The Goncourt and the Booker a Tale of Two Prizes Marie-Françoise
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■ This article originally appeared in Logos 14/2, 2003, 85–94. THE GONCOURT AND THE BOOKER A tale of two prizes Marie-Françoise Cachin and Sylvie Ducas-Spaes In both Britain and France, there are today numerous literary prizes, of which the Goncourt and the Booker are pre-eminent. The Prix Goncourt was created 100 years ago, while the Booker Prize was instituted only in 1969. In what senses are they different? What do the two prizes have in common? What could one learn from the other? The Prix Goncourt, created in 1903, was designed as a form of liter- ary patronage offered by the French writer Edmond de Goncourt, who bequeathed his personal wealth to the cause of literature. This took two forms: a regular income for ten writers committed to create an academy and an annual literary prize to help a young author. At that time, the status of writers was being weakened by the rise of large publishing empires like Hachette. It was increasingly hard for authors to live by their pens. Goncourt’s purpose was to relieve some of them of the obligation of living on journalism. Members of the Académie Goncourt were granted yearly allowances of 6,000 francs, and the prize winner received 5,000 francs. These were considerable amounts of money for the time. However, nowadays, after a number of bad investments and devaluations over the years, the members of the Académie Goncourt are no longer paid for their jobs, and the prize of fifty new francs (about seven euros) is symbolic. However, the impact on sales of the prize-winning novel generates income for the author beyond Goncourt’s dreams. The creation of the Prix Goncourt was also a reaction against the exclu- sive monopoly enjoyed by the Académie Française, which was then the only honourable access to public recognition for French men of letters. The Académie Goncourt was formed to counter the rejection of novelists by At the time of writing, Marie-Françoise Cachin was affiliated with the Université of Paris 7, teaching 19th- and 20th-century fiction, and Sylvie Ducas-Spaes was affiliated with the University of Angers. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�83534_0�4 112 marie-françoise cachin and sylvie ducas-spaes the Académie Française, which considered fiction to be a popular, hybrid and minor genre because of its links with the press through serialization, even though the novel was becoming the epitome of literary modernity. The Académie Goncourt was seen as a ‘counter-academy’, favouring the Naturalist aesthetics loathed by the Académie Française, to which Emile Zola had applied for membership unsuccessfully twenty-four times. The new Academy aroused great interest in the nascent mass reading public, who wanted more fiction. Goncourt’s will specified two strict rules for the academicians—co- option by their peers and appointment for life. Although resignation and removal are allowed, they have been very rare, the best known instance being the resignation of Sacha Guitry, who was suspected of collabora- tion with the Nazis and therefore in a delicate situation with French jus- tice after World War II. But Louis Aragon’s resignation in 1968 and the novelist Bernard Clavel’s in 1977 were even more spectacular, the latter denouncing the unfairness of literary prizes at a time when they were already severely criticized. At the start, the co-option policy implied that would-be members had to belong to the Realist or Naturalist movements. The first Académie Goncourt boasted such novelists as Huysmans, Daudet, the Rosny broth- ers, Léon Hennique, Gustave Geoffroy, etc. Today the choice of judges reflects a balanced representation of the three great literary publishing companies: Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil, although the jury still favours Realist-oriented authors. For example, Michel Tournier and Daniel Boulanger are Gallimard authors, François Nourrissier and André Stil are published by Grasset, and Didier Decoin by Le Seuil. This drift is a clear sign of publishers’ interests in literary prizes and indicates the pressures on Goncourt academicians by their publishers. The hegemony of publishing companies like Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil in the literary arena, expressed in the famous portmanteau word ‘Galligrasseuil’ (coined by the publisher Belfond), is often denounced by detractors of prizes. It is hard for small publishing houses to compete. In the first years of its existence, when the Prix Goncourt was still a discovery prize, without any significant effect on sales, small publishing companies like Ollendorff or Corrêa, and even little magazines like La Plume, had opportunities to win, whereas today the scarcity of small companies among prize winners is obvious. They provide only 10% of the short-listed books. When it comes to the selection of entries, nothing in theory prevents judges from proposing novels of their own choice. Since the number of new titles published has soared, some publishers send dozens of their .