Culturally Insular

This has to be the dumbest thing to come out of the Swedish Academy since Knut got all up in arms about giving Elfriede Jelinek the Nobel.

A number of people had emailed or called me about the controversial
statements made by Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl
about American writing, basically stating that the U.S. is too
culturally insular to have a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize.

Speaking of Jelinek, apparently a famous recluse with a recognized "social phobia" isn’t too insular to receive a Nobel.

The fact that someone like Jelinek could receive a Nobel just underscores how absurd these remarks are . . . fact is, by and large Americans are insular, but that obviously doesn’t mean that any one American can’t have read and traveled widely. Examples of Americans writing fiction reflective of this can be easily provided.

Of course, this is to ignore the whole issue that you don’t necessarily have to write fiction that proves you’re not insular to write well. But this isn’t the kind of fiction the Nobel is interested in.

This also underscores how the Nobel has more or less become an award for politically engaged writers. To be a writer the Academy likes you probably do have to think Europe is the center of literary culture and be enough of a world citizen to acutely break down some major socio-political topic in your works. Fine. Lots of good novels have been written that do this, but it betrays a significant ignorance of literary culture to assume this is the best or only kind of novel.

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