Why Canada never wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Canadians are never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and for a good reason: quite frankly, they can't qualify. Detractors of the prestigious prize accuse it of being too political: they don't accept that a true literary body of work (as the Nobel committee rightly sees it) is always one fraught with danger, and the price the writer must pay for his/her ideals is oftentimes imprisonment, enforced isolation and possible death. Those have been the usual criteria and the committee is right to justify their choices by them. Authors and their work are, in short, a palpable life-narrative in which real perils lie strewn in the path towards a complete & genuine artistic representation of the contemporary world.

Do any of these criteria apply to Canadians? The question causes laughter. Or to Americans recently? The biggest setbacks to American fiction writers these days, faced with stiff e-book competition, is the loss for debut fiction writers of lucrative advances & royalties. When was the last time anyone in Canada was imprisoned for human rights advocacy like Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo? Again, more laughter. Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of this year's Nobel for literature, is a name deeply ingrained in the dangerous vicissitudes of Latin American politics. Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), also considered a top candidate for the Nobel, has always criticized, at great risk to his own life, the political & religious uses to which Arabic poetry has been put.

The problem is that culture in Canada, on the other hand, is politicized so heavily in the opposite direction— creativity of any kind ordered by bureaucratic decree & doled out in language that fears to offend anyone— that the vision of a significant national expression is all but impossible. What comes directly from a highly subsidized culture of entitlement is mediocre work that was so obvious even to former high commissioner, Lord Moran that he made the following disparaging comments :

Anyone who is even moderately good at what they do - in literature, the theatre, skiing or whatever - tends to become a national figure. And anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once." (Lord Moran, high commissioner in Ottawa between 1981 and 1984)

Canadians will never get the attention of the Nobel committee so long as this fateful divide continues to exist between the state and a cultural expression that's rooted in real life world conditions, ones that may oftentimes result from real oppression at home. The only two writers (within recent memory) to have merited a Nobel-type recognition for the threat they posed to Canadian governmental policy & way of life are Thomas Berger and Pierre Vallieres: the former for his untiring defense of the land rights of Indigenous peoples as Commissioner of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (1977), and the latter as a result of his own FLQ activism and the work White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec Terrorist (1968) that he wrote in exile.

MarioVargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

It's too easy to write in Canada: state intervention is usually anything but oppressive. Cultural productions in this country, in fact, are the result of a system of "literacy by bureaucracy" in which artistic output is tied directly to publicly funded Canada Council (and other various regional) grants & subsidies programs. A kind of 'royal privilege' granted to permissible writings. Envisaged as a strategic plan ,with objectives and strategies aimed at blending as many "traditions, practices, and media" into one national body of work, it's no wonder so much of our national literature looks bland and uniform. Any kind of protest is bound to come (as it has lately with news of more Harper government arts cuts) when artist-recipients stop receiving their arts monies or not as much as they've been accustomed to. Nothing stirs more heated debate than any form of cuts to cultural spending. I don't ever recall a national debate on literary innovativeness nor any sort of impassioned oratory from poets & artists to equal the fervor of government funding.

 The same outcry is heard even when cutbacks affect big-circulation magazines. For example, government funding agencies,such as the Canadian Periodical Fund, have recently put a $1-5 million dollar cap on what any one magazine can receive. In fact, so enmeshed is artistic production in government bureaucracy that the work of Canadian musicians, poets and composers, artists, journalists and filmmakers etc would come to a grinding halt if the arts were entirely privatized. How can victims of funding cuts ever win the sympathy of international observers with a more sanguine sense of political danger of the kind that imprisons, tortures and kills?

If Canada does produce a Nobel laureate, it might come by proxy: the prize given to a writer who flees his or her own country, and takes residence here. Canada is a nation of mostly subsidized artistic whiners (there are always notable exceptions, of course: I am purposely excluding small publishers, artists and writers who don't receive any form of government assistance) who seem quite incapable of creating on their strengths alone. A whole mainstream arts network, comprised of such tax-payer funded luxuries as the digitization of literary archives, investment in independent films,an artists' travel support fund, etc. etc. would collapse. If perhaps Canada could arise out of the ashes of a destroyed Canada Council regime, ready to face alone the real anguish & risks of literary activity (such as Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern writers have always had to endure), we might one day be entitled to a Nobel laureate of our own. Just might.