The Nobel Prize committee's top member and
permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, told
the Associated Press Tuesday that American literature can't compete with the
rest of the world: "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."
The reaction in the U.S. has been to accuse the Nobel
committee of either an anti-American bias, which the A.P. report suggests, or
of simple ignorance.
"Such a comment makes me think that Mr.
Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a
very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age," said Harold
Augenbraum, who heads the National Book Awards. "I'll send him a reading
list."
But there's another explanation for the paucity
of American Nobel winners. The committee doesn't oppose Americans--they oppose
postmodernism, which has dominated American literature since the 1960s. This
would explain the exclusion of not just Americans, but of prominent
non-American postmodernists like Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco. It would also
partly explain Engdahl's statement: Anyone can see that the U.S. participates
in a "big dialogue of literature"--the issue is that it isn't a
dialogue he thinks is worthwhile.
After all, the American authors who have been
denied the prize have something far more significant than their nationality in
common: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and William Burroughs are all
leading figures in the postmodern tradition. Postmodernism has been central to
American literature for decades. David Foster Wallace, whose death last month
at age 46 rocked the literary world, could not have been more postmodern.
The only exception to the Nobel committee's
apparent embargo on postmodernism has been the Turkish writer Orham Pamuk, who
won in 2006. However, Pamuk, who writes politically-charged novels about his
country's history of government and social oppression, may have won despite his
postmodern style rather than because of it. Most of the recent laureates have
written politically-oriented fiction protesting their oppressive, non-Western
societies: Doris Lessing from Zimbabwe,
Gao Xingjian from China and
V.S. Naipaul from Trinidad, for example.
Why does the Nobel committee reject postmodern
literature? Is it because postmodernism is somehow intrinsically, almost
uniquely American, and simply does not resonant with readers in Europe? Or is the answer political. Postmodernist works
are rarely political, owing to their treatment of objectivity and truth as a falsehood.
Postmodernists typically don't attack or defend any political or social
ideologies--they reject the entire premise. Whatever its virtues, the Nobel
committee's clear preoccupation with politically-oriented literature stands in
the way of recognizing postmodernist authors.
--Max Fisher