An Ideal Nobel

Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed presents some responses - more responses! - to laughing-boy Horace Engdahl's comments about American literature and the Nobel Prize. You can read some measured words from, among others, Ron Silliman, Levi Stahl, Charlotte Mandell, Scott Esposito and Morris Dickstein.

In these and other contributions, you will cry in agreement and then gasp in astonishment at the suggestions for contenders. Mario Vargas Llosa! Is the author of Shag Auntie Peggie really anything more than a middlebrow entertainer? The other, much bigger American names that feature tend to leave me cold, though not for Engdahl's reasons. As Charlotte Mandell's and Steven G. Kellman's observations confirm, the US has a rich engagement with world literature, only the names mentioned are not as well-known as Roth and the rest (except perhaps Paul Auster and John Ashbery). Who is insular now Mr Engdahl?

Of course, we all have our opinions about who should win, but it is axiomatic that the prize is now, as Ron Silliman says, political rather than literary. It is, therefore, in literary terms, irrelevant. (At this point, David Markson's entry in Reader's Block deserves another outing).

So what is the alternative to handing the prize to the latest politically-correct poster boy or girl? Well, how about applying Alfred Nobel's original criterion - that it should go “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”? Maybe this needs unpacking too, with a ... heaven forbid ... literary and philosophical/ethical discussion.

If the spirit of Nobel's words were applied today then the two living authors I see speaking from the Stockholm dais are Peter Handke and Aharon Appelfeld. (I'd be happy if Enrique Vila-Matas won if only to hurry along translations of his post-Montano Malady novels). There are two big reasons - neither of them literary - why the former won't win, but the latter might sneak under the PC radar; his name even appears in Morris Dickstein's contribution. However, of the several "big" Israeli names who might win this year listed by The Literary Saloon not one is Appelfeld. It's very demoralising. Next year, Schocken publishes a translation of Appelfeld's 1994 novel Laish. It has been many years since one of his novels has been published on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, Engdahl's comments apply more to Great Britain. What's more, had he directed them at us, they would have been ignored.