First published, 5th December 2014
What you need, in order to win the Man Booker Prize is to win it. That may sound obvious or meaningless but it’s not. Okay, try this: what you need, in order to win the Turner Prize is to win it. See? It works there too. To understand how and, more importantly, why the Richard Flanagans and Duncan Campbells of this world pull it off when they do, you have to go back to Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp was unapologetic about the apparent paradox exposed by Joan Bakewell (Late Night Line Up BBC, 1968) that anti-art so easily becomes art. Fountain was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists from its New York show in 1917 for not being art. Eighty-seven years later the urinal was voted the most influential modern art work of all time (a somewhat paradoxical description in itself). The BBC news report of 1st December 2004 cited ‘art expert’ Simon Wilson: “The choice of Duchamp’s Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock,” after 500 other art ‘experts’ on the run up to the 2004 Turner Prize voted it into first place ahead of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych from 1962.
Duchamp was a wily fox. Readymades like his bottle drier were signed in batches of eight or so. I remember learning as a kid that you could write a bank draft on the side of a cow like a cheque. Well, Duchamp knew a cash cow when he saw one. His signed works were cheques made out to himself.
Duchamp wasn’t a satirist so much as a cynic who knew how the art industry works. He failed to make it as an expressionist, cubist, futurist, Dadaist, you name it. His Fountain was almost literally a piss taker.
But Duchamp unwittingly stumbled on a truth. I don’t think it was his intention to expose the fact that what makes something art is not the artwork but everything around it. In fact, whatever your object, be it urinal or bottle drier, a piece of dog’s shit, is art if and when art experts decide that it is art. By implication, a retinal masterwork, say by Rembrandt, is not art if experts decide it isn’t. The point is that the object can be anything: created or readymade. The object is just a reference point; something that can carry a signature. Something to which we can point. Something that you can buy.
Who is or are ‘we’? Well, here’s a list: art experts, critics, galleries, museums, the media, advertising and marketing, agents, awards committees, other artists or writers, journalists, market places, book shops, libraries, academic institutions, publishers, prize judges, politicians, collectors and so on and the such like. Collectively the ‘we’ might be referred to as the ‘manufacturing system’. Duchamp’s urinal is art because an object of raw material has been manufactured into being art by the industry.
Let’s try the opening sentence again: What you need, in order to win the Man Booker Prize is to win it.
Has the penny dropped?
No?
Okay, try this. The emperor’s new clothes. (Oh, that old chestnut). To work as a metaphor relevant to the present context, suppose the emperor was in on the fraud. I mean, suppose he wasn’t being duped by two conning tailors. What traditionally makes the fable work is that the emperor, like the courtiers and townsfolk, is being taken for a ride. (Well, actually it’s not that simple, only the emperor is a fool, his subjects have to go along with what the idiot says or believes because he’s got all the power). Anyway, the boy doesn’t play along because he’s innocent. He’s naïve and has yet to learn how it all works. But, suppose the emperor deliberately and knowingly set up the situation and he commissioned all the ‘manufacturers’ of his society to sell the idea of invisible clothes to the population as, say, conceptual clothing or call it what you will. Then you’ve got something very different. You’ve got a new fashion.
If the art world can be persuaded a urinal is art then it’s art. Art is simply what we decide is art. Literature is simply what we decide is literature. There is nothing intrinsic in the object be it painting, bottle drier or novel that is at all relevant, when it come to deciding if it is culturally significant, valuable, right or good. The industry dictates.
The satirist, Stewart Lee, recently produced two series of what looked to be stand-up comedy. Lee tried to explain that what he was actually doing wasn’t real stand-up but a parody of stand-up. How do you do a parody of stand-up without becoming stand-up? Well, in one episode specifically on stand-up comedy, Lee delivers his gag-free performance sitting down. But it’s still stand-up. It takes an inordinate amount of will power on the part of the people in the audience, not to fall into feeling they are watching a stand-up comedian. It’s a problem that kind of underpins what I’m trying to say. I mean, how could you parody a detective novel without writing a detective novel? If the parody is too clever or subtle, the satire flies out the window; the parody becomes what it set out to ridicule. A urinal becomes the very thing it set out to attack. Context is all.
But it gets worse. If modernism sought to undermine identities, postmodernism destroyed evaluative criteria. To an intelligent alien life form, this planet’s art and literary prizes could appear, initially, to be another example of the madness dogging the dominant species. After all, these humans don’t even know what it is they regard as objects to award prizes to and then they want to evaluate one over another, having decided that there are no absolute standards on which to base their judgements of what is good or bad.
Good writing or bad writing?:
“He found himself feeling both slightly resentful and somewhat nervous. What business did beauty have with him? Particularly when her expression, her voice, her clothing, everything about her, he understood as that of a woman of some standing, and though he was a doctor now, and an officer, he was not so far removed from his origins that he did not feel these things acutely.”
Or,
“I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him to be an invitation to adventure.”
Or,
“Where’s that kilt?
You were thinking of her again, weren’t you?
My kilt?
It hurts me, you know.
Bloody damn kilt.
He had arrived in a kilt, following the annual dinner of the Parramatta Burns Society, to which he had belonged since his work had brought him to Sydney in 1974, and of which he was patron for no reason that he could fathom other than, perhaps, his public vice of whisky and his secret vice of women. And now the kilt was lost.
Not Ella, she said. Because that’s not love.
He thought of his wife. He found his marriage a profound solitude. He did not understand why he was married, why sleeping with several different women was seen to be wrong, why all of it meant less and less. Nor could he say what was the strange ache at the base of his stomach that grew and grew, why he so desperately needed to smell Lynette Maison’s back, or why the only real thing in his life were his dreams.”
Good, good, good. God. This and on and on of dreary subordinate clause-clunking prose that could only have come out of a flat hot desert of an island in the middle of a culturally, historically parenthetical void.
Fellow Australian littérateur, Thomas Keneally (Man Booker prize winner for Shindler’s Ark) gushingly lauds his fellow countryman (The Guardian 15 October):
“The Narrow Road to the Deep North is indeed a stellar book and few would argue with that claim. It is a book full of significance, but very accessible – Flanagan has a gift for being brisk at narrative, but also for conveying serious and complex ideas painlessly. Unlike most of us, he doesn’t overwrite scenes. I envy his economies, his poetics and his capacity to play with time – time being the servant of Richard’s novels, not their linear master.”
Interestingly, Keneally goes on to quote another Booker Laureate, Kiran Desai:
“When he [Flanagan] won the other night, he must have felt shock and validation in one vast wave. Kiran Desai, who won the Man Booker in 2006 for her masterpiece The Inheritance of Loss, said that until then she had felt like a dilettante, but that her first joyous thought at hearing her name was, ‘I must be a novelist, because even they think I’m a novelist.’”
“I must be a novelist because even they think I’m a novelist.” Actually, the adverb ‘even’ seems odd to me. But there you are. Whatever. Who cares. The fact is novelist or not, writing like this:
“In a dense frustration of lust and fury – penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of – he stuffed his way ungracefully into her….
Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury – this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas – but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevolency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run – it turned his civilized stomach.”
in page after page of dreary under-edited, over-written, gerund-glutted prose is the stuff of great literature.
Apparently.
Actually.
Whatever.
Adrian Searle (again from the only paper worth reading) concludes on this year’s Turner Prize winners in a somewhat gently tired, despairing way:
“Lots of really good artists don’t win the Turner Prize. Some lousy ones do. It felt to me that the judges wanted to produce an interesting group show rather than to present the most vital things going on now. I fully expected Ed Atkins, Helen Marten or Heather Phillipson to make the shortlist. They didn’t. Maybe next time. (The Guardian, 1st December)
Couldn’t there be even just a few basic criteria for a good novel? I don’t know, like:
1.The reader becomes totally absorbed, immersed. S/he forgets they’re reading a finely crafted book. Absence of: self consciousness, pretentiousness, over-writing, stylistic gimmicks. The author is dead. Absence of author’s massive ego and ambition. Authenticity. Honesty.
2. The book is saying something important and original and relevant.
3. The work is: connected to a literary canon, intertextual, culturally enriched by literary reference, allusion, echoes.
Nope. Anyway, who asked you?
Well, if you still don’t get how it works, here’s one final thought:
Once upon a time there was this person who just had to create stuff. A sort of Anselm Kiefer driven to do his own thing. A person who, locked away in some garret somewhere just had to write what she wrote.
And they got on with the creation of their own worlds regardless of everything and everyone.