Nobel's novel idea

The literary is inherently political, and we have much to gain from a literary reading of politics.

This year’s Nobel Prizes recognize the two spheres’ inseparability. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his political and historical novels celebrated for their “cartography of structures of power” and “images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Jailed Chinese literary critic  Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Peace Prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”  

The Chinese government recently sentenced the writer to 11 years in prison for publishing a 2008 manifesto calling for political reform and democracy.  

In spite of the Nobel Prizes’ significant recognition of politicized writing, American society has largely come to accept the deceitful proposition that the two are unrelated.

The digitalization of society, I believe, can explain their perceived disconnection.

In this age of high-speed Internet access and online newspapers, a much-publicized 2007 poll revealed that 25 percent of Americans had read no books in the previous year.

And heady fiction such as Vargas Llosa’s didn’t fare well even among the reading public, whose favored genres are romance novels and religious texts.

As the reading public shifts to Internet-based text, the decline of the novel seems increasingly inevitable. After all, who reads extensive fiction online?

For better and for worse, the Internet moves us toward consuming smaller, bite-sized factoids. We can easily navigate between tabs, finding more information even while becoming increasingly less focused readers.

The Internet’s superabundance of facts must be partially responsible for our quickly diminishing appreciation for the power of fiction and sustained immersion in an imagined world.

Yet fiction testifies to the world’s boundless possibilities. It uniquely predisposes us to call into question our assumptions, and thus, to deconstruct power and privilege.

This is no small loss. When readers of fiction disappear, so do the number of citizens predisposed to analyzing the political realm as if it were a scrutinizable text.

Fiction’s inherent malleability instills an appreciation for the constructed nature of our society and our corresponding ability to change it. This we cannot do without a developed imaginative capacity.

The 2010 Nobel Prizes are something of a rallying-cry. They take literature off whatever apolitical pedestal we have placed it on. Our belief that the two are separate entities does not preserve some sort of artistic integrity.

On the contrary, it debilitates art’s immense potential to participate in public life.

It must be said the Internet is a powerful tool, too.

Its factual abundance demystifies accepted assumptions and connects human rights activists on the other side of the globe.

When information is readily available to people, they can challenge the factuality of the myths maintained by their repressive leaders. Controversial sites such as WikiLeaks make it easier to expose wrongdoing.

But a complete loss in fiction steals our ability to see what might be truly novel in the world.

The recognition of Mario Vargas Llosa and Liu Xiaobo as Nobel laureates signals mixing fact and fiction and  the novel and the status quo can be a crucial part of transforming the world into a more just place.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu