In Which We Pat Our Own Backs Because We Are So Great

I don’t really know how to read Liesl Schillinger’s article in the NYTBR as anything but facile self-congratulations. Apparently, Schillinger’s argument amounts to: “we don’t need to bother with that foreign literature nonsense because we nominated some immigrant authors for an impressive American award”:

Last fall Horace Engdahl, then the spokesman for the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel literature prize, criticized American fiction for being “too isolated, too insular.” In light of the controversy that followed, it seems natural to ask: was Mr. Engdahl wrong?

To refine the question: how can our literary tastes be “isolated” and “insular” when they can be assimilated and imitated so successfully? And what does it mean to write an “American” book, if you don’t need an American address to do it?

The judges of the National Book Awards tacitly suggest a heartening response: the American idea not only translates, it disregards national boundaries. To qualify for the award, a writer must have American citizenship but can carry other passports, too.

This is either hopelessly naive or hopelessly arrogant. Or to put it another way, I’m sure Horace Engdahl et al. will be pacified by Schillinger’s insistence that we need not bother with those other writers out there since American ideas are better anyway and have already slathered themselves across so much of the globe. One might respond that McDonalds hamburgers and epic Hollywood action movies have been similarly assimilated and imitated, although clearly both are the product of extremely isolated world-views and now have less to do with “America” as such than some murky post-national niche of the capitalist economy.

Of course, it’s great that America provides a home for writers from other countries, and it’s likewise great that said writers are eager to relate the immigrant experience and in so doing convey a sense of their homeland. This isn’t my favorite genre of fiction, but occasionally it has its pleasures, and I’m fine with it. But reading this literature is not nearly the same as reading the literature of someone who has spent a lifetime in a foreign country writing from within that country. Simply put: its pernicious to imagine that reading the work of an American immigrant is a substitute for reading the literature of a foreign culture. That’s why one of Schillinger’s favorite examples of the great American fiction machine, Aleksandar Hemon, chose to commit his energies to editing an annual collection of foreign fiction.

Still, as hollow as I find Schillinger’s justifications for our lack of interest in the world’s literature, I much prefer her triumphalism to her condescending caricatures of why Americans rightly don’t understand international fiction:

And it’s also true that there are limitations to how much a reader can appreciate cultural preoccupations that differ too greatly from the reader’s own. Many French readers have a passion for short, self-serious, faux-philosophical novels that stupefy American sensibilities. Many German and Northern European contemporary novels zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic realities that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing. Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership. By the same token, why should anyone be surprised if the Middle East couldn’t care less about the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and its divine secrets; or if the Germans don’t share our obsession with the Vietnam War (just as we tire of their revisitations of World War II); or if the French don’t care for the meditative descriptions in the tomes of American short stories that emerge from M.F.A. programs from Iowa to the Atlantic Ocean. Not every taste travels. But that doesn’t rob it of its intrinsic value, or of its appeal to the land that produced it.

Silly me: I thought good art transcended time and place. And silly me again: I thought I liked reading literature for the opportunity to get beyond my cultural assumptions and try to understand a different person’s point of view.

Michael Orthofer also has thoughts.

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