Ten years ago, American literary critics told DN that they had stopped caring about the Nobel Prize - the wait for an American prize winner had become too long. In the same year, Bob Dylan received the award, and soon after Louise Glück.
But the great American novelists continue to be absent, when three decades have now passed since Toni Morrison received the award.
And time is running out. The prize is not awarded posthumously. Several long-talked-about American novelists, such as Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, have passed away. Others, such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates, have come of age.
Does the Nobel committee risk "missing" great American novelists - and thus an important part of literary history?
That's the opinion of Bo G Ekelund, professor emeritus of English literature at Stockholm University, who previously pointed out what he sees as a gap among the Nobel laureates.
- The two generations of postmodernist American novelists have had enormous significance far beyond the US and the West, so it feels a bit like a literary historical blind spot that none of the monuments to the literary movement have been awarded, he says.
Frida Beckman, professor of literary studies at Stockholm University, is somewhat more ambivalent.
- It depends on how you think. There are lots of writers in other countries and generations who may not have ever been noticed, she says.
- But if you accept that the Nobel Prize is as Western-oriented as it is, you can say so. It is a generation of writers who have been very important to modern Western cultural history.
The generation or generations of writers that the researchers are referring to were mainly active in the second half of the 20th century: William S Burroughs, Philip K Dick, William Gaddis, later Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster.
Daniel Kane is a professor of American literature at Uppsala University and himself an American.
- For me, the big elephant in the room is Thomas Pynchon. And Don DeLillo, whose novels are remarkable for their formal innovation, but also so deeply engaged with American culture and politics. So if you had to choose a significant novelist, why not him?
Frida Beckman describes a distinct literature, with a consistent theme linked to how society is reshaped through globalization, technological development and various political movements.
- The USA has a strong individual focus, that you are free and can make your own happiness. After the 1950s, it seems like this becomes more unclear. The authors are preoccupied with the feeling that one may not be fully autonomous. A feeling of being persecuted, infiltrated, or that someone else is in charge, she says.
If you think that the names mentioned are a long line of white men, you are right.
People like Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid and Marilynne Robinson are and have been important American novelists, but they were not in the same way part of the specific postmodernist thematics, according to the researchers.
- One of my research results was that female writers and African-Americans do not fit into this pattern as clearly. My interpretation was that this strong sense of individuality was mainly bestowed on white men in a Western context, says Frida Beckman.
Why then don't the American novelists get the Nobel Prize?
One possible reason can be found in a 20-year-old statement by Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary: that the United States is too isolated and narrow-minded to measure up to Europe in terms of great literature, and that American writers are too used to their own mass culture.
However, Daniel Kane does not believe that it is a matter of American literary creation being of a lack of quality.
- My feeling is that the Nobel committee does not want to give the impression that they think the USA is number one. Because there are a whole range of other writers who don't have the privilege that American writers have, when it comes to purely material things like distribution and media attention, he says.
Regardless, there is still hope for some of the great novelists. Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon are still alive, and compared to them, 82-year-old Marilynne Robinson is almost young. And, as Bo G Ekelund points out:
- The Nobel committee's mistakes belong as much to the prize as what they reward. You can't get rid of this generation.
Read more:
