Last night Seattle Arts & Lectures invited to town Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and, more recently, Freedom--which is both "visceral and lapidary," says the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called "the stupidest person in New York."
If you subscribe to TIME, you have a recent copy featuring Franzen staring off-screen as he's lauded as the Great American Novelist. (Locally, Michael Upchurch would seem to agree.)
On the other hand, two of the most commonly used words last night were "torture" and "torment," so life is not yet a bowl of cherries for Franzen. SAL wanted a substantive talk, not a book reading, so Franzen obliged by reading a lecture he'd prepared for a German audience, thinking that this level of continental sophistication would go over well here. Kafka figured prominently.
It was also a year old, and when he came to references that had aged in the interim, he broke out a pen and updated them on the fly. Correction is constant in the Franzen weltanschauung; here he is laboring to answer a question later on in the evening: "So the project...the project becomes...to look in...inward...."
His talk centered on the four big question that authors are asked--which remarkably stopped no one in the audience from writing down variations of these on their question cards. For the record, the standard foursome are, Who are your influences?, What time of day do you write?, Do your characters "take over" the telling of the story?, and Is your fiction autobiographical?
Jonathan Franzen (Photo: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux/EPA)
For Franzen, the answer to the question about influences is so broad as to be tedious and meaningless. Writers quite naturally read a lot, especially in youth; it's their way of joining the timeless conversation of books. But if you think of it as a conversation, "influences" is a misdirection. Franzen prefers--has preferred--to rank his authors as friends and enemies (though the way he described it made it sound more like the categories of tonic and toxic).
He's very serious about the task of writing, of striving toward some darkly glimpsed lucidity. He tries to cultivate a loving ruthlessness in his authorial gaze--to encompass, rather than ignore, but without surrendering judgment. When you ask him about his process, about the time of day he writes or what rituals he has, you negate some of what those rituals are for, which is to remove himself, as an object of concern, from the room. He's trying to be pure writing. ("It's amazing how much noise can enter a room through a keyhole," he said later.)
His characters do not take over. He quoted Nabokov's comment about working them like galley slaves. The notion of characters coming to life clearly smacked of pretense to him, because despite what it may feel like, the author must write the book. If characters get what they want, you simply have wish fulfillment or fantasy. If you are writing serious literature--which is not to say unfunny--abdication of authorial responsibility is not an option.
Franzen is a stern god, which may account for why someone asked him if, with his insights into the Midwestern soul, he was a Lutheran. He seemed taken aback slightly, but mentioned that while his father's side of the family were culturally Lutheran, they were also atheists. So if he was Lutheran at all, he concluded, it must purely genetic, deriving from the stock of people for whom Lutheranism feels like a pretty good deal, religion-wise.
The Q&A got slightly prickly when he demanded of SAL's Linda Bowers if a question about his friendship with David Foster Wallace was hers or from the audience, noting that it was very near the anniversary of DFW's death. That was one question he did not spend much time with; there were others. At one point he said merrily, "We're just whipping right through these, aren't we?" and in a little while closed the Q&A on our behalf, assuring us that while he could answer our questions all night, he was afraid of taxing our interest.
The audience laughed right back. Not for nothing is he the author of The Discomfort Zone.
The final question of the big four, Is your fiction autobiographical?, was on one hand the most quickly dispensed with (No) but one which opened up a mini-treatise on how to be a writers, and the costs, sacrifices, and discipline required. Franzen's view is that good fiction resists purloining the scenes of day-to-day life--they won't fit into a strenuously imagined world, the seams show.
But fiction can be meta-autobiographical in that each book tells the story of what you were able to write. A novel is a biography of the challenges you were able to surmount. In Franzen's telling, that's largely shame, guilt, and depression. An early protagonist in The Corrections was a "creepy, depressing, and remote" figure that Franzen related to his own early marriage, its subsequent rockiness, and his failure to leave.
It wasn't until he was able to tidy up his personal life's loose ends that he could bury the character--Franzen drew a little tombstone in his notes, and gave the character the Faustian epitaph, "Him we can redeem."
In another instance, he couldn't write successfully about a character's sexual history because of the baggage due to his own. (Talking about a post-marriage affair, Franzen winced theatrically and laughter rose, which he batted away, trying to explain, "...because I was so unprepared and to inflict that unpreparedness on someone...." He gave a sighing "yeesh" to illustrate the level of ick.) The solution was to encapsulate that sexual shame, literarily, as an impotence-addressing pill the character took.
Not that it ever ends. The claims of family on a writer are often the most self-inflictedly constricting. "Well, you're an eccentric," Franzen's mother told him, as she was dying--dismissively, he thought, freeing him from worry about how his writing would upset her.
But not freeing him from worry. The stage had two little easy chairs set out for Franzen and Bowers, and Franzen was distinctly not at ease in his, flinging his head back in thought, leaning away to the side, covering his eyes with his hand, jerking upright. He either dodged a question physically or absorbed its impact. Sentences trailed off into long pauses as he struggled to condense the complications of a response. Once, with evident relief, he directed the questioner to a previous work that contained a suitably lengthy rejoinder on how he'd found birding, all but dusting his hands.
Altogether it was one of the more entertaining Q&A sessions I've had the pleasure to witness, and judging from the applause, the rest of the audience was glad to find Franzen such a cagey correspondent as well.
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