It’s that time of the year when the Booker Prize shortlist is announced, which, like the Nobel literature prize announcement, always makes me wonder about the point of literary prizes at all.
There’s an argument in favour of course, and those in the running for the Booker would perhaps be among the first to make it. We’re in an era when fewer and fewer people read books, and of those that do, fewer and fewer read contemporary literary fiction. Surely anything that promotes such literature and brings it to the general public’s attention can only be a good thing? We might call this the ‘Harry Potter’ argument, after the longstanding axiom that, were it not for JK Rowling’s wizarding world, the entirety of Gen Z would be functionally illiterate.
Readadamn Bookium!
There’s also a concomitant self-serving argument on behalf of the authors, as I said. It’s not very lucrative to write literary fiction. In fact, it’s a very poor decision, careerwise, if you think about it. The average published author in Britain makes about £7,000 a year. That’s not very much when you consider that the average rent is around £1,400 per month.
Now, when we substract people like Rowling, or Julia Donaldson, or Jeffrey Archer from the list, obviously that £7,000 is going to become much, much smaller again. Take out the non-fiction writers, the popular genre writers (chicklit, SF, fantasy, romantasy etc) and the pot gets smaller and smaller again. So merely winning the £50,000 prize would be an enormous financial boost to any writer on the list. Even appearing on the list leads to a boost in sales. David Salariya pointed out last year that winning any kind of prize can boost sales by anywhere from 40% to 500%, which is obviously good news for those trying to encourage the world to read their fiction.
So, while you might disagree with the choices of Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker et. al., the very fact that they sat down and read a whole bunch of contemporary novels, then whittled them down to a longlist, and then a shortlist, all of which received media publicity, as will the decision of who actually wins in November, is a generally good thing for writers.
Is there a counterargument then to the prize culture? Yes, there are quite a few actually. Art is not sport. There’s no empirical method for establishing what’s ‘better’ than something else. Its beauty and appreciation lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder alone. So if you like Dan Brown and think Rachel Cusk is shit, then that’s your choice, and you make it with your own hard-earned cash, and no one can take that choice from you.
And then there’s the posterity argument. Shakespeare didn’t need no prizes, we get told occasionally. Neither did Homer or Dante or Sappho or (insert favourite eternal ancient author here). And while that is true (to an extent – many cultures including the Greeks and Irish had annual competitions for composition in the distant past), it hints at a further implicit argument, that the choices of posterity are likely not to reflect the popularity of the present.
We can see that this is indeed true (again, to an extent.) The best-selling novel in 1922 was If Winter Comes by ASM Hutchinson. It deals with topics like suicide and divorce, which were quite shocking at the time, and was filmed twice. It’s fair to say, however, that nobody is reading If Winter Comes today. By contrast, James Joyce published Ulysses that same year in an edition of just 1000 copies. A century or more later, and it’s on pretty much every university literature course on the planet. Is it well-read? Perhaps not, but a lot of people try every single year due to its immense reputation. Posterity has judged in favour of Joyce and not Hutchinson, despite Joyce never winning a prize for anything.
But to be in the running for posterity’s consideration, it probably helps to have at least some attention while still alive, which was certainly the case with Joyce. It’s also the case with a lot of the Nobel and Booker prizewinners too. There are examples like Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka whose reputations were all but unknown during their lifetimes, and yet who sprung to a large degree of prominence later, of course. These are largely notable because of how few there are. And one suspects that Kafka and Dickinson might quite have liked a few sales and some critical attention, not to mention maybe a prize, while they were still around to enjoy the acclaim however modest it might then have been.
Generally, the Booker Prize has quite a good track record of picking the same writers that have been accepted by posterity, if we can attribute fifty or so years of reputation as an early judgement of history. If you read down the list of winners from 1969 onwards, there aren’t so many winners who didn’t attract plaudits, success and acclaim for other of their novels also. Quite a lot of them are still highly regarded and well read today. Would Rushdie, Gordimer, Murdoch, Golding, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Byatt, McEwan, Attwood et. al. be so popular today had they not nabbed a Booker? Possibly not.
So it’s likely that Salariya is correct to note that the prizes phenomenon is a kind of necessary evil, drawing attention to the toil and achievement of writers generally, and literary fiction writers in particular. Without them, we might not discuss literature much in the public sphere at all.
Questioning why Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker should be an arbiter of literature is therefore part of the process (and he’s positioned himself in recent years as a curator of artistic experiences so it’s not especially outrageous), as is raising an eyebrow when one judge asserts that “the purpose of literature is to open our eyes to gay sex”. They’re doing their job, which is to redirect frazzled eyeballs in the attention economy to a more worthwhile reading experience. The debate, the outrageous comments, the questionable decisions (Where’s Switzy on the shortlist this year? Why didn’t Ballard win for Empire of the Sun, or Burgess for Earthly Powers?) are all part of that attempt to redirect the general public.
Novelist has increasingly joined poet and some other professions in the kudos economy, where people are rewarded not monetarily but in terms of grudging status. A novel or two is a useful status marker, not unlike a higher degree or a royal honour, in British and perhaps other societies too. In that context, one cannot begrudge anyone receiving a prize that might lift them financially rather than in terms of kudos. Kudos won’t pay that £1400 pcm rent after all.