...My my, how I can resist you

Here’s a bit of literary news from last week. I saw it today, which shows what a poor literati I am. Quoted from the New York Times:

If you’re John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates, you don’t have to worry about whether the phone bill has been paid. You won’t be getting the call from Stockholm next week.

On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Obviously the NYT was a little incensed by Engdahl’s comments, but, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care. As the article goes on to explain, the Swedes — who dominate the academy’s voting board — are not into narrative realism anymore:

This may be what Mr. Engdahl, himself a post-structuralist literary critic, was referring to when he complained about “trends in mass culture” dragging down American literature: we tend to write, for the most part, about the world we live in, without resort to the devices of myth or fable or allegory, all of which are popular in Stockholm these days.

I have no qualms if it’s truly a matter of taste (though the article makes it seem like the Swedes are the ones swinging with “trends in mass culture”). I’m not into awards, and I think the NYT article exaggerates the importance of Engdahl’s comments and perhaps the prize itself; it makes it seem as if American writers are doing something wrong, and that there’s no pattern in their awarding for writers to attune to. Writers should write to inspire, inform, and educate, not win awards. Opinions and tastes are relative to personality — what’s good reading for one person may be impossible garbage for another — so big deal if the Swedes don’t like realism or share in the American obsession with life experience and everyday life. That should have no bearing on what we write. No one should let outside trends, nor Nobel Prize secretaries, affect their art and inspiration. Hollywood script writers and ghost writers do, and they’re soulless automatons because of it.

It's true that a lot of writers cater to trends in pop culture, but I think it speaks more about our American artistic lifestyle and values than about the writers themselves. Writers in the United States (at least those who make a living by writing, unlike me) have to sway with the trends in order to eat. If it's not catchy, cool, and exciting it's not worth the paper it's printed on. Profit dominates art in the United States, and that is especially true when it comes to literature. If there's not a potential audience and a good chance the publishing company will recoup it's investment the book never hits the press. I've never been to Europe and couldn't tell you about the Swedish, Dutch, or French view on art, but I assume it's very different. From my experience, the literature and art coming out of Europe is much more experimental, avant garde, and liberated. A lot of American art is still influenced by what the Europeans are doing. Think of all the music, TV shows, and movies coming across the Atlantic and being rehashed and repackaged for American audiences. The Europeans do import their share of American schlock, but I'm sure much of it is at the behest of major corporations. They'd probably send most of it back, including the Danielle Steele, if it wasn't force fed to them.