What Are Literary Awards For?
Literary Awards, Racial Representation, and the Failure of Statistics
Front Matter: Programing Notes and The Golden Notebook
Inspired by Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (a book largely about problematic male geniuses), we’re picking up a daunting classic by a woman that Dederer mentions in her essays, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. If you want to join along, the idea is just to read a little each day at your own pace and chip away at a very long, difficult book without anxiety. Instead of mixing an update in every week to the Thursday newsletter, as I did with Moby Dick, I’m going to send periodic updates on Tuesdays when there’s something interesting to say. Happy reading.
Biggest “news” in Books: Book Award Stats
A statistical analysis of the National Book Award and other literary awards came out this week. It’s not a very intensive analysis and it doesn’t even answer its own headline, “What 35 Years Can Tell Us About Who Will Win the National Book Award.” The main data points it examines are the race of the judges and the race of the nominees and winners. Even that data point isn’t very granular, as it is divided into two categories: white and nonwhite. The gist of the analysis: from the late 80s to the early 2000s the vast majority—nearly all—of the judges were white and the vast majority of nominees and winners were white as well.
The social media pull quote from the article, which offers a misleading message about the current state of award giving (publicbooks.org)
Not featured in the tweet above, and much more interesting and complicated to talk about, is that in the last decade, as the judges for the National Book Award have gotten much less white, the nominees and winners have, in lock-step, also gotten less white. Heartening, is that the study discovered that a diverse panel of judges has meant more diverse books but not the same books as the races of the judges, meaning “a diverse jury may eventually lead to a diverse shortlist, but that process is far from an exercise in identification.”
More diversity equals more diversity, simple maths (publicbooks.org)
Numbers are helpful to see if you have a problem, and it was obvious there was a very big problem until recently with giving out literary book awards to only white writers. Statistics open our eyes to inequality so that we can do something about it. The question in publishing now, as with other forms of media, is once you address inclusion on a statistical level, something we still haven’t in many layers of the publishing industry, but seem to have done in literary awards, what comes next? And what is the exact state of critical and award-giving apparatus in book publishing beyond white or nonwhite?
The article does acknowledge shortcomings of their data analysis, ultimately saying that these awards are: “a quantitative average of the individuals involved, and more a qualitative record of their social dynamics.” The article also brings up Percival Everett and his novel Erasure as a way to illustrate what these stats look like—Everett was the only Black judge on a National Book Award panel in the late 90s. It’s a peculiar example given the main thrust of how the study is framed. Erasure is a skewering of the literary world that centers on Monk, a literary, experimental, obscure and intellectual Black writer (read: a thinly-veiled fictionalized version of Everett). Monk frustrated by what the literary industry and readers reward, decides to write an offensively racist, parody of a “Black experience” novel under a pseudonym, which, of course, becomes a massive bestseller. Later the fake novel is up for a literary award that Monk, in his literary intellectual capacity, has been tapped to judge. Monk despises the work he’s created, but every other judge loves it and admonishes him for not voting for what they assume he should automatically try to uplift.
Erasure, which is the source material for the forthcoming likely Oscar award-contender American Fiction (huge shoutout to the poster art for this film which is worth clicking the link to look at), is an audacious and inventive piece of auto/meta/comic literary fiction (it has a truly epic Krauss). There are so many layers to the novel, but if I had to take a stab at one thing Percival Everett was trying to communicate with Erasure, it’s that representation doesn’t tell a finished story when it comes to race or art. A central tension for the book’s protagonist is that everyone wants to view him as a Black writer who writes about the Black experience rather than what he really is: a Pynchon type of writer, so intellectual and dense it’s almost unreadable, a style that has long defaulted to being the purview white writers. In writing his fake, lowest-common-denominator novel (call it Oscar bait), Monk/Everett exposes the falsehood that representation is a defacto good in something as subjective, idiosyncratic, and niche as art and literary fiction. Call it the Green Book Effect. On the surface Green Book, a Best Picture winner, was an uplifting film about race whose Black co-lead Mahershala Ali also won a Best Supporting Actor statue for. Green Book counts for representation in statistics and yet in context its quality and its commentary on race—seemingly a large part of why it won—were left extremely wanting (and irony of irony, it won in the same year as Spike Lee’s Blackkklasman and Black Panther were also in contention). Percival Everett told us this was coming, that it was already here even when representation was just a fledgling concern.
Wesley Morris, one of the most brilliant critics of this century, tackles the thorny nature of being a critic in this social justice era in his great piece “The Morality Wars.” He talks about the difficulty of critiquing any piece of art that has a subject and an author from any marginalized group and the near impossibility of seriously analyzing an icon of one of those groups (like Beyonce) in any meaningful way. He writes:
“A lot of this zealous police work makes sense. Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginal. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it. They’ve demanded to be taken seriously, and now that they kind of are, they can’t not act. This territory was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any cost. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy — not directly. They can, however, amend the culture. But as urgent as these correctives, cancellations, pre-emptions and proscriptions may be, they do start to take a toll. It can be hard to tell when we’re consuming art and when we’re conducting H.R.”
Everett and Morris are both tackling the same problem from different angles: the problem of moralizing inclusion and representation and making this the be-all, end-all of tackling historical inequality in the arts. In publishing we’ve entered the phase, from literary awards on down, of dutiful H.R. when it comes to identity. It’s important to stop and acknowledge that awards like the Pulitzers and Oscars are the very endpoint of a number of systems and that they will always be a reflection of the message of the art, be it political or otherwise, and never primarily a measure of artistic merit. But that doesn’t mean we as readers or critics have to discuss or judge books or films or paintings in a strictly “who does this come from and what is its message” way.
While the exercise of counting is helpful in identifying an issue, we cannot expect to count our way to a solution. Now that we’ve decided the old way was wrong and have the data to back up just how wrong it was, we hopefully can move into a new phase of critical appraisal, not just retaining our old ways while mixing in representation (see again the Green Book Effect). Or holding up a piece of art or artist with a level of toxic positivity just because we want to see someone from that group succeed. Eventually we have to look past statistics and decide what our values are. We have to look at the content of character. Good artists deserve good criticism.