Self-Image (1)

Note: Remember how I said I'd be consistent about maintaining this blog? Well, about that...

The Second Note, or Note II, or NII: I actually first started writing this post weeks ago, with the purpose of lovingly criticizing The New Yorker (2), but it ended up making a better case for a different kind of post.

Introduction, or the Part in Which Something Begins to be Said

I talk to myself.

I talk to myself all the time. I talk to myself in soap and grime. I talk to myself (3) in the shower and in the street. I talk to myself in the rain and in the sleet. I do it when it's night and day. I do it in the grass and hay.

But that's not really the topic of this post (4). The real topic is talking about oneself to oneself, a wholly different phenomenon, as I hope will become clear.

So here's the skinny (5): We peoples, maybe especially we American peoples, have this tendency to talk about ourselves. Our self-esteem needs it (6); our potential enablers of matriculation, suppliers of capital, and lifelong bedfellows demand it (7). But every so often we talk about ourselves to ourselves, and that is where identity and selfhood and [synonyms] are fashioned. These are the times when we reveal to ourselves (and those who drop eaves, and those who lope between, and those who pass tresses and those who hear over) what we see and think and doubt and want. For me at any rate it is often maddening, but it is always productive and instructive.

The Next Part, in Which Something is Supposed to be Said

Self-reflection aside, there is a kind of awesomeness in watching this phenomenon in action. I take particular joy in the moments when I catch people and characters and Institutions in the act of talking about themselves to themselves (8).

One such catch was the following passage from an essay about the late John Updike, in which the writer, speaking (I'll say) for the magazine, reveals in part the self-perception of the character that is The New Yorker (9):

If he gave so much to the magazine, he took something from it, too. He took, and kept, a tone. Updike the humorist is probably the least known or recognizable Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber sound of the New Yorker that he joined—that bemused, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing, anti-malicious comic tone—lingered in his work till the very end....

He flourished in his early years here... the material of comedy remained implicit in almost every sentence he wrote: the dancing recognition of the likeness of the unlike, the will to treat the organic mechanically... The common sense that regularly inflected his judgments of big writers and dubious ideas had its origins in a humorous tradition, too; in his criticism he caught the notes of Wolcott Gibbs and Brendan Gill as much as those of Edmund Wilson.

And the comic current ran deeper even than that. Despite the lyrical surface of his prose, Updike was a realist, as comedians must be, and never even marginally a romantic. He was genuinely unseduced by all the myths of American romanticism: gorgeous Daisys and vast sinister Western landscapes are equally absent from his books. His girls and women are real, with scratchy pubic hair, and his American landscape of car dealerships and fast-food retreats held no place for doomed, exciting, existential gunmen. He was, for all those perfect shining sentences, a realist; the sentences sing, but they don’t ennoble.

Given how seamlessly he fit here, it’s a miracle that he ever got out; he could have stayed at the magazine, tried out all the chairs, and become a local god. But he did something braver. He fled New York for Ipswich, and then made a bolder journey into writing, absorbing the hardest and highest of the moderns—Proust and Nabokov first of all, but Borges and Henry Green and so many others—without abandoning the old sounds he loved, either.

In writing about Updike, what is really being described is the quintessential New Yorker, the New Yorker as it sees itself -- perfectly balanced, home of the most thoughtful and crafty writers of the generation. The beauty of Updike is the beauty of what a writer should be, of what The New Yorker doubtless is -- humorous but not overly so, creative but never to the point of inviting incredulity, highly attuned to the lives and quirks of normal people and never intolerant or mocking of them -- nuance and subtle brilliance. The monologue that comes out the mouth of the person, kivyakhol (10), of The New Yorker is one that reflects the self-assuredness of the magazine. This is but one monologue, however, and I look forward to catching more such glimpses as I keep reading the magazine. We'll see what else comes up.

The End, in Which I Conclude; or Conclusion, in Which I End

Point is, there's this type of self-interaction that can be illuminating about people and magazines and what-else-not. Being on the lookout for it in others can be an amusing pastime, but applying this kind of self-reflection and -knowledge and -criticism is, I think, the most important thing of all.

Notes, in Which I Ramble and Bore

(1) Honest Injun, this isn't what it sounds like.
(2) I called it "that eternal beacon of literature, Culture, and the left-leaning upper class," going on, "It should be established before I go on that pretense and pretentiousness and suchlike are not to me entirely opprobrious concepts or categories. If anything, my embracing of the style and the worldview that attends it is probably apparent in a way usually not so easily detected in my fellow young, über-exposed, self-righteous, semi-to-very privileged, if genuinely curious, East Coasters. Let it be known, then, that I read The New Yorker (and The New York Review of Books, as well as African literature and all the other things teased by StuffWhitePeopleLike) and enjoy it; I appreciate hyper-vocabularized and -wordplayed writing, and even aspire to successfully do the same in my own; and, I must admit, I can't help but think myself a bit superior to those who fail to exhibit curiousness or humility (ironic, I know; don't stone me) in their opinions or at least an attempt at nuance and some sort of more sober wisdom. Even so, I find what to criticize in The New Yorker, the publication I would die to work for but rather die than work at."
(3) And I don't mean talking-to-yourself-is-one-thing-but-oh-no-dear-sir-having-conversations-with-yourself-is-quite-another talking to myself. I mean full-on talking to myself.
(4) I break that damn fourth wall entirely too much, no?
(5) I don't know where this expression comes from, and I'm vaguely curious, but not enough right now to look it up. At home I have a Dictionary of Cliches, which has been very useful in the past, but I neither have it handy nor do I think it would have this particular phrase.
(6) Mmm, says the blogger.
(7) I hope I'll have some kind of blog-rant on this some day, especially re: the employers and educators.
(8) It's fun and at least a little mind-blowing to find yourself in a discussion that begins with the thought, for example, "Imagine the character of God in Tanakh/the Hebrew Bible/the Old Testament. [Or, Imagine Tanakh as a composite character.] What do you think he's like? What would it say about itself?" The reason this is a footnote is because I had it in the previous version of this post, and it has nothing to do with what I'm trying to do here, and I didn't really want to cut it.
(9) Ahh, that's why it was relevant. Disregard the end of the note above.
(10) Poor translation, from the Hebrew, "as it were" or "if one could say."