25th Estate: Jonathan Franzen on the Social Novel pt 2

In the concluding part of our interview with Jonathan Franzen, the author talks about why he writes long novels, not short stories, and his worries about the threat to writing posed by cultural entropy.

My experience of daily life, even hourly life, is one of constant conflict and division. Of simultaneously being never fewer than two and often as many as four or five different people. And I very much suspect that I will never succeed in writing a book with a single point of view, a single character who carries the whole thing. I consider this a technical failure of mine, and I’ve wasted many years of my writing life trying, in a macho way, to write novels that have a strong, single, Philip Roth-like coordinating subjectivity. It never works. The novel to me is the venue for sympathy. In terms of leading my actual life, being a divided and conflict-riddled person is unpleasant. ‘Disaster’ would be too strong a word, but it’s definitely no fun. At the same time, my psychic splinteredness does mean that there are few impulses in human beings that I don’t have some way of connecting with. The novel to me is the art form that allows scope for my impulse to turn things around and look at them from another perspective. So that’s part of it.
It takes me a very long time to develop a character. I’m usually frustrated with what I can do in 30 pages. Characters need space in which to reveal their complexity. Even though they’re always simplified and cartoonish in comparison to a real person’s character, they still have their own complexity. You need to give them time to really be themselves, and maybe also to be some other kind of self as their life starts closing in on them. This, again, takes space. Plus I don’t develop a really good character every day or every month or even every year. It’s like making strudel dough. You stretch it out, you fold it over, you stretch it out, you fold it over. You do that about thirty times. It’s a long process, and a character who’s developed in this way doesn’t really fit into a story. And then, having taken the time to develop four or five characters like that, you don’t want to just burn them up in 20 pages. And, beyond that, I can’t seem to write well about characters I don’t love. Sometimes it seems to me my defect as an American fiction writer that I tend to be monogamous and form strong, loyal attachments. I don’t want just a two-week quickie with the character. I want to get into a five-year relationship.
To me [one of the biggest problems facing fiction] is cultural entropy — Levi-Strauss’s notion of the disappearance of difference, the rise of global homogenization. A world in which people’s public lives were very different from their private lives has been replaced by public spaces filled with intimate things and by intimate private realms filled with the generic and the public. This is a disaster for the fiction writer and needs to be opposed on that basis alone. Fiction writers spend a lot of time trying to track down that fugitive sense of difference. Things are neither Midwestern nor American anymore; it’s all sort of mush. Things are neither urban nor rural, it’s all exurban mush. Things are neither high art nor pop, it’s all middle-brow po-mo mush. And so on down the line.
And the thing is, some of this entropy is politically healthy and good. If you’re too pro-difference, you can end up sounding anti-miscegenist. Or sexist, or classist — the poor should know their place and the wealthy should know their place, etcetera. Suddenly, if you’re not careful, you’re back in a Shakespearean world order. And yet, part of the nostalgia that the artist feels is ‘Wow, look what Shakespeare was able to accomplish back when all those distinctions were really hard and firm!’  There’s something very unattractive in the artist who wants to break all those boundaries and fluidly pass between them, but wants the boundaries to keep existing for everyone else, so that it’s only the artist who gets to play with them, excitingly. If I take a close look at my reasons for rejecting the unwholesome mixing of public and private, I see things that may be politically rather unattractive in me. It’s interesting that critics on both the right and the left decry the same cultural entropy. You know, ‘It was Madonna Studies that broke down blah blah blah’, say the people on the right. And, ‘No it’s Fox News and Rupert Murdoch that are breaking down the blah blah blah’, say the people on the left. We always locate the problem on the other side. But in fact everyone is conspiring in it. This is why the term ‘cultural entropy is such a brilliant formulation — because the process has an inevitable, thermodynamic feel to it. As we globalize and as communication systems and transportation and population all expand, how could it not happen?
The fact that I myself think in thermodynamic terms, as if the process is autonomous and unstoppable, is an example of the difficulty of bringing politics into the discussion. Politics itself has been excluded, because the whole notion of the political, in contrast to the eternal or the apolitical, is another one of those distinctions that have been muddied. What serious political thinkers have in mind when they say the word politics is one of those pure quantities that, like all the other pure quantities, is under increasing assault. And as I say this I can hear myself proving to myself that I am not Marxist in my bones, because I’m proposing that politics is not the last instance. It itself is a phenomenon; it’s not the driving force.
We would like to thank the interviewer Chris Connery, and the magazine boundary 2, where this interview was first published, as well as, of course, Jonathan himself.

A special edition of The Corrections, created to celebrate 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, and featuring limited edition cover art by Michael Landy, is available here…