Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel

DN DECEMBER 11, 1938 PEARL BUCK WAS FORMALLY awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation read: "For rich and truly epic descriptions of Chinese peasant life, and masterpieces of biography." In the Academy's judgment, the decisive factor was not only the admirable biographies of her parents, but her depiction of the Chinese peasa:1try. Her Chinese. novels are authentic in wealth of detail and rare insight. They recreate a region, a time, a people then little known and ba..-ely ur..derstood by Western readers. Today Pearl Buck is eminently famous the world over for her vivid accounts of China and its people. Appropriately, in her formal acceptance speech, Mrs. Buck spoke of the Chinese novel and its influence upon her own philosophy of composition. There was no doubt that the term "Chinese novel" for her meant the traditional Chinese works of fiction, not the novels of contemporary Oriental writers strongly under foreign influence and somewhat ignorant of the riches of their own indigenous literature. She had selected the subject of the traditional Chinese novel for two reasons: first, her own concept of the novel il;> wholly Chinese; and, secondly, her belief that the Chinese novel possesses an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western no" velist. Her lecture was well received by the Nobel Committee. Direct, unassuming, convincing, it explored a lively and delightful subject. Indirectly, the lecture was an apologia for the novels she had written. Devotees of Oriental literature read 1 her words with understanding and appreciation. Most literary critics and cultural historians found her lecture informative and memorable. A few critics, those who felt she was not quite worthy of the Nobel Prize and all it implies, turned a deaf ear. They were too busy grumbling that she was not equal to such international recognition to listen to what she had to ,say about the traditional Chinese novel and her own literary aspirations.