Not a horse race

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics.

Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula K. Le Guin

Most of us love lists, rankings and ratings. I know I do. Which candidate is leading in the polls? How is my team seeded in the NCAA basketball tournament? What was the best movie of 2017? What are the 50 greatest American novels ever written? At least with political candidates there are elections and with sports teams there are games to settle matters. In most other things, including movies and books, it is only a matter of opinion as to which is better, awards, prizes and surveys notwithstanding.

"Literature is not the Olympics," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a blog post included in No Time to Spare. The late writer rebeled against the notion of judging one piece of writing against another. The very idea of a Great American Novel repulsed her. How does one compare Moby-Dick to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath or, for that matter, any of Le Guin's own novels? We may each have our opinions about which is better, but even when opinions agree, they remain just opinions. (Come to think of it, the winners of a number of Olympic events, such as figure skating and diving, are determined by the opinions of judges. They, too, are more art than horse race.)

Novelist Russell Banks said something similar when I heard him speak in January in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Writing is not a competitive sport," he said. Yet some writers, in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, seem to think that it is. They compete for sales, prizes and critical acclaim. Other writers are viewed not as colleagues but competitors.

There is nothing wrong with opinions. We all are going to like certain books and certain writers more than others. Some books truly are better than other books, even if we can't always be sure which ones. Not all novels deserve to be taught in high school and college literature classes, but it's probably a good thing that there seems to be more variety today than there was when I was in school.

What Le Guin and Banks are saying is simply that individual opinions matter, but really not all that much. They are fun to talk about and argue about, yet still each work of literature stands on its own merits, appreciated more by some readers than by others, but so what? Unlike a horse race, there can never be a winner.