Handicapping the Nobel Prize for Literature

Cormac McCarthy

Tomas Transtromer

Ko-Un

NO AMERICAN POET HAS won the Nobel Prize for literature.  If you think of Eliot as American or his poetry as American, you might be able to quibble with my brash opening hook, but otherwise, not.  Eliot had already been a British citizen for 30 years when he won the Nobel in 1948, making "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" over 30 years old and the even creakier The Wasteland a Twenty-Something.

Chances are, an American poet will not win the 2010 prize, despite some impressive candidates.  Oddsmakers are bullish on South Korean Poet Ko-Un, the Sweedish poet Tomas Transtromer, and the American novelist Cormac McCarthy.  All are good choices, though, I think the smart money might go on Ko-Un.  I mean, who can say no to that smile?

Why impressive American poets like W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Charles Wright get lower seeds in the March Madness of the Literature Nobels remains somewhat of a mystery.   And yet not.

In 2008, Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Nobel prize jury, wagged his finger at American writing for its American-centric-ness. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

Merwin, in particular, obviates Engdahl's claim.  He has translated countless authors, though, agreeably, most are rather obscure: Pablo Neruda, for example, Osip Mandelstam, Jean Follain, Antonio Porchia, Roberto Juarroz, oh, and, like, Dante.  His work has always carried heavy political water, and recently, he's become particularly active as a poet of and a voice for environmental awareness--in particular the rain forests of Hawaii.  He's won the Pulitzer Prize and just about every other award, and he's the current Poet Laureate.

But, even so, I wonder if Mr. Engdahl and perhaps the entire Swedish academy defines "big dialogue" as "externally political."  For someone like Charles Wright, the big dialogue is "landscape, language, and the idea of God," which, I think, is pretty big.  Graham and Ashbery both are legendary for taking on complex issues about knowledge, language, communication, history, and the self in finely-tuned language that forces the reader to reorient how she sees the world and his place in it.

American poets, even Eliot--especially Eliot--have generally excavated the universal in the particular.  They locate the public deep within the private. Think Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens.  And, they often help translate America's Americanness--perhaps the world's most complex text--for the rest of the world.

I'm always happy when writers whose work I don't know win major awards like the Nobel, but I would also like to see some of this country's best voices be given a chance to articulate what they are working through here on the world's biggest stage.

The Technology of Craft: Cormac McCarthy's Typewriter

TECHNOLOGY COMES FROM THE Greek word technae, which means "art" or "craft." One wonders what the relationship might be between the technology of Cormac McCarthy's typewriter (above) and the art produced on it. Form does, after all, follow function. Or, in the case of clipped sentences, does function determine form?

McCarthy recently announced that he plans to sell his Olivetti typewriter since it's showing signs of wear and tear.

A couple of years ago, while in Havana, I saw the typewriter Alejo Carpentier wrote most of his novels on. A piece of paper was still spooled around the roller, part of a manuscript page frozen in time, partially typed and intertwined like a clingy but devoted lover around the body of the machine. I remember how stirring it was to see the implement of art-making making art. Its tactileness was just so much cooler than my laptop.

It's those love hickeys, disguised as battle wounds, that stand out on McCarthy's machine.

Extolling McCarthy

NOVELIST CORMAC MCCARTHY IS at the center of a most unusual concomittance. In 2007, his bleak apocalyptic novel, The Road, captured the Pulitzer Prize for fiction while just a few months later the film version of his novel, No Country for Old Man, snatched the most Academy of Award nominations-- including, of course, "Best Picture." Thus, for the first time, a living writer has a corner on both the literary and the film market, making McCarthy's vision one of the most prevalent around.

So, what does it say about the literary and film cultures at this moment in history when one of the most violent, most seemingly nihilistic writers has seized the imagination of America's creative class? More interestingly, what is it about McCarthy that appeals to the likes of the Pulitzer board, The Coen Brothers, and Oprah?

The first question is easier to answer. Since 9/11, American cultural production has trended toward the violent, the bleak, and the expansive, and McCarthy's work plays into this weltanschauung like no other American writer. In McCarthy's world, evil is a living, moving force that is both tangible and stubborn. What we might think of as "good," never actually wins, but it also never suffers overt defeat. Rather, men enact these forces across the battlefield that is the Old West, the deep racialized and class-segregated South, and, in the case of The Road, an atavistic post-apocalyptic landscape.

In No Country for Old Men, a man's life depends on the toss of a coin. Literally. The protagonist is killed half-way through the book (and the movie), and his young wife suffers the same fate. In McCarthys' texts, violence looses itself upon the world. Good people die; bad people die. There are never easy answers. Such is the case in America right now. The country is at war. Our enemies are hard to pin down, and morality seems to have no bearing on actions or policies. Good and bad are unpredictable; they seem to flow in and out of each other. Not surprisingly, Hollywood has experienced difficulty developing narratives with the same complexity and contradictions as our current social and political climate, so McCarthy's vision resonates with unusual clarity. His otherness feels familiar.

For example, the issues that are the engines of No Country and The Road differ from those driving Titanic or The Lord of the Rings. However, they are themes that have framed American discourse, ranging from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to The Searchers to the novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison: What is duty? Why do men kill each other? Is there justice when there seems to be no justice? What is heroism? For what will a man risk his life and betray his moral code? McCarthy loves probing large issues that never get resolved, though they do get injected with a philosophical emotion that is nearly religious.

What we see, ultimately, in McCarthy's McCarthyness is a metonym for America. Whether we like it or not, the ontology of the United States is violent. Part of our national psyche understand the degree to which the fiber of America's vast blanket is dyed with crimson. Though No Country is not an allegory of Iraq, The Cold War, Vietnam or the colonization of Native lands, aspects of the movie and book get at each. In No Country and The Road, a lone man (a McCarthy favorite, perhaps a symbol of American self-reliance) must survive a hostile landscape in order to live and protect his family. In one case, the anti-hero fails at both; in another, one dies and one may or may not live on. There is no resolution; only indeterminacy.

To me, it is fascinating that as Barack Obama hypnotizes America on a platform of hope, America's most vaulted institutions of creative expression are honoring what some would call America's least hopeful living author. But, to read McCarthy as devoid of hope, as nihilistic, is to misread him. As the tag line for the film suggests, you can't stop what's coming, but as McCarthy's novels say over and over, we have never been able to stop what's coming. All we can do is adjust to the arrival. In my mind, writing novels and making films about these issues are themselves projects of optimism.

Contrary to what many believe, such works do not depress; they don't make us more pessimistic. They give us faith in our storytellers because they show us a world we already know but don't acknowledge. Most important of all, McCarthy's novels and the Coen Brothers film remind us that endurance, attention, and reflection are the ultimate goods. They remind us that in a world of unpredictability and terror, communication is more important than ever.