Yes and No and the New Yorker

My brother recently informed me that everything I love is pretentious. This includes, I suppose, The New Yorker, which I do love — except for the annual fiction issue. In principle I like the idea of a fiction issue; I like discovering new writers, I like being reminded that living people also write (I have to be reminded of this because, as a truly pretentious person, I only read dead writers), and I like to fantasize about one day having a short story of my own in The New Yorker. I think if I were ever published in The New Yorker, my pretentious instincts would be satisfied and I could go on to, I don’t know, watch American Idol unabashedly, instead of abashedly, which is what I currently do.

The most recent fiction issue’s theme was “Writers Under 40.” A brilliant theme, a perfect theme for fantasizing (I am also under 40!), marvelous choice all around, and as a bonus, featuring Jonathan Safran Foer, who has also been accused of pretension, and whom I also love. So I attempted to suspend my usual skepticism about the fiction issue and discover some great young contemporary authors.

Here’s what I discovered. The majority of their stories could be subtitled in one of two ways:

1. “The Death of a Meaningless Person”
2. “The Sexcapades of a Meaningless Person”
   

I don’t mean to be flippant, but really, it’s a little bit exasperating. And somehow it reminds me of a discussion Lauren and I have been having recently, about our literary tastes. In addition to our joint preference for works by the deceased, she has also declared that she likes flashy writers (e.g. Nabokov and Gombrowicz). And after reading this particular New Yorker, I have discovered that I like flashy plots. Three of my favorite books are The Brothers Karamazov (featuring murder), The Magic Mountain (featuring tuberculosis), and Mrs Dalloway (featuring autodefenestration). Any of the three could be subtitled: “The Death & Sexcapades of Very Interesting People.”

These are also, admittedly, sad books, written by authors whose world was about to end, who were writing in a gathering storm. They are sad, but not bleak; and this distinction is crucial. As John Berger wrote, “The despair of an artist is often misunderstood. It is never total. It excepts his own work.” That is: you are sad, you write, but by writing you create a space to dissolve your sadness. In Deleuzian terms, you write to flee, but in fleeing you seek your weapon. I read dead writers because it is easier for me to sense their inner resistance, their affirmation, in that space between despair and art. I don’t object to despair; it is easy to feel agony, particularly when writing, so my only objection is to making this despair total, to the point where writing languishes in and glorifies boredom and disillusionment, simply because it can find no way out. (Writing itself is the way out, but only a potential one; it must be chosen and employed as such. )

The phrase ‘way out’ always makes me think of Kafka, and Kafka always makes me think of Beckett. I associate them with each other because they both strike me as people who were writing to save their lives, people who were sad and disillusioned, but against their will, who were surrounded by boredom and who fought back. The theatre director Peter Brook said of Beckett, “he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn.” The ghost of affirmation haunts his writing, laughing; despair and boredom are never total. (Beckett and Kafka are also masters of the tragicomedy, one of my favorite genres and one which I would love for these writers under 40 to revive.)

So, this, I suppose, is what I was hoping to find in The New Yorker: this longing for ‘yes.’ Instead there was, for the most part, only ‘no,’ or rather, ‘I don’t care.’ So what?, I wanted to say, after Meaningless Person slept with Other Meaningless Person and then drowned. I don’t care either.

I don’t mean to condemn contemporary fiction. It’s not a homogeneous bloc and I know that some of it’s wonderful. But the world is always falling apart, and it is so easy to be bored and unremarkable. In writing it is possible to produce an alternative, to carve out a little space of freedom. I will own my vice of being a pretentious reader, if it gives me the right to demand agony in writing, if I can demand that something be at stake.