Introduction for Jonathan Franzen, Swarthmore College, Feb. 14, 2013. <\/p>\n
Good evening. Speaking for our community of readers, I\u2019d like to welcome you, Jonathan, back to Swarthmore. As for you, the audience, I will do you credit and not list Jonathan\u2019s books and prizes, nor will I discuss a certain TV talk-show host, nor even cite what national magazine featured him on its cover. (Though I must admit that I\u2019m grateful to them for printing an article on Jonathan\u2019s most recent novel, Freedom<\/em>, for their piece gave me some different reading when I came across it among piles of magazines like Guns & Ammo<\/em> and GQ<\/em> while enjoying waiting for an hour in the fluorescent customer lounge of a local auto repair shop.) Instead, by way of introduction I\u2019d like to speak briefly on two common misperceptions about Jonathan\u2019s fiction held by many of his detractors and his fans. <\/p>\n The first misperception is that many assume Jonathan\u2019s fiction is disguised autobiography. This is a common problem many fiction writers face, particularly in the U.S. Jonathan himself in interviews and essays has been very open about the ways in which, say, Enid and Alfred Lambert in The Corrections<\/em> are somewhat inspired by certain traits in his parents. He\u2019s also spoken eloquently about how he sees himself basically as a comic novelist, and that a significant breakthrough in his development happened when he learned to treat ironically his own obsessions and self-delusions. \u201cSelf-deception is funny,\u201d Jonathan\u2019s said. As Henri Bergson argued about comedy long ago, we laugh at what is mechanical and unconscious in others, and comedy\u2019s hope is that such laughter may liberate us from our own unconsciously imprisoning behaviors. But many readers either miss or downplay the critical self-engagement in Jonathan\u2019s work and assume that his narratives are primarily self-regarding, a mirror held up to himself, even if that reflective surface is sometimes admitted to be a rather well-made fun-house mirror. Let me offer a somewhat different point of view. I think when we call his work autobiographical it is often a defense mechanism\u2014it\u2019s because his writing makes us uneasy. It touches a nerve; it holds a mirror up to us<\/em> and shows us all too clearly delusions and difficulties we share with his characters. The Corrections<\/em>, for instance, gives us not just richly drawn protagonists, one of the most profound portraits in all of American literature of the loving and demonic dynamic of family life. It also parodies all kinds of master narratives that hold sway over our psyches. To name just two, he imitates concepts from market economics that influence how we treat each other, and also what Jonathan has called the new materialism of the brain, in which character and memory themselves are seen as mere functions of chemistry adjustable by drugs. Jonathan is also adept at mixing competing master discourses in unusual ways, so that we become conscious of them as full of questionable assumptions and results. They seem suddenly rather laughable; their authority detumesces. A classic example would be a comic paragraph in The Corrections<\/em> that describes Gary Lambert\u2019s pornography using the diction of industrial mass production. \u201cThere was something of the assembly line in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material\u2026. [T]he worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously processed it with his tool\u201d (169). (By the way, if you want an example of how this kind of discourse functions when it takes itself with utmost seriousness, as high-tech sublime rather than as parody, consider the recent Calvin Klein male underwear ad featuring abs, pecs, and oiled engine parts that got such a buzz during the Super Bowl. This new underwear design is dubbed Calvin\u2019s \u201cConcept\u201d line.)<\/p>\n As Austen and Dickens and Thackeray well understood, fiction\u2019s ventriloquism can expose such master languages as seductive fictions, I might even say frauds, and it does this not just by pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, but also by showing us why we so intensely need to outfit such master narratives with robes and authority in the first place. \u201cConcept\u201d lines, indeed. As I said, the Franzen fun-house mirror is primarily directed at us, and this both delights and disturbs. <\/p>\n The second common delusion about Jonathan\u2019s writing follows from the first, and it too is symptomatic of larger issues in American and contemporary global culture on which Jonathan helps us focus. Instead of being too autobiographical, this way of reading him overemphasizes the satiric. True, irony and satire are present on just about every page of his fiction, and they are delicious. Those who enjoy his work\u2019s satire, though, often identify with the author as a kind of cruel god far above his characters\u2014Olympian, aloof, ironic, and unforgiving as he skewers their self-delusions with sentences as sharply honed as Zeus\u2019 thunderbolts. Yes, it\u2019s heady fun; we can smile at a character\u2019s misunderstanding of his or her own life from an apparent position of superiority somewhat approaching that of the author himself. But lots of contemporary popular culture is driven by safe mockery, even a kind of smiling sadism. To last, art has to counter this kind of arrogance, not just feed off it. Franzen is primarily a tragicomic author, as my colleague Phil Weinstein demonstrated in his faculty lecture here a few weeks ago. I agree. Franzen rightly understands that satire must be a means, not an end. The materialistic master-languages that he mocked in The Corrections<\/em> have only become more powerful in contemporary life since 2001. That materialism, he believes, is \u201cantithetical\u201d to the ancient project of literature, which \u201cis to connect with that which is unchanging and unchangeable, the tragic dimension of life\u201d (Franzen, Paris Review<\/em> interview<\/a>). Empathy and catharsis, not just satiric distance, are crucial to understanding the full resonance of his art. That his sentences simultaneously inspire in us so many different responses is a miracle only the best writing can achieve. <\/p>\n For instance, consider the prose near the beginning of The Corrections<\/em> portraying Alfred Lambert trying to pack a suitcase (p. 11). An expert builder of railroads and communications systems, Alfred has the work ethic and world-view of the mid-twentieth century generation that created modern industrial America. But now his own systems are beginning to fail due to Parkinson\u2019s disease\u2014his body won\u2019t often do what his mind wants and his mind keeps losing its train of thought. Asked by his wife Enid what he is up to, he tries to speak a simple sentence\u2014 \u201cI am packing my suitcase,\u201d subject, verb, object, job done\u2014but he gets lost in the middle of that sentence by runaway thoughts and fears. These are rendered for us by a magnificent periodic sentence of Jonathan\u2019s that takes place between dashes in the time-space gap that opens up when Alfred pauses speaking. I\u2019ve had to trim this long sentence for this introduction, but my excerpt will still give you a taste of its headlong momentum and haunting imagery:<\/p>\n \u201cI am\u2014\u201d but when [Alfred] was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he\u2019d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he\u2019d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds\u2026. In the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he \u2026 became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he\u2019d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing when Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods\u2014 \u201cpacking my suitcase,\u201d he heard himself say. (11)<\/p>\n This sentence plunges us into Alfred\u2019s vertigo, his desperate attempts to keep order and purpose even as forces he calls the \u201cdarkness\u201d undo his efforts. We follow and feel his very self split into desperate child and dying man, a Hansel in the Hansel-and-Gretel tale losing his map of the world. The syntax here, which endlessly revises itself while also swerving in new directions, makes us as we read experience the chaos of Alfred\u2019s thoughts. And yet the sentence itself, when seen as a whole, is not chaotic at all; it is superbly balanced and calibrated. As readers we experience Alfred\u2019s panic from inside yet also are outside of it, guided by a master sentence-maker who shows us both the comedy and the tragedy, the outside and inside, of Alfred\u2019s fate. This is great art indeed, and something far more rich and complex than just satire. <\/p>\n One good term for it might be borrowed from the critic James Wood, who has argued that much of the best modern fiction creates \u201ccomedies of forgiveness\u201d very different from either mockery from a distance or tragedy experienced solely from within. Certainly the plots of both The Corrections<\/em> and Freedom<\/em> move toward profound moments of forgiveness, given and received, for some of their characters\u2014Denise and Chip in The Corrections<\/em> allowed to understand their parents in a new, more adult way, or Patty, my favorite character in Freedom<\/em>, saying \u201cit\u2019s me, just me\u201d near that novel\u2019s end (559). (Whether Walter or Richard in Freedom<\/em>, or Gary in The Corrections<\/em>, eventually seek or earn forgiveness would be an interesting matter to debate.)<\/p>\n Introducing a fine novelist in under five minutes, as you can see, is an impossible task. So I\u2019ll end with my own simple sentence. Please give Jonathan Franzen some Swarthmore Valentine\u2019s Day love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introduction for Jonathan Franzen, Swarthmore College, Feb. 14, 2013. Good evening. Speaking for our community of readers, I\u2019d like to welcome you, Jonathan, back to Swarthmore. As for you, the audience, I will do you credit and not list Jonathan\u2019s … Continue reading