A critical look at the Man Booker Prize
White bias and class disparity dictate the finest in fiction
11/29/11
Julian Barnes recieved a Man Booker Prize this year. Photo by Ellen Warner
On October 18th, 2011, British author Julian Barnes was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction–an award that, according to its spokespeople, “promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year.” But how, you may wonder, is the winner of this prize chosen? Who gets to pick a book and declare it the very best book of the year? How do the judges make such a decision? Behind the Prize’s bombastic, carefully staged finale and its spectacular gala dinner lurk the politics of selection and exclusion. There are numerous contributing factors, but in order to address these issues more easily, one can divide them into politics of language, class, and nationality.
In order to address the issues concerning language, it is pertinent to take note of the Prize’s core ruling principle: only novels written in English are eligible for nomination. If the Prize claims to “promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year,” it seems problematic that only books written in English will be considered. So why English? The Prize does not seem to offer an answer to this question; the rules simply specify that English translations of works written originally in other languages are not eligible. This implies that in order to be the author of the “very best book of the year” one must be literate in English. This proves to be problematic as so many authors are excluded by this one principal rule.
To address the politics surrounding nationality, the Prize rules state that “any full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe is eligible.” Which leads one to wonder, why is this limited to such a small group of countries? This restriction excludes the majority of writers around the world from nomination, and causes one to infer that those outside of the above-mentioned clique of nations are somehow incapable of writing fine fiction. It is also interesting to note that the small group of authors that are eligible due to their ethnic backgrounds; over half of Prize winners have been British.
Finally, it is important to consider that the list of eligible writers is reduced even more by authors’ class standings. Most people involved with the Prize, specifically judges, administrators and board members, have received educations from upper-class universities.
For example, Barnes, this year’s award recipient, attended Magdalen College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. Therefore, it is fair to infer that the novels promoted by the Prize as the most superb exemplars of literary production only deal with a very narrow range of ideas and experiences—those of an extremely small, privileged elite.
On top of all this controversy, another issue seems to influence the so-called ‘objective’ nature of the Prize. The Prize is sponsored by the investment company Man Group plc. A sponsorship of this nature may seem harmless; however critical theorist Graham Huggan explains how such a sponsorship may be problematic: “In a global cultural economy controlled by huge multinational companies, the corporate sponsorship of the arts has become an indisputable fact. […] As state subsidies of the arts have dwindled, alarmingly in many countries, corporate sponsors have emerged to dominate the literary/artistic scene.” Thus, by sponsoring The Man Booker Prize, the Man Group plc. has the power to influence how the prize is run. This draws parallel, to the issue of class mentioned earlier, because this large corporation has such an influence on the Prize, the group of eligible authors may be further discriminated upon according to a corporate, elitist bias.
One may wonder, why is all this an issue? Why should literary biases like this bother us? One of the major reasons that this is a problem is due to the false perception surrounding the Prize. For example, when people—judges, authors, or commentators—speak of the Man Booker Prize, they usually fail to mention its rigidly exclusionary agenda. Most often, these people will proclaim that whichever novel has been chosen as the winner is indeed the best of the best, suggesting that it has been selected not because several layers of discriminatory practices have rendered most other works ineligible, but because it’s the epitome of literary excellence. This is apparent in the case of the most recent winner, Barnes. On choosing his novel for the shortlist, judge Gaby Wood said, “It seems to be the most obvious book on this list. It’s a quiet book, but the shock that comes doesn’t break stride with the tone of the rest of the book. In purely technical terms it is one of the most masterful things I’ve ever read.” More alarmingly, judges have even stated that the winning novel offers us insight into the deepest recesses of the human soul, presenting us with a pristine, vivid picture of human nature. Referring to Barnes’s novel, head judge Stella Rimington stated, “We thought it was a book that spoke to the humankind of the 21st Century.” In these quotations, it is clear that the views and values of upper middle-class Commonwealth citizens have come to dictate what is to be considered a picture of human nature. What about those of us who are not white? Not middle class? Can one novel truly have the power to speak to all of humankind?
While considering these questions it is hard to believe that every year these extremely narrow sets of experiences and ideas are selected by white (upper) middle-class British judges as well as sponsored and mass-distributed by multinational corporations to ultimately end up on our bookshelves. This consequently reinforces 19th-century ideals about English as the one and only language in which “the finest in fiction” can be written.
Despite the presence of these books on our shelves, most consumers’ cultural visions of humanity will never enjoy such a wide dissemination, since the vast majority of us would be ineligible to even be longlisted for the Prize.
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