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Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it:

A correction

By Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus defends experimental fiction against critics, Jonathan Franzen in particular, who disparage it.

If not the best novelist of his generation, then certainly the most anxious—eager for fame, but hostile to the people who confer it—Jonathan Franzen has excelled most conspicuously at worrying about literature's potential for mass entertainment. It's a fair worry to have, if vain, but he's been a strange and angry contender for the role, and the results have been spectacular, depressing, and confusing all at once. In reviews, essays, and lately even a short story, he has taken wild swings at some unlikely culprits in literature's decreasing dominance. In the process he has also managed to gaslight writing's alien artisans, those poorly named experimental writers with no sales, little review coverage, a small readership, and the collective cultural pull of an ant.

Citing Ulysses as the ultimate scare text, he claims, in an online conversation with New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, that its frequent placement on top-ten lists of the best books of the twentieth century "sends this message to the common reader: Literature is horribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It's particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life."

Even while popular writing has quietly glided into the realm of the culturally elite, doling out its severe judgment of fiction that has not sold well, and we have entered a time when book sales and artistic merit can be neatly equated without much of a fuss, Franzen has argued that complex writing, as practiced by writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and their descendants, is being forced upon readers by powerful cultural institutions (this is me scanning the horizon for even the slightest evidence of this) and that this less approachable literature, or at least its esteemed reputation, is doing serious damage to the commercial prospects of the literary industry.

Most recently, this anxious ideology has contaminated his fiction. A skeletal story in The New Yorker of May 23, 2005, depicts a husband-and-wife writing team whose relationship dissolves over their artistic differences. She stays in Hollywood, where her success and fame seem limitless, entirely comfortable with her vocation. And he, a husk of a character desiccated by Franzen's obvious scorn for him, retreats to New York and the austerities of marginal fiction writing, where his unhappiness is telegraphed so heavily that it seems gouged into the page. It's a cautionary tale for writers, and could very well be a public-service announcement: to leave the mainstream, to write experimental fiction, is to be a miserable narcissist, obsessed with the pleasures you left behind.

As a champion of industry, policing not just writers but audiences as well, Franzen is a prickly advocate at best, seemingly unable to judge an author's work without resorting to the concept of "fame." In his long review on Alice Munro in the November 14, 2004, New York Times Book Review, rather than discuss her book, Runaway, he sandbags the entire piece by trying first to account for what he sees as her lack of supporters. "Outside of Canada," he writes, ". . . she has never had a large readership." Before he gets to the book and its merits, he wants to take "some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame."

Never mind that Alice Munro was one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2005, or that she was awarded the Medal of Honor for Literature by the National Arts Club, or that Runaway itself was a bestseller in the United States, or that her books regularly hit bestseller lists and have appeared in at least thirteen languages. Aside from the fact that Munro could only be better known to readers if she were Jonathan Franzen or maybe because of it Franzen provides a sassy list of possible excuses, each of them having little to do with Munro's work. She's Canadian, she doesn't write educational fiction, she fails to brood in her author photos, and "She doesn't give her books grand titles like Canadian Pastoral,' Canadian Psycho,' Purple Canada,' In Canada' or The Plot Against Canada.'"

Franzen's reasons have nothing to do with Munro and everything to do with the limits of literary fame. The straw-man premise allows Franzen to declare that literary fame, even at its most realized, does not equal other kinds of cultural stardom, a complaint that echoes back to his essay "Perchance to Dream," in which he fretted over the power of television and the Internet and worried that all the rave reviews his work had received did not deliver to him the fame he had expected. We were meant to imagine a greater kind of celebrity for writers, one that corresponded more to movie stars. Why he's using Munro, a seventy-four-year-old from Wingham, Ontario, as a finger-puppet for this renewed complaint is unclear. In "Perchance to Dream," he was able to pontificate without redtagging unsuspecting writers into alliance with him. The only example he used was himself.

It must have surprised Munro to find that she was far too underappreciated, and that it was at least partially because she wrote about people:

As long as you're reading Munro, you're failing to multitask by absorbing civics lessons or historical data. Her subject is people. People people people. If you read fiction about some enriching subject like Renaissance art or an important chapter in our nation's history, you can be assured of feeling productive.

Here some more kissing and slapping occurs. In apparently trying to court a new audience for Alice Munro, Franzen offends the one she already has, and then insults an imagined readership that is supposedly obsessed more with feeling productive about their entertainment than with its actual quality. Nor is it clear when the audiences for mass entertainment became interested in multitasking, unless he's referring to us sucking down large tubs of soda while we watch movies.

Although Franzen may be right to show distress over a culture that values the true story over the imagined one, or a culture that promotes the productive entertainment paradigm (which would explain the crushing dominance of Highlights magazine), he seems far too ready to believe in the endurance of momentary cultural comets, like Bill Clinton's memoir, which gets its own pelting, and which is now throbbing ever more quietly in the past, cited by precisely no one as a fine work for the ages.

Another of Franzen's reasons for Munro's lack of fame is that her "work is all about storytelling pleasure. The problem here being that many buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical, tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff." Although I love the whiplash of circular reasoning, it would not take gunpoint for me to admit that buyers of serious fiction who do not prefer serious fiction are not exactly buyers of serious fiction. And why has "lyricism" become the enemy of this serious fiction, an antithesis to storytelling pleasure, if it only means "an artist's expression of emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way," at least according to my dictionary? This is an inconvenient contradiction, and it takes a swipe at actual buyers of serious fiction, most of whom do, in fact, buy books by Alice Munro and do not need to be accused of buying "faux-literary stuff." The ambassador would do well to turn his weapon away from the natives.

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To read the rest of this essay, pick up a copy of the October issue of Harper's Magazine, on newsstands near you. Looking for a newsstand?

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SEE ALSO: Criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Jonathan Franzen; Literature, Experimental; Realism in literature

Response: December 2005, page 4 · December 2005, page 4 · December 2005, page 5 · December 2005, page 5 · December 2005, page 6

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