Watkins: the prizewinner

This week Claire Vaye Watkins won the Dylan Thomas Prize (worth £30,000) for Battleborn.  The panel of prize judges, tasked with finding the year’s “best literary work in English” by an author under age 30, praised Watkins for creating “perfect version[s] of a complete world.”  This is the latest in a string of awards for Watkins:  last March she won the Story Prize ($20,000) and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award ($10,000) from the American Academy of Arts.  These awards amount to institutional donations, sums of money for individual writers, wrapped in the rhetoric of competition.  The panels charged with administering these prizes use the form and rhetoric of the financial “award” to define “best literature” as a competitive enterprise, one that fits neatly into the field of capitalist market values (“justification”) to which Evan Kindley calls our attention.

This heuristic of “best literature”—the “perfect version,” according to the Dylan Thomas Prize administrators—tends to produce the narrative of the successful, emergent writer as one who garners universal acclaim.  We can see hints of this narrative in the history I’ve outlined above:  Watkins, the emergent writer, produces a first book that attracts international acclaim in the form of “prizes,” which are an apparently objective measure of literary value.  Before her emergence as a prizewinner, Watkins is not a producer of literary texts although she has published work elsewhere:  the rhetoric of competition recognizes only “best literature,” not good literature, so Watkins is illegible in the field outside the prizewinner narrative.  Even if economic self-interest does not explicitly motivate literary production, in a cultural context that only values and pays what is judged “best” the prizewinner narrative unavoidably introduces new economic and (maybe more importantly) ideological contours into what constitutes recognizable “literature.”

Kindley conducts his historicist analysis in terms of the transformative potential of arts philanthropy (regarding the notion of “justification” or “obligation” inside the grants economy), but it might be equally relevant to situate the rhetoric of competition and “best literature” in a late-twentieth-century neoliberal context.  In a culture that valorizes the individual economic actor, the narrative of the prizewinner strategically occludes the dependence of “successful” literary art on both wealthy philanthropic actors and the editorial favor of the literary journal, which may in some cases constitute the same group.  This is merely conjecture, but I assume that the coterie of prize administrators for institutionally-sponsored literary philanthropy at least occasionally overlaps with the coterie of journal editors; many of the letters Kindley cites express some form of anxiety over the potential for this collusion.  Richard Lea of The Guardian notes that before Battleborn was published in 2012 certain stories (some not included in the collection) previously appeared in journals such as Granta, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review; “Ghosts, Cowboys” was, in fact, first published in 2009 in The Hopkins Review.  (This journal is an affiliate of The Sewanee Review.)  Narratives of Watkins as prizewinner valorize the writer as a producer of literature, not the network of affiliations that constitute the literary itself.

And what is “Ghosts, Cowboys” about, even on the level of plot?  An allegorized, pseudo-fictitious version of the author inhabits the space of the narrative, and, while she grapples with various myths of her family’s pasts, a movie producer (not the first, Watkins notes) requests that she deliver to him the same tale (or set of tales) that she delivers to us—narratives about her father, or narratives that attempt to invent her father, a former member of Charles Manson’s Family, about whom she knows only what research can show.  Latent in this story is a metanarrative about literary value itself, for Watkins heavily intimates that her own version of her father’s story, the one she relates to us, won’t sell—the hallmark, ironic in this case, of the modernist aesthetic.  It is, after all, this anxiety over the integration of grants funding into literary production that prompts Wallace Stevens (according to Kindley) to express nostalgia for some precapitalist ideal of “honor” or “love” in literary production (85–6).  The ideology of the literary does invisible work, even (or maybe especially) inside the bounds of ENL 200.