Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

Stephen J. Burn

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441191243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is thefirst full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Chapter 1
A Map of the Territory
American Fiction at the Millennium

Why are terminal events so pleasing?

Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (223)

This book is a study of the novels of Jonathan Franzen, but it is also about the context in which these novels were written as it attempts to outline a tentative map of American fiction at the millennium, a time when numerous writers struggled through what they seemed to believe were the last days of postmodernism. But to begin a survey of American writing by referring to the American writer’s self-conscious awareness of a critical framework requires some explanation, since American literature is, after all, famously resistant to traditional modes of classification. As far back as 1841, for example, Thomas Carlyle questioned the applicability of critical categories to American writing and warned readers encountering Ralph Waldo Emerson to not worry about classifying the American, for “ists and isms are rather a growing weariness” (x). Emerson, himself, extended this sentiment by imagining in “The American Scholar” a mind “tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct” and remorselessly categorizing everything it encountered (86).

From Emerson through to Wallace Stevens’s reflections on the “rage for order” (130), American literature is fascinated and revolted by the classifying impulse, and much postmodern fiction may seem to replicate that relationship. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), for example, the fear is distilled into almost pure form when Pynchon imagines a text that is “to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated … squeezed limp of its last drop” by the “scholar-magicians of the Zone” (520). Nevertheless, the generation of American writers who came to be associated with the rise of postmodernism in the 1960s were unusual not just in their self-conscious efforts to classify their relationship to literary history, but also in their tendency to dramatize that self-consciousness within their fiction. This anxious awareness of literary history shadows the work of many major postmodernists. Robert Coover, for example, began his career by invoking the shade of Cervantes in an attempt to neatly define the beginning of a new literary era that his work would help usher in. In Pricksongs and Descants (1969)—a volume that gathers many of his earliest fictions—Coover tells the ghost of the Spanish novelist that he finds himself “standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another,” addressing the need for “new … fictional forms” (78, 79). To an even greater extent, John Barth internalizes and recasts the tensions of his generation in his late fiction. In Once Upon a Time (1994), for instance, Barth presents a writer working on what he “can’t resist thinking of as [his] Last Book” (382), an elegiac sentiment that is reinforced by the acronym yielded by Barth’s title: this writer is on his way OUT. Barth’s writer acknowledges that he is driven by “the record-keeper in me” (11), and the skeleton of the novel is provided by a survey of, and a progression through, Barth’s fictional productions that is, in turn, prefaced by a sketch of literary history’s production of a “division between high art and commercial ‘prolefeed,’ polarizing novelists into James Joyces on the one hand and James Micheners on the other” (24–25). Trying to establish “who in the fluxing world he is” (323), these maps of both literary history and his own works locate him in time and space, affirming for Barth his position at the confluence of modernism and popular fiction, as “a confessed Postmodernist” (25).

Once Upon a Time and Pricksongs and Descants stand at opposite ends of postmodernism, but both texts illustrate an impulse within the movement to imagine the writer’s work as a kind of historical marker, illuminating the self’s relationship to the literary past. Although earlier literary periods were constructed by critics, these texts embody the efforts of postmodernism—as Brian McHale has argued in “What Was Postmodernism?”—to “periodize … itself.” McHale writes: “From the very outset, postmodernism was self-conscious about its identity as a period, conscious of its own historicity, because it conceived of itself as historical.”

As much as any writer of his generation, Jonathan Franzen has been preoccupied by the question of how a writer who grew up in the heyday of postmodernism might relate to a movement that so forcibly established and policed its own borderlands. In 2001, Franzen told Donald Antrim that he had begun writing novels as a way of creating a “conversation with the … great sixties and seventies Postmoderns” (73), and his reviews of other novels, as well as the essays where he meditates on the state of fiction, indicate how deeply he is concerned with the place of his fiction within a larger literary ecology that has been predominantly shaped by the energies of American postmodernism. But to excavate Franzen’s relationship to his literary ancestors—and so, implicitly, to theorize about the end of postmodernism—requires a reader to revisit and reconsider both the mode of postmodernism’s initial construction in the early 1960s and the messy cluster of meanings that have congealed around the term over a much longer period.

A genealogy of the end of postmodernism: Order and chaos

Summaries of postmodernism are commonly framed in terms of the movement’s supposedly derivative relationship to modernism, a relationship that is just as commonly introduced with reference to the first book to use the designation modernist in its title: Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927). The problem that immediately besets such constructions, however, is that by the time Riding and Graves’s study was published, the term postmodernism had already appeared in the title of a book: Bernard Iddings Bell’s Postmodernism and Other Essays (1926). The break in linearity implied by these titles may seem appropriately postmodern, but the discontinuity can be explained by the fact that Bell is positioning himself post- a different kind of modernism to that addressed by Riding and Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry largely circles aesthetic issues asking how punctuation might be deployed in a poem, or what relation might exist between a poem’s length and its structure, and arguing that the self-conscious criticality of the modernist period meant that “poetry becomes the tradition of poetry” (261). Bell’s interests, by contrast, are theological. He is preoccupied with the disintegrating certainties of Christianity—the infallibility of the scriptures, the power of the individual mind—that have made of Protestantism “a collapsing system” (4). Trying to square the scriptures with modern science, Bell imagines a “Postmodernist” today as “a man without a Church” (65), but he has little to say about difficult poetry.

The divergent focus of these two books introduces the first problem faced when addressing the history of postmodernism. The term not only has different meanings in different disciplines and contexts, but those varied usages are also attached to different chronologies for the term. So while, in theology, the first use of postmodernism predates the canonization of literary modernism, in artistic circles the term is not proposed for another 10 years, eventually appearing in a 1936 issue of the Journal of Higher Education to describe the emergence of surrealism (Rusk 379).¹ With such tangled histories and often conflicting usages, it makes little sense, then, to explore what the end of postmodernism might mean in an interdisciplinary sense. While I’m going to suggest that many novelists and critics have already posited the end of literary postmodernism, to a social theorist concerned with the logic of late capitalism, postmodernism might show few signs of weakening. The difficulty here, as Terry Eagleton argues at the start of The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), is that with its many distributed meanings “postmodernism is such a portmanteau phenomenon that anything you assert of one piece of it is almost bound to be untrue of another” (viii). But if it is impossible to anatomize the widescale end of postmodernism, it is possible to isolate different moments in the evolution of literary postmodernism, to ask which strands survived and which died as postmodernism approached the millennium. To detach postmodern techniques from the complexities of the literary field in which they’re deployed goes against the stated beliefs of postmodern novelist John Barth, who argues that “what makes a text postmodern” is not “literary strategies in isolation, but rather ‘their connection through complex feedback loops with postmodernism as a cultural dominant’” (Further Fridays 308). But I think there is some taxonomical value in separating two aspects of literary postmodernism, in particular, that I would like to examine from opposite ends of the movement’s construction.

In Constructing Postmodernism (1992), Brian McHale argues that as literary histories are constructed, “each successive cultural phase recuperates what has been excluded and ‘left over’ from the preceding phase” (56). This is certainly true of the emergence of critical debate about literary postmodernism in the late 1960s and 1970s, as scholars constructed a movement characterized in terms of its opposition to modernism.² I’m particularly interested, here, in the tendency of early critics of postmodernism to identify the movement as a deliberate attempt to subvert the emphasis that the modernists placed on artistic form. For disillusioned critics, this subversion of form would be the triumph of the Pound Error that Ezra Pound describes in the fragmentary last phase of The Cantos, an “Error of chaos” (802)³:

my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod,

I cannot make it cohere. (810)

The classic works of modernism insisted upon an order that was both formal and intellectual, controlled by both their careful textual arrangement and the nonliterary grids—drawn from Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Greek myths, and so on—their narratives followed. “Order, order, order,” as Joyce insists—twice—in Finnegans Wake (1939) might properly be taken as the movement’s governing principle (337, 338). Early postmodernism, by contrast, seemed to deliberately stress disorder. In artistic manifestos, such as Raymond Federman’s Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow (1981), a new fiction was presented whose “most striking aspects” would “be its semblance of disorder and its deliberate incoherency” (13). Federman explained: “it will be deliberately … non sequitur, and incoherent …. The new fiction will not create a semblance of order, it will offer itself for order and ordering” (13–14). Critics were presenting similar diagnoses. De Villo Sloan, for example, (who was already detecting “The decline of American Postmodernism” in 1987) constructed an irrational, chaotic postmodernism by arguing that while “modernism considered itself high art, postmodernism tends toward nonart … [it] seeks to cultivate the irrational” (32–33). In its purest form, this subversion of artistic order was indicated by chance methods of composition. Leonard B. Meyer was one of the earliest critics to identify the role of “random operations” in the production of what he called antiteleological art (173), but the idea was elaborated by later writers. Christopher Butler, for example, wrote in After the Wake (1980) about William S. Burroughs’s use of chance juxtapositions to develop an “art which repudiates rational control” (102). Equally, Richard Kostelanetz described less well-known works, such as Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962) and Peter H. Beaman’s Deck of Cards (1989), as examples of chance literary composition in An ABC of Contemporary Reading (1995).

There are certainly examples of recent postmodern fiction that incorporate the role of chance. Lee Siegel’s Love and Other Games of Chance (2003), a carefully constructed novel that nevertheless encourages the reader to select chapters according to their progress on “the great aleatory game” of snakes and ladders (224), springs to mind. But as American fiction has evolved, the importance of disorder has significantly diminished. Partly this is the function of a generation of critics attuned to emerging sciences of chaos and complexity—as well as work in other disciplines—who have revealed that the illusion of disorder in many postmodern works has rather indicated, as William Gaddis notes in The Recognitions (1955), the presence of a “perfectly ordered chaos” (18).⁴ But at the same time, the diminished importance of disorder is partly a function of the simple passage of time: as postmodernism has progressed, it has become easier to trace fuller arcs for the careers of the early postmodern writers, which makes it easier to distinguish their major works and to reconceive their artistic ambitions. From this long perspective, it becomes clear that many American postmodernists—like the authors of encyclopedic narratives Northrop Frye describes, who “build their creative lives around one supreme effort” (322)—conceived of their careers as culminating in a capstone masterpiece, often encyclopedic in scope, that they constructed over a number of decades. While DeLillo and Pynchon each spent at least 6 years working on a single long book, each designed to encapsulate what Mason & Dixon (1997) calls “some Zero-Point of history” (152), their investment of time is dwarfed by the efforts of Gaddis, Coover, and William H. Gass.

Gaddis spent around 50 years researching (and wrestling with) a history of the player piano. A character in his first novel, The Recognitions, boasts that this piece of nonfiction would have “everything in it” (579), and Gaddis’s notes for the book suggest a landmark work of awesome scale, tracing endless connections through art, science, and music. But as he sensed the scope of the project would defeat him, Gaddis was forced on his deathbed to recast the book as Agapë Agape (2002), a more modest 96-page monologue. In a similar vein—though his final work, presumably, is closer to its initial conception than Gaddis’s—William Gass spent 30 years working on the dense, allusive journal that makes up his 653-page novel, The Tunnel (1995), a text that Gass’s narrator describes as “a kind of encyclopedia” (157). Despite the acclaim that greeted his earlier essays and short fiction, Gass often insisted that his reputation should ultimately rest upon this long book. In the early 1970s—more than 20 years before the book was published—he told an interviewer that The Tunnel must be considered his “crucial work,” while his other projects should be relegated to the status of mere “exercises and preparations” (“William H. Gass” 39). More than any other novel, The Tunnel encapsulates this postmodern ambition, taking as its subject a writer who announces that “it was time for ‘the Big Book,’ the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have” (4).

To some extent, this drive is surely a product of the same anxious pressures that encouraged the postmodern writer to periodize postmodernism. But the example of Robert Coover, in particular, stresses that when a fuller sense of a postmodernist’s career trajectory is considered, a similar level of formal control can be found in their encyclopedic capstone work to that found in the work of the high modernists. Less than 5 years after the publication of his first book, The Origin of the Brunists (1965), Coover had evidently begun to plan a long work entitled Lucky Pierre, that he would work on for more than 30 years.⁵ Despite the fact that he published 11 other (sometimes short) novels and built an impressive reputation with Pricksongs and Descants, The Universal Baseball Association (1968), and The Public Burning (1977), dazzling examples of metafiction that are inescapable in any primer of postmodern fiction, this big project preoccupied him and eluded completion until the year of Coovers’ 70th birthday. In its final form The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (2002), like much of Coover’s earlier work, is composed of a dense verbal tapestry of puns and repetitions, with a central character’s narrative caught up in a complex blurring of ontological layers that makes it difficult to locate what’s real and what isn’t, and—as in all good postmodern tales—this is, of course, partly the point and partly the subject of a critique that’s carried within the novel itself. One character’s self-conscious outburst “Storyline! It’s an associative free-for-all” (116), recasts the complaints of those critics for whom randomness and incoherence overlap with postmodernism, but a more precise examination of the novel reveals a rigid and careful order that underpins the novel’s anarchic action. The book’s two-part title provides one key to revealing Lucky Pierre’s latent order.

The first half of the title alludes to an old joke (also referenced in Gravity’s Rainbow [497]) about the so-called lucky member in the middle of a homosexual threesome and introduces the reader to at least one of the novel’s subjects: pornography. In the porn- and film-dominated setting of the novel, named Cinecity by Coover, Lucky Pierre has long been the most famous porn actor. His career has gradually shifted through six phases that encapsulate the passage from his early days as a child actor, when he was known as “Wee Willy,” to his last aged incarnation as “Pete the Beast.” The subtitle “directors’ cut” may be an ironic allusion to the massive editorial process Coover must have gone through to organize more than 30 year’s worth of notes and drafts into a 405-page narrative, but the position of the apostrophe is also significant. Unlike Gass’s novel, which describes itself as a “domestic epic … that took place entirely in the mind” of one narrator (32), there is not a single controlling director who has produced this text, but instead there are nine female directors whose attempts to direct and entice Lucky are dramatized in different chapters. The combination of Pierre’s six incarnations and his nine directors produces what Coover calls a “structural pun” (“An Interview” 72): 6 plus 9 in this pornography-suffused world equals one 69 for the reader.

The artistic sympathies of each of these directors adds further shading to the underlying order of the novel, as Brian Evenson has demonstrated that “each director is associated … with one of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne … who served in ancient Greece as the goddesses of music, art, literature, and intellectual pursuits” (257). But even given this fundamentally modernist patterning, a reader might still fairly ask why a 400-page book required a gestation period of more than 30 years? The first answer is apparent all over the novel’s surface in the brilliant verbal exuberance of Coover’s prose. The world of pornography is surely one of the most limited and clichéd arenas a novel can enter, but Coover escapes these confines with characteristic verbal dexterity. In an example that could be taken as an algorithm for Coover’s technique, the reader can mark the steps as he sheds the constriction of his subject matter in the following passage: “Stand up to be counted these days, you get counted out, swept a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• eCopyright
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Note on Editions
• Chapter 1 A Map of the Territory: American at the Millennium
• Chapter 2 Genealogy: Franzen’s Early Writing
• Chapter 3 In the Concrete Waste Land: The Twenty-Seventh City
• Chapter 4 Midnight in the System Rooms: Strong Motion
• Chapter 5 Millennial Fictions: The Corrections
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works by Franzen
• Works Cited
• Index