Plasma Pool

On Thursday, the Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller. Before today, I knew nothing of Müller’s work and had frankly never heard of her. (I can’t have been the only one — it turns out only five of her books have been translated into English, although that number will surely go up now.) But once I heard her name, I knew exactly what subjects she covers, because the committee has become more predictable than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving an Oscar to Kate Winslet for playing a retarded famous person with a weight problem.

In their press release, the Nobel Committee says they recognized Müller for how she, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” I have no idea what “the frankness of prose” means, but I don’t think you can argue that the dispossessed’s landscape should not be depicted. The problem is that the Nobel Committee now only gives the Prize in Literature to people who write about this topic.

I harbor no ill feelings towards Müller. I’m sure she is a fine writer who accurately and movingly depicts life under the Ceausceau regime in Romania. This passage, from a New York Times article on the award, is certainly evocative:

Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. Then they opened their eyes wide. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.

Again, it’s good, and big ups to her for receiving the hefty Nobel paycheck and what will surely be a giant boost in sales. I don’t want to knock writers who win the Nobel Prize, just to speak up for every writer (and reader, by extension) who does not fit the Nobel Committee’s very narrow definition of prize-worthy literature.

Look at the last few winners of the prize. The names might not pop out at you, but that’s unimportant — they are notable for the fact that all of them tackle themes of exile, oppression, disenfranchisement, and clashes of cultures. In other words, they are overtly political. While it’s not exactly my favorite type of fiction, it’s certainly okay for a writer to focus on politics in their work. I haven’t read most of the recently honored writers, but J.M. Coetzee is one of my favorites, and if not every other winner matches his willingness to be weird (Elizabeth Costello forever!) and refusal to give easy answers, I’m sure his fellow recipients have serious merits.

But the Nobel Committee’s refusal to honor anyone but overtly political and frequently oppressed writers sends a message that they think this is the most serious type of literature, the genre most worthy of fulsome praise and readers’ money. Essentially, it says that many types of literature can be good, but only one kind is best. And this elitism cuts deeper still. Here’s Nobel Secretary Horace Engdahl:

“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” Mr. Engdahl said, “not the United States.”

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” he continued. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

“That ignorance is restraining.”

Okay, whatever. I think there are plenty of totally legitimate American writers who deserve the Nobel Prize — the most obvious ones would be Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo — but that’s not the worst thing about Engdahl’s quote. Also look past the hypocrisy of someone criticizing the the U.S. publishers and authors for being isolated and insular right after saying that Europe is clearly the hot-shit center of the literary world.

The really awful part of this is that Engdahl thinks that the Nobel Committee is somehow not isolated from “the big dialogue of literature.” Forgive me my extrapolation, but it seems as if Engdahl and his Nobel cronies think “the big dialogue of literature” should be about the dispossessed and political turmoil. In other words, that literature is primarily a force for directly confronting injustice in the world. That’s part of its importance, to be sure, but there is also much more to it, including an intensely personal aspect to the reading experience that cannot be explained by big political discussions. There are other ways to be trenchant and probing and — really pay attention to this one, Nobel Committee — socially meaningful.

People like to mention that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust never won the Nobel Prize, but the committee has a rich history of giving the prize to writers who would probably have little chance of claiming the honor in today’s climate: Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Issac Bashevis Singer (1978), Saul Bellow (1976), Samuel Beckett (1969), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), John Steinbeck (1962), Ernest Hemingway (1954), William Faulkner (1949), and potentially many more writers who I just don’t know enough about to list. Many of these authors cover political ground, but they’re not seen primarily as political animals. They tell stories with universal relevance.

It’s also instructive to note the reasons for many of these writers’ selections. Hemingway won “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” Steinbeck, who wrote one of the most famous novels about the dispossessed in the history of American literature, was honored “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” García Márquez claimed the Nobel “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”

Compare these explanations to some of the recent winners. Coetzee “in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.” Orhan Pamuk “in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” Imre Kertész won “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

The differences should be obvious — whereas writers were once honored for how they told stories, they are now praised for what they tell stories about. The note on Müller is perhaps the most troubling: “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, [she] depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Poetry and prose are described only in the broadest terms. Her style and narrative gifts are secondary to her subject matter.

I don’t want the Nobel to devolve into an award given to whomever generates the most sales and seems like the biggest star in the literary universe. We already have that in the form of the canon, and while it gets lots of people to read lots of good books, it also forced me to read The Scarlet Letter three times in five years. The Nobel Committee should be recognizing writers whose worldwide fame might not match their gifts. But in giving the award to one type of writer and progressively devaluing style and narrative, the committee is broadcasting the belief that the thematic final products of literature are more important than the down-and-dirty revelations of a well-constructed sentence or a surprising turn in the plot. To put it another way, the experience of reading continues to get less and less important. If all we cared about were themes and subject matter, we’d just go straight to the Cliff’s Notes.