@ehBeth,
OK. Your wish is my command.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been a joke at least since the early 1950s (though probably even earlier) when it was awarded to Sir Winston Churchill. I hold no brief against Sir Winston, but he was not a fine writer; he was a fine politician. Everyone who knew Churchill also knew that most of the "writing" he did on his multi-volume opus was by way of dictation to a panel of literate secretaries who would dutifully polish the prose and edit out any egregious errors. Winston Churchill did not write that work if the verb "to write" is to have any linguistic meaning.
Next, the Nobel committee decided to honor the Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, for his tortured tome on love and war
Dr. Zhivago. That book was singled out not because it is a fine novel (it isn't; it's on a par with
Gone With the Wind) but because it was banned in the Soviet Union and had to be smuggled out of the country to be published, in translation, in the West. Fine. I was as gleeful about giving the Russians a black eye as anybody, but the fact is that Pasternak did not deserve the Prize. It was a strictly political decision to award it to him.
Politics have always played a large part in the decision of whom to honor with a literary prize. At least one American author who did receive a Nobel, Pearl S. Buck, deserved it about as much as I deserve a Pulitzer for writing this post.
The Good Earth is a readable book, interesting in its insights of Chinese peasant life in early 20th Century China. Great literature it ain't. But, you see, here was a daughter of American missionaries writing about
China! This astonishing (to the Nobel committee members) accomplishment had to be honored somehow. Else, the world might say that the Swedes were somehow not attuned to the problems of emerging nations.
Emerging nations. In recent years we've seen awards made to writers whose works the awarders had never read because they weren't available in translation and how many Swedes can read Swahili or Arabic or Urdu? If a person is a Western writer, that person's popularity alone is enough to make his work seem suspect in the eyes of the Swedish Academy. Frankly, I'm rather shocked that this year the Prize went to a Frenchman. If you're going to honor someone who writes in a language which is so accessible to half the world's population, why didn't they choose an Algerian (no, Camus doesn't count) or Moroccan?
Some of the truly great writers of the 20th century (and, yes, I use the word advisedly) who never received a nobel have already been mentioned -- Proust, Joyce, W.B. Yeats. I'd add a couple of Americans who, I think, at least deserved consideration -- Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Too late now.
If, in years to come, some American writer should be honored by the Swedish Academy, I think he or she should decline the Prize on the same basis that Marlon Brando refused to an Oscar for his performance in
Apocalypse Now. Both Academies have become irrelevant.
