Known for

Do we recognize greatness when we see it? I thought about this recently when I heard that Orhan Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I saw him speak earlier this year, and wrote in part:

Turk Orhan Pamuk, the famous novelist and now political figure, looking suave and distinguished--not at all like his goofy picture. Also a bit nervous, I think, he kindof wasn't paying attention when the others were reading, like a kid anxious to get his turn over with. He apparently lives and writes in the same building that he grew up in; he read an excerpt from a memoir, Istanbul, that was essentially one long, amazing sentence, very Walt Whitman-esque in that it was just one phrase and image after another, each preceded by 'Of', describing his beloved Istanbul. My favorite was: "of everything being broken, worn-out, past its prime." He started out wanting to be an artist and photographer, can totally tell, each phrase was like a little photograph.

He also said he thought a word that summed up the Turkish people was their equivalent of the word 'melancholy', but the Turkish word apparently connotes also a 'nobility of failure' meaning, essentially the entire country was living in the ruins of an empire, but it was somehow okay, not to be celebrated, but nothing to be ashamed of, either, just sad.

Pamuk was one of five wonderful novelists on a panel devoted to 'The Global City.' He read an excerpt from his memoir, Istanbul; answered a few questions, and that was about it.

If you had asked me at the time, of these five, which one is most likely to win a Nobel, I may have picked Pamuk--but only because of what I knew of his career, of the raves his works draw, of his interesting role as a bridge between East and West in this post-9/11 era.

But on this panel, he was truly one among peers; pretty much everyone was, at a glance, thoughtful, warm, brilliant yet gentle. I've only read the opening chapter of one of his novels--it didn't suck me in, the words swirled too much for what I was in the mood for, so I left it on the shelf, to be picked up again, soon.

[Incidentally, I'd put Pamuk's Turkey on the short list of countries most likely to play an outsized role in the world in the coming decades. Israel, Iran and North Korea would be there too, for pretty different reasons; you can't really put the U.S. on the list because the word 'outsized' doesn't really apply to us. Ditto for China and India, both of whom have long punched below their weight.]

Here are the last 33 years of Pamuk's fellow winners:

2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V.S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo José Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
1981 - Elias Canetti
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
1976 - Saul Bellow
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

You're struck, of course, by the geographical diversity of winners. Wikipedia's version of this list comes with helpful little flags--a glance shows the UK, Austria, South Africa, Hungary, Trinidad & Tobago, China, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Poland as the countries of origin of the prior 10 winners.

It makes you wonder where's the U.S., particularly since we dominate many of the other Nobel prize categories. Toni Morrison is the only American to win the award in recent tyears--you have to go all the way back to John Steinbeck in 1962 to find another one who's not a bi-national (although I always thought of Saul Bellow as an American, turns out he's originally Canadian).

What gives? Well, there's the oft-repeated criticism that politics plays a big role in the selection of winners, that the Nobel isn't an accurate barometer of literary merit since so many obvious worthies have never won--Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, John Updike among those still living so therefore theoretically eligible.

In an article headlined The Nobel as a mysterious joke, Susan Salter Reynolds of the San Francisco Chronicle puts together this list of authors who died Nobel-less:

Critics point to the glaring omissions of Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, among others (but then again, Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, so maybe there's some kind of freakish reverse psychology thing happening).

It's a pretty damning list, to which I'd add Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, any author's club without these guys is not really one worth getting into (in part because it'd be pretty dull).

But you could also say there aren't more Americans on the discredited-or-not Nobel list because in this day and age determining someone's nationality can be a tricky thing.

I'd wager half of the more recent winners have spent significant time in the U.S. during their adult careers, either teaching/lecturing, or else living in New York City.

For reasons of convenience if nothing else, most of what they read is probably in English; and I'd guess that America in general and American letters in particular is for almost all of them a major force shaping their worldview, even if in opposition.

We were never all really Berliners, but it's not that wrong to say in this world, for a certain type of people, we're all Americans.

Or, at least, we'd like to think so when it comes to explaining why the lack of American Nobel winners isn't an indictment of what we think of as our leading, even guiding, role in world literature.

Incidentally, alt.Muslim makes the interesting point that Pamuk's win and Muhammad Yunnis'Peace Prize means two Muslims have won Nobels this year.

Oddly enough, I've yet to see anywhere the headline Muslims Commit Great Acts of World Renown....

Uncredited photo of Pamuk found in various places online.