Beating Up On Jonathan Franzen

In the scattershot literary landscape that is the United States today, Jonathan Franzen has emerged—along with the late David Foster Wallace (see his much-circulated graduation speech given at Kenyon College in 2005)—as the preeminent spokesperson for the non-academe intelligentsia. In the current cultural backlash (especially in a post-Occupy world), anyone who speaks out for the divide between ‘good’ culture and ‘bad’ culture is bound to be branded as ‘elitist’ or, at very least, ‘controversial.’

While Franzen hasn’t clarified that divide in so many words, he has nevertheless appealed to that loose understanding. For example, see the kerfuffle he caused when he spoke out against his 2001 novel The Corrections being included in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Franzen labeled Oprah’s picks for the book club as being “schmaltzy.” Now there are plenty of great novels in her book club and I’m not here to address that decade-old feud, but I think—as a broad generalization—that it’s worth sometimes trying to draw lines in the sand when it comes to ‘popular’ art and more ‘serious’ art.

Franzen’s latest faux pas involves his relationship with e-books, particularly in that he accuses those who read on e-books as not being “serious readers” in the Telegraph two days ago. I think, ironically, that people are taking his sentiments too seriously. I would argue—maybe without the blessing of Franzen, but what does that matter in the long run? I’m pursuing my own argument now—that there is an important philosophical argument hiding underneath what might seem to be ‘technology-hating’ rhetoric.

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Franzen claims, “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. […]

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

In Torie Bosch’s summary of this latest Franzen feud on Slate.com, she helpfully points to an article in the Telegraph by Tom Chivers, who wonders: “Does he think that e-publishers will surreptitiously edit classic works? […] In all honesty, I suspect that this is an example of a very clever man using his considerable brainpower to dress up unconscious prejudice in what sounds like reasoned argument.”

In response to Bosch’s concerns, I think she overlooks Franzen’s more philosophical point. There are crucial differences in the ways that we approach paper and screens. I’ll emphasize once more that I’m merely following Franzen’s faded footsteps down this path of argument, but I would contest that there are deep psychological and cultural associations that we bring to any interaction with a screen. For more than half a century in human history, screens were the playground for film and, briefly, television, before they had anything to do with computers. (For a great, hard-to-read, difficult, and rewarding discussion, check out Gunt her Kress’s discussion of how the screen has replaced the page as the major form of communication in his book Literacy in the New Media Age.)

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We all have to remember that the widespread use of the Internet and computers is a very recent development in our history. We still have trouble cognitively understanding how to communicate through them. (See Ilana Gershon’s excellent book The Breakup 2.0 about ending relationships through Facebook and other technologies.) While our experience of the Internet has a remarkable number of dimensions, the primary experience is one of openness and change. For anyone who has ever used the unfortunately addictive StumbleUpon application, you know that the Internet is unfathomably deep. There is no end to the Internet. There is also no tidiness to the Internet. There is no sense of neatness and cleanness. There are corners of the Internet, here and there, which are well-swept and kept up, but for every ‘complete’ experience on the Internet, there are hundreds of dead links and cluttered blog pages and random image files.

I think this extreme randomness that is part of any Internet experience (indeed, perhaps part of the Internet ideology) and the Internet’s implicit association with screens is what led Franzen to say what he said. I’m equally uncomfortable associating my reading experience, which should hopefully not be cluttered, unless it be intentionally so (Naked Lunch?), with something so open-ended and changing.

So maybe the worst thing you can say about Franzen is that he didn’t express himself all that well…assuming he was trying to arrive at a similar screen/page argument. As for e-books? I don’t like them. I don’t like Kindles and Nooks and iPads either. But you already knew that, didn’t you?