Richard Ford vs Rick Moody: an Investigation of McSweeney’s Relationship to Literary Institutions in Autumn 1998
Kevin O’Neill
Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. Well, it’s all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what’s going on.[1]
Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is an American literary journal founded by Dave Eggers that publishes short stories and creative non-fiction. The journal started in 1998 and has published 33 issues in the 11 years since this date. Though both its form and its content are constantly changing, it can be generally conceived as interesting for its sustained publication of some of the leading figures of late 20th-century American and British fiction, including David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Robert Coover, Ann Beattie, Douglas Coupland, and Joyce Carol Oates. It also publishes work by unknown writers, and has accepted unsolicited submissions throughout its existence. This paper explores how McSweeney’s interacts with literary institutions through a case study which localises one of its writers, Rick Moody, in the context of the publication of its first issue in late-autumn 1998.
McSweeney’s 1The first issue of McSweeney’s contained a selection of articles that had been rejected by other periodicals, or had been commissioned and written, only for their writers to be told that their work would not be published. McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers explained this phenomenon in a 2004 anthology of material from its first ten issues:
Writers I knew were having great work rejected everywhere, or having assigned articles killed for any conceivable reason—too long, too difficult, too timely, not timely enough, or too much emphasis on a giant growing slug. I began wondering if it were possible to start a new journal, assembled from these articles not fit for other magazines—a quarterly of orphaned stories.[2]
Eggers implies that the writers featured in the early McSweeney’s were excluded (consciously or unconsciously) from the existing system of periodical publication. I want to explore what relationship there was between the mass-media of 1998 and the McSweeney’s journal. This is not explicitly addressed in the first issue, but it is, however, possible to identify traces of this relationship in certain texts contained within the journal. I will use Rick Moody’s article to focus this investigation, for reasons to be explained below. I will use the figure of Rick Moody to make connections across various periodicals of autumn 1998; this method deserves some exposition, as periodical criticism is an under-developed field.
Aim 1: Understanding the Function of PeriodicalsBy looking at the relationship of writers to periodicals in 1998, I want to understand more about how forms of dissemination can influence and determine the literary output of a generation of writers.
The medium in which a writer’s work is published can contribute to the construction of their literary identity. For example, to have a novel or book published signifies a publisher’s economic investment in a writer. A rudimentary sketch of the acquisition of literary authority could look like this: as a writer accumulates more publications, so their cultural cache grows. Publication is perceived as the basic goal for aspiring writers. The twentieth century saw a phenomenal rise in the number of books being published; consequently, there was also a rise in the number of writers trying to be published.
Periodical publication is one option that writers can use to build up their reputation to attract the interest of publishers. My interest in the literary institutions of 1998, then, is in terms of how far periodicals functioned as a staging ground for developing writers. One way to think about periodicals is that they represent specific literary communities.[3] Some communities are more difficult to gain access to than others, and have different audiences and varying levels of influence. If a writer is published in the New Yorker, for example, their literary identity is elevated in a certain way. Obviously, writers may be successful without being published in the New Yorker, but they will not have the same kind of cultural cache that comes from a writer who is associated with this magazine. What I want to explore, then, is what kind of community is imagined by the first issue of McSweeney’s, how it relates to the function of periodicals in the mass media.
Mass-circulation periodicals are closely related to issues of production, dissemination and consumption. These are arguably more pressing with the periodical form than with, for example, the novel. The very existence of periodicals can be threatened by economic factors such as a downturn in advertising revenue. Though cover price and subscription revenue are important, most periodicals make the majority of their money from advertising.[4] To think about the relationship between creative practice and the periodical form is to think about the very real economic and commercial forces that impact upon the production of these publications. Periodicals manifest the interactions between their creators, culture, and commercial forces. This paper takes inspiration from the Romanticist Mark Parker's assertion that the task of the periodical critic is to investigate the place of the periodical in culture, and the place of culture in the periodical.[5] Following Parker, what can we learn about how the McSweeney’s community related to the dominant literary culture of 1998?
Aim 2: Richard vs Rick
In this paper I aim to understand what kind of attitude McSweeney’s articulates towards the mainstream literary establishment. One way in which I pursue this aim is by considering the literary profile of two writers who represent the McSweeney’s community and the literary establishment respectively: Rick Moody and Richard Ford.
Richard Ford was born in 1944. In 1998 Richard Ford was 54. Rick Moody was born in 1961. In 1998 Rick Moody was 37. Richard Ford received his BA from Michigan State University. Rick Moody received his BA from Brown University. Richard Ford got his MFA in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine. Rick Moody received an MFA from Columbia University. Richard Ford is best known for his novel The Sportswriter. This was published in 1986. Rick Moody is best known for his novel The Ice Storm. This was published in 1992. Ford edited The Granta Book of the American Short Story in 1992. This book created a representation of what was ‘good’ American fiction. Editing an anthology is like curating an exhibition: whatever is omitted is deemed not part of the community’s culture, is excluded. Ford’s authority allowed him to create a fixed representation of American literature. Ford’s status as a literary institution is used to create another institution. This anthology is not an oppressive or aggressive construction, but provides an example of how literary authority is enshrined in textual artifacts.
Rick Moody had an article published in the first issue of McSweeney’s. This was commissioned but rejected by the New York Times Magazine. The September 20 1998 issue of the Times Magazine that Moody’s article was commissioned for featured an article by Richard Ford. Richard Ford had a long article published in a contemporary issue of the New Yorker, the October 5 1998 edition. This profile by a member of the literary establishment was written about another member of the establishment, Raymond Carver. In the same issue, Rick Moody had a short humour piece on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair. This one-page feature represents the sole article or story published in the New Yorker in 1998 by any of the contributors to the first issue of McSweeney’s. In this article I will hypothesise that the relationship between Ford and Moody (and between the New Yorker and McSweeney’s, by extension) symbolises the tension between an established literary community and those excluded by it. In 1998, Moody was poised between these two groups. The Ice Storm was made into a film by Ang Lee in 1997, and Moody's reputation was growing. His rejection by the Times, I suggest, signals his not-yet-complete assimilation into the more mainstream literary community.
Aim 3: New Yorker vs McSweeney’s
Related to my second aim is an exploration of how literary periodicals and their corresponding communities can be understood using the art/mass-media dichotomy described by Eco in my epigram. Is McSweeney’s a defiant defender of the principles of Art versus the monolithic and oppressive Mass Media? How does it conceive of the mass-circulation model of the periodical? Is the New Yorker an omnipotent and monolithic rival that McSweeney's attempts to overthrow?
Richard Ford’s association with the New Yorker’s literary community is a symptom of the effect of the mass-media on literature. In the twentieth century, one of the most prestigious places for a writer’s short fiction to be published was the New Yorker. Publishing several pieces a week for most of its existence, it helped to create a canon of twentieth-century short fiction. In her farewell 'Talk of the Town' piece, Tina Brown called the magazine ‘a citadel of literary culture’.[6] Ben Yagoda describes it as ‘the most sought-after literary showplace in the country’, and claims that ‘an appearance in the New Yorker could launch a [writer’s] career’.[7] Its circulation has fluctuated but the magazine is commonly held to have reached between 500,000 and 1,000,000 readers weekly.[8] It retains a staff of over a hundred, not including freelancers.
The magazine was and is a mainstream, mass-circulation magazine. It was published independently until 1985, when massive debt led it to be taken over by Advance Publications, and included in the Conde Nast stable. Until very recently, it consistently ran at a loss, subsidised by Conde Nast as a loss leader, bestowing prestige on the rest of their publications for advertisers.[9] The New Yorker would not have survived as a magazine without support from this mass-media giant. As a result of this incorporation into the mainstream publishing industry, with the concomitant pressures from advertising, in the early 1990s the magazine began to reduce its fiction content, limiting itself to just one story per week outside of biannual fiction specials. Though they did publish some less-established writers in 1998, they also published (from fifty stories) three writers three times, and another four writers twice. Of fifty stories, then, 35% were by writers who published more than once in the magazine, in the space of a year. This insularity does not encourage us to think of the magazine as a place for the development of young writers. Therefore the guiding question of my thesis is: what kind of identity did McSweeney’s create in relation to this established literary community?
'On the Yule Log'; Literary Labour in Autumn, 1998
Rick Moody’s article in McSweeney’s 1, 'On The Yule Log', was originally written for the September 20, 1998 issue of the New York Times Magazine. This issue was dedicated to television, and, among other articles, featured five literary figures writing short pieces on their favourite programmes. ‘On The Yule Log’ was rejected by the magazine because it did not focus on a contemporary TV show. The ‘literary’ writers featured in the Times Magazine of September 20, 1998 were Richard Ford, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Crouch, Daniel Menaker and Ellen Gilchrist. All are, or were, closely involved with the literary establishment: Pinsky was poet laureate, Menaker was a former New Yorker editor. This issue’s agenda seems to have been to assess television with a critical yet appreciative tone. In a sense it tried to elevate the mainstream medium by commissioning noted intellectuals (i.e. writers/purveyors of serious fiction) to discuss it; to transfer their cultural cache from a high cultural sphere to the mass/low media.
Moody’s language communicates a derisory attitude to the New York Times: “not like I’ve had the pleasantest experiences with The Grey Lady”; “…the Times Magazine, which I dislike in the extreme”.[10] Despite this attitude, Moody had still originally chosen to write an article for the Times. I now want to explore what this can tell us as an artifact of literary culture: how does it reveal the workings of the literary marketplace in 1998; what does it say about how the labour of writing was evaluated/rewarded within the production and dissemination systems? Moody’s McSweeney’s piece illustrates how the Times interacts with, or uses, literary culture. A paratextual footnote commentary reveals the Times Magazine’s process, and we are privy to both the commission and rejection of his work:
OK, so the Times called one day […] they said they were putting together an issue of the Times Magazine […] on television, 400 words on any television show that you really like.
I got very excited and banged out this stuff here immediately, in an hour or so, until the Times [sic] called back and said, Nope, has to be a modern television show, at which point I said, Forget it.[11]
This is the clearest example in McSweeney’s 1 of a piece that has been rejected by the literary establishment. 'On The Yule Log' is offered to the reader less as an example of Moody’s writing than it is a criticism of the literary agenda he perceives in the Times, and the conception of publishing culture that the Times draws upon. Ellen Gilchrist’s article from the Times Magazine foregrounds the question of why fiction writers are engaged in television criticism:
It is a sign of how hard times are for fiction writers that I have agreed, for money, to admit that I stay up until 10 o'clock central standard time on Thursday nights to watch ''E.R.''[12]
Moody’s dislike of the Times is significant given this perspective. Gilchrist gently pokes fun at her own situation, at how difficult it can be for writers to make a living. This raises the question of how independent writers can be, of what kinds of sacrifice or compromise become necessary to make a living from creative writing. It is not that the Times is doing anything particularly insidious, or treating writers negatively. Rather, what I want to suggest is that their choice of writers does imply a certain conceptualisation of American literary culture. I want to suggest that it perpetuates an establishment view, an unchallenging, conservative representation of American letters.
This issue of the Times Magazine is evidence that writers have to practise non-literary activities to survive. By non-literary I mean anything that is not writing their chosen form of literary expression, e.g. short stories, novels, poems, plays. Writers become ‘public intellectuals’, talking heads on news shows; they write for the non-literary press, or they teach; they give lectures. The financial recompense for writing is often not sufficient by itself to support writers. It has to be noted, also, that this ‘public intellectual’ career path is often only open to those writers who are already successful. What is already a tight market becomes even less rewarding for those not yet established. The writers featured in this magazine are part of this exclusive group. Rick Moody is not. His McSweeney’s piece serves as a symbol of this exclusion.
Moody chose to write about 'The Yule Log', which was the broadcast of a recording of a burning log on Christmas Day:
My recollection is that “The Yule Log” was broadcast for three hours on Xmas, so that those who did not have a fireplace could nonetheless participate in the symbolic richness of that eternal flame of Xmas, and perhaps even those who did have a fireplace, or who didn’t come from any religion that was celebrated on that day, could enjoy this footage.[13]
This is a piece of anti-television, designed as a substitute, a replacement experience for families without log fires. It was thought up by a New York station manager Fred Thrower, and its first broadcast involved the sacrifice of $4,000 of advertising revenue for Christmas Day, 1966. Commercial television depends on advertising for survival. Thrower suspended this relationship, repurposing the television set as a piece of installation art. It was an experiment with the social function of the television set, justified by festive cheer. There is a neat irony here: the pressures of capitalism were set aside for an event that is the zenith of commercialism. Moody’s article in McSweeney's resonates with these issues, challenging the treatment of writers by the literary establishment. His writing can be considered as conscious/unconscious rebellion against the Times’s interaction with the literary establishment.
Richard vs Rick.
Using the New York Times alone is not sufficient to understand the more mainstream, or established, literary community that I want to discuss. The Times selects its writers from a specific literary community, one I believe is better represented by the New Yorker. As a way of elucidating the difference between the McSweeney’s community and part of what it reacts against, I want to use Rick Moody and Richard Ford as participants of these two groups. As explained earlier, both Ford and Moody had articles published in the October 5, 1998 issue of the New Yorker. Richard Ford wrote a ten-page article on his friendship with Raymond Carver, 'Good Raymond'. Moody wrote a poem, 'It Generally Leads a Solitary Life or Lives in Pairs', which was made up of quotations from Shakespeare, Whitman, and a report on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.
This issue of the New Yorker contains several pieces on the media coverage of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky investigation. The entire ‘Talk of the Town’ section is devoted to commentary on this, and the ‘Political Journal’ department also contains a report. Rick Moody’s work, then, provides a ‘literary’ perspective on these events. This is a kind of non-literary activity, as discussed above. Moody’s main modes are short stories and novels. ‘It Generally Leads a Solitary Life or Lives in Pairs’ is a short humour piece, placed at the back of the magazine, on the very last page. It is difficult to judge the effect of this: does it validate Moody as a New Yorker-approved writer, or does it marginalise him? He had previously published two short stories in the New Yorker. His poem covers a topical event in a humourous fashion. Is the fact that Moody had a poem published, rather than a short story, significant? But then his piece in McSweeney’s is not a short story, but rather a non-fiction piece. To turn this round again, the non-fiction piece is significant for its context, its origin as rejected by the New York Times. Therefore the context of his New Yorker piece is relevant, and what I find significant about this issue of the New Yorker is the entrenchment of a certain representation of American literary endeavour. I do not mean to use this single issue to indict the entire activity of the magazine, but this may be useful as an experiment for trying to localise the functions of literary institutions.
Ford’s article on Raymond Carver profiles a writer who at this time had come to represent the minimalist ‘movement’ in American fiction. Mark McGurl has discussed ‘Carver Country’, populated by both the characters of his stories, but also the writers whose style had affinities with Carver’s, like Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Frederick Barthelme.[14] Ford uses the pages of one literary institution to canonise another—Carver, the 'father' of American minimalism. Or perhaps Ford is used as an institution (leading figure of American literary fiction) by another institution (the New Yorker) to perpetuate its literary credentials.
On Richard on Raymond
Ford’s article can be read as illuminating three aspects of the American literary cultures of 1998: 1) that literary success is measured by financial success and institutional recognition; 2) that literary networks are important for the dissemination of writing; and 3) the relationship between academic institutions and the labour of creative writing. All three of these factors are interrelated, as I shall demonstrate. Ford’s article recounts his friendship with Carver, which includes the period when the latter gained most success:
“Richard?” he said to me once on the phone—maybe it was 1984—when some new good luck had landed on his desk. A movie deal. A New Yorker acceptance. A foreign best-seller list. Some award from the American Academy—the mixed bounty of literary success.[15]
Carver’s success does not stem from his writing his best material (though he may have been), or that people were enjoying his work (which they assuredly were). It comes from institutional approval. It is a prestigious magazine publishing and paying for his short story. It is his books selling well in a foreign market. These institutions all bring financial reward. The accolades that provide Carver with pleasurable success are an inextricable combination of prestige and profit. This is the reality of the literary marketplace. It is helpful to think of the literary establishment as a pyramid; there is only room at the top for a few writers. These writers become the focus of the market for a while, receiving attention and reward. Everyone else at the bottom must compete for a share of whatever is left.
Another part of Ford’s representation of literary culture involves networks: that friendships and working relationships play a crucial role in the dissemination of literature. Ford makes frequent references to friends and colleagues, unconsciously revealing one aspect of how these networks sustain and promote literary production:
A friend of ours at S.M.U. had included us on the “faculty” as a way of putting some money in our pockets and giving us some needed exposure.[16]
It was commonplace to all of us who were our familiars then—Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, Chuck Kinder, Bill Kittredge, Amanda Urban—that Ray had enough of bad…[17]
He spoke well of me behind my back—to editors in England and France, to his friend and editor Gary Fisketjon, who became my friend. To journalists who had never heard of me or what I might’ve written.[18]
Networks can contribute to a writer achieving literary success, with ‘success’ defined as publication and institutional recognition. Writers get their work seen by editors and publishers by making friendships, by being able to say they’re a friend of a friend. The proliferation of creative writing graduate programs (discussed below) leads to a proliferation of writers seeking publication. Any shortcut helps, any benefit that can be found by knowing the right person is useful. Literary friendships provide writers with a community, a vital sounding board for their ideas and with friends who are going through the same struggle with creative labour, but it also helps them achieve publication. Finally, Ford’s article suggests the importance of the university for the creative writing community:
…all of us seeking improvement in the standard postwar American way: through some form of pedagogy. Ray had been to Iowa and to Stanford. I had been to U.C. Irvine. I had an M.F.A.; Ray said he had one, though in fact he hadn’t stayed around long enough. But we had entered the writing world by that institutional means, just as Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams did years before, and that way was moving us along, giving us walls to reach out and touch until we could put up some persuasive edifices of our own with what we wrote.[19]
The association of creative writing and the university in postwar America is the subject of Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era. Understanding the link between the writer and the university is beyond the scope of this paper. Ford’s article is a document of the phenomenon McGurl explores. Mark Grief has discussed the way the industrialisation of the labour of writing by the university, turning it into a vocational career for which the MFA is seen as the qualification:...the creative writer is also the emissary of the market into the privileged uncommercial space of the tenured faculty. Famous novelists carry the glamour of success in brutal “real-world” competition, from which childish “ivory-tower” professors are protected. Students glom on to writing teachers as much to find out how to “market” their work and themselves as for guidance on craft. [20]
The proliferation of writers seeking to become literary professionals leads authors to take on the kind of non-literary work I mentioned above, such as Ford writing this article for the New Yorker. The existing literary institutions in 1998 could not support the number of writers, provide them all with literary success. McSweeney’s caters for this overspill. Its writers are those who do not have access to the same networks as the likes of Ford, whose literary success makes him a preferred candidate for non-essential literary work, when it is not essential for his financial survival, but may be for those who have no access to it. Their writers were not excluded from the literary establishment through some determined effort to marginalise their work. This was simply the natural function of the literary marketplace. To take it as an example, the New Yorker did not achieve its success solely through publishing short fiction. It was part of the formula, but only in combination with its many other features, such as travel writing, news reportage, and event listings. That advertising pressures reduced its short fiction output can be seen as a logical response to ensure its long-term survival.
Starting Again from the Beginning
Within this context, then, McSweeney’s emerged as an intervention into the periodical culture of 1998 as a result of the following formula:
The proliferation of writers (caused by MFA programs) + increased advertising pressures = reduced opportunities to be published.
McSweeney’s was a response to this crisis, a way of mediating the increased number of writers seeking to be published. Instead of looking to the mass-circulation periodicals and the mainstream publishing industry, the writers behind McSweeney’s cast out on their own, publishing independently of these institutions. McSweeney’s rejected the production and dissemination strategies of this ‘New Yorker’ community. The rest of my paper considers how this commercial position affected the content of the first issue.
I have already discussed above how Rick Moody’s article in McSweeney’s 1 articulates an opposition to and ostracisation from the New Yorker community. Having further explored precisely what kinds of relationships this community inculcated between writers and periodicals, I now want to return to McSweeney’s, to consider in what other ways its organisation and content may manifest (or challenge) this stance. The contributors' notes at the back of the issue function as a paratext that communicates facts about the issue’s composition to readers. The following extracted notes suggest a different conception of literary labour than that constructed by the New York Times's contributors and Ford’s New Yorker article:
Zev Borow lives in New York. His work appears regularly in Spin, ESPN Magazine, and New York.
Ana Marie Cox lives in San Francisco, where she is an editor at Mother Jones magazine. Her work also regularly appears in Feed.com.
Chris Harris lives in New York City, where is a writer for “The Late Show with David Letterman,” a comedy variety program on CBS. He has recently finished a novel, which for a long time was called Peh: The Great American Derivative, but is now called Situation Normal .
William Powers writes about the media for the National Journal. He was previously a senior editor at The New Republic.
Don Steinberg and Steve Steinberg are brothers. They co-created the defunct magazine Meanwhile in the early 90s and later published it as an interactive experience on America Online. Sorry girls, they’re married. [21]
The frequent references to writers’ work appearing in magazines and on the internet documents the limited opportunities for publication open to aspiring or developing writers. Though there are writers featured in this issue who have published novels (Rick Moody, Mark O’Donnell, Dale Peck, Glasgow Phillips, and David Foster Wallace), most of the contributors are not literary professionals in the sense of making money from books that they have published. The representation of literary labour offered by the organisation of McSweeney’s 1 suggests a group of writers connected to the mass-media, aspiring to reach the literary establishment. This paratext is also the location of a series of short fiction pieces by Adrienne Millar, printed adjacent to each contributor's biography. This furthers the irreverence and subcultural pose of the journal.
Another paratext of the issue communicates a similar disconnection from a conventional conception of literary production. The copyright page is used as an editorial column—this practice is itself an indicator of a subversion of literary conventions–and contains the following statements, that function as a production manifesto:
This journal was typeset using a small group of fonts that you already have on your computer, with software you already own.
This journal has been proofread, but not by paid professionals.[22]
These suggest a DIY aesthetic, borrowing conceptually from the ethos of zines and self-publishing. The physical form of zine periodicals provides a strategy for zines to construct their reading context. Zines are traditionally non-commercial publications, and their homemade aesthetic signals this stance. Zines manifest evidence of their creation: photocopied images, stapled pages, hand-numbered editions. Their materiality is markedly different from the physical properties of mass-media periodicals. It symbolises individal involvement, something that it is lost in mainstream publishing. The chapter on zines in Amy Spencer’s DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture has the introductory heading, ‘A Platform for the Individual’.[23] It is this kind of anti-mass-media individualism that McSweeney’s tries to evoke with their attempt to downplay the professionalism of their first issue. However, Issue 1 is a professionally printed paperback book—its aesthetic is distinctly not handmade. It alludes to non-professional production values, but the reality of its physical form contradicts this. McSweeney’s 1 is not a countercultural zine, but it is not a mass-media product. It is something in-between.
There is another article in the issue that explicitly discusses its rejection by another publication: 'Impressions' by Stephen J Shalit, which is a pseudonym for editor/founder Dave Eggers. This begins with a subtitle that describes its context:
It started with an assignment from a certain award-laden magazine concerned with enjoying the outdoors and looking great doing it. But somewhere along the line, things went horribly, horribly wrong. Now there is this.[24]
I take the ‘award-laden magazine’ to be National Geographic—Eggers was commissioned to investigate the interest of New Age tour groups in Egyptian pyramids. The piece adopts a triptych form, presenting two versions of Eggers’ article, with a third column providing a paratextual commentary on the article’s history. The narrative of the third column informs us that Eggers’ editor had implicitly asked him to liven up the story by creatively re-imagining some of it. Eggers then uses the rest of the third column to discuss the case of Stephen Glass, the former New Republic writer sacked in 1998 for inventing certain elements of his articles:
Mr Glass was much less the crazed, Highland-Park-pressured, ambition-addled, pathological/congenital liar and trampler of all that is journalistically held dear, and more a byproduct of systemic flaws, systemic pressures, systemic greed, and the systemic carelessness fueled by the other three, less the Evil Mastermind, and more the Guy Who Got Caught.[25]
Eggers criticises the mass-circulation magazine system and its demand for creative non-fiction to be consistently engaging and narrative-led. Where Moody’s article seemed aimed specifically at the New York Times, Eggers directs his anger towards the media culture that encourages writers to embellish their work for the sake of a ‘story’. Eggers discusses the need for articles to have 'arcs', and indeed uses the word story on several occasions. The ambiguity over the word ‘story’ is useful here—Eggers uses it to refer to his non-fiction article, but it is more commonly used to describe fiction narratives. I will return to this point in my coda, below.
Does Issue 1 of McSweeney’s, then, articulate an anti-mainstream agenda? There are elements of its content and design that seem to have this aim, but the articles that I have focused on are the most virulent examples of this. Though this may have been its editorial manifesto, the other features are content to simply be published somewhere, if a brief personification can be permitted. As this is only the first issue of McSweeney’s, it becomes necessary to widen the scope of my consideration to truly understand its relationship to the New Yorker literary community.
Coda: SpeculationsIt seems significant that the two writers whose articles I have discussed here are in 2009 primarily known as writers of fiction, but in 1998 were having non-fiction articles rejected by mass-media publications. McSweeney’s 1 is an indictment of this aspect of the 1998 periodical system. They were not just fiction writers writing non-fiction; they were fiction writers writing non-fiction that was rejected. Is it a coincidence that, since the founding of McSweeney’s, Eggers and Moody have become more successful for their chosen form of writing, and feature more prominently in periodicals like the New Yorker?
The separation from mass-media periodical practice hinted at in the first issue has become a fundamental inscription of change as the defining aesthetic of the journal. Paradoxically, this difference from the conventional periodical has become part of the reason for its success. The first issue of McSweeney’s did not try to make itself into a literary institution. My contention is that McSweeney’s has subtly replaced the New Yorker as the paradigm for periodical production in the twenty-first century. This is not a straightforward substitution, however—it is more that McSweeney’s exemplifies, and is the most successful example of, the subcultural forms of production and dissemination that have taken up the cause of new writing in the absence of a mainstream champion like the New Yorker.
The paradox of achieving success through oppositional style is one subject of Kara Oakes’s book Slanted and Enchanted; she discusses the incorporation of the indie into the mainstream, and the concurrent dangers of the mass media using subcultural aesthetics for marketing purposes.[26] Is the commodification of oppositionality something that McSweeney’s could be accused of? McSweeney’s has created several new outlets for literary endeavour, including a non-fiction literary magazine and a humour website. Are these examples of 'cashing-in' on the success of the journal, or do they offer legitimate new forums for writers?
Bibliography
Brown, Tina, 'Talk of the Town', The New Yorker, 27 July 1998, 4
Corey, Mary, The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986)
Eggers, Dave (as Stephen Shalit), 'Impressions: of a life very, very different from our own, half a world away, if not farther, depending on where you leave from: an Egyptian remembrance. (Or, notes and complaints from a colicky child)', McSweeney's 1 (1998), 83-96
Eggers, Dave, 'Introduction' in The Best of McSweeney's Volume 1, ed. Dave Eggers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), p.vii-xiii
Ford, Richard, 'Good Raymond', The New Yorker, 20 September 1998, 70-79
Gilchrist, Ellen, 'E.R.', The New York Times, 20 September 1998, section Magazine, 24
Grief, Mark, 'Shop Talk'. Bookforum, June/July/Aug (2009) <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3847> [accessed 21 August 2009] (para. 8 of 9)
McGurl, Mark, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Moody, Rick, 'On the Yule Log', McSweeney's, 1 (1998), 61-62
Oakes, Kara, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009)
Parker, Mark, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Spencer, Amy, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (London: Marion Boyars, 2008)
Wheatley, Kim, Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003)
Yagoda, Ben, About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (London: Duckworth, 2000)
Notes
[1] Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), p.150.
[2] 'Introduction', in The Best of McSweeney's Volume 1, ed. by Dave Eggers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), pp. vii-xiii (p.viii).
[3] Kim Wheatley, Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p.ix.
[4] Mary Corey, The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.5.
[5] Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.11.
[6] 'Talk of the Town', The New Yorker, 27 July 1998, p.4.
[7] Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (London: Duckworth, 2000), p.215.
[8] ibid., p.12.
[9] ibid., p.401.
[10] 'On the Yule Log', McSweeney's, 1 (1998), 61-62 (p.61).
[11] ibid.
[12] 'E.R.', The New York Times, 20 September 1998, section Magazine, p.24.
[13] p.62.
[14] The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp.279-80.
[15] 'Good Raymond', The New Yorker, 20 September 1998, pp.70-79 (p.76).
[16] p.70.
[17] p.74.
[18] p.75.
[19] p.73.
[20] 'Shop Talk', Bookforum, June/July/Aug (2009). <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3847> [accessed 21 August 2009] (para. 8 of 9).
[21] pp.138-141.
[22] p.2.
[23] Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (London: Marion Boyars, 2008), p.125.
[24] 'Impressions: of a life very, very different from our own, half a world away, if not farther, depending on where you leave from: an Egyptian remembrance. (Or, notes and complaints from a colicky child)', McSweeney's 1 (1998), 83-96 (p.83).
[25] pp.91-2.
[26] Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009), p.13.