Nobel Status Anxiety

Little follow up. Is Obama getting this award because the Committee is eager to demonstrate it is not provincial? Maybe this seems like a stretch, but indulge me.

Remember back last year the big kerfuffle when Horace Engdahl (thank you, Google) ripped American literature as "isolated" and held back by "ignorance" of the wider world? A common defense on this side of pond was to note that the provincialism was all with Horace and and Noble Committee. That when American literature had focused on the rural and slowly built up still in the shadow of other traditions, it well pleased the Committee to award it the occasional prize. But as American literature flowered in the post-war years with countless major authors representing a global cultural and linguistic American presence, so to did American visibility in the Nobel awards slow to a trickle. In other words, America could be appreciated while its literature embodied certain stereotypes or as the country mouse to Europe's city, but not so much as an engine in its own right of international culture. "Europe," Horace had huffed, "is still the center." Provincialism, replied defenders, explaining Horace's en masse dismissal of American writers, his ignorance of the American literary scene, and his trite use of geography to locate a "center" for literature. It was provincial in another way as well. The attempt to pretend, both in the quote and in the Prize's ignoring of American literary contributions for the past several decades, that American literature didn't matter all that much smacked of les provinciales mocking les parisiennes in old French plays (coarse! not really so important!), with the Europeans in the role of les provinciales.

Seen this way, the controversial quote from Horace last October was a statement born of insecurity. The comically politically overdetermined awarding of Barack Obama might be seen as an attempt to play a relevant role in American politics. Perhaps it was meant to demonstrate the Committee wasn't as tone deaf as those Danes over the border. However it was meant, the case for continued relevance that the award unavoidably makes every year has been made ridiculous by its utter misapprehension not only of the US political scene (high octane political fodder for Obama opponents at crucial time for the president), not only of the political moment (ends a week of Obama being satirized SNL, Stewart, and Maher for accomplishing little), and but perhaps most appallingly of race in America. Even while the award undermines him (as a distraction and unwelcome occasion to play defense) politically, it crosses him up symbolically as well. There is a suggestion here of awarding Obama for African American-ness, a position both terribly patronizing (you need a political crutch only we can provide) and reductionist (he is black and powerful and so must be the same as Martin Luther King). Maybe the Committee wished to show that it had come away from the provincialism of anti-Americanism, away from the Danish squares unable to recognize the man of the moment, and into a continued relevance to great power politics and world brotherhood. Instead, they simply underscored that they have little conception of what they were doing.