Inter Alia #16: Footnoting D.T. Max’s DFW Piece

Inter Alia
March 5, 2009 | 5 books mentioned 15 3 min read

Related Books:

Well, Wyatt Mason beat me to it. Over at his blog, Sentences, the Harper’s critic has registered a couple of cavils with D.T. Max’s powerful, fascinating New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace, “The Unfinished.” First, Mason suggests, Max makes his case for The Broom of the System at the expense of what may be a better book, Girl With Curious Hair. Second, Max might have profitably spent more time on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and the nonfiction. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me to find Mason anticipating, more eloquently, my own response to “The Unfinished”; I find him to be our most astute critic of Wallace (by which I mean, of course, the one whose thinking most resembles mine).

coverIt’s important to note, as Mason does, that these are minor quibbles, mere footnotes to Max’s achievement. (In my case, think of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy pontificating from the front row.) But they also betoken the immense, almost maternal protectiveness some readers feel toward Wallace’s reputation. We feel about Infinite Jest as William H. Gass does about Finnegans Wake: “Not to have been… influenced by it as a writer is not to have lived in your time.” Our underlying anxiety is that the Kakutanis of the world will deprive our grandchildren of the beautiful thing we ourselves have been blessed to witness. And so, with an eye toward posterity – toward those who have not yet experienced Wallace’s writing first-hand – I humbly submit three additional footnotes to “The Unfinished.”

1) It seems to me that there’s an assumption in certain passages of the article that writing fiction posed a “risk to [Wallace’s] mental health,” without sufficient evidence to discount the possibility that the causal arrow might have pointed the other way. In general, Max exhibits an admirable tact on the subject of Wallace’s depression and addictions; he wants to extend to the author the dignity that is his due. It seems important, therefore, that we not turn “The Unfinished” into an explanation of Wallace’s suicide. In particular – for the sake of reading the forthcoming The Pale King with a clear head – one wouldn’t want to succumb to the temptation to say that this last novel pushed Wallace over the edge. Writing is a form of daily frustration; it can also be, as Max shows, a source of daily grace.

2) Because “The Unfinished” suggests that Wallace “began to develop a taste for journalism” in the wake of the publication of Infinite Jest, rather than in the early 1990s, it skirts a more thorough examination of the relationship between Wallace’s fiction and his nonfiction.

3) Perhaps most significantly, Max summarizes a bit too approvingly Wallace’s sense that he had never “hit his target.” Indeed, Wallace’s attempt to do so becomes the narrative hinge of the article. But many who have read Infinite Jest will feel differently.

On the subject of his own creations, the novelist is, at best, an unreliable witness. As Robert Musil writes in that other unfinished monument, The Man Without Qualities:

He loves creation as long as he is creating it, but his love turns away from the finished portions. For the artist must also love what is most hateful in order to shape it, but what he has already shaped, even if it is good, cools him off; it becomes so bereft of love that he hardly still understands himself in it, and the moment when his love returns to delight in what it has done are rare and unpredictable.

It is seemly for an artist to never be satisfied with past achievements, as Wallace no doubt knew, but it’s readers who get the final word. As time passes, Infinite Jest looks closer to Wallace’s stated target – “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction” – than any other English-language novel of its era. I felt this way before Wallace’s death, and I still do.

(P.S.: You got me, Andrew.)

Bonus link: Sam Anderson’s take on “The Unfinished,” from New York Magazine

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

Inter Alia Screening Room

Inter Alia #18: Julia Child and the Ethical Appeal

Inter Alia Screening Room
August 19, 2009 | 5 books mentioned 5 4 min read

Prominent among my childhood memories is the voice of Julia Child. Or rather, the voice of my father imitating Julia Child. Ours was (you’ll be shocked to learn) a PBS household, and the pseudo-Julia arias he would deliver while making Chicken Dish – in that swooping, fluty, Childian soprano – were guaranteed to crack me up, as was his Maggie Thatcher. (Come to think of it, they were pretty much the same impression). And so this year, when the first posters for Julie & Julia began to appear, I thought I knew what I was in for: some laughs, some game-fowl, and Meryl Streep trilling, “Save the liver!”

What the movie and the attendant retrospectives of the real-life Julia Child suggest, however, is less a figure of fun than a figure of liberation. In a country that has never quite outgrown its Puritan pedigree, here was a woman fearless about all things sensual: food, sex, and her own big, lovely body. Seen in this light, Mastering the Art of French Cooking amounts to a kind of manifesto in defense of pleasure. I don’t own that particular book, but Julie & Julia sent me back to Child’s slightly less-famous opus, The Way to Cook, which had been sitting neglected on a shelf in my kitchen. And Julia Child turns out not only to have been a kind of unfussy feminist; she was also a terrific writer.

It’s not often we think of recipes as a form of literature, but they are as formally exacting as the Spenserian stanza (and, as anyone who’s ever ruined $40 worth of lamb knows, the stakes are higher). The Way to Cook is a model of clarity and pragmatism. Moreover, it offers a master class in rhetoric.

In my freshman comp classes, we talk about the three classic rhetorical appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. Most any piece of rhetoric makes all three appeals simultaneously, but a good rhetor will emphasize one or the other. The first two are fairly easy to grasp; the pathetic appeal (a.k.a. the appeal to emotions) is the mode of contemporary advertising, and is thus ascendant in American discourse. (Death panels, anyone?) Other voices will attempt to correct for widespread abuse of pathos by focusing on the logical appeal (a.k.a. the appeal to reason). Thus, we get liberal pundits reasoning themselves blue in the face: But there are no death panels in these bills! Alas, in cooking, politics, and other inexact sciences, head does not always trump heart. To mediate between the claims of each, we must look to that mysterious creature: ethos.

As I understand it, the ethical appeal has to do with establishing the speaker’s credibility, or the attractiveness of her persona. One approach might be simply to flourish one’s expertise. But, in our postmodern age, the conspicuous display of expertise too easily gives rise to charges of elitism. (Charges which, because they are essentially pathetic, are impossible to rebut.) Contemporary masters of the ethical appeal – among them David Foster Wallace, Jane Jacobs, and my quondam dentist, Dr. Bob Cargill – use the vast resources of voice to make us want to trust them. And how do they do this? By trusting us. By respecting our intelligence. By making a point of showing all their cards and giving a fair assessment of the strength of the overall hand. And above all, by acknowledging that we have the freedom to disagree.

Notwithstanding that overweening title – The Way to Cook – the power of Julia Child’s ethical appeal is that rather than seeking to bully or lecture or intimidate or dazzle us (which, of course, she could) she writes as though we are working in the kitchen alongside her. She allows that there are different approaches to cooking; she frequently suggests that, in her experience, some complication is necessary and some is not. And she does all this with constant, gentle humor. Here is her introduction to game birds:
Since all birds roast in about the same manner, and simmer, sauté, and stew in almost the same way, you’ll find them grouped together that way here, for the most part. It makes more sense, it seems to me; then you have the theory and practice for each technique, whatever your bird happens to be. Actually, it would make even more sense to group the beasts along with the birds . . . but I have resisted carrying logic that far.
Compare to Martha Stewart, a fine writer and cook but an imperialist of logos if ever there was one. Here’s a classic example, first noted by Anthony Lane, of Martha’s single-minded, logical pursuit of the very best:
Locate an area in advance with tender, young, organically grown grass that has not yet been cut. . . . It is best to cut it very early in the morning while the dew is still evident.
It is evident that Martha has lost sight of her context – a recipe for baked ham – and thus of her audience. How much she presumes about us: our lives, our patience, our willingness to go along with her harebrained schemes! Her ham might taste just as good as, or even better than, Child’s, but the cook will feel too humbled, or even belittled, to enjoy it much.

I would suggest that the same principles of ethos that make The Way to Cook so effective – mastery lightly worn and a pronounced solicitude for the reader – might translate well to other fields. Even, perhaps, to literary criticism. A truly great critic has two jobs – to judge and to persuade – but some of our most polished logicians seem sometimes to forget the ethical appeal entirely. Aspirants to the throne of E.M. Forster and Leslie Fiedler could do worse than to study The Way to Cook. Julia Child’s voice on the page proves as indelible as her voice on the tube.

[Image credit: foodista]

Inter Alia Screening Room
| 5 books mentioned 5 4 min read
● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #8: Whither the Short Story?

Inter Alia
February 18, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 10 5 min read

I.In the ongoing conversation about the future of literature, novelty is a rare thing. For at least forty years, American novelists and critics have been worrying about the fate of the novel – and of reading itself – and though the finer points of the argument have changed, the basic contours have stayed remarkably constant. Electronic mass media poses a threat – or at least a serious challenge – to literature; the novel functions as a kind of coal miner’s canary, a bellwether for the health of the culture at large.I’m sympathetic to the need to assert some kind of narrative control over the technological revolution, but I had assumed the stance of a weary spectator at the “death of the novel” when, in the fall of 2007, a diagnostic shift piqued my interest. Suddenly, it seemed, it was the short story that was ailing. Witness Stephen King’s introduction to the Best American Short Stories anthology:[American short fiction,] if not quite dead on the page… [has become] airless, somehow, and self-referring… show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open.”Or witness the introduction to the second issue of the literary quarterly Canteen, which took issue with King’s assessment. Or witness another excellent lit-mag, One Story, whose “Save the Short Story” direct mailings reached me alongside pleas from Planned Parenthood to save reproductive rights and from the ACLU to save civil liberties.II.Though the hue and cry seems abrupt, the conditions for the short story’s endangerment have been developing for a quarter century. Once-reliable “general interest” venues like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post have disappeared from newsstands. The New Yorker long ago ended its practice of running several stories per issue. Esquire has drifted away from the stringent editorial commitments of Gordon Lish. Harper’s confines itself, more or less, to a stable of old hands. The Atlantic recently cut its monthly fiction offerings altogether, in favor of a single annual “fiction issue” (part of a series of missteps that included putting Christopher Hitchens on the masthead and spending 30 back-of-the-book editorial pages helping people with too much money figure out how to spend it.) In 2007, fewer than 100 short-stories were published in the traditional general-interest outlets.At the level of the little magazine, the current trend seems to be toward ever-more print outlets with ever-smaller circulations… good for building the C.V.s of aspiring writer-academics, but bad for generating consensus around work of surpassing distinction. And the economics of running a print magazine outside the institutional shelter of the academy are inhospitable to longevity, as we can see from the recent folding of the print editions of Grand Street, Pindeldyboz, Ballyhoo, and numerous others. Websites such as failbetter.com have begun to fill the gaps, but it will be some time before online publication supplants print as a commonly accepted arbiter of the good and the beautiful.Not surprisingly, things get even grimmer when we turn to the publishing houses. I won’t claim that my own inability to sell a collection of short stories is attributable to anything other than their own shortcomings, but I will note how many complimentary rejection notices from publishers tend to end with phrases like “…but you know how hard it is to market book of short stories” or “of course, a novel would be more marketable.” It is nearly impossible to imagine a word-drunk ephebe moving to New York to become a short-story writer, as so many New Yorker contributors did at mid-century. Given the prospects for remuneration, you’d be better served to move to wherever the cost of living was cheapest – North Dakota or Guatemala.Interestingly, however, the transformation of the literary marketplace has not dampened the supply of short stories. If anything, the opposite. In the aisles of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Book Fair last weekend, I passed literally thousands of aspiring novelists looking to publish their short stories. It became obvious that my preliminary sketch of distribution mechanisms for the short story had failed to account for a technology even more important than the Internet: the photocopier.The photocopier is the single indispensable technology for the rise of the graduate creative writing program – there are now more than 350 – and the graduate creative writing program is without question the single biggest contributor to the boom in short story production. The pedagogical staple of M.F.A. programs is still the workshop, and the workshop requires complete, coherent, and (above all) short bits of fiction that can be photocopied and distributed to eight or 10 classmates. Chapters of novels, shorn of context, are difficult to work with. Stories on the short side – 3,000 to 5,000 words – are best, if one wants to avoid pissing off one’s peers. The ideal workshop story can be digested in a week, returned to the writer with comments, and improved. How? Through the application of a certain set of principles of what the short story should be. We call these principles, collectively, “craft.” In the fiction workshop, “craft” is king, simply because it’s teachable. Thus writing teachers, themselves former M.F.A. students, tend to talk about Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor as if it were their formal balance, rather than their deep strangeness, that brings their stories to life.Think about the numbers: 350 fiction programs. 3,000 new graduates per year. Each taking let’s say four workshops, each of which requires three submissions. That’s 36,000 short stories for each graduating class of writers, who have worked to convince each other that the top 1% of short stories – those that come closest to generating workshop consensus – may be published in a literary magazine. A literary magazine whose readership may largely comprise writers looking for a place to publish their short stories. “Guarded self-consciousness” starts to look like a mathematical inevitability. Perversely, then, the greatest danger to the short story may be the very institution that’s sustaining it.III.Yet, even if the foregoing manages to capture something true, I’ve neglected all the factors that guarantee that the short story will survive in the 21st century… and even thrive. First, there is the durable insanity of writers, which a proper education channels, rather than cures. To be sure, some workshop students are angling for literary celebrity, and others rightly see graduate school as a comfortable alternative to a desk job. But my own experience suggests that a significant fraction of M.F.A. candidates write short stories because, like Chekhov and O’Connor, they are helpless not to. These are the writers I want to read.Second, there is the competitive pressure on editors to create venues for the short story that stand out in a crowded marketplace. In addition to the upstart publications mentioned above, recent years have seen the advent of such forums as McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All Story, The Oxford American, 9th Letter, A Public Space, Black Clock, and NOON… This is not to mention the continued excellence of Conjunctions, Witness, Callaloo, ZYZZYVA, and The Paris Review, to name a few.Finally, the very shortness of the short story ensures its necessity in our new century. Like the sonnet, it is both a form and a discipline, but the short story also offers its acolytes remarkable freedom. Because the reader absorbs it in a single sitting, it has the capacity, like Seamus Heaney’s swans, to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” And for the writer, there is the possibility that anything may happen on the page, in a way that there isn’t, quite, in a novel. I think of my favorite living practitioners of the short story – David Means, Edward P. Jones, Diane Williams, and Deborah Eisenberg (about whom I’ll be writing later this week) – and I remember a series of surprises, like colored scarves drawn from the sleeves of magicians. That is, I see cause for celebration.Perhaps “saving” the short story simply means to read it, devotedly, and to write it, when called, and otherwise to let the market sort itself out. We could do worse than to follow the example of Henry James – no short-story slouch himself – who wrote, “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Inter Alia
| 5 books mentioned 10 5 min read
● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #15: Toward a Phenomenology of Snark

Inter Alia
February 9, 2009 | 5 books mentioned 2 3 min read

Today on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, David Denby put in an appearance promoting his new book, Snark. I’m not sure what qualifies Denby, a movie critic, to save us from “a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation.” Nor am I entirely sure we are in need of saving. That said, I’ve enjoyed Denby’s recent feistiness in the back pages of The New Yorker (after some mid-Bush-era doldrums), and was perfectly happy to give him a hearing while I made lunch.

Suffice it to say, I was underwhelmed. The segment largely consisted of Denby listening to audio clips of SNL and Crossfire declaring whether or not they constituted “snark.” In place of any really useful distinction between “nasty” snark and legitimate discourse, we got a tendentious history lesson (Diogenes but no Juvenal?) and a jurisprudential approach to snark that amounts to “I know it when I see it.”

Do we need anything more than that? Do we need to define snark? I would argue that we do. Ever since Heidi Julavits popularized the term, in her March 2003 Believer manifesto, the word “snark” has been used as a cudgel against all manner of populist tomfoolery (Julavits singles out The New York Post), even as it has proven useless against the pungent attitudinizing of Gawker and its discontents. (For fun, check out the Denby comment thread.) Moreover, the pejorative overtones of the floating signifier “snark” imply that equally fatuous but positive commentary is somehow less damaging to “the national conversation.” If we’re going to have a conversation about that conversation, it seems worth knowing what we’re talking about when we talk about snark. So here, tendered with love and humility, are some notes toward a phenomenology of snark.

Snark is, above all, a tone, and this is what makes it so difficult to pin down. Julavits calls it a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt,” but forecloses the possibility that hostility and bitterness might be legitimate critical positions. And again, for some reason, online text often reads as more hostile than it actually is. (Think of the phenomenon of the misunderstood email.) No, it’s not negativity, but been-there, seen-that “knowingness,” that is the call-note of snark. (It is impossible to surprise a Snark.) However, allowance must be made for the fact that some people actually know things. Perhaps snark, properly understood, involves a tone of knowingness that doesn’t correspond to actual knowledge. (Truly great snark would thus be impossible to identify: persuading us of its authority, it would be ignorance that leaves no fingerprints.)
A related point: snark is a response disproportionate to the offense, a comment that outshouts the original post. The Snark expends more emotional and intellectual energy formulating his aphorisms than he did consuming, or skimming, their subject. Otherwise, we would have to recognize his hostility, bitterness, or contempt as legitimate. (We carp because we care.) Currently, the perfect object of snark for me is Benjamin Button; it’s a movie I’ll never see, but have put a great deal of thought into making fun of. This lack of regard is more deeply wounding to Benjamin Button fans than it would be if I actually had a legitimate grievance against the film.
The true Snark, perhaps by virtue of his reflexive contempt, cannot be bothered to understand the object of his snark – to expand the compass of his sympathies, to assume good faith. Thus James Wood, even at his most trenchant, does not get accused of snark, whereas Lee Siegel, for all his anti-web fulminations, often seems to be writing from the very heart of snarkness. Siegel believes the length of his essays, and their appearance in print, indemnifies him against his own charges, but is wrong (see numbers 1 and 2 above). Brevity is the soul of wit, but not necessarily of snark.
Snark is a kind of show of plumage, almost a mating ritual. As such, snark always calls more attention to the Snark than to snarked. But again, just because the dagger is driven in with a flourish does not mean it is done snarkily. The thoughtful, the passionate, and the justly aggrieved – Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Lane – are entitled to be stylish, without being shouted down for snark.
Morally, snark is no better or worse than genial puffery; indeed, it is its dark twin, its complement, an advertisement for the self. Snark is more aesthetically pleasing than puff, however, by virtue of the complexity of its defense mechanisms. It reduces criticism of itself to a negation of a negation – that is, to mere snark. Hence: Denby.

Such notes can only be preliminary. They attempt to prepare the ground for, but do not answer, more important questions: Is snark truly a conjunctivitic plague upon the nation? Or is it, rather, a form of hygiene, defending us against an epidemic of epiphenomena we do not and should not care about? Perhaps the answers are not to be found in intellectualizing, but in a tortured embrace of our own snarky sides. As Susan Sontag might say, in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of snark.

As always, your thoughts (even snarky ones) are welcome.

Inter Alia
| 5 books mentioned 2 3 min read
● ● ●

15 comments:

  1. I don't want to sound too over-the-top or sentimental, but if there is a secret to getting through life, I believe Infinite Jest contains it.

  2. Re – the "You got me, Andrew" link –
    Now if only I could harness this peculiar power I seem to have and solve the world's economic crisis while I sleep.

  3. Another thing, there's not a single mention of Wallace's collaborative work with Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers.

  4. Very cogent remarks in point 2 and 3, Garth. Point one–well, it's a minefield. I find myself, due to my affection toward his work and toward my imagined DFW-the-person, rather frightened to approach any ultimate conclusion there.

  5. My biggest issue with pieces like this is that they reflect a "New Yorker" view that there is no such thing as literature outside of America. The only other writers name-checked in the piece itself are American novelists like Franzen, DeLillo, Pynchon, and Roth. The idea that equally mindblowing and experimental and boundary-pushing fiction is being written in our countries — not to mention other languages than English — doesn't seem to have crossed the writer's mind, nor the editor's when we realize that only an American writer like DFW would ever rate a 12,000-word article, other equally deserving candidates such as Javier Marias, Peter Nadas, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, David Grossman, Fernando del Paso, Marcelo Cohen, Alberto Laiseca, et al receiving nary a mention (I think Marias did receive a short career overview review once in the back of the mag, but that's it). The only word for such an ignorant, incurious, and nationally constrained conception of literature is provincial.

  6. I'm not sure I'd agree with your proposition about "The New Yorker" view, Anon. If you look back over our New Yorker fiction posts, you'll find that about a quarter of the fiction is "international" – translated, or by writers like Dandicat, Adichie, and Mueenuddin, who write in English but are strongly identified with other countries. The New Yorker has been a great friend to Bolano, Murakami, Pamuk, Grass, not to mention Borges, Hannah Arendt, &c. &c. And Updike, in particular, was heroic in looking all over the globe for the best of world literature and bringing it to light in long reviews. I've been looking back over Updike's five or six thick collections of criticism, and I can't urge them on you strongly enough, as an antidote to what you call "provincialism."

    There may be some truth to the idea that the long, middle-of-the-book critical-essay-cum-profile (not that common a beast in The New Yorker) often tends to focus on English-language writers (most recently McEwan and DFW), and I'd love to read a profile of Peter Nadas, in particular, but it may be hard to find a reporter who writes a great profile and is also fluent in Hungarian?

    I welcome your reaction to these points; I would assert, however, based on the above, that The New Yorker, like few other American publications is a model of cosmopolitanism. The idea of a "New Yorker style" is more useful as a kind of heuristic tool (there is, I think, a kind of aggregate New Yorker style, if you average everything out – as there will always be an average in any group of things) than as an indicator of the breadth of what gets published in the magazine.

  7. It may be hard to find a reporter who writes a great profile and is also fluent in Hungarian? I seriously doubt it. And if we're talking a language like German or Spanish- we'll, we know that answer to that question: of COURSE there are people.

    But writers like Danticat, Adichie, and Mueenuddin are mediocrities in the larger scheme of things. That supports my larger point. More often than not, the "international" writers featured in the New Yorker — who are a distinct minority, as you note — are (1) writing in English, (2) living in America, (3) supplying "culture porn" for the New York social set, and (4) just not that great. That these writers get play over people like Krasznahorkai and Nadas is a joke from a literary standpoint.

    I love Pamuk, Murakami, Grass, and Bolano, too. But again- this supports my point. To the extent that The New Yorker features fiction written in other languages, by foreign authors, they only do so by authors who are already pretty main-stream and famous. When Roberto Bolano was alive and being lionized in the Spanish-speaking world as the writer of his generation, his name never even appeared in The New Yorker. When his work was finally snatched up by NY publishing houses who decided to give it a big marketing push, then they "discovered" him. Pamuk only started getting book reviews (first one in 2001, second in 2004) when his name moved into Nobel shortlist publishing world buzz. When he was becoming the most critically celebrated author in a country of 70 million, a position he had cemented by 1990 with The Black Book (the book which Horace Engdahl said the Nobel committee considered his greatest, by the way), his name never appeared. Murakami is an outlier, and we can all be grateful for The New Yorker's support for him over the years. The point remains: In its fiction coverage, The New Yorker is not a leader, but a follower. They're incurious. If the work is already done for them — if you've been discovered by the Nobel, or by glitzy New York publishers who want to give your work a big push — then maybe you can get a mention. Otherwise, fuck you. That's the kind of incurious attitude I call provincial.

    I feel lucky to be a reader in today's world. There are so many great, innovative writers plying their craft all around the world, and globalization has made it probably easier for me to enjoy and learn from many of them than ever before. But The New Yorker doesn't give you this impression of a vibrant literary world where experimentation and breakthroughs are happening all over. They're not reporting from the front lines in this case, as often are from the front lines of other issues. Go back to The Unfinished. In the article, we're given the impression that in the decade previous to DFW's debut at the end of the 80s, literature was dominated by Ellis and McInerney. I actually really like BEE, but that's just fucking stupid. In that decade we got A Book of Memories, Repetition, The White Castle, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Waiting for the Barbarians — and you're trying to tell me that DFW was a breath of fresh air for an artistic medium whose foremost practitioners when he entered the stage were Ellis and McInerney?? Thats just stupid — and, again, provincial.

  8. Anon: For the most part, we'll have to agree to disagree, I think, though I'd note that your definition of "provincial" appears to have shifted a bit between your two posts. There may, indeed, be some publishing industry juice gumming up the works at The New Yorker, but you also have to consider that the publishing industry is how books get 1) translated, and 2) brought to the attention of reviewers. I really do urge you to look back through the tables of contents of those Updike compendiums and to see how many pearls he was diving for. That said, The New Yorker is so influential in these matters that it becomes hard to isolate when it is catching on to a trend and when it is inaugurating one. In either case, bringing The Savage Detectives to the attention of readers – on the eve of its publication – is good editing, not trend-surfing. Finally: to my way of thinking, a good profile is as hard to write as a good novel; it's hard enough to find a writer who is fluent in English and writes a great profile.

  9. So you wouldn't be interested in what George Szirtes, for instance, would write about Nadas? You don't think he could write something up to New Yorker standards?

    How has my definition of provincial shifted?? Provincial is incurious, unsophisticated, and local/restricted in outlook and interests.

    I have appreciated the variety of books reviewed by Updike. But a short book review in the back of the magazine being pretty much the best a foreign writer can hope for under the best of circumstances vs. a 12,000-word issue centerpiece for an American writer is quite a contrast. We're supposed to believe that's reflective of the real artistic state of affairs?! Or I guess we're supposed to settle for that as good enough…Maybe an advertising exec at the magazine can say that's good enough; if we care about literature I think we have to say No, that's not good enough.

    I won't reiterate my other points since you didn't respond to them.

  10. "I would suggest that the magazine should be seen as a symptom, and not the disease."

    This is an apt conclusion. Let's remember that as recently as, what, fifteen years ago, the NYer was publishing two stories per issue. And that entire novellas regularly appeared under Shawn. The magazine's focus on literature both domestic and foreign has waned along with the culture's. That short stories even appear in a magazine with a 1 million plus circulation is borderline preposterous, but preposterous in a good way.

    That said, it's rare that the fiction they do publish is cause for excitement.

  11. I appreciate your lengthy response, and would just say two things as a final response of my own.

    First, I don't think that my argument is as circular as you make it out to be. To me, including some writing about foreign places (provided that it's almost always been orginally written in English, of course) and including some short reviews of foreign-language novels that've been translated into English (provided, of course, that the authors are already relatively famous and thus constitute "safe" choices for inclusion in the magazine — and with the understanding that the 12,000-word length profile which can really delve into a writer's body of work in a sustained way, as well provide "reporting" on that writer, in the form of interview and whatnot, that one might not be able to find out already through Google) does not absolve The New Yorker from its "provincial" status. One way of looking at this is to ask whether The New Yorker is "a symptom" or "the disease." I think that's a false distinction. Clearly The New Yorker is both a reflection of existing cultural and economic states of affairs AND a cause of them — and I don't think the first reality should preclude us from critiquing the magazine for the second one.

    Which brings me to my second point. If the first point was that, while you think the situation isn't quite as bad as I think it is, and I'm responding to say, "Yes, it is THAT BAD," the second point would be based on your saying, if I understand you correctly, that to the extent the situation isn't ideal, this is so because of mainly economic imperatives. On this count, I disagree with your stance for two reasons. First, if we want to think from the perspective of economic cost-benefit analysis for the magazine, I think the NYer could absolutely maintain its current readership while improving its literary coverage to remedy the defects I've pointed to. Maybe I'm overestimating the openness of the audience, but I think you can write include foreign-language writing in translation that would be just as compelling to the audience as the English-language writing now on offer, and that you could write about foreign-language writers in such a way that those profiles would be just as interesting as, say, Ian McEwan or Alber Elbaz or African merchants in China or John Yoo or whatever else the NYer covers. Second, I think that even if this weren't the case, it's for the magazine to make that argument, and for us, as members of the audience to which the magazine is trying to cater, to articulate our own preferences in a clear way — and, who knows, maybe change the editorial team's stance if we all do so loudly and clearly enough?

    Thank you for the dialogue on a subject that's important to both of us.

  12. Garth, I'm hoping you aren't completely exhausted on the topic of DFW and "The Unfinished." I'd really like your thoughts on something that no one has really written about, which really disturbed me.

    My beef is with the last paragraph. Max does a tremendous job drawing us in to the life of DFW — his struggles as both a man and an artist (separately and together), his fundamental vision for understanding what it means to be "a fucking human being." But then, in that last paragraph, he goes abruptly from Karen Green finding Wallace hanging, to "pages bathed in light."

    That phrase, and the conclusions Max draws from that disgustingly indulgent/presumptious image, struck me as utterly IN-humane. The schmaltzy deification of those PAGES — the sharp turn after 12,000 words of understanding better the MAN — horrified me. Consuming those "pages bathed in light" in that literary star-f*&^er way, is NOT, I believe, what it means to be a fucking human being.

  13. Looking back, I'm not sure I see the "deification" you're talking about. Instead, Max's description of the manuscript ("Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel") looks to me more anthropomorphic. That is, I see him comparing the untidy, provisional nature of the manuscript not to the godhead, but to the experience of being "a fucking human being" – at least as Wallace seemed to understand it.

    Did you feel, reading the article (or, say, "Good Old Neon") the tremendous amount of pressure this writer felt was involved in the daily assembling of a "self" from the uncontrollable contradictions, paradoxes, tensions of being in the world? And the way, in "The Unfinished," it resembled the reporter's struggle to present a unified portrait of his subject?

    I did, but it seems we interpreted the article differently. At any rate, it wasn't "bathed in light" but "fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them" that stayed with me; and I didn't find that star-f*&^er-y at all.

  14. "Pages bathed in light" felt to me contrary to the untidy-ness which made up/makes up human and creative experience as Wallace and we knew/know it. The writer's "assemblage" was admirable and moving overall, no easy feat of reporting or writing; but he came in, I feel, with a heavy hand in the last paragraph to "stage" Wallace's end — in a way that read especially cheap given the admirable, moving, struggled-for arc of the article up to that point.

    I don't know the writer and wouldn't want to presume motive — but if human-ness is our subject, perhaps the writer himself became so invested in the story (and the man) that the staging originated from his own need to make meaning. Which seems perfectly human to me, and yet (going with your idea of untidyness, fragments, and evaded attempts) ultimately revealed a glaring fault line in that struggle. A beautifully human contradiction, or an ugly failure? Maybe this is where we agree to disagree.

    Thanks for your response, and my apologies for the 3 (untidy) "really"s in my first post.

  15. Pingback: Publications « Garth Risk Hallberg

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Inter Alia

Inter Alia #4: International Prizewinners and the Business of Translation

Inter Alia
May 15, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 5 4 min read

[Editor’s Note: To plug a hole in the Inter Alia series, we’ve numbered this one out of order.]I know next to nothing about the translation business, except that it is vital to my reading habits. And so, earlier this week, I posted a little survey of international awards for fiction, along with the unobjectionable (I think) suggestion that more foreign-language prize-winners should be translated into English. I had been surprised at how difficult it was merely to find English-language information on, for example, The Austrian Grand Prize for East European Literature, and part of my intention was to put the “wisdom of crowds” to work for me, via reader comments and blog reactions. And, lo! The Complete Review and The Guardian’s book blog obliged. From the former, (which seems in possession of much better intel than I am) I learned that the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize may have been a weak proxy for the cream of German-language literature. I also learned, in a pleasant surprise, that my “translation quotients” apparently “do seem to reflect general translation-trends.” I thought I’d follow up today with a few interpretive gambits.First: literary awards are a notoriously subjective indicator of literary value (with apologies to fans of James A. Michener’s Pulitzer-winning fiction.) Nor is a foreign book’s publication in the U.S. or U.K. a measure of its greatness. The absence of translations of Tanizaki Prize-winners should not be taken as a reflection on the prestige of the prize, the health of Japanese literature, or even the level of American interest in Japanese writers. (Witness the runaway success – not to mention the genius – of Haruki Murakami.) And again, given the relative paucity of information, my “Prizewinners: The International Edition” feature may have been looking at some of the wrong awards.However, in aggregate, it does constitute an interesting snapshot of the business of translation. Romance languages seem to predominate. Is this because these are the languages Americans tend to learn in school – leading to a surfeit of translators? Or because of our long-standing cultural ties to Western Europe?The picture shifts a bit when we consider writers whose non-prize-winning novels are the ones that have been translated into English, and when we look at prizes given for a body of work. Writers who have been canonized in, say, the Netherlands are a sure bet for translation into English. But the single-book prize can be a testament to what’s vital and urgent in a literary tradition. It’s the difference between Philip Roth and, say, Edward P. Jones. And a healthy culture of translation will make sure that Edward P. Jones gets read in other languages now, rather than in 40 years. The Rómulo Gallegos had this effect for Bolaño; the Alfred Döblin Prize, for Katja Lang-Müller… well, not so much.Indeed, a translation gap for the historic period 1995 – 2005 seems particularly glaring when we look at Germany. With the exception of Ingo Schulze (whose monumental New Lives will appear from Knopf this fall), few of the Döblin winners have had any of their work at all translated into English. Does this mean that American publishers are doing a crappy job translating German novels, or that American readers have little appetite for them, or that I did a crappy job educating myself about contemporary German literature? (A friend who used to work at publisher Berlin Verlag suggested calculating TQs for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Aspekte Literaturpreis, and the Berliner Literaturpreis der Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung.) Rather, I think it suggests that having a clearer awards consensus can make it easier for readers like me to find out about new books, and can help push publishers off the fence. Already, the creation of the Booker-esque German Book Prize in 2005 has proven a boon to German-language translation. Since being shortlisted in 2006, Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, to name one example, has been published in about a billion countries.[It bears mentioning at this point, inter alia, that there is a lot of wonderful contemporary Chinese, Arabic, Slavic, Hebrew, Setswana, etc. literature that slipped through the cracks of my survey. (I’m currently reading the Hungarian Péter Esterházy’s Celestial Harmonies and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun.) I had hoped to create a more truly International edition of “The Prizewinners,” but the criteria outlined in my original post prevented it. Literature is, of course, irremediably tangled with history, and it came to seem, as I looked at the various prizes, that they were closely linked (as language is) with nationalism. This made it difficult, in particular, to construct a proxy for African literature, or to compare specific traditions within Africa with specific European traditions. Nigerian authors are eligible for the Booker, while Egyptians would compete for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The existing pan-African literary awards seem to represent such a diversity of languages, and such a plurality of markets, that it was difficult to find any one award to focus on. The cultural traditions of Communist China remain opaque to a monoglot like myself, and while the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize seemed comparable to the Booker or the Pulitzer, none of the winning books has been translated into English.]Ultimately, it seems to me that the “problem” of translation is, like many of the “problems” of the literary marketplace, a problem of money. Translating the second and third parts of Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance, for example, will require two or three years’ pay for the great translator Joachim Neugroschel. A more well-publicized award field, with more prominent awards for foreign markets, might give publishers and foreign funding agencies the “hook” they need to make deeper investments in translation. (And might yield even greater sales for presses like New Directions, Dalkey Archive, Archipelago, NYRB and Open Letter, who have already made heroic commitments to publishing translations.) The mainstream media “hype machine” has a role to play here. As do blogs.* Which gives me an idea… who wants to figure out how many of our own Anglo-English Prizewinners have been translated into Russian?*(whose job would be easier if Blogger would make it simpler to use diacritical marks in posts; sorry, no stresicas, Sasa!)

Inter Alia
| 5 books mentioned 5 4 min read
● ● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #13: Font Wars, the Phantom Menace

Inter Alia
October 17, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 2 2 min read

Back in 2001, The Onion published a breathless report from a gala awards ceremony: The Fontys. A few dissenting voices groused about the night’s big winner, Helvetica Bold Oblique – “a bold as best font?” – but ebullience carried the night. “‘A million thanks to all the wonderful folks in the font community who believed in Helvetica Bold Oblique,'” said “an ecstatic Oliver Rudd, designer of the font,”Without your faith in my vision, I would not be here before you tonight. I’d also like to thank Helvetica Regular designer James T. Helvetica, the giant upon whose shoulders I stand.Of course this was satire, and its ostensible message served mainly to emphasize a subtext: No one cares about typeface. Some recent reading experiences, however, have me wondering if that’s really true.This summer, I encountered the ultramodern Vendetta font in two books of debut fiction: Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis and Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. Its polygonal punctuation and strangely shaped gs and ps kept distracting me from the text. I’ve also had problems reading several books from the NYRB Classics series, which has otherwise been justly praised for its attractive design. In each case, an obtrusive font made it hard for me to forget that I was staring at ink on a page. It was hard to distinguish frustration with the typesetting from frustration with the prose itself.Now I’m about three-quarters of the way through John Crowley’s Aegypt Cycle, which Overlook Press has heroically brought back into print. Aegypt is a startling hybrid, part fantasy and part novel of ideas, and, when you’re hip-deep in Daemonomania, a blurb comparing Crowley to Thomas Mann doesn’t seem unjustified. For some reason, however, Overlook has chosen a stylized typeface called Rotis that graphically overemphasizes Aegypt’s connection to genre fiction. Overlook told us that Rotis was chosen because it echoes the “feel” of the book; for me, it overdoes the echo. At times I’ve found myself reading racing along to the next plot-point, rather than slowing down to appreciate Crowley’s rich prose, which deserves the same distinction accorded to other modern masters. I wonder if my experience would be different had Crowley been given the Everyman’s Library treatment – or, indeed, if War & Peace would read differently, printed on copier paper in 12-point Courier.The New Critics taught us that we were supposed to disregard superfluities and focus on the words on the page – but how much does the printing process color our reception of those words? Don’t design choices advance a set of claims for the work – claims that subtly shape our judgment? This seems particularly worth thinking about now that modern technology has made typesetting easier. It would seem to be a fairly simple matter to switch the next print run of Crowley or Gessen or Ulinich to good old Garamond, or to some other font that meets master typographer Matthew Carter‘s criteria: clarity is all. Perhaps there are readers out there who care nothing for the superficial, who would just as soon read an airport paperback as, say, a Vintage International trade. I’ve been a little embarrassed to discover I’m not among them.

Inter Alia
| 5 books mentioned 2 2 min read
● ● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #11: The Death and Life of Literary Spaces

Inter Alia
June 10, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 1 3 min read

Last week, Manhattan’s Mercantile Library emptied the shelves of its shambling, elegant midtown mansion and locked the doors for good. The Merc, one of Old New York’s several private libraries, had occupied its East 47th Street location continuously since 1932, but could no longer outrun the fiscal exigencies of arts funding and NYC real estate. Executive Director Noreen Tomassi did her best to put a positive spin on the Merc’s search for a new home, pointing out in the Times that a downtown relocation could put the 175-year-old institution closer to the center of the current literary scene:The vibrant centers of the city have changed. The challenge the board faced was trying to run a capital campaign to raise money to refurbish the building in an area which does not have the kind of residential community and vibrant night life that we believe is important to the institution to grow, where young writers are living who we can help.Nonetheless, count this young writer among the pessimists. The Merc’s move strikes me as both a huge loss for bibliophiles and an indictment of the self-annihilating quality of the current “Warhol economy.”What kind of loss? It’s hard to describe the charms of The Merc to anyone who’s never visited, but I suspect that denizens of other literary cities can find analogues in beloved (and perhaps shuttered) bookstores, museums, and libraries. Originally a resource for merchants and their clerks – one pictures Melville’s Nipper and Turkey calling up books from the stacks – The Merc became, in its East 47th Street incarnation, nothing less than a temple of the book. As the Times noted, the building provided a “midtown perch” for 75 years’ worth of writers, known and unknown. And the ghost of readers past – in the open shelves and dusty stacks, the sunken armchairs, the uneven stair a Pulitzer winner may once have stumbled over – gave the place an auratic quality that would be difficult for any renovation (and impossible for any relocation) to preserve.Of course, the American city is defined by change, whether at the hands of developers, of neighborhood associations, or of government. At their best, the three exist in a kind of dynamic tension. (The Merc’s rebranding as a “Center for Fiction,” offering studio space, reading groups, classes, and awards, is an example of what might be called intelligent re-design.) But it seems to me that our increasingly culture-driven economy has a vested interest in sustaining the cultural spaces that sustain it; instead, a kind of remorseless accounting – in which potential funders scrutinize “metrics” – threatens to strip them of their distinctions.Moreover, in a city where the distance between culture and commodity is increasingly notional, The Merc’s visible continuity with a literary history encompassing Thackeray and Twain offered a welcome corrective. This is not to say that a quantum of glitz doesn’t help the cause of literature, but there’s more than enough of that going around. Young writers need the courage to be marginal, and to write for posterity, just as much as they need pressure to speak to “the vital centers.” When I had the pleasure of giving a reading in the old building this winter, it was precisely its distance from the “vibrant night life” of downtown that made the event meaningful to me. People were there to engage, rather than to be seen.By nature of its inherent privacy, literacy is one of the cultural practices most insulated from the vagaries of fashion. It takes years to write a book, and sometimes weeks to read one, and this acts as a check on the hype cycle. To put it another way, literature and real estate trade on different notions of “vitality.” Spaces where readers and writers can congregate help bridge the divide between the two, literalizing an otherwise imaginary community; the quality of that community will, perforce, inform the quality of the work written for it. And so literary spaces are worth protecting.The foregoing is doubtless an oversimplification. The Merc will continue to foster literary vitality once it finds a new home, as the central branch of the New York Public Library (where I’ve been logging many hours of late) will survive its Steven Schwarzman-funded renovation. But the private equity moguls and cultural stewards who have created the conditions for the gut renovation of Gotham would do well to remember Walter Benjamin’s warning: “What is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.” That is, a building like the old Mercantile Library will look great as condos, but, absent neighborhood cultural draws, good luck finding anyone who wants to live there.

Inter Alia
| 5 books mentioned 1 3 min read
● ●