Reading the New Yorker in Bed
by Christy Rodgers
© 1998
Some months ago I was ill, with a strange nausea that for several weeks refused to get better or worse, but simply sapped my will and energy. It rained, every day, all day, during this time. I spent most of that dreary period in bed, like someone with a mysterious “wasting disease,” as such undiagnosed ailments were once called. I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I had no job, and no money for doctors. One afternoon The New Yorker came. I wasn't sure why it arrived on my doorstep, as I couldn't remember ordering it, but I was glad to get it. I was longing for something which would engage my attention without meaning that I had to get out of bed. My extreme lethargy was appalling to me, but it literally made me sick to move about much, or even to think about moving.
As I lay in bed and leafed through the magazine, which in and out of my intellectual life has been some sort of benchmark for it for at least two decades, I was very conscious, suddenly, of entering a world that I remembered as once seeming wide and seamless as the world itself, and that I now found, in all its staid presumption, to be very starkly and narrowly defined. It had almost nothing to do with what I had come to perceive as the truth of my own experience. I realized that The New Yorker was more than a magazine. It was a distillation of an entire culture.
This in and of itself was no major revelation. But my feelings about it were very contradictory and somehow related to the nature of what ailed me, and ails me still, if not physically then psychologically, even spiritually.
What astounded me was the complete fantasy at the core of the New Yorker worldview, the unshakeable assumption of the fundamental truth of an illusion. And also, how attractive this enclosed world was to me, because it was a known quantity. It is unquestionably the world of the old “liberal elite.” Its mythology, secular humanism, is one I grew up steeped in and surrounded by. Its subscribers suggest, without ever overtly boasting, that within its boundaries lie all that is reasonable, elegant, insightful and just, i.e., all that is truly real. Accordingly, the impoverishment, cruelty, isolation and rage that I have seen teeming on every city street and grimacing out of so many exhausted faces are not the defining parameters of our society. They are not the real world.
The real world, according to The New Yorker , is the world of concepts, the struggle of the soul of man to express itself in art, or commerce--or one of the boundary worlds between the two, like fashion or cinema--or politics or science or some field of endeavor. It is a quiet, sunlit world of cottages on the Long Island Shore and travel in Europe (look at the ads). It is peopled at the center by comfortable educated persons ensconced in the Western tradition but firmly believing they are possessed of open, enquiring minds. Though it prides itself on skepticism and inquiry, this mindset retains a number of unspoken preconceptions: totalitarianism (i.e. what used to be the ruling system in the Eastern bloc) is evil by nature; western civilization is flawed but basically good; other cultures are generally primitive or strange, but often have aspects of grandeur and mystery which serve primarily to enrich “our” culture and understanding. Personal income is not relevant to an individual's ability to perform, unless it is excessively large or small. Political or socially engaged art is de facto inferior art. Class, as an institutional, structural, economic and political fundament of society does not exist, at least in this country, and is of fairly minor relevance even in more overtly stratified societies. The government exists to mediate among a “variety of conflicting interests,” not simply to serve the interests of a powerful elite.
I could pull an article or review out of any issue of The New Yorker at random and find examples of one or more of these ideas in it. The particular issue I received that afternoon was rich with them. I first read a long, glowing article on the life and work of James Merrill, a great American poet recently dead. I know little of his work, and yet several poems of his encountered serendipitously have stayed with me as lovely evocations, in shimmering, opalescent language, of a particular moment or truth. As a man, he seems to have embodied the ideals of the liberal elite, to have been an example of all that it sees as noble, vibrant and great in itself. He was the son of Charles Merrill, one of the founders of Merrill Lynch, Inc. His family was phenomenally wealthy, but he himself was not obsessed with money, though he did not reject it either. He and his male lover lived for many years in a cottage on Long Island Sound and on a hilltop in Greece ; he was generous and witty and loyal to his friends and produced some of America 's best poetry. It is not once mentioned, in this long, comprehensive piece, whether James Merrill ever held a job.
I felt a great sense of longing when I read about his life, for, freed from the constraints of livelihood which continually oppress so many talented people, he dedicated himself to his art and excelled at it, and he seems not to have been perverse or cruel or tormented or isolated (stereotypical artistic “types”) but warm and happy and human. He is that liberal argument which says: “money is really irrelevant; it's what's inside that counts.” Ironically, his life is actually proof that the only circumstance in which money is truly irrelevant is when one is privileged to have enough of it (and not to want more than enough). The point is not that art cannot be created out of poverty--historically, far more art, even great art, I would venture to say, has been created by poor artists than by wealthy ones. The real point, in my view, is that James Merrill got by accident of birth what all human souls ought to have by right. His inherited affluence gave him freedom from physical hardship, from having to sell his labor for another's benefit, freedom to live his life in pursuit of his dreams, loves and, in his case, some of the deepest truths about human nature and life itself. Not everyone has his talent. But I cannot see that creative excellence, or any particular strength of character, should be offered to justify the fact that his freedom and comfort is humanity's exception, not its rule.
There were other representative articles in the magazine: a weak defense of affirmative action (the classic liberal “it's not great but it's better than the alternative” argument), and a film review complaining predictably about an entertainment which weakened itself, in the reviewer's view, by trying to convey some kind of social message.
The most striking thing about the whole experience of reading The New Yorker was my extreme sense of cognitive dissonance. The tolerant, liberal, economically privileged social group which promotes its views in these glossy, colorful mouthpieces as central, firmly established and omnipresent is, according to my knowledge of this society and several others, not only marginal and irrelevant to most of the beings on the planet, but actually under threat of extinction here in the U.S. The America I live in is openly fragmented into economically stratified classes and dozens, if not hundreds, of culturally distinct groups that utterly distrust one another, with some good reason. These groupings have few shared interests or passions (“...how ‘bout those Lakers?”) Our social dividedness goes still deeper, because economic classes do not unite across cultural lines, nor cultures across lines of class. Thus all illusion vanishes of the educated, sophisticated and tolerant liberal bastion being some sort of societal center of gravity.
With it, in my case, vanishes my upbringing and most of the traditions and precepts in which I was educated. Since maturity I have lived in parts of the world where most people live as most people do all over the world, bound nearly hand and foot by the political, economic and ethnic circumstances of their birth. I have seen that the true norm for most people is not spaciousness, physical comfort and quiet ratiocination, but vibrant and desperate daily struggles with the severe, imposed limitations of their lives. My cognitive center has disappeared, that world of soi-disant reason, beauty, knowledge of human frailty but faith in human progress. It now seems a quaint, fading Victorian place, out of one of the costume dramas that are such a popular component of the bland public television programming doubtless favored by New Yorker readers, writers and editors. (Actually, except for its lack of local fashion and gossip, public television could be seen as a kind of electronic equivalent of The New Yorker .)
My liberal birth culture is inadequate to the times we live in; it does not provide sufficient strength for me to function, much less accomplish in the world, now that its falsely optimistic unities have broken down. It does not supply the conceptual tools I need to survive outside its shrinking boundaries, in the vicious glare of the New World Order. Its fundamental conceptual flaw, in my view, is its pretentious dismissal of class-based socio-economic analysis. Such analysis, it is implied, lacks any relevance to matters of the human spirit. Historically it has only produced the theoretical basis for totalitarianism. The liberal view, by refusing in this way to accept any explanation for oppression beyond flaws in the individual human character, is no match for the easy vicious demagoguery that fuels reaction. Nor does it offer any balm to the spirit wounded and trapped in the enormous machineries of power. In our time, as this machinery, increasingly unfettered, demands ever more resources to maintain, throwing more lives into dislocation and suffering, liberalism's analysis becomes increasingly irrelevant.
I sense (since the issue is tacitly taboo, it's hard to get evidence) that the voice of class-based analysis is one perceived in the liberal mindset to be too shrill, too didactic, too “divisive” for the symposium of rational discourse. Certain passions are allowed to inspire meaningful action and thought in the liberal worldview; anger is not one of them. Yet a deep, abiding anger at injustice does inform much class analysis. This anger is tolerantly seen as misguided and counterproductive by liberal rationalism. This is another reason why liberalism is so completely out of step with and inadequate to the times. If there is one thing characteristic of public discourse in the U.S. today, from politicians to call-in shows to “real life” television, it is anger. It is rage that rankles and simmers and explodes, and much of it is anger at injustices real or perceived. Denying this anger any real, systemic reason for existing is a serious failing of any conceptual system. In the face of terrorism by populist reactionaries, as in the face of radical social upheaval among marginalized groups, the liberal response is to bleat for some sort of institutional mediation, as if class warfare could be mitigated by a combination of legislation, policing and therapy.
Tarring all anger as destructive and misinformed is simply wrongheaded. It is as misguided as it would be to stigmatize all desire, all pain. These emotions carry truth, and can be creative, transformational forces, if the person who feels them has an understanding of her society's fundamental mechanisms and her relation to them.
I have been reflecting since that rainy day in bed with The New Yorker that perhaps my unidentifiable nausea was more than just the flu. For weeks I lay huddled under blankets in a damp, cold, disintegrating tenement, paid for during my unemployment by a companion, a fellow artist who was never there because he was working three separate ill-paying jobs. Without the deus ex machina of a lottery win, we had little hope of ever being able to improve our economic situation beyond subsistence. I won't assert now that I was suffering from classic existential nausea. The sickness felt much more discomforting than a metaphor. But it was also true that I felt eerily dissociated from the society I live in. For some time I had grown increasingly weak and sparkless as I contemplated the grim life that lay in wait out on the streets of my city, of all our cities and towns. I felt as if my power to shape my own destiny were being sapped, drawn from me in direct proportion to my increasing alienation. All I could hear around me was the generalized mutterings of unfocused and barely suppressed rage, as the privileged continued to raise the already impossible ante in their loaded game against the poor, and the poor fought and howled at and destroyed one another in their despair.
Who will give voice to valid, profound and powerful ideas in this situation? And who will listen if they do? The rising right brays its vituperative lies to millions over radio and television. The traditional left is no match for it. In the fragments that remain of the new and old American left, eviscerated by history, the power of capital, and its own short-sightedness and political ineptitude, it stutters, mumbling to itself, its only audience. And the liberal fantasy of a moderate “center” continues to evaporate. As I put The New Yorker aside it seemed odd to me that so much effort and money were expended to maintain so foundationless and irrelevant a world. But it is a very necessary illusion to those who maintain it. In the vast sphere outside its still point, inchoate struggles rage.
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