We didn't want that Nobel anyway

I share Adam Kirsch’s frustration and pique regarding the statements by the Nobel academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, that Americans haven’t gotten the Nobel recently because “[t]he 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.” It was of course a breathtakingly pig-headed and ignorant thing for Engdahl to say, but it’s also clarifying in a couple of ways. As Kirsch points out, now we know that,

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.

And we also now know what the real motivation was behind some of the most recent Nobel picks:

Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

What does distinguish the Nobel Committee’s favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that “the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless” and to call for “Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.” Doris Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as “neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think,” adding: “They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be.”

I would also add that it exposes the silliness of the enforced ghettoization of writers of speculative fiction. (And, incidentally, s.f. is particularly vibrant on both English-speaking sides of the Atlantic, which probably counts against it in the eyes of Mr.Engdahl’s set.) Do names like Jelinek, Fo, Pinter, and Lessing really stand so tall over names like Ellison, Herbert, Pynchon, LeGuin, and Stephenson, either in terms of accomplishment or influence?

P.S. I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem at the moment. I’ll let you all know how it turns out.