Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community

Narratives of Salvation

Jesús Blanco Hidalga

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501343681
• eBook ISBN: 9781501319846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, his work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community analyzes each of Franzen's five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work. Integrating various formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen's work, Jesús Blanco Hidalga demonstrates that the concepts of salvation and redemption, typical of romance narratives, run throughout Franzen's fiction. Even as he re-assesses and expands the familiar interpretations of Franzen's work, Blanco Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community offers a new theoretical approach to a major contemporary author.

1

Introduction: A formal and ideological approach to Jonathan Franzen’s fiction

To read a plot – to take part in its work of recognition – is to imagine a transformation of life and its conditions, and not their mere reproduction.

Ian Duncan

1 Jonathan Franzen’s relevance to contemporary American culture

Franzen’s novelistic work raises a series of questions which are central to the understanding not only of modern-day American fiction but also of contemporary culture in the United States and elsewhere. Studying Franzen’s work means coming to terms with pressing issues such as, in no particular order, the viability of the novel as a form of mass entertainment today; the cultural and political status of the socially engaged writer, and more specifically, of the white straight novelist in the face of the perceived compartmentalization of American culture; the possibility of exerting effective political critique in the age of late capitalism; the alleged exhaustion of postmodernist fiction and the pertinence – or mere feasibility – of an updated realist social novel in our postmodern times. Last but not least, Franzen’s fiction is also concerned with the practicability, or even conceivability, of truly transformative political action in our age. Besides, the fact that Franzen sets his fiction in the present time, together with his calling for the inclusive social novel, also facilitates our discussion of the recent socio-historical development of the United States: its almost accomplished transition from industrial society into advanced modernity, to use Ulrich Beck’s expressions, the so-called culture wars and, in short, the current state of American Gemeinschaft or community. These are all issues that are reflected in Franzen’s work and I will be dealing with them in the course of the analysis of his novels. In fact, and this is another reason that makes Franzen an outstanding writer among his contemporaries, he has openly addressed some of these questions in quite outspoken essays. The discussion of these topics per se, however, is not the primary goal of this book. Rather, it is intended to be subservient to the main objective of this study as the necessary reconstruction of the cultural, historical and political context of Franzen’s work. And this book’s main objective is to offer a critical reading of Franzen’s fiction that will focus on its formal and ideological aspects, drawing attention to the relationship between these two domains. My analysis of Franzen’s novels includes the discovery and exploration of a complex, large-scale rhetorical strategy of persuasion and self-justification which unfolds through his novels in conjunction with some of his essays – a strategy so far unaccounted for in the existing critical literature on Franzen and which I have called, following remarks by Jeremy Green (2005) and Robert Rebein (2007), the narrative of conversion.

2 Narratives and metanarratives: The conversion

Franzen is still widely regarded as the novelist who – as Rebein (2007) put it – said ‘No’ to Po-Mo; the novelist who publicly abjured of postmodernism to embrace realism and subsequently attain massive success. To be sure, this is a more than adequate foundation for a story with religious overtones. The first critic to call attention to Franzen’s frequent use of quasi-religious discourse was surely Green, who devoted a chapter to Franzen’s work in his monograph Late Postmodernism (2005). In his text, somewhat derisively, Green interprets Franzen’s famous act of recantation in his 1996 essay ‘Perchance to Dream’ (soon to be known as simply the Harper’s essay) as a ‘retreat from the political’ (Green, 2005: 104) partially disguised under ‘humanist platitudes’ (2005: 95).¹ As Rebein later observed (Rebein, 2007: 209), for Green, Franzen’s argumentation in that article evinced ‘a deeply traditional notion of literature as quasi-religious solace’ (2005: 96). It was Rebein, nevertheless, who specifically discerned a narrative in the way Franzen presented its literary evolution from postmodernism to realism. In the same way, it was also Rebein who perceptively drew the parallelism between Franzen’s move and a religious conversion. Rebein examined the already well-known Harper’s essay, and also a 2002 piece published in New Yorker under the title of ‘Mr. Difficult’, where Franzen set out to criticize what he saw as ‘needless difficulty’ in much postmodernist fiction. As in the Harper’s essay, in ‘Mr. Difficult’ Franzen predicated the existence of a community of solitary readers paradoxically united in their shared vital concerns and in their expectation to find these preoccupations reflected in literature. The satisfaction of these readers, Franzen argued, should be the novelist’s aim, rather than a sterile pursuit of phony literary recognition by means of contrived obscurity. In his essay, Franzen proposed a twofold division of novelists: there were those who abided by a ‘Contract’ model, in which the writer is compelled by a sort of compact to provide a pleasurable experience to her readers; and there were ‘Status’ novelists who selfishly aspired to membership of an isolated literary elite in abstraction of – or even against – their potential readers. There is clearly an ethics as well as an aesthetics implied here. In ‘Mr. Difficult’, Franzen chose his declared former idol, the archetypal postmodernist writer William Gaddis, as the paramount example of self-sufficient, arrogant and ultimately vacuous Status novelist. As Rebein sharply recognized, Franzen was advocating a vision of literature as a cult in which he arrogated to himself the role of a reformer:

It goes without saying that this, too, is a religion of sorts, that Franzen has cast himself not in the role of a faith-denier like Nietzsche, but rather in that of a faith-reformer, like Martin Luther. … The dark, corrupt ‘Catholicism’ of postmodernism (the formulation is Franzen’s, not mine) has given way to a lighter, more honest and forgiving ‘Protestant’-style realism. It is a faith that will allow Franzen to pursue without guilt his interest in locale and character – to concentrate wholly, in his own words, on the business of ‘peopling and arranging’ his ‘own little alternate world’, trusting all along that ‘the bigger social picture’ he used to worry so much about will take care of itself. (Rebein, 2007: 212)

In any case, what both Green and Rebein stop short of realizing (they lacked the further evidence later offered by Freedom) is the fact that the narrative of self-justification that Franzen offers in his essays is also inscribed and replicated in his novels by means of a series of salvational narratives which indirectly support and legitimize Franzen’s formal and political evolution. Indeed, from Strong Motion through Freedom, Franzen’s protagonists go through vicissitudes that in some way or other mirror Franzen’s own Künstlerroman or artist narrative in invariably legitimizing ways. In the Harper’s essay and ‘Mr. Difficult’, Franzen presents his case as that of a young aspiring novelist who, partly out of admiration for a respected group of novelists, namely the classic American postmodernists, and partly out of a misguided notion of literary value, cultivates a kind of fiction completely alien to his literary self. In the end, the strain of writing against himself leads him to clinical depression, despair of the novel in contemporary culture and, in short, sheer inability to continue writing. As Franzen recounts in the Harper’s essay, eventually he undergoes a sort of epiphany with the providential mediation of the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, a researcher of contemporary reading habits. Heath discloses her findings to Franzen: for readers, the point of reading is the sense of ‘having company in this great human enterprise’ (HA 83). With her help, Franzen discovers his real vocation for addressing and serving an extant community of readers of which he is himself a part. In that essay, he also brings to bear a reassuring letter from his admired Don DeLillo in which the older writer expresses his confidence in the persistence of the novel as a relevant cultural form in the future. Franzen recalls having written to DeLillo ‘in distress’, to be thus reassured by the latter in his response: ‘Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals’ (HA 96, my italics).

From a narratological point of view, it is not difficult to notice that Heath and DeLillo perform an essential role in Franzen’s own salvational metanarrative: they become helpers, to use the term coined by the semiologist A. J. Greimas (1966). Through their mediation, Franzen regains his faith in the novel and starts writing fiction that emanates from his true self, achieving therefore literary and personal salvation. From an external point of view, the less becoming aspect of this transformation is that it implies getting rid of previously avowed literary and ideological professions. This renunciation could be very generally synthesized as a dismissal of literary and ideological radicalism and the forsaking of a public sphere perceived as beyond repair. And though prior persuasions are duly denigrated and publicly abjured in the Harper’s essay and ‘Mr. Difficult’, these moves seem not to be enough for Franzen, possibly because of his awareness of deeply entrenched cultural prejudice against this sort of disavowals. As a result, these salvational narratives, whose power Franzen had discovered at the end of Strong Motion, gain prominence in his subsequent novels. Franzen’s protagonists are debased by different types of selfishness, dishonesty or self-delusion until an epiphany-like moment in which they humbly come to terms with themselves. It is therefore an epiphany related to self-recognition. Franzen’s heroes are redeemed by rejection of their previous pretension as well as by ethical commitment to the closest community of family or lovers. This is a fairly obvious pattern in Strong Motion, The Corrections and Freedom, though not in Purity (2015), Franzen’s latest novel. Regardless of this pattern, however, Purity shares with the other three its orientation towards romance, a pre-realist narrative genre characterized, according to Fredric Jameson, by the presence of a ‘salvational or redemptive perspective of some secure future’ (Jameson, 2002: 90).

Franzen’s latest novel notwithstanding, his narratives of salvation are so similar from a structural point of view that they lend themselves easily to classic formalist and structuralist analysis. The fundamental biographical events that articulate the plots in Franzen’s novels (degeneration, humiliation, self-improvement, reconciliation, social integration) appear as clearly drawn in their structural role as the narrative functions described by Vladimir Propp in his time-honoured study of the morphology of the Russian folk tale.² Indeed, the recurrent presence of fixed plot elements might allow us to talk, as Tzvetan Todorov did in his structuralist examination of Bocaccio’s Decameron (Todorov 1969a), of a kind of narrative grammar in Franzen’s fiction. In this sense, it is conspicuous that, at a certain level of abstraction, the main narrative patterns that Todorov discerns in the Decameron are remarkably close to those we identify in Franzen’s novels, which suggests that the novelist is drawing on an ancient and probably universal repository of narrative resources. The critic argues that all stories in Boccacio’s compilation are informed by the same broad schema: ‘two moments of equilibrium, similar and different, are separated by a period of imbalance, which is composed by a process of degeneration and a process of improvement’ (Todorov, 1969b: 75). But for Todorov it is possible to make a distinction between two kinds of stories in the Decameron: what he labels narratives of ‘avoided punishment’; and those of ‘conversion’, which are essentially descriptions of an improvement process through which a character gets rid of a certain flaw (1969b: 75). Readers of Franzen’s novels will surely recognize that his protagonists (Louis Holland, Chip Lambert, Walter, Patty and Joey Berglund) are invariably beset by a moral blemish, be it selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion or a daimonic determination (such as, for instance, Walter’s environmental engagement) which is obviously perceived as misguided. All of them get close to receiving irreversible punishment in the form of any of the following: utter dejection and loneliness, clinical depression, definitive estrangement from the loved ones, or even material poverty. And all of them achieve redemption through humiliation, enhanced sympathy and ethical and amorous commitment. They are in this way freed from their flaws or at least – in typically novelistic fashion, as we will see – they learn to live with them.

Crucially, these structural models can also be applied to the narrative through which Franzen presents his literary career in the Harper’s essay. For example, the times of dejection suffered by Franzen in the early nineties would correspond to Propp’s twelfth function, or first function of the donor, whereby the hero is tested, preparing the ground for his receiving a magical agent or helper – the donor, a role which would in this case be performed by the encouragement received from Heath and DeLillo. If we choose to apply the less empirical and more synthetic actantial model of narrative devised by Greimas, we see that the basic scheme also holds. In his Sémantique Structurale, Greimas is able to further refine Propp’s analysis of narrative structure by subsuming the Russian critic’s thirty-one functions into three pairs of more abstract dimensions of narrative or actants, a category which includes characters and situations. According to Greimas, these six actants are articulated along two axes: Sender-Subject-Receiver and Helper-Object-Opponent. For Greimas, one actant can be realized by one or more agents and vice versa. In this model Franzen is obviously the subject. The role of the object is split between Franzen’s personal happiness and a valid form of the novel that is suited to our times. The sender that sets the narrative in motion is embodied by contemporary cultural decay, admittedly the cause of Franzen’s depression. The receiver is formed by the members of the community of readers, whose supply of spiritual nourishment is further secured thanks to Franzen. But the novelist himself can be also seen as a receiver, inasmuch as he is the first beneficiary of a newly acquired vision which gets him out of his despondency. The helper is represented, as we have seen, by Heath and DeLillo. Finally, the opponent is realized by the hegemonic techno-consumerism inimical to literature which Franzen deplores in his essays and novels. It may be added, in this sense, that in the subsequent instalment of this narrative constituted by ‘Mr. Difficult’, the role of the opponent is also performed by postmodernist experimental fiction and specifically, as we know, by Gaddis, who becomes a veritable villain in this story.

But it is not my intention to conduct a formalist or structuralist narratological study of Franzen’s fiction, even though advantage is taken of categories and insight from such disciplines. To be sure, narratology has traditionally been more oriented towards the logic of formal structure than to the actual content of stories. Obviously, the objective of this book is different. My aim is to transcend the study of form to grasp its content: its social, historical, ideological and even psychological import, always bearing in mind that there is not a clear separation between form and content, as the former is always meaningful, historical and ideologically charged. This will require a constant awareness of the diachronic aspects of the novelistic form throughout this book. From this critical perspective, I shall look into the political implication of Franzen’s narratives of self-amelioration, which quite obviously boils down to the belief that salvation can only be individual. Similarly, we will observe that these narratives consistently end with acts of reconciliation which in the light of the theories of Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti I will interpret as symbolic resolutions of social and individual contradictions.

It should be clear that this arrangement of the narrative materials in Franzen’s fiction does not reveal a kind of master plan, but rather constitutes a piecemeal series of legitimizing responses to literary and ideological moves. Certainly, the novelist did not have in mind the closing of Freedom while he was at work with The Twenty-Seventh City or Strong Motion. It is far from my intention to forge any type of organic reading of Franzen’s fiction. I am not proposing the array of salvational narratives as a meaning of Franzen’s work which I have arrived at through some hermeneutic process. Instead, these narratives are analysed as recurrent rhetorical instruments of persuasion and ideological and political self-legitimation which are informed by a pattern that gets ever clearer after each novel. This caveat will not prevent us from noticing an obvious evolution in the way these narratives of salvation are presented, especially as regards the increasing assertiveness of their closings. This suggests that each one of Franzen’s novels includes an implicit evaluation of the previous one, a circumstance which by means of accretion rather than planning gives substance to a metanarrative. The fact that Purity (even thoug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: A formal and ideological approach to Jonathan Franzen’s fiction
• 2 Knowable conspiracies: The Twenty-Seventh City
• 3 Strong Motion: Activism of the private sphere
• 4 The Corrections: A family romance for the global age
• 5 How to close a (meta)narrative: Freedom
• 6 Recapitulation: What’s in an ending?
• 7 Epilogue: Purity and hope
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright