Prize fight

IT'S TRUE THAT no one at the National Book Awards on Wednesday called William Vollman's ''Europe Central," the upset winner in the fiction category, pornographic or an abomination, or accused the judges of philistinism or nepotism--all of which would be par for the course at the Man Booker Prize, the annual literary spectacle in London that's aired on British national television. But to say we Americans don't do book-prize controversies as well as the Brits sells us short.

Last year, when the five fiction nominees for the National Book Award were all obscure female authors from New York, a former chairman of the foundation that oversees the awards groused that the fiction prize is ''supposed to be an achievement award for the best that's been done, not a feel-good award for aspiring writers."

And in 2002, after the editor and columnist Michael Kinsley wryly explained how he'd read only a tiny fraction of the books he was supposed to as a nonfiction judge in the National Book Awards, the chair of the judging panel said Kinsley had ''demeaned" his fellow judges and the ultimate winner, the biographer Robert A. Caro--although, as Kinsley pointed out, no human being with a day job could read all the hundreds of books in the time the judges are given. ''The convention is to lie," one frequent British judge has said.

Then there was 1987, when, in perhaps the most significant prize fight of the past 20 years, a group of eminent African-American intellectuals rose up to insist that Toni Morrison receive the Pulitzer Prize for her novel ''Beloved" after it was nudged out at the National Book Awards by Larry Heinemann's ''Paco's Story"--for racist reasons, subtle or unsubtle, her supporters suggested. (Morrison won, as the judges insisted she would have anyway.)

Skirmishes like these--not to mention the Booker shenanigans or the hisses that greeted playwright Harold Pinter's winning the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature--are often treated as a tawdry sideshow to the endeavor of making art. But in his new book, ''The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value" (Harvard), James F. English, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that prizes and the fisticuffs they inspire are more central to the literary-value game than most of us care to think.

Scoffing at prizes, while universal among the literati, implies there's a purer realm where literary reputations are made. ''I don't buy this," English says from his office at Penn. ''Where is this other space that is so much better? How are these determinations of value made? They get made by people who struggle against each other and bond with each other. There are economic and all sorts of other interests that come together."

Not every prize is important, says English, but struggles over artistic value, of which prizes are the most concrete symbol, are important. The often-intemperate clash of interests is messy, says English, but ''it's all we got."

And we got a lot of it. Postindustrial societies produce two things in great quantities: service jobs and prizes. According to English, there are now more than 100 literary prizes for every 1,000 books published in the United States, and the trend cuts across all the arts. There are some 500 piano competitions worldwide. Someone right now--is that the Grieg concerto I hear?--is winning a gold medal for piano virtuosity.

The Nobel Prizes (born in 1901) and the Academy Awards (1929) provide the models for the two main variants of the modern prize: One aspires solely to honor art, the other to combine art with a moneymaking event. As with the Oscars, Golden Globes, MTV Movie Awards, and the Golden Raspberry Awards (for worst films and performances), the trend is for prestigious prizes to spawn rivals--in time they all come to resemble each other--and parodies. Far from subverting the prize system, the parodies only bolster it. The Razzies, for example, contribute to Oscar-week hype. (Actually subverting the prize mentality takes real cleverness, as when England's ''K Foundation" offered a 40,000 pound prize for Worst British Artist in 1993, promising to burn the cash if the prize was not accepted. The sculptor Rachel Whiteread, who had just won the Turner Prize for best artist, glumly showed up to take it, vowing to give the money to needy artists.)

Although there was a time when refusing an esteemed prize made a statement--Sartre's turning down the Nobel in 1964 being a classic case--English concludes that, by now, there's no way out of the prize system: Turning down a major award itself comes off as a tawdry publicity stunt or affectation.

So the best an author or other artist can do is deploy a ''strategy of condescension" to distance himself from the prize whirligig. English's lesson: There are few paths that lead from sitting at a typewriter to getting into the Norton Anthology without hitting a prize or two. And if you do get that far, selection for the Norton itself is a prize that can inspire unseemly fights. So relax, get used to prizes--and think harder about them.

''I don't know what this means," Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder once said, accepting a Grammy. ''I don't think it means anything." Yes, it does, says English. But in acceptance speeches, there are no prizes for honesty.

Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.