On Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature, the pre-eminent — perhaps only — global arbiter of literary greatness.
What distinguishes the Nobel isn’t that it singles out the best new poems, novels, essays and plays — that kind of reader service is the job of the National Book Awards, the Booker, the Pulitzer and the dozens of other worthy prizes that crowd the calendar. The academy does not celebrate great books; it consecrates great writers, compiling not a canon but a pantheon, not a reading list but a roster of immortals.
It’s easy enough to second-guess the choices, to count the past winners who have fallen into obscurity (no disrespect to Salvatore Quasimodo) and list the non-winners who have stuck around for posterity (Vladimir Nabokov was totally robbed). Questioning the wisdom of the Nobel Committee is a cherished paraliterary ritual, along with guilt-buying the works of an author you’ve never heard of. (I swear I’ll get to Jon Fosse, as soon as I’m done with Herta Müller and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.) Mostly, though, the busy and distracted reading public is content to take the learned Swedes at their word, to balance skepticism and bewilderment — wait, who? — with a measure of relief. We can rest assured that, for one more year, an important cultural principle has been upheld.
But what purpose does the principle serve? What good is greatness?
The concept has an old-fashioned, even retrograde ring. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the literary canon was attacked for its narrowness, a critique of the syllabus — too European, too male, too familiar — that was often extended to the writers who inhabited it. The suspicion of dead white men and their living would-be counterparts has intensified since then, partly thanks to the upheavals of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Every great artist is a potential art monster; every canonization is a cancellation waiting to happen.
Furthermore, the notion that a conclave of learned Scandinavians would presume to decide, every fall, which writer matters most seems quaint, if not absurd. Usually, such decisions are left to the marketplace, or to helpful market-adjacent mechanisms that aggregate, sort and rank. Critics make lists; newspapers conduct polls; algorithms and social platforms serve up carefully curated consumer advice.
Nobody invests any of these with too much authority. If you don’t like what’s on my list, you can make your own. How we evaluate the things we enjoy thus feels data-driven, democratic and subjective in the ways that institutions like the Nobel don’t. Which is to say that the Nobel’s specialness comes from its aloofness, its unworldliness. The anachronism — the tuxedos and medals, the pomp and majesty — is part of the brand.
The Swedish Academy is not here to tell you what writers you might like. Greatness is not the same as popularity. It may even be the opposite of popularity. Great books are by definition not the books you read for pleasure — even if some of them turn out to be, and may even have been intended to be, fun — and great writers, being mostly dead, don’t care if they’re your favorites. The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read. Great writers are the ones who matter whether you read them or not.
How strange. And yet, how normal. “It is natural to believe in great men,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “We call our children and our lands by their names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.” That’s from the beginning of “Representative Men,” an 1850 collection of essays, influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History,” that pursues the principle of greatness through time, locating it in a half-dozen exemplary individuals.
Given Emerson’s title and his times, it’s not surprising that all his exemplars are male. But it is notable that most are writers and thinkers, including Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare and Goethe and Emerson’s favorite, the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Napoleon is the only political leader in the group, perhaps in keeping with a mid-19th-century New Englander’s temperamental mistrust of monarchic or imperial power. And while Emerson’s era — he lived from 1803 to 1882 — was the age of Bismarck, Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, it’s remembered above all for its parade of artistic and intellectual giants. Marx and Darwin. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Beethoven and Wagner. Not to mention Emerson himself.
The early decades of the 20th century kept up the pace, and the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, were founded to keep score. In addition to literature, the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel’s bequest specified a handful of sciences — medicine, chemistry, physics — and peace. (Economics was added in 1968.) The five original fields suggest an idealized bouquet of human endeavor, untainted by the scramble for wealth, power or fame. The laureates were devoted, at least in theory, to the pursuits of truth, beauty and progress, indifferent to the money and celebrity that were nonetheless, thanks to Nobel’s largess, their reward.
In our more cynical, more quantified time, money and celebrity are part of the substance of greatness. We prefer the indisputable, measurable achievements of pop stars and athletes to more nebulous judgments of cultural importance. Surely no one can argue — though I guess people will — that Simone Biles or Serena Williams is overrated, or that Taylor Swift doesn’t dominate the landscape.
According to a poem by Stephen Spender, the “truly great” are those who “left the vivid air signed with their honor,” but honor is hardly a definitive feature of modern greatness. The heroes most aggressively offering themselves for our worship are tech billionaires and authoritarian leaders. Their achievements are calibrated in revenue and attention; often, they build their own monuments and forge their own medals.
Have you seen “Megalopolis,” the new Francis Ford Coppola movie? Most likely the answer is no; its poor performance at the box office has already become the stuff of Hollywood legend. The film may yet join the ranks of flops belatedly hailed as masterpieces, but its failure can be taken as a referendum on greatness, which is also its theme. Coppola’s most ardent champions are critics eager to defend a heroic conception of cinema in an age of streaming, when the pictures have gotten small.
Decades in gestation, “Megalopolis” is a colossally ambitious “fable” about colossal ambition. Through the persona of his hero, a visionary architect and urban planner named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), Coppola strives to restore honor to the kind of world-altering aspiration that might easily be caricatured as monstrous or maniacal.
Cesar, who happens to be a Nobel laureate (in one of the sciences, it seems), dreams of building a utopian community within the city of New Rome, a project that gives the movie its title. In some ways, the obstacles he faces predict the fate of the movie. He is an archetypally misunderstood genius, alternately adored and reviled by a fickle public, undermined by the politicians and plutocrats who should be his allies.
More than that, Cesar embodies the tension between grandeur and grandiosity. His democratic instincts do battle with his ego; his civic spirit is entangled with his self-absorption. He envisions Megalopolis as a dynamic place of questions, debates and experimentation, a republican rather than imperial city-state, with buildings that look more like flowers than fortresses. But the unfolding of this vision comes up against the brute realities of power, violence and deceit, and against his own narcissism.
Building Megalopolis requires the synthesis of imagination, politics and money, each embodied by a great man: Cesar, the architect; Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome; and Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), the city’s leading banker. Often at odds with one another, this triumvirate is opposed by the media, the masses and a cadre of decadent nepo babies. For most of “Megalopolis,” Megalopolis seems doomed.
The movie has been criticized as an auteurist muddle, but to my mind its confusion — its unresolved ambivalence about heroism and hero worship, its unstable alloy of futurism and nostalgia, its mix of patriarchal swagger and gestural feminism, of fascist iconography and bleeding-heart liberalism — is, like the confusing swirl of emotions aroused annually by the literature Nobel, the most timely and authentic thing about it.
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