Creative courses are killing
western literature, claims Nobel judge
Grants cut off
writers from society, whereas past greats worked as ‘taxi drivers and waiters’
to feed their imaginations, says Horace Engdahl
Horace Engdahl, of the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm.
Photograph: Fredrik Persson/AP
Western literature is being impoverished by financial
support for writers and by creative writing programmes, according to a series
of blistering comments from Swedish
Academy member Horace Engdahl, speaking shortly
before the winner of the Nobel prize for literature is awarded.
In an interview
with French paper La Croix, Engdahl said that
the “professionalisation” of the job of the writer, via grants and financial
support, was having a negative effect on literature. “Even though I understand
the temptation, I think it cuts writers off from society, and creates an
unhealthy link with institutions,” he told La Croix. “Previously, writers would
work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters to make a living. Samuel
Beckett and many others lived like this. It was hard - but they fed themselves,
from a literary perspective.”
Engdahl, who together with his fellow members
of the 18-strong academy is preparing to
select the winner of this year’s Nobel literature award, and announce the
choice on Thursday, 9 October, said it was on “our western side that there is a
problem, because when reading many writers from Asia and Africa, one finds a
certain liberty again”.
“I hope the literary riches which we are seeing arise
in Asia and Africa will not be lessened by the assimilation and the
westernisation of these authors,” he added later in his interview with Sabine
Audrerie.
Engdahl told the French journalist that he “did not
know” if it was still possible to find – as Alfred Nobel specified the prize
would reward – “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Today’s
winners are usually 60 or more years old, he said, and are thus unaffected by
the changes he described in the life of today’s writers. “But I’m concerned
about the future of literature because of this ubiquity of the market. It
implies the presence of a ‘counter-market’: a protected, profound literature,
which knows how to translate emotions and experiences”.
Highlighting 2004 Nobel
laureate Elfriede Jelinek for praise,
Engdahl slammed novels which “pretend to be transgressive”, but which are not.
“One senses that the transgression is fake, strategic,” he said. “These
novelists, who are often educated in European or American universities, don’t
transgress anything because the limits which they have determined as being
necessary to cross don’t exist.”
Literary criticism, too, came in for a mauling from
the Nobel judge, who was concerned about how the lines between literature, and
“literature which has arisen as a commodity”, have been erased. “We talk in the
same way about everything which is published, and literary criticism is poorer
for it,” he said. “This revolution has marginalised proper literature, which
has not got worse, but which has seen its status change. Before, there were
mountains and lowlands. Today, the outlook is that of an archipelago, where
each island represents a genre ... with everything coexisting without a
hierarchy or centre.”
Observer critic Robert McCrum said: “Engdahl’s bracing
remarks reflect quite a lot of informal comment within some senior parts of the
literary community, especially those grey cadres that are anti-American. At
face value, these comments are an odd mixture of grumpy old man and Nordic
romantic. I’m not sure that the author’s garret is the guarantor of
excellence.”
In 2008, Engdahl
prompted outraged headlines across the
Atlantic when he said: “The 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.” An American writer - Toni Morrison - last
won the Nobel in 1993.
But Engdahl told the French paper that his comment had
been misinterpreted. “Everyone reacted as if I’d said that the major American
writers had no chance of winning the Nobel. I said nothing of the sort; I
didn’t say that there were no worthy American writers. I said that American
literary life, American criticism and teaching were limited today by too narrow
an access to world literature, because the number of translations and their
reach in the US is feeble. Everything is focused around their [US] writers and
their language, like a hall of mirrors which reflects a perpetual, infinite
image of America.”
Andrew Kidd, the literary agent who founded the Folio
prize to find “the most exciting and outstanding English language books to
appear in the last year”, said that it was “certainly the case that some of the
strongest new voices in literature are emerging from those places where change
is dramatic rather than incremental, from where the news is most urgent to
report, and the global outlook of the Folio prize was designed to capture these
voices not least”.
Kidd added: “As to whether some of these are
‘manufactured’ in Anglo-American universities, we see it as the role of the
writers and critics who constitute the prize’s academy to spot the difference.”
Praising last
year’s Nobel winner Alice Munro, the Canadian
short story writer, and 2012’s laureate the Chinese
writer Mo Yan for their universality, Engdahl gave nothing away
about the identity of this year’s soon-to-be-announced winner – although his
admiration of Asian and African literature could support the candidacy of the
Kenyan Ngũgĩ
Wa Thiong’o, and the Japanese Haruki
Murakami, both favourites at Ladbrokes.
“It surely suggests they’re very open to someone like
Ngũgĩ, or the likes of Krasznahorkai László and Mikhail Shishkin,” wrote
MA Orthofer at literary site the Complete Review.
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