Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Speech (1993)/Jean-Paul Sartre's Nobel Prize Rejection Letter (1964)
(originally discussed on 3/5/2020)
This week, we will read Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech alongside Jean-Paul Sartre's 1964 rejection of his Nobel Prize. While reading Morrison's speech, it is important to study the mechanical parts of her narrative and the language she uses. She often juxtaposes phrases that are meant to signify fantasy and universality such as "Once upon a time..." against explanations of limitations imposed by the specific context of the speaker ("In the version I know..."). In doing this, the reader/listener is forced to consider not only how the colonial history of the English language makes it difficult for a reader to believe that an author marked as a black woman is telling the "Truth," but also how the idea of Morrison individually telling a "black woman's Truth" is impossible. It is also important to consider that Morrison gave her speech in front of the entire Swedish monarchy, many international dignitaries, scientists, and renowned literary and cultural figures. In a sense, she was tasked with writing a speech which Empire did not wish to hear but needed to perform hearing in order to justify its continued claim to power.
Nearly thirty years before Morrison accepted her Nobel Prize, the existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, and poet Jean-Paul Sartre rejected his in a statement made to the Swedish press. Sartre rose to prominence following the publication of his 1938 novel, Nausea, which is narrated as the diary of a young white male French philosophy student who returns from a long trip to North Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe and finds himself totally alienated, isolated, and suffering within his old French bourgeois life. Sartre was also intellectually and personally close to Simone de Beauvoir, whose text The Second Sex is credited with expanding existentialist ideas into feminist theory, as well as Frantz Fanon, whose texts Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth follow his critiques of the psychological effects of French colonial rule in Martinique and Algeria. Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon are all connected through their interest in examining the social construction of a self-other relationship, as well as the profound suffering which emerges from the feeling of being totally alienated from or oppressed within one's society. I would venture to say that Morrison offers us a template for a black feminist or black women's existentialism in her Nobel Prize speech, as well as in novels such as Sula and The Bluest Eye, which seek to narrate the world from the vantage point of black women who are suffering and alienated from their communities.
Link to Morrison speech: https://www.
Link to Sartre rejection: https://www.
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