The Common Reader
Well-known member
Audouard's comment makes the Goncourt sound a lot like another literary prize...that doesn't get it right all the time, or even most of the time, but that occasionally manages to shine light on something genuinely new and important.The Goncourt is also very much a horse-trading thing where publishing houses, not authors, are rewarded. It's only in 2008 that jurors were forbidden to have a concomitant salaried position in a publishing house... While it remains prestigious to the wider public (and, especially, lucrative for the publishing house!), French readers know not to expect much. An article here; a couple of quotes:
Bory (1945 laureate, for his first book!):
"Le Goncourt, c'est automatique, vous attire le grand public. Il vous aliène, c'est aussi automatique, les “connaisseurs”, aux yeux de qui le Goncourt est une maladie assez honteuse, un peu dégoûtante, qui se tient entre le lupus et la blennorragie. (…) Résultat : le grand public lit votre livre pour l'unique raison qu'il a eu le Goncourt, mais ne lit pas vos livres suivants, pour la bonne raison qu'ils ne l'auront pas. (…) Les connaisseurs ne liront pas votre livre parce qu'il a eu le Goncourt, et ne liront pas les suivants parce que le premier a eu le Goncourt."
"The Goncourt, automatically, gets you the wider public. It alienates, also automatically, the "connaisseurs", in whose eyes the Goncourt is a rather shameful illness, a bit disgusting, between lupus and gonnorhea. Result: the wider public reads your book for the sole reason that it got the Goncourt, but won't read your following ones, for the good reason that they won't. Connaisseurs won't read your book because it got the Goncourt, and won't read your following ones because the first got the Goncourt."
Audouard, french humorist (who did not get it): "Il n'empêche que le Goncourt est une connerie persévérante et diabolique. Qu'il fausse totalement la vie littéraire de ce pays. Qu'il abîme ceux qui l'obtiennent, aigrit ceux qui le ratent, encombre la presse des humeurs de M. Armand Salacrou et n'a d'autre intérêt que de faire croire à M. Armand Lanoux qu'il a de l'importance. Dans ce cas on peut véritablement parler de connerie institutionnelle. Il n'améliore ni ne détériore ceux qui en font partie. Ils ne sont pas cons à titre privé. Mais ils sont devenus les agents actifs d'une dangereuse connerie collective. Et le pire, c'est qu'ils le savent."
"Nevertheless, it must be said that the Goncourt is a fucking stupidity, enduring and diabolical. That it distorts this country's literary life completely. That it damages those who get it, embitters those who don't, litters the media with the tantrums of jurors and has no other point than to make laureates-turned-jurors believe that they're important. In this case we can truly speak of institutional stupidity. It neithers betters nor worsens those who are part of it. They are not privately stupid. But they have become the active agents of a dangerous collective stupidity. And the worst thing is that they know it."
Gracq wrote his pamphlet Literature on the Stomach in 1950, castigating the whole literary prize rigmarole; the Goncourt wanted to give him the prize in 1951 for the Rivage des Syrtes (still one of the most magnificent French-language novels I've read), which he promptly (and coherently) refused.
The masculinity of the jurors, short-listed and laureates has also been repeatedly and acidly pointed out by various feminist groups.
TL;DR: the Goncourt is more of an incestuous industry than a genuine literary prize. I still flip through them if I have the chance, on n'est jamais à l'abri d'un heureux accident....
Remember that the Goncourt brought Proust (in 1919 for A l'ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs ), Malraux (in 1933 for La Condition humaine ), and Patrick Chamoiseau (in 1992 for Texaco ) to prominence. It also celebrated writers such as Marguerite Duras, André Schwartz-Bart, and Simone De Beauvoir (even if, in the case of the latter, it arguably ought to have been given to one of her other books).
For those who speak French there is a brilliant series of podcasts by Pierre Assouline tracing the history of the prize decade by decade: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/du-cote-de-chez-drouant