Writing to win

Prize culture has long controlled the business of literature, but has it begun to shape the content as well

Prize culture has long controlled the business of literature, but has it begun to shape the content as well

I AM sitting at a crowded conference table, high above the city, in a room painted arts administration beige. A filter coffee cools by my side as I fight an urge to gawp at the insectoid activity on a construction site floors below. Instead, I listen as one of my fellow judges explains why his nominated book deserves to win a major Australian literary prize.

His case, made on behalf of a sub-panel of judges, is eminently reasonable and clearly presented. His chosen title is the nonfiction account of a scandalous injustice. That it is not great literature is granted, but it is well-written, creatively structured and its contents are important. A win would ensure far wider public attention for its subject matter.

My heart sinks as heads nod around the table. I am to speak next, on behalf of others, in support of a work of fiction, a book whose merits lie chiefly in the imagined realms of character and plot, whose achievements are won through style alone. Whatever moral fragrance my book may give off is unforgivably faint compared with the pungent real-world virtues of the competition.

Until this final meeting, I had considered that my title had a lock on the prize. And others around the table had agreed, at least via email. But we had read the book in our respective solitudes in various domestic zones. Having given myself up to what Nabokov called the "gloriously inutile" fantasies of art in private, I was now being called to defend my judgment under the sober adult gaze of my peers. What had once seemed a work of art now struck me as suspect, frivolous; what's more, I could sense some of those present tilt away from earlier endorsements. Gathering in these official quarters had changed the temper of discussion.

It is a rare person who is publicly willing to argue for saving the Rembrandt rather than the baby from a hypothetical burning building.

Opening my mouth to speak, I heard a voice announce a quaint enthusiasm for a redundant set of literary values. The grand statements I had mentally rehearsed the evening before dissolved in the midday light. I did plug my nomination, but almost apologetically; certainly I didn't defend it with the vigour it deserved.

I thought a lot about this moment in the 12 months that followed, while sitting on national prize juries and local library award panels alike. I kept it in mind while reading scores of young and unpublished writers for The Australian-Vogel Literary Award, and while helping award funding to authors through a round of Australia Council grants, a selection process partly underwritten by prize-padded CVs.

Not that the memory always impinged. I revelled in the opportunity to talk books with dozens of men and women who, almost without exception, met philosopher David Hume's preconditions for makers of good taste: "Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice."

And I was able to read a slew of authors who were either unknown to me or known but unread. For every flawed or apprentice effort there was a manuscript or published book that woke some enthusiasm for the writer and their work. Reading like this is not an obligation: it is gold panning in continual anticipation of the telling glint.

Still, during a year in which I lived and breathed literary prizes, that failure of nerve kept returning. It was only when I happened on an essay by American academic James English -- Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards and the Rules of Art -- that I began to appreciate what had taken place that day.

Here is the opening sentence of the essay:

There is no form of cultural capital so ubiquitous, so powerful, so widely talked about, and yet so little explored . . . as cultural prizes.

Because it is the omnipresence of prize culture that blinds us to its far-reaching effects. At the time of my birth in the early 1970s the US had, according to that nation's standard reference, Awards, Honours and Prizes, about 2200 prizes, of which roughly one-third were directed towards cultural activities such as visual arts, film, music and literature.

The 1969 edition of Awards, Honours and Prizes was 300 pages long. The most recent full edition is the 22nd, published in 2003 and consisting of 2600 closely printed pages divided among multiple volumes. By the mid-90s, its register was adding new prizes at the rate of one every six hours.

Google the history of British literary prizes and you will find a timeline of relevant documents going back to 1880. In 1909, there is not a single archived article relating to prizes, literary or otherwise; in 2009, there were 60 pages of hyperlinks for the month of January alone.

In Australia, a country where literary prizes could for much of the century since Federation be counted on the fingers of one hand, there are 33 major literary prizes and hundreds of smaller specialised or local awards.

What English called the super-saturation of the cultural universe with prizes is not hyperbole but our daily reality. A process that was once restricted to the mass entertainments of popular music and film is replicated in every field of the arts. Literary prizes profoundly affect the way we talk about books in the public realm. But not only by altering the way authors are validated by the culture: prizes change what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the rules of art".

Sitting at the conference table that day I witnessed a clash, between two different sets of rules about how the game of art is played. On one side, a distant echo of that older idea of literature, where the product of sovereign imagination, produced in isolation from society with little thought of profit and much toil by the author, is cast into the world for posterity's judgment only. (Gustave Flaubert, the archetypal "pure" writer, took the position to its extreme with his axiom, "Honours dishonour.")

And on the other, authors who are of the moment, writing with one eye on the prize. These understand the new rules of the game and leverage them to maximise the public visibility, economic value, and broad cultural kudos granted to their creations. The projects they undertake may be more reflexive -- that is, more conscious of the disposition of readers, the media and those who award literary prizes towards certain genres, themes or subjects -- but there can be no doubt of their savvy in exploiting the cultural capital that accrues from embracing the new literary environment.

Surprisingly, the question of how this state of affairs came to be has been left unexamined by academics and journalists, even though the media has always paid an enormous amount of attention to the outcome of prizes and the scandals that invariably attend them.

But there are obvious starting points. English notes how close the 1901 establishment of the Nobel Prize of literature followed on the heels of the first modern Olympiad, in 1896. Here was a stirring model for measuring nation against nation. And just as countries clamoured to hold the Olympics in the century that followed -- rightly sensing that the host nation would become, for the Games' duration, a global It Girl -- they also established prizes in the arena of culture.The problem with translating sporting competitions into cultural realms is the lack of any objective yardstick with which to judge the winner. No one at the first Athens Olympic Games could deny that the first man home in the marathon was local hero Spiridon Louis. Yet when, five years later, the inaugural Nobel for literature went to French poet Sully Prudhomme rather than, say, Leo Tolstoy, controversy raged.

Ever since, English contends, controversy about the legitimacy of literary prizes has been their central feature. "This threat of scandal," he writes, "is constitutive of the cultural prize."

And it is true that the Nobel Prize contains, in embryo, all our later complaints. The prize favoured the mediocre over the truly great and the instant wealth it provided threatened to commodify literature. Moreover, the prize was from the outset co-opted for political ends.

Instead of Hardy, Ibsen, Rilke, Kafka and Proust, early Nobel prizes went to such giants as Bjornstjerne Bjornson, lyricist of the Norwegian national anthem, and Selma Lagerlof, author of the children's book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. That American authors and cultural critics should still be arguing a century later with the Swedish Academy about preferential treatment for Europeans says a great deal about the enduring power of special interests to affect the prize outcome as well as the continuing value attached to the cultural validation such awards confer.

These extra-literary forces made accepting prizes hard for those who wrote in Flaubertian mode. How could one kick against the pricks if accepting the prize meant official endorsement of your rebellion? How could "pure" art, divorced from material considerations and the opinions of society, speak its difficult truths once it was converted into gold and subjected to the doltish simplifications of the media?

The answer, for writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, was to refuse the award outright. For Sartre, whose cultural capital was founded largely on his ideological antipathy to the post-war West, accepting the Nobel would have been the dialectician's equivalent of box-office poison.

But a position of total resistance to the burgeoning prize culture became increasingly difficult for writers to maintain as the decades rolled on. Last year, for instance, Meine Preise, Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard's memoir-cum-critique centred on nine literary prizes he received during the 60s and 70s, was posthumously published in German.

The famously cantankerous Bernhard loses no chance to rail against prize culture. He describes the various ceremonies he attempted to upset through ferociously ungracious acceptance speeches, prima donna-like demands, or simple non-attendance. Bernhard goes so far as renouncing prizes altogether: until, that is, vanity and avarice get the better of him.

"I'm greedy for money," writes the auto-flagellant of his return to the fray. "I'm unprincipled, I, too, am a pig."

Patrick White, another Nobel laureate, provides a fascinating local example. When he was awarded the inaugural Miles Franklin Prize in 1957 for Voss, White fronted up to receive the prize (after dropping in on his doctor en route, for a sedative).

The second time around, in 1961, when he won with Riders in the Chariot, White sent a proxy to collect the award. And by the time his publishers entered The Solid Mandala for the prize in 1967, initially without White's knowledge, he was furious. Australia's greatest living author demanded the book be withdrawn and that no future works by him be given up for Miles Franklin consideration.

White was not being entirely pure in turning his back on the Miles Franklin (at the same time he was writing regularly to his Swedish Nobel champion, critic and journalist Ingmar Bjorksten) but the terms of the award White established using his Nobel earnings -- for "a writer who has been highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition" -- is a more eloquent indication of his attitude towards prizes.

The Patrick White Award, I wrote in a 2008 piece on the Miles Franklin,

stands at the antipodes to today's prize culture. It lets time do some of the sifting. It rewards perseverance. It finds virtue in mid-list authors who are threatened with extinction by a contemporary publishing scene obsessed with bestsellers. It recognises the unfashionable and out-of-date and recalls past excellence from obscurity. Its effect is to provide necessary ballast to prizes whose short-term excitements are inimical to the long gestation required for sustained literary excellence.

And yet the very fact of the award's establishment was an admission of the threat faced by a certain kind of writer from the entrenchment of prize culture. There would, after White, Bernhard and a few other recalcitrants from the earlier literary culture, be no more serious resistance. Few have seen fit to follow John Berger's example: having won the Booker Prize in 1972 for G, he gave half his winnings to the Black Panthers as reparation for Booker PLC Group's slave-owning origins.

For the postmodern generation of authors that followed, strategies such as these were old hat. If culture was a game, they were playful; if old hierarchies were being overturned, they were the anarchist brigades. For a generation of theorists who considered their bus ticket a text as worthy of study as Moby-Dick, the literary bingo of prize culture was of a piece with the carelessly ludic spirit of the time.

The one thing that linked old and new was scandal. Prizes kept on being controversial, breeding column inches and howls of outrage. These "scandals of the middlebrow", as English describes them

fastened on to any particular gaffe or embarrassment of the moment, but [were] ultimately directed at the mediating institution . . . which was accused of furthering the encroachments of the marketplace, or of politics, or of personal connections, on to the artistic field, and hence diluting what ought to be pure cultural capital with economic, political or social capital.

So it was the old binaries trotted out by arts editors, book reviewers and public intellectuals slumming in magazine pages, pitting the older rules of the art game against the new ones being established by prize culture that kept the circuit of controversy fully charged.

However, it was at about this time that scandal itself showed signs of becoming domesticated. There is an aphorism by Kafka about a temple where the daily ritual of setting out sacrificial chalices for some deity is interrupted by a pair of leopards, who break in and drink the dregs of the offerings. After a period when the animals repeat their theft, these regular transgressions are simply incorporated into the ritual.

Something like this happened with literary prizes. Sincere gestures of principle or pique -- ruptures in the orderly progress of the prize-giving ritual by authors, publishers, agents or judges -- were tamed by being folded into the mixture. An air of expectancy began to surround prizes such as the Booker: surely something would go terribly awry this year?

And if it didn't, there was a palpable sense of let-down, as when Hilary Mantel recalled her year as a Booker judge:

Not a discourteous word was exchanged between the hardworking 1990 judges -- much to the disappointment of the administrator Martyn Goff, who praised us to our faces and later whined that we were boring.

In the two decades between Mantel's judging the Booker and winning last year for Wolf Hall, prize culture has achieved such a frictionless mesh with other aspects of the book trade that the outcomes of big prizes now dominate the literary year. Like the west London prep school deemed so desirable that wealthy mothers reportedly had their babies induced so as to fit in with its timetable, the whole machinery of publishing and bookselling now organises itself around the most visible awards.

Indeed, the prize is so important to the book business's bottom line that there is considerable pressure on judges to ensure that the winner is a saleable item. Lest this sound like a wild claim, I should relate a conversation from 2005, when I was working in London as a bookseller for Rick Gekoski, who was serving that year as a Booker judge.

Having watched the Guildhall ceremony on television the night before, I was ready to congratulate Rick on his success in getting his favourite -- John Banville's The Sea -- over the line. But when he arrived at work he was as incensed as much as exhilarated. He told me that, immediately after the prize giving, the head buyer for one of Britain's largest bookshop chains upbraided him for having chosen an unmarketable, highbrow "art" novel.

Julian Barnes wrote of the Booker in 1978 that the prize is "dubious because it now has an unwarranted influence on public perception of the novel". Today that public perception, combined with market pressures and shifts in the make-up of judging panels, has fed back into the sort of books that win it.

In other words, prize culture no longer simply controls the business of literature: it has begun to shape content as well. It is not that there is a Booker novel, per se, any more than there is a typical Miles Franklin novel. But, as with the Nobel, institutional structures tend to influence prize outcomes in ways that are not solely to do with literary merit.

In the 70s judges of the Booker Prize included Saul Bellow, John Fowles, George Steiner, Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly, Mary McCarthy and Philip Larkin: all giants in the literary field. Judges from the decade just past have included Rebecca Stevens (the first woman to climb Everest), comedian David Baddiel and Rowan Pelling, founder of Erotic Review.

Being a mountaineer or a comedian does not immediately disqualify anyone from being an excellent prize judge (in Baddiel's case, it was comedy via Oxford, where he read English literature). But the growing effort to include non-specialist readers in juries has led to a shift in the way books are sorted and graded.

Author Giles Foden's report on judging the 2007 Booker insinuates as much:

tried to keep estimations of literary qualities in some kind of balance, though I was surprised at the degree of importance ascribed to subject matter, sympathy with main characters and what might be loosely described as the "moral status" of books.

And moral status, as I discovered around that conference table two years later, is a tar baby that traps the old-school critic the more they struggle with it. Moral status is the grey fog in which the narrative of the book in competition is lost and replaced by the narrative of the book's maker. What will be forgotten first: the story of DBC Pierre's tragic youth, his conman past, his screwed-up existence redeemed by one last throw of the dice, a novel called Vernon God Little? Or the ho-hum Booker winner he produced?

Moral status is the hook on which a media avid for drama can hang the literary artefact; it is the means by which literature may be finally assimilated into the realm of celebrity. Just as we have politicians whose stage presence is more effective than their policy grasp and celebrity tennis players whose rankings are less important than their endless legs, we now have celebrity authors whose writings are less important than their prize endorsements.

In one sense, this hollowing-out is utterly contemporary: as glossily empty and seamless as a void by minimalist sculptor Anish Kapoor. In another, it is a return to the distant past. The 18th century was also a period when it was tough to make a living from writing. It, too, was a time when authors were obliged to seek external support, particularly when it came to books on subjects outside the mainstream. And, just as with today, it was often mediocrities writing to order for their aristocratic patrons who were given the fillip of a grand title to link with their work.

It was Samuel Johnson who, with his notorious letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, is said to have blown the trumpet on a new age of independence for the author, marking the moment at which (in Thomas Carlyle's words) "literature . . . was in the very act of passing from the protection of the patrons to that of the public" And in a recent essay on Johnson, author Andrew O'Hagan beautifully pins down his achievement:

Samuel Johnson may have failed often enough to be personable, but he nevertheless freed subjectivity . . . and brought both dignity and self-sufficiency to the writing game, allowing authors to be who they chose to be, unshackled from patronage and the requirement to please great men. We see it in his essays and we see it again in his Lives of the Poets: a writer's writer, beckoning individual creative power out of the mire of dependency, making the work answerable only to high standards of excellence stringently applied.

"High standards of excellence stringently applied" served literature well from Johnson's time to the recent present. The novel's rise corresponded with a period in which the author's desire for autonomy was balanced, albeit imperfectly, with the exigencies of the marketplace.

But for many our new era of corporate patronage renders Johnson's brand of seriousness hopelessly out of date. English praises new models of "provisional and witty alliance, duplicity and double-dealing" that characterise strategies of artists in the marketplace seeking to convert their cultural capital into hard cash, whether it is Damien Hirst stirring the possum with sharks in formaldehyde or Toni Morrison and her supporters openly agitating for prizes to add to the lustre of her oeuvre.

"It may well be," English acknowledges,

that . . . we could confirm the almost universal truism that the tremendous proliferation of cultural prizes has done more to further the consolidation and homogenisation of capitals than to enlarge the endowments of artists as artists, much less to advance the cause of cultural democratisation. But we are a long way from being ready to make such a pronouncement.

Ten years on from the publication of English's essay, American Idol, a sort of apotheosis of contemporary prize culture, remains the most popular show on American TV. And 300 million North Americans are serviced by the only remaining stand-alone newspaper book section (The New York Times Book Review) in which high standards of excellence are stringently applied. I suspect the truism has become a little truer.

Prize culture has taken the older game of art and turned it into an immensely successful new one. Financial capital and cultural capital face each other across the media field, kicking dollars and artistic validation back and forth in a manner entertaining for spectators and mutually beneficial for the participants. But this does not alter the fact that some of the things being bunted are literary creations: autonomous worlds imagined in solitude and read in solitude. In the essential privacy of its production and consumption, literature is diametrically opposed to prize hullaballoo. Harold Brodkey, one of the great writers of the later 20th century, said that some books, especially the best ones, sit uneasily in the present moment. But the present moment, the ephemeral glamour of event, is all that prize culture has to offer.

The very best books are also likely to be of uncertain moral status. Flaubert's masterpiece concerned a deluded adulterer who ran up debts and poisoned herself. And what prize jury today would give a gong to the first-person account of a man who spent years raping his stepdaughter? That Madame Bovary and Nabokov's Lolita endure today is a victory of artistic achievement over damning precis. But their survival is equally down to Johnsonian defenders,, arguing for the ages.

Lewis Hyde, whose 1979 study The Gift remains an eloquent plea for the value of literature as literature instead of an opportunity for a prize culture event, writes that "there are . . . times when the spirit of the market destroys the gift of which cultures have in their works of art". Johnson would not have used those words, but he would have agreed about the poisonous effect of the patronage system of his own day. As when he writes in a Rambler essay, The Perils of Having a Patron:

None of the cruelties exercised by wealth and power upon indigence and dependence is more mischievous in its consequences, or more frequently practised with wanton negligence, than the encouragement of expectations which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the heart by needless vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.

Prize culture, like aristocratic patronage, makes a lottery of literature, in which one, sometimes unworthy, winner obliterates the hopes of a thousand others.