Let’s stick with this for a moment: I think it’s fair to say that the latest Tim Parks piece in the New York Review of Books is an extension of his defeatist take on literature.
From today’s article (which is more of an ad hominem than about literature) —
Remember that we’re talking about poems as well as novels and they’re coming from all over the world, many intensely engaged with cultures and literary traditions of which the members of the Swedish Academy understandably know little …
From “The Dull New Global Novel” —
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.
It’s the same argument and the same thesis and it’s still wrong. The transmission of culture may not be full and instantaneous — even news isn’t that fast — but the immediacy with which things race around the world today — novels, fiction, and poetry included — means that that first step into a culture for readers is closer than ever before. No Word from Gurb is a fantastic first-step into Catalonian life (which I first read about on a website), as is Antonio Lobo Antunes a great first step into Portuguese life, as is Rodolfo Walsh and Moreno Ocampo a great first step into the looking at the Argentine terror, Atul Gawande’s Complications into the life of medicine, Havel’s into the Czech, and so on. That’s how reading works — you read one book, and then another. You learn.
Where does this argument end, anyway? Culture is debasing itself? It’s not as refined as it once was? Don’t read? Don’t be curious? Don’t study? People can’t learn that much? Local prizes for local readers only, since that’s all they can handle?
Where’s the patience? Why doesn’t he say, “Here’s what a Swedish reader might have missed about novel XYZ” instead of writing —
Let’s pause for a moment, here, and imagine our Swedish professors, called to uphold the purity of the Swedish language, as they compare a poet from Indonesia, perhaps translated into English with a novelist from the Cameroun, perhaps available only in French, and another who writes in Afrikaans but is published in German and Dutch and then a towering celebrity like Philip Roth, who they could of course read in English, but might equally feel tempted, if only out of a sense of exhaustion, to look at in Swedish.
What middlebrow clap-trap. Where’s your sense of a challenge?
