“My literary taste is unorthodox, by current standards. I happen to think it’s sound, and I do my darnedest to defend it in my criticism. But I’ve never been bold enough to imagine that my literary judgments amount to objective, provable truths. That said, I don’t view them as negotiable either. So the prospect of sitting down with a couple of strangers to haggle about our respective tastes in literature struck me as radically unappealing.”
— 'Judge a literary prize? No thanks, they’re all a giant waste of time', by David Free, July 9, 2021, 'Sydney Morning Herald'.
David Free’s essay jogs around an interesting question: assuming we should rank literature, how do we go about it? David Free is an Australian literary critic (and novelist), so I’m guessing he’s okay with ranking literature. But he’s definitely against the idea of a group of literary worthies handing out literary prizes.
Why? He doesn’t trust juries. He wouldn’t mind a single judge making a decision; at least, the subjectivity would be obvious. Even desirable. But the consensus of a jury, he argues, would invariably gravitate towards the mediocre and safe options. All too often, it’s not about the book at all, but the author.
I’ve been on a few prize panels, and yes, I always found it rather weird. There can be serious melodrama. I’ve seen books ruled out for the flimsiest reasons – at least, so it seemed to me. The author’s biography does matter, though it’s considered rather bad form to bring it up. There’s also no consistency in the way we talk about literature or evaluate it. Some judges wanted to grade books like homework exercises; others seemed to see it as an opportunity to make this a better world. My own bias was to value originality over everything else, so I invariably picked asylum cases. So on and so forth. Enjoyable experience, on the whole, in the manner of having friends suddenly slap you with a wet bath towel. WTF at the time, but later, haha.
I’ve come to believe that if the aim is to reward representativeness, then a jury is the way to go. For example, if an age values interiority over plot, then a jury’s decision would reflect that value.
This explains why the author’s biography has begun to matter in jury prize selections. Our age increasingly values morality or performances of morality. It also explains why it matters if the author is from this or that group: our age has begun to value representing the under-represented in all spheres. The jury’s decision is bound to reflect that. That’s what juries do: they pick the most representative candidate of an imagined set of common values.
On the other asscheek, if the aim is to reward originality rather than representativeness, then a single judge, preferably insane, is better. The trouble is, that useful insanity is hard to come by, so original books often remain unread and unrewarded books.
Incidentally, let me be clear: I’m 100 per cent for people giving me literary prizes. Any kind of prize actually. My first prize, ever, was Eric Knight’s Lassie, Come Home, received at the age of seven, for winning a frog-jumping competition.
Mathematically (ie feel free to stop reading here), there is a far more profound problem with all group evaluations, not just literary evaluations. Suppose we think of authors as athletes and literary criteria as athletic events in a decathlon. Each judge evaluates an athlete (author)’s performance in each event and comes up with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd,... ranking. Now we have to somehow combine/collate these rankings into one overall ranking. What are some minimal conditions for this collating procedure?
Well, we don’t want any one judge being able to override every other judge (i.e. no dictators). But if everyone prefers author A to author B, then the final ranking should reflect that preference (Pareto principle criteria). Also, can we agree that when we are trying to decide between authors A and B, we don't want some other author C to be relevant to the discussion (relevance criteria). And of course, every ranking should be acceptable (unrestricted scope criteria). For example, if some judge wants to rank Barbara Cartland over James Hadley Chase over Samuel Beckett, then fine, whatever.
Here’s the question: Can we have a collating/aggregating/combining process that will take the rankings of each judge and produce an overall ranking which will satisfy these four, quite reasonable, criteria: no dictators, Pareto principle, relevance and unrestricted scope?
The answer is no. Kenneth Arrow’s celebrated impossibility theorem states that, in general, there’s no collation scheme that can simultaneously satisfy all four criteria. He got a Nobel Prize for it. Amartya Sen became famous (and got his Nobel Prize) for building on Arrow’s work.
The point? Group literary judgments are always at risk for picking winners whom no judge wanted; they are at risk for one judge overruling all others; they are at risk for considering irrelevant alternatives; and they are at risk for ruling out certain preferences.
Blame math.
This was originally posted by Anil Menon on his Facebook profile.
