When the Nobel Prizes launched in 1901, possible choices for the award in literature, bestowed upon a living writer to honor their entire life’s work, included such historical titans as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The Swedish Academy—18 elders with absolute power to choose the winner—instead gave the first medal to a formalist poet named Sully Prudhomme and the second, in 1902, to a historian named Theodor Mommsen.
There’s a lesson here: Literary heroes of an age are often neglected by future times and tastes. If you’d asked most Italians in the 1930s to pick the greatest poet since Dante, they’d have named Gabriele d’Annunzio. (It helped that he was a Fascist.) In the ’40s and ’50s, many Americans deemed Pearl Buck the finest living novelist.
Given that literary fame is so fickle, it might make more sense to anoint a work that’s mutable—an all-encompassing text that changes at the pace of society itself. Today there is such a work. And that is why, in 2013, the Swedish Academy should award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Google.
The idea isn’t as implausible as one might think. Consider that the Nobel Peace Prize—intended for “the person who shall have done the most … for fraternity between nations,” in Alfred Nobel’s wording, was awarded to the European Union in 2012. As Ulrike Guérot of the European Council on Foreign Relations told the BBC, “There is a symbolic component to the award, and also a promotional and supportive component.” That is, the prize was designed to remind Europeans, at a time when their unity was under siege, that the EU had a higher purpose in its peacekeeping mission.
If the EU can count as a “person,” then it’s hard to see why Google couldn’t.
Is Google literature? As a search engine, of course, it lacks a conventional narrative.
Is Google literature? As a search engine, of course, it lacks a conventional narrative. But a traditional bildungsroman would hardly suit our era. Not even James Joyce could capture the fractured nature of 21st-century life, let alone the nearly unlimited interconnectedness among people and events these days.
Google can, and it does so as a matter of course, tracking the entire world’s culture as it shifts and evolves, cataloging the news of the day, sifting it all for relevance, and preserving it for posterity. The prize for literature in 1902, remember, was awarded to a historian—yet another precedent for honoring Google, given that any worthwhile history of the current century will need to begin with Google’s massive, endlessly complex record of all we now think and do.
The honor would be important symbolically too, because Google, like the EU, is widely disparaged by those who ought to treasure it most.
The worst assault involves Google Books, which the Authors Guild, a trade group for writers, has been dogging in court since 2005. Their class-action suit would punish the company for its Library Project, which makes books from the past searchable. Though Google hasn’t been intimidated, some libraries have, and Google needs broad access to library collections if its Books project is to be comprehensive. Copyright law was created to balance the interests of authors and the public. Giving Google the Nobel Prize would make a powerful statement in favor of fair use.
According to Nobel’s will, the accolade is to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Google Books provides greater literary benefit to more people than any single title or oeuvre. Whatever your taste in reading, you’re a beneficiary, as Google’s digitization protects books from hurricanes and fires and censorship by repressive regimes. There could be as many as 20 million volumes in the public domain, and already more than 2 million of them—from Utopia to Rights of Man—can be downloaded free (with help from proxy servers, if necessary) in Iran, Syria, and China. (In that respect, Google stands in marked contrast to last year’s Nobel laureate, the Chinese novelist Mo Yan, a Communist Party favorite who recently compared state censorship to airport security checks. That doesn’t exactly move literature in an ideal direction.)
This year the Swedish Academy has the opportunity to get it right. A prize for Google would reward all authors—those who work with words as well as those who write in code. If nothing else, the committee should do it to preserve the Nobel’s own history: The easiest way to read the poems for which Sully Prudhomme won the first Nobel is, of course, Google Books.
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