The Hunting Of The Snark [Aug 27, 2003]

The Believer Magazine, a monthly publication started by Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida, one of whom is married to my best friend Dave Eggers, has started a new feature called Snarkwatch. The purpose of the feature, derived from an over-discussed essay Julavits wrote a spell ago, is to ferret out unfair reviews of literary works from the popular and not-so-popular press and to subject those reviews to a stern schoolmistress hide-whipping. Since The Believer published the essay, Julavits and Vida have been under attack for their anti-snark posture, largely from people who are jealous of them for getting their novels published.

The first installment of Snarkwatch bravely attacks James Fenton for his review of Robert Lowell's collected poems. It seems that Fenton has failed to note the considerable labor that went into editing the book, which brings one of the 20th century's most notable poets to renwed attention, and, and...

I'm sorry. It's just that there are other fine candidates this month for Snarkwatch, such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan Laura Miller's recent blindside of Chuck Palahiniuk in Salon, in which she calls his fans "strangely oversized fellows you sometimes get seated next to on airplanes or in bars." Then there's Mark Ames' attack on Chuck Klosterman in the New York Press, that contains the trenchant literary comment, "Klosterman's soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man’s failing, hairless back end."

Snarky snark snark snark snark!

I won't join the weirdly rousing chorus of Internet debate on this topic. As the Greatest Living American Writer, it's important for me to stand above the fray. Also, I'm friends with Julavaits, Vida, Fenton, Miller, Palahinuk, Ames, and Klosterman. Full disclosure: I've had sex with three of them. Instead, I thought it might be useful for me to discuss the origin of this mysterious word, "snark."

The word snark is derived from the ancient Greek word, "snarkos," meaning, "a review written by a jealous competitor of Homer who is more worried about hipster cache and masthead climbing than actually literary quality." The word makes its first modern appearance in Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza says to his master, "those who would criticize you for tilting at windmills, sire, are merely engaging in snark."

Jump forward about 400 years to France, and you find Francois Education, the hero of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, lamenting that "poetry in France is impossible because of the snarkiness of today's literary scene. Also, I want to have sex with that middle-aged woman." The theme is continued with somewhat more clunky yet socially relevant prose in Balzac's Lost Illusions, where the protagonist, young Jean-Bertrand Aristide, discards his youthful pretensions toward youth and beauty in favor of becoming the literary editor of a publication called Salon. "I lost my illusions," he tells a prostitute with whom he falls in love. "But gained a lot of buzz."

In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald went on an anti-snark rampage, but to be fair, he was drunk at the time and also thought that he was swatting away elves with his tennis racket. H.L Mencken certainly went to town on the snark when he said "It is the misfortune of humanity that history is chiefly written by third-rate men," and "no democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence." That Mencken. There was no snark when HE was reviewing books. No sirreee!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that no one on any side of this debate is even remotely qualified to take a stand. Contemporary lovers of literature are like starving beggars desperately hunting for scraps in a darkened room. What that means, I don't know. But it's not particularly snarky, or if it is snarky, it at least displays a moderate amount of literate wit. In that, I think it's an observation of which the late great Robert Lowell would be proud. He is dead, right?