THE BIG DIALOGUE

by Melodie Johnson Howe

To call someone insular is a high-minded way of saying they are narrow-minded and therefore intellectually and creatively ignorant. According to the AP, not only did Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Prize for Literature jury, call American writers insular but he also added that they, “… don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

I would like to repeat that. The big dialogue of literature. If anybody knows what that means hit the reply button and tell me. I’m too insular to understand these things.

Mr. Horace Engdahl the Horrid, as I like to call him (it lends a European sensitivity to his name), did not stop there. In a we-are-the-world-except-the-US tizzy he added, “Europe draws literary exiles because it respects the independence of literature and can serve as safe haven.”

Thank God. I mean without Europe there would be no place for writers to write. There would be no country that is a safe heaven for the tired, the humble, the poor. Thank God, they have the Nobel Prize as a beckon of light for all their literary immigrants. And what do we have? Just an old Statue of Liberty who will let anyone in. But I guess the literary refugees just don’t want to come here to be dumbed-down and filled-up with Egg McMuffins.

Horace the Horrid continues blithely: “Very many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death.”

Again thank God for the Euros. We writers would all be beaten and enslaved if it weren’t for them and their great sense of freedom. In fact if it weren’t for them we might be living under a Nazi dictatorship. Where else could you work and write and not be in fear for your life? Certainly not in thick-headed America.

The Horrid also implied that Americans are too interested in trends.

You know trends such as the experience of black Americans, the lives of Latino immigrants, and the burgeoning Iranians trying to recapture the ghost of their lost country in a new country. And then the voices that come out of the hard west and the decimated steel towns. The female voices that shattered the veneer of middle-class domesticity. The wasp voices still rattling those puritanical bones. The multi-layered Asian voices along with the tough Irish voices. The beguiling storytellers from the South. The Jewish Americans who fled Europe and brought their bundled dreams here and created a whole new literature. It’s sad how parochial and provincial we are.

Toni Morrison was the last American to win the Nobel. That was in 1993. I don’t think there will be another American to win soon. Sorry, Phillip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, and many others.

I think it is time to stick some of that dynamite that Nobel created in that bureaucratic prize of his and blow “the big dialogue” into The Big Sleep. You know that novel, Horrid, it’s by Raymond Chandler. The author who never intended to write the big dialogue.

I’m traveling to Bouchercon today. I can hardly wait to meet my blog pals and friends of this site.