A Very Narrow Vision of Cosmopolitanism

November 17, 2022 3:36 PM

The prescience of Steinberg’s famous cover of a New Yorker’s skewed vision of the world is not merely the outsize importance he grants to New York City, but also the schematic way he depicts other countries. For all the ironic self-awareness this cover suggests about the New York–centrism of the magazine’s readership, it is, in fact, emblematic of the fiction section’s myopia. from The View From The Fiction of the “New Yorker”
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

Ireland: a former colony.

I've often thought statistics is the best way to judge literature. I just searched Pale Fire for any instance of the word 'Mexico' and Nabokov, a Russian writer for the New Yorker, mentioned that word a shameful zero times. Surely the editors failed at internationalism by hiring this western chauvinist to write for an American magazine called the New Yorker.
posted by adept256 at 4:13 PM on November 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

An earlier version of this article stated that Yiyun Li was the magazine’s only regular fiction contributor of Asian descent, but left out Haruki Murakami

Is Jhumpa Lahiri not of Asian descent?

Certainly the NYer could have a more diverse editorial staff, and it would be great if they were publishing fiction by foreign writers in translation more, but I don't know how their system works. I would have thought that authors were submitting their pieces to the NYer, which either buys or rejects them. If foreign authors aren't getting their work translated and then submitting it to the NYer, I'd kind of expect that those authors would have to gain some notoriety before the NYer went through the trouble of translating it for them, right? If they're routinely rejecting foreign authors originally writing in a language other than English that are submitting translated works, that would be disappointing, but the linked article gives no information on that, only implying it based on the makeup of their editorial staff (which, I mean, fair enough) and the results of location name searches.
posted by LionIndex at 4:51 PM on November 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean, yes, this is true, and I would love it if the NYer would widen the scope. I am literally the subscriber that, even if I read nothing else in an issue, I read the fiction. And I am generally pro-translated fiction. But they've been on kind of a roll recently with the fiction section, even with its shortcomings. I too could happily never read Jonathan Lethem again, but I thought Ben Okri's recent-ish dystopian allegory "The Secret Source" was pretty great. And the Ling Ma story from July and the Annie Erneaux. Even the Joan Silber piece, which is about as New Yorker a New Yorker story you can get and still be about ending up stranded in the southwest as a teenager runaway, was kind of a delight.

And on the Ireland note, thanks to the NYer I learned about Colin Barrett. And Colin Barrett is a pretty effing fantastic short story writer, y'all.

I would have thought that authors were submitting their pieces to the NYer, which either buys or rejects them. If foreign authors aren't getting their work translated and then submitting it to the NYer, I'd kind of expect that those authors would have to gain some notoriety before the NYer went through the trouble of translating it for them, right?

Anyone can submit fiction to the NYer. It's also a free submission ( I've submitted a bunch of times, because wtf not?) My understand is that odds of you getting published without an agent on letterhead their literary editor recognizes and an existing book deal? Very, very, slim
posted by thivaia at 5:56 PM on November 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

A Very Narrow Vision of The New Yorker - During all the years of looking at other people’s copies of the magazine, all I ever read were the captions under the cartoons.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:13 PM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Childhood in the Midwest. No notion. One of my best friends' families subscribed to the New Yorker and stacked the magazines on the toilet tank.

Many long shits.

College and sixteen years in New York City later, I am figuratively myopic because of my experiences, as is everyone else in the world.

(I am literally myopic, too.)
posted by Scarf Joint at 7:33 PM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Many long shits.

So, is this like Tagline Week or what?
posted by y2karl at 7:44 PM on November 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

The New Yorker reflects whoever is staffing it, same as the New York Review of Books. You expect New York City to be the center of the magazine. What gives this piece bite is the way NYC used to consider itself the center of the Universe (which is what Steinberg's cartoon is saying). You still see that on SNL sometimes.
posted by CCBC at 11:21 PM on November 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

adept256: Ireland: a former colony.

Yes, but crucially a colony largely inhabited by people considered white within the racial hierarchy of American society, and who wrote natively in English. While being Irish is socially marked in a negative way in England, it is almost entirely socially positive to have Irish ancestry in the US.

Also, it’s easy to forget this now, but for most of the 20th Century, the New Yorker was considered deeply uncool in the British Isles. Roddy Doyle has a funny bit somewhere about being appalled by the magazines his aunt Maeve Brennan brought with her when she came to visit Ireland. But for various reasons, probably because Dublin-based Irish writers didn’t have the same kind of access to better paying gigs that their London-based English colleagues had, plus differences in the way their respective class systems work, Irish writers were very willing to publish in the New Yorker. Furthermore, there were a sizable number of New Yorker readers and staff with Irish ancestry, who wanted to read stories set on their ancestral island. And even Irish writers working for the New Yorker, like the aforementioned Maeve Brennan (who’s brilliant, I might add). So if the editors of the New Yorker wanted international color in their fiction, there was a ready pool of eager contributors that could write about Ireland.
posted by Kattullus at 4:42 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

all I ever read were the captions under the cartoons

Christ, what an asshole!
posted by Meatbomb at 6:55 AM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

adept256: Ireland: a former colony.

Yes, but crucially a colony largely inhabited by people considered white within the racial hierarchy of American society, and who wrote natively in English.

I think part of the WTF there is in describing Ireland as a "colony" in the first place: 1) was it really a colony? Are Scotland and Wales currently colonies? Is Norway a former colony? 2) Why should that matter when we're talking about a magazine published in a actual former colony, and a lot of the countries you'd like to see author representation from are likely former colonies? Like, Borges is a writer from a former colony, as are Roberto Bolano and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So what? 3) Why is Ireland the only country referred to as such? It's just kind of a pointless distinction in the article that makes you say "wait, what?"
posted by LionIndex at 8:56 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well, I thought that contrast between Ireland and China that the article draws up is incredibly telling, and in my comment I wanted to hone in on why Ireland has such an outsized presence in the New Yorker. I think it was specifically identified as a former colony in contrast to China, which isn’t.

As to your other questions, LionIndex, there is no way to discuss Ireland, Norway, Argentina, Chile and Colombia without acknowledging their past as colonies. There are considerable differences between them, of course, Norway is a petrostate, the island of Ireland is still divided between a post-colonial republic and an enclave of the UK, Borges, Bolaño and García Márquez were descended of European settlers.

Scotland and Wales are colonies of England, but the elites of those countries took part in the colonizing project of the British empire, and Welsh and Scottish soldiers served in colonial armies. The same was true, with complicating wrinkles due to English anti-catholic bias, of Ireland.

So yeah, it’s complicated, but the long aftermath of the colonial system is still felt in all these countries. The same goes for the US, of course, but with the wrinkle that only a small part of its territory is the former colonies, and that it has itself a long history of being the colonizing empire.

The point is that the imagination of metropolitan elites in the offices of the New Yorker is going to run along the well-grooved ruts that the colonial system laid in western thinking for the last few centuries. It’s interesting when it doesn’t quite do so, and worth pondering.
posted by Kattullus at 12:33 PM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

What gives this piece bite is the way NYC used to consider itself the center of the Universe (which is what Steinberg's cartoon is saying). You still see that on SNL sometimes.

What do you mean “used-to”? The current opening for the daily show: “New York: the only city in the world”
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:05 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]