Frequent readers of this column know that in general, I’m a skeptic when it comes to literary prizes. Literature isn’t really a competitive sport, and often winners of awards represent a compromise among members of a committee.
Still, you don’t have to be a jingo patriot to feel somewhat annoyed by the recent comments by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy with respect to living American writers. In dismissing the chances of Americans who might be in the running for a Nobel Prize in literature, Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press, “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. . . . Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States.”
Unfortunately, the AP didn’t say anything about Engdahl’s credentials as a literary critic — and you have to be wary of a prize given out in the name of the inventor of dynamite.
One naturally feels a bit protective of such distinguished American writers as Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates. What’s more, Engdahl’s comments about Americans could extend to others who write in English and deserve recognition. Canadians Alice Munro and Margaret Drabble, the Irish writer William Trevor and Great Britain’s Ian McEwan all seem worthy of Nobel consideration, yet the Nobel Committee seems more often to make its selections based on political considerations rather than literary merit alone.
Harold Pinter, the playwright who won in 2005, took winning the prize as an opportunity to attack American’s conduct of the Iraq war and Doris Lessing, last year’s winner, has been known more for her political activity than her literary output in recent years.
Putting politics aside, however, the Nobel committee has been characterized throughout its history as much for misses as hits with regard to literary excellence. Among the many noteworthy writers ignored by the Swedish Academy are Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. And while T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Jean-Paul Sartre have won the prize, it’s also been given to such mediocrities as John Galsworthy, Pearl Buck and Anatole France.
In any event, it’s certainly true that the prize has had a European flavor in recent years. The last American winner was Toni Morrison in 1993. Saul Bellow won in 1976, but after that you have to go back to John Steinbeck in 1962 and Ernest Hemingway in 1954. Further, while Engdahl claims Europe is the center of the literary world, such writers as Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, J.M. Coetzee and Isaac Bashevis Singer were living in America when they were awarded the prize.
V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott are Caribbean writers and Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though South American, certainly have had an ongoing dialogue with writers in the North. It’s also unfair to brand all American writers with the tag of insularity. For example, in the 1980s, Philip Roth served as editor of a series called “Writers from the Other Europe,” that introduced such writers as George Konrad, Bruno Schulz, Jerzy Andrzejewski and, most famously, Milan Kundera to American readers.
The year’s Nobel winner is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who was described by the Swedish Academy as “an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy.” Le Clezio is unlikely to be widely known in this country since even those books of his that have been translated into English are often hard to find, either online or in bookstores — a small irony considering Engdahl’s statement regarding the failure of American writers to translate into other languages.
This, of course, says nothing against Le Clezio, who has won both the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Grand Prix Paul Morand in France. Known initially for experimental work that was praised by Michel Foucault and others, Le Clezio’s writing style changed dramatically in the 1970s, which seems to have led to a larger audience for his books in France and Europe.
It is probably useless to complain that a Swedish prize should be awarded more often to American writers and — really — what difference should it make? There are certainly enough prizes given in this country to satisfy anyone. Moreover, while politicians drone on endlessly about America being the greatest country in the world, it could be a useful corrective to hear contrary views from literati overseas, unfair as these judgments might seem.
At the same time, without finding fault with Le Clezio or other recent winners of the prize, it’s understandable that American readers might desire similar recognition for one of their own. Some, like Engdahl, may not consider America to be the literary center of the universe, but there’s no question that the U.S. is by far the largest market for books.
Even in what often seems like a post-literary age, the number of books published annually is staggering, and writing about books is growing exponentially on the Web and elsewhere. More important, we have a wide variety of gifted writers publishing here and participating internationally in literary culture.
Being recognized for this every so often somehow does not seem like an unreasonable thing to ask of the Swedish Academy.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.
