Octave Mirbeau’s devastating satire on academic institutions and literary prizes. A conversation exposing how the French Academy rewards connections over merit, stifles genius, and betrays the public good.
The other evening I had a rare stroke of luck, rare enough that I’m tempted to record it… I met a man of free and fair mind, who keeps his judgements about things and people free from all exaggeration in any direction, and who has truly but one passion in life: the public good… His name is W. G…, and though he is over fifty, which means he must have encountered all manner of filth in life, he remains steadfast in his love and keeps intact his illusions of regeneration, not merely social but human… I have only recorded his initials, not wishing to deliver the full name of this phenomenon to the malice of men of wit… wit full stop… for generally speaking, there are no worse ignoramuses, no worse imbeciles, no worse reactionaries, and consequently no more dangerous beasts than what we call men of wit…
We had been discussing the Nobel prizes at length…
“It’s the same with all academic prizes,” I was saying… “They’re never given for merit, but always for scheming… and servility… To get a prize, one must first be a candidate, which means being quite determined in advance to perform all the repugnant and base tasks that this very condition of candidacy presupposes and necessitates… Someone who desires a prize for literature or poetry… for instance… I speak of things I know best… must first offer the Academy a set number of copies of their books, adorned on the flyleaf with the most grovelling dedications. This humiliating formality accomplished, they unleash upon the Academy as a whole, and upon each academician in detail, the pack of their protectors… For it’s not a matter of the Academy going off to discover somewhere the ignored and hidden merit, the proud merit, the free merit… Not at all… It must know nothing of the literature and poetry of its time except what’s contained in the Institute porter’s lodge, where the competitors’ volumes are deposited. So here’s a writer like M. Charles-Louis Philippe… Mother and Child, Good Madeleine, Bubu of Montparnasse, these are truly books of fresh emotion… Here’s something that brings something new to today’s literature… Well! M. Charles-Louis Philippe will never get a prize, because he truly has better things to do than carry his books to the Institute porter and place them in the pile of works dedicated to academician X… which are the only ones from which the crowned work must be chosen, that is, the one with the most recommendations… For once again, it’s not literary merit that’s rewarded… It’s the hairdresser, the chiropodist… the doctor… the mistress… of such and such academician, it’s the dinner party… the fine connection… everything except the book or poem which are really only pretexts for arrangements… generally unspeakable ones…”
“Capital!” said M. W. G…, “that’s explicit… The other day, in one of your articles, you said Academies were sterile, without surrounding this opinion with facts or considerations that might justify it… It seemed rather like invective, and that’s always unfortunate… Now I find this epithet ‘sterile’ insufficient… I’d be perfectly indifferent if Academies were merely sterile… The tragedy is they’re disastrous for the public good… And I’ll prove it to you… Before academic foundations, there were always men capable of abnegation and sacrifice, men devoted to the public good… It’s thus—excuse this military comparison—that soldiers of a detachment march unhesitatingly to certain death when each is convinced that on his death depends the salvation of an entire army… It’s thus—unfortunately, moreover—that all religions have had their disciples, their apostles and their martyrs… It’s thus that the works of Homer, Moses, the admirable Arab poets—the greatest poets in the world—Mohammed… and others and yet others, could traverse centuries upon centuries, reach us despite the absence of printing presses, the rarity and inadequacy of means of transcription, difficulties of every sort, and active persecutions, without anyone attaching the slightest spirit of lucre or vanity of honorific reward… It sufficed for a man to be convinced that the idea expounded by a thinker in the public square or in a gathering of friends, that the beauty expressed by an open-air storyteller, might be beautiful and useful to future generations, for the thought, the poem or the tale to be piously collected and transmitted from mouth to mouth, country to country, century to century, until the moment of being fixed in durable, eternal signs… Look, Kepler’s story is enough to make one shudder… Kepler, having discovered the law of planetary movements, Kepler ill, without resources, literally dying of discouragement and hunger, found a publisher who, also not rich, knew he was undertaking a commercially disastrous venture but didn’t want a great and useful discovery to be lost, like so many others, in the immense oblivion of dead things… Well! The existence of Academies has purely and simply suppressed this force, superior to all Academies, of individual collaboration in the general good of humanity… Everyone thinks their devotion in this respect has become useless, since we now possess a special institution, the Institute, officially charged with this great, sublime and difficult mission… Besides, what use would this force be?… None… Just see what becomes of individuals’ struggles against Academies!…”
M. G. W. breathed for a moment, then continued:
“Suppose Kepler… returns… and implores your protection or mine… I’d say to Kepler: ‘If you’ve discovered, my good man, some unpublished natural laws of interest to humanity… I can only congratulate and pity you… As for judging or helping you, since you’re poor, I declare myself incompetent… There’s an Institute across the water whose job it is to do what you ask… Apply to them… I pay taxes for their upkeep, and also so they’ll discover, aid, reward and preserve genius in all its forms… and follow a whole nation’s effort towards betterment… That’s all I can do… Beyond that, I can do nothing, and no one listens to me… It’s the Institute that will discover you, my good Kepler, help you, reward you, preserve you, unless, which is most probable, they throw you out… Go and see them… It’s past the bridges… on the right… a sad and sullen façade like a dyspeptic’s face… And there’s a dome… a dome that caps it like a nightcap!… Or rather, since you can’t see it, this old Institute, as it’s always ill, always taking enemas and purgatives, go see the porter… and hand him your discovery… your genius… your good will… He’s a philosopher and he’s seen plenty… And if you have influential and right-thinking friends… beautiful ladies, infinitely snobbish, who take an interest in you… and above all, if your discovery, your genius, your good will, aren’t too difficult to understand, too revolutionary… if they don’t threaten in any way the nullity of some and the laziness of others… you can hope for a five-hundred-franc prize in five or ten years… that is, when you’re dead from hunger, despair or rage!… And why would they bestir themselves for you, these excellent people whose chests are laden with honours and crosses?…’ That’s what I’d say to Kepler!…”
M. W. G… added, after a silence:
“That’s why purely scientific communications addressed to academic sections are qualified in advance as follies and binned unread… That’s why the most remarkable works, discoveries capable of exercising a beneficial influence on humanity’s future, emanating from researchers without fortune or living outside academic spheres, are condemned in advance to disappear along with their authors… Not only do Academies discover nothing, encourage nothing but servile mediocrity, but they’ve broken men of good will of the habit of doing these indispensable tasks for them… tasks they used to do, before an authoritarian minister afflicted with chronic literary constipation had the unfortunate and criminal idea of substituting for the always brilliant and always disinterested initiative of the individual this institution through which a country’s intellectual activity and a race’s genius gradually impoverish themselves and die…”
“Yes… but the remedy?…” I ventured…
“Abolish the Academies… all the Academies!” said this gentle and just man.
And he added, with a mischievous smile:
“Even the Académie Goncourt, monsieur!…”
1902.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
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