Dartblog

This column has already made note of Horace Engdahl’s announcement that America is D.Q.’d forevermore from the Nobel prizes in literature because “[t]he US 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.”

This is something approaching a compliment, because the Swedes who hold sway over the name of Nobel have an established preference for writing that is obvious, pompous, political, and ultimately unbeautiful. “It must give pleasure,” &c., are not the touchstones of the Nobel committee. In fact it may be accurate to say that a piece of literary art must cause extreme displeasure in order to be considered for the top prize. Others like Roger Kimball and James Panero have written more ably about this, but it seems rather an undoing of the critical faculty that the criterion of quality art is now, more than anything else, complexity, with the transcendent omega being incomprehensibility. But, no: incomprehensibility into which can be read a leftist politic is nothing less than genius. On this score it is worth noting that the only American author to win the prize in recent years was Toni Morrison.

Anyway the winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature has been named. He is Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. He is, we are told, concerned with ecology, the bygone European colonial period, and “melancholy.” And speak of the devil…