Gadfly and mayfly

It’s a slim volume, 78 pages, so nondescript you might not notice it at first. On the cover, there is no art, no graphics, just a listing of the contents -- a story, a poem, an interview, two essays -- beneath a red banner bearing the title Final Edition, and then, in smaller letters, “Volume 1 no. 1 (the last issue).”

The effect is that of a scholarly journal, Foreign Affairs or the Columbia Journalism Review, yet Final Edition has nothing so sedate as scholarship in mind. Instead, suggests its editor, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, this is an example of the journal as provocation, an attempt to light a certain kind of fuse.

In an editor’s note, Shawn says that within a matter of weeks after the release of pictures of U.S. soldiers degrading and abusing “desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the images began to become assimilated into what the American public found itself willing to accept. “And so now one has to ask, Well, what does that portend?” he writes. “We have to think about being Americans and living in the United States.”

For anyone who has followed Shawn’s career, the idea of him putting out a journal -- political or otherwise -- seems an unlikely turn. He is, after all, known primarily for his dramas (“My Dinner With Andre,” “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Designated Mourner”), as well as his performances in movies like “Toy Story” and “The Princess Bride.” Yet Shawn is no stranger to periodicals; his father, William Shawn, edited the New Yorker for 35 years. And when it comes to politics, he, like many people, has seen his orientation shift of late.

“I am a bourgeois, lazy, comfortable American,” he says by phone from his home in Manhattan, “but my opinions have changed. I’ve gone from being a genial liberal to someone who is, let’s say, tremendously alarmed and upset by what I see the U.S. doing in the world.”

It’s a process, Shawn continues, that began during the Reagan era, but in the wake of Sept. 11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he’s felt a heightened urgency, the need to offer a public response. Such immediacy is part of the fiber of his project, for Final Edition is a one-shot (hence its designation as “the last issue”), a magazine that will appear just once. This is among the most unexpected aspects of the journal, that it comes with its own obsolescence coded in.

As Shawn writes: “It’s not going to be an institution, because I don’t think everything has to be an institution, and sometimes the impulse to make things permanent can be a symptom of the grandiosity that is part of our problem. So that’s why this magazine is going out of business after its first issue.”

On the one hand, the notion of a journal that ceases publication after its debut issue is nothing if not a gimmick, a way to draw attention in an increasingly oversaturated world. “I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg, whose short story “Twilight of the Superheroes” is, to some extent, the journal’s centerpiece. Yet there’s another element at work here also, a sense that, in the face of a monolithic media and political culture, the best way to effect change may be simply to redefine our terms.

For Shawn, this means going back to the most basic unit of community, that of one’s close friends. Of the three other contributors to Final Edition, one, journalist Jonathan Schell, has known Shawn since childhood -- “Wally and I,” Schell says, “have been friends since we were 5 years old” -- and Eisenberg has lived with Shawn for many years. It was Eisenberg’s story, in fact, with its portrait of New York after the World Trade Center disaster, that inspired Shawn to do the journal.

“I only have one idea every four years anyway,” he jokes, “but the whole magazine came to me in one second. We are friends, and we have something in common.... I wanted to gather the thoughts of these people, and see where we are.”

What it all adds up to is a collection of quick takes, impressions, including Shawn’s fragmentary preelection “diary,” Schell’s “Invitation to a Degraded World,” with its sense that history is now “being authored by a third-rate writer ... [with] the plot of a bad comic book;” and Mark Strand’s poem “The Webern Variations,” which doesn’t even address politics in any direct way. The intention is to comment on the current moment, to “take the patient’s pulse right now.” In that regard, Final Edition exists in the grand tradition of American pamphleteering, which extends from Thomas Paine to Noam Chomsky, whom Shawn interviews here.

Of course, at the heart of Final Edition is the issue of whether writing -- or, by extension, any art -- can be a force for social change. For his part, Shawn admits that his point of view is shifting, as he looks to make “some worthwhile contribution” to the discourse. “I used to be very suspicious,” he says, “of artistic claims to making a better world. Today, though, that seems less obvious to me.” Partly, he suggests, this has to do with the failure of mainstream media to keep the public well informed. Even more important are the subtle ways art gets inside us, reaching us at a cellular level, where ideas and emotions merge.

“I do think,” says Eisenberg, “that art and empathy are related, at least for the audience. You’re taking a walk through somebody’s brain and areas of your own brain are livened, activated.” What she’s describing is exposure, the notion that, as Shawn says, “when people meet, they influence each other, which is part of how art, or literature, works.”

As for why this matters, Shawn says all you need to do is look at the current administration, which, he argues, wears its ignorance with pride. “When I look at Bush and Cheney,” he says, “who are clearly very culturally limited, I have to think that their provincialism would be lessened if they knew something about other cultures. They are terribly limited. Their imaginations have not been developed. This is why they face every challenge with brute force. So poetry and fiction may be part of what we need right now.”

For Shawn, it’s all a matter of communication, which he believes has hit a crisis point. “So many forces,” he argues, “have conspired to lower the level of conversation in this country. It’s harder for people to think broadly and widely, to have their sensitivity increased.”

As an example, he cites the response (or lack thereof) to Abu Ghraib -- “the perfect expression of all the trends that are so contradictory to the affectionate portrait of the United States I had when I was growing up.” That too was part of the inspiration for Final Edition, the idea that “if we don’t rise up in disgust, we have added this to the menu of what we can stomach. In that sense, it would be better for those pictures not to have been seen.”

Unspoken in such a comment is a question, that of what America has become. “The fact that there wasn’t a bigger reaction,” says Schell, “is upsetting. But even beforehand, lawyers were writing lengthy memos to support and justify torture. So it’s impossible to see it as a mere aberration, as the administration contends.” This leaves us in a treacherous middle ground between fear and ideology, between our basest and our better selves. “The truth,” Shawn says, “is that if the American public doesn’t care about other people, we have a struggle that will last a very long time. We have to face that frankly, and it’s not exactly a cheerful thought.”

Yet even now, Shawn calls himself an optimist and tells a story to illustrate the point. “When I was 11,” he recalls, “I was afraid of teenage hoodlums. Every evening, my father would take a walk to buy the newspaper and I would ask what he would do if some tough kids tried to beat him up. He told me he would talk to them and explain why that was not a good idea. I think he meant it, actually, that he believed in the power of communication. And I have some of that optimism, as well.”

As for the influence of Final Edition, Shawn has no illusions. It’s an independent project (co-published by Shawn and the New York press Seven Stories) with a print run of only 7,000, and it’s intensely topical, which means it may not have a long shelf life. But he also understands from experience that reactions can be difficult to predict.

“When Andre Gregory and I did ‘My Dinner With Andre,’ ” he says, “no one we knew would have imagined that more than a handful of people would be interested. But then they were.” Either way, the important thing is to have put it out, to have made a statement, to have entered the conversation in some way.

“We’re living at a time,” says Schell, “when the big structures are not working very well, so we need to find another strategy. It’s like what Vaclav Havel used to say in Czechoslovakia: ‘Work unswervingly to do something you want in your own local sphere.’ ”

That’s a sentiment with which Shawn has sympathy, although he frames it in more fundamental terms. “I just had the sense,” he says, “that I needed to say something. And the place to start was with the circle of one’s friends.”