The Slippery Thing
I thought blogging was all about writing short. Dale has just posted almost 2,000 words. And his arguments are smart and subtle to boot. Allow me to ignore the absurdly high bar he has set.
The very idea of the national character of works of fiction is a slippery thing. Try the thought experiment of removing or altering the geographic and cultural particulars of this or that great novel, and a lot of those books - maybe most - cease seeming so "American" or "English" or "Russian." This first occurred to me not long after I graduated college, freshly filled with the notion of national literatures as virtually scientific categories, when I read A Confederacy of Dunces. That book, for all of its balls-out, funny-tragic artifacts of "Americanism," reminded me of Don Quixote...and I got to thinking how Confederacy of Dunces could work just as well if it were set in, say, Malaga instead of New Orleans...which in turn got me to thinking that Don Quixote is, well, a very American story, a serious comedy about falsehood versus reality and nobility of character and a picaresque journey-cum-dreamquest that Mark Twain didn't happen to write.
And speaking (per Dale) of Melville's visionary internationalism, he was writing at the very moment that globalization was just getting under way - that is, an exponential increase in the global exchange of goods and ideas was being enabled by new technologies in transportation (super-fast ships, railroads) and communications (the telegraph, steam-powered presses). And I think it's probably key, too, that Melville was writing at a time before the U.S. had become a major global power; that is, his international outlook was hatched in a citizen of a country that was, its exceptionalism and embryonic hubris notwithstanding, still just one more country in a big world.
I guess I don't buy the idea that the "American dream narrative" in fiction is now becoming anachronistic as a result of ongoing globalization. Rather, I tend to think, the American global dominance of the last 60 years, especially in pop culture, means that stories about restless, striving, self-reinventing characters are appearing in the literature (and cinema) of all sorts of countries and cultures without necessarily seeming "American" at all.
But here's a related question I've wondered about: why is it that among ambitious new American fiction these days, it's so frequently not the best work that achieves the greatest esteem abroad?
Because literature is first and foremost a construction made out of language, and very few readers abroad are on speaking terms with the language employed by writers of American fiction.
July 30, 2008 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed on literature being married to its language, but Faulkner continues to resonate in France, Latin America, and Japan - how to explain this?
Last I checked, Faulkner's work had a bit of linguistic nuance, in an intensely American vein.
I think there are more non-Americans fluent in American idiom than you might suspect.
July 30, 2008 11:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
And American authors never get translated to other languages.
July 30, 2008 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Apologies if my irony-detector is off - have you found in your experience that American authors are less likely to be translated than European authors?
My other question is - in which language(s) have you noticed this?
And if what you're saying is actually "oh come on - non-English speakers just read the translation, like Americans do with everything not originally in English" - sorry to be dense.
July 30, 2008 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
No prob, I'm sometimes a bit on the cryptic side :)
Yes, my point was that American authors do get translated into other languages.
I don't know if it's possible to make a meaningful comparison of whether American authors get translated less or more than writers from other countries. If someone could figure out how to do it, the comparison would no doubt be interesting.
Personally I believe country of origin is not a factor. Authors get translated when their work is relevant for the target market. Fiction authors like Stephen King or John Grisham are quite well known in many non-English speaking countries.
July 30, 2008 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
"best" - slippery terminology indeed, but my gut is that the ambitious American literature that resonates in America right now is often very narrowly descriptive of a specific American torpor - citizens of a not-so-healthy superpower - that isn't terribly resonant worldwide.
Hell, i don't even like most of it; it reads late-imperial navel-gazing, and a lot of it isn't very fun linguistically, settling instead for mid-brow clever.
Mind you, if anyone wants to reply with some of this ambitious American contemporary literature that the rest of the world is wrongfully ignoring, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.
July 30, 2008 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Two reasons. One, "best" is in the eye of the beholder. Two, the relative exposure American authors and their works get abroad is not the same they get in America.
July 30, 2008 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
For the same reason our best writers don't sell well in the States - it's a business and unless the author is very successful in his/her own country, no one over seas is going to bid on the rights to print the book. Books with an initial printing of 25,000 aren't worth it to them although some printers here and overseas do specialize in small printings of well regarded but poor selling authors. University presses do have quite a catalog of obscure authors - it isn't that they're not translated and sold, it's that they're not sold widely - they don't print enough of them to distribute nationwide.
July 30, 2008 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Naively, may I ask if America currently has any great writers? Granted, it's often easiest to recognize 'em in retrospect. Yet, while we have some amusing writers, do we have any where you finish the novel and your world's never the same again? Because I'd hold that that's the distinguishing mark of great writing: that it alters the world of its contemporaries. Afterwards, part of its power becomes nostalgic, which can be an equal sort of greatness (almost). But I'd venture (as one who's not admittedly reading widely in contemporary fiction because, well, most of it's so trivial it seems), that we have few if any great writers, just as we currently are quite short of great (as compared to competent or entertaining) painters. Even our musicians are short of prior heights.
Let me hasten to say I don't want a novel about the lackings of our artists. We've got plenty of those. They mostly suck.
July 30, 2008 5:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
E.L Doctorow, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, ZZ Packer, Jonathan Foer, Kevin Brockmeier, John Wray, Garrison Keillor, Larry McMurtry, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, Phillip Roth, Edmund White, to name a few.
As for American art, sculpture is the best it has ever been, with Ann Melanie, Jon Isherwood, Barry Tinsley and Dan Kainz producing some wonderfully new work. There are also some very good painters and photographers doing some very good work - Jared Joslin, Jon Roos, Raphaela Spence, Benjamin Donaldson and Allison Safford.
I don't think the distinguishing mark of great writing is that it forever changes the way you look at the world, I think the distinguishing mark of good reading is that it forever alters the way you see and hear language and the distinguishing mark of good art is that the artist provides you with a view of the world you've never before considered.
July 31, 2008 12:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
To help the conversation along, please name a few "neglected" writers you consider among the best- and maybe a couple who are widely-published-abroad you consider second-rate.
It'd be a lot easier to comment!
July 30, 2008 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
i'd like to add to the chorus asking for examples from kurt. if only to get book recommendations from kurt andersen. not that i'll ever get around to reading them - denis johnson's tree of smoke is taking me forever with all of the time i waste griping here at TPM...
July 30, 2008 10:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
The country I live in is teeming with foreign-born people striving and struggling to make it and achieve...the Canadian dream. It isn't just economic globalization that has caught Americans up short, it is the dated view of themselves as the sole beacon of freedom and artistic exemplar to the world. From afar, the US is a puzzling mixture of melting pot pride and provincial, insular habits. American culture is still everywhere, but how many foreign movies are shown in US multiplexes? How many foreign novels in translation make it to the NYTimes bestseller list?
July 31, 2008 7:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
please consider William T. Vollmann if you are still fumbling around barnes and noble, groping for contemporary american literature with ambition and linguistic-play. i have yet to see him out-performed in both of those realms.
July 31, 2008 1:08 PM | Reply | Permalink