How Prizes Work in the Literary Economy by Beth Driscoll
An extract from HEAT 18
Download a pdf version
To place a bet on the Booker Prize, I had to leave the bright noise of Finchley Road and walk down lurid, carpeted stairs, past a row of old men whose faces were lit by flickering TV screens, and across to a perspex counter. A young woman with spiky pink hair stared at me impassively.
‘I’d like to place a bet on the Booker Prize.’
She blinked.
‘The what?’
‘It’s a prize. For books.’
She chewed her gum, scanned the calendar, and flicked through the screens on her computer with a kind of dogged apathy. Not only had she never heard of the Booker Prize, she didn’t know where to start finding it on their system. I shifted from foot to foot, thinking that if I’d wanted to get rid of my money quickly I really should have bet on the horses. After she vaguely offered to call Head Office, I scribbled ‘Lloyd Jones Mister Pip’ on a scrap of paper and handed over five pounds.
How awkward. Yet literary culture often seems to produce moments like these, fusing art and money in ways that feel discordant. This is nowhere more striking than in the case of literary prizes. In his book The Economy of Prestige (2006), academic James English suggests that literary prizes have at their heart a duplicity, or an ambiguity. On the one hand, prizes are spectacular stages, media events that draw together authors and the public as stars and fans. Prizes manufacture the excitement of the contest, the glory of winners and the shame of losers, providing a surge of adrenaline to the scene of literary production. In this sense, prizes are a function of our celebrity-obsessed society and a symptom of the sort of globalised mass consumerism in which one item is pimped and sold in massive quantities. On the other hand, prizes endorse elitism. They declare themselves consecrators of genius, ignoring the market-driven successes of bestsellers to honour works that display style and originality. Prizes reaffirm the possibility of critical judgement, the notion that some cultural products are simply better than others. Embodying these competing drives, prizes are thoroughly embedded in an ambivalence where prestige collides with popular appeal.