Nobel literature head: U.S. too insular to compete

Wednesday 01st October, 05:03 AM JST

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

Latest 15 of 27 Total Comments Show All

smithinjapan at 12:52 PM JST - 1st October

Sez: "Language and culture are inseparable. There is no language which does not provide a lens on the human condition and there is no language which does not let its best poets and authors focus that lens on something of interest to people of all cultures."

I agree with you... but one of the points (particular in regards to being 'insular', as Enghdal puts it, is that there is not enough translation work coming from the US -- in other words, there's no access to the work being put out there. Much easier to do in Europe, of course, but that's not the point.
Suzu1 at 01:41 PM JST - 1st October

Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, and the late David Foster Wallace are just some examples of how absurd this pretentious critic's comments are on contemporary American novelists.
SezWho2 at 02:15 PM JST - 1st October

smithinjapan,

I think I would agree that readers in the United States don't have enough access to translations of great world literature. However, I'm not sure that I could say that writers in the US don't have that access or interest. Additionally, I would hesitate to assume that writers in the US are incapable of reading world authors in their original languages.

I think that there is a point to talking about the "big dialogue of world literature" but I think it's a little smug to believe that the big dialogue is taking place in London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm but not in New York.
Sarge at 02:38 PM JST - 1st October

"The academy hardly ever picks best-selling authors"

If I wrote a book, I would feel more satisfaction if it sold heaps of copies than if it sold few copies and won a Nobel prize. Not to mention I'd be rich! Nobel prize, schnobel prize!
smithinjapan at 02:39 PM JST - 1st October

Suzu: I love DeLillo in particular, although he has a serious dry spate before 'The Flying Man' (I actually threw 'Ratner's Star' out the window at least once before insisting on going out to get and finish it). Still, it's inconsistancies like this in DeLillo that undermine the body of a writer's work as a whole at times. Americans that have won in the past, as well as those of other nationalities, have been stellar in EVERY piece of work they do (granted some comparatively not as good, but still).

Sez: Again, I see eye-to-eye with you more or less, but what I meant by the 'They don't translate enough...' comment in the article was related (and as such uses the active 'translate') to the fact that American work itself is not being translated enough, and is a clever pun on whether they don't care to send it out beyond their borders, or whether those outside them do not want to receive.

I know for a fact that there is plenty access to translation in the US, but perhaps not so much US work translated.
cleo at 02:40 PM JST - 1st October

Not to mention I'd be rich! Nobel prize, schnobel prize!

Doesn't a Nobel Prize come with a sackful of money?
Sarge at 02:45 PM JST - 1st October

Cleo - Nowhere near as much money as selling heaps of books! And wouldn't you feel good knowing that hundreds of thousands or millions of people paid to read what you wrote? Heck, I should get a Nobel prize for my posts here ha ha ha
Noripinhead at 03:18 PM JST - 1st October

When Kazuo Ishiguro is much older, they'll probably give it to him. He's still got a few good novels left in him, and he has yet to top his classic "The Remains of the Day".
SezWho2 at 06:44 PM JST - 1st October

smithinjapan,

OK, I see what you mean now. I'm not sure that's what Engdahl meant, however. The antecedent of "they" isn't clear but from the context here it might be "writers" or "[people in the] U.S.", not "books". As far as I'm concerned, "the books don't translate enough" would be an awkward way of saying "the books aren't translated widely" or "we don't translate enough of their books".

I had thought that the decision to translate was a local decision. European curiosity has been sufficient for the Europeans to translate a relative hack like Dan Brown. Maybe the literati over there should get busy with Pynchon, Oates and other great American authors.
Azrael at 11:06 PM JST - 1st October

I wonder if there is a correlation between this news and that "Have your say" on JT that went, "Why do moviegoers in English-speaking countries tend to avoid foreign movies with subtitles, while in Japan, for example, it's just the opposite?"

Do Americans decidedly avoid foreign films and books (not counting the obliged classics of universal literature, most of whose authors are long dead) and rather exclusively consume their own produce? Do average, everyday Americans shun foreign literature? Is it rare for Americans to speak more than one language?

I do have noticed the US looks in general, insular. Americans (as in the average American you can meet on the internet - a paradox?) tend to be generally unaware of the world outside their borders, and instead have quite stereotyped views of other countries. Generally they have no malice about it, just a sort of pre-packaged view. However I cannot quite judge a whole nation for its internauts. Brain fodder from early infancy and throughout youth forms the base from which authors write. I don't see anything wrong on writing from "behind the fence," keeping literary concerns within the borders of their own country; but how often do Americans look outside? In a way yet empirically, what Horace Engdahl said seems to make sense. I may be wrong, but the US is not part of any "international community" I can think of. Yes, the US is a prominent member of many international organizations... but it's not quite the same. The US is not part of any "region," not even with its closest neighbors Canada and Mexico. The Mediterranean, the Caribbean for example, host numerous countries whose culture is entwined with one another. The US looks orphan sometimes. I think global participation as members of a cultural whole (western Europeans, latin americans, arabs, and so on) give people a pool of exchange where cultural enrichment flows freely. Where do the Americans get this? Does such exchanges reflect in American literature? How?
SezWho2 at 02:36 PM JST - 2nd October

Azrael,

That's a very interesting post. And I think you have made some good points. Without getting into it deeply, I'd just like to say that one of the things that gives America cultural enrichment is immigration whether the path was forced--as in the case of Alice Walker and Tony Morrison--or voluntary as in the case of Amy Tan and Khaled Hosseini.

I'd grant you that all of these writers write from the experience of difficulty in acculturation, yet I doubt that cultural enrichment ever flows only one way. The English language itself is a voracious sponge for words and ideas from other cultures. Although I have no bone to pick with the French, you might compare that to their Academy's zeal to keep their language pure.
Nessie at 10:39 AM JST - 4th October

Interesting one from Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2201447/pagenum/all/#page_start

...The Washington Post's Michael Dirda pointed out that it was Engdahl who displayed "an insular attitude towards a very diverse country": It is a bit rich for a citizen of Sweden, whose population of 9 million is about the same as New York City's, to call the United States "isolated." David Remnick noted that the Swedish Academy itself has been guilty of conspicuous ignorance over a very long period: "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."

When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back practically to the Revolutionary War. It was nearly 200 years ago that Sydney Smith, the English wit, famously wrote in the Edinburgh Review: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" Ironically, though, while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel's history, it was exactly its "backwardness" that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature.

Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them.

Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure.
SezWho2 at 07:17 AM JST - 5th October

Nessie,

Thanks for the link. While not disagreeing with what you excerpted here, it was difficult for me to get a feel for the full article. The full article, which is not much longer, makes it pretty clear that the writer believes that, if anything, it is the Europeans who have a debt to the US. I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but it certainly is pugnacious Americana.
Nessie at 09:39 AM JST - 5th October

Sez, I think the author perhaps overstates his case, but he does make a good point of the Europeans tending to go for rustic realism when it comes to American literature, in which case one ignores large streams of American literature -- particularly the streams that are likely to be the least insular.

I met a German woman once in Indonesia whose thesis was that the US has had no culture. I said, "What about jazz?" She said she didn't like it; it didn't count. "Cinama?" She didn't like it; it didn't count. Many Europeans make the mistake of thinking that no European culture equals no culture.

Americans, on the other hand, make the mistake of thinking multiculturalism makes the US automatically less insular and more cultural, which is not necessarily the case.
SezWho2 at 07:16 AM JST - 6th October

Nessie,

I guess it depends on who's keeping score:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Of course, that would be a cinematic take on things--which (according to your German expert) does not count.