Michael Cunningham on literary prizes, Joyce and Woolf
One is skeptical about literary prizes. And yet – confess to it, please – one likes literary prizes, as well.
I’m not talking only about winning prizes, though winning them can (and probably should) produce a potent, mingled sense of skepticism and pleasure. I’m talking about the divide one may feel upon hearing that a certain book has won a particular prize.
On one hand, there’s the obvious absurdity of prizes – their inevitable subjectivity, not to mention the plain silliness of deeming one extremely good book better than another (quick, off the top of your head – is Middlemarch superior to Bleak House, or vice versa?). If you’re interested, and have a few minutes to spare, go on-line and look at the list of American novels that did not win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction since it was established in 1917.
On the other hand, though, there’s one’s rightful devotion to the whole Ta-Da business: the pronouncement, the trumpet blare, the laying of the laurel wreath on the most gifted and beautiful of all the heads in the arena.
It’s human. There’s not much to be done about it.
There is, however, a certain fundamental question that tends to arise whenever prizes are being contemplated (I speak as someone who’s been on prize juries). Is it the fundamental purpose of the prize in question to acknowledge the writer who’s veered closest to greatness that year (or decade, or century), regardless of the boxcar-loads of accolades that may already have been delivered; or is the prize’s truer purpose to draw attention to an extremely good and possibly significant writer who seems to be passing more or less unnoticed?
I don’t think bifurcation like that is necessarily called for where a contemporary prize is concerned, because, after all, history’s verdict is still out on newer books. But when we consider centuries of literary effort… Well, if nothing else, I’d feel too torn between naming one of what are probably the most obvious fifty or so, or naming a less-than-deified book. The list of undeniable greats is predictable, and so, a little dull. However. If one stretches to name a book that’s been (in one’s own estimation) under-recognized, one implies that some lesser-known book leaves Middlemarch and Bleak House in the dust. I personally know of no such book.
And so, at the risk of disappointing those who like a certain savage singularity, I have to suggest two Folio prizes, when we’re talking about every book ever written in English: One for the Greatest, and one for the Wrongfully Underestimated.
The Greatest.
I’m afraid there’s yet more equivocation to come. I’d award this particular prize to Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
I’m not talking about a tie. I’m talking about two seminal works of literature that should be considered in tandem.
Let’s pause to remember that the novel, in English, is less than three hundred years old. Given its youth, its track record is remarkable. A species able to produce, in relatively short order, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, The Golden Bowl, The Sound and the Fury, and The Great Gatsby, just to name a few (Middlemarch and Bleak House have probably been sufficiently acknowledged already) should really be preserved (note to self: the holes in the ozone layer should, if possible, be knitted back together, and the oceans really shouldn’t rise up and engulf the cities).
For me, however, it was the Modernists who engendered the most significant literary revolution. Suddenly, in the early 20th century, a novel had as much to do with its language as it did with its events. A novel concerned itself with epic tales about outwardly ordinary lives, and thereby established that there’s no such thing as an “ordinary” life; there is only inadequate appreciation of the humanity of anyone, everyone, alive on the surface of the planet. And a novel was no longer meant as moral instruction for readers who were, perhaps, ever so slightly in need of it.
Ulysses is, of course, Godzilla, and the rest of us are merely the citizens of Tokyo. Ulysses changed everything. Ulysses is the novel most likely to inspire, in a still-living writer, the question, “Oh, well, now that that’s been done, why bother anymore?”
To the Lighthouse doesn’t slay and pillage in the same way. It is, however, every bit as revolutionary as Ulysses, and for some of the same reasons. Like Joyce, Woolf knew that the entire world could be seen not only by looking at the big picture, but also by looking at the small one, in more or less the way a physicist who studies sub-atomic particles is witness to miracles every bit as astonishing as those observed by an astronomer.
Unlike Joyce, though, Woolf didn’t need to devastate her readers. Nor did she need her readers to comprehend just how brilliant she was. And, of course, she cared more than did Joyce about the lives of women.
If Joyce, in Ulysses, is the vengeful god – if he’s the father who gives his children the occasional, all-too-clear sense of their own limitations – Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, is Winnicott’s good-enough mother, the one who’s able to love her children while simultaneously urging them onward into lives of their own, beyond her reach or influence.
For all their genius, both authors arrived with limitations, as humans always do. Woolf was a snob, and could not, would not, write about sex. Joyce was something of a bully, on the page – he cared, at times, or so it seems to me, a bit more about his readers’ apprehension of his immense talent than he did about the readers themselves, or, for that matter, about the characters in his book.
Mom is adoring and nurturing and ever so slightly out of touch. Dad is potent and challenging and ever so slightly uncaring.
And so, I nominate Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, not by way of a draw, but as a pair – a marriage, if you will. A marriage in which each member is enhanced by the other, a marriage that creates a two-bodied entity far more influential, and more important, than either individual, than any individual, could possibly be.
On to The Under-Appreciated.
As I’ve said, if there’s an unknown or neglected book on the scale of, okay, Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, it’s unknown to me. It’s neglected by me, along with everybody else.
There are, however, a number of books that should be read by everyone, and, as of today, have not been.
In alphabetical order, the prize(s) go to:
Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
James Salter, Light Years
And that, surely, is more than enough out of me.