Critique of Impure Judgment

The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a Frenchman with the marvelously French name of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio .

Perhaps his writing is quite as marvelous as his name, but the terms in which the Nobel committee praises him make me suspicious of their criteria. Much is made of the fact that he is “a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad” who stood out early in his career as “an ecologically engaged author.”

To be sure, the committee also says he has distinguished himself in a specifically literary way as a “conjurer who . . . lift[s] words above the degenerate state of everyday speech.” But why do I think they are even more pleased that he depicts the “ugliness and brutality of European society” which European cultural elites so often deplore?

And why do I suspect that his most recent work, a “deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author’s life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world” would strike the average reader as a tedious exercise in narcissism only precious members of the literati could enjoy?

But without question he has a marvelously French name.