I couldn’t say, having not read the book myself, but I can say that I am more inclined than ever to read it. I couldn’t agree more with the passage with which Desai concludes his meditation on snark: “We should be wise enough to realize that, exasperating as irreverence can be, the alternative is worse. After all, a figure or institution that crumbles at the first touch of snark might deserve to be targeted. Denby would argue that we—the Correct—should be nice to each other and heap our scorn only on the Incorrect. That would nice if these categories were distinct except in retrospect (or even then). Since life is lived forwards, not backwards, only fanatics know for sure if they’re wrong or right in the present, and this necessitates skepticism and irreverence and, yes, snark.”
It would be better to leave Denby’s convoluted book behind, and—in drawing the line between the uses and abuses of snark—look at an established classic. Here is a line from a work, which the author described as “an experiment in literary investigation”: “According to the rumors, it was all the work of ex-soldiers (recent ex-soldiers!).”
The author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, while advancing west with the Red Army, was arrested by his own government and imprisoned, becoming an “ex-soldier.” When prisoners in one of the camps revolted, government propaganda found it useful to describe the rebels as “ex-soldiers,” implying that they were a ragtag mob of deranged, violent men, long out of the army and lashing out against a reasonable penal system. But these were in fact “recent ex-soldiers,” having been transformed overnight from stalwart defenders of their country into condemned criminals. Ex-soldiers they certainly were—why, just a week ago they were risking their lives for the motherland, and now here they are, being tortured as “fascists”!
. . . Many who have heard of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) but not read it are under the impression that it’s like an encyclopedia with all the light parts cut out and that only a rare surge of piety could make anyone want to read it instead of just gazing at its spine on the shelf. This is a strange reputation for one of the most entertaining books ever written about mass murder to have, but maybe that dour dust-jacket is what’s throwing them off. It couldn’t be the prose, when every other page raises the question of whether, once you’ve found yourself laughing at sarcastic descriptions of torture and brutality, you should feel bad or just go with it.
