One of the short stories on the syllabus for Thursday—”The Bingo Van” by Louise Erdrich—is from the February 19, 1990 issue of The New Yorker.
Larry loves The New Yorker: he mentioned it twice last week as a source for great short stories. Before the summer ends he’ll talk about the excellence of its prose. (If I remember correctly, Larry worked an a copyeditor for The New Yorker for a few years.)
Larry taught me to love The New Yorker—I’m a subscriber and ardent reader—but if this is your first time reading it, you might find the experience similar to that of reading Jane Eyre: strange rules shape the page and no one really explains what those rules are.
It’s particularly odd, I think, that even though the writers who make it into The New Yorker are among the most respected in the world, the magazine’s editors scatter mediocre poems and unfunny little cartoons into their stories.
The cartoons, the poems, the tiny illustrations (called spots), the wordplay and the typo at the end of the article (newsbreaks)—none of these have anything to do with Erdrich’s story. They are there, I think, to add some levity to what would otherwise be oppressive columns of text: it just looks easier to read a page of a magazine if it isn’t filled with words.
Still, if you look closely at the cartoons, spots, and newsbreaks you learn a lot about how The New Yorker imagines its audience:
- All 7 cartoons that populate the Erdrich story feature white characters and lightly mock the white upper class, as though from the vantage of people planning to join it: a man who can afford to dine alone at a fancy restaurant, and who doubts that a woman could be a talented chef; a man in a richly-appointed room with all the markings of wealth interviewing a dog; a suburban man mocked for making his own furniture when, the cartoon implies, he would have no trouble paying thousands to furnish his living room. Six of the cartoons feature a male speaker, and the woman speaking in the 7th focuses on her husband.
- The first spot depicts 4 stylized trees on a hill, as though nature were an abstract and distant thing; the Georgian-style gallery in the second spot, by contrast, is realistic, metropolitan, and imposing. Message: the city is more solid than the country.
- The newsbreaks at the end read like a coastal mockery of midwestern wordplay. Are there no delis in New York with silly names? Are there no amusing typos in the New York Times?
There’s an interesting contrast at play here. The paratext (the material surrounding the text) privileges all the adjectives that describe New York power—urban rather than rural, upper class rather than middle, male rather than female, white rather than minority.
But Louise Erdrich’s story attacks these descriptors: the hero, Lipsha Morrissey, is Chippewa; at his poorest, he has $20 to his name; he respects and honors the few women in his life. When he is destroyed by white men in a position of power, he remains the calm, moral center of the text.
Even the poetry inserted into the piece is anti-patriarchal: Eavan Boland, a woman poet from Ireland, amplifies the tension of “Distances” through images of immigration, rural life, and class (and gender) difference.
If you look at other issues of The New Yorker, you will see stories similar to Erdrich’s. The recent fiction issue features stories by Uwem Akpan, Edwidge Danticat, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, and Haruki Murakami.
Why, then, does the magazine’s paratext stand against the generally inclusivist language of its writers?
Tags: 2008, Louise Erdrich, Short stories
