Whenever I consider the magnitude that my next project should take, I always spend a half hour of my life re-reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen. This essay has been re-titled three times or so, going from "Perchance to Dream" to "The Harper's Essay" before it finally came to the entirely sensible "Why Bother?" by the time it was published in his collection "How to Be Alone."
Jonathan Franzen, I imagine, is pretty much a stuck up asshole who lives in a big, chic apartment in the middle of New York. He probably lets all of his calls from agents and publishers and ex-wives go to voicemail. He has written three full-length, entirely too-wordy novels and two non-fiction collections and I don't even think this guy is thirty years old.
I'm now 22. 22 and a half depending on the maturity of calendar you happen to be watching. I would say that I am pretty much behind.
The "Why Bother?" essay hits me on a million different levels at the exact same time. Here is an accomplished writer who can do nothing but white for thirty five pages. But, he manages to whine with a very logical point. He writes: "The real problem is that the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structure to avoid the kinds of conflicts on which fiction, preoccupied with manners, has always thrived."
Avoidance. People would deny that novels address the tragedies that happen to compose their existence, but those people don't have time to read.
Franzen goes on to claim that the purpose the novel had in the early 1900's has now been replaced by movies and television and communication methods that move faster and deliver the same information more quickly. The novel has been replaced by the cathode ray tube; by the plasma screen. The novel has been replaced by the internet.
The novel has been replaced by Zoloft.
And here I stand with a self-drawn map of current and future events and fears in one hand and Franzen's musings in the other. What is his answer? Why should novelists even bother? HE claims that "a country's poets and novelists are often the ones obliged to serve as voices of conscience in times of religious or political fanaticism" and "what emerges . . . is not the belief that the novel can change anything, but that it can preserve something."
I wonder if it is moments like this that I should seriously consider drastic measures in the art of self-preservation.
Jonathan Franzen, I imagine, is pretty much a stuck up asshole who lives in a big, chic apartment in the middle of New York. He probably lets all of his calls from agents and publishers and ex-wives go to voicemail. He has written three full-length, entirely too-wordy novels and two non-fiction collections and I don't even think this guy is thirty years old.
I'm now 22. 22 and a half depending on the maturity of calendar you happen to be watching. I would say that I am pretty much behind.
The "Why Bother?" essay hits me on a million different levels at the exact same time. Here is an accomplished writer who can do nothing but white for thirty five pages. But, he manages to whine with a very logical point. He writes: "The real problem is that the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structure to avoid the kinds of conflicts on which fiction, preoccupied with manners, has always thrived."
Avoidance. People would deny that novels address the tragedies that happen to compose their existence, but those people don't have time to read.
Franzen goes on to claim that the purpose the novel had in the early 1900's has now been replaced by movies and television and communication methods that move faster and deliver the same information more quickly. The novel has been replaced by the cathode ray tube; by the plasma screen. The novel has been replaced by the internet.
The novel has been replaced by Zoloft.
And here I stand with a self-drawn map of current and future events and fears in one hand and Franzen's musings in the other. What is his answer? Why should novelists even bother? HE claims that "a country's poets and novelists are often the ones obliged to serve as voices of conscience in times of religious or political fanaticism" and "what emerges . . . is not the belief that the novel can change anything, but that it can preserve something."
I wonder if it is moments like this that I should seriously consider drastic measures in the art of self-preservation.
whodoyoudo:
Well spoken, our apathy is all too prevalent these days... We're always looking for the magic pill but fail to find any answers in the wisdom of those that have come before us. Or maybe I just don't sleep enough and have too many long nights to dwell on cynicism...
megze:
True, true. At least neither of us had the satisfaction of beating out the other person for the fortune.