Hello Gentle Reader
Have you ever watched the television – which is a redundant and stupid question that has no grounds; and carefully watched rather closely at the lips of the people? Have you watched their lips – the voice is there, and its moving towards their lips; yet the words that you hear just do not fit with the lips that are moving right around on the face. The way they say their ‘O’s,’ just do not fit with their lips. They look they’re about to say a ‘B,’ or an ‘A,’ or some other word but not the ‘O,’ of the word that they just said. When they say ‘Oh,’ it looks like they are saying ‘Ah,’ but not ‘Oh.’ That sense of misplacement, or not being quite instep or in tune with oneself, or the work in which they are doing – this is how it could best be described of the current trend in American Literature. At least according to a few people – who may or may not be of any importance to anyone, but the few people around them.
Alexander Nazaryan is a writer and accordingly to the internet, a teacher as well. He has published articles in places like “The New York Times,” “Village Voice,” “Salon,” and “The New Republic,” and is currently completing a novel titled “Golden Youth,” about Russian organized crime in Brooklyn. He wrote an article, for “Salon,” in two thousand and eleven – last year actually – not even a year ago, just a few months ago really – it was written on October third of two thousand and eleven – three days before the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced and was awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. It was about the insularity and narcissistic writing of American writers of today’s age, which is best characterized for its absorbance in mass culture and nostalgia for its writing.
Alexander Nazaryan states quite profoundly in his article, that the entitled sense of whining that America deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature since two thousand and eight, when Horace Engdahl called America’s literature too “insular and isolated,” and had profoundly stated that Europe is “the centre of the literary world,” and the constant self-pity that they have not won a Nobel Prize for Literature since nineteen-ninety three is not justified in the least bit. However Alexander Nazaryan also pointed out that, the outrage over the Prize’s political statements with winners like (2004) Elfriede Jelinek and (2005) Harold Pinter, were not justified either, in their liberal left leanings in the George W. Bush era of American history. However he still defends the Swedish Academy for not awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recent years to an American author. The last American born male to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was in nineteen-sixty two to John Steinbeck – and to a male American author was back in nineteen-eight seven to Joseph Brodsky whose real tradition of writing was the experience of writing of the emerge of a Soviet Union dissident.
However the author of the article, does state though, that America is to blame for their own inability to deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is no author in the current time or age, which is writing outside of the Cold War Era, twentieth century tradition or nineteen-century tradition. There is no need for gun slinging westerns, the family chronicle of the drama, or the hermetic precincts of Jewish rivalry. The late David Foster Wallace, probably the only author that may or may not have had a chance in his would be later years, to win the Prize, had predicated with precedence the current crisis that is facing American literature, in his review of John Updike’s novel “Towards the End of Time,” David Foster Wallace states the problem of postwar American Literature with the following statement that can be generally acquired to all great male American writers (Thomas Pychon, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo):
“The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”
In other words this great American tradition of writing purely about what one knows is all one can do and most importantly write about. If one puts it that way Fran Lebowitz puts up the best argument against it for writing about what you know period. People have far too much self-esteem these days and these same people are all writing about what they know. What they know is not of particular interest to anyone.
For example I could write a five hundred to seven hundred page novel about what I know – which is the following. It would be a fictional memoir, about a boy who has a normal childhood, grows to be a teenager and has all the teenage problems that come with puberty and low self-esteem or rather low esteem for others. The coming to adulthood and the working of menial jobs, and then a stable job and then the recession, the menial jobs again, hardship that befalls from it, and then the subsequent death. I’ll write about all the relationships, fill the prose with some stream of consciousness writing, some interior monologues, some dry humour and with lush descriptions of the world and the emotional landscape of the world.
That is neither a book worth reading, nor is it a book worth writing. What impact was that book to have on someone throughout the world? What importance would such a book have on someone in Germany, Japan, France, the UK or South Africa have in such a book – what importance would it have on someone in Canada?
This concept of write what you know (which I have championed at times, also makes me a hypocrite). However some authors make this work for them. Herta Muller the Nobel Laureate of Literature in two thousand and nine, writes about her experience of the communist dictatorship in Romania run and headed by Nicolae Ceauşescu and overshadowed by the Soviet Union. It’s a frank discussion of the terrible regime and the deaths, the darkness, and the shadows of the past that have haunted her – a collective grief from her father’s SS days, to her own decision to write against the dictatorship and the harassment that had come from refusing to work with the secret police. How is this different then Philip Roth’s work or Thomas Pychon – it discusses history and the politics of an era and participates in the dialogue of world literature in a political format.
Other authors like William S Borroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway – they have experienced something. Whatever it maybe they had seen the world at large – they had travelled, participated in war, watched the civil war, went on the hunt for drugs, road tripped – these were all aspects of their lives, that they had experienced and knew how to write about what they knew, but what they knew was not insular, it was not narcissistic and self-absorbed. It participated in the world as a dialogue and literature and books being the words.
That is what the Nobel Prize for Literature is – it is the first step in the world participating in the dialogue of world literature, and the books of the Nobel Laureates are the underlined and distinguished ambassadors, who are using literature as the words, and are making the dialogue as the world of literature happen. Yet America acts as if it is an island stranded by itself in a sea of nothing, and that its voice, is the only voice that matters. However America can change that, and then deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Right now American literature is a recycling past cultures and fashion trends, and becoming nothing then self-absorbed in this repetitive use of times, and the same themes used over and over again, in just saying the same old message. America needs to move past the nineteenth century, twentieth century and come into the twenty first century and explore and make new voices, and innovate.
Sehnsucht is a German word that is best described by C.S. Lewis (an author I have little respect for) as a: “insatiable longing,” for something that one is not quite sure what. The word Sehnsucht is best described for current theme in American literature – it is longing and lamenting about the time that has been past, and wishes to emulate the writing of past masters. Yet it has all been said and all been done before. The family saga, the Jewish immigrant narrative, the Cold War paranoia novel, the pop culture pastiche of other works, has passed. It is time for the work to move on and become something new. Something that opens another door like the previous authors had done.
Hopefully America will stop making the shape of their mouth as if to say a ‘O,’ and out comes an ‘A,’ – as if they work their work starts lining up properly again. There work becomes something new, and better. The time of America’s Sehnsucht for the past, and past works, is over. America needs to stand up and write more than just about what they know. Put the mirror down and look out the window.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
(If you are interested in reading the original article by Alexander Nazaryan please click on the following link:
http://www.salon.com/writer/alexander_nazaryan/
Thank-you again Gentle Reader.)
