Where we live: not Poland or Turkey, but someplace like that December 6, 2006
THE winners of the National Book Awards were announced this month.Did anyone notice?
Does anybody really care who wins literary awards? Certainly publishers do, and after all, most book awards are highly effective publicity machines that generate extra sales. Authors do- because they can usually find good ways to dispose of the prize money, not to mention the speaking engagement fees and the aforementioned increased sales. And the judges do- they engage in major reading marathons, think for a long time, and debate the outcomes. But how about the general public, apart from those browsing the shelves at Barnes and Nobles?
In her brief but enlightening essay, Marianne Wiggins, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, gives us a glimpse into student awareness of the literary prizes. As an exercise, she presented her creative writing class at U.S.C with a list of years that Americans had won a Nobel Prize in the 20th century, and they drew a collective blank. For the year 1978, she gave out that the winner was a Polish emigrant, wrote in Yiddish, and lived in New York City. They guessed Shel Silverstein, not Issac Bashevis Singer. One brave spirit, according to Wiggins, ventured that this year’s laureate was someone “from Poland or Turkey” or someplace like that. Close. Orhan Pamuk is Turkish.
We, meanwhile, live in a private “someplace like that”, where Cormac McCarthy, a writer critics justly compare to Melville and Faulkner, sells less than a hundred thousand copies of any new book, and where the average T.V. writer takes home more money in a week than a first novelist’s average advance. So we need the book prizes, and will continue to do so, even if the someplace we live in is not Poland or Turkey, not the U.K.- where according to Wiggins, the Man Booker Prize (the leading British literary prize) is broadcast live on television. But if the student who advanced the Polish-Turkish thesis was unconsciously calling both a kind of cultural backwater, and if a cultural backwater can be defined as a place that spends far too little advancing literary causes- we certainly live in that kind of place.
Tags: Marianne | WINNER | Prize | Wiggins | picking | man | Britain | award
