Catching Up on the New Yorkers

It’s that time again. A stack of unread issues of the New Yorker has formed on my nightstand – about 2 months’ worth of them—and lately I’ve been trying to catch up, issue by issue, making a slow but steady progress. Along the way, I figured this was a good place to mention some articles that have made an impression on me.

For example…

"My Father’s Suticase", the 2006 Nobel Lecture by Orhan Pamuk (12/25-01/01 issue). A lovely meditation on writing and writing life. I liked his way of describing of what it’s like to be a writer:

“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.”


I like his idea of the “inward gaze.” It’s so essential, and yet so hard to accomplish, especially on the days when everything is hectic, and when writing is supposed to somehow fit in between errands, grading, grocery shopping, and doctors’ appointments.

In comparing himself to his father (who wrote much of his life but wasn’t published), Pamuk describes two types of writers. He describes himself as someone who’s at odds with the world, lonely and alienated, and his describes his father as the opposite of that:

“In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent it happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me also knew that I was not so much “angry” as “jealous,” that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. I’d ask myself in a scornful, angry voice: What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?”

I wonder if all writers belong to one of these two camps. I like the idea of being a writer who lives in harmony with his/her world/surrounding. But god forbid, I wouldn’t want to be a complacent writer. So some degree of anger is essential, isn’t it?

Pamuk also makes an important—and to me, unexpected--point. Growing up in Istanbul, he felt he was living in the provinces, far away from the cultural centers where the real art happened. Not only the country didn’t seem very encouraging towards its artists and writers, it also lacked, according to Pamuk, the excitement and richness of “the centers.” (This is surprising to me, because I never thought of Turky as provincial. To me, it was a part of Europe. Then again, how many Turkish writers do I know?)

This idea of provincialism is continued in "Die Weltliteratur” by Milan Kundera (the New Yorker, January 8th), unfortunately not available online.

He defines “provincialism” as “the inability (or the refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context.” What’s large context, you ask. Kundera exaplains that “[t]here are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation (we can call this the small context) or else in the supranational history of its art (the large context).” He says that in most anthologies, “world literature is always presented as juxtaposition of national literatures! Literatures in the plural!” “And yet,” he points out, “Rabelais was never better understood than by a Russian, Bakhtin; Dostoyevsky than by a Frenchman, Gide; Ibsen than by an Irishman, Shaw; Joyce than by an Austrian, Broch.”

This made me want to look at the authors less known and more marginalized than Doestoevsky and see whom they influenced (across the national borders) and how. It made me wonder how often the idea of nationality is used as a crutch, how often the works of literature become linked to information, i.e., read this book by a Russian writer and learn more about Russia. I think of all the panels at AWP that use region/ethnicity as their organizing principle. Chinese Women Writers. New Russian Literary Diaspora (in which I participated). It’s marketing. I don’t think it’s wrong, but I also don’t think this should be the only focus. Yes, it’s great to read a book and learn something about the country and the people among which it’s set. But as far as literature is concerned, it should be a secondary benefit. First and foremost, it’s art, and as such, it should be able to transcend national boundaries. Anyway… Kundera says it much better than I.

The final article I wanted to mention is also about writing. "The Art of Extinction" is about Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian writer, who may be seen as one of those marginalized writers Kundera talks about. I’ve read only one of his novels so far, Yes, and it was glorious—dense, dark, emotionally sweeping. (He uses very few paragraph breaks.)

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the article:

"Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country’s most provocative postwar writer: he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which, with typical bluntness, he once represented as a pile of manure on the stage. At first, he declined to participate in the commemoration, saying with caustic humor that a more appropriate gesture would be for all the shops once owned by Jews to display sign reading “Judenfrei.” But the author of play like “The German Lunch Table,” in which family members gathered for a meal discovered Nazis in their soup, could not resist such a rich opportunity to needle Austria’s political and cultural élite."