Inter Alia #6: DeWitt Goes Digital

Today on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, David Denby put in an appearance promoting his new book, Snark. I'm not sure what qualifies Denby, a movie critic, to save us from "a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation." Nor am I entirely sure we are in need of saving. That said, I've enjoyed Denby's recent feistiness in the back pages of The New Yorker (after some mid-Bush-era doldrums), and was perfectly happy to give him a hearing while I made lunch. Suffice it to say, I was underwhelmed. The segment largely consisted of Denby listening to audio clips of SNL and Crossfire declaring whether or not they constituted "snark." In place of any really useful distinction between "nasty" snark and legitimate discourse, we got a tendentious history lesson (Diogenes but no Juvenal?) and a jurisprudential approach to snark that amounts to "I know it when I see it." Do we need anything more than that? Do we need to define snark? I would argue that we do. Ever since Heidi Julavits popularized the term, in her March 2003 Believer manifesto, the word "snark" has been used as a cudgel against all manner of populist tomfoolery (Julavits singles out The New York Post), even as it has proven useless against the pungent attitudinizing of Gawker and its discontents. (For fun, check out the Denby comment thread.) Moreover, the pejorative overtones of the floating signifier "snark" imply that equally fatuous but positive commentary is somehow less damaging to "the national conversation." If we're going to have a conversation about that conversation, it seems worth knowing what we're talking about when we talk about snark. So here, tendered with love and humility, are some notes toward a phenomenology of snark. Snark is, above all, a tone, and this is what makes it so difficult to pin down. Julavits calls it a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," but forecloses the possibility that hostility and bitterness might be legitimate critical positions. And again, for some reason, online text often reads as more hostile than it actually is. (Think of the phenomenon of the misunderstood email.) No, it's not negativity, but been-there, seen-that "knowingness," that is the call-note of snark. (It is impossible to surprise a Snark.) However, allowance must be made for the fact that some people actually know things. Perhaps snark, properly understood, involves a tone of knowingness that doesn't correspond to actual knowledge. (Truly great snark would thus be impossible to identify: persuading us of its authority, it would be ignorance that leaves no fingerprints.) A related point: snark is a response disproportionate to the offense, a comment that outshouts the original post. The Snark expends more emotional and intellectual energy formulating his aphorisms than he did consuming, or skimming, their subject. Otherwise, we would have to recognize his hostility, bitterness, or contempt as legitimate. (We carp because we care.) Currently, the perfect object of snark for me is Benjamin Button; it's a movie I'll never see, but have put a great deal of thought into making fun of. This lack of regard is more deeply wounding to Benjamin Button fans than it would be if I actually had a legitimate grievance against the film. The true Snark, perhaps by virtue of his reflexive contempt, cannot be bothered to understand the object of his snark - to expand the compass of his sympathies, to assume good faith. Thus James Wood, even at his most trenchant, does not get accused of snark, whereas Lee Siegel, for all his anti-web fulminations, often seems to be writing from the very heart of snarkness. Siegel believes the length of his essays, and their appearance in print, indemnifies him against his own charges, but is wrong (see numbers 1 and 2 above). Brevity is the soul of wit, but not necessarily of snark. Snark is a kind of show of plumage, almost a mating ritual. As such, snark always calls more attention to the Snark than to snarked. But again, just because the dagger is driven in with a flourish does not mean it is done snarkily. The thoughtful, the passionate, and the justly aggrieved - Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Lane - are entitled to be stylish, without being shouted down for snark. Morally, snark is no better or worse than genial puffery; indeed, it is its dark twin, its complement, an advertisement for the self. Snark is more aesthetically pleasing than puff, however, by virtue of the complexity of its defense mechanisms. It reduces criticism of itself to a negation of a negation - that is, to mere snark. Hence: Denby. Such notes can only be preliminary. They attempt to prepare the ground for, but do not answer, more important questions: Is snark truly a conjunctivitic plague upon the nation? Or is it, rather, a form of hygiene, defending us against an epidemic of epiphenomena we do not and should not care about? Perhaps the answers are not to be found in intellectualizing, but in a tortured embrace of our own snarky sides. As Susan Sontag might say, in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of snark. As always, your thoughts (even snarky ones) are welcome.

Well, Wyatt Mason beat me to it. Over at his blog, Sentences, the Harper's critic has registered a couple of cavils with D.T. Max's powerful, fascinating New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace, "The Unfinished." First, Mason suggests, Max makes his case for The Broom of the System at the expense of what may be a better book, Girl With Curious Hair. Second, Max might have profitably spent more time on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and the nonfiction. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me to find Mason anticipating, more eloquently, my own response to "The Unfinished"; I find him to be our most astute critic of Wallace (by which I mean, of course, the one whose thinking most resembles mine).It's important to note, as Mason does, that these are minor quibbles, mere footnotes to Max's achievement. (In my case, think of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy pontificating from the front row.) But they also betoken the immense, almost maternal protectiveness some readers feel toward Wallace's reputation. We feel about Infinite Jest as William H. Gass does about Finnegans Wake: "Not to have been... influenced by it as a writer is not to have lived in your time." Our underlying anxiety is that the Kakutanis of the world will deprive our grandchildren of the beautiful thing we ourselves have been blessed to witness. And so, with an eye toward posterity - toward those who have not yet experienced Wallace's writing first-hand - I humbly submit three additional footnotes to "The Unfinished."1) It seems to me that there's an assumption in certain passages of the article that writing fiction posed a "risk to [Wallace's] mental health," without sufficient evidence to discount the possibility that the causal arrow might have pointed the other way. In general, Max exhibits an admirable tact on the subject of Wallace's depression and addictions; he wants to extend to the author the dignity that is his due. It seems important, therefore, that we not turn "The Unfinished" into an explanation of Wallace's suicide. In particular - for the sake of reading the forthcoming The Pale King with a clear head - one wouldn't want to succumb to the temptation to say that this last novel pushed Wallace over the edge. Writing is a form of daily frustration; it can also be, as Max shows, a source of daily grace.2) Because "The Unfinished" suggests that Wallace "began to develop a taste for journalism" in the wake of the publication of Infinite Jest, rather than in the early 1990s, it skirts a more thorough examination of the relationship between Wallace's fiction and his nonfiction.3) Perhaps most significantly, Max summarizes a bit too approvingly Wallace's sense that he had never "hit his target." Indeed, Wallace's attempt to do so becomes the narrative hinge of the article. But many who have read Infinite Jest will feel differently.On the subject of his own creations, the novelist is, at best, an unreliable witness. As Robert Musil writes in that other unfinished monument, The Man Without Qualities:He loves creation as long as he is creating it, but his love turns away from the finished portions. For the artist must also love what is most hateful in order to shape it, but what he has already shaped, even if it is good, cools him off; it becomes so bereft of love that he hardly still understands himself in it, and the moment when his love returns to delight in what it has done are rare and unpredictable.It is seemly for an artist to never be satisfied with past achievements, as Wallace no doubt knew, but it's readers who get the final word. As time passes, Infinite Jest looks closer to Wallace's stated target - "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" - than any other English-language novel of its era. I felt this way before Wallace's death, and I still do.(P.S.: You got me, Andrew.)Bonus link: Sam Anderson's take on "The Unfinished," from New York Magazine