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In
the latest Harper's Ben Marcus demolishes
Jonathan Franzen. Marcus, however, wouldn't say
"demolish," as he also locates some respect for Franzen
the novelist, and, too, for the gravity of audience
Franzen's criticism also serves.
Marcus details, in the October Harper's, the
extent of his interest in Franzen's development as a
fiction writer. Much more, though related to this, he
focuses on Franzen's recent prominence in writing
criticism, and how it speaks for a mainstream – one
where many Americans may be, like Franzen, fed up with
what he condemns as too much writing that is
overly-difficult, arcane, and otherwise experimentally
odd. Like this mass audience for whom he has appointed
himself to speak, Franzen, too, recently lost whatever
tolerance he used to have for those with literary
indulgences. In the most prominent of places he has
been writing and speaking against literary celebrities
as well as minor league others who, in their oddities of
style and format, he says, threaten to kill our very
business and citadels of literacy. He has made himself
key spokesman for our previously traditional narrative
forms, for more direct and linear,
character-development-based realism. His most recent
novel exemplifies this tradition – his commercial and
critical success, The Corrections. In his
wanting what's best for literature and, he presumes, for
us, Franzen has been steadily confronting what he sees
as works that are, as Marcus puts it, "pretentious,
alienating, bad for business." The title of Marcus's
long Harper's piece conveys the danger inside and
out that Franzen feels:
WHY EXPERIMENTAL FICTION
THREATENS TO DESTROY
PUBLISHING, JONATHAN FRANZEN,
AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT
With the subtitle,
"A correction," Marcus responds to
the menace Franzen feels but, even in attacking this new
spokesperson for resurgent realism, Marcus never
badmouths the traditional narrative Franzen espouses.
Lots of good people prefer mainstream traditions. He,
Marcus, can live with that – no need to treat this or
any literary mode as per se dangerous: not
damnable as Franzen damns the experimentalists. But
Marcus does chew on Franzen for his setting himself up
as ambassador for tastes he urges for saving the lit
business and all of us.
When Marcus says, let many styles live, let even the
marginal flourish – and don't worry about it – he
means literature – his entire article addresses
literature – but all of his comments could apply
otherwise, too. They could apply to our willingness
either to shut out or embrace the diversity of peoples
on this earth, their abundance of styles, and the same
crazy-quilt cultural heterogeneity that Herodotus long
ago saw and celebrated in his, the first, Histories.
People differ. But even as our cultural dress differs –
in clothing, food, landscape, architecture, and travel
preferences – all styles convey human values that,
different as they seem, could link us, if we chose to
see the links. We could connect much better than we do
– ethnicities, religions, nationalities – if we could
admit, see, and wade into these stylistic issues for the
marvelously-interlinked humanity they carry. Marcus's
Harper's piece, however, sticks to issues of
literature for how we may open to diversity, or close to
fear and paranoia. (Though, too, he teases in one
non-literary digression. In a section on the dangers of
writers with "outsized self-regard," he notes how this,
like any narcissism, has us also feel that our "subjective experience must form a basic template for
the reality of others." Marcus calls this "unfortunate":
"a failure of empathy, an inability to
believe in varieties of artistic interest, and a refusal
to accommodate beliefs other than [one's] own." His
next sentence nods to the masses of Americans in the
most recent presidential election who voted for fearful
jingoism, arrogant militarism, and simplistic views of
foreigners: "I recognize the personality type, and I
did not vote for it.")
Though his article hews to issues of literature, Ben
Marcus's defense of literary oddballs can apply well to
a wider defense of ethnicities, nationalities, and
religions for the grammars of skills we could use for
opening up and connecting to the varieties of styles in
our neighbors – especially for connecting to those our
most earnest authorities and orthodoxies have long kept
taboo. We can live with other styles, Marcus says
(meaning lit styles) – and live better for them. Franzen says no. Franzen loathes the dangers that might
upset our (lit) marketplace. In saving us from
ourselves (from all those slant among us) – he has
proposed what he calls "contract" culture. "Contracts"
will secure us in a guaranteed and firm culture of
expectations so that, before we undertake (before we
read) anything, we have all permissible forms and
formalities understood and agreed on first.
"Contract" culture (or
"contract" literary culture)
sounds very much like the agreements professors make
with students at the beginning of courses. We call these
contracts syllabi, each syllabus stipulating what
students and their instructors will do, complete with
time chronology, textbook assignments, point spreads,
and issues listed by step-by-step and modular subsets.
Such an arrangement has the satisfaction for all of
orderliness and predictability: everyone's vision set
to the same clear options. All souls in our
institutions of higher education learn to fit this
singular corporate culture. There, seeing the end of a
term, all learn to expect mileposts as do our freeway
drivers in their related forms of similarly-rehearsed
(and similarly-aggravated) tunnel vision. All get
shaped to the divinity of the great God Closure (whose
real logic is our own love of control). All learn to
agree that things add up, that they add up through the
marketplace and our niche demographics. Our schools
thus train us to see our worth by the grades we might
get as measure of how we have negotiated each syllabus
system. If, like Franzen, our divinities are the
marketplace and celebrity location in it, the books we
read must deliver us the same style and form
expectations he calls fairness of "contract." Sci fi,
historical romance, noir, or memoir/family saga:
we know soon enough at the beginning more or less how
things may unfold. We can anticipate each author's
range of suspense, character development, and
descriptive patches. It can be "pleasurable," says
Marcus, "to get what we knew we wanted – that is, after
all, why we wait in line to sit on Santa's lap."
For an author honoring
"contract"
with readers, as Franzen defends it, things become what
he calls "difficult" if an author puts "his selfish
artistic imperatives or his personal vanity ahead of the
audience's legitimate desire to be entertained." For a
classroom of students and instructor joined by their
syllabus, things also get "difficult" if an instructor
mixes in his or her extracurricular concerns. Franzen
scolds "difficulty": any author letting personal vanity
interfere with audience expectations is no longer a "contract" player, but has, instead, puffed oneself up
as a player for "status." As no such author should be
published or be read anymore in Franzen's lit utopia, no
instructor skewing to the odd or the personal at the
expense of the professionally orthodox even today can
last in the hierarchies and economic privileging systems
of corporate academia.
Marcus understands our base appeal to Franzen's urges,
his attractions to the predictable, the normative, and
business-like adherence to template, but Marcus
lusciously demurs. He prefers "forging complex bursts
of meaning that are expressionistic rather than
figurative, enigmatic rather than earthly, evasive
rather than embracing." He knows this is personal
choice, just as Franzen represents a very different
choice. But where Franzen has set himself up to defend
us against the odd, the unpredictable, and the fringe
idiosyncratic, Marcus sees no danger in being open –
more danger when more of us choose to be hedged by fear
and by Grand Inquisitors who always thrive on fear.
Marcus shows some levity spoofing why we might be
endangered by those not conforming to Franzen's "contract" norms. He takes Franzen's literary paranoia
as a joke. Maybe it is, if literature is only
entertainment (or marginal careerism). Apoplexy about
lit's role may be a joke if Auden was right when he once
ventured that "poetry makes nothing happen." But if we
look closer at Franzen, and see how righteous,
exaggerated, and bent he is in his censoriousness, we
can also see and diagram how fear works and how it
connects to "failure of empathy." We reduce ourselves
when we exclude the oddly personal from the
professionally public, when we deny "loose ends" and
their value, and when we isolate ourselves from others
as if their different styles cannot enhance us.
Marcus demolishes Franzen. He does this not for anything wrong in the
realism modes now pleasing Franzen (and his fans) – he
demolishes him more for Marcus's own larking style, his
subject-verb-object clarity in going after Franzen with
panoplies of subordinate clauses mirthfully playing
around all Franzen's fears. Franzen, however, won't
lose. He wins. He rules as the priestly ruled 2,000
years ago with Pontius Pilate fronting them, as that
majority of Americans won who recently voted in its
theocratic cabal to advance corporate interests while
entertaining our most base fears on fetal fates, gay
sex, and the menace of the foreign. Franzen wins for
letting his lit norms track the larger departmental
orthodoxies of our corporate academics who ever teach us
to isolate by specialization. They rule – they
always have – as if the rest of us must not see, nor
connect to "others," by the styles so effervescently
carrying all humanity in the conditions all express in
our varieties of clothes, food, travel modes, and
buildings and landscape. |
