Awarding literature prizes devolves into controversy

Remember when watching the Oscars was a big deal?

We’d gather around the TV with great anticipation, watch the stars make their red-carpet entrance and sit through a couple of endless musical numbers and sonorous self-congratulations from the Academy, eagerly awaiting the Oscar winners and their sometimes entertaining speeches. Who (at least among those alive in 1973) can forget Marlon Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather in his stead to turn down his best actor award?

For me, the same might be said for major literary prizes. I used to wait with great anticipation to find out who got the Pulitzer (just announced last week), the Nobel, the Booker and France’s Prix Goncourt.

In recent years, however, my enthusiasm has waned. The prizes, it seems, have been eroded by controversy over judges, perceived racism and misogyny. It’s gotten to the point where the very notion of awarding prizes for literature has become questionable.

A friend of mine sits on the jury for a prestigious prize in another state. This year, she told me, the jury process became bitter, even vicious, with members pitted against one another over issues of diversity, ageism and the same increasingly tiresome, heated conversation about who gets to tell a story. The result was a complete reconfiguration of the jury with continued conversation about the process.

In France in 2013, the Prix Renaudot, the country’s secondbiggest literary prize, was awarded to Gabriel Matzneff, a known pedophile. And just last year, France’s top book prize, the Goncourt, was engulfed in a dispute over ethical breaches after the short list included a book by the boyfriend of one of the judges.

Then there’s the Booker Prize, which used to be open only to English-language novels from Britain and the Commonwealth. In recent years, though, the Booker has gone global, and fears that books by American authors would dominate the winners have proved prescient. In 2018, the Guardian reported that 30 publishers urged administrators to “reverse the change, or risk a ‘homogenised literary future.’ ”

I loved the brouhaha over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. It stirred up a robust conversation over what constitutes literature and seemed to shake some of the dust off the staid old Nobel. (I’d venture that for a poetic lyricist, you can’t do better than Leonard Cohen, but nobody asked me.)

According to author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in the New York Times in 2013: “We want awards to be clear markers of excellence, but if anything, they repeatedly demonstrate that there are no absolute standards for judging aesthetic matters.” Hear, hear.

In a poke at literary prizes in general, the writer known as J.C., former diarist in London’s Times Literary Supplement, created the All Must Have Prizes Prize. This imaginary literary award recognizes the proliferation of literary prizes over the years, suggesting that “no book is published without being longlisted for a prize.”

I recognize that literary prizes are a shot in the arm to the publishing industry and, on rare occasion, can catapult previously unknown writers to fame and even fortune.

But prizewinners should beware. A 2013 paper published in Cornell University’s Administrative Science Quarterly found that “winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.” Hmm.

We humans seem to have an innate need to rank things. With the ever-growing deluge of material available to us, ranking seems to help us create some kind of order. Following the advice of “experts,” some would say, facilitates our choices.

I have no problem ranking baseball players based on their stats or cars or refrigerators based on their performance, but books, movies and art are other animals entirely. Radical as it may sound, it would be interesting to see what suspension of these prizes would do to public consumption of books.

Might we, dare I say, be trusted to make evaluations without the guidance of judges who, after all, are only human, and thus flawed like the rest of us?

I used to wait with great anticipation to find out who got the Pulitzer.