Medal Fatigue

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
November 13, 2005
Essay
Medal Fatigue
By A. O. SCOTT

I AM proud - but also deeply humbled - to deliver this
unofficial and unsolicited reminder that next
Wednesday, Nov. 16, the National Book Awards will be
distributed in New York City. (I know! I can hardly
wait, either.) These awards will, as always, add
incomparable and well-deserved luster to the
reputations of the lucky - that is to say, the
absolutely worthy and painstakingly chosen - winners,
and also reveal the vibrancy and diversity of American
literary endeavor in all its forms....

Or, to put it another way, the prizes, transparently
trivial, implicitly corrupt and utterly detached from
any meaningful notion of literary value, will be
greeted with cynicism, derision and, if we're lucky, a
burst of controversy. It will escape no one's
attention - not even the winners' - that the very idea
of handing out medals and cash for aesthetic and
intellectual achievement is absurd, if not obscene.
Furthermore, the selections will inevitably reflect
the rottenness of the literary status quo, which is
either hopelessly stodgy and out of touch, or else
distracted by modish extraliterary considerations -
hobbled, that is, either by conservative complacency
or by political correctness. As if that weren't bad
enough, the N.B.A.'s will force upon the public the
startling revelation that book publishing is a
commercial enterprise. Unless of course they uphold
the idealistic principle that it isn't. Anyway, the
winners will be the obvious choices, authors who have
already won plenty of prizes and acclaim, in which
case what's the point? (Does John Ashbery really need
another medal to accompany the N.B.A., the Pulitzer
and the National Book Critics Circle Award he won for
"Self-Portrait in a Convex-Mirror"?) Either that, or
the winners will be people nobody outside a tiny elite
has ever heard of (Vern Rutsala? René Steinke?), in
which case . . . well, see above.

No offense to Rutsala, Steinke and Ashbery, by the
way, who may for all I know someday make up the jury
judging a prize for which I might be eligible (and for
which I'd like, in advance, to thank my parents, my
wife and His Holiness the Dalai Lama). My point,
really, is that the National Book Awards, like every
other prize in the crowded field of global cultural
honormongering, rest upon some intrinsic paradoxes.
Prizes are both eagerly sought after and reflexively
disdained. They are covered in the media with
breathless awe and, at the same time, with savage
mockery. They affirm the disinterested autonomy of
artistic labor even as they undermine it by placing a
cash value on its products. The winners chosen are
either too obvious or too obscure, too safe or too
scandalous. There are more awards every year, but
their proliferation, rather than diluting their
importance, only seems to increase it.

These contradictions are the subject of "The Economy
of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of
Cultural Value" (Harvard University Press, $29.95), a
new book by James F. English. "Why has no historian
attempted a history of the modern cultural prize?"
English wonders, and by the end of his closely argued,
unfailingly astute book, it does not seem like a silly
question at all. Not that English, chairman of the
University of Pennsylvania department that bears his
name, has written such a history. He has some
interesting, occasionally esoteric, stories to tell:
about the undistinguished birth and tantrum-filled
childhood of the Booker Prize; about how the music
awards system in apartheid-era South Africa influenced
the career of Ladysmith Black Mambazo; about the
origin and development of the Nobel-giving Swedish
Academy. But this is not a book either for collectors
of gossip or devotees of institutional lore. While he
does mention the comic Irwin Corey's appearance, as
"Professor Irwin Corey," at the 1974 National Book
Awards dinner - to deliver a memorably nonsensical
acceptance speech on behalf of the fiction winner (and
no-surprise no-show) Thomas Pynchon - English forgoes
the opportunity to retell the saga of Sacheen
Littlefeather, who pulled a similar stunt on behalf of
Marlon Brando at the Oscar ceremony a year earlier.

For that kind of scuttlebutt, you can turn to dishers
like Damien Bona or Tom O'Neil, who serve as tireless
rhapsodes and statisticians of the showbiz awards biz.
By contrast English, according to his online
curriculum vitae a one-time co-winner of Penn's Mortar
Board Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award, is
relentlessly analytical. He takes his methodological
cues from the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,
whose anatomies of contemporary life are at once
loftily abstract and grittily detailed. As his book's
title suggests, English is especially interested in
the manufacture and distribution of prestige, a
quality that turns out to be both valuable and
elusive, and one whose main form of currency, he
argues, is the prize.

It will immediately be noted that no one really takes
prizes seriously. It will, indeed, be noted most
frequently and publicly by those involved with the
prizes themselves. Winners and judges deprecate the
idea of competition; pundits find ideological fault
with the selections; scandals erupt. And the peanut
gallery is always full of commentators taking easy
potshots at the number of prizes, the stupidity of
most of them, the hype that attends them and so on.
(Really, is there a lower form of cultural discourse?
I certainly hope not.)

But the brilliant, irrefutable crux of English's
argument is that, rather than tarnishing the luster of
the cultural prize, such debunkery actually - oh, no!
- constitutes a primary source of the prize's
legitimacy and power. "It is difficult to find anyone
of any stature," he writes, "who speaks with unalloyed
respect for prizes, and still more difficult to find
books or articles (other than those underwritten by
the prize sponsors themselves) that do not strike the
familiar chords of amused indifference, jocular
condescension or outright disgust." But this familiar
disrespect is what Bourdieu would call a "strategy of
condescension," which, in English's account, "enables
one to enjoy both the rewards of the game and the
rewards due to those who are seen as standing above
the game."

In other words, prizes flourish to the extent that
they are not taken seriously, but this does not mean
they are all a big joke. Rather, they exist in a limbo
of anxiety and uncertainty about the status of
artistic and intellectual endeavor in a global
consumer economy. We assume - we know - that art and
thought have value, but we lack agreed-upon means to
measure that value, so we come up with tools that are
transparently and grandly inadequate to the task.
Prestige, that is, functions as a poor substitute for
even less tangible attributes; it is not necessarily
the same as excellence, but it is not necessarily not
the same. It is not ratified by commercial success,
except on those occasions when it is. And prizes
sometimes do go to the best candidates, which are
sometimes (and sometimes not) also the most popular.

My only prediction for the coming N.B.A.'s is the same
one I offer each year when, in my day job, I am asked
about the Oscars. I have, at the moment, no idea who
will win, and a year from now I will not be able to
remember who won. I would hope, though, that in the
near future English's book wins some prize for which
it is eligible. This shouldn't be hard, given that
there are now, he writes, around a hundred prizes for
every thousand books published in the United States.
(If he had made a movie, his chances would be even
better, since, as he writes, "by the end of the 20th
century, the number of film awards distributed each
year exceeded the number of full-length films being
produced.") A prize for the best book about prizes! In
the tradition of Irwin Corey and Sacheen
Littlefeather, English should send a proxy to collect
his medal: the obvious choice would be Cosmo Kramer,
the fictional author of a prestigious coffeetable book
about coffee tables.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13scott.html

Professor Irwin Corey, the world's foremost authority,
accepts a National Book Award for Thomas Pynchon,
1974.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/11/08/books/scot450.jpg



	
		
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