Those Dour Swedes

Dwight Garner isn’t the first to wonder if the Swedish Academy’s commitment to honor “work of an idealistic tendency” has prevented it from rewarding some of the greatest writers of the past century: “Was it lofty Swedish idealism, as some have contended, that in part kept James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, among others, from this most elite creative-world dais?”

That loftiness prevents it from recognizing the importance of wit: “If the Nobel committee has a blind spot, it’s mostly for wit. This is calamitous, because if tragedy plumbs our emotions, humor tweaks the mind. . . . The world of literature needs its Bill Murrays, its soulful clowns, as much as film does.”

Loftiness is also at war with popularity. The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami isn’t likely to win, Garner thinks, because “his books sell. The Swedish Academy has traditionally taken a dim view of moving actual units.”