Chekhov’s Mistess

In Praise of Seriousness: A.O. Scott on The Believer and n+1

Last year I wrote a piece (In Praise of the Sublimely Un-hip) comparing the new magazine n+1 to what seemed to be their intellectual opposite, Zembla. This week, A.O. Scott, the New York Times’ film reviewer, profiles n+1 alongside its declared intellectual opposite, The Believer (Among the Believers, 11-Sep-2005).

After a fairly lengthy profile of the two magazine’s editors, I began to wonder if Scott had caught n+1’s purposeful contrast of the two, bluntly put in the first issue’s “The Intellectual Situation.” He does. How could he resist?

“The reader of n+1 discovers what the magazine is for by grasping what it is against, which is not only exercise but also, in no small part, other magazines – including, as it happens, The Believer.”

Where n+1 says “Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one’s badge of intellect is not to be a thinker as such,” Scott claims it “a bit wide of the mark,” and says “it overstates the differences between the two magazines.”

This would seem an inevitable conclusion after a profile that reads as though they’re all part of the same crowd anyway, but as a reader – and enjoyer – of both magazines, I see nothing but contrast between the two. That’s not to say that The Believer is anything like the shallow, fashionable Zembla – which I dislike all the more for taking a name representative of a serious author [ed. isn’t this a bit hypocritical, “Chekhov’s” Mistress?]. But I see The Believer as a far more cheeky defender of the intellect than n+1, to the point that what is serious in the magazine is often obscured. Thankfully, they’ve done away with those short essays on everyday things, like flashlights and motels, that were cute at first and a waste of paper soon after. Still, I don’t think The Believer is consistently true to its mission.

The Believer’s manifesto article on ‘snark’ put their mission clearly as being “against the superficiality and dismissiveness that she [Julavits] and her friends believed was undermining literary discussion,” as Scott says: “Her frustration, it seems, is not so much with book reviewing as such but with everything that conspires to trivialize literary discourse and to prevent books – and not only books but also music, movies, opinions, utopian dreams – from being taken seriously.” A highly worthy purpose, yet, their recent review of Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay is indicative of that very superficiality they claim to be against:

“Every year our literary tastemakers unearth another fossilized giant of European letters and cause the veteran review-section pundits to wag their bony, liver-spotted fingers at upstarts like me until we cave in and read him. And I am a total sucker. When I heard that someone planned to finally release Witold Gombrowicz’s story collection Bacacay in English I damn near crapped my pants.”

After throwing in a few well known names for good measure, the writer of this review oddly compares the book to Joyce’s Dubliners and essentially just makes the point that Bacacay is good without addressing any of the questions he broaches. This might be what Scott describes as “pluralism and wide-eyed curiosity,” but in my mind it’s a disservice to something important; a valid discussion of a European writer who is not widely known here in the U.S.

I’ve been critical in the past of n+1’s high-mindedness (and blog hating), but on balance, their brand of skepticism and seriousness puts them in a place far more rare in a world lacking ardor and thought.

Of course, I always imagined all these litbloggers discussing literature every day on the Web – at great expense of time and effort – were doing something similar in a small, digressive way, but Scott says:

“If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention – all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days.”

As a self-appointed (and sometimes unwelcome) defender of the litblogging faith, I could not resist quoting that paragraph, but while he’s not entirely wrong, it seems dismissive on Scott’s part, who gives all the credit to print journals, saying that…

“what they provide is space – room for the exploration of hunches, experiments, blind alleys and starry-eyed hopes, by readers and writers whose small numbers can be a source of pride,”

when in fact, that’s what a lot of us are attempting to do around here [ed. that’s enough bud!].

That’s not to say that I put blogging in the same plane as literary journals such as the two discussed here. I’m glad to have them. They’re made for me and you and they are needed. The upcoming issue of Columbia Journalism Review takes the New York Times to task for its overt pandering to consumers of popular culture when Michael Massing argues…

“how the hip and ambitious coverage of pop culture in our most influential newspaper manages to miss half the story.”

There’s a particular fierceness needed in the world to counter people like Salon’s (and contributor to the NY Times) Laura Miller who embodies in her writing an attitude that mistakes a sallow irony for skepticism. If not for journals like The Believer and n+1 (and, I might add, some other great literary journals and publishers), whatever their respective merits or shortcomings, where would we be?

[For another take on the print journal/blog aspect of the Times article, see Amardeep Singh’s site and The Valve, and Crooked Timber.]

comments

“Sallow irony” is exactly what’s going on in the review of Gombrowicz you quote. It’s the bane of serious literary discussion in this country. And in a recent article in Slate, Jack Shafer even called for more of it!

    – Dan Green (09/12  at  06:16 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: September 12, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Literary Journals

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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