Stripping away the prejudice

Why the Washington Post saw fit to publish it is unclear—it has small news value and less new insight—but the novelist Julianna Baggott, who teaches in Florida State University’s creative writing program, complains in an op-ed today about the eight-week-old Publishers Weekly list of the year’s hundred best books, which contained (as everyone knows by now) no women in the top ten. There is, Baggott whines, a prejudice against women in the literary world. “So how do we strip away our prejudice?” she asks. “First, we have to see prejudice.”

No, ma’am. First we have to establish prejudice. Every single complainant against the dismal PW list has merely assumed prejudice. “PW hasn’t yet owned up,” Baggott hiccups—even though ten of the twenty-six titles listed in fiction and poetry, excluding mysteries, are by women. That’s thirty-eight percent. How high must the percentage be to evade the prima facie guilt of literary prejudice against women?

The accusation has become so commonplace that it has begun to sound like a pre-recorded sales pitch. The unavoidable truth is that literary posterity is ruthless: it accepts only the best. For a while you can get away with substituting irrelevant criteria for literary greatness, but over time they will be ignored. Lists of the year’s best books will be ignored too.

Creative writing functionaries like Julianna Baggott can yelp that “The top [literary] prizes’ discrimination against women has been largely ignored.” And perhaps they will even be successful in bullying prize committees into bestowing more awards upon women. But in the long run it will make no difference. One of America’s Nobel Prize-winners in literature was Pearl S. Buck, upon whom no one wastes criticism any longer. Few people even read her. Her international prize is irrelevant; her sex is irrelevant. All that counts to posterity is the literary gift, which Buck, sad to say, did not possess in superabundance.

While it is dismaying that someone who devotes her life to the teaching of writing places more importance on gender politics, Baggott is hardly unusual in doing so. For most people, almost anything is more important than literature. In literature there is a single overriding value—how well something is written—and few people are ready to strip away the prejudice that life is more meaningful off the page than on.