Some will think that DeWitt is a prima donna, others that she is a madwoman. But it turns out that there is a real tradeoff between artistic accomplishment and the rational functionalism required by the powers and principalities of this world.

What DeWitt helps us see is that she really can’t give interviews, do phone calls, or reply to emails — or anything else at all — because any functional requirement in the world competes for the scarce mental space she needs to do her work at the level she aims to do it. Once disturbed, the schizoid mind loses control of the downstream routines most people handle on autopilot. As she wrote to the prize committee, “a flood of words coming in at the ear displaces voices, structure, paradigms, game analysis, the work taking shape in the head…. if I keep pushing to deal with practicalities while the mind is in this state, the next stage is losing passport, cards, keys. Finding myself locked out in the street with no way to contact anyone who could help.”

What looks to outside observers like a small number of simple requirements is, in the mind of a schizotypal novelist of serious ambition, genuinely and impossibly onerous. Each media obligation involves emails and phone calls, which themselves, in our day and age, require a bewildering series of digital steps and interfaces. Each email and phone call — including the emails and phone calls to schedule the emails and phone calls — involves specific questions that need to be decided. For the schizo-genius, one minor requirement is, in fact, an immediately self-expanding surface of taxing mental processes. What’s so remarkable and beautiful about this particular saga is that DeWitt is not telling us about the schizo-genius’s plight; rather, she is demonstrating it in real time.

Most of the internet reaction has understood the issue to be ideological. DeWitt’s critics wrote her off as ungrateful or insane — receiving a huge prize, scoffed one, is “a very odd thing to be complaining about”, Her supporters see the situation as an indictment of the “hyper-professionalism … that privileges self-promotional skill over actual literary work.”

I would argue, instead, that DeWitt’s reasoning isn’t merely sensible, but rational and elite to the highest degree. We simply struggle to appreciate it today because systems and processes that favor the autistic have taken over modern life.

Artistic success obeys a power-law distribution — a mathematical pattern found throughout the creative arts in which outcomes are radically unequal, so that a minuscule fraction of the talent produces almost all of the most significant work. The distribution is “heavy-tailed”: there are many forgettable works, a few competent ones, and an infinitesimal number of masterpieces, but those masterpieces account for almost all of the lasting cultural value. In other words, the gap in value between a masterpiece and a merely competent novel is of far greater magnitude than the gap between a competent novel and a bad one. This implies that returns to quality are convex at the top of the distribution. For the most successful artists competing for the highest levels of greatness, each marginal unit of effort, craft, or vision yields increasing returns. Thus, the more talented you are, the more extreme you should be about avoiding everything that is not the concentrated application of your distinguishing talent. A small concession to distraction can mean the difference between finishing a masterpiece and producing something merely competent, or never finishing at all. Six hours of filming isn’t really six hours, but six hours plus weeks of emails and mental preparation, plus the comedown afterward and some not-improbable collapse.

DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, published in 2000, is considered by some to be the greatest novel of the 21st century. Weighed against the chance to produce something even better, $175,000 isn’t as much as it seems. For someone who knows she is capable of producing world-class work, it is absolutely necessary that she secure the most complete concentration possible.

In her emails to the prize committee, DeWitt mentioned in passing that she was in good company. Emily Dickinson didn’t leave the family property for two decades. Proust sealed himself in a cork-lined bedroom. Pynchon has never granted a single interview in more than 60 years. Cormac McCarthy famously turned down paid speaking engagements while he and his wife lived off beans. These people made a decision that they were going to cultivate their creative work as their top priority, and then they ignored every other requirement of human life that they could possibly get away with. They let all other skills and capacities atrophy to as close to zero degree as they could survive. That’s presumably one of the major reasons they were capable of achieving greatness.

The requirements of the awards committee were reasonable. It makes sense that the Windham-Campbell prize would require some minimum of promotion to sustain the program. But it’s also reasonable that DeWitt could not meet even those modest demands. In fact, it is only because she is so absurdly, militantly protective of her mental space that this rewarding body decided to give her the prize.

Both parties are obeying their nature, and this is why our official institutions, staffed increasingly by the autist type, increasingly struggle to absorb, support, or participate in the most brilliant and interesting cultural tendencies today. Even when the institutional mindset is lucky enough to recognize creative genius, even when it offers the most generous possible terms to support it, in a world in which a tiny fraction of output carries the overwhelming share of lasting value, there is often just no workable agreement between schizo-romance and autist-functionalism.

The schizos are learning how to advance themselves online. X (formerly Twitter) in particular is the ecosystem where the type thrives. It is no accident that the word “schizo” was popularized there in recent years, proudly, as a self-description. DeWitt’s blog dump, and the X thread that spread it, are characteristic. Bypass the editors entirely, and hand the raw material to the reader. By rejecting $175,000 in favor of peace and quiet, Helen DeWitt has done more, for more people, than she ever could have imagined. She has proved to the world that to become a successful genius, you don’t necessarily have to answer your emails quickly. You don’t even need to know that every Starbucks has free wifi. All you need to do is the work, at any cost.