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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Wred Fright, ULA
No Nobel For You, Yankee Doodler!
Every fall, literati worldwide look forward to the announcement of
the winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. This year's
laureate is Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian novelist. It's been over a
decade since an American won the prize. The last was Toni Morrison
in 1993. Now, seeing as how Americans are constantly reminded by
their domestic media that the United States of America is the
“world's lone superpower” and that our culture “dominates the
globe,” it may strike the remaining Americans who can think that it is
odd that more of our writers (since our American literature, like the
rest of our culture, is surely the best in the world!) haven't been
chosen as worthy of the Nobel Prize, world-class authors, winners of
the most prestigious prize in literature. Among those who ponder the
situation, three likely explanations arise:
(1) The kinder, gentler hypothesis. There are a lot of countries in the
world, and a lot of writers in each country, so it's reasonable that
even the best country in the world (U! S! A! USA! USA!) can only hog
so many awards. One a decade is the best we can hope for.
(2) The it's-a-conspiracy hypothesis. The Swedish Academy, like the
rest of “old Europe,” hates us Americans because we kick so much
arse worldwide (why look what we did to Saddam, we'd eat
Stockholm for lunch), so they unfairly promote European writers
such as Jelinek and other riff-raffish cultural inferiors over the likes
of such American “supergeniuses” as Don DeLillo, John Updike,
Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, and so on (even with the odds stacked
against him, Thomas Pynchon's still got money on him in Vegas to
be the next American laureate though).
(3) The American literature sucks hypothesis. In a society where
such influential and important authors as Kathy Acker, Charles
Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller
usually are missing entirely from the standard literary canon (e.g.,
The Norton Anthology of American Literature taught in college
courses) in favor of blander, less interesting writers culled from
pyramid scheme/academic welfare Master of Fine Arts in Creative
Writing programs (take a look at some of the writers who appear in
those anthologies where the aforementioned authors should), and
where contemporary writers of similar merit are almost completely
ignored by large, creepy corporations who'd rather sign the latest
reality television star (Paris Hilton anyone?) to a book contract in
order to make a quick, shortsighted buck (and then it's decades in
the remainders bin, with the next stop the landfill) rather than nurture
quality writers whose works would continue to sell and make profits
(and whose early editions would end up preserved in libraries and
rare and used bookstores) for decades, what the fuck do you
Americans expect? You’ve got a literary culture completely bankrupt
of world-class work, and the Nobel Committees recognize that fact
and go looking elsewhere.
The Underground Literary Alliance favors the third explanation. So
much for the Great American Novel, eh? At this stage, we'd bloody
settle for a good one, and even that's not too likely, except in the
underground, far beneath the average reader's and the Nobel
Committee's notice.
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