![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Took time out from feeling utterly overwhelmed to read Jonathan Franzen's essay Farther Away from the Best American Essays 2012 birthday book RTT gave me.
I'd like to hate Jonathan Franzen because he's arrogant, smug, insufferable, and because I did hate Corrections, but I liked Freedom a lot and this essay is really first-rate.
It's about Franzen's decision to recuperate from the grind of promoting Freedom and the death of BFF David Foster Wallace by reading Robinson Crusoe on an honest-to-God desert island approximately 350 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The island is called Masafuera (Farther Away) by the locals and Alexander Selkirk by the map. Alexander Selkirk is the name of the Scottish adventurer upon whose published chronicles Dafoe based Robinson Crusoe.
Like many famous intellectuals, Franzen cultivates eccentricities. His is bird watching. I know, I know – millions of Americans enjoy bird watching; in fact, some pundits opine that bird watching is America's number one recreational pastime. I'm not sure why Jonathan Franzen's bird watching is so annoying while, say, the ducks in Tony Soprano's pool were not, but it is. There's something twee about it. It's a posture. So, his second day on the desert island, having breezed through Robinson Crusoe in record time, Mr. Franzen decides to go in search of some rare and fug-lee! Ecuadorian bird, and gets caught in a pounding rainstorm on horrifyingly steep cliffs, and has numerous epiphanies about the castaway experience, the meaning of fiction, and the death of his pal.
And guess what? The epiphanies are interesting.
What really animates these adventureless adventures, and makes them surprisingly suspenseful, is their accessibility to the imagination of ordinary reader, Franzen writes in a passage that credits Robinson Crusoe as the first novel written in what one might call the realist style, (as opposed to the romances penned by Henry Fielding and Jane Austin.) … To read about his practical solutions to the problems of hunger and exposure and illness and solitude is to be invited into the narrative, to imagine what I would do if I were similarly stranded, and to measure my own stamina and resourcefulness and industry against his.
Hel-ll-lloooo, Emile Zola! Are those keys in your pocket, Theodore Dreiser, or are you just happy to see me?
…The novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, provided its readers with a field of play that was at once speculative and risk-free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you.
Franzen then goes on to make the argument that fiction was something that was invented in the 18th century because all those people, freed by the Industrial Revolution from the necessity of having to toil 18 hours a day to sustain themselves, needed something to do.
Indeed, as the novel has proliferated subgenerically into movies and TV shows and late-model video games – most of them advertising their fictionality, all of them offering characters at once typical and specific—it's hardly an exaggeration to say that what distinguishes our culture from all previous cultures is its saturation in entertainment.
Point and set.
The David Foster Wallace agonistes stuff wasn't nearly as interesting. You'd have to threaten to water board me before I'd pick up a copy of Infinite Jest. I've come to terms with the fact that I have really pedestrian tastes in entertainment. I don't do heavy lifting between the pages. I have read some Wallace short stories I liked a lot but that's as far as I'm prepared to commit.
Wallace hung himself. The subtext of that particular suicide method always suggests sexual performance issues to moi, of course, ("well hung"), but what the hell do I know? Maybe sometimes a person just wants to… check out.
Be done with it.
Is that depression, boredom or a quest for the one experience that is always going to be authentic?
Don't know.
Having achieved epiphany in record time, Franzen voted himself off the island within two days and was back home at a Superbowl party within a week. I do wonder how much of his epiphany was pre-recorded, but even if it was, doesn't really subtract from the strength of his argument. It's an excellent essay. Joe Bob Patrizia sez: Check it out!
And now back to our regularly scheduled panic attack!
I'd like to hate Jonathan Franzen because he's arrogant, smug, insufferable, and because I did hate Corrections, but I liked Freedom a lot and this essay is really first-rate.
It's about Franzen's decision to recuperate from the grind of promoting Freedom and the death of BFF David Foster Wallace by reading Robinson Crusoe on an honest-to-God desert island approximately 350 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The island is called Masafuera (Farther Away) by the locals and Alexander Selkirk by the map. Alexander Selkirk is the name of the Scottish adventurer upon whose published chronicles Dafoe based Robinson Crusoe.
Like many famous intellectuals, Franzen cultivates eccentricities. His is bird watching. I know, I know – millions of Americans enjoy bird watching; in fact, some pundits opine that bird watching is America's number one recreational pastime. I'm not sure why Jonathan Franzen's bird watching is so annoying while, say, the ducks in Tony Soprano's pool were not, but it is. There's something twee about it. It's a posture. So, his second day on the desert island, having breezed through Robinson Crusoe in record time, Mr. Franzen decides to go in search of some rare and fug-lee! Ecuadorian bird, and gets caught in a pounding rainstorm on horrifyingly steep cliffs, and has numerous epiphanies about the castaway experience, the meaning of fiction, and the death of his pal.
And guess what? The epiphanies are interesting.
What really animates these adventureless adventures, and makes them surprisingly suspenseful, is their accessibility to the imagination of ordinary reader, Franzen writes in a passage that credits Robinson Crusoe as the first novel written in what one might call the realist style, (as opposed to the romances penned by Henry Fielding and Jane Austin.) … To read about his practical solutions to the problems of hunger and exposure and illness and solitude is to be invited into the narrative, to imagine what I would do if I were similarly stranded, and to measure my own stamina and resourcefulness and industry against his.
Hel-ll-lloooo, Emile Zola! Are those keys in your pocket, Theodore Dreiser, or are you just happy to see me?
…The novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, provided its readers with a field of play that was at once speculative and risk-free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you.
Franzen then goes on to make the argument that fiction was something that was invented in the 18th century because all those people, freed by the Industrial Revolution from the necessity of having to toil 18 hours a day to sustain themselves, needed something to do.
Indeed, as the novel has proliferated subgenerically into movies and TV shows and late-model video games – most of them advertising their fictionality, all of them offering characters at once typical and specific—it's hardly an exaggeration to say that what distinguishes our culture from all previous cultures is its saturation in entertainment.
Point and set.
The David Foster Wallace agonistes stuff wasn't nearly as interesting. You'd have to threaten to water board me before I'd pick up a copy of Infinite Jest. I've come to terms with the fact that I have really pedestrian tastes in entertainment. I don't do heavy lifting between the pages. I have read some Wallace short stories I liked a lot but that's as far as I'm prepared to commit.
Wallace hung himself. The subtext of that particular suicide method always suggests sexual performance issues to moi, of course, ("well hung"), but what the hell do I know? Maybe sometimes a person just wants to… check out.
Be done with it.
Is that depression, boredom or a quest for the one experience that is always going to be authentic?
Don't know.
Having achieved epiphany in record time, Franzen voted himself off the island within two days and was back home at a Superbowl party within a week. I do wonder how much of his epiphany was pre-recorded, but even if it was, doesn't really subtract from the strength of his argument. It's an excellent essay. Joe Bob Patrizia sez: Check it out!
And now back to our regularly scheduled panic attack!
