Handicapping Your Mind, Part I: Jonathan Franzen 3 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Should we hold writers accountable for the comments they make in interviews? Of course we should—writers are like anybody else. But how closely should we analyze those comments? It seems that it would be unfair to do so, since writers, who usually take hours to craft a single paragraph, cannot always be expected to provide a polished soundbyte on the spot. However, sometimes a poorly planned remark in an interview gives hints of a faulty premise, or an erroneous bias, and also provides an opportunity for correction.

In this case, we are dealing with the needless handicapping of the human mind.

The writer is Jonathan Franzen. In a public interview with critic James Wood recently held at Harvard University, Franzen makes the following comments about the art of criticism:

“I think the worst phenomenon, the most upsetting thing nowadays, is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text.”

Franzen’s entitled to his opinions, but maybe he should be more attentive to what’s going on—to say that there’s no one “out there responding intelligently to the text” might sound like a slight to Stefan Beck, Adam Kirsch, or Stephen Metcalf, just to name a few serious critics who appear regularly in print. Admire them or dislike them, at least they are all dedicated to the idea of a critic “responding intelligently” to the current fiction and poetry.

Franzen goes on:

“That’s why I so value so what James [Wood] does, and why I had unrealistically high expectations of your review of The Corrections, because so few people are doing real criticism. It’s so snarky, its so black-and-white.... It’s discouraging. And so I think an absence of criticism, and the absence of intellectual content to the criticism, is the worst problem I have, the one I feel most keenly.”

That review, which Wood anthologized in his second essay collection, is actually pretty good, and contains some of his best meditations on the art of fiction. Wyatt Mason, writer and blogger for Harper’s, was the one who prompted the comments from Franzen. After listening to the lines quoted above, he asked a follow-up question:

“Why then...is it that the back pages of the New York Review of Books are filled with non-fiction writers responding to the indignities heaped upon them by critics who [they believe to have] missed their argument, but fiction writers don’t feel the same liberty to respond to their critics and say: ‘You’ve missed it.’ Is it beneath the dignity of art to respond to your accuser?”

To which Franzen makes this unfortunate response:

“You can actually dispute facts,” Franzen said, “but you can’t dispute taste. That’s the sorry condition of the artist. There’s no proving it.”

“There’s no proving it” is an easy way out of a difficult discussion about the way we judge art. Wyatt himself, in his very persuasive account of the whole event, has his own response to it, and readers can find it here. I think, though, that there is one point that must be made, and that is that Franzen, needlessly and sloppily, is relativizing the practice of literary criticism. And he should know better. He himself is something of a critic, often publishing reviews in publications like the New York Times.

If one really believes that art in general, and fiction in particular, is a “lie that makes us realize the truth,” if art and literature really expose a truth about reality, if we can really learn from it, in a different way than how we learn from the sciences, then there is more to literary criticism than relative taste. There isn’t a “proof” of a mathematical sort, but there are reasons, there are demonstrations. I can look at a novel and judge the way in which a writer accomplished what he set out to do. If this is an attempt at realism, how real are his characters? If this is a philosophical novel, how persuasive are its ideas, and how believable are their incarnations in the narrative? One can also measure the attempt with other, more successful attempts that have been made in the past. In terms of depicting erotic desire, how does Houellebecq stack up against Flaubert? What do we learn (if anything) from the former Frenchman that we did not get from the latter? And so on. This is basic stuff.

Aristotle, the progenitor of so many areas of human learning, began as a biologist and worked his way from that starting point to metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Somewhere along his journey, he also began the practice of literary criticism with the Poetics. This much, most AP Literature students should know. The key point here, however, is that for Aristotle, the tools that he used for biology were the same tools he used for criticism: his senses and his reason. Why should we handicap our minds by limiting our intellectual capacity, throwing up are hands, and saying that “there’s no proving it”? There is plenty to demonstrate, if not to prove; there is plenty to dispute and argue (respectfully) about, and Franzen should be happy that this is so.

James Wood, I think, would agree. In a shorter review of The Corrections that he wrote for the British press in 2001 (before he wrote the long essay in the New Republic), Wood comments on another line from Franzen: “Five years ago, [Franzen] wrote: ‘I resist the notion of literature as a noble calling because elitism doesn’t sit well with my American nature, and because...my belief in manners would make it difficult for me to explain to my brother, who is a fan of Michael Crichton, that the work I’m doing is simply better than Crichton’s.’ Eh? Franzen doesn’t want to tell his brother that he is better than Crichton, for fear of offense; but he is sure he is better than Crichton anyway!”

Sources

Wyatt Mason, “An Egg in Return,” Part One, Part Two, Part Three, “Sentences” blog, Harper’s.

James Wood’s longer review of The Corrections, originally published in the New Republic.