Nobel Prize – Is There an American Eligible?

Today's post is from Rick Ayers, co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher's Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives, author of Studs Terkel's Working, a Teaching Guide and co-creator (with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary. Ayers blogs about politics at the Huffington Post.

The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment 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."

Did this observation give us pause, make us hesitate, push us to ask for clarification? Indeed not. Americans don't take insults like this easily and the media took a quick break from following Sarah Palin's every utterance to chatter about the dis from these upstart Europeans. But, you know, Horace Engdahl might just have something there. We do translate too little of world literature – complaining, apparently, that such works would not sit well with the American literary sensibility. We do not really, as a culture, betray much curiosity about the world.

Perhaps this literary dust-up is a reflection of the larger change of power in the globalized theater of culture. American letters, like American military and American corporations, are used to dominating the world, lecturing the world on the proper way to do things. Our arrogance, narrowness, and provincialism are well known not only in Europe but in the Third World, which appears to be stirring and less than grateful for the beneficent gifts we have bestowed. Lately, however, with the US bogged down in an endless war in Iraq, with the economy tanking, people are beginning to wonder: perhaps it is not a unipolar world. Perhaps China, Russia, the Latin American alliance, Europe, and, yes, Africa, are beginning to call their own shots. This is true economically and culturally. Those ingrates!

Critic Adam Kirsch on NPR's Talk of the Nation complained that recent Nobel winners have been decidedly "anti-American." Harold Pinter declared that President Bush is liable for arrest for war crimes; Doris Lessing declared that Americans mourn the September 11 attacks but are blind to similar pain they inflict on others; José Saramago, Dario Fo, Günter Grass were all decidedly of the left. Again, I'm not sure how Kirsch slices his identity. But I will say that I am American and I agree that Bush should be arrested for war crimes; and I'm on the left. He betrays the very problem of our literary establishment: they conflate American rightist loyalty with being American.

And who would our literary leaders have us rally behind as the American candidate for the Nobel Prize? Who else but Philip Roth? And a fine nomination that is, I would say. Roth embodies the essence of American literature. A skilled stylist, he is also a perfect example of American narcissism, of the privileged who bemoan their victimhood. And isn't that white American culture to a T? The richest country, the ones who have devastated the environment, the ones who have armies wreaking havoc all over the world, the ones with the greatest caloric intake and the most income per capita – and we always seem to feel put upon, under attack, and aggrieved.

Of course, Americans have won in the past. Notable was Toni Morrison, whose 1993 acceptance speech should be read again and again by the current literary establishment. If there are to be other Americans up for consideration, they will probably need to come from the globalized, the marginalized, the displaced and diverse people who possess the critical eye to say something important about the U.S. I would imagine that might be Edwidge Danticat from Haiti, Jhumpa Lahiri from India and London, or Junot Diaz from the Dominican Republic. Yes, they are the Americans with a story to tell, the story of the 21st century which may yet redeem us all.

You may also be interested in Rick Ayers' previous Beacon Broadside post on challenged books and his many posts on politics at Huffington Post.

Comments

[Tom Miller]

Thanks Rick. It's not a new problem, starting with our first attempts to convert the "heathen" into our limited perspective. James Baldwin put it this way in a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel: "What Americans today don't know about the rest of the world ... is what they don't know about me."

Let's hope the fear and insular world view that has been cynically nurtured since 9/11 will be replaced after 11/4.

[MisterP]

As you say, Philip Roth is a great stylist, but to me, his introspective obsession with middle class American angst is boring. You want to say to at least half his characters, "Die, already - or just get over it!" If that's an American's reaction, imagine how he looks to a European. At least Updike can tell a joke. None of the usual American suspects has a body of work like that of Lessing or Pinter or Saramago or Gass. To your list of potential American winners, I'd add Tony Kushner, a true genius who can write richly on both a small and a worldwide scale.

[Chuck B.]

I think this part of the discussion is important, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let's take a hard look at the business, shall we?

2 book chains: Barnes and Nobel, and Borders own most of the stores in all of the Major US cities. Think about that.

Also...in a country of over 300 million a best seller is still a book that pulls over a hudred thousand.

These are the problems. Before we should even say a word about the quality of our writers we need to break the incestuous charade that is our publishing industry.

Small book stores can barely keep their head up. Why is that? Cause fewer people read anymore and we don't have a tax system that supports small business.

Heck, we the people allowed a duopoloy to form without one peep from the Anti-trust regulators. And we are talking about the most base form of intellectual growth. Nothing beats reading in terms of intellectual stimulation and growth and yet here we are a country of literate nonliterates.

Those two chains have unbelievable power. They determine the level of advances because they are in all the malls where the books will be sold.

And don't talk about Amazon.com. That's the place to go when you know what book you want. Even with its advanced browsing options you have to wade through pages of self published drek to find anything decent. Amazon.com does provide low cost books, but there is a marked difference between browsing Amazon.com and browsing a real book store. Anyone who thinks Amazon is better has an agenda.

I don't know if any readers know this, but did you know that a book selling at Amazon.co.UK takes 6 months to get to Amazon.com? Why is that? Where's the translation barrier?

Great writing, works by authors who were reviewed and shaped by editors who love the language, authors whose work evolved through the dynamics of a thriving marketplace of ideas, those are the writers who win Nobels. Those are not the writers of the USA. We have a readership that would rather pat ourselves on the back for reading "How Stella got her grove" or "The lovely bones" and ignore that only about 5 other people in the surrounding 5 blocks of our homes in our dense metropolitan cities have read it to or will read it in our life time.

We shrug and mutter about how the movie will reach more because we are too intellectually compliant to face how sad such a statement is.

Writers who reach more than less than one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of one percent can do great things. Those writers only exist in a culture that values writers and support book stores.

Not internet blogs, not websites by some lit student who needs an editor to make is rambling coherent, but book stores. Power fails, and not everyone can afford to snuggle up with a laptop to read in bed at night, and that means people do not have access. That is bad. A thriving democracy need well formed, well written ideas that reach the greatest number of the polulace. Hell, a viable society needs that. The internet and TV are not cutting it baby, and they never will.

American publishers put out books that will fit in the shelves of the two major chains, and then they sell in bult to Wallmart. Those chains now devote, on average, one quarter of their floor space to books and the rest goes to DVD/CD racks and a cafe. A cafe where people rarely read books.

We don't deserve the Nobel prize for literature, because we turned our backs on the concept of literature.

So before we talk about Roth, or Morrison, let's be honest and talk about the small independant book sellers who took the chance to put those first works on their shelves. Let's talk about paying a little extra in taxes to ressusitate our country's literary heritage.

When we have the guts to do that...then we can talk about the Nobel.

[Kathleen de la Peña McCook]

The Nobel Prize winner for 2008 should be Joyce Carol Oates. She has written intensely and brilliantly for many decades and her writing becomes stronger and more enduring with every new work.

--
Kathleen de la Peña McCook

[Denis duka]

American must understand that their dry writer cant compare with the european style.I dont waiste my time reading First New York best seller.I mean im a big fun of Heminguej,Twain,Drajzer,etc but you cant be serios to create a debate here