The Meritless Nobel Prize?

Thursday morning, somebody will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature... and that somebody probably won't be American. Sure, there are the usual rumors being floated around about Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, but it's not very likely to happen. Heck, people are desperate enough to create rumors about Salinger winning the award! So, why hasn't an American won the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993? Prize secretary Horace Engdahl provides the answer:

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature . . . That ignorance is restraining."

How dare you, Horace Engdahl! Why, that makes me want to blast Kid Rock in my SUV as I read passages from Blood Meridian! Seriously though, if Engdahl truly believes that American fiction is superficial, he's lost touch with what makes fiction powerful altogether.

Fiction's power does not necessarily lie in the political, nor does it lie in stylistic concerns that claim themselves as "high art." Instead, it lives in the power to unlock a universal truth, to somehow change the way a reader sees the world once they've put a book down. This is something that is true of fiction on both sides of the pond. It is not some sort of strictly European sensibility. Truth is fair game for all wordsmiths.

True, the Nobel has been awarded to some truly deserving talents over the years. Faulkner, Naipul, Coetzee -- all possessed a talent that can only be called superhuman. But it goes beyond Faulkner's wonderful use of stream-of-consciousness or Coetzee's wonderful economy of language. They went beyond painting the landscapes of America and South Africa -- they went for something deeper, something inside their souls.

The point is, there are plenty of writers in America deserving of the prize. Off the top of your head, I'm sure you could bat off a few names without thinking -- Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Chabon -- and many more after giving it more thought. It goes beyond politics and into the realm of creating a good work, of giving a lens to the world around us.

Soon, all fiction, all frivolous, nationalistic issues are going to be a moot point anyway. As writers continue to ignore the significance of prizes, we'll see a true community of great fiction that ignores whether the novel is French of American -- you need to look no further than at Zadie Smith to see it happening already.

It can be very easy to look at past Laureates and claim that some choices were political. For instance, many have accused Orhan Pamuk's recent win as something beyond his abilities as a writer (brilliant as they may be). Is there something political about the Nobel Prize? Sure. Should there be? Probably not.

Am I getting too worked up over this? More than likely. Maybe at a time like this, those of us literati getting worked up over the Nobel should look at what last year's winner Doris Lessing had to say:

"Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."

Comments

[TimJMarshall]

Hi, agreed on the literature stuff. I think the peace prize is devalued as well. Whats with giving it to environmentalists and human rights people, they may be worthy of honour but Nobel wanted the prize to be about disarmanent - this year the group coming closest of those nominated has to be the Cluster Bombs lot. http://blogs.news.sky.com/foreignmatters

[pinchme]

Mr Tomford and Mr relevancematters,
Q. What do the following writers have in common?:
Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, W.H. Auden, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Musil, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado, Zbigniew Herbert, Vladimir Nabokov, Cesare Pavese, John Ashbery, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bishop, Osip Mandelstam, Zora Neale Hurston, Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg. . . doubtless I'll be kicking myself in a few minutes for the ones I've left out . . . (Of course Hardy is most famous for his novels, which he abandoned after Jude the Obscure offended the pants off his fellow Brits, but once he returned to his first love he wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language--and in plenty of time for the Nobel committee to take notice. (He lived till 1928, for crying out loud.))
A. They didn't win the Nobel Prize. They're most of the very greatest writers of the century; the best of them rank among the greatest writers of all time.
And the laureates? Mostly an embarrasing collection of "highly esteemed" second- and third-rate plodders with the occasional gem thrown in (Neruda, Yeats, Kipling, Beckett, Shaw, maybe Laxness, probably a few others) because even with its collective nose stuck that far in the air the committee couldn't quite miss every worthy writer.

[charlygardel]

Throw in Jorge Luís Borges...

[dtrobert]

Engdahl is quite correct. Americans, on the whole, have little if any exposure to the world at large, and it shows in every cultural product. Literary fiction is only one of its victims. There is also a raging anti-intelligence streak (not anti-intellectual) in American structure, where even the thought of thinking is denigrated and relegated to the "elites".

[pfc1369]

This is a selection process that over the decades have overlooked Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Jorge Luis Borges, for a steady stream of (not all, but most) mediocrities.

[relevancematters]

I have a degree in Literature (ca 1972) and I have to tell you, I quit reading "serious" American fiction years ago. I found too much of it gratuitous, self-indulgent, superficial, and--yes--insular. I cut my eye teeth on Steinbeck and Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and the incomparable (if too deeply reticent) Harper Lee. I deeply admired Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Sigrid Undset , who won the 1928 Nobel for the stunning "Kristin Lavransdatter", which nobody reads anymore because it's--like--really long.

Nobody writes like that anymore. Nobody thinks like that anymore. I know--I'm old, and my touchstones are passing into history. But somehow I think the Nobel Committee is as disappointed in American Letters as I am. I know you younger lit types are loyal to your generations, but the truth is, our literature reflects our collective state of mind, which--until the very recent advent of rising intellectuals like Barack Obama and Rachel Maddow--has been immersed in the standard-less mediocrity of polarized thinking, television dramas, action movies, chick lit and upgraded comic books.

Our standards are very low.