Britons Chafe at Giving Americans a Shot at the Booker Prize

[Dave Monroe]

>From Michiko Kakutani, "Britons Chafe at Giving
Americans a Shot at the Booker Prize," NY Times,
Monday, June 10th, 2002 ...

The brouhaha that erupted in Britain last month when
it was learned that the prestigious Booker Prize might
be opened to American writers by 2004 is one of those
parochial flaps that reveal just how foolish the
literary establishment can be. It also underscored the
remarkable persistence of preconceptions that Britain
and the United States hold about each other in the
face of sweeping changes that have begun to remake the
global literary landscape.

Lisa Jardine, the chairwoman of this year's Booker
panel, whined that the move would make the Booker
Prize "as British an institution as English muffins in
American supermarkets," that it would make the award
"more blandly generic as opposed to specifically
British." (The prize is now open to British, Irish and
Commonwealth authors.) American authors like Philip
Roth, she asserted, would inevitably overshadow their
British counterparts: "With someone like Roth at his
best, I can't see how an Amis or a McEwan could touch
him. The American novelists paint on a much bigger
canvas. If you look at Pulitzer Prize winners, every
book there is on a majestic scale."

Other Britons quickly joined in the chorus of
self-deprecation....

[...]

Such displays of a British inferiority complex are all
the more curious for being thoroughly unmerited. The
Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan's new novel,
"Gould's Book of Fish" — a huge, phantasmagorical work
that combines magical realism, Joycean language and
Melvillian intonations to examine the legacy of
colonialism through the story of a 19th-century forger
— recently won the Commonwealth Prize, and turns out
to be as inventive and visionary in its reimagination
of history as Ms. Morrison's masterwork, "Beloved."
Ian McEwan's new novel "Atonement" — a symphonic book
that reprises all of that author's perennial themes to
create a deeply affecting story about love and war and
the destructive powers of the imagination — is as
powerful a piece of storytelling as anything by Mr.
Roth or Saul Bellow. And Martin Amis's novel "The
Information" — a tale of middle-aged angst that opens
out into a dark, dyspeptic portrait of 1990's London,
reeling from racial and class tensions — stands as a
trans-Atlantic bookend to the harrowing picture of
1990's America created by Jonathan Franzen in "The
Corrections."

Though a new generation of American writers led by the
bravura talents of David Foster Wallace and Dave
Eggers is asserting itself, though no British author
has written an equivalent of Don DeLillo's dazzling
American epic "Underworld," much of the most daring
and inventive fiction in the 1980's and 90's was being
produced by British writers. While many younger
American writers were still in thrall to Bobbie Ann
Mason's brand of Kmart realism and Raymond Carver's
minimalism — retreating to small, personal canvases in
the face of the mind-boggling cultural and political
confusions wrought by the 60's and 70's — British
writers were experimenting with a hodgepodge of styles
and techniques to tackle large themes dealing with
history and social change and the meaning of art.

With dazzling, sleight-of-hand performances in novels
like "Midnight's Children" and "The Moor's Last Sigh,"
Salman Rushdie reinvented the history of the Indian
subcontinent, while limning the modern condition of
rootlessness and exile. Mr. Amis, meanwhile, was
assimilating lessons from an older generation of
American writers — most notably Mr. Bellow and Thomas
Pynchon — filtering them through his darkly comic
sensibility to create a series of innovative fictions
very much his own. Indeed, many British writers were
looking not to the small, well-made English novel of
the past for inspiration, but to models from abroad.
There were echoes of Faulkner, Günter Grass and
Melville in such Graham Swift novels as "Last Orders"
and "Waterland," shades of Rabelais and the Grimm
Brothers in Jeanette Winterson's fiction, and of
course the ghost of Gustave Flaubert in the novels of
Julian Barnes.

Given the last two decades of ambitious
experimentation by British writers, why do intimations
of literary inferiority persist? In part, it's a
reflection of the European view of the United States
as a bullying superpower, acting unilaterally, be it
in the political and military sphere or in the world
of cultural commerce. In part, it has to do with what
the British critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury once
called "trans-Atlantic mythologies" — deep-seated
attitudes that writers on either side of the ocean
have long held about one another. Through the end of
the 19th century, Britain and Europe represented
history and tradition and the sort of society of
manners that Americans like Henry James felt that the
United States still lacked, whereas America
represented a kind of primeval Arcadia, vigorous and
naïve, but lacking in sophistication. In the 20th
century, the parent-child relationship between the Old
World and the new began to shift: Europe, ravaged by
two world wars, increasingly came to represent the
past, while the United States began to embody progress
and the future.

The breakup of its empire heightened Britain's sense
of eclipse, and in the wake of World War II, a
cultural retrenchment of sorts took place ...

[...]

As late as the 70's and early 80's, many British
writers continued to focus on the private and
domestic.... 

[...]

The critic John Gross said in 1983, "While Americans
think we're miniaturists, English people tend to think
Americans suffer from gigantism."

What has changed since then is that trans-Atlantic
exchanges have accelerated to the point where one of
the chief avatars of what was once considered the big
American novel (complete with gritty urbanism, broad
historical canvases and roiling, street-smart prose)
is the English writer Martin Amis. At the same time,
writers on both sides of the pond have become part of
a new internationalism. It's a global phenomenon that
includes not only the emergence of a host of talented
writers with roots in Britain's former empire and
commonwealths (among them Mr. Rushdie, Mr. Flanagan,
Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee, Timothy Mo, Hanif
Kureishi, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Amit Chaudhuri,
Rohinton Mistry and Thea Astley), but also the
wholesale trading of narrative styles and ideas across
continents and national borders.

Postmodern pyrotechnics, invented by the French and
American academics, have been digested and retooled by
writers as varied as David Foster Wallace, J. M.
Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro. Devices of magical
realism, pioneered in Latin America and Eastern
Europe, have been embraced and assimilated by
novelists like Mr. Rushdie, Mr. Ondaatje and Tim
O'Brien. Mr. Pynchon's darkly playful inventions have
been disseminated on either side of the Atlantic,
through the work of such younger novelists as Mr.
Wallace and Mr. Amis. And through the work of writers
like Dave Eggers, Richard Flanagan and Stephen Fry,
the improvisatory digressions of Laurence Sterne have
been turned into a hip narrative technique.

In the brave new world of the 21st century, where DJ's
and the Internet have made sampling a daily part of
life, where the fates of countries and individuals are
increasingly intertwined and the lines between the
public and the private are blurry at best, talk of
what Ms. Jardine calls "specifically British" — or for
that matter, specifically American — awards seems
absurd, for nationalist literatures as such are
rapidly becoming obsolete. For instance, the British
writer David Mitchell's new novel, "number9dream" (a
finalist for the 2001 Booker), is heavily indebted to
the work of the best-selling Japanese novelist Haruki
Murakami, whose work in turn owes a heavy debt to
American writers from Raymond Chandler to Raymond
Carver. 

In the early part of the last century, Modernism —
which, in Malcolm Bradbury's words, sprang "from the
cultures and contradictions of European life" — became
an international school largely through the influence
of Americans like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William
Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.
Today, another aesthetic school — which could be
called the Post-Modernist Eclectic — is being born
from the bazaar of international exchange, and the
result is not a "more blandly generic" art, but a more
vital and multifarious one.

This time, it's not about expatriates picking up and
moving abroad to soak up foreign vibes. It's about
ideas and styles and even language being swapped and
appropriated across the globe. It's about artists
picking from a smorgasbord of techniques and
influences to try to get a handle on an increasingly
fragmented and cacophonous reality, and in doing so
creating a new wave of writing that is richer for its
multicultural mingling of styles and voices, its
voracious mixing of the high and low, the cerebral and
street-smart, the old and the new.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/books/10NOTE.html


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