While Americans scooped up Nobel Prizes this week for medicine, physics, and chemistry, writers and readers here and abroad waited to see if the literature jury considered Yanks too “ignorant” and “isolated” to deserve the honor.
Yesterday, with the announcement that Romanian Herta Mueller has won the prize and its $1.4 million purse, the question remains open.
Mueller, an ethnic German dissident who was persecuted for blistering accounts of life behind the Iron Curtain before the collapse of communism, won the Nobel for prose and poetry depicting “the landscape of the dispossessed,” the Swedish Academy said.
But the award did nothing to mute the echoes of last year’s insult to American writers by Horace Engdahl, then chief of the Nobel lit panel. Engdahl caused an international stink by telling The Associated Press that “Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.
“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” he continued. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”
Engdahl’s sniffy snipe may explain why no American has won the literature prize in the 16 years since Toni Morrison was tapped in 1993. But comments this week by Engdahl’s replacement as “permanent” secretary of the jury, as well as a Danish literature professor’s protest nomination of Bob Dylan for the prize, had suggested that the times might be a-changin’.
Engdahl resigned in June, and Peter Englund, who at 52 is the youngest member of the Swedish Academy, told the AP on Tuesday that the literature panel has been too “Eurocentric” while “there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well.”
Today, he had to backpedal.
“If you are European (it is) easier to relate to European literature,” Englund said. “It’s the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It’s not the result of any program.”
All but two of the literature laureates since 1994 - J.M. Coetzee of South Africa and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey - have been Europeans, including the 2008 winner, France’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. The last South American writer to be honored was Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.
But Englund’s comments earlier this week seemed to foreshadow good news for perennial North American contenders Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Israeli Amos Oz.
Harold Augenbraum, administrator of the National Book Awards, greeted Englund’s words Tuesday with a little grace and a lot of skepticism. “It’s a nice conciliatory statement,” he told the AP. “One wonders how they will comply with it. Will they bring in consultants and lecturers to explain the approach non-Europeans take to literature?
“I hope so. The Nobel has such power to help people understand literature as an elastic art form. Every reader knows it, and respects it, despite an annual slinging of mud. The better its principals understand their place in the world republic of letters, the more literature will thrive.” But mud, no doubt, will continue to be slung now that Americans writers have again been ignored.
Last year, Augenbraum’s reaction to Engdahl’s broadside was less civil. “Such a comment makes me think that Engdahl has read little American literature outside the mainstream and has a narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said, adding that he might send the Swede a reading list.
British novelist and creative writing professor Giles Foden one-upped all critics of the Nobel committee’s Eurocentrism in his reaction to Engdahl’s gas.
Citing the works of Americans Roth, Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dave Eggers, Don DeLillo, and the late David Foster Wallace among others, Foden wrote, “The proper response to Engdahl is a word conceived in America but universally understood: bullshit.”
Besides Morrison, previous American Nobel laureates include Czeslaw Milosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, Eugene O’Neill, and Sinclair Lewis.
Even songsmith Dylan seemed to have a shot this year. The Swedish Academy “should be generous in the interpretation of what is and what is not literature,” Englund also said Tuesday. “I think the boundaries are a bit more porous, a bit more generous, a bit more flexible than one imagines, and I hope that they will be expanded.”
Maybe next year.
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