Why Is n+1 So Annoying?

BY DOLORES PALLAS

 

This is a difficult question to attempt to answer, because a rational approach leads clearly to the conclusion that n+1 is not, or at the very least should not, be very annoying at all.  And yet the emotional thrust behind that which leads to this question, the inexorable charge, electric and fierce, to find certain and damning proof of n+1’s hackneyed conceptions and formulations of the ideal art – because ultimately the journal seems to strive to answer nothing short of this: of how to make true, avant-garde, “high” art relevant, or even existent, again –, make this question difficult to ignore; I am thrilled upon the release of each new issue of the journal: “Maybe this time,” I think, “they will have screwed up enough to validate my annoyance with them.  Maybe this time they’ll drop their guard.”  And so I’ve prepared several answers to this question; all of them are inadequate and many of them are necessarily exclusive of at least one of the others, but they still seem somehow inextricable from each other: they together forge an irrational logic that is erratic in its applicability but feels right in its ramshackle coherence; some points digress into territory that seems to judge n+1 incorrectly or unfairly, at which point it becomes time to pick up another digressive strand from perhaps a competing or contradictory “answer.”  And herein lies the fundamental problem: n+1 feels annoying; its approach and methods feel inadequate to fulfill its oft-stated goals; it feels irrelevant to the avant-garde that it so desperately seeks to pinpoint and articulate.  But these feelings are inchoate and imperfect in reasoning.  And n+1 is, ultimately, more than good enough to sneak past these accusations unsinged.  To get to the more important point, then, the superficial will be done away with as soon as possible: in no particular order, this is why n+1 feels annoying: it is not as good as it thinks it is, and certainly not as good as its name thinks it is; it is not as profound as others claim it to be and as it shamelessly advertises itself as being; it is indicative of a worryingly conservative trend in contemporary literary criticism; it captures the woeful state of the particularly Western contemporary popular literary scene; it is utterly removed from a wider literary realm; it is offensively élitist; it is hopelessly self-conscious, but its consciousness of itself is hopelessly inaccurate; it maintains a struggle against precisely everything that it unwittingly stands for and promulgates; it doesn’t come out often enough: many other periodicals manage to produce journals of the same quality far more frequently; it comes out far too often: if it takes so long to publish such an unpredictable smattering of articles ranging from the thrillingly good to the bewilderingly bad, it might as well wait however long it must in order to create a journal solely of  the former; “The Intellectual Situation,” which begins every issue, provides an embarrassing and nearly intolerable biannual space for the editors’ approximations of wit; everyone that seems to like it is generally very intelligent and articulate, while those who don’t are primarily unthoughtful battering rams of intellectual imprecision whose qualms with the magazine seem to amount to little more than the fact that it is trendy and made by young and attractive people.

Most of these “annoyances” are straw men that can be easily dismantled with just a simple perusal of any given issue; others are simply ones of taste or temperament, often having little to do with the journal itself but rather with the “culture” of the journal: either of the “personality cult” that surrounds it or the social and cultural privilege that it represents and from which the vast majority of its editors and contributors have profited.  And besides, goes wise reasoning: if you don’t like the magazine, just don’t read it; it’s not harming anyone.  Before I continue, I should offer a telling disclosure: I applied for an internship at n+1 this past Fall and was turned down, rightfully so: the discomfort my interviewer clearly had in dealing with someone as unprepared and ill-equipped for any such position causes me shudders still.  But what I keep returning to, and what keeps annoying me about the journal, is that it bears so nakedly a particular artistic fear – a fear that many of this current twenty- and thirty-something generation indulge in and that its founders and editors articulate, perhaps unwittingly, nearly better than anyone else – and it does so with seemingly little awareness of how deeply distressed they are by it.  It is the fear that we are missing out on something, that we are missing out on something big for which our generation – if it is remembered at all – will forever be renown.  More terrifying, then, is the fear that our generation may not even have this something to miss out on; an almost frantic exigency typifies much of the journal’s criticism, often lending it an air that can be interpreted either as proscriptive and conservative or simply just scared and unhappy with our generation’s artistic contributions thus far.

This “something,” more specifically, is the next big avant-garde, the next major artistic step forward.  Mark Greif, Keith Gessen, Dushko Petrovich, and Eliza Newman-Saul speak about this in the n+1 publication P.S.1 Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde, transcribed from an event presumably of the same name in 2006.  The pamphlet, as they refer to it, has moments of tremendous insight, often articulated with great clarity, pith, and occasionally beauty.  But an undercurrent seems to course through their discussion that goes all but unmentioned, and it is precisely of this fear of “missing out” on the next avant-garde, if it even goes by such a name or is recognizable as such.  But the journal wants it both ways: it wants to elucidate this new avant-garde – or what the new avant-garde must be – while still adhering to the traditional strictures of the literary/artistic/contemporary affairs journal to whose guidance it appeals.

This deserves something of a digression, although I should be careful with these: I worry that I may simply be allowing myself to wallow shallowly in lowly mudslinging, much of which is the result more of envy than actual distaste.  Nonetheless: n+1 fits squarely in the mold of a great number of publications.  The editors cite Partisan Review and Lingua Franca as influences, but these two exemplary periodicals distilled their content into a product of their thought, and were not, as n+1 primarily is, soapboxes for the expression of their thought.  While n+1 quite frequently discusses the avant-garde it is ultimately, as Sam Frank states in the pamphlet, “a higher-quality middlebrow magazine.”  Greif, upon hearing this, retorted: “I feel it is the job and the mission of n+1 to be a low-quality highbrow publication.”  He is joking, somewhere in there, and there is some truth in his labeling, but Frank’s distillation is more accurate.   While n+1 wants to engage, and engage with, the avant-garde, it also wants to be counted among those in the same discussion as the New York Review of Books.  This is why it parades itself with the many glowing reviews it has received from such sources, among which is Jonathan Franzen’s remark that “Just when you think you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands,” a beguiling comment in which it is unclear if he is praising the journal or himself.  Basically, n+1 wants to be accepted by the mainstream literary high culture; no occasion to blame, certainly.  Greif states at one point in the pamphlet that “for n+1 the will is not to constitute an avant-garde,” adding: “That’s not our job.  The task is to restore the level of progress: the values and impetus that keep avant-garde practice from going about rootless and unanchored.”  The problem is that, while they see themselves as encouraging a robust avant-garde, they are really more closely attuned to the particular kind of conservative, proscriptive literary criticism that afflicts so many of our otherwise liberal thinkers, such as James Wood or Adam Kirsch, the former of whom n+1 has formally disparaged and the latter of whom they likely don’t particularly care for either.  And so they are stuck at an odd but understandable impasse: they want to encourage the avant-garde, but they don’t want one of the “weightless” kind, as they term experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake in the pamphlet; and, at least judging from Kunkel and Gessen’s perfectly likeable forays into fiction writing, they have no particular interest in contributing to anything other than the “perennial” – as Kunkel labels it, referring to the literary status quo – layer of literature.  They salivate for the new, exciting, and dangerous, but they participate only in the safe.  They want the respect, the literary street cred, of the avant-garde, but they need the security of being renown as the greatest literary journal of their generation.

And herein lies another digression: what the editors of n+1 consider valuable as literature.  I will spend as little time on this as possible so to avoid this low “mud-slinging” territory.  They hold literature up quite highly, challenging that only certain kinds and qualities of the art are worthwhile; they sanctify it, making any less-than-worthwhile effort near-blasphemy.  Certainly there is nothing surprising in this, and nothing immediately offensive either: at worst, they just sound like the beer aficionado who disdains any beer below the standards he has set for himself.  I find myself quite often indulging in the same kind of élitist view of literature.  But n+1 takes the dangerous step toward proscription, whereby they deign to acknowledge that any kind of literature other than that which they most admire might have some valuable contribution to make to the lives of its readers, might even have a hermeneutic effect of some sort.

n+1 defines itself against McSweeney’s, almost using Dave Eggers’ journal as the source against which it derives its particular self-consciousness; the problem is that McSweeney’s, whatever objections one may have with it and its weltanschauung, is both the more adaptive and clearly defined – ideologically, that is – of the two.  McSweeney’s is more effusive, more excitable, and in many ways more exciting; it is an institution, having also created a book-publishing wing, the literary journal The Believer, and many literacy centers across the country.  It adores and savors reading and writing, and adores and savors the adoration of reading and writing, with generally little regard for the style, content, or quality of that which is enjoyed, so long as enjoyment is taken.  The quality of the work McSweeney’s publishes is very good, often excellent, but they do not expand this to a qualitative assessment of all published literature.  Enjoyment and fulfillment – spiritually, intellectually, emotionally – are prized by McSweeney’s above any particular literary methodology or ideology.  Eggers provides implicit articulation of this in his foreword for the 10th-Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest.  To the editors of n+1, McSweeney’s represents a certain literary naïveté that only mimics progress but doesn’t produce it.  Kunkel terms McSweeney’s a “regressive avant-garde” – apparently disregarding the fact that so many a great deal of other avant-gardes, among them Brutalism, Dadaism, and Minimalism, similarly focus upon regression, variously defined–, in that they eschew the transcendent truths that ostensibly only the truly avant-garde offers in order to make way for a kind of childlike sentimentality.

There is an offensive assumption in this: only one kind of literature is good, namely, the kind that they approve of.  This leaves a wide gap of “useless” literature, sub-perennial, that, it can only be assumed, they believe should not exist.  Like the beer aficionado, they have no tolerance for anything they deem sub-par.  And like those who do happen to like what the beer aficionado deems sub-par – who, bewildered, wonder, “What the hell is that guy’s problem?  I just want to get drunk.”  –, any reader who indulges in the less-than-perennial is seen as participating in a part of culture that is below what should be the lowest common denominator, that what they take delight in should be forbidden for quality’s sake.  This position takes no account of “other” literatures that may provide its readers with just the kind of spiritual, intellectual, or emotional stimulation that McSweeney’s encourages; because it doesn’t suit those who have been privileged with an education and a lifestyle that provide the opportunities to take advantage of “higher” literatures, it is not deemed worthwhile.  McSweeney’s encourages illumination of any kind, not distinguishing between low or high; n+1 encourages illumination of one kind: specifically, of the sort that defines a good Western education.  They fail to acknowledge the potential benefits of other, “lesser” literatures, to appreciate the fact that, like many non-discriminatory beer drinkers, there are many readers who just like to get drunk, so to speak.

Here returns the fear. In seeking to be intellectually abreast of the avant-garde and in denying credit to lesser-than literatures, n+1 is driven by a simultaneous fear of inclusion – of these other literatures – and of exclusion – of the avant-garde –, but it cannot reconcile them as such.  Its fears are, as are those of so many well-educated youngsters, a product of its desire to participate in our generation’s potential avant-garde, whatever, wherever, however, and whenever it may appear.  In its way, n+1 is representative of that most emblematic fear of the bourgeois bohemian artistic class: not being in the center of a true, and truly important, artistic avant-garde.  It seems driven by the kind of self-consciousness particular to our era, in which it has become a brand marketable as a kind of new intellectualism: a “meta-intellectualism,” both founded in all the other brands of twentieth-century thought and confounded by what – after all these daunting “post-” prefixes – could possibly come next, and incessantly plagued by this question; “postmodernism” and “post-structuralism” dim our contemporary circuit with what seems a necessary call for the new: but the new what?  n+1 seems to take Pound’s declaration to “make it new” to heart, and as it was intended: to make the old new again, but not to fashion some new literary fabric altogether and out of nothing: this would be too opaque and difficult to discern, too “weightless.”  n+1 is a journalistic distillation of what so many in its social milieu – including myself – feel, and fear.  It’s not conservative, per se, it’s just scared.  It’s not just n+1 that’s annoying, it’s all of us.

Realistic Cynicism, Part II

BY PER GIOTTO

 

 

In the January 18^th issue of the New York Times Magazine, photographer Nadav Kander provides two photographic contributions: one is a photo essay of Obama’s incoming cabinet while the other, documenting Washington landmarks, supplements an article by Matt Bai on the predictable and rapid diminishment of a president’s approval ratings soon after his inauguration.  The former is a bit odd: Kander works with a variety of styles, many of which mimic somewhat standardized ones, and here he strives for an Avedon-like documentation of celebrity.  Many of his other photographs have the eerie composure and tones of Hollywood horror and sci-fi films, and these, too, have a somewhat nauseous cyan sheen.  While there are several excellent results – the utterly creepy portrait of Larry Summers and the wholly endearing one of David Axelrod are perhaps foremost among them –, they for the most part feel as though Nadav was capable only of approximating Avedone in style; any substance is absent.  The figures look beyond the frame almost chronically – artificially, as if pretending to be caught unawares –, and a great many of them look like they were photographed in Madame Tussaud’s for convenience’s sake.

But the Washington landmark photos are phenomenal.  They are far fewer in number than those within the cabinet portfolio but infinitely more intelligent and incisive.  More than that, they are adorable.  Nadav manages to capture the particular and peculiar willingness with which so many of us are, with some difficulty, allowing ourselves to feel hopeful about Obama’s presidency. 

And thus these old haunts of Washington – having become largely imbued with a sinister tinge, an aftertaste of the Bush Administration – appear sheepishly behind branches and trees, as if staring out at us for approval, hoping to impress us anew. They are marvelous, seeming to ask us, as we too may now be asking them, to be accepting.

It is difficult to not be tritely cynical about Obama’s presidency and the possibility of his accomplishing all that he has claimed; the seemingly naive trust so many have placed in him and his administration makes it all the more difficult to resist the temptations of disillusionment.  But beneath these familiar twinges of cynicism, I am immensely hopeful.  These photographs invest the city – and thus the Obama Administration and the entirety of the American government – with this hopefulness.  It is too early to definitively praise or condemn the administration – the charming hangdog expressions of the Capital; the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials, the last of which is unfortunately not available online; and the White House reflect the tendency to make such prognostications –, but it does feel nice to be hopeful.

The Articulation of Mental Illness, Part I

BY FREEMAN BRANDYWINE

 

Several years ago, in an interview with the New York Times or the New Yorker or some other journalistic institution based out of New York, Tony Kushner said something to the effect of “The body betrays; the mind does not.”  He was reflecting upon his mother’s cancer specifically but related it to his own work and its commitment to exploring the degradations that physical illness inflict upon the body.  Surely this is a misquote, but the general thrust seems similar to the intent of his remark: that while one can rely upon the health of one’s mind, one is always subject to the often cruel vacillations of the body within which it is caged.

His plays never directly address mental illness; the characters within them often suffer horrific mental corruptions as a result of their physical ailments, but neurological disorders or diseases seem largely absent from his realm of artistic inquiry.  And what the earlier misquote most clearly betrays is Kushner’s myopia regarding the reality of the betrayal of the mind.  Indeed, even while his characters undergo the most ferocious and terrifying symptoms of their corporal diseases, they largely remain intact enough to describe their states – even their incapacity to describe their states – with great articulacy.  The intention here is not to condemn Kushner for overlooking the true terror of mental disease – although his characters’ persistent ability to articulate whatever immensely confusing states they are in with witty, sound-byte ready calculations is somewhat annoying, and feels disruptive and disloyal to the emotional morass in which they proclaim to find themselves –, but to question the capacity of any artistic medium in appropriately conveying this terror.  Kushner’s articulations provide his audience with a means by which to digest the incomprehensible; he formulates dialogue that is often very intelligent, acutely observed, and understandable.  The audience leaves the theatre not in the thick of the emotional fog through which those whom his plays portray describe themselves as suffering, but with a seemingly lucid comprehension of their suffering.  And herein lies Kushner’s greatest achievement and most unfortunate failure: he makes the unfathomable seem comprehensible, and in pithy, charming, oft-quoted phrases no less.

Certainly there is no harm in this.  On the contrary, there is much good to be found in it: we often turn to the articulacy of art – whatever be its tongue – to express what we feel ourselves incapable of more accurately communicating.  These articulations are a solvent of sorts: it seems quite likely, for example, that William Styron, in seeking to express the inconceivable and incredible depths of his depression, found great solace upon coming across Milton’s description of the “darkness visible” in his Pandemonium.  If clarity is to be gained in such references, if what is otherwise untouchable by language – as the entire human experience is, as the particular assumption goes – can at the very least be pointed to, if the signifier is weak but signifies well enough, then what, ultimately, is the problem?  Dialogue, and the ability to express one’s condition, is necessary for empathic relations, even for maintaining sanity.  Why denigrate attempts at doing such, no matter how impoverished these attempts may be?

I do not hold that denigration is at all appropriate or necessary.  But it is upsetting to imagine what is lost in translation, what can never be understood.  If Kushner provides his audiences with the belief that they have begun to comprehend a condition, when in fact they have merely been pointed more precisely in its proper direction, isn’t this gap problematic, or at the very least upsetting?  Should what is unfathomable be left unfathomed?  The answer clearly seems to be that they should not.  But the alternatives are so often filled with trite assumptions and consolations, with tame approximations and pat articulations, that it is reasonable to yearn for the less expository: for the inchoate or untranslatable, for the amputated sources of the howls in Francis Bacon’s work, or the cavernous transliterations of dreams and death-bound ruminations of Finnegans Wake.  And even these – made static, at some near-infinite horizon line, by the very fact of their earthly, physical existences – may seem too much, too expository.  The breadth of the mind, and of its diseases and disorders, is inherently averse to any form of complete representation, as Joyce may have attempted to produce, or pithy evocation, as Beckett may have; any artistically isomorphic recreation would seem impossible and, more importantly, pointless: it would be too boring, too tedious.

Perhaps we need a certain amount of pith in addressing the pithless spread of life and thought.  At the very least – as in Kushner’s work – it provides words where little present themselves; in Joyce’s grand attempts to encapsulate aspects of human experience – his works build, in Finnegans Wake, to perhaps the greatest attempt thus far at such an artistically isomorphic recreation of life – it is often specific moments, phrases, or words that strike most resonantly.

As any obsequious and self-respecting Post-Structuralist or Deconstructionist would have it, nothing more is possible.  Literature and life are largely irreconcilable as existing forms; perhaps we should just celebrate whenever they do overlap, however grossly, coarsely, or fittingly they can.