One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity

ONE MAN ZEITGEIST

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ONE MAN ZEITGEIST DAVE EGGERS, PUBLISHING AND PUBLICITY

CAROLINE D. HAMILTON

The Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2010 Caroline D. Hamilton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6696-8

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 Finding the ‘Right Reader’

11

Chapter 2 ‘Just Like You’: Fame, Narcissism and the Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

28

Chapter 3 Mistakes He Knew He Was Making

45

Chapter 4 A Publisher’s Progress: You Shall Know Our Velocity and the McSweeney’s Publishing Model

65

Chapter 5 The Optimist

84

Notes

98

Works Cited

110

Index

135

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of people deserve special mention because they have been steady supporters throughout the process of researching and writing this book. Very special thanks to Dion Kagan for his gallantry, generosity and editorial talents. His intellectual engagement and enthusiasm has been a source of tremendous encouragement throughout the process of writing and researching this book. I am blessed to have such a thoughtful colleague and friend. The counsel and encouragement of Melissa Hardie has been important to me since the very earliest days of this project. I consider her a mentor and a source of stylish inspiration. For invaluable advice and comments on early drafts my deepest thanks go to Katherine Barnsley. Our many conversations, on this project and many others besides, were just the tonic needed after long hours caught in the cobwebs of the internet. Early in the process, the encouragement of Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Sarah Brouliette convinced me it was a fruitful undertaking. For support and encouragement my thanks go to my colleagues Kate Crawford, Gerard Goggin, Kieryn McKay, Kirsten Seale and Lisa Dempster. Alexandra Grantham, Yasmin Lambert and Lyndall Judd have been patient listeners and energetic cheerleaders all throughout the process. My heartfelt thanks to them. Finally, my greatest debt is to my parents. Their support and quiet faith taught me to follow my own convictions and take pleasure in the inevitable rewards that come from hard work.

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INTRODUCTION

On the news of the passing of J. D. Salinger early in 2010 the New Yorker magazine asked Dave Eggers to write a few words in his honour. To anyone familiar with the work and lives of these two American authors the commission is striking. Salinger, the recluse famed for the iconic coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, gave American culture Holden Caulfield, a teenager obsessed with authenticity and popular culture in equal measure. Eggers, a writer who shot to fame by cataloguing his life after the death of his parents in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius offered readers at the end of the twentieth century an equally compelling portrait of youth in a mode that might easily be described as ‘Caulfield-esque’. Salinger’s response to his success is well known. Not long after the 1951 publication of The Catcher in the Rye, he receded from public view and ceased to publish. At the time opinion was divided on the novelist. Initially, there was some concern regarding his novel’s potentially corrupting influence over the young, but the fate of Salinger’s reputation was mostly cemented by his decision to withdraw from public life. While he enjoyed engaging with his readers, especially young readers, Salinger struggled with the nature of the attention his book had earned him. Leaving the public behind, he also earned their approbation. Not until Eggers’s arrival on the literary scene in 2000 did the media industry engage in the same degree of scrutiny of an author’s position as celebrated cultural touchstone. Surprisingly, for an author who wrote of celebrity so knowingly, Eggers, at the height of his fame spoke candidly of wishing for anonymity. Unlike Salinger, he never proceeded with his threat to withdraw from public life, instead seizing the reins of literary celebrity. He not only

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ONE MAN ZEITGEIST

continued to write but also began publishing his own work, founding a company that has made him one of the twenty-first century’s most influential literary figures. In his tribute to Salinger, Eggers contemplates the great author’s literary legacy, in particular the possibility that he may have continued to write, even while he resisted the public’s demand to publish. On reflection Eggers acknowledges that this is an unlikely but wonderful thought. Yet even more astonishing is Eggers’s admission that as a publisher he had harboured the ambition to publish in book format some of Salinger’s last known stories, promising the writer complete control to print his work however he saw fit, on whatever scale and according to his requirements. Said Eggers: It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that – with the desire to just have the book look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. But I don’t think he ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.1 For many years now the depiction of authorship in popular culture has been heavily influenced by the Salinger story: the Great American Novelist living in self-enforced seclusion in order to more wholly concentrate his intellectual powers on the society he devotes his life to examining. Over the last twenty years the image of the author who courts rather than shuns public attention has become more prevalent. Perhaps the surest benchmark of contemporary cultural attitudes, the animated sit-com The Simpsons routinely features cameo appearances by distinguished American authors including George Plimpton, Thomas Pynchon and Gore Vidal. In the world of The Simpsons these literary heavyweights are satirized as nothing more than shopping-network spruikers (Plimpton) and duplicitous attention junkies (Pynchon), absorbed by the most banal aspects of everyday life (Vidal). The punchline of these parodies is that literary fame necessarily involves the sacrificing of higher-minded ideals in exchange for the rewards of celebrity. To be a successful public figure one needs to trade on the appeal of a personal life, even when authorship relies on the imagining of other people’s lives. Like the entertainment industry before it, the publishing industry is indebted to marketing and the generation of public talk about authors and 2

INTRODUCTION

authorship rather than the altogether more quiet and private activity of reading. This is observable in the material changes in public culture such as a shift to biography, autobiography, book readings, literary festivals and even book clubs. In a commercial culture literature is inextricably tied to the saleability of the author, and successful books are books that mobilize the personality of their authors to encourage people to buy and read (and talk). P. David Marshall, Graeme Turner and Frances Bonner write in Fame Games that, ‘book publishing has become more and more concerned about the nature of the author’s image/identity and how it might assist sales.’2 If book reviews are designed to satisfy the potential reader’s question, ‘why read it?’ by contrast, literary hype generates and responds to the altogether more ephemeral question, ‘why is everyone talking about it?’ This taps into a larger obsession with celebrity and identity in public culture, in which the celebrity may present, as Marshall et al. suggest ‘the ultimate unauthenticity through the perceived artificiality of their personality’, but in which ‘audience interest is nevertheless aroused by the possibility of penetrating that construction and gaining access to some essential knowledge about that celebrity.’3 The means through which the public attempts to reach the authentic self behind the celebrity is by buying the commodities the celebrity promotes. The book, marketed in terms of its author becomes a product that offers the promise of this connection. Significantly, that search for the authentic self behind the celebrity image mirrors the reader’s desire to explore beyond the textual surface of the page. Reading ‘into’ and toward transcendence is one of reading’s primary pleasures. Thus, reading books also involves reading authors, and it likewise has its own particular pleasures. When Eggers’s first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was published in 2000 he distinguished himself from the majority of first-time authors by courting publicity while also mocking it. His career and the success of his memoir were both built on his willingness to acknowledge his desire to be a visible and representative part of literary culture in the United States. At one point in the book Eggers notes that his ambition has always been to seek out alliances with others, like us, who are taking a formless and mute mass of human potential and are attempting to make it speak, sing, scream, to mould it into a political force. Or at least use it to get themselves in Time and Newsweek.4 3

ONE MAN ZEITGEIST

While the scriptwriters for The Simpsons parodied Pynchon and his ilk, Eggers has been able to incorporate his own self-parody into his public persona. Even his marketing material involved a sly joke about the (im)possibility of balancing public and private lives. A photograph of Eggers shows him looking every inch the young American author (t-shirt, relaxed pose, tousled hair); somewhat incongruously, a large dog stands beside him. Beneath, his brief biography tells readers he ‘has no pets’. What the reader sees is not what the reader gets. Jokes like these earned Eggers a reputation as the twenty-first century’s literary pied-piper. He plays a tune that seduces some, notably young, readers and leaves others mystified. Either way, no American interested in books could ignore his impact. At his book’s launch critics wrote of it infiltrating the culture, being passed ‘like a new drug from reader to reader’.5 By the end of 2001 the formulation ‘A Heartbreaking ____ of Staggering ____’ had become part of the collective pop culture consciousness. The Village Voice, for instance, described the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Evil,’ media blog Gawker chastised the New York Times for having run ‘A Heartbreaking Frontpage of Staggering Inaccuracy’ and American Digest lamented the existence of ‘A Heartbreaking College Class of Staggering Idiocy’. Even geologists were in on the joke, with a conference paper entitled ‘A Heartbreaking Stream of Staggering Complexity: What the Pioneer Geologist Knew and Didn’t Know’.6 No one needed to have read his memoir to understand the reference. Eggers’s celebrity was inclusive, even his decision to use the name ‘Dave’ gave the public the impression of an author who was unusually relaxed about intimacy. Eggers’s talents go well beyond creating catchy titles and friendly feelings. He began his career as a graphic designer and a journalist with an ambition to create his own youth culture magazine. Now, he has not one but three magazines in his fold. He edits and publishes fiction and non-fiction through his company McSweeney’s Books, and he devised and manages the literacy charity 826 Valencia which offers students free tutoring and literacy development. Since the release of his memoir, Eggers has written a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity and worked collaboratively to produce Teachers Have It Easy, an exposé of the disintegration of the US educational system, and two works of first-person testimony based on the life experiences of others. The first, What is the What with Valentino Achak Deng, 4

INTRODUCTION

provides an account of life as one of the Sudan’s ‘Lost Boys’. The second, Zeitoun, documents the experiences of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, caught up in the political confusion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. No longer famous for having courted fame, Eggers’s influence is noted not only in the world of books but in marketing, media, film, visual arts, education and politics. He is credited with single-handedly instigating a new literary movement, managing an entire small-scale literary industry and mobilizing the next generation of readers and writers. In 2007 Eggers was the youngest person to receive the Heinz Award for his philanthropic work with 826 Valencia. In 2008 he was presented with the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize; the award asks recipients to make a humanitarian wish a reality (Eggers asked for people to engage with their local public school). In 2009 Eggers was given the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award, presented to an individual for ‘outstanding service to the American literary community’. In the same year it was reported that the newly inaugurated US president Barrack Obama included What is the What on his bedside reading list.7 Through sheer weight of media coverage alone, Eggers has earned the rather extraordinary accolade of being a ‘one man zeitgeist’.8 Given these successes, it may come as a surprise to learn that Eggers’s also holds the mantle for being one of the most disliked of contemporary American authors. A recent article on the website The Awl explains how Eggers leads (by a wide margin) a list of literary names that, when used in conjunction with the phrase ‘I hate . . .’, yield very high results in the search-engine Google.9 On blogs, websites and message-boards across the globe people proclaim their dislike for Eggers regularly and with enthusiasm. It is difficult to pinpoint precisely what provokes these reactions, but the answer lies in part in the fact that, as many critics have observed, Eggers’s work betrays an unusual, passive-aggressive dislike for his public. In a review in The American Scholar, for example, Julian Bukiet wonders if ‘[m]aybe I’m taking literally what’s meant to be sarcastic, but beneath the sarcasm lays real disdain’.10 The New York Times critic A. O. Scott also concludes that no matter how self-deprecating Eggers’s work may be ‘you should also understand that you are not welcome.’11 How then does Eggers inhabit two seemingly antithetical positions? The answer lies in that territory between personality and work with which Salinger struggled. It is not Eggers’s writing so 5

ONE MAN ZEITGEIST

much as his personality that divides readers. Often referred to in the media as the head of a ‘literary empire’, Eggers is cast as a modern day Citizen Kane: a hubristic figure abandoned by his parents and in search of a project to satisfy his yearning for success and approval. Just as Kane defies his guardian the sombre Mr Thatcher, Eggers, ignoring the paternal old-guard, says whimsically, ‘I think it might be fun to run a publishing house.’ This kind of bravado arouses strong reactions. It demonstrates a confidence that speaks of unedifying self-interest. Readers of Eggers’s early work might have agreed that the assessment of Kane offered by his loyal friend Leland could equally be applied to Eggers: ‘[he] never had a conviction except [himself] in his life.’ This book examines Eggers’s writing and literary career in terms of his negotiation of the porous space between the public and private life of an author. In his career it is possible to trace the development of a new strategy for dealing with the expectations and operations of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘the literary field’. This field includes the broad range of participants involved in book culture (from readers and writers to publishers, promoters, critics, and even agents) and it functions to produce and disseminate both literature itself and ideas about literature in our culture (that it serves to enlighten, educate, entertain and so on). The notion of literature as something unique and separate from other arts emerged during the era of industrialization as writers sought to differentiate their work from other kinds of industrial activity. One way of making this distinction was to suggest that literature was not motivated by commercial but artistic motives. Thus, the personality of the author took on considerable importance, a situation that remains today, and indeed has escalated. While the publishing industry is presently preoccupied by the development of alternatives to print publishing, readers continue to enthusiastically celebrate the physical personage associated with the written word, taking any opportunity to get ‘up close and personal’ with their favourite authors. I want to propose in this study that reading does not stop when the book is closed and put back on the shelf; it is a series of practices that intersect with other aspects of our everyday culture. The motive of this book is to provide an integrated analysis of Eggers’s writing and his career and his fashioning of a literary celebrity that responds to circumstances of our culture. His strategy for managing the presentation of his

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INTRODUCTION

public identity as a writer and publisher is as imaginative as his many creative enterprises. Literary theorist Gerard Genette has proposed that books must be read not only on the page but as they are disseminated in culture. Features such as the title, the cover design, the introduction, blurbs, inscriptions, autographs, and photographs all effect how the individual reads both book and author. These elements are what Genette calls ‘paratexts’. In addition, a book’s reception is shaped by the culture into which it is published. Genette describes the sociocultural reception of literature in terms of ‘epitexts’: books reviews, media coverage and public appearances. No successful author in recent publishing history has taken as much care with these literary accessories as Eggers. The image of his own books and those published under the McSweeney’s imprint have been so tightly controlled that it is possible to identify his work on the basis of typeface alone. Thanks to Eggers’s success, book design has emerged as a subject for serious discussion in popular reading culture. Borrowing from and expanding Genette’s designation, my approach to Eggers’s work takes seriously the potential to find meaning in those things that are sometimes dismissed not only as supplementary but secondary or superficial. Media coverage – be it on blogs and message-boards, or in glossy magazines, or from the pages of the literary reviews – provides formative information, shaping the portrait of the artist that readers (and even non-readers) create. Likewise, events that take place in public such as book readings, signings or launches are significant sites of presentation and communication between reader and writer that demand attention. Because paratexts and epitexts are central to how audiences understand a text they are also ‘essential reading’ for those scholars seeking to understand literary celebrity and the nature of authorship. In taking Eggers as representative of – and indeed, partly responsible for – a new instantiation of twentyfirst century literary culture, I have embraced the wisdom that his work would seem necessarily to imply: it is not books but authors who are judged by their covers. Within each chapter I investigate the textual and paratextual elements of Eggers’s work and the media commentary surrounding it. Within these commentaries I look for the vision of self and author implicit within. As cultural signifiers, authors contain elements of the idea of the charismatic, uniquely inspired creative artist, but they

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also gain legitimacy as celebrities that are broadly popular and successful in the marketplace. The ambivalence with which literary celebrities are often represented feeds into the conflicted ideologies of celebrity culture in general, drawing as it does on a conflict between aristocratic notions of fame as the domain of a natural elite and democratic-capitalist notions of fame as inclusive and meritocratic. While it is one thing for a socialite like Paris Hilton to be ‘famous for being famous’, public expectations about authorship necessitate that writers are sincere, or at least appear to be sincere, in prioritizing art over success. In fact, these lofty ideals are not theirs but ours. No matter how many times it is acknowledged that the publishing industry relies upon sales and marketing, audiences are still drawn to literature as an example of the potential for soulful transformation in an era of wholesale commodification. The love/hate relationship that Eggers has engendered demonstrates a continuing anxiety about literature as both commodity and art. However, I propose that there is more to these strong reactions than simply a fear of literary culture’s contamination by pop culture. We have arrived at a point when relationships between the presentation of the self and products of our culture (commodities like books, clothes, music and so on) have become considerably more complex and semiotically sophisticated. Eggers’s presentation of authorship is distinctive because it illustrates a conflict between his representation as an author in media commentary about him, and his own presentation of self in his texts. While representations of Eggers positioned the author as necessarily allied to one or the other side of the barrier between commodification and art, Eggers’s own presentation stresses that he sees no divide between these two supposed poles. Eggers is unique in recent cultural memory for his ability to motivate and connect with young people. In part this has to do with his irreverent attitude towards media and celebrity culture. Many of his earliest supporters were interested in using their appreciation of Eggers’s work to mobilize their own presentation of self in everyday life. The San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper where Eggers began his career, bemusedly noted that the city’s ‘tattooed hipsters’ were wearing their allegiance to Eggers ‘like a rosary’, conspicuously displaying his memoir as they travelled around town.12 Ironically, given Eggers’s self-identification with this cohort, these enthusiastic readers became some of the most vocal of Eggers’s early critics, dismayed

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INTRODUCTION

to see the author willingly embracing and working within the industry he had no qualms in mocking. I have chosen to focus on Eggers’s early efforts with writing and publishing which best illustrate the evolution of his strategy to master his own media identity. Hence my decision to explore Eggers’s first two books A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity in depth, combining my analysis with supplementary texts authored by Eggers, some authorized (such as editorial comments in early editions of McSweeney’s) and some, for want of a better term, unauthorized (emails leaked to the internet, messages the author has posted on websites, and so on). My focus on these early works has also been influenced by Eggers’s reconfiguration of himself as author. With his more recent writing Eggers has worked in collaboration with others, recounting real-life events in the form of non-fiction novel or creative non-fiction. In such circumstances, and this presumably is partly the point, one cannot be certain where Eggers’s authority starts and his collaborators’ ends. Discussing Hollywood stars Richard Dyer argues that their primary function is to act as ‘idols of consumption’ instructing their fans on how to negotiate the modern world and the daily concerns of lifestyle and pastimes.13 In this study of Eggers’s career, I propose that it is necessary to update Dyer’s proposition, taking into account the new role of celebrity in a culture dominated by digital communication and the shift from representations of self by officially sanctioned authorities to self-presentation. Eggers’s texts and their reception reflect changes in literary culture and the publishing industry that are themselves influenced by recent changes in technology and digital communication. The past two decades have seen significant cultural shifts in terms of: the incitement to self-expression, self-creation and self-help; the twinned perspectives of increased individual responsibility and the sensed potential of a global community; and a cautious sincerity regarding life in the twenty-first century. By charting Eggers’s very public development as a ‘one man zeitgeist’ I hope to contribute to discussions regarding the redefinition of some of the cultural boundaries that currently preoccupy our culture. What are the borderlines between print and digital cultures? Between media texts and literary texts? At what point are nichecultures also popular cultures (and vice versa)? What significant

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distinctions remain between producers and consumers? How much responsibility do we owe to others? Eggers has by no means stepped forward and self-consciously accepted the title as a literary tastemaker. Nor has he identified his publishing projects as anything more than a way to ‘do something good’. But with this goal he has demonstrated the possibility that celebrity and sincerity need not be perceived as mutually exclusive. Legitimating practices of consumption via entrepreneurialism, and reinvesting the proceeds of publishing success in philanthropic projects Eggers, to corrupt Dyer’s phrase, has become an idol of production.

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CHAPTER 1

FINDING THE ‘RIGHT READER’

As writers have elected to act out marginality, they have become more central; as they have acted out alienation, they have become integrated and embraced; and as they have acted out a kind of cultural nihilism, their culture has made them famous. Philip Stevick, ‘The World and the Writer: A Speculation on Fame’1 One of the first novels to address the anxieties of the writer in the new mass marketplace was George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Published in 1891 at the height of industrialization, Gissing’s novel tells a cautionary tale of the writer’s craft in a new ‘publishing industry’ where good work or great talent is no guarantee for success. One of the three exemplary figures scribbling away in Gissing’s novel is Jasper Milvain, a man with a talent for writing but with a genuine gift when it comes to making shrewd publishing decisions. While his fellow writers are condemned to poverty and despair as they try to make their names, Milvain realizes that the best publicity for a book is the personality of the author. If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres. [. . .] You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.2 Milvain is Gissing’s cipher for a new kind of man of letters – the literary entrepreneur, an opportunist who knows how, as Norman

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Mailer put it decades later, to ‘advertise himself’, who understands the value of novelty and entertainment. Midway through New Grub Street Milvain hits upon an idea he feels is guaranteed to cause a sensation: ‘a comic literary paper [. . .] treating things and people literary in a facetious spirit. It would be caviar to the general public, but might be supported, I should think. The editor would probably be assassinated, though’.3 Presciently, Milvain’s proposal is an almost pitch-perfect description of the publication upon which Eggers has been able to build his own successful career. Appropriately, the earliest issues of Eggers’s literary journal, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, look more like works from Gissing’s era than the present. They resemble the kind of facetious pamphlet that might have been printed by a man such as Milvain. An early issue of McSweeney’s described its content to readers as follows: There are no restrictions on the size or content of submissions, other than that they should all be 2,300 words and about relationships. Any submissions that are not 2,300 words long and about relationships will not be considered, unless they are 2,300 words long and about talking animals. If they are not 2,300 words long and about relationships or talking animals, they should be 670 words and concern problems of race.4 This tongue-in-cheek tone became the McSweeney’s house style. As much as it was a literary journal McSweeney’s was also a parody of literary journals. McSweeney’s made it clear from the outset that it refused to take the world of letters seriously, or at the very least, would take letters seriously only in so far as they had anything to do with typography and bookish graphic design. Issue one directly summoned the reader from the front cover: BECAUSE THERE IS STILL SO MUCH MISUNDERSTANDING, THERE IS: TIMOTHY

MCSWEENEY’S QUARTERLY CONCERN. (FOR SHORT SAY ‘MCSWEENEY’S’.) KNOWN ALSO AS

‘GEGENSHEIN’. [. . .] 12

FINDING THE ‘RIGHT READER’

To you we say: WELCOME TO OUR BUNKER! LIGHT A CANDLE, WATCH YOUR HEAD AND

– WHO, US? WELL, OKAY . . . AHEM: Believing in: INDULGENCE AS ITS OWN STICKY, STRONG-SMELLING REWARD; Trusting in: THE TIME-HONOURED BREAD SAUCE OF THE HAPPY ENDING; [. . .] OUR MOTTO: ‘WE MEAN NO HARM.’5

This flamboyant and conspicuous design aesthetic was – and in a more muted fashion remains – Eggers’s signature style. But while it has attracted considerable attention, not everyone is enamoured with the mischievous and sentimental approach to matters literary that the journal endorses. Given its unexpected celebration of the curious old world of publishing it is difficult to determine just how seriously readers are expected to treat the writing between the covers. One critic described the magazine as nothing more than a ‘mélange of turgid prose and graduate seminar emoting’, suggesting that it appealed to readers who wish to ‘feel literary’ rather than actually take pleasure in literature.6 Others, however, found this new turn refreshing: ‘here at last is a publication with an identity.’7 Positive or negative, the reactions to McSweeney’s indicated that something unique was happening in American literary publishing. In a comparably short period of time the distinctive McSweeney’s style would become recognizable even to those who were not fans of Eggers or his publishing projects. In effect, Eggers’s small, mischievous, highlypersonal publication became a literary, not to say media, brand. Although nominally identified as a literary journal early issues of McSweeney’s incorporated a heavy dose of media satire. For a journal that prides itself on resembling an antique curio, McSweeney’s owes much of its success to the dot com explosion of the late twentieth century. In 1998 Eggers developed the concept as a website with a view to a very small scale print version, distributed only around the bookstores of New York where he was then living. Eggers had already experimented with magazine publishing, having produced an idiosyncratic pop culture magazine, Might, during his time in San Francisco 13

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in the mid-1990s. This had been a boom time for self-starters in new media and Might shared its office space with another surprise publishing success, Wired magazine. Might mixed journalism with satire, mimicry, parody and hoax, and packaged it in an unusual square format which advertised from the newsstand its distinction from other publications. Bringing high and low culture together Might celebrated but also critically examined contemporary America. One issue, for instance, irreverently posed the question: ‘Are Black People Cooler than White People?’ Today, with the popularity of television programs such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report and blogs like Stuff White People Like and Gawker, this knowing analysis of media and culture is becoming the rule rather than the exception. But in the mid-1990s, before the blossoming of the blogosphere, Eggers perceptively identified the entertainment value to be found in turning media-conscious irony against itself to comment on current events and culture. In Might’s first issue, for example, Eggers published a manifesto designed to poke fun at the media stereotyping and lack of ingenuity that beset the modern publishing industry. Could there really be more to a generation than illiterate, uninspired, flannel-wearing ‘slackers’? Could a bunch of people under twenty-five put out a national magazine with no corporate backing and no clue about marketing? With actual views about actual issues? With a sense of purpose and a sense of humour? With guts and goals and hope? Who would read a magazine like that? You might.8 His optimism was rewarded. For a time, the magazine had a dedicated band of readers energized by this unique perspective on what might be possible in publishing. Eventually though, the pressures of finance and business operations became an unsustainable burden and after several years Might folded. Eulogizing the magazine, journalist James Poniewozik explained, ‘Might was in a meta sense [. . .] about being young and on the outside, wanting in on your own terms.’9 This was the central principle in Eggers’s publishing philosophy and in spite of early setbacks it proved the key to his success. On the strength of Might Eggers was offered a position as an editor with Esquire magazine. But in New York, writing celebrity

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profiles for a men’s magazine, he felt palpably out of place. To address his discomfort he began toying with the idea for a new magazine, something with more literary ambitions but still true to the irreverent spirit of Might. The result was McSweeney’s – a publication intended to undercut the pretentious expectations of both the boutique literary scene and the competitive closed circle of New York magazine publishing. Having learned from the Might experience Eggers took a new route with McSweeney’s. In his cramped Brooklyn apartment, he produced the journal in his spare time, taking occasional advantage of Condé Nast’s equipment and resources to help him with his work. Initially he opted for modest publication numbers and a higher cover price in order to avoid dealing with advertisers. The plan was to produce as many copies as he thought he could reasonably sell. With the help of friends Eggers distributed the first print run of 1,500 by hand across the book stores of New York. The distinctive look and content attracted attention and for the next issue Eggers arranged to print 5,000 copies. By the third issue it had grown again, to 7,500. Today McSweeney’s has diversified into a series of publishing projects: the quarterly journal, a monthly review magazine (The Believer), three book imprints (McSweeney’s Books, Believer Books, Voices of Witness), and a magazine-DVD of short films and videos (Wholpin). McSweeney’s started life not as the first chain in a networked media empire but essentially as a zine – without even the grand ambition to make something ‘with guts and goals and hope’ that had first characterized Might. The journal pointed out to readers, for example, that it had been ‘made with only you in mind by people you do not know’ and disclaimed its semi-professionalism: ‘proofread, but not by paid professionals’, typeset ‘using a small group of fonts that you already have on your computer, with software you already own’. Where the first issue of Might had been devoted to deconstructing and satirizing the media obsession with Generation X, the first issue of McSweeney’s featured only articles that were rejected by mainstream magazines. McSweeney’s may have alluded to an era in which books were cloth bound and embossed in gold but it promoted itself to readers as the kind of publication that anyone with a computer, some spare time in the evenings and an oddball sense of humour could create. ‘We train all of our people to be able to do everything’ Eggers told the Wall Street Journal. ‘Write, design, copy-edit, write

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headlines and captions, scan and adjust photos, etc.’10 Like Might, McSweeney’s challenged ideas of market success. As such, the publication was able to claim disinterest in the publishing industry, all the while devoting itself to the publishing industry’s central preoccupations.

MARKETING MARGINALITY

Writing of the development of a distinctive ‘nineties culture’, the critic Michael Bracewell observed, ‘[n]ever had there been a better time to declare yourself a one-person Bloomsbury Group’.11 In the United States ‘slacker’ was the epithet used to describe the generation of young people who entered the 1990s as adults, aware of their existence in a self-indulgent, consumer-based popular culture and dissatisfied with the range of options presented to them by their society. Slackers were not defined, as Eggers rightly notes, by uninspired fashion choices or their mopey reluctance to stay at college, but by their attempt to live economically unfettered by America’s corporate system.12 Eggers emerged into this culture having trained as both a journalist and a graphic designer and was inspired by the doit-yourself art and music scene which had popularized activities like making zines and short-films, or forming bands and art collectives. In keeping with the tradition of zine-making, the earliest issues of McSweeney’s were self-consciously idiosyncratic artefacts and bore signs of being made by an individual rather than a publishing company. Appropriately, for a journal that initially published the work of overlooked and marginalized writers, footnotes and marginalia were distinctive features of these early issues. Issue three, for instance, features a number of stories that take margins as a theme. Ken Foster’s ‘Red Dresses’ includes annotations and critical comments by the author and another reader printed in the margin, to be read as the action of the story progresses. The well-known author David Foster Wallace may not have adhered to McSweeney’s early remit of publishing overlooked authors but certainly his submission, ‘Another Example of the Porousness of Various Borders (VI)’, would easily have been overlooked by other journals given that it was short enough to be published on McSweeney’s spine. Eggers’s own contribution to the same issue proposes that all young American writers labour under the mantle of the marginalized. In ‘A Note about the Type’ 16

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Eggers blends editorial comment with a Barthelme-style short story in which he reflects on authorship: Does there seem to be more meaning in these asides, footnotes, marginalia? Could it be that a group of writers, of a certain bent or ilk or demographic or just age, feels more comfortable here, in the crevices, speaking their minds in these small, almost hidden ways, afraid to simply say things in plain language and bold type? Is it such a stretch to interpret the footnote as the haven for the foot-noted-to-be? Marginalia as the medium of the marginalized?13 McSweeney’s put marginality in the centre of the page, taking it almost as a philosophy of publishing. These experiments with the margins addressed the ambiguity of what it meant to identify with literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century. In numerous ways McSweeney’s had been inspired by the romantic figure of ‘the outsider’. For one, the real man known as Timothy McSweeney was a mentally ill and occasionally homeless drifter distantly related to Eggers’ family (McSweeney was Eggers’s mother’s maiden name). McSweeney wrote to the family from time-to-time to ask for financial assistance and accompanied his letters with unusual and cryptic illustrations. When Eggers formulated the idea for his journal he took McSweeney as its mascot, describing him as the kind of creative spirit who would sympathize with the plight of so many overlooked writers: ‘a troubled fellow, an outsider, a probable genius of indeterminate age . . . he wanted attention, some consideration, an attentive ear’.14 With the luxury of being able to choose his own position on the fringes, Eggers fused his own contrarianism with McSweeney’s own. His journal celebrated eccentricity, isolation and exclusion and proposed the recuperation of these experiences by a new community of readers. Living in a cramped Brooklyn apartment single-handedly producing works which looked nostalgically to the past for ironic inspiration, Eggers reappropriated the idea of the writer as an outsider (even as his own popularity and notoriety grew). When asked to comment on his experience in the publishing industry Eggers lamented, [i]t’s an unfortunate clash between a crass, commercial enterprise and some wonderfully creative people who want to create art, or the closest thing to it under the circumstances. It’s so rare for 17

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someone who writes passionately about something late at night in their apartment to ever really find the right reader.15 McSweeney’s was intended to help writers find those ‘right readers’. Implicit within these words, however, is the suggestion that there might be any number of ‘wrong readers’ out there. When Eggers’s and McSweeney’s popularity and profile expanded some readers couldn’t help but sense that McSweeney’s traded on the exclusivity that came with being part of a fashionable literary clique. A reviewer for the Observer said, for instance, that the knowingness of McSweeney’s was exclusionary to all but the inner sanctum: [O]ccasionally, it is difficult to know what is spoof and what is real, which is part of the fun for the folks at McSweeney’s, of course, but relentless second-guessing is a little wearing for the rest of us. Is a joke really a joke if the reader isn’t sure if it is a joke?16 By framing contemporary literary production as a clash between two separate and unsympathetic worlds – the ‘industry’ (a faceless collective with central-city offices, working nine-to-five) and the individual artist (urban hermit isolated in an apartment late at night) – Eggers signalled to his audience that he would offer an alternative, a journal that was the antithesis of a crass, commercial enterprise. McSweeney’s would be a magazine true to the spirit of its contributors and their talents. The small scale of the journal, its limited distribution and wilful obscurantism produced the sense amongst readers that they were part of a group which valued different things. McSweeney’s was quite consciously a very different literary magazine – it not only looked different and published a different kind of writing, it made its readers feel different too. Lorraine Adams attests: Issues of McSweeney’s, lined up on a shelf, are a curious collection. One is composed of 14 color pamphlets in a box. One is a short-spined, cloth-covered oblong. One’s front cover is blank. Inside, the graphics are luscious, funny and playful, culled from children’s illustrations, scientific drawings, museum catalogues and flea-market memorabilia. This mishmash is the McSweeney’s aesthetic. There is an implied McSweeney’s economics: What is

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valuable is made in batches, the hands of its maker much in evidence. There is a McSweeney’s psychology: Previously outmoded warmth is defended with a force field of self-consciousness. And there is McSweeney’s endorsed music: Exemplified by the band They Might Be Giants, it is a cross between understated rock and nursery chant, with quizzically cerebral lyrics.17 Adam’s description demonstrates that McSweeney’s was much more than just a journal – it was a way of living, complete with its own aesthetic philosophy, its own system of value, even its own soundtrack for life. Issue six took this to its logical conclusion by producing a CD for readers to play while they browsed the journal. Eggers acknowledged the importance of remaining outside the mainstream, admitting (with a candour that wasn’t to last) that ‘[n]o one wants to be an acolyte, or part of the chorus, so the writer who has something to prove must stand apart and say mean or speculative things, to make clear that they are apart from the pack, that they think independently.’18 Eggers didn’t just think independently, he administered his publishing operation independently, rejecting the business principles that usually govern magazine publishing. With modest distribution and a higher cover price McSweeney’s could cater to its audience and (have the possibility to) expand only as its audience did. McSweeney’s also sidestepped the traditional flows of production and distribution: it was, for example much easier to buy online or in a small independent bookstore and even as its distribution swelled, McSweeney’s did not expand to include large chain bookstores in its network. This decision attracted considerable attention in the media: Eggers was lauded as a maverick, not just an author but ‘a counter media-culture event’19; McSweeney’s fired a salvo for readers, affirming, ‘yes, you too can exist outside empty media culture, you can create these works of value’20; the simple act of reading was characterized as ‘a political act, a blow against the media empire’.21 Ironically, it was the media’s positioning of Eggers as a rebel that attracted growing numbers of readers, drawn not from the literary underground, but the mainstream. From its early distribution-by-hand and subscription of 500, McSweeney’s now enjoys a circulation of at least 23,000.22 It is common to think of literary rebels as figures on the fringes of society – poets in slovenly garrets, bohemians in dark cafes and bars talking

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for hours (or days) on end – but Eggers was touted as a rebel by the US media even as he paid a prestigious agent to negotiate the optioning of his memoir to Hollywood. While the dominant myth of cultural rebellion throughout the twentieth century has proposed that counter-cultural activity works in opposition to the mainstream – is a system that ‘stands apart’ – more complex and nuanced interpretations of rebellion now acknowledge the impossibility of separation from the prevailing structure.23 Even in a sub-culture that ostensibly rejects the primacy of finance and profit-making, other forms of capital are traded and circulated to establish relationships between individuals in the group, as well as between the group and the broader culture. Whether they comprise beatniks, hippies, punks, or today’s urban hipsters, many cultural groups reject mainstream tastes and values but cannot claim ‘freedom’ from the society upon which they base their distinction. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu devoted his career to exploring how taste and value come to operate as their own systems of ‘capital’ in the lives of everyday people. His classic work Distinction proposes that an individual’s culture and cultural inheritance gives them access to power or status just as wealth might. Knowledge of certain subjects, or the possession of certain objects, has symbolic value in particular social circles and this value is conferred upon the owner. This ‘cultural capital’ can, just like money, be accumulated and ‘spent’ in interactions where the same cultural currency is recognised.24 Bourdieu observed that while cultural capital was being traded everywhere in society, it was in the art world that its operations were most apparent. Ever since the Industrial Revolution artists had established themselves against the prevailing system of capitalism reasoning that the creative genius required for the creation of art could not be accommodated into the industrial system. ‘Nobody is rich enough to pay us,’ quipped Flaubert.25 Bourdieu describes how other late-nineteenth-century writers, like Flaubert, sought to transform the literary world into ‘a world apart, subject to its own laws’, defined by its break with the economic order.26 It is this supposed ‘break with the economy’ that Bourdieu identifies as particularly important: ‘the symbolic revolution through which artists free themselves from bourgeois demand by refusing to recognize any master except their art produces the effect of making the market disappear’.27 While cultural capital cannot pay the rent, it gives one an inordinate amount of legitimacy and authenticity and these are very useful for 20

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attracting public attention to one’s work. When Eggers talks of the unfortunate clash between the industry and the artist, that struggle to ‘find the right reader’, he exemplifies Bourdieu’s thesis: by placing emphasis on creative integrity and appreciation for art that goes beyond monetary value the artist makes the market appear irrelevant; what matters is cultural capital – a currency possessed in large quantities by the ‘right readers’. One of the unusual paradoxes of the literary industry is that marginality is central to the marketing and promotion of literature and writers. This is not a recent phenomenon but has been part of literary culture since the Romantic era. As Terry Eagleton has explained, authors are complex cultural signifiers who are repositories for all kinds of meanings, the most significant of which is perhaps the nostalgia for some kind of transcendent, anti-economic, creative element in a secular, debased, commercialized culture. They thus reproduce a notion, popular since the Romantic era, of authors and their work as a kind of recuperated ‘other’, a haven for those creative values which an increasingly rationalistic, utilitarian society cannot otherwise accommodate.28 The figure of the romantic artist standing aloof from the machinations of the culture industry has enduring appeal but it is of course illusory: the marginality of literature in mainstream culture is one key reason it generates public attention; disinterest in the market is an author’s selling point. In this respect McSweeney’s was perfectly fashioned for its times, inspired as it was by a bonafide outsider and designed to be a nostalgia-tinted imitation of just the sort of literary society that would have traded in the cultural capital possessed by gentleman publishers, wordy boffins and gifted eccentrics. While it seems unlikely that books, and more particularly, literary journals, would re-emerge as a cultural fad in an era flooded with new technologies, some of McSweeney’s success must be attributed to the journal’s production of a complete philosophy for literature’s role in the production of the self. This is a cultural capital that blends literature’s nostalgic value as high culture and its function in commodity culture as an identity marker. McSweeney’s offers readers much more than short stories: it is a collectable object, a virtual community and a social identity. The same cannot be said for other 21

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literary journals, although this is changing. McSweeney’s capitalizes on nostalgic ideas about what literature represents: books become mysterious lost objects, gateways to worlds of wonder, steadfast friends in one’s darkest hour.29 In a culture dominated by LCD screens and digital devices McSweeney’s is reassuringly tactile, crafted – not merely published. These are literary works designed not only to be read, but to be collected – and displayed. McSweeney’s is perhaps the first literary journal to so openly acknowledge the importance of its own cultural capital. THE ‘McSWEENEY’S TYPE’

One key element to the success of McSweeney’s was the existence of a companion website, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. McSweeney’s online predated its printed cousin but, like the hardcopy publication, it shared a similar anti-publishing aesthetic. The site rejected trends in internet publishing – eschewing the then ubiquitous flash animations, pop-up windows and splash pages. Instead it was composed as a single, long-scrolling page with an encyclopaedic list of links. Since those early days the website has only slightly changed. Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency publishes smaller exercises in humour and absurdity and, particularly in its early years, the site seemed specifically tailored to the boredom and frustration of office juniors in the media industry. Today, the self-expression made possible by blogs and social networks provide outlets for the creatively frustrated, but in 1998 McSweeney’s website was one of few conscious of the large audience sitting idly in front of computers looking for distraction. The approach, perhaps inspired by Eggers’s own experiences at Esquire, proved successful. Much entertainment could be found, for instance, in the website’s serialized satirical story ‘The Service Industry’ in which Eggers and other unidentified authors satirized the vicissitudes of life in the New York media industry. In this series of vignettes Eggers made jokes about the vacuity of journalists obsessed with the size of their offices, workplace fashions and donuts. The feature became cult reading and the website gained a reputation. Demonstrating his business savvy, Eggers ensured that the content on the website was entirely distinct from the printed version; readers were encouraged to regularly visit the site, make their own contributions to it and perhaps eventually, subscribe to the print journal. In its early years the McSweeney’s site was a very personal 22

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and interactive operation with Eggers composing email replies, addressing subscription queries and editing submissions. Because of this close connection between readers and Eggers, a community quickly developed online and, seeking to extend this into physical space, McSweeney’s began to stage elaborate launches for each new issue and promote readings for authors featured in the journal. At these McSweeney’s events writers only occasionally read from their work, instead they sang and played guitar, they held ironic t-shirt competitions, impromptu hair-cutting sessions, or drinking contests. McSweeney’s, for all its use of the figure of the outsider, emphasized that literature was a social opportunity, designed primarily to bring people together. According to Nicholas Blincoe, the secret to the McSweeney’s approach is their recognition of a ‘literary sensibility in areas that are often thought to stand in opposition to literature’, and their belief that ‘a kind of literary inclusiveness already exists beyond the world of books.’30 This spirit of literary inclusiveness is McSweeney’s call to arms: ‘Welcome to Our Bunker!’ Author Neal Pollack, an early contributor to the journal, confirms this when he writes of his frustrations with the old routines in the publishing industry: When their books come out, if they are lucky, writers are placed on a pedestal at the lowest end of the celebrity food chain, adored by autograph seekers who wait in line for an hour, and then the writers disappear, escorted by a $600-a-day paid professional, not to be seen for at least two years, until the next book, when the process resumes. This divide between writers and their readers is inexcusable, particularly since it does not seem to be what most readers, and many writers, want. Instead, Pollack says, McSweeney’s broke down barriers at readings and launches: ‘bands played rock-and-roll, and people kept drinking and wanting to have sex with one another.’31 Reinvigorating the hackneyed stereotype of literature as an interest for fusty academics and shy, bookish types, McSweeney’s transformed books into accessories of cool. According to journalist Paul Flynn it was all thanks to Eggers that ‘a jaded generation of late twenty- and early thirtysomethings’ were using literature to fill ‘the slot once occupied by nightclubs, records, trucker caps and magazines’.32 Like riding scooters or wearing vintage dresses, reading McSweeney’s was a 23

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consumption habit that gave people a boost in the cultural capital of cool. The success of McSweeney’s demonstrated that literature could be just as viable an element of lifestyle culture as any other item upon which individuals predicate their identity. It did not take long for McSweeney’s to become a rather particular fashion accessory, used by cultural critics as shorthand for a particular demographic of young American. Stephen Amidon notes, for instance, that ‘[t]he ideal McSweeney’s reader (or writer) lives in Brooklyn, wears interesting T-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalization but uncool to go on too much about it.’33 Young, entrepreneurial technocrats were identified as the quintessential McSweeney’s consumers, buying the journal along with a host of other brand names: Steve Madden shoes, Kate Spade handbags, Starbucks coffee and Vespa scooters.34 Bill Wasik claims that McSweeney’s is ‘the most significant literary movement the hipsters have produced’, suggesting that the journal’s popularity functions akin to ‘a popular music fad’ and owes much to the vicissitudes of commercial culture. ‘Like starlings on a trash-strewn field the hipsters alight together, peck intently for a time, and at some indiscernible signal take wing again at once.’35 Wasik’s observations suggest that McSweeney’s success can be attributed to its qualified exclusivity: it seems to be something rare and unknown, and yet, it largely gains its value by being adopted by ‘hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes’.36 Sensing the new opportunities made possible by McSweeney’s popularity and its cool cache, corporate interests took a leaf from Eggers’s book. There was not only a distinctive McSweeney’s type of writer (an outsider), and a type of reader (a hipster), there was also the literal McSweeney’s typeface, Garamond, featured in advertisements and on book covers throughout the United States. Big corporations like IBM, Nike and Random House borrowed from Eggers design aesthetic, particularly his use of the single iconic font to brand their corporate enterprise and associate themselves with Eggers’s cool capital.37 Renowned book designer Chip Kidd remarked to the New York Times that he admired how Eggers had turned the font into a fashion statement: ‘[i]t has an inherent dowdiness to it, but he made it look respectable, like somehow he turned his grandmother into a fashion model.’38 Eggers’s response to his imitators was in itself characteristically ‘cool’ – he chose not to bite back at the

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co-optation of his independent business by corporate interests, instead deploying his trademark irony: I think IBM is obviously trying to associate itself, in a very subliminal way, with our semi-obscure journal, to boost investors’ confidence [. . .]. Weirdly, this is our goal, too. We want only good things for IBM. I think one of these days, they’re going to be playing with the big boys.39 The ‘McSweeney’s type’ rapidly expanded beyond the journal’s distinctive appearance and the appearance of its prototypical readers, and came to be recognized as its very own brand of literature. Like the New Yorker short story before it, with its Carver-esque gritty realism, McSweeney’s fiction could be recognized by certain essential ingredients: ‘[t]ake mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith’ said Julien Charles Bukiet.40 Others were even less charitable. In the New York Times Book Review Judith Shulevits noted that, [t]here was once a sound reason for the tone that McSweeney’s has taken as its house style, with its Dadaist hyperbole, its fake credulity, its desire to inoculate itself against hype by being moreabsurd-than-thou. But that was before everyone else who wanted to be seen as young and pure and anticorporate started speaking the same way. An air of aggressive innocence and chirpy bemusement has become the official armature of the American hipster, and has lost its power to cross critique. It isn’t even that cute anymore. The McSweeneyites may be the current emperors of cool, but they’re starting to need some new clothes. Shulevits criticized the mocking, self-referential writing style that Eggers popularized, claiming it was nothing more than a marketing technique that had been adopted in a society obsessed with the latest trends and fashions. She credited Eggers and his ‘McSweeneyites’ for popularizing a style marked by ‘a note of cloying disingenuousness’ and ‘a knowingness so bratty it borders on sniggering’.41 The repackaging of literature as a commodity and the transformation of novelty into conformity have become central themes in discussions of Eggers and his contribution to recent American

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publishing. Indeed, these themes have dominated discussion much more than critical evaluations of the nature and quality of the material the journal has published. Shulevits asserts that ‘the stories published in McSweeney’s though sometimes quite good, are secondary to the packaging, which is the central drama’42; Bukiet claims the magazine is ‘more like a corporate enterprise with multiple tentacles and spinoffs’. It is the apparent disingenuousness of this approach which seems to rankle most. Bukiet objects to McSweeney’s creation of a holier (and cooler)-than-thou enterprise: ‘they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley face of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.’43 In November 1999 the New Yorker published a photo of the McSweeney’s editorial team under the headline ‘Next Generation’. With the new millennium just around the corner the magazine was looking to profile the voices of the next century, and had selected Eggers. Along with an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, they included a photo feature about McSweeney’s.44 Posed on a Brooklyn rooftop in the midst of a sudden downpour, the photo encapsulates the whimsical-absurdist aesthetic for which the journal would be celebrated and derided in equal measure over the next decade. The editorial team appear poised for celebration, a young man and woman in formal attire stand beneath an umbrella, the man wears a bright apron over his tuxedo. Two other young men occupy the extremes of the frame – one, wearing an ironic t-shirt, reclines while the other stands covered in a weather-proof poncho. In front, Eggers sits on a plastic stool wearing a baseball cap and sneakers. He is also wearing a garbage bag fashioned to protect his clothes against the rain. The scene seems calculated to suggest the incredible levels of hilarity which their lives regularly achieve: the other editors are grinning widely, mugging for the camera. Eggers doesn’t smile, exactly: his eyes are steely and his mouth is pulled almost to a smirk. In his hand there is a half eaten apple. His pose seems to suggest he is less comfortable with the forced reconstruction of the so-called slacker Generation X-ers into the enthusiastic, smiley faced McSweeney’s ‘Generation Next’-ers. The inclusion of the fated fruit of Eden, the half-eaten apple, lends the photograph an eerie quality and hold an echo of the criticism the magazine will be subject to in the not too distant future from critics like Bukiet. By February 2000 Eggers

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book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would be released and spend 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Even with the growing popularity of McSweeney’s Eggers was unprepared for this level of exposure. This photograph heralds Eggers’s rise but also his fall: the magazine spread will give him unprecedented publicity but also slowly erode and alienate the community of readers with whom he identifies. Captured by the photographer on the cusp of fame Eggers is eating an apple that appears to be rotten at its core; it is the kind of metaphor that Gissing himself might have used.

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CHAPTER 2

‘JUST LIKE YOU’: FAME, NARCISSISM AND THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHESY OF A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS

Illusions about oneself can become crutches useful to those who are not able to walk alone. Eric Fromm, The Fear of Freedom1 Despite a surfeit of memoirs on the market at the turn of the twentyfirst century one title captured the imagination of the public: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. ‘A title’, Umberto Eco says, ‘unfortunately, is in itself a key to interpretation. We cannot escape the notions prompted by The Red and the Black or War and Peace.’2 This was certainly the case with Eggers’s memoir. The grandiose title and kitsch book cover (depicting a red velvet curtain pulled to one side to reveal a nineteenth century-style landscape) allude to a time and a literary style so out of step with the current moment as to be not merely humorous but disorienting. Who, today, would proclaim themselves a genius? Such bombast is reserved for a bygone era of ‘gentlemen of letters’ matching wits in parlours and coffee houses. Yet, Eggers’s title was strangely appropriate. The concept of genius was integral to the newly developed fame system of the eighteenth century giving authors like Pope, Dryden and Johnson the patina of legitimacy even as they traded bon mots and earned the reputation that made them the topic of public conversation. Eggers’s title and his book’s cover combined put the reader in the position of having

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to double-take to check, is this for real? Or, as he says in the guise of the perplexed reader in the opening preface: Like, if this book is heartbreaking, then why spoil it with the puffery? Or, if the title is some elaborate joke, then why make an attempt at sentiment? Which is to say nothing of the faux (real? No, you beg, please no) boastfulness of the whole title put together. (A.H.W.O.S.G, xxii) Eggers’s publishers were equally uncertain: despite arranging for an excerpt to appear in the New Yorker a week before its release, only 8,000 copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (A.H.W.O.S.G) were printed on the assumption that the book would sell primarily to a college audience. It came as a genuine surprise when, within weeks of his debut, Eggers was being hailed as the genius to which his title alluded. The well-respected New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani, advised readers that the book may start off sounding like one of those coy, solipsistic exercises that put everything in little ironic quote marks, but it quickly becomes a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented – yes, staggeringly talented new writer.3 No one was more surprised by the memoir’s success than its author, who had earlier professed to an interviewer, I don’t like the idea of it being a popular book; I think it would creep me out. Nobody likes the self-conscious stuff too much. I don’t think the average Angela’s Ashes reader will take to this. And the word motherfucker appears like 60 or 70 times.4 Clearly, Eggers underestimated his public. The memoir became a bestseller and was optioned to Hollywood; Eggers embarked on a nationwide book tour; he socialized with celebrities; the characters in popular television shows like Dawson’s Creek and Friends were shown reading his book in their TV lounge rooms while real-life readers queued in the streets to meet him. The New York Observer’s famed ‘Page Six’ gossip column observed that Eggers had become a

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‘literary media star’.5 Fawned over by journalists, critics and readers alike, Eggers was no longer an author but a fashionable image of what writing represents in the popular consciousness. In this mainstream milieu Eggers’s jokey title became unmoored from its intended context as part of an ironic pop-culture sensibility aimed at those college readers already familiar with his idiosyncratic style from Might and McSweeney’s. ‘I just thought it would be funny to give the book this grandiose title when, of course, it’s a disaster. I thought about three people would read it and that would be the end of it,’ Eggers said.6 It was only the beginning. A.H.W.O.S.G recounts the tale of how at the age of 21 Eggers was orphaned when both his parents died from cancer within weeks of each other. Eggers takes on the role of caring for his 8-year-old brother, Christopher (Toph) and together the two orphans set out for a new life on the West Coast and enact a transformative journey, disrupting society’s expectations of family and youth. This remarkable series of events is the ideal stuff of personal memoir; however, it was not this story alone that drew the attention of the public. Somewhat surprisingly, while A.H.W.O.S.G tells the story of a family tragedy the majority of the memoir is given over to Eggers’s exploration of his own conflicted attitudes towards fame and stardom, the anger he feels towards those who have it and his own uneasy relationship with his desire for it. Despite his ambivalence, Eggers acquiesces to the temptation of public revelation, noting that writing a memoir promises fame, a very specific fame that he insightfully describes as ‘celebrity mixed with pathos, fame sprung from tragedy – the best kind by far’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, xxv). Eggers’s title may have parodied the abilities of its author, but it also subtly offered an instruction manual on how he ought to be regarded. This was the coup de grace of his strategy. Deftly, Eggers was able to solicit the affection of readers, whilst managing to have it seem that he was uninterested in their attention; he asks readers to look him in the face while also managing to look the other way. According to fellow author and small magazine creator Keith Gessen, ‘[t]he book says, in effect, “I want to be famous, I do not want to be famous. You are reading . . . you are finishing . . . are you almost done with this book? Then I am famous. Sucker.”’7 In this respect Eggers’s coy protests regarding his sudden literary stardom seemed to critics as at least a little disingenuous. To judge from Eggers’s memoir he had been waiting for this moment in the spotlight all his life. 30

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MEMOIRS AND MIRRORS

‘I would never pick up a book that said “memoir”,’ Eggers told the L.A Weekly at the time of A.H.W.O.S.G’s publication. ‘I hated the word, I thought it was silly.’8 These comments are revealing on two accounts: Eggers’s suggestion that he has avoided the word memoir in describing his own work implies that he rejects any association of his book with the form and that he assumes his readers will be equally resistant to the ideas this word conjures. Secondly, these comments reveal that he has taken himself as the model for his ideal reader. Much discussion about Eggers’s memoir and his rise to fame has addressed the insincerity of his claims to be disinterested in celebrity, but this is only part of the story. Eggers’s defences against his use of the memoir form (and in particular, the attention he draws to his title as parody and the inevitable disappointment of readers expecting the next Angela’s Ashes) reveal an author preoccupied by the constituents of his audience. It is true that A.H.W.O.S.G asks for the attention and adulation of readers, but what has been overlooked in critical discussions of Eggers’s work (and his popularity) is that the author had only ever conceived of his readers in his own image: an audience composed of young people just like him. Eggers tells readers this much in his introduction, although he is gracious enough to invert the arrangement to prioritize the reader, noting that: the success of a memoir – of any book, really – has a lot to do with how appealing its narrator is. To address this, the author offers the following: a) That he is like you. (A.H.W.O.S.G, xxiv) Eggers’s ambition, however self-consciously stated, was to become the voice of his generation. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart! [. . .] I am the product of my environment, and thus representative, must be exhibited, as inspiration and cautionary tale. Can you not see what I represent? I am both a) martyred moralizer and b) amoral omnivore born of the suburban vacuum + idleness + television + Catholicism + alcoholism + violence; I am a freak in 31

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secondhand velour, a leper who uses L’Oréal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 207) Eggers casts himself as the Walt Whitman of Generation X: an ideal representative of a new community united in its obsession with self-promotion and attention. One critic acerbically and insightfully quipped, ‘[Eggers] means his self-consciousness to be not so much a postmodern trick as a public service.’9 Together, both author and reader are imagined to intone: ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . .’ As an author Eggers is not unique in his obsessions. Daniel Grassian’s study of contemporary American literature, Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X contends that ‘[p]opular culture has become the primary text of reference for young, contemporary, American fiction writers’ noting that Eggers was the most vocal and persistent in his claims for attention and representation and, in his honesty, he was more representative than most.10 ‘The nakedness of his ambition – and the nakedness of that nakedness – was part of Eggers’s appeal. Unlike the musicians and even writers you typically see struggling to understand what journalists want from them, Eggers was, from the first, an apparatchik in the machinery of stardom,’ observed Gessen.11 Eggers’s success can be explained largely as a result of having made himself his own target market. As he says in A.H.W.O.S.G, ‘[y]ou need someone like me. I represent tens of millions, I represent everyone who grew up suburban and white’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 179). For all the talk of Eggers as a literary phenomenon born of media hype, the author did bring a pre-existing readership to his book. He had released three issues of McSweeney’s by the time of the memoir’s release and had an established fan base.12 If a memoir relies, as Eggers suggests, on an appealing narrator then it follows that the most likeable narrator will be the one who reflects us back to ourselves. The mythical tale of Narcissus begins with the boy’s conception by a nymph who is mysteriously advised by a prophet that her child will only live to old age ‘if he does not know himself’. The rest of the story is common knowledge – the boy becomes infatuated with his own reflection and loses touch with those around him. The myth is often unquestioningly associated with warnings about shallow selfobsession, but the details of the story present an altogether more complex tragedy: Narcissus is captivated by the sight of himself in

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the pond, mistakenly supposing it to be another boy. Transfixed and compelled to get closer to this ‘other’, he falls into the pond and drowns. Thus, he suffers in classical ironic fashion: he wishes to connect with another, only to become absorbed by himself; his pursuit of depth is only a superficial reflection and the pleasant surfaces of the pond turn out to be, all too literally, deep. The hubris of Narcissus’s story is appropriately mirrored in A.H.W.O.S.G. Eggers, like Narcissus believes he is not alone: he is his generation’s (self-appointed) representative and has composed his book with this audience and this role in mind. His memoir is like the pool into which Narcissus gazes: he believes it is a portal, a point of connection to others, yet in constructing an imagined audience entirely like himself he is actually gazing into the literary equivalent of that lily pond, a surface that reflects back only his own image. For centuries the directive to ‘know thyself’ has been taken for granted as the basis of an enlightened life. In the twentieth century this idea has expanded to encompass new concepts of self-knowledge which have developed in concert with new media for self-presentation. Now, reality television and talk shows offer myriad opportunities for individuals to pour out their hearts in public. Likewise, blogs, YouTube and even social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. Recent scholars of autobiographical storytelling have proposed that other more innocuous personal records should also be recognized as part of life writing. Things like CVs, medical records, shopping lists and receipts all constitute autobiographical narratives, shaped as they are by everyday life. In their book Getting A Life, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson state the case succinctly when they note that ‘we are culturally obsessed with getting a life – and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with consuming the lives that other people have gotten.’13 The value and pleasure individuals take in ‘getting a life’ has to do with the catharsis of confession and, more particularly, the affirmation derived from having this disclosure recorded and disseminated. Eggers notes for instance that the media has profoundly altered how people of his generation imagine their existence: [W]e ’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the politicalmedia-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think about how we would fit into this or that

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band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it . . . [we] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 176) This situation is described elegantly by the sociologist Thomas de Zengotita as the perception of ‘imagined persistent address’.14 Rather like the oft-quoted scene from Taxi Driver in which Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle rehearses his tough-guy persona before the mirror, modern individuals spend large portions of their time posturing and questioning themselves, ‘are you talkin’ to me?’ Bickle is a perhaps surprising, but relevant, touchstone here. He is a classic malignant narcissist – the product of delusional fantasies of heroism and an inability to confront the shaming reality of life and, as the psychoanalyst Theodore Rubin describes the condition, a man who ‘becomes his own world and believes the whole world is him’.15 Eggers’s memoir reveals that self-knowledge is felt to be deepest when one is recognized by others for what one is. This is one of the significant developments of self-perception since the early twentieth century. It is not enough that one live a good and moral life, or create such a life after hardships and challenges, other people must know about it. In part, this explains why memoir and other forms of first person testimony have grown steadily since the middle of the twentieth century to become one of the most lucrative genres for the publishing industry. At the time of Eggers’s memoir, for instance, the American market was saturated with books by similarly young authors in which they document their personal struggles with sex, drug addiction, trauma, abuse and depression.16 Eggers seeks to distance himself from the crowd of ‘Gen X memoirs’ on the market, telling readers that they should feel free to simply ‘PRETEND IT’S FICTION’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, xxi). Yet, while the memoir may be less salacious than some, it contributes its own narrative of addiction to the genre. Eggers’s addiction is not drugs or sex but something altogether more banal: an addiction to attention. As he says, privacy is ‘[c]heap, overabundant, easily gotten’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 189), and dignity is ‘an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves [. . .]. So fuck it’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 190). The words of philosopher Charles Guignon help put this in perspective, ‘the idea here is that you can truly be such-and-such a person only if others see you as being that person. The look of the other is needed to confirm and

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stabilize one’s identity.’17 Self knowledge is only achieved through the affirming gaze of the other. Writing about memoir, Nancy K. Miller observes that the etymology of the word can be traced to concepts concerning ‘recording’ or setting down information ‘on the record’.18 Appropriately, Eggers uses this notion of ‘recording’ and the reality television milieu to explore what it means to write autobiography in a mediated culture, and more particularly, what it means to invest one’s sense of self in the reassuring look of another. Not long after his parents’ death and his move to San Francisco, Eggers auditions for the MTV reality television program Real World. In the memoir he tells readers that, we all despise it, are enthralled by it, morbidly curious. Is it interesting because it’s so bad, because the stars of it are so profoundly uninteresting? Or is it because in it we recognize so much that is maddeningly familiar? Maybe this is indeed us. Watching the show is like listening to one’s voice on tape: it’s real of course, but however mellifluous and articulate you hear your own words, once they’re sent through this machine and are given back to you, they’re high-pitched, nasal, horrifying. Are our lives that? Do we talk like that, look like that? (A.H.W.O.S.G, 167–8, italics in original) Recording the self is by no means an uncomplicated (or shameless) experience, Eggers suggests. And yet, despite his reservations, he finds himself auditioning. After several emotional chapters detailing the painful experience of watching cancer consume his family Eggers turns to reflect on just how this experience will be regarded by others. Supposedly relaying to readers the verbatim script of his interview with MTV, Eggers’s audition climaxes with a revelation that is disarming for its blend of satire and sincerity: Reward me for my suffering. Excuse me? Have I given you enough? Reward me? Put me on television. Let me share this with millions. I will do it slowly, subtly, tastefully. Everyone must know. I deserve this. I have this coming. Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough? It was sad.

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I know how this works. I give you these things, and you give me a platform. So give me my platform. I am owed. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 206) These three words, ‘I am owed,’ indicate a radical conception of the self in relation to society. Suffering offers the individual the mark of social distinction; fame is its reward. Eggers’s telling phrase, ‘fame sprung from tragedy’, perfectly encapsulates the kind of celebrity made popular by tell-all memoirs, talk shows and reality television genres which confer recognition upon individuals who agree to publicly expose themselves emotionally. Examining this ‘post-traumatic culture’ Kirby Farrell argues that in a world in which power structures and authority are beyond the reach of influence for average individuals the proximity of modern media allows individuals to find or regain a sense of control over their world and their lives.19 Eggers – like so many other memoirists, bloggers, reality television stars, washedup celebrities and crime scene eye-witnesses – engages in the transformation of personal suffering into the social currency of recognition. His request to his interviewer at MTV to ‘reward him for his suffering’ must also be recognized as a directive to his reader. But Eggers is hardly an unaware autobiographer – the simultaneous loathing and desire he identifies in relation to the Real World experience mirrors the dilemma he must confront in having produced a memoir. One way around this problem is to confront it directly and acknowledge that although unedifying, the desire for fame is nearly ubiquitous amongst his cohort and therefore can and should be honestly confronted. So, Eggers talks openly of his memoir as a bid to become well known for his sorrows, or at least to let his suffering facilitate his becoming well known, while at the same time not shrinking from the admission of such manipulations of his pain for profit, because the admission of such motivations, at least in his opinion immediately absolves him of responsibility for such manipulations’ implications or consequences, because being aware and open about one’s motives at least means one is not lying, and no one, except an electorate, likes a liar. (A.H.W.O.S.G, xxvii–viii) SINCERELY, YOURS

Part of the appeal of being well known stems from the fact that celebrity now constitutes a quasi-existential state in which the instability 36

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of self and its representation are taken as given. Contemporary life is confusingly composed of many enduring social and cultural structures while the fluidity of recent media and communications networks encourage individuals to rapidly re/deconstruct their knowledge of themselves and their world. The current celebrity system reflects this contradiction: celebrities are prized for presenting both the banality of everyday life (‘Stars! They’re just like us!’ as a feature section in one gossip magazine puts it) and simultaneously modelling the re-creative possibilities of a consciousness shaped by the advanced capitalist–communications network. Unlike the many skeletons that once lurked in the closets of Hollywood’s Golden Era celebrities, today’s most successful (most known) celebrities do not often present a veneer of idealized perfection (the Vaseline on the teeth or on the lens, as it were). Instead, what was secret is now broadly exposed, and ideally, exposed by the celebrity themselves. As Eggers jokes, while some audiences are particularly susceptible to succumbing to the allure of the half-truths of political candidates, being honest about one’s fabrication is the only way to ensure that savvy audiences will take you seriously. As he told a journalist, I’ve always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I’ve never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that’s required in fiction. I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you.20 Somewhat confusingly for a culture that glorifies self-fashioning, such self-presentation is regarded as revealing the ‘true’ self. Perhaps it would be better to say that such disclosure is seen as wholly sincere even if it can not be premised on any concrete truth or reality. Eggers engages with this distinction in the construction of his memoir, rejecting truth but nonetheless purporting sincerity. As a memoirist he senses his suitability to become just such a celebrity and positions himself and the MTV producer as likeminded, sharing as they do the ‘common ground’ of constructed reality. So tell me something: This isn’t really a transcript of the interview, is it? No. 37

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It’s not much like the actual interview at all, is it? Not that much, no. This is a device, this interview style. Manufactured and fake. It is. It’s a good device, though. Kind of a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that would be too awkward to force together otherwise. Yes. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 172) Not only do these declarations disarm readers by breaking down the reader’s faith in the narrative as true, Eggers’s honesty disarms possible criticism of his fabrication of the interview. Eggers and the producer are on the same page when it comes to understanding that ‘telling the truth’ mostly involves telling the truth. Just as he begs for the reader’s attention in his introduction while he feigns disinterest, throughout the memoir he uses these devices to establish that he is being genuine about being ‘manufactured and fake’. In this way Eggers’s documentation of real life is resolutely real while also being spectacular; he represents the real and in doing so transforms it into something else: a ‘good device’. Eggers does not simply address the problems of representation and media affirmation in his memoir, he has his book enact them. ‘The text looking at itself’ is how he described it to an interviewer.21 This is a telling phrase and it reminds readers of the centrality of narcissism to Eggers’s work. A text looking at itself brings to mind a book regarding itself in a mirror, in the manner of young Narcissus. A.H.W.O.S.G not only looks at, but comments on itself: ‘THIS WAS UNCALLED FOR’ reads an otherwise blank page. Before the narrative beings the reader is given the option of perusing 43 pages of ‘Acknowledgements’ including ‘Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book’, a preface that discusses aspects of the writer’s work like ‘Dialogue’ and ‘Characters, and their Characteristics’ and a lengthy guide to the book’s interpretation. That the text includes its own meta-commentary cements its position in a media-saturated landscape. Eggers’s prefatory devices presage the current ‘culture of commentary’ that dominates the media landscape. Audiences are offered opinion, analysis and encyclopaedic information at the click of a button: online newspapers and blogs solicit comments, crowdsourcing is used to collect knowledge and DVD special features offer to give audiences multiple versions of the same story via director’s 38

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commentary and other supplementary texts. Eggers’s memoir similarly presents readers with commentary, multiple perspectives and a look behind-the-scenes. All the while that Eggers resists the possibility of writing a true story his many ‘good devices’ point to the larger truth that all stories are a matter of opinion and perspective. This distinctive approach suggests that Eggers knows his audience. In a decade that has seen the rise of equally idiosyncratic visual stylists interested in self, truth and representation (including director/writers Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry), Eggers brings this sensibility to literature. A.H.W.O.S.G implicitly proposes that readers are no different to bloggers, ‘commentarians’ and cinema and television audiences, nor are they any less savvy in their expectations. Of course, Eggers’s tactic of playing the fallible autobiographer is by no means new. Even the first autobiographer St Augustine acknowledged the knot that confounds all life writers: the self is not something which exists ‘prior to’ the present moment, so how can it be accurately captured by language? One consequence of acknowledging the fictions in one’s memoir (or the truths in one’s novel) is that such declarations are really very effective tricks: we escape accusations of vanity and egocentrism when we seem so aware of the limitations and insufficiencies of our autobiography; and no one notices that, by the same movement, we extend on the contrary the autobiographical pact, in an indirect form, to the whole of what we have written.22 Philippe Lejeune’s idea of the ‘autobiographical pact’ – that the reader should and can put their trust in the writer’s story – is taken to an appropriately literal end by Eggers. On A.H.W.O.S.G’s copyright page, a space normally reserved for legal disclaimers, Eggers insists on his own disclosure: NOTE: This is a work of fiction, only that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author’s imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for those sorts of things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters – it felt like driving a car in a 39

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clown suit [. . .]. All events described herein actually happened, though on occasion the author has taken certain, very small, liberties with chronology, because that is his right as an American. (A.H.W.O.S.G, copyright page) Here, in this officially authorized space, Eggers plays around with the definition of truth telling.23 He is careful to make a show of protecting himself ‘legally’ regarding the various truths and lies in his story, recognizing, after Lejeune, that ‘the autobiographical genre is a contractual genre’.24 In fact, Eggers turns the contract on its head, making it a game in which the writer rewards readers who demonstrate they can trust and be trusted. He devises a host of ‘prizes’: he will make five dollars available to the first 200 readers who write in ‘with proof that they have read and absorbed the many lessons herein’ (xxxv); he promises a copy of the book on computer disk which will allow readers to personalize the story by inserting their own names, friends, and towns, in place of the author’s; he even suggests that readers who doubt the sincerity of his work call his friends directly for confirmation, publishing (at least in the book’s first printing) their real phone numbers. For Eggers these devices are a means of externalizing his own difficulties with his material, with his medium, and himself. This opening up of writing about the self – allowing the text to speak for the writer – is an example of what Susan Egan has dubbed ‘mirror talk’. Egan uses the phrase to describe autobiography (often dealing with crisis, death and trauma) in which reflexivity and dialogue are the preferred devices for documenting the self. The form can be understood as autobiography written as though it were biography, treating the self from the outside. Just as metafiction pushes the reader in two different directions (acknowledging the text as a fictional world, while also engaging with language imaginatively) so too does the mirror talk in memoir use the tropes of dialogue to remind the reader of the inherent construction of self and story. Eggers gives an excellent example when he remarks to his brother apropos of nothing: ‘So. Big day huh?’ He continues, ‘I mean, a lot happened. A full day, this was.’ His brother replies, ‘Yeah. The half day at school, then basketball, and then dinner, and the open house, and then ice cream, and a movie – I mean, it was almost as if it was too much to happen in one day, as if 40

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a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or rise) to actually pacing the story out.’ ‘What are you getting at?’ ‘No, I think it’s good, it’s fine. Not entirely believable, but it works fine, in general. It’s fine.’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 101) Younger brother Toph steps out of character and voices Eggers’s own criticisms of his narrative’s plausibility. Egan suggests that, unlike other forms of autobiography, the essence of mirror talk is ‘not privileging one perspective over another, but transforming the narcissistic by means of the corrective lens of the other, developing linguistic strategies that enable plural voices and that contain the oral and the written within each other’.25 What Linda Hutcheon says of metafiction could equally apply to Egan’s description of the memoir that engages in mirror talk: ‘The text’s own paradox is that it is both narcissistically self-reflexive and yet focused outward, oriented toward the reader.’26 The strategy (in both cases) attempts to grapple with the fear of solipsism in one’s life: no one wants to be alone. PEOPLE WATCHING

Certainly, Eggers is ‘oriented toward the reader’. As a narrator he ingratiates himself to them (‘This can be about You! You and your pals!’), seeking always to entertain and convince them that he is the kind of person ‘worth watching’. He tells the producers of Real World, for instance that he is a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy! (A.H.W.O.S.G, 168) While comments like these demonstrate Eggers satirizing himself and the convenient marketing stereotypes of popular culture, readers come to know enough of Eggers as his narrative progresses to recognize that the only thing which separates the ‘angsty prophet’ from the Midwest Catholic boy is a change in angle, an arch of the eyebrow, 41

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a wink at the audience. Throughout A.H.W.O.S.G, Eggers writes from the perspective of watching his readers watch him watching himself. While he cannot see how his performance is being received he knows that his success depends on his ability to become an idealized everyman: the Whitmanesque ‘dandified but down to earth’ parentless man-boy. In so doing, he is able to claim the transformation of his obsessive self-interest into a shared experience. Like Egan’s identification of ‘mirror talk’ Eggers’s memoir attempts to displace narcissism: he does not say ‘look at me!’ but instead ‘hey, everyone’s looking at me?’ Stories of being watched pervade Eggers’s tale. He relates, for instance, a story from his youth of singing along to his favourite album in his bedroom late one night and feeling ‘deeply embarrassed’ when he stumbles over the lyrics. Living always in the expectation of being observed by a phantom audience induces an extraordinary state of shame: even alone he is embarrassed to have made such a slip up. This revelation in itself disturbs Eggers: it is one thing to sing into one’s hairbrush in front of the mirror, quite another to have internalized the notion of living as a performer always on show. Perhaps Eggers greatest concern here is not that he is always performing but that his audience is simply a figment of his imagination: without the phantom crowd Eggers would be singing to no one at all. Theorist Slavoj Žižek observed in relation to the stars of the reality television contest Big Brother that despite the many embarrassments to which they submit themselves, the real embarrassment for them would be to realize that nobody is watching.27 Even when – indeed, especially when – alone individuals regard themselves in an attempt to feel socially validated. In Eggers’s case this self-obsessed performance is all part of a bid to reach out beyond solipsistic storytelling and engage in ‘mirror talk’ with his fantasy fan base. By the time A.H.W.O.S.G was published, Eggers had no need to pretend. The notion of ‘people watching’ is not always comforting. The flipside to being constantly watched is an all pervading sense of paranoia. To live with the expectation of a constant audience means that one is always having to judge how their performance is being received. This is a problem with which participants in reality television programs are routinely confronted. Throughout their tenure in houses, on islands, and before the cameras, participants are encouraged to reveal their ‘true selves’ (self-discovery is a central tenant of even the most outrageous reality programs). Yet, often when they 42

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re-enter regular life, these participants discover a new self that exists in the minds of their audience, a self that is often at odds with their own perception of their identity ‘on the inside’.28 Eggers, like those reality TV contestants, struggles with the possibility of extricating himself from this constructed image; having written his memoir with his readers always in mind he still has no sense of how he will be received. ‘Stay inside,’ Eggers warns no one in particular, [b]edrooms are safe sometimes, if the door is closed and the blinds are down, but if the watchers are in trees, they can see certain things. Windows are fine to look out but harrowing to stand in front of. Even if you check and find that there are no people watching, the people watching can be somewhere not immediately visible. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 186) In one respect, Eggers’s paranoia is justified. There is an audience ‘not immediately visible’: his reading public. Are they the ominous observers judging him from trees and windows? Eggers does conflate the threat of these ‘people watching’ with the disclosure involved in his memoir. He explains in his introduction for instance that he feared A.H.W.O.S.G ‘would alienate me from my friends and relatives’ and even, ‘enrage many readers for one reason or another, and would compel them to come and kill me’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 16–17). Eggers imagines himself the victim of some literal character assassination. A bad performance or a slip up might result in the displeasure of his spectators and precipitate a very definite end. It is this scenario that brings the memoir to its close: What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I’ll stand before you and I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I’ve been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me – Oh do it, do it, you motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 437) It is difficult to tell who here is the enraged aggressor. For all the charisma and confidence Eggers displays throughout his memoir he is also angry and fearful, and most of the time those emotions are directed towards his audience. If Eggers loves and fears his readers 43

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in equal measure, it is largely because without them he is nothing. Much as Žižek notes the reality TV contestants’ need for the camera to verify their own existence, Eggers needs his readers to justify his self obsession and he exists in a state of hyper-vigilant performance. Eggers’s memoir is less an instance of autobiography than it is a process of formulating the literary celebrity called Dave Eggers, constantly devising new strategies for marketing his brand to a target audience who thrive on the idea of being ‘smart legitimate permanent’, just like Eggers himself, but who also crave the insubstantial rewards of fame. How then to interpret Eggers’s expectation that his readers would all be cast in his own image? Is he, like Travis Bickle, a malignant narcissist? Certainly the Eggers of A.H.W.O.S.G displays manic fits of world-conquering re/deconstruction of reality. He tells readers at the end of his sermon on hair gel for instance that he wants ‘to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I’ve made’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 207). Incredibly, Eggers has in some very significant ways achieved this aim. Now regarded as almost singlehandedly bringing literature and independent publishing into the youth-culture firmament, he is routinely described in media profiles as the ‘voice of a generation’. This is the role he offered to play from the very first pages of his memoir. For all the self-deprecating caveats, A.H.W.O.S.G is less an autobiography and more a reflexive instruction manual on contemporary celebrity: both outside and within the pages of his text Eggers performs as the star, and responds as its demographically targeted audience. ‘Just like you,’ Eggers is both exceptional and utterly representative. By writing A.H.W.O.S.G, he achieves what he claims only to have jokingly set out to do. His success can be explained by the fact that he transforms selfpromotion into communal celebration. Eggers’s book is a mirror; an exercise in two-way flattery: it reflects back to its audience the rapt adoration it demands of its readers. In one of the greatest cases of twenty-first century life imitating art, Eggers’s memoir brings to its author the real-life experience of celebrity; a celebrity that has proved to be at least as complex and contradictory as the fantasy version about which his book obsesses.

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CHAPTER 3

MISTAKES HE KNEW HE WAS MAKING

The most usual mistake of the famous in our era is to think that the language of fame can be used without one being used by it. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown1 In A.H.W.O.S.G Eggers exhibited unrestrained openness about his self-obsession and need for attention. The epigraph to his memoir (courtesy of his younger brother) reads: ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m Dave, I’m writing a book! With all my thoughts in it! La la la!’ Flourishes like this signalled the author was self-consciously aware of his overinflated ego. For a time it was an inventive and exciting strategy. Eggers appeared capable of taking on the media, beating them at their own game. However, A.H.W.O.S.G’s growing popularity challenged the central premise upon which Eggers’s unabashed narcissism was built: as he achieved the celebrity he had so openly claimed to crave, his self-deprecating disclaimers began to ring hollow. ‘Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success, wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, has second-order vanity, bad,’ said one critic.2 Although Eggers had used his memoir to make it clear he wanted to be famous, he now needed to make doubly clear just how uncomfortable the reality of fame made him. All the while that he was being photographed, interviewed and profiled, he told these same journalists just how uncomfortable the whole experience was making him. ‘This sort of mainstream – whatever is really uncomfortable, and I didn’t realize what it would do’ he told one interviewer.3 What Tom Wolfe once said of Jackson Pollock – ‘[t]hey had to accept him Uptown but he couldn’t stand liking it’ – may equally be said of Eggers.4 Mercifully, Eggers never urinated in a fireplace or tried to crash the Stork Club, but in order to demonstrate 45

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his discomfort he did engage in a steady campaign of irritating the cultural gatekeepers responsible for ushering him into the media spotlight. In the swelling number of media profiles devoted to the author one could detect a new aspect to his media personality: Eggers, who had been charming and disarmingly open in early interviews now placed restrictions on the kinds of information he would discuss and even the manner in which his comments could be published. He insisted, for instance, that all interviews be reproduced in question and answer format only. He began to belittle journalists, telling outright and obvious lies to test the limits of their gullibility.5 The McSweeney’s website began a department of ‘clarifications’ where Eggers would post rebuttals to supposed bad press. ‘Eggers loves talking’ remarked one journalist, ‘he just doesn’t want to be questioned.’6 But Eggers was questioned, relentlessly, and the questions increasingly focused on both his celebrity and his financial success. In April 2000, the paperback rights for A.H.W.O.S.G were auctioned to Vintage publishers for 1.4 million US dollars.7 Eggers used the sale of the rights as an opportunity to produce a revised edition that involved a redesigned cover and an appended section which directly engaged with the critical response that his memoir had provoked. Entitled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making (M.W.K.W.W.M),8 this short work combined critical rebuttal with selected ‘outtakes’ from the original manuscript. The purpose of this supplementary text was largely to give Eggers a literary soapbox to respond to his critics and readers. Yes, we should perhaps continue to write exactly as everyone has written before, though evermore plainly and clearly and simply, and yes perhaps we should refrain from any deviations from our copyright page / dedication / epigraph / sentence /sentence / paragraph / chapter / chapter / denouement structure, but then again, equally appealing might be, say the injection of hot boiling acid, via titanium funnel, into our navels, while eating maggot-covered glass, while at lunch, in midtown Manhattan, at noon, in late July. (M.W.K.W.W.M, 34) Eggers may have boasted of so-called mistakes he knew he was making, but the real mistake was one he didn’t see coming: he supposed that he could call upon readers to give him their attention without 46

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also acknowledging that he couldn’t always control the terms. He may have initially received the stardom he claimed to crave by making his personal life public, but once his book was public property he could not control the trajectory his story would take. MAXIMUM FUN!

M.W.K.W.W.M is the work of an author unable to accept the authority of others; reluctant to accept that his work is public property. Around the time of the paperback’s release another American author, Jonathan Franzen, also greeted with sudden and unexpected public attention, was under attack for his attempt to control the readership of his book, The Corrections. Franzen’s novel had been widely praised in the United States but when talk show host Oprah Winfrey invited him to appear on her televised book club Franzen publicly expressed some uncertainty about the prospect. ‘I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it,’ the author explained. He went on to note that Oprah’s seal of approval would antagonize some potential readers (particularly men) and would limit the work’s interpretation. ‘I feel like I’m solidly in the high art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood.’9 In the most basic terms, Franzen wished to control who read his book and how. Unsurprisingly, he received considerable criticism for his ill-conceived statements and Winfrey retracted her offer to feature him and his novel on her show. Perhaps these anxieties regarding control were a product of the millennial moment, since Eggers, in M.W.K.W.W.M, exhibits a near identical angst to Franzen (though he never makes the mistake of publicly attaching himself to an elitist and implicitly sexist position) regarding literary cultures. Like Franzen, Eggers was concerned with what appeared on the cover: the A.H.W.O.S.G paperback involved the design of three new ‘back-covers’ that would give readers increased choice as to which version of his story they would buy. And, like Franzen, Eggers claimed that his decision was categorically anticommercial. He told a journalist that it wasn’t ‘any effort to sell two or three books to any given person. [. . .] the point was just to do as many covers as we could,’ because ‘it relieves the monotony.’10 Eggers’s argument in M.W.K.W.W.M reiterates this point. Responding to reviewers and critics puzzled over the unrelenting use of 47

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formal devices and literary tricks Eggers dismisses their convoluted interpretations, justifying his creative decisions by suggesting that he simply wished to offset the monotony of conventional publishing: The author wishes to reserve the right to use spaces like this, and to work within them, for no other reason than it entertains him and a small coterie of readers. It does not mean that anything ironic is happening. It does not mean that someone is being pomo or meta or cute. It simply means that someone is writing in small type, in a space usually devoted to copyright information, because doing so is fun. (M.W.K.W.W.M, 34) Importantly, Eggers draws a line between the critics who misunderstand and the ‘small coterie of readers’ (the right kind of readers) who recognize his purpose (‘fun!’). This explanation of his intention coincides neatly with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s formulation regarding the ‘decommodification’ of objects in our everyday lives. In these objects, we see not only the equation of the authentic with the exotic everyday object, but also the aesthetics of diversion. Such diversion is not only an instrument of decommoditization of the object, but also of the (potential) intensification of commoditization by the enhancement of value attention upon its diversion.11 These objects take on symbolic value much greater than their price tags. Appadurai is referring to ‘collectability’ which can transform an object, making it more valuable both socially and financially. Eggers’s appeals to fun are his attempt to sidestep the commercial aspect of his book, but as Appadurai observes, fun by no means prohibits commodification, it simply expands the realm of options available for the consumption of everyday things. Eggers’s redesigned book is a case in point. With three different covers and a new appended section it is certainly possible to interpret it as a collector’s edition. The publishers at Vintage acknowledge this when they note that ‘Dave’s artistic ideas also happen to be brilliant marketing.’12 Eggers cites ‘fun’ as part of a larger aesthetic principle that governs all of his creative enterprises. It offers him a way to take part in a commercial system of publishing while still claiming to be disinterested in profits and the publishing industry. In short, he is able to 48

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exist in the commercial system while appearing to resist it. As Sarah Brouillette notes, Eggers has not rejected involvement in the marketplace, instead ‘[w]hat he is engaged in is, essentially, the mass production of objects that aim to distinguish themselves from the abundance of disposable works on display at the average major chain store.’ Eggers makes many didactic pronouncements about his intentions in M.W.K.W.W.M, staging a one-sided debate with his critics, even taking the trouble to belittle his opponents’ arguments by literally shrinking the site of debate. The following, for example, is printed in barely legible, tiny type: If we dismiss the idea that all formal fun – and we must be allowed it – constitutes irony, then we must agree that: . . . Prefaces are not ironic. . . . Notations are not ironic. . . . Diagrams are not ironic. . . . Funny titles are not ironic. . . . Numbered points are not ironic. . . . Footnotes are not ironic. . . . Small type is not ironic. (M.W.K.W.W.M, 34) To take part in the critical discussion of his work Eggers forces the reader to strain over the fine print, reminding them of their contractual obligations in the reader/author pact. In this respect M.W.K.W.W.M is a singularly self-serving text. Given that Eggers’s memoir explicitly engages with the challenges of representation and performance (and that his book’s design is an extension of this project) it seems especially disingenuous for Eggers to refute the relevance of irony to his work. This is more particularly so given that Eggers’s comments regarding footnotes and small type are ironically presented to the reader in footnote sized type. Etymologically, irony comes from the Greek word for dissembling, and the Greeks used it in reference to the gap between appearance and reality or between truth and belief. As Eggers notes, [I]rony should be considered a very particular and recognizable thing . . . and thus, to refer to everything odd, coincidental, eerie, absurd or strangely funny as ironic is frankly, an abomination upon the Lord. [Re that last clause: not irony, but a simple, wholesome, American-born exaggeration]. (M.W.K.W.W.M, 33) Eggers actually avoids defining the term, though his comments demonstrate that irony has something to do with an irreverent sensibility. 49

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In a thought-provoking essay on the nature of irony entitled ‘E Unibus Pluram’, Foster Wallace notes that popular culture now has a monopoly on the form. It is from television, Wallace proposes, not the ancient Greeks, that we are taught how to make meaning from the realities of our daily lives: [F]latness, numbness, and cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out transcendence – flatness is a transcendence of melodrama, numbness transcends sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naïve about something at maybe like age four.13 This contemporary, self-aware, media-saturated ironist is a far cry from the Greek tragedian; he or she is better known colloquially as ‘the smartass’ – the arrogant figure who has fun at the expense of others.14 This form of irony not only requires a shared language of pop culture intertextuality and complicity between interlocutors, it establishes bonds between receivers on the basis that others are excluded. It is against this mode of ironic expression that Wallace rails in his essay, arguing that it is a pointless exercise in selfish bignoting at the expense of genuine engagement about meaningful subjects. As a form of cultural criticism, he says, this kind of irony is ‘ground-clearing [but] singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.’15 Because it has become wholly integrated into consumer culture it is now impotent as an oppositional strategy. It is in the context of this recent cultural history that Eggers’s objections to the description of his work as ironic must be understood. For the author to concede to the label of ‘ironist’ would also be to concede to the absence of any agenda except the promotion of himself. While it is true that Eggers’s book is obsessed with selfpromotion, he intends his readers to understand that, at the same time as wanting fame, he is searching for a true and honest connection with them: When I was done [writing the memoir], I was ashamed, because I had written what I saw as a much too revealing and maudlin thing, overflowing with blood and sentiment [. . .]. The book was seen by its author as a stupid risk, and an ugly thing, and a betrayal, and overall, as a mistake he would regret for the rest of 50

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his life but a mistake which nevertheless he could not refrain from making, and worse, a mistake he would encourage everyone to make [. . .] Because if you do it right and go straight toward them you like me will write to them, and will looking straight into their eyes when writing, will look straight into their fucking eyes, like a person sometimes can do with another person. (M.W.K.W.W.M, 35) In light of this sentiment, to call Eggers an ironist would be to miss the sincerity and warmth towards life that lies at the heart of his aesthetic and that is responsible for his tremendous appeal to young audiences. Eggers does not specialize in irony but in a new form of guarded sentimentality, ‘a heretofore unknown strain of smart-ass irony that bonds tightly with sincerity, with vulnerability, and with honest human emotion’.16 This sensibility has been branded ‘new sincerity’. Alexei Yurchak explains that, [a]lthough the aesthetics of new sincerity implies avoidance of cynicism in relation to the subject matter, this does not mean that new sincerity lacks irony. Quite the contrary, as a postpostmodern phenomenon it is acutely self-aware and self-ironic. However, it is a particular brand of irony which is sympathetic and warm, and allows its authors to remain committed to the ideals that they discuss, while also being somewhat ironic about this commitment.17 In cinema, one need only look to the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, PT Anderson, Sophia Coppola, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman to see this strategy in action. In other fields of popular culture the popularity of ‘reality television, Internet blogs, diary style ‘chicklit’ literature, [and] personal videos on You-tube . . .’18 have been cited as evidence of the sensibility. To these one could add the rise of past times such as crafting and vintage or thrift-store shopping. As a mode of affective cultural reception the new sincerity responds to the ‘unmanageable textuality’ of present day media. Audiences approach their culture with a mixture of childlike naivety, nostalgia, and an unwavering belief in the pathos of positivity.19 Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America, a National Public Radio show in the United States, describes it as ‘irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power’. 51

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Should this description fail to resonate with those who did not grow up watching the animated TV show from the 1980s, Thorn offers a real-life equivalent: just think of Evel Knievel. [. . .] Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. [. . .] Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind. But by the same token, he isn’t to be taken ironically either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome.20 Indeed, ‘be more awesome’ and ‘maximum fun’ are, according to Thorn, the mottos of new sincerity. Narratives of new sincerity endorse authentic ‘aliveness’ as superior to any artificial experience, so consequently global travel, physical escape and self-discovery via nature are common tropes. A strong nostalgia pervades the settings and the present is sculpted in the mould of an appealing, if not ideal, past. According to the logic of new sincere texts, ‘the problems of the present are symbolically resolved in a past that not only did not, but could not, exist.’21 In these stories individuals inhabit the bliss of childhood, outside the realm of parental control, while still possessing all the adult sovereignty that permits them unencumbered freedom. In this respect, Eggers’s A.H.W.O.S.G is something of an Ur-text for new sincerity, presenting as it does the author as both orphaned child and parental authority. ‘No one can stop us,’ Eggers writes in his memoir as he and his brother speed down the highway heading for San Francisco after the death of their parents. ‘They are the old model and we are the new’ he writes defiantly of his new family. These words might just as easily apply to his creative approach. Eggers’s work stands as a call to arms and a functional example of the unlimited creative capacity of the young, hopeful and ambitious: no one can stop us. To further understand the impact of this outlook it is instructive to consider how critics have connected new sincerity with Eggers’s success. Renowned British book critic James Wood, notorious for his often reproachful reviews, was not at all convinced by this lively optimism, proposing a different motto for the movement’s supporters: ‘vitality at all costs!’ Complaining of attempts to find transcendence via ‘irrelevant intensity’, Wood singled out Eggers, Foster Wallace and British author Zadie Smith for special mention, although the 52

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work of Jonathan Safran Foer, Benjamin Kunkel, Michael Chabon and Rick Moody could also be included in this group. ‘At a time when the MFA track had replaced bohemia as the dominant writerly lifestyle, Eggers was doing wonders for the notion of a young, asskicking literary community,’ notes Gessen.22 Certainly, Eggers has always had a knack for fostering these idiosyncratic communities. When he worked in San Francisco on a weekly comic Eggers would leave the original artwork in the open trunk of his car and invite readers of the comic to take an item and sign their name on a guest register. Similarly eccentric, in A.H.W.O.S.G he talks about the visionary dimension to running a magazine, which he compares to a world-clearing sort of revolution, a bloodless one, one more interested in regeneration than any sort of destruction. [. . .] every day you’d start from scratch, and everyone’d get together and say, Hey let’s put some building there, and, um, over there, let’s have a five-hundred-foot stuffed hippo, and there, in front of that mountain, a huge fucking, uh, something else. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 128–9) In Eggers’s hands, new sincerity is not only an attitude to life but is, ideally, an intrinsic characteristic of that life. Life should be lived ‘to the maximum’; dreams, no matter how idealistic, must be realised! The many young readers attracted by this ethos saw in Eggers not only a literary model but a life coach. In the words of writer Keith Gessen, he became ‘Dave Eggers: Teen Idol’. These fans eagerly imitated his hyperactive writing style and aligned themselves with what might be termed an Eggers-advocated lifestyle which they believed marked them out as a distinct and unique breed of cultural producers and consumers. BACKLASH

In their book Media Scandals Stephen Lull and James Hinerman note that ‘a star’s moral violations . . . are always recontextualised in terms of his or her “image system” . . . and any particular transgression is constructed and read against an image in circulation.’23 In Eggers’s case the image in circulation was the model of creative cool typified by his author photo: a scruffy, self-satisfied pose of independent, romantic can-do-ism. The near-saturation reproduction of this image in the mainstream media started to compromise 53

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the message it connoted. Eggers’s moral violations were not only contextualized by his image it was the circulation of image itself which constituted the very violation. Eggers’s protests of sincere irony and coy reluctance about his growing fame fell on deaf ears. Appropriately enough A.H.W.O.S.G included its own invocation of this process. In the memoir Eggers tells readers of an incident in which Might satirized a stereotypical hip, young writer: Zev, with a gesture that says ‘Who, me?’ poses as Kevin Hillman, whose entry strikes eerily close to home: Kevin Hillman, 26, Author ‘Slacker? Not me,’ laughs Hillman. He can afford to laugh, too. His book, Slacker? Not me! has been perched atop the Times bestseller list since early January and shows no signs of slipping. The book is simply the transcribed recording a week’s worth of conversations between Hillman and his friends, captured by accident on a tape recorder. ‘I just forgot the thing was recording, and when I listened to it, it was just so, so, so damned real!’ Next month Hillman guest VJ’s with Kennedy on MTV’s Alternative Nation Weekend Rock and Jock Tribute Water Polo Weekend. (A.H.W.O.S.G, 285) Tellingly, Eggers concludes this vignette by informing readers that not long afterwards the Might team descend into ‘self-loathing turned against each other’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 284). The fictional ‘Kevin Hillman’ presages Eggers’s own fate at the hands of the media. As the interviews, reviews and profiles about Eggers proliferated in the weeks and months following the debut of A.H.W.O.S.G he became the butt of his own joke. For an author who specialized in parody Eggers found himself relentlessly imitated by fans and detractors alike. Online magazine Salon poked fun at the writer’s new mainstream popularity, proposing a new TV show, ‘Who Wants to Marry a Staggering Genius?’ The article purportedly quoted the author as saying, ‘[e]ver since MTV turned me down for “The Real World”, I have wanted to use television to get laid. . . . This fulfils one of my greatest dreams. Thank you, Rupert Murdoch.’24 The McSweeney’s website itself was parodied. A young man named Nic Musolino created a near identical version of the site that was flooded with admiring notes from fans mistaking the imitation for the real thing.25 Musolino claimed to be 54

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an Eggers enthusiast and cited the surfeit of young female fans the author attracted as reason enough to claim some of this attention for himself. Eggers was not amused. By the end of 2000 Eggers had been awarded the number one spot in New York magazine’s bizarre ‘10 Most Overexposed Writers of 2000’ list and in the United Kingdom, where his fame was also growing, the Guardian newspaper suggested that ‘Eggers’s real genius is for PR.’26 Gary Baum, a teenaged boy from California, took inspiration from this media coverage and decided to write a blog cataloguing Eggers’s press clippings and making inferences about potential nepotistic favours the author might have demanded. Baum called his blog the ‘FoE! Log’ (‘FoE!’ stood for ‘Friend of Eggers!’) and although it began as a document of conflicted fandom it eventually became a source of information for journalists and associates of Eggers who themselves supplied Baum with tip offs, rumours and (in a few cases) media scoops. Thus, the lines between fans and journalists were increasingly hazy. Many of those involved in the media had enjoyed Eggers’s early parodies of their profession on the McSweeney’s website, but as Eggers became a hot commodity for newspapers and magazines he took his representation more seriously. This shift is perhaps best demonstrated by Eggers’s widely reported dispute with his agent, Elyse Chaney. Eggers claimed that Chaney was attempting to profit from his family’s tragedy, an accusation that came quickly on the heels of news that Eggers had just sold the rights for his memoir to a film production company for a figure in excess of one million US dollars. Eggers then hired the renowned agent Andrew ‘The Jackal’ Wylie to manage his representation. Wiley had earned his nickname for his ruthless deals and shrewd exploitation of the market for celebrity authors and his appointment was seen as clear confirmation that the author had been changed by his success. When the New York Times journalist David Kirkpatrick wrote an article on the paperback release of A.H.W.O.S.G and reflected on the author’s conflicted relationship with the media and money, Eggers became embroiled in an ugly battle with the journalist that seemed to symbolize just how sour things had become. Initially resistant to talking to the Times, Eggers had agreed to an email-only exchange with the journalist on the proviso that he would have the final approval of all quotes attributed to him. On the day the article was due to go to press Eggers was not available to give his approval and so Kirkpatrick, on advice from a publicist, went ahead with publication. The article, headlined ‘Denouncing Profits and 55

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Publishers While Profiting from Publication’, reproduced comments Eggers had clearly marked ‘off the record’ in his emails. Angered by Kirkpatrick’s behaviour Eggers responded furiously with the publication of a ‘clarification’ on the McSweeney’s website. Over 10,000 words long, the ‘clarification’ details all the email exchanges between Kirkpatrick and Eggers and includes Eggers’s own justification for his actions. The opening line of Eggers’s clarification reads: ‘This article, by Mr Kirkpatrick, will be made an example of for many reasons.’ Eggers goes on to insult Kirkpatrick, telling him that ‘everyone at Vintage and Random House thinks you’re a hatchet wielder’ and ‘a bitter little bastard’.27 In response to several ‘factual fabrications’, which Eggers asserted were deliberate, he included a biography of Kirkpatrick’s career which he loaded with falsehoods, speculating on Kirkpatrick’s private life with talk of professional ‘unhappiness’. Aside from Kirkpatrick’s breach of journalistic ethics it was his speculation on the author’s intention to ‘profit from publication’ that most piqued Eggers. According to his ‘clarification’ Kirkpatrick’s article was intended to make ‘something painful and true (my book) look cynical and calculated’.28 Kirkpatrick’s article, with its air of scepticism about the author’s intentions, was a product of its times. It gave voice to sentiments that had been brewing amongst Eggers’s fanbase for some time. By agreeing to copious newspaper and magazine interviews, by promoting his writing at book readings and tours Eggers was believed to have ‘sold out’ the legitimacy of his (and by extension, his fans) position on the fringes of the mainstream. The notion that Eggers’s dealings with the media constituted some kind of conspiracy was an idea that fans and journalists shared. In several mainstream media profiles Eggers had been represented a gang-leader. Sometimes these portraits were innocuous and childlike: ‘[McSweeney’s] is like Peanuts for adults who are reluctant to grow up’29 or else is a bratty bunch of misfits like the stars of John Hughes’s teen film The Breakfast Club.30 Other depictions were all together more sinister, the journal constituted ‘not only a charmed circle but a separate media existence – a media cosa nostra’.31 Gossip circulated that Eggers was, and had always been, a thin-skinned bully. His eye-for-an-eye response to Kirkpatrick’s unprofessionalism, his treatment of his agent, along with the defensive tone of M.W.K.W.W.M only exacerbated the situation. If Eggers ever had been the leader of a happy band of misfits, as the media seemed to suggest, then it

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was also the case that his revisions of his memoir betrayed a concern that his fans would abandon him as public scrutiny increased. Indeed, he had addressed them directly, beseeching: ‘PLEASE, PLEASE: TRUST THE MOTIVES AND HEARTS OF YOUR MAKERS OF THINGS’ (M.W.K.W.W.M, 34). In some respects there was little difference between the New York Times journalist Kirkpatrick and the mass of fans who, like Gary Baum, had seen Eggers as a cultural idol worth emulating. The mainstream attention was destroying the aura of sincerity and legitimacy surrounding the author and his memoir. SELLING OUT

Eggers used another media interview, this time with the editors of the undergraduate literary magazine the Harvard Advocate, to address the concerns of these fans. Like Kirkpatrick, Eggers’s interviewers at the Harvard Advocate were interested in the ethics of self-promotion and Eggers’s purported purer interests. ‘In moments of dark suicidal despair,’ wrote one via email, ‘I think McSweeney’s is just trying to sell a lot of magazines by being so pretty and “authentic”.’ The key problem for these young critics, it seems, is not so much the commodification of the magazine per se, but Eggers’s intentions. The interviewers pose a philosophical follow-up question to Eggers, demanding to know ‘[a]re you taking any steps – are there any steps to be taken – to keep this shit real?’ Eggers deflects the question, returning to the principle of fun to offer an explanation regarding the possibility of ‘keeping shit real’ in a corporate enterprise: ‘I say yes when Hollywood says they’ll give me enough money to publish a hundred different books, or send twenty kids through college. Saying no is so fucking boring.’32 This ‘Sellout Rant’, as it came to be known, quickly circulated on the internet and was widely discussed on websites and message boards devoted to music fandom. Harper’s magazine printed an edited version under the headline ‘Too Legit to Quit’ (a sly reference to the fame-hungry rapper MC Hammer who had made a number of disastrous attempts to become a credible artist while also at various times promoting snack foods, Christianity and eventually filing for bankruptcy) and placed it next to a short note from Eggers’s sister Beth in which she protested that her brother was a self-aggrandizing

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liar.33 Quite clearly, Harper’s intended to make Eggers look foolish, and the incident marked the apex of the media acrimony towards the author. In an essay entitled ‘The McEggers Tang Clan’, Robert Lanham jokingly proposed that, like successful gangsta rappers who use hyperbolic boasts about their ability to outclass enemies, Eggers would have to find a strategy to counteract the media ‘playa-haters’ circling around him. Gangsta rap has an enduring reputation for both self-promotion and violent retaliation for transgressions of ‘face’ and Lanham’s overblown comparison between the privileged, white, middle-class experiences of Eggers’s cohort and the institutionalized poverty of the black ghettos serves a parodic function but also illustrates that the two very distinct cultural enclaves are governed by a similar logic, where financial success must be leveraged against the power of popularity. Lanham astutely noted the double standards at work in the critique of Eggers: ‘[p]eople have written Eggers off for years, meanwhile mimicking his style, buying books published under the McSweeney’s moniker, and renewing their subscriptions to his publications.’34 Eggers’s interviewers at the Harvard Advocate like Lanham, also identified that Eggers’s predicament had its precedent in the music industry, where, as they said, ‘indie cred is of perennial concern,’ and so posted the full content of Eggers’s email on a website devoted to fans of the band Pavement. From there the ‘Sellout Rant’ was posted and forwarded all across the internet. Dictionary definitions of the term ‘sell-out’ note links to finance and exchange: as a noun a sellout constitutes ‘the sale of all one’s stock of a commodity’ and, as a verb, the betrayal of another often by ‘secret bargains’. When musicians, artists, authors or other cultural performers are accused of ‘selling out’ these two meanings come together so that the first implies the second: to succeed financially means the betrayal of the original value that had been invested by both the creator and the audience.35 Like musicians and artists who establish themselves in a separate creative zone ostensibly outside corporate production and distribution, Eggers’s declaration of antagonism towards mainstream media set him up to have many critics (most of whom were part of the mainstream media) carefully watching for signs of hypocrisy. Gessen’s examination of Eggers’s treatment in the media concludes, for instance, that, ‘[e]vidently [the media] knew he was one of them, and they were amazed he could get away so long with pretending otherwise.’36

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In his rant Eggers explains that he is, and has always been, well aware of the operations of ‘the sellout’: I bought R.E.M.’s first EP, Chronic Town, when it came out and thought I had found God. I loved Murmur, Reckoning, but then watched, with greater and greater dismay, as this obscure little band’s audience grew, grew beyond obsessed people like myself, grew to encompass casual fans, people who had heard a song on the radio and picked up Green and listened for the hits. Old people liked them, and stupid people, and my moron neighbor who had sex with truck drivers. I wanted these phony R.E.M.-lovers dead. But it was the band’s fault, too. They played on Letterman. They switched record labels. Even their album covers seemed progressively more commercial. And when everyone I knew began liking them, I stopped. Had they changed, had their commitment to making art with integrity changed? I didn’t care . . .37 The salient point in Eggers’s charting of the process is not his allocation of blame equally between audiences and the artist but his ultimate deferral to the artist as arbiter of value: it is not REM who have changed, it is the type of fans. Although the application of the term ‘sell out’ suggests that fault lies with the practitioner rather than the receiver (e.g. the fan says, ‘REM are sellouts’ rather than ‘I’m not buying into REM anymore’), it is fans that pose a problem to an artist’s legitimacy. The problem is, as Joseph Heath, notes not that corporations co-opt countercultures, it is that rebelling through style or consumption is collectively self-defeating . . . co-optation is not something that corporations do, from the outside, it is an endogenous effect produced by consumers, a logical consequence of many people seeking to obtain the same positional good . . . everyone wanting it precludes everyone getting it.38 If niche audiences were not preoccupied by their desire to use cultural products, like music or books, to establish their distinction from other consumers they would not become disgruntled when the credibility of this difference is destabilized by growing popularity.

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As a pejorative term, ‘sellout’ would seem to imply that the problem stems from the exchange of art for capital, however, closer analysis of the term’s deployment in popular culture suggests that the anxieties of selling out do not concern increased wealth, so much as the popularity that comes with it. For instance, in his rant, Eggers catalogues a range of misdemeanours that consumers often use to determine if an artist has ‘sold out’: z z z

z z

z

z z

An appearance on popular mainstream television Feature articles in widely circulated magazines A change in style, form, medium or context; especially when this change is a movement towards a style, form, medium or context that is associated with larger audiences of paying customers (e.g. a film adaptation of a book, a rock band reunion tour, an avant-garde jazz artist playing club ‘standards’, a popular DJ’s remix of an obscure track) The inclusion or invocation of advertising into any creative project (in magazines, paid spots, product placement, etc.) A movement towards or into a mainstream system (as in a takeover, merger, contract, etc., but could also be a symbolic act as simple as getting a haircut). An association with current fashion – e.g. clothing retailer Gap’s use of the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac to sell khakis; the seeming ubiquity of trends such as tight jeans, t-shirts with slogans or trucker caps An association (professional or otherwise) with those who are celebrated, well known, wealthy, etc. Any kind of creative work done in exchange for money; and/or especially if that creative work must be altered in order to increase or garner financial reward (e.g. the creation of ‘sanitized’ or ‘radio friendly’ versions of songs which feature bad language or run over the traditional three-minute pop song format)

For consumers the major transgression of the artist concerns increased audience rather than increased profits. This emphasis on audience means that the sellout is an essentially subjective category dependent on one’s own level of cultural awareness and exposure to various modes of media information within the field of cultural production. To this end, these examples illustrate that while some factors contributing to the sellout concern a change in the actual product 60

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itself (content, genre, format, etc.) in exchange for money others rely entirely on a change in the perception or reception of the product as a result of a change in context. The sellout has to do with a movement away from the popularly ‘unknown’ (the avant-garde, the cool, the underground) towards the mainstream. Early in his career Eggers was greeted with the adoration of a limited circle of fans: [a]t a time when the MFA track had replaced bohemia as the dominant writerly lifestyle, Eggers was doing wonders for the notion of a young, ass-kicking literary community. His readings, which were packed by hundreds, were conceptually interesting performances – he had jugglers, and guitar smashing, and sometimes he asked someone to sit up front and maintain eye contact with the audience, because he was bad at it. He had good taste as an editor and brilliant taste as a designer.39 It was this same group of fans who were later disheartened by his wholesale participation with the popular media. ‘FoE! Log’ creator Baum explains, for instance, that Eggers ‘was my own personal thing’. ‘No one knew about this guy. It was something I had found, like you find a cool band. And then all this stuff started coming out.’40 Of course, Eggers had always been upfront about his willingness to participate in commercial culture. In the copyright disclaimer for A.H.W.O.S.G he tells readers that the book is: [p]ublished in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, a division of a larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled. That said, no matter how big such companies are, and how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like 99 percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, or São Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly worth worrying about. (A.H.W.O.S.G, copyright page) 61

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Few of his most dedicated fans shared this sentiment, however. A large part of Eggers’s early success depended on the production of an elite culture based upon the imagined eradication of economic exchange systems in favour of cultural value, a point Sarah Brouillette makes: ‘[t]he subculture that has grown up around Eggers is made up of fans that want to say something about themselves through the objects they consume.’41 Eggers’s elaborate protests about the insignificance of corporate involvement in the art and life of individuals was regarded by some readers as a statement of implicit commercial resistance. In actual fact, Eggers may concede some antipathy toward the multinational corporation but is non-committal. Thus, as cultural products, Eggers and his books simultaneously represent an anti-commercial position and its opposite. Freud suggested that art was an activity done in order to gratify wishes, and as such, public popularity was the measure of the artist’s success; yet it is precisely this gratification that is viewed with scepticism in a cultural market where success equates with selling out. As Eggers notes in response to his Harvard Advocate interviewers, ‘any sort of popularity has an inverse relationship with what you term the keeping “real” of “shit”.’42 The illogic of this principle is that it is predicated on a belief that a cultural product begins life with a clean slate; untouched by the taint of the market. In order to reach an audience the producer must conform to systems of distribution and the structure of capital exchange. If the purpose of art is indeed to gratify wishes then to reach consumers art must necessarily undergo a transformation into commodity (i.e. they must sell out). Ever since the industrial revolution made the book a massproduced object, it has been a given of American culture that the greatest service a publisher can do for a work of literature is to give it the widest possible dissemination and, by extension, the success of a work – and the worth of a publisher – can be measured in terms of the number of copies disseminated.43 In his ‘Sellout Rant’ Eggers rails against the possibility of ‘keeping it real’ in a world where all art is part of the commodity market. Effectively, he proposes that traditional notions of antagonism between culturally credible artists and commercially motivated hacks are outdated. Art and commerce do not stand in opposition like combatants on a battlefield. While it may appear that there are clearly 62

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delineated realms such as the mainstream and the underground, cultural production takes place within a range of ‘partially autonomous subdivisions’44 such as the local branch of the multinational business, the literary imprint of the major publisher, or the small record label backed by a large parent media conglomerate. There are no longer two discreet zones, one dominated by artistic capital, the other economic, across which any battle is contested. If there ever was a battle to be fought, it is not on the site of cultural production, but consumption, where audiences look to invest in culture for the purpose of buttressing their identities. The ‘indie cred’ with which Eggers is associated may have seemed to his early fans to be at odds with goals of the publishing industry, however Eggers saw cultural production very differently. I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it’s corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no . . . [I]n the end . . . no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things . . .45 In this defence of his own involvement in the commodity market Eggers invokes again, this time to very different purposes, the notion of the outsider artist cocooned in their apartment and isolated from the market. Where he earlier attacked the market’s disinterest in engaging with the challenging work of the marginalized artist, here he suggests that isolation born of commercial resistance dooms the artist to irrelevance and self-destruction. Autonomy cannot be achieved via alignment with some increasingly slim segment of financially pure cultural production, but is arrived at, as James English says, by ‘seizing and managing as advantageously as one can the various and spatially scattered cultural instruments whose primary purpose is the negotiation of capital conversions’.46 Contrary to media suggestions that Eggers’s greatest contribution to literature was his unrelenting self-promotional campaign, or his popularization of an annoying form of whimsical literature, or his talent for making books suddenly fashionable, the most significant aspect to Eggers’s career has been his ability to negotiate the perceived impasse between success and credibility. Embracing the label 63

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‘sellout’, Eggers uses the principles of new sincerity to affirm the possibility of an alternative world that does not conform to the supposed logic of the market, or its subcultural antithesis, the trade in credibility. Eggers opts for a creative logic that endorses economic re-investment and conversion: [W]ithin the year I will have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going into publishing books through McSweeney’s.47

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A PUBLISHER’S PROGRESS: YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY AND THE McSWEENEY’S PUBLISHING MODEL

. . . I did not think To shew to all the World my Pen and Ink In such a mode; I only thought to make I knew not what: nor did I undertake Thereby to please my Neighbour; no not I; I did it mine own self to gratifie. John Bunyon, A Pilgrim’s Progress1 In light of the media fanfare that had surrounded the release of A.H.O.W.S.G it came as a great surprise when Eggers announced towards the end of 2002 that his second book, a novel called You Shall Know Our Velocity (Y.S.K.O.V),2 would be self-published by his own newly created McSweeney’s Books.3 Given Eggers track record for experimentation, his vocal frustration with corporate publishing, and his ambivalence regarding the media, speculation about the novel was rife. The book’s title was a closely guarded secret and rumours spread that Eggers would attribute his novel simply to ‘Dave’. Eggers had already entered a phase of self-imposed reclusiveness and mentioned to readers of the McSweeney’s website that he dreamed of anonymity: ‘I am at the point, and have been at the point for two years now, where I get a queasy feeling every time I see my name in print.’4 This gave rise to the notion that Eggers might release the new book under a pseudonym or print simply one copy and ask readers to pass it on. Few guessed that the author would start his

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own publishing company in preference to another experience with a major publishing house. I wanted to write and publish a book, but I didn’t want any of the hoopla that came with the first book. . . . I was like, ‘Is it possible to write a book without everything else that comes with it? Can I just go out and meet my peers, sign books, and go home?’5 In publishing the book himself Eggers was able to control his publicity, and avoid journalists in favour of direct engagement with fans at book readings and via the McSweeney’s website. His decision to use his first novel as a launch pad for his own publishing house was a declaration that he took his responsibilities to his readers very seriously: he didn’t wish to see a repeat of the media frenzy that resulted from the publication of A.H.W.O.S.G, or the bruising backlash that saw him criticized as greedy and self-interested. At its initial publication only 50,000 copies of Y.S.K.O.V were available for sale in the United States; 10,000 of those were limited editions available for purchase online at the McSweeney’s website and the remaining 40,000 were shipped to independent bookstores throughout the United States and Canada. Despite his earlier protestations that ‘art made with mission statements is not art,’ Eggers revealed that his self-publishing venture had an important social dimension: all the proceeds from the sale of Y.S.K.O.V would be used in the foundation of a charitable organization, 826 Valencia, dedicated to developing literacy skills among San Francisco’s disadvantaged children. Eggers’s desire to use publishing to make a tangible impact also had implications for the industry: those first 40,000 copies of the novel were released to independent booksellers who had supported Eggers during his early development of the McSweeney’s journal. Large retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon were excluded. The critical reaction to this announcement was mixed. Some publishers and critics found cause to marvel at the seemingly foolhardy decision to excise chain-stores and established internet retailers from the deal. Others proposed that Eggers’s interest in self-publishing was either a publicity stunt or else a cunning move to bring down the publishing industry from the inside. The Observer reported for instance that Eggers had enemies in the industry actively hoping for him to fail: they have ‘long considered Eggers to be a troublesome maverick and . . . see his latest 66

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venture as a quixotic attempt to undermine their dominance of the book world’.6 By contrast, the Wall Street Journal cast Eggers as a political rebel in the mode of Thomas Paine, continuing America’s tradition of self-publishing while having the foresight to blend history with modern technology and keep faith with his early supporters.7 Either way, Eggers’s decision to self-publish was inevitably understood as a political move. Y.S.K.O.V not only heralded a new business for Eggers it also marked a new beginning for his literary identity. McSweeney’s Books, with its commitment to nurturing new authors, independent retailers and charitable social work, repositioned Eggers as a rebel with a cause. In rejecting the large advance that he would have received from a big publisher, Eggers proved that money wasn’t his primary motivation; in deciding to publish himself he demonstrated that he didn’t buy into the artificially generated hype that fuelled the corporate publishing machine; and by reinvesting all the profits from his book into publishing new writers and educating young people, he illustrated that, in the words of one senior editor, he was ‘on the side of the underdogs’.8 No longer the self-aware narcissist of A.H.W.O.S.G, Eggers became a thoughtful humanitarian, a change also demonstrated by the new book’s shift in genre (from memoir to novel), setting (the United States to the rest of the world), and mode of production (from corporate publisher to independent, self-publishing). Evidently, change was on his mind. MAKING AMENDS

Y.S.K.O.V is a pseudo-spiritual parable that deals with guilt and grief on the part of the first world, particularly the United States, confronted with staggering disparities between wealth and poverty, privilege and hardship. ‘We were given things others have not been given. We had a clean 7-11 within walking distance,’ observes protagonist Will Chmliewski (Y.S.K.O.V, 261). With his name portending his own death, Will speaks to readers from beyond the grave, telling them of his attempt to leave ‘a testament’ by making amends for the privilege he has enjoyed. To overcome an all-pervading sense of guilt acquired after a sudden financial windfall, Will devises a simple scheme for relieving himself of his unwanted money: he will travel the world on a whirlwind tour distributing it directly to those who need it. With the assistance of his friend Hand, Will sets off to 67

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circumnavigate the globe and rid himself of his money and his lingering sense of helplessness. Eggers has acknowledged the novel’s preoccupation with the moral obligations and ambiguities of humanitarian aid: ‘[y]ou can draw parallels to American foreign aid, on one level, at least; it’s rife with complications and it always pisses someone off . . .’9 Eggers expanded on this philosophy in an interview with the New Yorker, noting that too many people build ethical roadblocks to action: A lot of people overintellectualize philanthropy, and we question our purer instinct, which is to just jump out of the car and do everything we can to bring that person – on the street or living in a hut in Senegal – to the same level of comfort we enjoy ourselves. And that we can’t or won’t always do that creates a horrible kind of cognitive dissonance, which we bury in all kinds of specious and ultimately patronizing notions of what’s best for those who need the help.10 The novel attempts to deconstruct these complications, but ultimately concludes that attempting to do the right thing will always involve ‘pissing someone off’ and therefore it should be accepted prima facie that good intentions are an acceptable justification for any outcome. It is significant that Eggers’s objection to the illogic of many philanthropic self-justifications (that sometimes we do nothing, and that this is always inexcusable) is the same reasoning he uses to defend himself against accusations that he sold out: I guess I’ve always been attracted to people who say yes, who overflow with ideas, energy, and who want things done the way they’ve dreamed them and, just as importantly, want them done right away. Accordingly, I’m murderously frustrated with people who are ambivalent about making things, who can think of reasons not to make things, who watch the bottom line, who can wait six months or two years to bring something in the world. I honestly want these people dead.11 Y.S.K.O.V may explicitly engage with the politics of charity but contains a hidden allegorical allusion to Eggers’s feeling of frustration regarding the production of his identity as an author in complicity with the commercial motives of the publishing industry. Comparisons 68

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between Will and Eggers are easily nurtured by the author’s insistence on the creative imperative, and his vigorous denunciations of the profit motive (particularly in his exchanges with those who accuse him of selling out) and the novel’s emphasis upon the inherently corrupting force of money. ‘My confusion knew no limits,’ says Will of his bounty, ‘and now I would get rid of it, or most of it, and believed purging would provide clarity’ (Y.S.K.O.V, 4). Early critical responses to the novel also noted that Will’s desire to escape the United States and make peace with his guilty conscience seemed to echo the author’s own confusion and self-disgust.12 ‘On more than a few occasions,’ notes critic John Freeman, ‘Eggers is exorcising the demons of his own recently minted celebrity on the page. Certain descriptions of Will’s anxiety over his capriciously acquired money sound much like an over-toured author, wondering if he’d made some sort of Faustian bargain.’13 Will is similarly disgruntled and cynical after a lucrative deal involving the use of his image on the packaging of a lightbulb. So I’d been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that’s what it was. My boss had a brochure he has his son make up on the computer, a two-fold Xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. [. . .] So next thing I know there’s a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb. [. . .] My outline burned into the minds of millions! But then I came back down, crashing. It was an outline, it was reductive. It was nothing. (Y.S.K.O.V, 41–2) Such is the nature of celebrity – thrilling but strangely unsatisfying. Crafted almost literally in Eggers’s own shadow, Will experiences a giddy ambivalence about his situation. He is ashamed not just because of the trivial way in which he has acquired his money, and its uselessness to him, but because, by capitulating to the market he has sold himself, he is no longer in control of his own image and no longer able to determine what he represents. If Will, like Eggers, feels that he has sold himself out, then he also arrives at a similar conclusion regarding how best to make amends: he will take back control by ‘doing it himself’. 69

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Writing about guilt and the practice of reparation, the anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert note that in many societies the readmission of the individual into society occurs as a result of a sacrifice for the sake of others: [The guilty party] find[s] in sacrifice the means of redressing equilibriums that have been upset: by expiation they redeem themselves from social obloquy . . . and re-enter the community. . . . The social norm is thus maintained without danger to themselves, without diminution for the group.14 It is this solidarity with the group which Eggers identifies as central to the successful continuation of his career, and which Will seeks to achieve with his absurd philanthropic scheme. Rebalancing the system is Will’s metaphor throughout Y.S.K.O.V for the charity mission he undertakes: ‘There is disparity and our instinct it to create parity, immediately,’ he explains to his mother. ‘Our instinct is to split our bank account with the person who has nothing’ (Y.S.K.O.V, 126). This is not simply a case of making things fair. Will actively repudiates the value of money and talks of wealth as a contamination, a pollutant that effects his ability to understand who he is. ‘God I hated this money and this was why; it cast me and refracted my vision – [we were now the guys] on the plane who should be robbed and stabbed and later dragged around by their penises’ (Y.S.K.O.V, 39). Likewise, Eggers’s rejection of the primacy of money to his ambitions as an author can be understood in terms of the way he was re-cast as a sellout after the success of his memoir. ‘You can’t claim I give a whoop about sales or money or any of that shit,’ as he told Kirkpatrick via email.15 Will fears being regarded as ‘those American guys on the plane’ who will be exploited and victimized. In Eggers’s case the identity to be feared is ‘corporate-owned Author’, subject to the industry’s value system: advances, endorsements, writing commissions, and double-page, full-colour magazine spreads. Denouncing his interest in wealth and reinvesting his profits into his publishing enterprise Eggers also denounces the author as a commodity. He explains in his ‘Sellout Rant’ that, [t]here’s a power in the knowledge that someone desires what you have. It can become a commodity, something tiny and precious that you keep tight to your chest for the fear that it might be taken 70

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away. Or you can give it away to everyone, every single day, in some seemingly meaningless transaction. You can let it slip from your hands and, instead of clenching your fist to save it, open your hand wide and let it drop. Let it go.16 This statement is, effectively, a declaration of principles. Instead of ‘buying into’ discourses about selling out Eggers takes an alternative path: he will let go of concerns about legitimacy and work according to a system of open distribution. Asked by a journalist if he identified with Will’s feeling that ‘this stuff was windfall you couldn’t justify?’ Eggers provided an evasive but nonetheless revealing response: ‘I guess all I can say is that I like to keep the funds in circulation. I’m impatient about money. I want to see it do things, right away. Generally, I’d rather it didn’t pass through my hands, if it’s not absolutely necessary.’17 It is noteworthy that from the point of his ‘Sellout Rant’ onwards Eggers talks more and more in metaphors of exchange and circulation. Clearly, business and finance are on his mind as he formulates the projects that will become McSweeneys Books and 826 Valencia. Even more salient is his use of metonomy in these comments. Eggers talks of not wishing money to ‘pass through his hands’ and explains his new open attitude to creative credibility by contrasting it to the clenched fists of those who are possessive. These symbolic hands represent two distinct attitudes to the commercialization of creative work. Eggers’s strategy, and by extension his new publishing model, aims to avoid the greedy, possessive commercial model of clenched fists, in favour of standing open handed (and open armed) ready to embrace the reading public. Eggers’s talk of ‘circulation’ reminds readers of his earlier plea in A.H.W.O.S.G to become ‘the lattice, the center of the lattice. Let me be the conduit. [. . .] let me be the strong-beating heart that brings blood to everyone!’ (A.H.W.O.S.G, 210). Here, Eggers asks to be made the centre of a circulation system that carries neither blood nor money, but rather a shared cultural value. This desire, tinged as it is with the frisson of celebrity’s power, is, at a deeper level, motivated by Eggers’s search for community, belonging and agency. In his early career it is possible to understand both Might and McSweeney’s as instantiations of this goal: exclusive communities of common values, kept ‘tight to the chest’, gripped by clenched fists, for fear of contamination or diminution. The publication of Y.S.K.O.V by McSweeney’s Books provides Eggers with the opportunity to redress 71

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this network of circulation. No longer anxious, Eggers has finally ‘let go’: ‘I am here to tell you that I have, a few years ago, found my way out of that thicket of comparison and relentless suspicion and judgment. And it is a nice feeling.’18 PASS IT ON

Circulation involves literal movement (cash across the counter, travellers across the globe, or books across an audience). But with this movement comes other symbolic, affective flows that place individuals in closer relation to each other and which acknowledge shared values and responsibilities. Will’s impulse to distribute money while circling the globe, for instance, is guided by his sense that money should only be used as part of system of circulation that establishes and consolidates human bonds rather than being used as part of a commodity exchange. ‘The point is I don’t want it. And we like giving it. It’s a way to meet people, if nothing else,’ Will explains to his mother when she asks what he hopes to achieve (Y.S.K.O.V, 123). In The Gift, Mauss uses this idea of a trace or a connection between giver and receiver to illustrate the difference between standard concepts of ‘charity’ and systems of ‘gifting’. According to Mauss, in giving objects to another a man gives in addition, ‘himself and he does so because he owes himself – himself and his possessions – to others’. This action is completely distinct from charity where the individual gives without any kind of connection to the recipient.19 Effectively, charity is part of the capitalist system; it prioritizes the position of money in a given community. Gifts, by contrast – even when they comprise money – underline the primacy of human value before all else, with commercial value being almost entirely effaced. Will’s acts of philanthropy, motivated by his desire to meet people and, in doing so, affirm the love ‘implicit in every connection’ and correct the ‘constant sense of denial and imbalance’ (Y.S.K.O.V, 287), are experiments with the gift economy. With the conviction that wealth corrupts and exploits entirely, Will insists that his money be reinvested; he insists that it occupy a solely symbolic place in his relationships with the people he meets as he travels. He is, as Eggers explains, ‘trying to connect with people, with money as the handshake’.20 The handshake is an effective metaphor. Recalling Eggers’s statement that when it comes to publishing he’d rather money circulate 72

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instead of pass through his hands, Y.S.K.O.V can be read as Eggers’s exploration of the ethics surrounding an alternative order for the production, distribution and sale of books according to the principles of the gift economy. Discussing artistic production and consumption as exemplary of the gift economy, Lewis Hyde suggests that art is a gift in two senses. In the first sense, it is the result of an ineffable blessing conferred upon the individual and, in the second, it is the use of this talent for the appreciation of others. A pianist, for instance, not only has a gift for music but gives the gift of music to the audience when he or she performs. In Hyde’s formulation all artists are gift givers and all forms of creative practice can be understood as a challenge to the dominance of commodity exchange. While it is true that art can be bought and sold in the market place, Hyde proposes that this exchange is not essential, what is necessary, however, is the gift: [h]aving accepted what has been given to him . . . the artist . . . feels the desire, to make the work and offer it to an audience. The gift must stay in motion. ‘Publish or perish’ is an internal demand of the creative spirit.21 Unlike the system of consumption, gifts operate according to the principle of circulation: the open ended ‘passing on’ rather than a definitive exchange of one for another. As Hyde says, ‘the gift must always move.’22 Publishing, likewise, is reliant upon circulation and Eggers’s decision to begin his publishing enterprise by producing his own first novel demonstrates his commitment to the belief that books are not only commodities but gifts: items that move, passed from hand to hand from author to reader, building community and a sense of shared values. ‘If you care about your writing,’ he told the New Yorker, ‘you care about how it makes its way into the world, and self-publishing is one good way to make sure it comes out the way you’d envisioned.’23 Eggers had complete control over the entire production process for Y.S.K.O.V and as with A.H.W.O.S.G, paid careful attention to the textuality of the book, labouring over design, format and layout. The first edition of Y.S.K.O.V aims for austere simplicity in this regard: neither the title nor the author’s name appear on the front cover, there is no author photo, no dust jacket, no laudatory blurbs, and certainly no prologue, acknowledgements or appendix. 73

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The novel begins on the book’s cover with the opening paragraph embossed onto a thick, rough cardboard slab in large, block-capital letters. The premature commencement of the narrative reflects the urgency (both literal and thematic) alluded to in the text; it is as if Eggers, unable to be restrained by a commercial publisher’s long lead-time, is no more capable of being reined in by the bound pages of his work. In distinction from a corporate publisher’s imprint, Eggers ignored the convention of placing publishing and copyright information in the flyleaf (which in this case would otherwise interrupt the story) and instead prints this material at the back of the book, along with a note that explains how the profits from the novel will be used in the formation of the 826 Valencia scheme. While still distinctive, these devices signal a very different kind of paratextual game playing. Where A.H.W.O.S.G used the copyright information section to advertise its author (e.g. ‘Height: 5’11”; weight: 170; Eyes: blue; Hair: brown; Hands: chubbier than one would expect; Allergies: only to dander; Place on the sexual-orientation scale, with 1 being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay: 3’) Y.S.K.O.V resists any distraction from the story between front and back cover. The presentation of the novel announces Eggers’s effort to make more of his career than a reputation for cheap gimmicks. Critics, even those who were not convinced by Eggers’s talent for long-form fiction, generally noted approvingly that he had moved beyond self-aggrandizing tricks. Time magazine, for instance, posed the question, ‘who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly for American writing?’24 In his study of contemporary gift economies David Cheal compares the short-term profits of the market economy with the longterm interest in sustaining social solidarity that drives the economy of interpersonal relationships. Eggers himself notes how the distribution model prioritizes close contact with readers: ‘We’re really just hoping to get the book into the hands of those who want to read it, and then call it a day and move onto the next McSweeney’s book.’25 Eggers’s interest in getting the book ‘into the hands’ of enthusiastic readers formalizes the notion of the book as a gift to be passed hand to hand from author to reader. In this light the apocryphal suggestion that Eggers’s second book would be released as an individual copy to be mailed from person to person is not as ridiculous as it first seems. The specific conditions Eggers’s insisted upon in the production of his novel can be interpreted as a way of gifting 74

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to readers, downplaying the commercial transaction by favouring independent modes of distribution and publication. The Eggerscontrolled McSweeney’s imprint guaranteed that Y.S.K.O.V reaches its readers as a faithful recreation of the artist’s intent, as if it has passed directly from Eggers’s hands to the reader’s. Indeed, one of Eggers’s fans noted on his blog his excitement at being able to take part in a Y.S.K.O.V-style quest in order to find the book. I already have mine, I thought to myself. What a lucky dude I am . . . The thrills of finding this book almost out weigh [sic] the actual reading of it. Ya, I could have ordered it from mcsweeney’s [sic] but I wanted to investigate just how hard it would be for the average Joe (me) to find a copy in the real world!26 Eggers thrives on the creation of such moments of surprise and delight in his readers, invoking a spirit of communal fun designed to triumph over the banality of commodity exchange. Unsurprisingly, the action of Y.S.K.O.V provides no shortage of similar incidents in which Will and Hand attempt to overcome the awkwardness of handing money directly to strangers by contriving various games. Unlike the confused taxi drivers and taciturn street vendors the pair encounter, Eggers’s readers are keenly interested in positioning themselves as anything other than banal consumers and so become enthusiastic participants in the gifting game. To acknowledge that books are also gifts is to align oneself with an attractive political position whereby consumers of McSweeney’s Books are separated from other kinds of consumers and other corporate models of production/consumption and corporate amorality. The thoughtful presentation of a McSweeney’s produced book signals the publisher’s valuing of the talents of the author along with a shared investment in what might be termed ‘publishing politics’: the belief that the book as a commodity can be recontextualized as a gift by means of its distribution and presentation. In the case of Y.S.K.O.V for example, Eggers affirms this by creating a book that is conspicuous about its value as a book (thick pages, cloth binding, colour photographs, etc.). He also uses limitations on production and distribution to ensure that the book’s status as a gift is preserved. ‘We’re not printing enough copies for it to be a bestseller,’ he explained to readers.27 Its limited availability means it is unable to circulate in the commercial publishing world, although, importantly, it is able to 75

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take on the value of a collector’s item. Similarly, the book’s limited mode of distribution makes it a ‘gift’ to independent booksellers, giving them a power within the market that they are normally denied. This limited circle of distribution affirms relationships between certain kinds of readers, writers and retailers and reflects a shared appreciation of what books represent. Finally, Y.S.K.O.V also ‘gives’ to young readers and writers via the creation of the 826 Valencia tutoring centre. According to John Frow, the opposition between commodities and works of art is often cast in terms of an opposition between the aesthetic of the gift and the aesthetic of the commodity. However this antagonism, he argues, fails to take into account the fact that ‘commodity objects can be conceived of as gifts, particularly when it comes to objects such as books that embody both the ineffable, organic artistic spirit and the uniform reproducibility of the mass produced object.’28 Eggers’s development of McSweeney’s Books and his desire to operate a publishing business within the sphere of the gift economy demonstrate how art and commodity not only coexist but are contained within the same object. Certainly, while sceptics saw the self-publication of Y.S.K.O.V as an attention-getting marketing exercise and an attempt to inflate his book’s value by limiting its availability, Eggers’s fans saw his limited edition release of the novel as a sign that he wished to participate in a system of distribution that emphasized a set of shared values about the tangible and aesthetic worth to be found in literature. Eggers makes this case very clearly when he states: We are talking about smaller and leaner operations that use the available resources and speed and flexibility of the market [. . .] to enable us to make not cheaper and cruder (print-on-demand) books or icky, cold, robotic (electronic) books, but better books, perfect and permanent hardcover books, to do so in a fiscally sound way, and to do so not just for old time’s sake, but because it make sense and gives us, us people with fingers and eyes, what we want and what we’ve always wanted: beautiful things, beautiful things in our hands – to be surrounded by little heavy papery beautiful things.29 Eggers’s incantation of the phrase ‘beautiful things’ reminds the reader that books are both aesthetic artefacts and commodities. 76

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Mary Gluck rightly observes, for instance, that ‘aesthetic beauty [is] only a form of exoticism whose function [is] to increase [a commodity’s] desirability in the marketplace not to separate it from other commodities.’30 Books are gifts, certainly in so far as they are imbued with the spirit of generosity between author and reader, and in the case of books produced by McSweeney’s they also happen to look like wonderfully wrapped presents. Mauss proposes that a gift exchange ‘is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things’.31 When a gift is passed from hand to hand what is at stake is not the thing itself, the object is simply a vehicle or ‘currency’ used to mediate social bonds. As gifts, books produced by Eggers are like the money used by Will and Hand: intended to be received symbolically (as ‘a handshake’), an instantiation of the bonds between people. Michael Meehan has argued that literary events where authors and readers meet are ‘a kind of de-industrialisation ritual, in which the “disembodied” and depersonalised commodity of the book, the packaged and boundaried text, is sheeted back to physical presence, and is finally authenticated by the reassuring presence of the author’.32 Eggers shares this passion for connection with his readers: I love meeting readers; that’s about the size of it. My favourite thing is to talk with the people who read a lot, just regular readers who love books. The media part of it often doesn’t have much to do with books; it’s wrapped up in so many other things: hype, distortion, weird motives, etc. So it’s more dubious and fraught than the more simple and personal experience between a writer and a reader.33 The literary readings and book signings that Eggers made famous with his unorthodox approach affirm the notion that the book is an extension of the person standing on either side of it (reader or writer): parts are made whole and words are made flesh. Writing for the online magazine of a Boston College, a student in attendance inadvertently illustrates this point. Excited to see Eggers close up while he signs copies of his book, she notes that, in the flesh, the author is ‘definitely buff’, his lecture is equally physical, being ‘[m]ore performance than reading’ since the author ‘knows how to work a room’. Most 77

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significant is the attention given to the way in which Eggers establishes a bond with each and every fan by carefully inscribing books. ‘Eggers sits at a table for an hour and a quarter, fully as long as his reading, individualizing each book with a slim felt pen. CURT, he writes at the top of one title page; at the bottom he draws a 3-D open box with the words “a box half-full of ennui & desperation”.’34 A journalist present at another of Eggers’s signings observed that he ‘actually decorates [books], using pen, paint and glitter’.35 Such elaborate personalization demonstrates Eggers’s interest in both the materiality of his work and the individualization of his relationships with readers. By offering to personalize and decorate the text, Eggers affirms both his book’s status a gift and his connection to the reader. To extend the metaphor of the gift, the book in Eggers’s hands also becomes its own greeting card. Readers who take the trouble to find his novel and attend his readings and signings demonstrate their eagerness to participate in this gifting spirit, cementing their bonds with the author and their support of his wider publishing project. As Meehan notes, signing books and meeting readers is ‘an attempt to resolve the conflict that has developed through the successful commodification and commercialization of the literary product’; it is a ‘literary tight-rope walk between intimacy and commodity’.36 According to Genette, an author’s inscription ‘leaves no room for uncertainty about the identity of its inscriber’.37 It signifies both authorship and ownership; it is always an assertion of the author’s rights over the work. The signature functions as a metonym for a person; it performs the function of making the work of art an extension of the artist’s personality. In Y.S.K.O.V Eggers uses the motif of Will signing traveller’s cheques to make this point, connecting authorship explicitly to the creation of capital: My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though. (Y.S.K.O.V, 40) These beautiful paper slips are made valuable by the mark of their owner. In this instance ownership and capital are united by the individual’s name. Frow proposes precisely this idea regarding the autograph of the author, viewing this action as one further illustration of the commingling of commodity and art. He suggests that the 78

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author’s signature is more than a statement of ownership, it is a function of the process of commodification in the publishing industry: ‘In the context of mass cultural production the authorial signature becomes less important as a creator of value than the construction of the author’s or artist’s or actor’s or performer’s name as the object of a brand recognition – a process closer to the trade mark . . . and one in which the artist is effectively corporatized.’38 It is this corporatization that Eggers seeks to resist through the establishment of his own publishing system. While he enthusiastically decorates his books, Eggers’s deprioritization of his autograph in favour of other personal touches is a considered attempt to write himself (as an authorcommodity) off the page. This reaffirms their status as well-wrapped, personalized gifts. His emphasis on the identity of the reader (e.g. ‘CURT’) and the simultaneous elision of his own name (e.g. often he simply prints his initials in the corner) imply that the books are less ‘his’ and more ‘ours’. As is apparent in everyday gifting rituals such as birthdays and weddings, gifts are often commodities, but rarely are they just commodities: they contain within them an ineffable magic. It is this ineffable magic that Eggers seeks to capture with McSweeney’s Books. Contrary to the popular logic that art and capital must remain diametrically opposed, Eggers’s business demonstrates that the production of books can take place within the gift economy. His is effectively a benevolent business model in which success and popularity are not devalued as such but revalued via their reinvestment of success into social good. In Eggers’s hands books are gifts that give not once (to the reader), but twice (to charity). Eggers thus makes consumption an activity that can be redeemed and reinvested with value despite its potentially corrupting effects. Indeed, redemption is both literal and metaphorical for Eggers: in the words of one journalist, he now deserves the praise and attention of the industry because ‘instead of merely cashing in, Mr. Eggers has opted for the visionary path. Any number of equally well-placed authors could make a similar move using existing technology, but only Mr. Eggers has displayed the entrepreneurial energy to take the leap.’39 If Y.S.K.O.V explores the possibility that a pile of cash can be understood as a symbolic gift of friendship, then McSweeney’s Books affirms the notion that a pile of books can constitute a bond between different members of a literary culture. Eggers’s invocation of books as ‘heavy papery beautiful things’ demonstrates a distinctive revaluing 79

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of books in the era of the multinational media conglomerates interested in books as merely cheap commodities or opportunities for ‘icky’ multi-platform expansion. McSweeney’s Books and the aesthetic it nurtures is both a reaction against transience, and an expression of how Eggers (and his adherents) feel about writing: words, and the worlds they conjure are a thing of incredible beauty, to be savoured and touched, and importantly, passed on. RESPONSIBILITY AND REDEMPTION

By using his high profile for something greater than the promotion of himself, Eggers appears to have taken a leaf from contemporary Hollywood where it is common for celebrities to invest their popular identities with social and political significance. Actors like Sean Penn and Angelina Jolie or musicians such as Chris Martin and Bono use their media visibility to throw attention onto important social and political issues including global debt, foreign aid and fair trade. While this has undoubtedly been a successful strategy it is not without its complications. The redeployment of consumption for global good walks a fine line: charity causes are often about, or the product of, poverty while consumption is predicated upon personalized wealth. Recent years have seen the growth of this celebrity activism in highly publicized campaigns such as Make Poverty History, in which the star-power of celebrities is mobilized to draw public attention to social ills and to motivate people to campaign for justice via their everyday consumption habits (e.g. fair trade). It is true that in an era of global mass communication, celebrities can seem more connected to the public, and thus, better suited than politicians and activists to mobilize support, but while this strategy has proved successful in raising awareness and funds, as Priyamvada Gopal says, ‘there is also no doubt that the very success of this mobilization has relied on a discursive enactment of concern accompanied by an insistent and comforting disavowal of material implication.’40 Eggers is not ignorant of this, indeed, in Y.S.K.O.V he has Will and Hand enact a version of this disavowal, demonstrating that the privileges of consumer culture have distanced individuals from their own accountability for suffering, and fostered an expectation of feel-good reward. Will notes for instance that his visions of handing

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out cash were wildly idealistic, self-aggrandizing fantasies fuelled, at least in part, by his own ignorance: We’d wanted to come in, with our flowers, and then sit with them, be welcomed in, fed, and we’d leave with new friends in Saly, and they’d be left with a gift commensurate to our appreciation. But where I’d pictured loud conversation and joking in broken English and bad French, we were instead skulking in the dark, making no sounds. At least we could unload some currency. (Y.S.K.O.V, 132–3) Will and Hand idealize the way in which their gifts might be received and anticipate nations populated by the quietly dignified impoverished who will, like them, see the money not only as a commodity but rather as a gesture of kindness and fellow-feeling. This disavowal of wealth is reminiscent of the rejection of capital that Bourdieu examines as essential to the operations of the artistic fields. In denying the value of money to themselves, and by extension, insisting upon this same denial in their recipients, the pair rigidly adhere to a set of values which appear selfless and generous while actually being motivated by personal gratification. In these circumstances, as Will acknowledges, while the potential exists to share a bond, it is just as plausible to approach things from a commercially pragmatic perspective: ‘at least we could unload some currency.’ Similarly, when the two travellers play a game of basketball with some local young men this expectation of disavowal brings about an unpleasant revelation of hidden power dynamics: ‘You are not such the clever guy,’ said Hand. ‘Your brother he got all the brains, eh?’ Hand was getting overconfident; the man knew no English, but continued nodding eagerly. ‘But you know why,’ Hand continued, ‘we gave to your brother three hundred of the dollars American? Because he didn’t ask for it. You, you are crass – you know of this word, crass? – so no money you have coming.’ (Y.S.K.O.V, 118) This is one of many unpleasant exchanges catalogued in the novel. Naively, the pair want to be welcomed as benevolent visitors (rather than wealthy tourists) and they punish and humiliate those who illuminate the fragility of this balance. In Will’s disappointed realization

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that he will not make new friends in Saly with his cash offerings there is an echo of Eggers’s own dissatisfaction at the failed promise of literary celebrity; in Hand’s aggressive tirade about financial purity there is an echo of the angry Eggers questioning the logic of disinterest and the sell out. Together, Will and Hand resemble the credibility-obsessed younger Eggers torn between longing for celebrity and legitimacy. In this respect Y.S.K.O.V illustrates an older, wiser Eggers quite consciously moving beyond the social, cultural and political position of his protagonists. The pair, incapable of confronting the poor as individuals, develop what Brouillette rightly identifies as ‘textual mediations’ (treasure maps, envelopes, notes and games) which are used as intermediaries in the process of passing cash hand-to-hand. This process allows them to ‘diffuse their guilt without confronting the poverty that is its cause’.41 The donkey plan was Hand’s. As we drove, hair still wet, we looked for donkeys standing alone so we could tape money to their sides for their owners to find. We wondered what the donkey owners would think. What would they think? We had no idea. Money taped to a donkey? It was a great idea, we knew this. The money would be within a pouch we’d make from the pad of graph paper we’d brought, bound with medical tape. On the paper Hand, getting Sharpie all over his fingers, wrote an [sic] note of greeting and explanation. That message: HERE I AM ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE. We saw many donkeys. But each time we saw a donkey, there was someone standing nearby. (95) The textual mediations of Will and Hand have resonance with Eggers’s much remarked upon interest in book design and paratextuality. His early devices and defences, such as the addition of M.W.K.W.W.M or the cash-back offers in the introduction to A.H.W.O.S.G, were the products of an author uneasy with the tightrope balance between capital and credibility.42 But, where Will and Hand struggle to see themselves as anything other than wealthy tourists trying (and often failing) to do the right thing, Eggers has moved beyond using his book as self-conscious device to legitimate his own authorial identity. Will and Hand serve as ciphers for Eggers own journey through the global media(ted) landscape. But where the pair find themselves mired in uncomfortable contradictions and complicity, Eggers, thanks to the self-publication and reinvestment of profits from Y.S.K.O.V, 82

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qualifies his position about economic disavowal. His aversion to contemporary corporate publishing is grounded in more than posturing about cool credibility and legitimacy. Moving on from the critiques of fans during the ‘backlash’ phase of his career, Eggers used Y.S.K.O.V as an opportunity to make good on his comments in the sellout rant that ‘[w]hat matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.’43 The production and distribution of Y.S.K.O.V demonstrated Eggers redressing his earlier disavowal of financial interest in artistic matters. In distinction to the position he took publicly during the promotion of A.H.W.O.S.G where he rejected suggestions of commercial interest, Eggers now can legitimately call for his books to become as popular as possible, without any suggestion that such ambition is personally motivated. Who would not want a charity to earn as much money as possible? As allegory, Y.S.K.O.V is most heavily informed by Eggers’s musings on his own success. The shared concerns that exist between protagonist and author suggest that the novel is a commentary on the ambiguities and ethical uncertainties the author has experienced in the literary field. By relocating capital from the meaningless excess of success and celebrity into the meaningful field of social contribution, Eggers turns his reputation as an enfant terrible on its head. Said a journalist at the time of Eggers’s launch of McSweeney’s Books, ‘[w]hat is so fascinating about Eggers as a public figure is that he has found a way to take existing concern about how to give back to the world and make it both his life’s passion and his artistic obsession. . . . Whereas once his book tours were Dada-ist art shows, now they are fund-raisers’.44 Eggers is committed to demonstrating to his audience that he is not motivated by a desire to be either culturally legitimate or popularly recognized but socially relevant and personally inspiring. ‘I’m just very simplistic about the fact that if you have something extra and someone else doesn’t have enough, you try to equal it out. And it’s a very clumsy process and you look silly doing it, which is what Velocity was about.’45 The message here is that Eggers no longer minds looking silly. Or, to put it another way, selling out is necessarily good. As Eggers explained to the audience at the WebbWarring Institute for cancer research in Denver, Colorado, ‘[s]ometimes I think all we do, selling stocks or writing books, is pushing us toward doing something for people in need. It’s a big, fat, Christmaspresent kind of thing to be able to be part of something good.’46 83

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‘I’m not super-interested in my own thoughts and life . . . When you put out a memoir, there it is. Now let’s move on to anything else.’ Eggers to a journalist1 Eggers’s journey through the literary landscape has seen him move from hipster upstart to cagey prima donna to patron publisher. Throughout his career media coverage has focused on his ability to set a standard in literary trends. He remains nothing if not representative of his generation, even if now that means being a typical example of Generation X grown-up and settled-down. Now close to 40, Eggers is more sanguine about talking to the press and the press is more accommodating regarding his success and his self-interest: There is probably no cooler figure in American letters than Eggers: his prose is luminous, playful, original; he is the publisher of the ultimate in-crowd literary quarterly McSweeney’s; and, with Vendela Vida, his novelist wife, he produced the screenplay to Away We Go, the movie directed by Sam Mendes. And yet the figure before me looks like any slacker guy you would find huddled over his laptop in a corner of Starbucks: medium height, generic fleece, camping shop shoes, curly mop and a manner that, far from being knowing and cliquey, is warm, interested and inclusive. Above all, Eggers is a passionate advocate for writing, not as something grandstanding or masturbatory but as a force for change, a means of self-realisation.2

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Profiles like these make it obvious that Eggers’s reinvestment of his celebrity into worthy humanitarian projects has silenced criticism that he is motivated by commercial self-interest. Relations between Eggers and journalists are noticeably more warm (the ‘generic fleece’) and fuzzy (the ‘curly mop’ hair-do). Eggers flourished in the mainstream even as he has maintained his eccentric dissent against it. Keeping in mind the modest ambition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern with its 1,500 copies distributed by hand, it is remarkable to consider Eggers’s publishing success and his business’s growth: three magazines (McSweeney’s, the monthly review The Believer and the DVD magazine of short films, Wholpin), three book imprints and countless charitable enterprises devoted to literacy projects. The secret to his success is his recognition that readers matter at least as much as authors. Eggers told Forbes magazine that his business model for McSweeney’s Books was straightforward, ‘[w]e were determined to rely only on the support of readers. We grew only in relation to what readers would support.’3 Eggers endorses a symbiotic relationship: a publisher can only expand in relation to the support offered by readers. In challenging times, such as the recent financial downturn, McSweeney’s reached out directly to readers to ask for help. When the parent company responsible for the publisher’s distribution went bankrupt in 2007, Eggers made a direct appeal to readers to show their support: ‘Hey, if you ever wanted to buy a McSweeney’s book, now would be the time.’4 With the response of fans to this call and the auctioning of special items from well-known contributors, McSweeney’s Books was able to make up the $130,000 loss in earnings.5 This kind of relationship between readers and writers illustrates the new mode of direct commitment to the public and public issues that Eggers advocates. He has used his celebrity status to engage in a form of fun public diplomacy for his agenda regarding the role of literacy, testimony and print publishing in the present era. In his book Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future Joseph Epstein predicts that the unchecked consolidation of the literary industry by global media conglomerates will slowly dissipate with the emergence of new technologies for reading and publishing. Written in 2002 Epstein’s vision is slowly taking shape. Emboldened by the relative ease of digital production and distribution, small publishing ventures are returning to the literary landscape. Writers

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are increasingly conscious of the advantages of working with independent editors and publishers, and some have decided to publish their work exclusively online while others work directly with a printer, cutting out the need to have a text vetted by the marketing and promotions department. These are developments that McSweeney’s Books took as guiding principles in their early development, rejecting the inefficiency of a publishing industry controlled by multinational business conglomerates. As Lorraine Adams observes [McSweeney’s] has been a useful counterpoint to the mainstream publishing scene . . . it’s the first bona fide literary movement in decades – with all the old-fashioned energy that such a term implies. And with his dedication to self-publishing, Eggers has given the literary world a needed jolt, proving that a small press can still flourish in an age of conglomerates.6 Epstein writes of publishing returning to its roots as a cottage industry, and it is difficult to think of another enterprise like McSweeney’s Books that would better illustrate this scenario. What is crucial to Eggers’s success is not simply his control of the means of production, but his management of the production of his persona and his ability to put this into the service of his business. Just as the literary industry is presently undergoing significant and comparably rapid change as a result of digital communication and information networks, these same factors are reshaping discourses of identity (and publicity) in all social and cultural fields. The construction of the self and the management of public perception are activities that every individual undertakes each day as they go about life online at work, or home, or school. Eggers’s early career was marked by similar acts of self-presentation. At times this conflicted with the dominant representation of Eggers produced by and within the media. Instead of ‘being himself’, Eggers was read as willingly invested in the promotional structures of the publishing and media industries. Having begun his career in what could be called an ‘interpersonal register’ which blended his private self with his public role, Eggers attracted legions of fans. As his popularity grew, the authenticity of this persona was questioned. Eggers came to be not so much a well-known author but shorthand for a certain type of cultural fashion. Eggers was thus a cultural commodity, effortlessly imitated

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and just as easily degraded. It was through the establishment of his own publishing company that Eggers was able to wrest control of the ‘economy of the persona’ hitherto controlled by the publishing and media industries. If Norman Mailer boasted of penning Advertisements for Myself, Eggers can lay claim to having built a ‘Cottage Industry for Myself’. In every release subsequent to A.H.W.O.S.G Eggers has moved further and further away from the tone of ambivalent self-promotion that characterized his memoir. He noted to a journalist early in 2010 that ‘[i]n a lot of ways the guy in it is me but also he isn’t . . . in a lot of ways writing it was an act of rebellion.’7 Today Eggers’s rebellion is professional rather than personal. At times criticized for having taken J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as a role model, Eggers has turned from Neverland’s Lost Boys to become an advocate for Sudan’s real-life Lost Boys, along with founding an entire imprint, Voices of Witness, dedicated to documenting humanrights abuses in the world’s trouble zones. Giving voice to the silenced and championing supposedly lost causes is Eggers’s passion. Recently he has campaigned for the potential for newspapers in a digital era, devoting an entire issue of McSweeney’s to the production of a complete daily paper. His innovative tutoring centres are screen-free zones where children are encouraged to write with pencils and paper and are given the opportunity to edit and produce their own books. Even the design of the centres has been themed to recreate various lost vocations, supplying goods to present day time travellers, pirates, and superheroes. At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, when young readers are feared to be a near-extinct species, when the voice of the individual is drowned-out by the spin of the media cycle, Eggers’s projects illustrate his contrarian energy and indefatigable optimism. Indeed, ‘The Optimist’ was a working title for Eggers’s Believer magazine; a project that was yet another illustration of his opposition to the rules of the publishing industry. Corporate publishers, the literary industry and the mainstream media all react to a culture that values speed, currency and cleverness (features which were arguably responsible for Eggers’s early success with A.H.W.O.S.G). Eggers’s enterprises make conspicuous display of having abandoned these qualities in favour of consideration, tradition and simplicity. With the creation of McSweeney’s

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in the form of a daily newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama, for example, Eggers sought to reassure readers that, there are still a billion books sold every year. And there are about a billion newspapers printed every day. I understand when people are worried about aspects of the business, and as a small and always struggling publisher, we worry at McSweeney’s too, but there’s an element of doomsaying that’s just premature.8 The purpose of the Panorama is to illustrate that any medium which recognized its strengths and could demonstrate these to its audience could succeed. Eggers regards this as an article of faith, telling New York audiences that should they doubt that print was still a strong and valuable medium, they should email him directly: ‘I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.’9 This kind of optimism and confidence can be infectious, particularly in a climate where individuals often feel disempowered. ‘WE’ ARE THE WORLD

For an author famed for his much-imitated whimsical literary style, Eggers’s work almost always returns to questions of pain, suffering and injustice. In A.H.W.O.S.G the focus is Eggers’s own pain and grief. Y.S.K.O.V addresses the suffering of the individual in comparison to the injustices that take place on the global stage. Eggers’s collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry10 (H.W.A.H), is similarly interested in questions of accountability but is markedly more melancholic and modest. As with all of Eggers’s books these themes are echoed by the form: H.W.A.H is an austere all-black book pointedly designed to resemble a moleskin notebook (complete with elastic band around the cover) rather than a piece of commercial literature (Eggers’s name and the collection’s title are printed on a thin removable wrap-around paper sash). Many of the stories in the collection are simply titled with one word (‘Quiet’) or are given straight, descriptive headings (‘What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him From His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust’). Modesty seems to be the raison d’être for the story entitled ‘There Are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself,’ which consists of five blank pages. Where the Eggers of A.H.W.O.S.G was determined to 88

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keep nothing to himself, How We Are Hungry suggests there is wisdom to be gained by paying attention to gaps and the silences. In his memoir Eggers described himself and his readers as cannibals devouring themselves and each other – anything to fill up the void and provide a temporary sense of purpose. There are no cannibals in How We Are Hungry only confused young Americans trying to satiate their metaphysic hunger for some form of transcendence in their lives. Eggers’s fiction identifies the way that travel has become a lifeline for such characters, offering them a pre-packaged quest narrative ready for their digestion. Y.S.K.O.V hints at this with Will and Hand playing hyperactive overgrown children; seekers not entirely sure what they are seeking. In the short story ‘Up the Mountain, Coming Down Slowly’11 Eggers gives readers a fully realized portrait of this situation with Rita, a young woman climbing Mt Kilimanjaro with an adventure tour group, EcoHeaven Tours. The name of the company is significant: Rita is a pilgrim-adventurer in pursuit of an authentic ‘heaven’ at the summit of Kilimanjaro, far from the pains and pressures of home. On the course of the tour she is confronted by the implausibility of her own expectations regarding both the transformative power of travel, and more directly, the ethics of tourism. She is surprised to learn for instance that with five hikers and two guides the group will be bringing 32 porters. ‘“I had no idea,” Rita says to Grant, behind her. “I pictured a few guides and maybe two porters.” She has a sudden vision of servants carrying kings aboard gilt thrones, elephants following, trumpets announcing their progress’ (H.W.A.H, 152). Rita’s colonial vision is a prescient warning of what lies ahead on her journey. A few days into the climb several of the porters are found one morning frozen to death in an inadequately sealed tent. Rita is horrified, ‘[s]he would never have come this far had she known it would be like this, all wrong, so cold and with the rain coming through the tents on those men’ (H.W.A.H, 198). Inevitably, her suspension of disbelief falters just as she and her fellow climbers do on their progress up the slope. What Rita had expected was a modern, progressive experience which would ‘give back’ to the local community, not thinly veiled neo-colonialist exploitation. Coming to terms with the problems and inequities that must be confronted even when individuals have good intentions, Rita realizes her complicity is unavoidable. In another of Eggers’s short stories tellingly titled ‘Another’, an unnamed protagonist explores Egypt on horseback primarily, it seems, to prove to his hosts that he 89

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can tolerate the difficulty of travelling in a country where he believes himself unwelcome. As a remedy to the emptiness he experiences at home the man takes a tour of the pyramids of Egypt. While he constantly anticipates violence directed towards him he is ultimately disappointed to find he is just another man. Approached by an Egyptian man looking to make a few American dollars, the narrator takes up the offer to ride to the Red Pyramid on horseback. What he sees there puts into perspective his position as one more step in a circle of commodification. – What did you expect? his eyes asked me. – I wanted to know that I wouldn’t die like a bug, I said. – Sorry, he said. These men died, were embalmed, and have been stolen. People sold them again and again. Their every effect, their bones were traded for gold. You’ll be no better off. – There’s no reason to go inside these pyramids, I said. – No, not really, he said. – We learn nothing inside, I said. – Nothing, he said. (H.W.A.H, 15) Eggers’s narrator seems both surprised and relieved to learn that the tombs are empty, meaningless. The immortal kings he expected to find inside were simply bodies, now gone, exchanged for money years ago. If Y.S.K.O.V’s declarative title with its invocation of the first person pronoun implied the presence of some oppositional ‘you’ in counterpoint to the hyperactive duo of ‘our’ Will and Hand, then the ‘we’ of H.W.A.H implies the existence of a group, however loosely united, in a shared attempt to find a meaning in life greater than themselves. Critics have given various (and implicitly pejorative) names to the cohort of young people who identify with Eggers – Eggersians, McSweeneyites, etc. – constructing them as shallow followers of fashion. However, this collective ‘we’ is more meaningfully defined in terms of their restless search to engage with the world around them. Eggers’s stories encapsulate the interests, concerns, attitudes, experiences and sensibilities of this ill-defined ‘we’ and give voice to their desire for meaningful investment in everyday life. Reading Eggers’s short fiction it is apparent that his perspective has changed since he penned the defensive note in the copyright page of his memoir shielding himself against accusations of complicity 90

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with multinational corporations. Stories like ‘Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly’ suggest that the impact of ‘big companies’ on the ‘daily lives and hearts of individuals’ is most certainly ‘worth worrying about’. While the stories themselves do little more than catalogue the restless adventures of characters trying to balance individual desires with their responsibilities to others, external to his narratives Eggers offers readers opportunities for their own redemption and reinvestment. It was upon return from his own travels that Eggers had his moment of conversion. Returning from self-imposed exile in Costa Rica and Iceland to start up the tutoring centre 826 Valencia, Eggers told a journalist, ‘I felt like I was back where I knew what I was doing on the planet. I was liberated by a sense of obligation. I knew how I could be useful.’12 Just as the protagonists in Eggers’s work come to realize their accountability, Eggers recognizes his obligations as an author. The first step in honouring these responsibilities involved Eggers reinvesting all the royalties from his work into charitable trusts established in association with his literary collaborators. The commitment to encouraging young people to tell their own stories via the work of the 826 Valencia projects has grown to include projects that more directly engage with human rights and empowerment through story. Eggers devised the Voices of Witness project which has produced oral histories from exonerated prisoners in the United States, witness of the New Orleans’s Hurricane Katrina, refugees from the Sudanese war and those persecuted by the regime in Burma. These important testimonies give major geo-political crises the intimately affecting tenor that comes of first person experience. The Voices of Witness publishing project is a more palpably political project, but, like McSweeney’s before it, demonstrates Eggers’s commitment to giving outsiders an opportunity to be heard. In his creative practice too, Eggers has continued to craft stories about suffering and individual responsibility, broadening his range and adopting new voices and perspectives. Eggers has pioneered the form of ‘autobiography-by-proxy’: working in collaboration, he has produced two books, What is the What and Zeitoun13 both inspired by first person testimony. As an author Eggers aims to connect, but not to use his own personal life as the basis for that connection. His charitable and humanitarian projects represent the dissolution of his public ego; he no longer represents himself, but stands for a broad ranging charitable enterprise. Moving away from narcissistic narrative 91

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entirely What is the What uses the real life story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng as the basis for a narrative described as a novel. Deng was a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war and escaped the violence in his homeland by fleeing across the country to a refugee camp in Kenya, and eventually, the United States. What is the What tells his story, blending the interviewing and research practices of journalism with a fiction writer’s concern for story, pace and structure. There are distant thematic echoes of A.H.W.O.S.G in What is the What: the defiance of generic convention, the suffering of orphaned youth, the endurance of pain that breeds an unbidden optimism. But unlike Eggers’s earlier work, What is the What was almost universally acclaimed by critics. Billed as ‘the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’ and ‘a novel by Dave Eggers’ superficially the novel sees Eggers deliver on his reputation for fooling with literary convention, but with Deng’s story Eggers offers concrete justification for his authorial obfuscation: ‘I got out of the way completely and put it in his voice so no one thought about me and what I thought. I think it worked that way, anyhow.’14 The critical endorsement of What is the What seems partly derived from Eggers’s decision to erase himself as author of the story. Eggers seems to suggest his new strategy in assuming the voices of others is inspired by his fatigue with his own voice. ‘Even using the first person; I’ve been desperately trying to avoid that,’ Eggers has said.15 Reportedly, the author asked friends to read the manuscript of What is the What and assist him in weeding out any traces of his voice, while Deng himself explains in the novel’s preface that Eggers ‘concocted this novel, approximating my own voice’.16 It was an effective strategy, welcomed by critics as evidence of Eggers’s development and maturity as a writer. As with the reinvestment of profits from his books into charitable projects, Eggers now reinvests his authorial identity into the life stories of others, using his name to lend their stories attention. There are good intentions behind this drive of Eggers’s to erase his presence while still using his name as an author. As Deng explains, ‘[t]his book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war.’17 In contrast to the interpersonal register of A.H.W.O.S.G which blended Eggers’s consciousness as an author with his consciousness as a subject of his story, in What is the What, Eggers’s

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name remains but his presence as author is absent. One very pertinent consequence of this is that Eggers’s is able to continue to write and explore ideas about suffering and hope while being immune from critical attacks on his own life and person. After the success of What is the What Eggers turned his attention to the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American man caught in the turmoil of Hurricane Katrina. Published late in 2009, Zeitoun saw Eggers cement his reputation as a human rights advocate. Moving ever closer to journalism, Eggers documentation of Zeitoun’s story unites several important political themes of the early twenty-first century: the fear of terrorism, the failures of the Bush administration in the United States and a broader global fear regarding the individual’s fragility in the face of unstoppable disaster. Told from the perspective of Abdulrahman and his wife Kathy, Eggers’s narration is not objectively neutral but nevertheless inhabits a space that is both objective and affective. It is as if Eggers has evacuated the story and assumed the perspective of his interlocutors. ‘I consider the book as much theirs as mine’ Eggers told an interviewer.18 This relinquishing of ownership goes outside the confines of the narrative with Eggers’s donation of all royalties from these books to charitable funds established by his collaborators. In the case of Deng, the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation was responsible for the construction of the Marial Bai Secondary School in Southern Sudan, the first high school in the region. Likewise, the Zeitoun Foundation has redistributed money from the sale of Eggers’s book to various grants for the purposes of rebuilding New Orleans and developing interfaith understanding. Collaboration and community are creative imperatives for Eggers and in Deng and Zeitoun he has found people who share his optimistic spirit and commitment to the reformation of community. In both these accounts of suffering and injustice there lingers an indefatigable optimism, a belief that bearing witness and testimony are the antecedents of all stories. In What is the What, for instance, Eggers, assuming Deng’s voice, reassures readers that, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. . . . I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. . . . I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill

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today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (What is the What, 474–5) If the writing Eggers produces and publishes can be said to have a message, it is that literature is a recuperative medium. The sharing implicit in storytelling makes it an act of hope and optimism. ‘Books, inherently, require faith,’ Eggers has said. Faith in an author that he or she will reward the many hours you’ll spend in those pages, faith that a good story will be told, a lesson will be learned, a light will be shone upon a dim corner of the world.19 Eggers’s stories evince his interest in the dim corners of the world and give form to the experience of many of his readers who, like the author, are themselves confronted by two seemingly distinct versions of contemporary life simultaneously, ‘an abstract and universal consumerism where all local differences are effaced’ and the alternative, ‘an ethical recognition of economic and human rights and cultural differences’.20 McSweeney’s Books provides a model for the publishing industry that seizes the advantages of the capitalist system and harnesses them to positive political ends. Global distribution chains can be used to sell books whose profits are redirected into local, community projects such as literacy centres, disaster relief, and humanrights causes. Eggers is unique in the industry but this model has been successfully employed in other areas of business. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is perhaps the most recognized example of the benevolent capitalist, but there are many prominent international figures that endorse the notion that individuals can and should acknowledge their social responsibility: the former US President Bill Clinton, the CEO of Google Larry Brilliant, the combined starpower of actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. This philanthropic model is a product of our times. The reinvestment of profit into humanitarian projects demonstrates how it is possible to ‘have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concerns 94

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etc)’.21 Žižek gives these figures the elegant sobriquet of ‘liberal communists’ since their rhetoric proposes that ‘the market and social responsibility are not opposites.’ The goal here, he explains, is ‘not to earn money, but to change the world’.22 Eggers shares their ambition. With the development of his humanitarian enterprises Eggers [gives] readers the tools to understand . . . [he is] motivated by a desire other than a will to achieve a cultural greatness not tainted by interaction with commodity culture. That aversion can instead be a sincere form of social responsibility motivated by general cultural guilt and humanitarian sympathies.23 Taking the ‘do-it-yourself’ mantra nurtured by the 1990s independent arts culture, Eggers has introduced it into a global humanitarian context. He is more than a ‘Literary Tastemaker’, he is what sociologist Henrik Bang calls an ‘Everyday Maker’. Bang’s work investigates the new humanitarian sensibility born of globalization and digitization and perhaps most famously mobilized during the successful election campaign of US President Barrack Obama which featured the now iconic posters promoting ‘HOPE’, ‘CHANGE’ and ‘PROGRESS’. The ‘Everyday Maker’ is not driven by ideology but individual development. ‘Making a difference’ in the wider world is referenced against one’s own self-improvement.24 Individuals need to feel directly involved and see the outcomes of their investment. According to Bang, their credo is ‘do it yourself’, along with: do it where you are; do it for fun, but also because you find it necessary; do it with self-confidence and show trust in yourself; and do it with the system, if need be.25 With his endorsement of the liberal communist approach to social change and his insistence that fun and philanthropy need not be oppositional, Eggers is a prototypical Everyday Maker. Far from the rebel of A.H.W.O.S.G, the ‘freak in secondhand velour’ who sought to stand out in order to fit in, Eggers is now, in the words of fellow-writer Rick Moody, ‘the Bono of Literature’.26 Eggers explains that, Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn’t so good at that. I guess I’m very practical. My mom taught me that. That’s why I get along with Zeitoun 95

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so well, and with Valentino. They build things. They make things happen.27 Today’s iconoclast builds rather than breaks. The success of Eggers’s enterprises can be understood in terms of his recognition of a likeminded collective ‘we’, the ‘everyday makers’, who identify with the author artistically, socially, culturally and politically. While avid consumers they also seek to establish relationships which extend beyond the usual commodified contracts of our culture – be it writer/reader; book seller/book buyer or even tourist/ host. Eggers’s reinvestment of his success can be understood in relation to this pursuit of redemption. The combination of collective action and individual responsibility which typify contemporary global economic and communications networks also drive Eggers’s publishing and charitable enterprises. Beginning with his frustration at the lack of speed and foresight amongst major publishers Eggers used digital communications networks to foster a global community of supporters, in turn, these supporters of Eggers’s authorship have been mobilized into a community of supporters of Eggers’s philanthropy, thus allowing them to make tangible contributions to the lives of others. The system demonstrates that it is possible for commodity culture to be ‘not merely the means through which we see each other, but the means by which we shoulder each other’s fate’.28 Eggers, his readers and his protagonists all share a common goal: to do ‘good work’. As he told his critics in his ‘Sellout Rant’, ‘[w]hat matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. [. . .] What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.’ Paul Elie has argued that Eggers is a ‘crypto-religious’ author interested in exploring modes of sacredness and communion in and through his writings.29 Certainly, Eggers interest in his books’ paratextuality and the establishment of parasocial relationships with his readers points to an attempt to sanctify the printed word and demonstrate its symbolic power to consecrate human bonds. Eggers has made writing and publishing his artistic mission: through books he affirms the power within the individual and the community. Crucially, and in distinction to Eggers’s earlier experiences of fandom and criticism, his readers are engaged directly as supporters, not of his personality but of his 96

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‘publishing politics’. Like buying fair trade goods, consumers are called to account ethically at the same time as they pay their account online or at the independent bookstore. This goes beyond celebrating a shared passion for books and writing, and points to the possibility that an enterprise like publishing can improve the world.

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INTRODUCTION 1 Dave Eggers, ‘Remembering Salinger: Dave Eggers’, New Yorker, Book Bench Blog, 29 January 2010 (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ books/2010/01/remembering-salinger-dave-eggers.html, accessed 29 January 2010). 2 P. David Marshall, Graeme Turner and Frances Bonner, Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88. 3 Marshall et al., Fame Games, 12. 4 Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Random House, 2000), 153 (hereafter cited in text as A.H.W.O.S.G). 5 Robert Polito qtd in Gordon Burn, ‘The Believers’, Guardian, 27 March 2004, 4; Sarah Lyall, ‘First Came Instant Parenthood to a Brother; Now Comes Instant Celebrity’, New York Times, 10 February 2000, E1. 6 Nick Mamatas, ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Evil’, Village Voice, 16 July 2002, 47; ‘A Heartbreaking Frontpage of Staggering Inaccuracy’, Gawker, 4 January 2006, http://www.gawker.com/news/ new-york-times/a-heartbreaking-front-page-of-staggering-inaccuracy146367.php?mail2=true (accessed 5 January 2006); ‘A Heartbreaking College Class of Staggering Idiocy’, American Digest, 27 May 2004, http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/003429.php (accessed 24 March 2009); James L. Powell, ‘A Heartbreaking Stream of Staggering Complexity: What the Pioneer Geologist Knew and Didn’t Know’, Conference proceedings online, 16 October 2005, http: //gsa.confex.com/gsa/2005AM/ finalprogram/session_15575.htm (accessed 12 April 2009). 7 Amie Parnes, ‘Move Over Oprah, Obama Sells Books’, Politico, 30 May 2009, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23114.html (accessed 12 January 2010). 8 Daniel Stacey, ‘No More Brilliance’, Australian, 24–25 December 2005, Review, 10. 9 Maria Bustillos, ‘Dave Eggers, Wyndham Lewis and Hate’, The Awl, 25 February 2010, http://www.theawl.com/2010/02/dave-eggers-wyndhamlewis-and-hate (accessed 25 February 2010). 10 Melvin Jules Bukiet, ‘Wonder Bread’, The American Scholar, Autumn (2007), http://www.theamericanscholar.org/wonder-bread (accessed 10 December 2009). 98

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11 A. O. Scott, ‘Practicing Virtue, and Proud of It’, New York Times, 5 June 2009, http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/movies/05away.html (accessed 23 February 2010). 12 Heidi Benson, ‘The War on Snark’, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 July 2003, 10. 13 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (London: Routledge, 2003), 36.

CHAPTER 1 1 Philip Stevick, ‘The World and the Writer: A Speculation on Fame’, South Atlantic Quarterly 85 (1986): 251. 2 George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 378. 3 Ibid., 168. 4 Dave Eggers, editor’s note, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 2, Late Winter/Early Spring (1999). 5 Front cover, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 1, Autumn (1998). 6 Sam Munson, ‘Slices of Life’, Commentary, 116.2 (2003): 68. 7 Martin Riker, ‘Review of Literary Magazines: McSweeney’s’, Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture 1 (2004), http://www.centerforbookculture.org/ context/no1/riker.html (accessed 19 June 2008). 8 Eggers, A.H.W.O.S.G, 153. 9 James Poniewozik, ‘Cutting His Glossies’, Salon, 20 October 1998, http:// www.salon.com/media/poni/1998/10/20poni.html (accessed 23 May 2009). 10 Eggers qtd in Phillip Connors, ‘In the Fray: Coy or for Real? Celeb Author Flies under the Radar’, Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2002, D8. 11 Michael Bracewell, The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth (London: Flamingo, 2002), 71. 12 Daniel Grassian, Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X (New York: McFarlane and Co., 2003), 45. 13 Ken Foster and Ana Marie Cox, ‘Red Dresses’, McSweeney’s 3, (Late Summer/Early Fall, 1999), 129–34; David Foster Wallace, ‘Another Example of the Porousness of Various Borders (VI)’, cover spine of McSweeney’s 3, (Late Summer/Early Fall, 1999); Dave Eggers, ‘A Note on the Type’, McSweeney’s 3, (Late Summer/Early Fall, 1999), 288, 208. 14 Cover, McSweeney’s 1 (1998). 15 Matt Goldberg, ‘Mighty McSweeney’s’, Village Voice, 30 March 1999, 34. 16 Lawrence Donegan, ‘Eggers v the Establishment’, Observer, 16 February 2003, 5. 17 Lorraine Adams, ‘The Write Stuff’, American Prospect, February 2003, 39. 18 Eggers qtd in Caryn B. Brooks, ‘Email from a Staggering Genius’, Willamette Week, 23 February 2000, http://wweek.com/html/leada022300. html (accessed 23 June 2006). 19 Michael Wolff, ‘The Kidder King’, New York, 13 November 2000, 28. 20 Homans qtd in Benson, ‘The War on Snark’, 10. 21 Benson, ‘The War on Snark’, 10. 99

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22 Official figures on current circulation for McSweeney’s have not been produced, however, the San Francisco Panorama newspaper issue of McSweeney’s sold out all of its 23,000 copies in December 2009. See Choire Sicha, ‘By the Numbers: The McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama Experiment’, The Awl, 17 December 2009, http://www.theawl. com/2009/12/by-the-numbers-mcsweeneys-san-francisco-panoramanewspaper-experiment (accessed 12 January 2010). 23 See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joseph Heath, ‘The Structure of Hip Consumerism’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 27.6 (2001): 1–17; Mary Gluck, ‘Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist’, Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000): 351–78. 24 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Routledge, 1986). 25 Flaubert qtd in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 45. 26 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 48. 27 Ibid., 81. 28 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 19. 29 See particularly, Bukiet, ‘Wonder Bread’, for further explication of the McSweeney’s attitude to the wonder of books. 30 Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Rock and Read’, New Statesman, 20 October 2003, 39. 31 Neil Pollack, ‘FAQ: The First Annual Timothy McSweeney’s Festival of Literature, Theater and Music’, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 21 July 2001, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/events/festivalfaq.html (accessed 30 June 2008). 32 Paul Flynn, ‘Hip Lit Fiction’s Fashion Moment’, Sunday Times, 27 June 2004, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-536-1149945536,00.html (accessed 4 October 2005). 33 Stephen Amidon, ‘Their Master’s Voice: The Rise and Rise of Brand Mcsweeney’s’, Sunday Times, 3 February 2008, http://entertainment. timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3277269.ece (accessed 3 January 2010). 34 See Janelle Brown, ‘Enter the Yettie’, Salon, 7 November 2004, http:// archive.salon.com/tech/books/2000/11/07/yettie/print.html (accessed 24 February 2005). 35 Bill Wasik, ‘My Crowd’, Harper’s Magazine, March 2006, 63. 36 Ibid., 56. 37 The cover designs for the US editions of Rick Moody’s Demonology (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002) and Sarah Stonich’s These Granite Islands (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2001) are particularly clear examples of the use of Garamond typeface to attract readers who are drawn to Eggers’s literary style. 38 Kidd qtd in Anna Holmes, ‘Letters from the Past’, New York Times, May 13, 2001, sec. 9: 3. 100

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39 Eggers qtd in Julien Devereux, ‘IBM’s Quarterly Concern’, MetropolisMag, October 2001, http://www.metropolismag.com/html/ content_1001/ob/ ob03.html (accessed 31 October 2005). 40 Bukiet, ‘Wonderbread’. 41 Judith Shulevitz, ‘Too Cool for Words’, New York Times Book Review, 6 May 2001, 39. 42 Ibid., 39. 43 Bukiet, ‘Wonderbread’. 44 D. T. Max, ‘Next Generation: McSweeney’s’, New Yorker, 18 and 25 October 1999, 212–13.

CHAPTER 2 1 Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2001), 215. 2 Umberto Eco, ‘Reflections on The Name of the Rose’, Encounter, April 1985, 7. 3 Michiko Kakutani, ‘Clever Young Man Raises Sweet Little Brother’, New York Times, 1 February 2000, E8. 4 Mark Horowitz, ‘Laughing through His Tearjerker’, New York, 31 January 2000, http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/features/1865 (accessed 27 November 2003). 5 Gabriel Snyder, ‘Off the Record’, New York Observer, 21 February 2000, 6. 6 John Preston, ‘The Heartbreak Kid’, Telegraph, 29 December 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6865365/Dave-Eggersinterview-the-heartbreak-kid.html (accessed 10 January 2010). 7 Keith Gessen, ‘Eggers, Teen Idol; or, the Education of Gary Baum’, n+1 1 (2004): 54. 8 Erik Himmelsbach, ‘Dave Eggers Needs a Vacation’, LA Weekly, 3 March 2000, http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=13022 (accessed 23 May 2005). 9 Lee Seigel, ‘The Niceness Racket’, The New Republic, 23 April 2007, http://www.tnr.com/article/the-niceness-racket (accessed 23 November 2007). 10 Grassian, Hybrid Fictions, 15. 11 Gessen, ‘Eggers, Teen Idol’, 39. 12 Eggers had developed a dedicated fan base thanks to his work in San Francisco with the comic strip ‘Smarter Feller’ in the San Francisco Chronicle and later, Might magazine. After his move to New York he had also worked on the popular public radio program This American Life. It is worth noting that in the context of American popular media culture this list constitutes the dream CV of the young urban hipster. 13 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘Introduction’, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3; italics in original. 14 De Zengotita explains the term more fully by explaining: ‘This is a form of flattery so pervasive, so fundamental to the very nature of representation, 101

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15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

that it has escaped notice though it ultimately accounts for the muchremarked narcissism of our age. The flattered self is a mediated self, and the alchemy of mediated, the osmotic process through which reality and representation fuse, gets carried into our psyches by the irresistible flattery that goes with being incessantly addressed.’ Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 7. Theodore I. Rubin, ‘Goodbye to Death and Celebration of Life’, Event 2.1 (1981): 64. Some of the popular titles in this genre include Elizabeth Wurtzle, Prozac Nation; Mary Karr, Liar’s Club; Kathryn Harrison, Kiss (New York: Bard, 1997); Alice Sebold, Lucky: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 1999) and Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (New York: Routledge, 2004), 66. Nancy K. Miller, Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of Parent’s Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 43. Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 14. Tasha Robinson, ‘Interview: Dave Eggers’, Onion AV Club, 23 February 2005, http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=4108 (accessed 7 May 2007). Mark Horowitz, ‘Laughing Through His Tearjerker’, New York, 31 January 2000, http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/features/1865 (accessed 23 November 2005). Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 28. The author’s ‘disclaimer’ on the copyright page eerily pre-empts popular demands for similar legal insurances about truth in memoir since the revelations involving memoir hoaxes such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (New York: Doubleday, 2003) and legal cases brought against authors including Augusten Burroughs and J. T. LeRoy (see, Caroline D. Hamilton, ‘Passing for an Author: The Strange Case of JT LeRoy’, Humanities Research 16. 1 (2010): http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/ bookworm/view/Humanities+Research+Vol+XVI.+No.+1.+2010/185/ ch02.xhtml#toc-anchor). It should also be noted that Eggers was by no means the first author to hide such knowing disclaimers in his work, see, for example, David Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories The Girl with Curious Hair (London: Abacus, 1997). Lejeune, On Autobiography, 29. Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 8, 25. Ibid., 7. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye’, in Ctrl [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM/MIT, 2002), 224–7.

102

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28 Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 97.

CHAPTER 3 1 Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27. 2 Max Watman, ‘Flamboyantly Humble’, New Criterion, December 2002, 93. 3 Tasha Robinson, ‘Interview: Dave Eggers’, Onion AV Club, 23 February 2005, http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=4108 (accessed 7 May 2005). 4 Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 66. 5 For examples see, Paul Hughes, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’, Seattle Weekly, 4 April 2001, http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0114/arts-hughes. shtml (accessed 4 September 2006) and Clarissa Cruz, ‘His So-Called Life’, Entertainment Weekly 3 March 2000, 67. 6 Stacey, ‘No More Brilliance’, 10. 7 See David Kirkpatrick, ‘Denouncing Profits and Publishers While Profiting from Publication’, New York Times, 14 February 2001, E1. 8 Dave Eggers, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making (New York: Vintage, 2001) (hereafter cited in text as M.W.K.W.W.M). 9 David Kirkpatrick, ‘“Oprah” Gaffe by Jonathan Franzen Draws Ire and Sales’, New York Times, 29 October 2001, http://www.nytimes. com/2001/10/29/books/29FRAN.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed 24 January 2010). 10 This page was removed from Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency several months after publication. It is now only available as Dave Eggers, ‘Clarification Page’, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 14 February 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20010331103856/ www. mcsweeneys.net/news/clar_nytimes.html (accessed 23 January 2010). 11 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28. 12 Anne Messitte qtd in Kirkpatrick, ‘Denouncing Profits’, E1. 13 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1997): 168. 14 See Elise Harris, ‘Infinite Jest’, The Nation, 2 March 2000, http://www. thenation.com/doc/20000320/harris (accessed 13 May 2009) and David Beers, ‘Irony is Dead! Long Live Irony!’ Salon, 25 September 2001, http:// www.salon.com/life/feature/2001/09/25/irony_lives/print.html (accessed 13 May 2009). 15 Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, 67. 16 Bob Wake, ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers’, Culture Vulture, 2006, http://www.culturevulture.net/Books/ Heartbreaking.htm (accessed 30 June 2009).

103

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17 Alexei Yurchak, ‘Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Society Heroes Born Today’, in What is Soviet Now?: Identities, Legacies, Memories, eds. Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008), 258–9. 18 Ibid., 258–9. 19 Jim Collins, ‘Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity’, in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (Routledge: New York, 1993), 243. 20 Jesse Thorn, ‘A Manifesto for the New Sincerity’, Maximum Fun, 26 March 2006, http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/02/manifesto-fornew-sincerity.html (accessed 5 April 2010). 21 Collins, ‘Genericity in the Nineties’, 244. 22 Gessen, ‘Eggers, Teen Idol’, 46. 23 James Lull and Stephen Hinerman, Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 21. 24 Anthony Lappè, ‘Fox Announces Replacement for Troubled Show’, Salon, 25 February 2000, http://dir.salon.com/books/log/2000/02/25/ genius/index.html (accessed 26 August 2006). 25 Musolino’s website was such an accurate imitation and his motives so obscure that Eggers accused Musolino of harbouring sinister intentions towards him. Musolino eventually abandoned the project; however, a version of the imitation can be accessed via the Internet Archive. See, Nic Musolino, McSweeneys.org, 15 August 2000, http://web.archive.org/ web/20000815071402/http://www.mcsweeneys.org/ (accessed 5 April 2010). 26 Adam Begley, ‘Come to the Cabaret’, Guardian, 15 July 2000, 10. 27 Eggers, ‘Clarification Page’. 28 Ibid. 29 Lee Siegel, ‘The Niceness Racket’, The New Republic, 27 April 2006 (accessed 5 April 2010). 30 Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Rock and Read’, New Statesman, 20 October 2003, 38–9. 31 Michael Wolff, ‘The Kidder King’, New York, 13 November 2000, 28. 32 Dave Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’, Armchair News, 28 April 2000, http://www. armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html (accessed 14 May 2008); this document was edited and published as ‘Too Legit to Quit’, Harpers, August 2000, 19–24 (the original publication on Armchair News website is used throughout this book, hereafter cited in text as ‘Sellout Rant’). 33 See, ‘E Tu Beth?’ Harpers, August 2000, 19. Beth later retracted her words saying that she was having ‘a La Toya Jackson moment’; see Janice Turner, ‘Dave Eggers on His Screenplay of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are’, Times, 17 October 2009, http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6877630.ece (accessed 12 November 2009). Sadly, soon after her public disagreement with her brother she took her own life. 34 Robert Lanham, ‘The McEggers Tang Clan’, in Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times ed. Kevin Smokler (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 200. 104

NOTES

35 See David Hesmondhalgh’s excellent essay ‘Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre’, Cultural Studies 13.1 (1999): 34–61 for further explication of the operations of ‘indie’. 36 Gessen, ‘Eggers, Teen Idol’, 61.0. 37 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 38 Joseph Heath, ‘The Structure of Hip Consumerism’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 27.6 (2001): 14. 39 Gessen, ‘Eggers, Teen Idol’, 46. 40 Ibid., 41. 41 Sarah Brouillette, ‘Paratextuality and Economic Disavowal in Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity’, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 3.2 (2003), http://www.reconstruction.ws/032/brouillette. htm (accessed 4 September 2005). 42 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 43 Sandra Kirshenbaum, ‘Responding to the Word: The Fine Press Book Gives Voice to Text’, American Institute of Graphic Arts 11.2 (1993): 6. 44 David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production’, Media, Culture & Society 28 (2006): 222. 45 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 46 James English, ‘Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art’, New Literary History 33.1 (2002): 126. 47 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’.

CHAPTER 4 1 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W. R. Owen (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2003), 3. 2 Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2002) (hereafter cited in text as Y.S.K.O.V). 3 Although Eggers published Y.S.K.O.V independently, the rights for international publication and paperback reprints were managed by his agent Andrew Wylie who negotiated lucrative deals with large publishing houses, including Penguin in the United Kingdom and Vintage in the United States. 4 ‘Readers Interview Dave Eggers’, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, September 2002, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/interview/ readers_de.html (accessed 7 May 2005). 5 Tasha Robinson, ‘Interview: Dave Eggers’, Onion AV Club, 23 February 2005, http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=4108 (accessed 7 May 2005). 6 Lawrence Donegan, ‘Eggers v the Establishment’, Observer 16 February 2003, 5. 7 Connors, ‘In the Fray’, D8. 8 Dan Frank, then editor in-chief at Pantheon, qtd in Malcolm Jones, ‘Eggers Goes It Alone’, Newsweek 7 October 2002, 78. 9 Andy Borowitz, ‘Around the World in a Week’, New Yorker (Online), 5 August 2002, http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?online/020812on_ onlineonly01 (accessed 26 September 2004). 105

NOTES

10 Borowitz, ‘Around the World in a Week’. 11 Fran Gordon, ‘Dave Eggers and His Calculatingly Intuitive Response to Some Sincerely Cagey Questions’, Poets and Writers, July–August 2000, 58. 12 See, for example, Jon Casimir, ‘Novel Idea of Publishing Just for Fun’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2002, 14; Blake Morrison, ‘Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts’, Guardian, 3 April 2003, 19; Chris Cobb, ‘Literary Star Is Happy to Be a Yes Man: Dave Eggers Doesn’t Like to Give Interviews, But Loves to Give Away Money’, National Post, 28 July 2003, AL6; John Freeman, ‘Eggers Exorcises Some Demons and More’, Boston Globe, 27 October 2002, D7; Roz Kaveney, ‘An Elegy for the End of Youth’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 February 2003, 21; Raymond Seitz, ‘Round the World on 80k’, Sunday Telegraph, 9 February 2003, 13. 13 John Freeman, ‘Eggers Exorcises Some Demons and More’, Boston Globe, 27 October 2002, D7. 14 Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 15 Dave Eggers, ‘Clarification Page’. 16 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 17 Jon Casimir, ‘Speed Merchant’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 March 2003, 6. 18 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 19 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1967, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990), 45. 20 Borowitz, ‘Around the World in a Week’. 21 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (London: Vintage, 1999), 146. 22 Hyde, The Gift, 4. 23 Borowitz, ‘Around the World in a Week’. 24 Lev Grossman, ‘Dave Eggers Gets Real’, Time, 14 October 2002, 78. 25 ‘Readers Interview Dave Eggers’. 26 Chris Tarry, ‘A Review of the Adventure in Finding and Reading “You Shall Know Our Velocity” by Dave Eggers’, 14 October 2002, http:// www.christarry. com/books/eggersreview.pdf (accessed 5 May 2005). 27 ‘Readers Interview Dave Eggers’. 28 John Frow, ‘The Signature: Three Arguments about the Commodity Form’, in Aesthesia and the Economy of the Senses, ed. Helen Grace (Sydney: Faculty of Performance, Fine Art, Design, University of Western Sydney, 1996), 187. 29 Editor’s letter, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #5 Summer (2000). 30 Mary Gluck, ‘Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist’, Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000): 372. 31 Mauss, The Gift, 11. 32 Michael Meehan, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Festival, Carnality and Literary Consumption’, TEXT Special Issue 4 (2005), http://www.griffith.edu.au/ school/art/text/speciss/issue4.htm (accessed 16 December 2005). 33 Casimir, ‘Speed Merchant’, 6. 106

NOTES

34 Clare Dunsford, ‘The Dave Eggers Show’, Boston College Magazine, Spring 2002, http://www.bc.edu/publications/bcm/spring_2002/lindenlane.html (accessed 7 July 2005). It is worth noting that the article is accompanied by a photograph depicting Eggers signing copies of his memoir flanked by excited-looking young women clutching multiple copies of his book. 35 Kim Curtis, ‘A Man of the People He Refuses to Meet with Media . . .’, Globe and Mail, 25 April 2001, D4. 36 Meehan, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Festival, Carnality and Literary Consumption’. 37 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 139. 38 John Frow, ‘Signature and Brand’, in High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, ed. Jim Collins (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 62. 39 Connors, ‘Into the Fray’, D8; my emphasis. 40 Priyamvada Gopal, ‘The “Moral Empire”: Africa, Globalisation and the Politics of Conscience’, New Formations 59: 97 (2006). 41 Brouillette, ‘Paratextuality and Economic Disavowal’. 42 As Eggers observes in his introduction to A.H.W.O.S.G the multiple prefaces, acknowledgements, and so on are really a ‘device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at – avert . . . your . . . eyes!’ (xxvi). 43 Eggers, ‘Sellout Rant’. 44 John Freeman, ‘Self-Publishing His New Book Worthy Gamble for Eggers’, Denver Post, 13 October 2002, EE1. 45 Turner, ‘Dave Eggers on His Screenplay’. 46 Jason Blevins, ‘Author’s Pledge Staggers Crowd, Eggers Promises $100,000 to Research’, Denver Post, 14 September 2000, B2.

CHAPTER 5 1 Turner, ‘Dave Eggers on His Screenplay’. 2 Ibid. 3 Joe Hagan, ‘Dave Eggers’ Small Notion’, Forbes, 30 November 2006, http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/dave-eggers-mcsweeneys-tech-media_ cz_jh_books06_1201eggers.html, (accessed 23 February 2009). 4 Eggers qtd in Bob Thompson, ‘Author Dave Eggers Cops $250, 000 Heinz Award’, Washington Post , 12 September 2007, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/11/ AR2007091102533.html (accessed 23 August 2008). 5 When the publisher’s distributor went into bankruptcy in 2008(?), leaving them with a $130,000 loss it turned to readers to assist. McSweeneys made a plea for readers to purchase from their backlist and support them via an online auction of rarities donated by the magazine’s contributors. 6 Lorraine Adams, ‘The Write Stuff’, The American Prospect 1 February 2003. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_write_stuff. 107

NOTES

7 John Preston, ‘The Heartbreak Kid’, Telegraph, 29 December 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6865365/Dave-Eggersinterview-the-heartbreak-kid.html, (accessed 5 February 2010). 8 Hamilton Nolan, ‘Dave Eggers Reassures Us That Print Lives, Via Email’, Gawker, 3 June 2009, http://gawker.com/5277281/dave-eggers-reassuresus-that-print-lives-via-email (accessed 23 June 2009). 9 ‘Dave Eggers Will Prove You Wrong’, Book Bench Blog, New Yorker, May 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/05/daveeggers-will-prove-you-wrong?/ (accessed 9 June 2009). 10 Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2004) (hereafter cited in text as H.W.A.H). 11 ‘Up the Mountain, Coming down Slowly’ was first published in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Mammoth treasury of Thrilling Tales) #10 (2002): 243–91. The page numbers cited here refer to the pagination for the reprinted version in How We Are Hungry. 12 Turner, ‘Dave Eggers on His Screenplay’. 13 Dave Eggers, What is the What (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2006); and Zeitoun (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2009) (hereafter page numbers cited in text). 14 Don Hazen, ‘A Few Reasons Why Dave Eggers is a Great American’, Alternet, 18 March 2010, http://www.alternet.org/books/146071/a_few_ reasons_why_dave_eggers_is_a_great_american (accessed 18 March 2010). 15 Rachel Cooke, ‘Dave Eggers: From “Staggering Genius” to America’s conscience’, Observer, 7 March 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2010/mar/07/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-katrina (accessed 7 March 2010). 16 Valentino Atchak Deng, ‘Preface’, in Dave Eggers, What is the What (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006), 5. 17 Ibid., 5. 18 Stephen Elliott, ‘Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers Interview’, 9 June 2009, http://therumpus.net/2009/06/the-rumpus-long-interviewwith-dave-eggers/ (accessed 10 June 2009). 19 Dave Eggers, ‘The Future of Words’, Esquire, 26 September 2008, http:// www.esquire.com/features/75-most-influential/dave-eggers-1008 (accessed 28 September 2008). 20 D. N. Rodowick, ‘Introduction: Mobile Citizens, Media States’, PMLA 117.1 (2002): 16. 21 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Nobody Has to Be Vile’, London Review of Books 28.7 (2006): 10. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 Brouillette, ‘Paratextuality and Economic Disavowal’. 24 Henrik P. Bang, ‘“Yes we can”: Identity Politics and Project Politics for a Late-Modern World’, Urban Research & Practice 2.2 (2009): 117–37. 25 Ibid., 132. 26 Jonathan Lethem, ‘Introduction’, in My Mistress Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munroe, ed. Jonathan Lethem (New York: Harper, 2008), xi. 108

NOTES

27 Cooke, ‘Dave Eggers’. 28 Michael Ignatieff, ‘Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television’, Daedalus 114.4 (1985): 57. 29 Paul Elie, ‘A Fugitive Catholicism: The Work of Richard Rodriguez, Dave Eggers and Czeslaw Milosz’, Commonweal 131.19 (2004): 35.

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INDEX

blogosphere see new modes of media communications under blogs books aspects of marketing 2, 4, 8, 12, 21, 24–5, 44, 48, 74, 76, 86 as bond between readers and writers 23, 73, 94, 96 see also gift economy under publishing as commodities 24–5 collectable objects 21–2, 48, 75–6, 77–8 design aspects 7, 13, 15, 22, 24, 46, 49, 73, 82, 88, 100n readers’ representation of self 11, 21–2 see also cool under cultural capital Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 20, 21, 81

826 Valencia 4, 5, 66, 71, 74, 76, 91 Advertisements for Myself (Norman Mailer) 87 American cultural identity 49, 70, 76, 89, 92 authors autographs 23, 78–9 contemporary American 1–2, 4, 5, 31, 47, 53 as outsider figures 1–2, 7, 17, 21, 23, 24, 63, 91 photographs 4, 9, 26–7, 45, 53, 73, 79, 107n private lives 1–4, 6, 86 as promotional device 3–4, 7–8, 23, 70–1, 78 autobiographical writing memoir 3, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–6, 37–44, 49, 50, 84, 102n theories of 39–41, 44, 91–2 Away We Go (Eggers and Vendela Vida) 84

celebrity and charity causes 80, 94 literary fame 1–3, 8, 11, 28–9, 31, 32, 44, 45–6, 54–5, 69, 71, 82 and personal disclosure 34–7, 47 and trauma 36 Chabon, Michael 53 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 7 consumerism ethical consumerism 75, 94, 96, 97 and fashion trends 24, 59–60 and rebellion 16, 50, 53

The Believer 15, 85, 87 blogs and new modes of media communications 7, 22, 33, 36, 38, 39, 51 and pop-cultural satire 4, 14, 55 as sites for popular criticism 5, 55, 75 as status symbol 24 135

INDEX

The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) 47 cultural capital and cool 23–4, 26, 53, 61, 83 as explored in Eggers’s work 6, 21–2, 80–3 general theory of 20 in the literary field 6, 20–2

as self promoter 4, 8, 31–2, 36, 48, 50–1, 61–3, 86 as self-publisher 2, 5–6, 65, 73–80, 86, 96 see also McSweeney’s Books entrepreneurialism important figures 7, 94 in publishing industry 19, 22, 67, 76, 79, 85–6, 87–8

Deng, Valentino Achak 6, 92, 96 digital communications culture 9, 22, 85, 86, 87, 95, 96 see also new modes of media communications under blogs Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y) culture see independent creative cultures

Franzen, Jonathan (author) 47 Garamond (typeface) see typography Gawker see pop-cultural satire under blogs Generation X 15, 26, 32, 34, 84 Genette, Gerard (theorist) 7, 78 gifts 72–3, 74, 76–9, 81 Gissing, George (author) 11–12 globalization 24, 80, 89–90, 91, 95 Google 5, 94

Eggers, Dave ambivalent celebrity 5, 26–7, 29–30, 45–6, 54, 87 backlash against see media criticism under Eggers, Dave early career 4, 14, 53 and graphic design 4, 7, 13, 16, 24, 49, 61 see also design aspects under A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, How We Are Hungry, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, McSweeney’s and You Shall Know Our Velocity humanitarian and philanthropist 6, 13, 57, 64, 67, 68, 79, 83, 91, 95, 96 literary antagonist 5, 11, 55–6 see also Mistakes We Knew We Were Making mainstream rebel 19–20, 56, 87, 90–1 media criticism 7, 52–7, 58, 66, 74, 83, 84, 86 object of fandom 5, 32, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 74, 76, 86, 90, 96–7, 101n

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 1, 4, 12, 51, 71, 87, 88 design aspects 47, 61, 73, 74, 82, 88, 107n narcissism 32–5, 42 paperback edition see Mistakes We Knew We Were Making postmodern memoir 31, 33–6, 37–44, 82, 87, 92 sudden popularity 4, 8–9, 29–30, 32, 36–7, 44, 45–7, 53–7, 65, 66, 83, 87 unusual title 4, 28–31, 34 hipsters 8, 20, 23, 24, 25, 84,101n12 How We Are Hungry 88–91 human rights 80, 87, 91, 93, 94 Hurricane Katrina 5, 91, 93 independent creative cultures art and commerce 83, 95, 96, 97

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INDEX

memoir see autobiographical writing Might magazine 54, 71 see also origins under McSweeney’s Mistakes We Knew We Were Making 46–51, 82 Moody, Rick (author) 53, 95

art vs commerce 62–4, 68, 71, 76, 83, 91 see also ‘indie cred’ and ‘sell out’ in cinema 51 in literature 14, 15–22, 53 in music 58–9 indie see independent creative cultures ‘indie cred’ 58, 63 irony 14, 25, 49–51, 54 see also ‘new sincerity’

National Book Foundation award 6 New Grub Street (George Gissing) 11–12 new media 1990s development 14 current innovation/return to tradition 87 ‘new sincerity’ 13, 51–3, 63, 64

Kirkpatrick, David (New York Times journalist) 55–7, 70 Kunkel, Benjamin (author) 53 Lejeune, Philippe (theorist) 39–40 literary events 3, 7, 23, 56, 61, 66, 77, 78 literary field 6, 83

Obama, Barrack (President of the United States) 6, 95 paratexts 7, 74, 82, 96 Plimpton, George (author) 2 promotional culture 21, 32, 44, 50, 57–8, 63, 80, 83, 86–7, 95, 96–7 publishing alternative models 10, 13, 14–16, 19, 63, 66–7, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77–9, 96–7 commercial industry 2–3, 6, 8, 9, 11–15, 23, 25–6, 34, 48, 65, 68, 85–6, 87 digital production 85–6, 87, 88 Pynchon, Thomas (author) 2

Mailer, Norman (author) 87 McSweeney’s (journal) design aspects 9, 18–19, 24, 57 literary coterie 5, 18–19, 23–7, 56, 84 origins 13–15 website 22–3, 46 McSweeney’s Arm Which Publishes Books see McSweeney’s Books (publishing company) McSweeney’s Books (publishing company) literary brand 12–13, 25–6, 84, 86–7 publishing ethos 6, 15–17, 19, 64, 66–7, 70–1, 76–7, 79, 83–4, 86, 95 see also Voices of Witness project reader support 76, 85, 87–8, 94, 96 typical reader 22–6 media satire 13, 14, 35

reality tv 35–6, 42–4, 51 Safran Foer, Jonathan (author) 53 Salinger, J.D. (author) 1–2, 7 screen culture 22, 87 self-fashioning 34, 37, 38–9, 40, 42–3, 86

137

INDEX

western guilt 67–72, 80, 82, 95 see also charity causes under celebrity What is the What 4, 5, 91, 92, 93–4 whimsy 6, 26, 63, 88 see also ‘new sincerity’ Wholpin 85 Wood, James (book reviewer) 51

sell out 57, 58–9, 62, 82 see also ‘Sellout Rant’ and art vs commerce under independent creative cultures ‘Sellout Rant’ (Eggers) 57–62, 64, 68, 70, 71, 96 slacker see Generation X Smith, Zadie (author) 52 suffering 35–6, 80, 88, 91, 92, 93

You Shall Know Our Velocity 6, 11, 65, 88, 90 as autobiographical allegory 68–9, 82, 83 book design 73–4, 82 and charity 68, 79, 80–1, 83 circumstances of publication 65–7, 82–8 and economic disavowal 69–70, 71, 72, 79, 80–3 gifts 72–3, 75, 79 youth culture 23, 30, 51 and literature 1, 4, 16, 18–19, 23–4, 44 permanent childhood 52, 56, 87, 89 YouTube 33

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Prize 6 Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency see McSweeney’s (website) Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern see McSweeney’s (journal) tourism 52, 67–8, 81–2, 89–90, 96 typography 7, 12, 15, 16–17, 24, 48, 49 ‘Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly’ 89, 91 Vidal, Gore (author) 2 Voices of Witness project 87, 91

Zeitoun 6, 91, 93 Zeitoun, Abdulrahman (person) 6, 93, 95

Wallace, David Foster (author) 16, 50, 51

138