{"id":424,"date":"2009-01-14T19:40:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rickyopaterny.com\/blog\/?p=424"},"modified":"2009-01-14T19:40:07","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:40:07","slug":"jonathan-franzen-on-the-social-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/14\/jonathan-franzen-on-the-social-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Franzen on the social novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 5th Estate has some excerpts from an interview with\u00a0Jonathan Franzen<\/a>\u00a0that is running in boundary 2.<\/a> A lengthy snippet follows:<\/p>\n

We may just be little specks.\u00a0As a percentage of the total world population, we\u2019re ever smaller specks, and what we are is ever more mediated by the structures we\u2019ve created for ourselves to live in.\u00a0And yet, as you go through life, you still hit these points of crisis where something genuine is happening.\u00a0 A choice is being made, or a life is being destroyed, or hope is being regained, or control is being relinquished, or control is being achieved.\u00a0These moments may be utterly insignificant historically, but they\u2019re still hugely meaningful to the person experiencing them as meaningful as everything else in the world put together.\u00a0To try to connect with what might formerly have been called the soul, and what I might now describe as some interior locus of privacy and reflection where moments of personal significance are experienced: this, I think, is the job of the fiction writer.\u00a0As great as our various glowing screens may be at capturing vividness and complexity, you\u2019re still always on the outside and just looking at them.\u00a0You\u2019re never within.\u00a0Even if you were to construct a very fine virtual reality device, you would be literally insane if you mistook a manufactured and mass-produced experience for a moment of genuine human importance. If you could believe in the simulacrum enough to think you were having a moment of genuine personal meaning, it would mean you were insane.<\/p>\n

Only written media, and maybe to some extent live theatre, can break down the wall between in and out.\u00a0You\u2019re not looking at your feeling from within.\u00a0An Alice Munro story rushes you along in about 25 minutes to a point where you\u2019re imaginatively going through a moment of deep crisis and significance in another person\u2019s life. I know I\u2019m expressing this in very vague terms, but I think these epiphanic moments have a social and political valence as well, because they\u2019re what we mean when we talk about being a person, about being an individual, about having an identity.\u00a0Identity is precisely not what consumer culture says it is.\u00a0It\u2019s not the playlist on your iPod.\u00a0It\u2019s not your personal preference in denim washes.\u00a0The moment you become an individual is the moment when all that consumer stuff falls away and you\u2019re left with the narrativity of your own life.\u00a0All the things that would become impossible politically, emotionally, culturally, psychologically if people ever were to become simply the sum of their consumer choices: this is, indirectly, what the novel is trying to preserve and fight in favour of.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 5th Estate has some excerpts from an interview with\u00a0Jonathan Franzen\u00a0that is running in boundary 2. A lengthy snippet follows: We may just be little specks.\u00a0As a percentage of the total world population, we\u2019re ever smaller specks, and what we are is ever more mediated by the structures we\u2019ve created for ourselves to live in.\u00a0And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}