Fragments of Franzen

15 November 2011

“The solitary I as a writer is forever trying to reach the solitary I of the reader.” — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen was in town the other week to give a talk at the Egyptian Theatre. The Deco-era venue was filled to capacity and the excitement in the air was only faintly dampend by Franzen, who, after bounding on stage with a ruffian's flair, informed us rather stiffly that he couldn't, “for contractual reasons,” discuss his recent novel Freedom. There was a collective pause, and I swore I heard the crowd collectively wonder: then WTF are we here for?

But Franzen soon warmed up. He began reading from a “lecture” regarding the four pestering questions authors must answer “as payment for the privilege of speaking in public”:

1. Is your fiction just “thinly-veiled autobiography”?

2. When and where do you work?

3. Who are your influences?

4. An author interview I read said when writing, the characters take over. Does this happen to you?

Before we get to his reply, it's helpful (as a visual aid, if nothing else) to note how interesting Franzen is to watch on stage, both for how intensely he considers a question, and for his own self-aware position within the question's setting. He seems to be as frankly, and at times as nakedly and uncomfortably, self-conscious as some of the characters in his novels are. But he's equally, on the strength of his capable intellectual probing, as confident. You see him vacillating between the two states, talking through his thoughts, examining the air above the audience and then the floor at his feet, taking an apple from his leather valise and considering it too before taking a bite, pacing slightly as he hems and haws over a question, moving by degrees from doubt and dark humor to a revelation that is only occasionally ironic. The man seems a mix of impulses: wry and irreverent one moment, then good-hearted, even perhaps guilt-addled, the next. Is that what happens to good Midwestern boys when they go to live in Manhattan?

As for Franzen's influences (question number three, for those still hanging in there), he doesn't consider Tolstoy or Kafka or Roth to have any more sway over him than the bands or music (a mention of Stravinsky) or the movies he loves, though clearly these writers are dear to him. We are, I hazard to paraphrase, a product of a mosaic of cultural influences, and whether the effect is shattering — Elliot's The Wasteland comes to mind — or a constructive harmony, is for us to materialize through our art, and not stunt by fixating on the sources of inspiration. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of, or well-versed in, those sources. But Franzen, like Richard Katz in Freedom, seems to harbor an embarrassed revulsion of all things fetishized, of all things obvious. One's modesty must be equal to one's capabilities. “Sure,” he or Katz might say to the fawning questioner, “I like those (insert favorite writers/bands). What of it?”

For those kinds of details — where and when one writes, what music one listens to while sharpening their pencil — are not only fixations, but distractions from the spirit of a thing. According to Franzen, a writer doesn't so much take from the particulars of their exterior life as they receive from the current of their subconscious. Writing is a “deliberate dream”, flowing from one's nocturnal self. Kafka never experienced metamorphosing into a beetle; his story is an extension of states of consciousness explored by the author. For a novel to be worth anything to writer or reader, the writer must grapple with the conditions of the soul — particularly the follies and weakness therein — and bare some truth through one's investigation. And if an author achieves this, completes the exploration, then the geography has been mapped, the mission completed, and therefore in order to write a new novel the author must — and these are Franzen's words — become a new person, for they need new terrain to write about.

Here I thought Franzen might be stretching it. What if one's soul is vast and contains multitudes, as Whitman's does? Surely a soul with hordes of dilemmas and weaknesses and passions and loves and derangements could provide a hard-working author with enough sustenance for more than one book. We do grow and change and come to know more of ourselves over time. And that, I think, is what Franzen is requiring of the writer: to know your vast self and its many, sometimes contradictory, states; to write with your eyes wide to your dreaming soul.

(Which, I must insert, all sounds a bit more romantic than I find Franzen's work to be.)

But this is a question all writers must ask themselves (and these are my ideas here): are they revealing truths in their work? Or at the very least, are they exposing insights into the struggle to do so? Fiction writers face a particular dichotomy: they are at once writing truthfully about stuff of the imagination. And through the artifices of fiction. As Steinbeck said, “A novel is a true story that didn't happen.” To a degree, of course, fiction must be artful. But across that line lies artificiality. And shy of that line, the work becomes autobiography. Which isn't to say it's no longer meaningful, but the genre changes. Or if it doesn't — if the novel stays a novel and that novel stays a good one — the more you suspect the plot to be the experiences of the author, the more a mystique grows around the author. The novelist becomes a kind of hero in the Hemingway model. And maybe it's this role, this mystique, this obviousness, that Franzen is uncomfortable with; one he wishes to dispel with a claim that only thirty or so pages of all his fiction is directly relate-able to his life.

The strength of what I took from Franzen's lecture is this question of truths revealed and wrestled with in a novel. Truths that issue from your spirit's innards, and not necessarily from the trimwork of your day. Speaking of innards, the last book I read before Freedom was Yonder Stands Your Orphan, and the two books couldn't have been more different. While I savored Barry Hannah's swamp-rich, perverse and lovely writing — characters who could “sodomize and puke on [each other's] back, and still respect [each other]” — by the last page I had to ask myself what the point of Yonder was. A thrill-ride, a gorgeous pulp fiction verging on mystery? Being a fan of Cain and Thompson, I'm all for those qualities, but in the end I need some sustenance, some structure built on insights, to make the nastiness go down less cheaply. (Even the roughest moonshine still has some moon it, right?)

On the other hand, while I sometimes feel Franzen's characters to be over-intellectualized, too thoughtful, I at least trust that he's working through his scenes to get at some revelation, deep or quotidian. Hannah's tweaked characters, by contrast, at best exude a drop of truth only after some sick or euphoric contortion: a murder or molestation or barge wreck often larger than the capacity of the author to divine through. Which isn't to say I don't like Hannah. The fucker is funny. And it could even be argued that he rides his subconscious more freely than Franzen does or prescribes. But I need those revelations. For these days, being the pious family man that I am, there isn't much room to wedge in reading, and the book that gets pried open each night before sleepfall had better be good, had better shoot some truths into my slipping soul, or else it's stealing from my dream time. And Kafka wouldn't like that. Nor would Franzen.