The Meaning of Recognition (46 page)

Sydney learned its lesson with the Opera House, which looks sensational from the outside, but whose revolutionary inside caused more trouble than it was worth. The architect, rethinking the
conventions of theatrical design to fit a restricted lateral space, proposed to work all the major set-changes from the fly tower instead of the wings. It was expensively discovered that the
conventions of theatrical design, like the conventions of bridge suspension, are not susceptible of being rethought. The remains of Utzon’s innovatory fly-tower mechanism are now rusting in a
paddock somewhere near Broken Hill. Eventually London’s Dome will reach a similarly obscure destination, but not before all the wrong solutions have been explored. The free market has spoken:
the Dome site is worth hundreds of millions more without the Dome. But in this instance the government, with its dwindling prestige on the line, can’t afford to listen to the free market. And
you never know, the government might be right for once. It was Mrs Thatcher who gave Blair’s Britain the courage to be born. Believing that the State should get out of the economy, she never
grasped that a government is either
dirigiste
or it is nothing. Apart from an utterly buggered broadcasting system, her lasting and festering bequest is the transport chaos for which Blair
will have to take the rap. The Dome might not be enough to sink him – he can always blame Heseltine, dump Prescott or hand Simon Jenkins a poisoned peerage – but the trains could lose
him the next election.

Postscript

Though the Dome went on costing three million pounds a month even to keep empty, its hollow thunder was eventually stolen by the Diana Memorial Fountain, a purpose-built safety
hazard whose running expenses perpetually increase as new dangers are revealed. So far it has not bred sharks. In Edinburgh, the Holyrood parliament building was the most ludicrously overpriced
folly of the lot, but you had to go north of the border to get its full impact: it was never a joke in England. It should be said that a building project can go a hundred times over budget and
still be worth it. Australians justifiably proud of the Sydney Olympics should remember that their beloved Opera House cost its weight in lottery money. The question turns on whether something
considerable has been created. It doesn’t have to be admirable: just considerable. I don’t especially like either the Centre Pompidou or the Mitterrand pyramid at the Louvre, but I
would have to admit that there are many people who do. About the Dome, no conflict of opinion is possible. The number of people who find it even faintly interesting would be lost in one corner of
it, if it had any corners. My invention of the Dome Culture was meant to be a joke in passing, but as time went on I started to wonder whether it might not be possible for a whole nation to
contract a case of butter fingers. Christopher Booker put in some valuable work when he identified the virus of Neophilia, but Dome Culture goes far beyond that. Dome Culture is not just an urge to
make it new, but to make it ridiculous. The disease may have started with the inexplicable decision of the Post Office, back in the 1970s, to paint a few pillar boxes yellow, to see if the public
liked it. The public hated it. So the experimental pillar boxes were painted red again. But that was not true Dome Culture as we have now come to know it. If the Dome gnomes had been in charge,
every pillar box in the country would have been painted yellow, and the response to the subsequent outcry would have been a vast multi-media publicity campaign to prove that red is bad for your
eyes.

An extra note
– This book was already at the stage of its first proofs when the London transport system was attacked on July 7th, 2005. For a
while I thought of removing the above piece, because for once the London Underground was no source of mirth. But within a month people were making the same old jokes again, especially the one about
the stupidity of any terrorist who thought that the tube needed to be bombed in order to be brought to a halt. I don’t think it was a case of people revealing their essential callousness:
they were merely revealing their sense of proportion. I, for one, had spent too much time earning my Freedom Pass to waste any more of it by not using public transport: a free ride is a free ride.
The next bunch to attempt an outrage seemed to lack the secret for building bombs that went off, and one could look forward to the day when young people clever enough to succeed in such an
enterprise would lose the urge to try it, having noticed, perhaps, that the older men who encouraged them to seek martyrdom were seldom keen to seek it themselves.

The recently published ninth edition of the excellent
Chambers Dictionary
, which has always prided itself on keeping up with new words, gives only one meaning for the
noun ‘snark’. It’s ‘an imaginary animal created by Lewis Carroll’. The tenth edition might well carry a second meaning: ‘an adverse book review written with
malice aforethought’. If the dictionary were compiled on historical principles, like the
OED
, it might mention that the word ‘snark’ was first used in this sense by Heidi
Julavits in a long and fascinating article about book-reviewing which she published in
The Believer
. Elsewhere in the literary forest, Dale Peck, writing in
The New Republic
, had
attempted to bury Rick Moody’s novel
The Black Veil
under an avalanche of abuse. Generating a small but widely reported kerfuffle, this event was one of the stimuli for
Julavits’s contention that the killingly personal review might be reaching such epidemic proportions that it needed its own monosyllabic name, like plague.

Plausibly claiming to have identified an industry-wide rise in the prevalence of a snide tone, she called such a review a ‘snark’. Since the noun derives from the accepted slang
adjective ‘snarky’, one would have thought it a rather understated label for an attack whose intent is often not merely snide but outright murderous. Better acquainted with the concept
of gangsterism in public life, the Germans call a killer review a rip-up and the Italians a tear-to-pieces. But this new, English word – English tempered by an American determination to
believe that serious people can lapse from high standards only in a temporary fit of civic irresponsibility – is probably violent enough, and it certainly captures the essential element of
personally cherished malice.

The desire to do someone down, or indeed in, is the defining feature. Adverse book reviews there have always been, and probably always should be. At their best, they are written in defence of a
value, and in the tacit hope that the author, having had his transgressions pointed out, might secretly agree that his book is indeed lousy. All they attack, or seem to attack, is the book. But a
snark blatantly attacks the author. It isn’t just meant to retard the author’s career, it is meant to advance the reviewer’s, either by proving how clever he is or simply by
injuring a competitor. Since a good book can certainly be injured by a bad notice, especially if the critic is in a key position, the distinction between the snark and the legitimately destructive
review is well worth having.

But there’s a catch. Over the course of literary history some of the legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books,
they were useful acts in defence of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords
mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?

Back in the early nineteenth century, the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay might have said that the ineptitude of the poet Robert Montgomery had not yet been exposed. And indeed
the dim but industrious Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given for review to Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and
Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay’s hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery’s high style was asking to be brought low and
Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. But Macaulay must also have given thanks that it asked quite so blatantly. Montgomery had a line about a river
meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn’t even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny, but from Montgomery’s viewpoint
funny would surely have meant worse. He had been exposed for all to see as a writer who couldn’t see what was in front of him.

Across the pond, Mark Twain later did the same to James Fenimore Cooper. Making hilarious game of the improbabilities in Cooper’s tales of arcane woodcraft, Twain’s essays about
Cooper have been American classics ever since. So have Cooper’s tales, but only in the category of enjoyable hokum. After Twain got through with him, Cooper’s literary prestige was
gone. Reading the reviews that did him in, it is impossible to avoid the impression that Twain would have enjoyed himself less if Cooper had been less of a klutz. Like Macaulay, Twain used someone
else’s mediocrity as an opportunity to be outstanding. This is getting pretty close to malice, for all its glittering disguise as selfless duty.

The same applied in the twentieth century to Dwight Macdonald’s attack on
By Love Possessed
, a novel by James Gould Cozzens that was not only a bestseller but had a huge critical
success. Think of the reception for
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
, switch it back to 1957, and you get the scale. Cozzens had his face on the cover of
Time
. Macdonald thought
the face needed a custard pie, and wrote a review that convincingly exposed Cozzens’s masterpiece as portentously arranged junk. Macdonald usefully did the same for the clumsy prose style of
the New English Bible, but there he was attacking a committee. In the case of
By Love Possessed
he was attacking a man. When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When
you say it in words better than his, you have hurt him. It would be better to admit this fact, and admit that all adverse reviews are snarks to some degree, than to indulge the sentimental wish
that malice might be debarred from the literary world. The literary world is where it belongs. When Dr Johnson longed for his enemy to publish a book, it was because he wasn’t allowed to hit
him with an axe. Civilization tames human passions, but it can’t eliminate them. Hunt the snark and you will find it everywhere.

New York Times
, 10 September 2003

Postscript

Living in a brand-name economy, Americans like to see things clearly labelled even when it comes to matters of the mind. A literary
CONTROVERSY
has to be
marked controversy so that the readers can prepare themselves for the unusual spectacle of people disagreeing with one another in print over a question that really has no simple answer. In America
there must always be an answer or else there is something wrong with the question. Written at the kind invitation of the
New York Times
– whose cultural section has lately entered on
a welcome new phase of encouraging the unclassifiable voice – the above piece will probably seem elementary to a British or Australian reader, but I reprint it here as an example of what can
look like boldness in a context where consensus is held to be the norm, rather than the aberration. Had I been bolder still, I could have pointed out that the star critics of a dominant media
outlet – the
New York Times
for example – have far too much power, because any common opinion on a given topic in the field of the arts is largely imposed by them. Snarky
reviews in minor publications do little damage. They can easily be put down to personal ambition. But the ponderously delivered verdict of a tenured critic in one of the major publications can kill
a play or a book overnight. The verdict doesn’t have to be hostile, merely ‘negative’, a word meaning anything less than ecstatic. How these concentrations of influence emerged in
a democracy is no great mystery: Tocqueville foresaw just such an outcome. The mystery is why so many intelligent people should accept the resulting mediocrity of opinion as a fact of life. It was,
however, an American financial mogul who told me that he thought that the literary culture of London left the New York equivalent looking comatose. He told me this at a book-launch held in his own
apartment, where the crowd was dotted with extremely beautiful women. When I confessed to one of them that I had found
Moby Dick
a hard read, she reacted as if I had just revealed that I
earned my living as a roach exterminator. Perhaps I had egg on my tie.

‘“Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of
porte noir
, meaning back door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to
our family manor house . . .”’ Thus the young Alexander Portnoy dreams of convincing the pert shiksa ice-skater that he is not a Jew. But even in his dream she is not to be misled.
‘“You seem a very nice person, Mr Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?”’ As the narrator goes on to explain, to us if not to her,
it is because of his nose, which, unlike his penis, is now, with the onset of adolescence, so insistent on extending itself that it can’t be persuaded to retract even temporarily. ‘That
ain’t a nose,’ shouts his interior voice, ‘it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the ice and leave these girls alone!’

The Jewish notables who vilified Philip Roth after the publication of
Portnoy’s Complaint
in 1969 were objecting to a lot more about its hero than his preoccupation with sex. They
didn’t like his preoccupation with his nose, either. They didn’t like Roth’s apparent suggestion that there was no level ground for a young American male Jew between the twin
peaks of tormented insecurity and priapic self-assertion. As a goy who was born and raised in Australia, where the book was banned, and who first read it in England, where it wasn’t, I
couldn’t see their point at the time. I was too busy rolling around fighting for breath. It was the funniest book in the world. What was there not to like, except perhaps the hilarious sexual
frankness that had caused the distinctly non-Jewish puritans of my benighted homeland to wig out? Why should his own people attack him?