You're on page two of "Michael Cunningham's Fascinating—And Completely Unsatisfying—Pulitzer Defense." Click here for page one.
But then we get to this:
My own most dramatic reading experience occurred when, from the third shipment, I pulled Wallace's "The Pale King." I confess that I was not a huge fan of his novel "Infinite Jest," and further confess that I thought, on opening "The Pale King," that it was a long shot indeed, given that Wallace had not lived to complete it.
I was, as it happened, the first of us to read "The Pale King," and well before I’d finished it I found myself calling Maureen and Susan and saying, "The first paragraph of the Wallace book is more powerful than any entire book we’ve read so far."
Cunningham, the self-described "language crank," was wowed by the Finnegan's Wake-esque opener, and sold it to the other two judges. "It was a little like having heard a series of chamber pieces, and been pleased by them," Cunningham says of the novel in comparison to the other entries, "until the orchestra started in on Beethoven."
"The Pale King" was, of course, unfinished, but so are a number of great works of art. We have only fragments of Sappho's poetry. Chaucer was a little more than halfway through "The Canterbury Tales" when he died. And, of course, there's Haydn's unfinished string quartet, and all those magnificent sculptures by Michelangelo, only half emerged from their blocks of marble.
So now we know whom to blame for the inclusion of The Pale King. But there's an obvious problem with Cunningham's logic: while he's right that Sappho and Chaucer have been cemented into the canon despite the fragmented nature of their ouvre, and that unfinished works—Beethoven's Ninth comes to mind—are now classics, the distinction of each was bestowed by time, retrospect and scholarship, not the immediate recognition of awards; they were acts of accretion, not recognition. Sappho's poetry was written in completion, it simply has not survived that way. Canterbury Tales, classic of verse though it is, did not win the Pulitzer of 1475; centuries of readers and scholars have rendered it a classic as opposed to a half-text. Beethoven's Ninth was not awarded a proto-Grammy, instead being declared a masterpiece only because we have the luxury of considering it in the full context of the composer's career.
Only the last of these applies to The Pale King. It is possible that, in twenty or forty years' time, Wallace will be enshrined as the artificing frontiersman of fiction many claim him to be; at that point, if we want to declare The Pale King an unfinished masterpiece—a could-have-been in the way that, say, The Last Tycoon is—we may. This context, one of epochal movements and shifts in taste, is the opposite of the forces that govern a yearly prize, which asks merely to name the best work of fiction within a given twelve month period. What he'd written of The Last Tycoon at the point of his too-early death suggests Fitzgerald was entering a midlife return to form; but no way did it deserve 1940's Pulitzer, and it didn't receive it. The quality we read into it must, by definition, be read into it, almost entirely through hindsight; The Pale King has no such hindsight yet from which to benefit.
Then there's this:
It seemed, too, that a Pulitzer for "The Pale King" would be, by implication, an acknowledgement not only of Wallace but also of Michael Pietsch, the editor. As a novelist, I well know how much difference an editor can make—and there’s no major prize given to editors. The best an editor can hope for is mention on the acknowledgments page, when, sometimes, that editor has literally rescued the book.
That's obnoxious. Cunningham is no doubt correct about the underappreciated role of editors, and if he ever wants to rant about it over a single malt, I'll let him buy me a Balvenie. But the Pulitzer Prize isn't for righting the structural wrongs of the publishing industry; all Cunningham succeeded in doing by including this reasoning is making the process seem like an insular club of literati backslapping each other, rather than the celebration of genuine achievement.
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