Waarom het Minnesota van de Nobelprijswinnaars niet meer bestaat

I.

Bob Dylan has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He’s the 12th American to get it (depending on how you count), and the second American from Minnesota to get it. I wish they had given it to Prince, also a Minnesotan, before he died. And if “literature” means pop music, why not film? My money is on the Coen Brothers—also Minnesotans.

It so happens that the first American to get the Nobel Prize in Literature was from Minnesota, too. But it was a backhanded compliment.

Sinclair Lewis received the prize in 1930, for his satires of middle America. They reward re-reading now. His novels of the 1920s do not depict the Gatsby-ish Jazz Age (about which we’ve grown so nostalgic), and in the 1930s Lewis did not follow Steinbeckian Joads through Dust Bowls.

Lewis created a midwestern miniature, an exaggerated American world of small towns and medium-sized industrial cities: the fictional town of Gopher Prairie and the aspiring city of Zenith, both in the fictional state of Winnemac. Winnemac was some combination of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

The Zeniths and Gopher Prairies would have eroded, leaving postindustrial Rust Belt bastions of Trump support.

The Nobel Committee of 1930 celebrated Lewis for his ‘critical raids into the territories of Americanism.’ The main character of Babbitt (1922), his greatest novel, is George F. Babbitt. He’s a 46-year-old man who looks like a giant baby, works in real estate, and believes in the greatness of Zenith—his city of 360,000. At first glance, Zenith is full of automobiles, objects, and advertisements but empty of culture. Babbitt is proud to be woken each morning by ’the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial.’

Poor Babbitt. His agonies begin in his upper-middle-class bathroom, ‘an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver.’ American plumbing! He struggles with his ‘soap-slippery fingers’ to remove the ‘horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper’ from a fresh blade for his safety razor. This was the American Ulysses.

If you take a bath, you are civilized. If you don’t take a bath, you are cultured. America, in the person of Babbitt, seemed the pinnacle of cultureless civilization. European readers—and the Nobel committee—gravitated to Babbitt partly because the novel skewered the standardized “Americanism” that was then washing over European economic life.

II.

When Sinclair Lewis is mentioned today, it is not for Babbitt, but for a later novel: It Can’t Happen Here (1935), which imagined the rise of a dictatorship in the United States. The novel’s key insight is that if fascism were to happen in the U.S., it would speak in an American idiom. It would look like Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the Senator who becomes President and turns the U.S. into a police state. Windrip is Trump-like in some respects: he’s a demagogue, he’s a bigot. Windrip builds a vigilante army of “Minute Men” (the M.M. becomes America’s S.S.) and encourages them “to make America a proud, rich land again.” But the differences are as important. Windrip is “folksy,” while the emphatically non-folksy Trump has led a life of privilege and vulgarity. (Trump is also more grotesquely misogynistic than any character in Sinclair Lewis’s universe.)

It Can’t Happen Here is a nightmarish fable of the 1930s, but not really a prophecy of our own time. Lewis’s novels illuminate modern American politics not because they predicted an American totalitarianism; rather, they bring into clear relief the erosion of the American Zeniths.

The Zenith of Babbitt is ugly, but it is on the make. From the first chapter: ‘Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built—it seemed—for giants.

The Northern Middlewest of Lewis’s earlier novel, Main Street (1920), is the ’the newest empire of the world,’ ‘an empire which feeds a quarter of the world—yet its work is merely begun.’ The Americans of the little town of Gopher Prairie are pioneers in a world of ’telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues.’

If a Sinclair Lewis were to chronicle Winnemac today, it would be a chronicle of collapse and polarization. The Zeniths and Gopher Prairies would have eroded, leaving postindustrial “Rust Belt” bastions of Trump support. But within the state are islands of liberalism: cosmopolitan, cultured, and increasingly expensive. One district in Minnesota will send a Tea Party evangelical to Washington, while its neighboring district sends the first Muslim member of the House of Representatives.

In 1930, the Nobel Committee rounded off its backhanded celebration of Sinclair Lewis this way: ‘Yes, Sinclair Lewis is an American. He writes the new language—American—as one of the representatives of 120,000,000 souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence.’

Though I am fond of Sinclair Lewis, I am not nostalgic for those ’turbulent years of adolescence.’ We won’t be nostalgic for these turbulent years of obsolescence either.