The Noble Prize has always been a political affair, even when comes to literature. Last year, Horace Engdahl went as far as to say, “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." It may be true that Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon don’t translate well and perhaps many Europeans cannot relate to their work. It is also true that many Americans do not read foreign work, but domestic authors shouldn’t be punished because of the general population.
Over the past few years, the number of Americans who read a book in the course of a single year has dwindled close to 50 percent. If you only count books that are part of the canon or at least considered literary fiction, that percentage drops uncomfortably close to zero. Furthermore, the number of people in the United States who read books by Nobel winners has to be pretty limited, though there are no statistics proving this.
This is not limited to foreign winners, however, most people are unaware that Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the prize in literature. His books include “Arrowsmith” and “Babbitt,” both of which relate a specifically American experience to the world at large. By portraying the world as he saw it, readers could understand a situation well outside their own ken. These days, it is hard to find all that many people who have actually read either of those novels, or any of the rest of his work for that matter.
There are more distractions these days than there used to be. I mean there’s TV, the internet, pornography and whatnot. Hell, why read “Pride and Prejudice” when you can watch the movie and “The Lion King” is somewhat similar to “Hamlet.” It’s still depressing to think that authors have been constantly fighting censors and in some cases fleeing the homeland to get their work published and we as a people refuse to read it. If a few things went differently, “Ulysses,” “Lolita” and “The Tropic of Cancer” would never have even been printed in the US. On some level, we owe it to the author to ignore the myriad of distractions and read a damn book. We cannot remain so isolated and ignorant.
Americans at large have forgotten their literary heritage. It is hard to expect them to read Doris Lessing if they are not even vaguely aware of who Isaac Bashveis Singer was and what he wrote. Few remember Pearl S. Buck or Saul Bellow. Even Toni Morrison, the most recent American to be a recipient of the award, is read regularly by only a few and ignored by most. We are not only spatially isolated, but temporally as well. The important figures of our recent past have become as obscure as anyone else. We cannot expect to be apart of the “big dialogue of literature” if we do not even participate in our own.
—Thomas Shattuck is a junior in the School of Engineering. He can be reached at thomas.w.shattuck@vanderbilt.edu.
