Editor’s Note

We live in a medicalized time, when the maintenance and cure of mind and body absorb an ever growing share of our resources and effort. The contemporary literary arts have not said, with Macbeth, “Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it,” but play their part in this socio-medical enlargement. At Fourth Genre we receive for consideration a truly astonishing number of essays and memoirs about illness—not about health care, not philosophical meditations on sickness bolstered by research, but personal narratives. This abundance is evidence of the force of suffering, the humanness of disability and mortality, and of the tempting authenticity of testimony about one’s own pain. For readers saturated with the topic, however, the writing may seem overly familiar, nostalgic (prone to homesickness), sentimental (a word with overtones of addiction to feeling), even, dare I say it, deadening. That is to say, many essays on illness fall sick and die.

Sentimentality and nostalgia can be symptoms of a predictability born out of a writer’s excess focus on the situation of her material, on what happened to her, and insufficient focus on doing something with what happened to her. Ultimately the problem does not reside in the ubiquity of a well-trod subject. If that were the case, there would be no new worthy poems about the seasons, or novels about divorce. An essay can likewise transcend the great heap of writing about illness. But it needs Wit, to invoke the title of Margaret Edson’s play about a woman with ovarian cancer. It needs to defy expectations and break patterns of perception. It needs the play of mind and feeling about its subject.

Each contribution in this issue of Fourth Genre was selected because it wittily unsettles habits of reading. The essays are alive with the intelligent agency of writers who resist familiar patterns, working their material into new and pleasing structures of fine design. I’d like to single out two essays that exemplify the exploration and ingenuity that characterize the whole. In “Unfunny,” David Susman takes the sudden loss of his ability to be funny as the occasion to explore why humor was essential to his sense of self. Until he lost that part of himself, he wasn’t aware of how important it was to his social identity, his social passport. Susman asks what is lost when a man loses his sense of humor, ruminating on humorlessness as a kind of social exile. One of our editors had this to say in response to “Unfunny”: “I loved this piece—partly because it made me laugh out loud, partly because too much creative nonfiction of late seems humorless and cloyingly earnest (as this is not), partly because it takes an unsung aspect of contemporary culture (The New Yorker’s cartoon contest) and makes it seem worthy of consideration and, finally, new.”

The second essay I’d like to spotlight is “Bush” by Lucy Ferriss, which arises out of personal moments but is also propelled by intellectual curiosity. “Bush” negotiates a contemporary “depilatory dilemma” with stylistic deftness of touch and elegant concision. It wears its erudition lightly. Unlike a scholarly piece on the social custom of the Brazilian bikini wax that might reach some firm ideological and moralistic conclusion, “Bush” raises questions and sees where they go. It’s a startling example of a kind of essay we always are on the lookout for at Fourth Genre—an essay that combines cultural observation with personal revelation.

Both of these essays do what we like essays to do: the writers probe a subject, poking it here and there, turning it on its side this way and that, to catch, in James Merrill’s words, “a steadily more revealing light,” wondering what to think next, pushing their explorations a little further with each paragraph, until . . . what? Well, I’ll leave to your reading pleasure the discovery of until what.