Authors Who Were Excluded Speak Volumes About Cultural Barriers

List Fever continues to spread. Hot on the heels of the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American movies, the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House, has compiled its choices of the 100 finest English-language novels published in this century.

Executives at Random House say they hope this latest list will stimulate discussion of great works of fiction as well as stimulate sales. (Of the 100 novels selected, 59 are published by Random House or a division of its parent company, the Bertelsmann group of Germany.)

However, even before the list is announced officially (Friday at Radcliffe College, during a workshop for young publishers), it is being criticized for including too few women (eight) and only three works (all by James Joyce) by writers who live or lived outside the United States and Britain.

Here, the list is evaluated by Wanda Coleman, an author and poet who lives in Marina del Rey, and by Steve Wasserman, book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

*

“Ain’t I a writer?”

Had she been a contemporary novelist, Sojourner Truth might be asking that question this morning over her steaming, thin-mouthed mug of freshly brewed gourmet coffee, spilling just a tad as her dark hands tremble with a newly aroused militancy inspired by the Modern Library’s choices for the best 100 novels of this 20th century. Not a single black woman novelist was considered a fine enough writer to be included. Not Zora Neale Hurston (“Their Eyes Were Watching God”), not Toni Morrison (“The Bluest Eye”), not Ann Petry (“The Street”).

“Good Goddess, what an outrage! How many genius awards, Pulitzers and Nobel prizes does it take? Not to mention National Book Awards, American Book Awards and an ungodly number of politically correct multicultural ethnically diverse anthologies! What does a black womanist feminist novelist have to do to prove herself?” she might stammer, as she rises to peer out the dining room window, taking in the perfect blue sky, the impeccably manicured lawns, the lovely homes of quiescent neighbors.

“What possible criteria did they use in committing this crime of omission?” she might finally ask, slamming her folded copy of the list onto the hardwood dining table, infuriated at the obviously tokenistic inclusion of James Baldwin (“Go Tell It on the Mountain”), Ralph Ellison (“Invisible Man”) and Richard Wright (“Native Son”)--a move, she might surmise, deliberately calculated to neutralize any effective outcries of racism.

“Clever, these elitists!” Sojourner might speculate as she seethes over the selection of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim,” published in 1901, ranked No. 78 on the Modern Library list as a specious nod to a bygone era of British imperialism. She would see this as ironic, given that only English-language writers were considered for the list, thus disqualifying the stunning and influential novels of Albert Camus (“The Stranger”); Hermann Hesse (“Steppenwolf”); Andre Malraux (“Man’s Fate”); Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“One Hundred Years of Solitude”); Nigerian-born Nobelist Wole Soyinka (“The Season of Anomy”)--the first black author to receive the coveted prize; and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (“Nausea”), who declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.

“Why not create a broader selection by imposing a limit on the number of novels allowed any one author?” she might ask, after noticing that several authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Jack London and Edith Wharton, have more than one novel on the list.

With the extraordinary double exception made for “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie--a native of India (though he does live in England) who was born in 1947--no other author on the list appears to have been born later than 1932. By first limiting committee members to a one-author-one-novel vote, then dividing the list at mid-century and, third, limiting selections to 50 books per half, a fairer, more balanced selection might have been achieved--thus forcing the Modern Library’s committee into a more democratic survey of novelists who have emerged in the last 30 years across the persistent barriers of gender, ethnicity and region.

“But who reads this stuff today?” Sojourner might puzzle as she plows the list, not thoroughly displeased that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was ranked the finest novel of the century. She might fondly recall those sleepless freshman nights when, stuffing her face with cocktails of No Doz and Pepsi-Cola, she nodded over the voluminous tome in a desperate race against the clock to finish her term paper on this father of the modern novel.

Yet she might be incensed to find the impenetrable “Finnegans Wake” ranked 77th, viewing its inclusion as an act of outright academic snobbery, if not downright silliness. And this, just when she had applauded the inclusion of dominant culture genre writers Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”) and Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse Five”), only to have her suspicions aroused about why Octavia Butler (“Wild Seed”), the award-winning first and so far only black woman sci-fi novelist, failed to make the cut.

When presented with the ultimate argument that the novel has to have withstood “the test of time,” Sojourner might again point out Hurston, Petry and Morrison. She might also point the finger of culpability at the voraciously vocal coterie of slighted black male critics who led a recent protest over the exclusions of black males when Morrison was honored as the first African American Nobelist, male or female. To these critics, the commercial success of Terry McMillan (“Mama”) added insult to injury, as did a significant period when three works written by black women made the New York Times bestseller list.

“If it were up to those white male academics and those silly boogie Negroes, we’d all starve,” Sojourner might conclude, despite the purported six figures a savvy new generation of black writers is pulling down these days. Begrudgingly, she might ultimately applaud the list that, under the current social givens, others might view as radical, particularly when comparing the results of the Modern Library list to those compiled by “Great Books” editor Mortimer J. Adler.

As she drains her cup of coffee to the residual grounds, the new Sojourner might find the bitter brew leaves a sweet aftertaste. After all, there’s a new century on the horizon, and all the new possibilities that portends, with a new technology changing the face of literature more quickly than anyone seems capable of anticipating. Perhaps, if she thinks it over positively, Sojourner might roll up her sleeves and get busy at the monitor. She’s got her novel to write. And plenty of great achievements ahead.

* Wanda Coleman’s “A War of Eyes and Other Stories” (Black Sparrow Press) is listed in “500 Great Books By Women: A Reader’s Guide” (Bauermeister, Larsen & Smith, Penguin Books, 1994).