The New Yorker & Me: November 22, 2021 Issue

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

November 22, 2021 Issue

“The best way to understand a writer is to interpret the work,” says Maggie Doherty, in her absorbing “Think Twice,” in this week’s issue. Really? Recall Susan Sontag’s famous dictum: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’ ” (“Against Interpretation,” 1964). Sontag favoured experiencing the work – “experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are.” Robert B. Pippin, in his recent Philosophy by Other Means, is pro-interpretation. He writes, “But the injunction that we should ‘stop interpreting’ a work and just ‘experience’ it is like demanding that we just look at the words on a page and not say what they mean.” He has a point. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to Sontag’s approach – one that aims for “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” It seems to me that if a work is closely described, its meaning will follow. Peter Schjeldahl, in the Introduction to his great Let’s See (2008), says, “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.” Boom! As usual, Schjeldahl nails it.

But on further reflection, I realize I've overreacted. Doherty isn't arguing for interpretation as the critical approach. She's saying if you want to understand the writer, look at his or her writing. With that, I agree.