Literature in the news

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Mo Yan of China on Thursday. My feelings about the prize committee notwithstanding (my annual rants are here and here; apparently I let it go in 2010), I was stumped yet again by this year's selection. It seems to me that the Academy is moving steadily away from the mainstream. There used to be a time when the Nobel Prize winner was someone people actually read. T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre were all Nobel laureates. Even as recently as 2005, Harold Pinter was honored. But overall, the laureates seem to be people familiar only to those who have spent time in the ivory tower.


In my eyes, the Nobel Prize in Literature is beginning to suffer from a legitimacy crisis. There was no Pulitzer Prize awarded in fiction this year, and with that meaningful omission came the opportunity for the Nobel committee to reassert itself as the dominant voice in the world of literary prizes. That's not to say that the Pulitzer and the Nobel are in direct competition, but award committees have an opportunity to influence the direction of the global conversation. With no Pulitzer in fiction this year, there was a relative vacuum that the Nobel committee could have used to solidify its leadership.

I don't mean to take anything away from Mo Yan; I'm sure he's an extremely talented author. And it goes without saying that popularity does not necessarily equate with quality or significance. But there are a lot of equally talented, less obscure writers out there, any one of whom would have been a deserving recipient and probably would have quieted the chorus of "Who?" that erupted when the announcement was made (Cormac McCarthy for one). Instead, the Nobel committee once again made an obscure, ivory tower choice, further reducing its own relevance on the world stage.