's estate, each of the 10 jurors initially received an annual income of 6000 francs and the award money to the writer was 5000 francs. Today, the jurors receive no money and the prize money is only a token sum of 50 francs. But the conferment of the Prix Goncourt annually on any work and its author is such a highly valued honour that the sale of the books go up, making it a bestseller.
The criteria set forth for the prize state that it should reward "youth", "originality of talent" and a "new tentative in thought and form", "un ouvrage d'imagination en prose" (an imaginative prose work).
As the 10 jurors select, year after year, the name of the author and his award-winning book, the French literary world marks another milestone in the development of art, theatre, film, literature and political and social philosophy. The uniqueness of the award is its unbroken record even during the two World War years.
The very first award in 1903 went to John Antoine Nau, for his Force Ennemie (The Enemy Force).
Simone de Beauvoir
It is no surprise that given the shocking events of the early years of the 20th Century, French writers were deeply preoccupied with war themes. Henri Barbusse's Le Feu (The Fire) (1916) dealt with the horrors of the trench war. Its dramatic portrayal of the everyday turbulence on the German front had an echo in Erich Maria Remarque's treatment of the war theme in All Quiet On the Western Front.
The 1919 winner of the award at the age of 49 was Marcel Proust, a titan in French literature of that age.
Even as the L'Academie Goncourt honoured the great writer of melodrama in the tradition of Maupassant for his "A l'Ombre Des Jeune Filles En Fleurs" — "Within a Budding Grove" — Marcel Proust on his part enhanced the reputation of the honouring jury with his continuing novel of eight parts, published between 1913 and 1927. The eight stories are collectively known as Remembrance of Things Past. "Within a Budding Grove" was the second part of the magnum opus.
A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Proust sought the medium of fiction for throwing light on past experiences and to explore the hidden world of memory and guilt that Freud clinically investigated. Proust's imagery and analytical style are said to have influenced later writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
A landmark was reached in the Prix Goncourt story when Andre Malraux got a much-acclaimed recognition in 1933 for his novel La Condition Humaine (A Man's Fate).
Malraux was a fighter pilot, a man of action, participating in battles and revolutionary movements far away from his native France. His travels in the Far East, especially in Indo-China and China had an aura of adventure and mystery.
Out of his experience in China, Malraux was able to produce a work that is hailed as one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century. A Man's Fate unfolds to the reader in a cinematic progression the events in Shanghai in the spring of 1927 following an abortive communist uprising. The clash between the army of Chiang Kai-shek and the small group of communist insurgents brings into focus the vast social upheaval condensed within the incidents of a few weeks. What is at stake is not just the life of the revolutionary but humanity as represented by him.
In 1944 the Jury members of Prix Goncourt showed their courage of conviction during the war years by giving the prize to Elsa Triolet, an active militant of the French communist party.
During her time, Simone de Beauvoir was in the forefront of political and social movements. Simone de Beauvoir taught philosophy in several schools in Marseille, Rouen and Paris and was deeply concerned with the safety of factory workers, abortion rights for women, dignity of the elderly and the social status of women.
Simone de Beauvoir's 1954 awarding-winning novel, The Mandarins portrayed the emotional struggle of a woman torn between her public life and her very personal inner feelings. Set against the wartime Parisian intellectual society, The Mandarins revealed Simone de Beauvoir's relations with the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. The book was directed at the leftist intellectuals with a call to them to give up their secluded, ivory tower attitude of the mandarins and to take part in the real world of political struggle. Not without surprise, the book was banned by the Catholic Church.
The inter-change of roles between writers, film critics, filmmakers and TV personalities is a continuing process in France. Nowhere is it more seen than among the Goncourt Prize recipients.
Jean Louis Bory (1945), Jean-Jacques Gautier (1946) and Romain Gary (1956), as gifted writers excelled themselves in reviews of the theatre and films. Bory, cinema critic for Nouvel Observateur, made television adaptations of Balzac. Gautier, who was a member of the French Academy, was the theatre critic of the elite journal, Le Figaro. Romain Gary left the diplomatic service in 1961, married actress Jean Seberg and directed two films in French.
In the 1950s France was going through a very successful period of filmmaking. Jules Dassin along with Jean-Luc Goddard belonged to the pioneering school of French film directors whose works were classified as the product of the realism of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). The keynote of their films was stark simplicity and low-intensity drama.
Jules Dassin made a classic film in 1958 out of Roger Vaillant's 1957 Goncourt selection La Loi (The Law) and Joseph Losey made a film out of Vaillant's La Trinity (The Trinity) making it patent to everybody that a path-breaking story always made a good theme for a successful film in the hands of an innovative director.
The Goncourt prize is very rarely given to non-French nationals. From a perusal of the list of winners, one can identify Henri Troyat, who was born in the former USSR, but who spent most of his life in France as an exile. Troyat was a prodigy. In 1938, when only 27, he was the youngest ever to walk away with Goncourt award for L'Arraigne, which was followed by a series of biographies of Russian writers, Gogol, Gorki and Turgenev and the French novelist, Maupassant. Troyat also had the distinction of being a member of the French Academy.
In recent times, Amin Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon in 1949, got the Goncourt accolade in 1993 for his Le Rocher de Tanios (The Rock of Tanios), set in 19th Century Lebanon.
Maalouf, whose native language is Arabic but who writes in French uses to the best advantage his perceptions of a region that is at the crossroads of Western and Middle Eastern ideologies. He brings to light the outcome of military and political clashes over the centuries between divergent cultures in the area. Maalouf's Samarkand (Abacus, 1989) reveals the mind-set of the "jihad" suicide-killer ever since the origin of the sect in the inaccessible mountain redoubt of Almut in 11th Century Persia.
France has been very lucky with its writers. As the time approaches for the announcement of this year's Goncourt winners in November, writers, booksellers and readers look back with nostalgia at the 100-year-old record of this institution.
S. RANGARAJAN
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