Big Fat Story
Stephen King, David Remnick, E.L. Doctorow, on the new literature laureate
The award of the Nobel Literature Prize to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has left American authors cold. Never read him. Hardly heard of him. So who is insular? America, whose authors such as Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates have bodies of work that easily rival that of Le Clézio, or the Nobel jurors? “What I found difficult to swallow was the secretary of a committee making categorical lectures about a literary scene that he seems to know very little about,” says New Yorker editor and notable author David Remnick. And Ragtime author E.L. Doctorow praised the very insularity American authors are accused of. “When a great writer is resolutely local and specific in his or her attentions—whatever the narrative strategy—the work has universal relevance.”
Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP
Born in Nice, Le Clézio wrote his first two novels aged eight when en route to Nigeria with his father, who had served there in the British army during the war. He was brought up to speak both French and English, and he studied English literature as an undergrad in England, though he has only written books in French. His first novel was about Europe seen through the eyes of an unwanted African immigrant and it set the tone for his later work. He is concerned with the clash between the western world and the unspoiled third world, which qualifies him for the Nobel literature prize’s insistence that a winning writer’s work be “idealistic.” Further, the Nobel jury consider him “an ecologically engaged author.” When it comes to winning a Nobel, being anti-colonial and green helps a lot.
Photo: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty
Even England’s top literary people haven’t read him
Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, hasn’t read much Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio. But then no one much else has either, outside of France. His most famous novel has not even appeared in an English language edition. Although “not a fully paid member of the Washington-hating Paris intelligentsia” … “his subjects are commonly the peoples erased by dominant cultures -- in America, Africa and the Pacific.” When his 2006 novel Ourania told of an Inuit alcoholic's son at a school for abandoned children, the rumors started that a Nobel Prize was surely on the way.
Did He Have to be French?
So a Frenchman won the Nobel Prize for Literature. No surprise there, after the chief Nobel judge said American writers were too ‘insular’ to win. Stephen King, E.L.Doctorow and others see a new cultural gulf between us and Europe?
Nobel's top guy says Americans cannot win a Nobel for literature as they are ‘too isolated, too insular’ and ‘ignorant’
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, dashed Nobel hopes for every American writer when he dismissed our authors as "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." "The US is too isolated, too insular," he told a group of American journalists. "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." Writing in The Guardian, n+1's Marco Roth writes that Engdahl's dismissal of American writers "one of those incoherent anti-American rants that somehow transformed all of American literature into Sarah Palin and George Bush." “There should be global prizes for this kind of interventionist, political writing, and apparently there is. It's called the Nobel prize,” he writes. “There should also be global prizes for literary excellence. … If anyone has any leftover money this time next year, maybe we should start one.”
Photo: Bertil Ericson/AP
Here are all the American winners, in a gallery
It’s an impressive list that defies the Nobel chairman’s suggestion that Americans do not have it in them to win the top literature prize. Few nations could rival this roster: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Hardly “isolated.” Certainly not “insular.”
Photo: Drew Farrell/Retna
The Nobel committee are insular, isolated, and ignorant themselves, writes Adam Kirsch
Engdahl's remarks, writes Adam Kirsch, "made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature." Not only is he voicing a stereotype that goes back 200 years, but the academy's permanent secretary, in decrying US provincialism, ignores the fact that our literature's "backwardness" was once most prized by the committee. Until the most cosmopolitan of American writers, Philip Roth, gets the literature prize, "there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes."
Photo: AP
Here are all the American winners, in a gallery
It’s an impressive list that defies the Nobel chairman’s suggestion that Americans do not have it in them to win the top literature prize. Few nations could rival this roster: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Hardly “isolated.” Certainly not “insular.”
Photo: Drew Farrell/Retna
Nobel's top guy says Americans cannot win a Nobel for literature as they are ‘too isolated, too insular’ and ‘ignorant’
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, dashed Nobel hopes for every American writer when he dismissed our authors as "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." "The US is too isolated, too insular," he told a group of American journalists. "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." Writing in The Guardian, n+1's Marco Roth writes that Engdahl's dismissal of American writers "one of those incoherent anti-American rants that somehow transformed all of American literature into Sarah Palin and George Bush." “There should be global prizes for this kind of interventionist, political writing, and apparently there is. It's called the Nobel prize,” he writes. “There should also be global prizes for literary excellence. … If anyone has any leftover money this time next year, maybe we should start one.”
Photo: Bertil Ericson/AP
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