As I was figuring all this out, I got a letter from Don DeLillo, to whom I’d written in distress. This, in part, is what he said:
The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we’re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it’ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us—we won’t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.
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.
DeLillo added a postscript: “If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.” The strange thing about this postscript is that I can’t read it without experiencing a surge of hope. Tragic realism has the perverse effect of making its adherents into qualified optimists. “I am very much afraid,” O’Connor once wrote, “that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction, for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself. His concern with poverty is with a poverty fundamental to man.” Even if Silicon Valley manages to plant a virtual-reality helmet in every American household, even if serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, there remains a hungry world beyond our borders, a national debt that government-by-television can do little more than wring its hands over, and the good old apocalyptic horsemen of war, disease, and environmental degradation. If real wages keep falling, the suburbs of “My Interesting Childhood” won’t offer much protection. And if multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life. History is the rabid thing from which we all, like Sophie Bentwood, would like to hide. But there’s no bubble that can stay unburst. On whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, tragic realists offer no opinion. They simply represent it. A generation ago, by paying close attention, Paula Fox could discern in a broken ink bottle both perdition and salvation. The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.
[1996]
Notes
[1]I realize that this is a dismal confession, and that my managing to slip through college without ever taking a course in either American history or American literature is hardly an excuse.
[2]Certain novelists now regularly receive calls from movie-industry scouts asking about the progress of their book; when the manuscript is completed, often one copy will go to Manhattan and another to Los Angeles.
[3]Tom Wolfe’s manifesto for the “New Social Novel” (Harper’s, November 1989) was probably the high-water mark of sublime incomprehension. What was most striking about Wolfe’s essay—more than his uncannily perfect ignorance of the many excellent socially engaged novels published between 1960 and 1989, more, even, than his colossal self regard—was his failure to explain why his ideal New Social Novelist should not be writing scripts for Hollywood.
[4]THere is cyber-philosopher Brenda Laurel, speaking to the Times: “In the V.R. field, there’s kind of a naive belief that we’re able to do . . . what Tim Leary calls screen each other’s mind, well suddenly get a whole lot better at understanding each other. I know this sounds squishy, but I really believe it.”
[5]Last fall the word “literature” appeared twice on the magazine’s cover: “The Roseanne of Literature” (profile of Dorothy Allison) and “Want Literature? Stay tuned!” (“The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel”).
[6]The popularity of role-playing m on-line MUDs (multiple-user dialogues) and chat rooms, which enthusiastic theorists extol for their liberating diffractions of selfhood, in fact merely confirms how obsessed we all are with a superficially defined “identity.” Identity as a mystery (the continuity of consciousness from your childhood through the present) or as manners (how kind you are, how direct, how funny, how snobbish, how self-deceptive, how ironic; how you behave) is evidently weightless in comparison to the assertion: “I am a twenty-five-year-old bi female in fishnet stockings.”
[7]If the rolls of nineteenth-century literary societies are any indication, women have always done the bulk of fiction reading. But in a society where a majority of women both work and take care of their families, it’s significant that, even today, two out of every three novels purchased are purchased by women. The vastly increased presence of women in serious American writing probably has explanations on both the supply side and the demand side. An expanded pool of readers with unexpected lives inevitably produces an expanded pool of writers. And sometime around 1973, when American women entered the workplace in earnest, they began to demand fiction that wasn’t written from a male perspective. Writers like Jane Smiley and Amy Tan today seem conscious and confident of an attentive audience. Whereas all the male novelists I know, including myself, are clueless as to who could possibly be buying our books.
[8]I realize that this is a dismal confession, and that my managing to slip through college without ever taking a course in either American history or American literature is hardly an excuse.
A WORD ABOUT THIS BOOK
My third novel, The Corrections, which I’d worked on for many years, was published a week before the World Trade Center fell. This was a time when it seemed that the voices of self and commerce ought to fall silent—a time when you wanted, in Nick Carraway’s phrase, “the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” Nevertheless, business is business. Within forty-eight hours of the calamity, I was giving interviews again.
My interviewers were particularly interested in what they referred to as “the Harper’s essay.” (Nobody used the original title, “Perchance to Dream,” that the magazine’s editors had given it.) Interviews typically began with the question: “In your Harper’s essay in 1996, you promised that your third book would be a big social novel that would engage with mainstream culture and rejuvenate American literature; do you think you’ve kept that promise with The Corrections?” To each succeeding interviewer I explained that, no, to the contrary, I had barely mentioned my third novel in the essay; that the notion of a “promise” had been invented out of thin air by an editor or a headline writer at the Times Sunday Magazine; and that, in fact, far from promising to write a big social novel that would bring news to the mainstream, I’d taken the essay as an opportunity to renounce that variety of ambition. Because most interviewers hadn’t read the essay, and because the few who had read it seemed to have misunderstood it, I became practiced at giving a clear, concise précis of its argument; by the time I did my hundredth or hundred-tenth interview, in November, I’d worked up a nice little corrective spiel that began, “No, actually, the Harper’s essay was about abandoning my sense of social responsibility as a novelist and learning to write fiction for the fun and entertainment of it. . .” I was puzzled, and more than a little aggrieved, that nobody seemed able to discern this simple, clear idea in the text. How willfully stupid, I thought, these media people were!
In December I decided to pull together an essay collection that would include the complete text of “Perchance to Dream” and make clear what I had and hadn’t said in it. But when I opened the April 1996 Harper’s I found an essay, evidently written by me, that began with a five-thousand-word complaint of such painful stridency and tenuous logic that even I couldn’t quite follow it. In the five years since I’d written the essay, I’d managed to forget that I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person. I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that A
mericans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James. I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn’t share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times. I used to think that our American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process. The first third of the Harper’s essay was written from this place of anger and despair, in a tone of high theoretical dudgeon that made me cringe a little now.
It’s true that, even in 1996, I intended the essay to document a stalled novelist’s escape from the prison of his angry thoughts. And so part of me is inclined now to reprint the thing exactly as it first appeared, as a record of my former zealotry. I’m guessing, though, that most readers will have limited appetite for pronouncements such as
It seemed clear to me that if anybody who mattered in business or government believed there was a future in books, we would not have been witnessing such a frenzy in Washington and on Wall Street to raise half a trillion dollars for an Infobahn whose proponents paid lip service to the devastation it would wreak on reading (“You have to get used to reading on a screen”) but could not conceal their indifference to the prospect.
Because a little of this goes a long way, I’ve exercised my authorial license and cut the essay by a quarter and revised it throughout. (I’ve also retitled it “Why Bother?”) Although it’s still very long, my hope is that it’s less taxing to read now, more straightforward in its movement. If nothing else, I want to be able to point to it and say, “See, the argument is really quite clear and simple, just like I said!”
What goes for the Harper’s essay goes for this collection as a whole. I intend this book, in part, as a record of a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance—even a celebration—of being a reader and a writer. Not that there’s not still plenty to be mad and scared about. Our national thirst for petroleum, which has already produced two Bush presidencies and an ugly Gulf War, is now threatening to lead us into an open-ended long-term conflict in Central Asia. Although you wouldn’t have thought it possible, Americans seem to be asking even fewer questions about their government today than in 1991, and the major media sound even more monolithically jingoistic. While Congress yet again votes against applying easily achievable fuel-efficiency standards to SUVs, the president of Ford Motor Company can be seen patriotically defending these vehicles in a TV ad, avowing that Americans must never accept “boundaries of any kind.”
With so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily, I’ve chosen to do only minimal tinkering with the other essays in this book. “First City” reads a little differently without the World Trade Center; “Imperial Bedroom” was written before John Ashcroft came to power with his seeming indifference to personal liberties; anthrax has lent farther poignancy to the woes of the United States Postal Service, as described in “Lost in the Mail”; and Oprah Winfrey’s disinvitation of me from her Book Club makes the descriptive word “elitist” fluoresce in the several essays where it appears. But the local particulars of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone.
[2002]
Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
(Series: # )
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