Short Stack

Cherchez le Nobel

From our new daily blog, Short Stack.

We know that our economy, which used to be our ace, is in the tank. But, to make matters worse, the highest member of the Nobel Prize jury has now proclaimed us cultural Philistines. We're just too insular and ignorant to produce great literature, says Horace Engdahl.

And, not only that, but Europe's nattering classes have been laughing outright at the podium vernacular of a certain Alaskan vice presidential candidate. We're crass, vulgar and dumb, they say. Hootenanny navel-gazers. Incapable of making art, brokering the peace, even maintaining our vaunted prosperity. No matter the laurels handed to us in science this week, we'll feel it where it hurts: in the cultural department. We're like the fool who's expected to pay for dinner, but whose conversation only draws sneers.

It set me to thinking of Mark Twain, who once wondered what we'd think of the French, if all we ever saw of them was the Can-Can.

So I picked up a book on Twain and read this in one of his letters: "I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes . . . but hunted for bigger game -- the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere."

It strikes me as apt wisdom.

Perhaps great literature, particularly as perceived by "the cultivated classes," strives to do more than what Twain calls "entertain," but it can hardly strive, as Engdahl put it, to "participate in the big dialogue of literature." Which would mean what? Participate in dissent? Angst? Malaise? Abstraction? These are qualities the Nobel seems to honor.

My favorite authors never won the Nobel: Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov, Fernando Pessoa, Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera, Isaac Babel, E.M. Forster, Machado de Assis, Leo Tolstoy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Iris Murdoch, Marguerite Duras. And even a few Americans: Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, Cormac McCarthy, Stanley Elkin, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson.

And, of course, Mark Twain.

As Twain once said: "On the whole, it is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them." Watching the Nobel's track record in literature in these past years, I'd say there's a gaping ravine between the having and the deserving. Mr. Engdahl can keep his prize. [Short Stack, Monday, Oct. 6]

* * *

Of course, now we know that the 2008 Nobel laureate for literature is the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and that Mr. Engdahl was having a bit of fun with us when he said we don't translate enough. Le Clézio has been living in near anonymity right in our midst: He spends part of each year in New Mexico. Here is what Book World had to say of him in a 1994 review of his novel The Prospector:

"Before there was multiculturalism, there was the work of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. His 20 volumes of novels, short stories and essays are remarkable in their recurrent portrayals of native peoples and spiritual systems devastated by colonialism. . . . The Prospector offers a wonderful one-volume compendium of all the grand myths rooted in the European colonial experience, combining elements from Paul et Virginie, Robinson Crusoe, and Indiana Jones."

-- Marie Arana