Ursula K. Le Guin on book awards
Dec. 29th, 2011 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deborahjrossShe says it much better than I can, here on Book View Cafe
Literary awards are useless for guiding and informing and don’t even make good targets. In declaring a book as “the best,” a literary award serves that book. It does not serve literature. On the contrary, it does literature a considerable disservice.
Awards serve above all to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity and lazy-minded readers, teachers, and librarians with a readymade choice. They needn’t pay attention to the books that didn’t win the prize, they needn’t exercise their own critical faculties, they don’t have to think, they can just order the prize book and believe they’re reading what’s “important.”
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Awards are supposed to spur competitive excellence. But despite the theories of (almost universally male) critics and psychologists, the practice of art is not inherently a competitive activity. It can be made into one, of course. Male or cultural competitiveness often makes it into one. But I do not believe and see no evidence to prove that the passion to do something you have a gift for doing is originally driven by the need to excel or even to show off. Most people who have a gift work extremely hard at it, if they are able to, because the work is intensely, immediately, and reliably rewarding. You have to make a living, but art is very seldom a practical way of doing so. Most artists are in it for the satisfaction of knowing they’re doing, literally, the best thing they can do. In that sense of doing one’s best, and only in that sense, “the best” means something in art. To consider art as a competition to be “the best” is to miss the point.
Literary awards are useless for guiding and informing and don’t even make good targets. In declaring a book as “the best,” a literary award serves that book. It does not serve literature. On the contrary, it does literature a considerable disservice.
Awards serve above all to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity and lazy-minded readers, teachers, and librarians with a readymade choice. They needn’t pay attention to the books that didn’t win the prize, they needn’t exercise their own critical faculties, they don’t have to think, they can just order the prize book and believe they’re reading what’s “important.”
...
Awards are supposed to spur competitive excellence. But despite the theories of (almost universally male) critics and psychologists, the practice of art is not inherently a competitive activity. It can be made into one, of course. Male or cultural competitiveness often makes it into one. But I do not believe and see no evidence to prove that the passion to do something you have a gift for doing is originally driven by the need to excel or even to show off. Most people who have a gift work extremely hard at it, if they are able to, because the work is intensely, immediately, and reliably rewarding. You have to make a living, but art is very seldom a practical way of doing so. Most artists are in it for the satisfaction of knowing they’re doing, literally, the best thing they can do. In that sense of doing one’s best, and only in that sense, “the best” means something in art. To consider art as a competition to be “the best” is to miss the point.
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Date: 2011-12-30 06:53 pm (UTC)Ironically, my latest acquisition along those lines is Ursula K. Le Guin's own The Word for World is Forest. Her Ashtheans made Barlowe's list. (Next, I hope to track down some E.E. Doc Smith in the library.)
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Date: 2011-12-31 02:26 am (UTC)I don't buy books simply because they win awards, but I am more inclined to try a new author who has made it to the short list (of awards I respect) simply as an indication of professional quality. With all the self-publishing these days, we've lost the gate-keepers of standards, and award nominations are one way around that. But I'm willing to consider that I might be wrong.