Nemesis

On Choosing the Right Enemy

In my friend Dana Maier’s new book, Skip to the Fun Parts—a sort of parody of the how-to-be-creative subgenre of self-help books—she devotes an entire chapter to the importance of choosing an artistic nemesis. One friend of Dana’s defined a nemesis simply as someone you envy because they’re more talented or successful than you, but Dana and I both have a more nuanced understanding of nemeses. A nemesis is someone whose artistic m.o.—their intentions, sensibilities, technique—are similar enough to your own that you understand what they’re up to well enough to call them on their bullshit, to spot when they’re being sloppy, dishonest, or lazy. In reading about attachment theory, I learned that we are all attracted to people who remind us of our family but are also intriguingly Other; familiar enough to be comfortable, different enough to be exciting. A nemesis occupies this same sort of sweet spot, but on the spectrum of repulsion. It’s a trope of melodrama that the villain is an evil double of the hero; “I am but a shadowy reflection of you,” taunts Belloq, the sleazier, more venal rival of Indiana Jones.

This asshole

Although I pride myself on my laziness in real life, in the tiny, limited arena in which I’ve attempted to excel, I find it unforgivable when I see a colleague just not trying hard enough—going for the easy laugh, the cheap shot, guaranteed applause, reaching for the nearest cliché or contenting themselves with the first facile conclusion that comes along. (Think of your favorite writer: have they ever said anything you didn’t agree with? If not, you’re being successfully pandered to.) When I ask my friends about nemeses, they always immediately have one in mind: often that nemesis is doing something similar to what my friend does, more successfully and with less integrity. A student of mine once expressed an interest in reading “lyric essayists,” specifically mentioning the names of a few contemporary writers she wanted to study. I gave one of them a cursory read and told my student not to bother; she was already a better writer than this hack. Which is not to say her prose style was at the same level yet, but she was more conscientious; she was trying harder. A prose style is something you refine through laborious practice, but an artistic conscience, like an ethical one, is harder to cultivate.

Dana is too discreet to name her own nemesis (it’s just some instagram star) but she accuses him of presenting clichés as though they were insights, platitudes as though they were profound. “His work is part of a larger trend of pretending inspirational quotes and bromides are art,” she writes, “rather than the very thing that art should be slamming up against.” Telling people what they want to hear, whatever confirms their beliefs and reinforces their biases, is a time-honored formula for success not only in the arts but many other fields of endeavor—sales, politics, religion—and if you are one of those pretentious Quixotic losers for whom it’s a matter of scruple to try to say, instead, what seems to you to be true, it’s easy to get resentful of this strategy’s success, and discouraged by audiences’ apparently bottomless appetite for horseshit. My former artistic nemesis, a fellow political cartoonist back in the War on Terror years, wasn’t funny and couldn’t draw; what he did was provide talking points for liberal readers to use in angry agreement with each other or imaginary arguments with conservative families and co-workers. Which is, I suppose, a valuable service: helping to clarify people’s thinking, articulating their inchoate outrage, letting them know It’s Not Just Them. It just seemed inartful to me—heavy-handed, didactic, dull. I didn’t want to be a rhetorician or a pundit, but a cartoonist.

Nemeses are not enemies. They aren’t necessarily objectionable people, or even bad artists; they’re just doing something that you very pointedly do not want to do. David Lynch (who was, improbably, offered the job of directing Return of the Jedi) once said in an interview that he didn’t think directors like Lucas or Spielberg were cynical sellouts; they were making exactly the kind of movies they wanted to make. It’s just a reality that the movies they want to make are the kind that millions of people want to see, whereas Lynch’s arthouse audience is a much tinier niche, so that, despite his reputation, influence and honors, he still has to struggle to scrape together financing for a film.

Maybe Dana’s friend is just more honest than we are; these may all just be elaborate rationalizations for plain old ignoble envy. I am a petty, envious, vindictive man, and my own current nemesis is one of the few essayists whose collections actually sell. But I don’t think it’s his success that I resent, or at least not only that. (I am capable of collegial admiration; when I first read the essays of David Foster Wallace in the Nineties, I felt a kind of relief—here, I thought, was someone writing the very kind of essays I would write if I were less lazy and more talented. I felt let off the hook, free to goof off while he was doing the work of being a literary genius.) My current literary nemesis isn’t an essayist so much as a humorist, a hipper iteration of Erma Bombeck or Andy Rooney, and his humor is largely predicated on the presumption that the stories he tells are true, which, it’s been established, they aren’t. So he’s both frivolous and dishonest. But his pieces are funny, and people like to believe they’re true because it’s more fun that way, as with urban legends, tweets, or propaganda. He’s good at what he does, and modest in acknowledging its limited ambitions, and he is, by all accounts, generous and helpful to less recognized artists. Just being funny is an honorable calling, but my ambitions and criteria for my own writing are higher, even if I mostly fail to meet them. It never occurs to me to embellish or invent (which doesn’t mean I don’t misremember), and not only because I have no idea how to write fiction; I just wouldn’t see the point of it. My own artistic agenda is to try to understand something about this thing we’re all in sometime before it’s over, and I simply don’t understand life well enough to make things up that seem true.

This is a pretty self-flattering narrative, I know—posing people like Dana and me as artists too pure for this mercenary world, and our nemeses as shameless, striving sellouts. I imagine there are counter-narratives to this one—less well-known stories, because less inspiring, the kind people don’t tell in interviews—about artists who watched colleagues like Dana and me sink into poverty and obscurity while upholding our precious integrity and decided Fuck that shit, and set about drawing a cat book or painting watercolor platitudes or peddling self-help horseshit. I would wish them luck, but they don’t really need it.

In her book, Dana tells the story of how my own career as an essayist began after I saw a guest essay in the New York Times written by an acquaintance of mine that was, let us say, unexceptional, and I thought Oh for fuck’s sake—if Dwayne [not his real name] can get published in the New York Times, I’m gonna get published in the New York Times. I like Dwanye, to the extent that I know him, but he’s not an essayist, which, it turns out, I am, and his breezy indifference to the art form was a goad and an inspiration to me. I suppose it’s a kind of origin story, the way that Batman accidentally created the Joker (see Detective Comics #168, 1951). Nemeses are beneficial to the extent that you define yourself in opposition to them. In Bokononism, the religion Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. invented for his novel Cat’s Cradle, this kind of person is called a wrang-wrang: "someone who steers a Bokononist away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity." Just as outrage can provoke you to rant pointlessly and insult strangers online, or rouse you to engagement and activism in the real world, a well-chosen nemesis can reduce you to suppurating self-pity and resentment at the capriciousness of fame and the tastelessness of the ovine masses, or they can act as a whetstone against which to hone your own intentions and ethos, clarifying what you want (and don’t want) to be, and—maybe most importantly for anyone afflicted with ambition—what, if anything, matters more to you than success.

Dana Jeri Maier’s book, Skip to the Fun Parts, is now available.