The poverty of navel gazing

Back in October, Horace Engdahl, then the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, earned the indignation of American commentators when he observed that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. . . . The U.S. is too isolated, too isular.  They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.  That ignorance is restraining."

Given the proximity of the remark to the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature (which went to JMG Le Clezio, a French writer virtually unknown in the U.S.), the remark seemed a (taunting?) forewarning of yet another snub of Philip Roth and any other Nobel-worthy American writer. 

Yet the remark contains an unpleasant truth, one that I felt starkly when I recently read the poet Charles Simic's review of new poetry collections by Ron Padgett and Ellen Bryant Voigt.  In it, Simic writes, "We have become a nation of self-absorbed individuals who care little about the lives of the underprivileged, and that attitude has even affected our literature."

Outside of the context of the Nobel prize, and the tiresome politics -- literary and otherwise -- that accompany it (and, perhaps, coming from the mouth of a fellow American, rather than a superior European), the critique reveals a sad, pathetic state of affairs.  Insularity and self-aborption appear a bulwark against the tribulations of underprivilege: out of sight, out of mind.  But that denial leaves us limited, ignorant -- restrained, to use Engdahl's word. 

We've become a different sort of underprivileged, and of a type that cannot be relieved with a mere increase in income.