Book Awards and the Literary Marketplace

File under: Must read someday. Sociological approaches to literature and art tend to be of fairly limited interest to me. I already know that in the global marketplace works of art and literature are regarded as one more commodity to be bought and sold and that in their pursuit of cultural capital artists and writers can be as competitive as CEOs are of economic capital. Nonetheless, James English's analysis of the function of literary prizes in The Economy of Prestige sounds intriguing.

His basic premise is that controversies and scandals about who and what works deserve or don't deserve awards are precisely why the prize system exists in the first place. The contempt for the prizes that various scandals provoke (e.g. When Toni Morrison's Beloved failed to win the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1987 forty-eight of her friends and supporters published a statement of protest in the Times Book Review. She won the Pulitzer a few months later and the Nobel five years after that) enables us - the reading public - to sustain a belief in artistic meritocracy and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. Louis Menand summarizes English's core claim:

His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

The same could be said of a number of other major writers whom the Nobel snubbed. James Joyce immediately comes to mind, and I suspect Thomas Pynchon, no stranger to prize controversies, may follow in Joyce's wake. I'm curious to see what English has to say about Pynchon. My sense has always been that Pynchon understands the literary market as well as anyone and that his decision to assume the role of ultra-reclusive novelist with an irreverence for awards (sending the comedian Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow) was a shrewd move. Pynchon doesn't have to do the circuit of readings and public appearances (TV hardly appears to be an option anymore, unless Oprah Winfrey picks up your book) yet remains in the public eye (at least in the Internet, where his name turns up regularly - though not as often as Don DeLillo - in my Google updates).