The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

by Max Ross   ::   posted on Oct. 02, 2008 - 11:52am

And Horace Engdahl, top member of the award jury for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was all like, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States...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."

And I'm all, like, knee-jerking and stuff. My reaction is of course to be offended. Engdahl's stomping on my toes. I'm a devout fan of our ‘local' authors - Roth ‘n Oates ‘n DeLillo ‘n so on (and many others, but that's the trio most often mumbled about for Nobel glory). But then I'm remembering that NEA study, which was all like, "Fewer than half of all American adults now read literature," yo.

So I ask myself, and readers of this blog, like, how relevant can American literature be, if most Americans don't even read it? How can a European institution bestow an honor on an American book - an honor generally given with some emphasis on societal impact - if there isn't a societal impact? This is sort of a tree-falling-in-the-forest-type situation, no?

But then I'm also thinking, if a body of literature is the best body of literature ever, and only five people read it, but those five people comprise the Nobel voters, then shouldn't it still win? And then maybe peeps will be like, ‘let me get my eyes on that.'

Given the relative obscurity of some recent winners (Elfriede Jelinek couldn't find mainstream U.S. distribution -- only Soft Skull, when it was still indy, would take her for a while; Wis?awa Szymborska isn't exactly ubiquitous...) it would seem international readership doesn't account for much when considering the Nobel Prize.

Does my rambling thus far have anything to do with Engdahl's comments? Let's take the phrases "too isolated" and "too insular." Well. I suppose geographically we're fairly isolated from Europe. And therefore farther from the Middle East and Africa and China. And this probably has some non-geographical ramifications. Like, I suppose we really don't identify as much with the secular/traditional culture wars going on in Turkey, and maybe we have a completely different concept of the Israel/Palestine situation than the rest of the world. When's the last time we had foreign troops on our soil? These things are viewed from afar, and maybe they don't resonate within our national literature.

But we are of course a country of immigrants, and many of our best writers have been foreign-born or first-generation Americans. So it seems wrong to say we're too insular, as the insulated population is probably the most diverse in the world. There's some great literature out here, if not on separate culture, then at least on the erosion and assimilation of culture. Granted I'm a little biased.

"Don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." I confess I'm not quite sure I know what this means. Is it that our writers don't use writing to lash out against oppression and tyranny? Maybe. At the very least, there is this, though.

It's probably fair to state that the truths we glean from our fiction are more personal than political, more Paley than Pamuk. And frankly, I wouldn't trade that, even if it means our writers are for the most part excluded from Nobel consideration. Hell, my favorite European writers are the introspective ones, and they're pretty well known, collectively, for not getting the prize.

Maybe we should even feel privileged. We're allowed to search out our truths in truth, instead of having to mask it in fiction. In Sarajevo, writes Aleksandar Hemon in The Lazarus Project, "disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity."

Or maybe really David Remnick of The New Yorker got it right, when he was all like, "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures."