Ignore Jonathan Franzen

I wasn’t invited to deliver any commencement addresses this year, so I have not been giving too much though to the kind of advice I would offer to newly-minted college graduates.

If I were to do so, I might consult past commencement addresses, to see what the world’s luminaries have been able to offer.

Then, I would be confronted with the fact that the most famous piece of commencement wisdom appeared in a fake speech, attributed to the late Kurt Vonnegut, but not written by him. You probably recall it: Wear sunscreen.

Practical advice it was. You cannot go wrong by wearing sunscreen. The notion that four years of college and a mountain of debt would make you apt to embrace such good advice is, at least, somewhat heartening.

Alas, you cannot go peddling someone’s old advice as your own. The first piece of new advice that popped into mind was this: Floss.

While this is also unimpeachably good advice, it feels a bit derivative, and besides, college students being college students, it is likely that their first thought would have related dental floss to a certain style of swimsuit.

There I was, stuck for a pithy piece of wisdom, when I chanced on Jonathan Franzen’s commencement address to last week’s Kenyon College graduates. Link here.

I read it. Which is more than I can say about Franzen’s fictional output. I read it with an increasing feeling of horror. Franzen had managed, as was his wont, to load up his essay with a mix of mindless banality, utter stupidity, and godawful advice.

You might consider this to be a literary achievement of the highest order. It told me that the next time I am asked to give a commencement address, I am going to say: Ignore Jonathan Franzen.

You remember Jonathan Franzen. A favorite of the New York literary elite, he wrote a book called The Corrections. Widely proclaimed to be a masterpiece-- it wasn’t-- the book was having a fairly good run... until Oprah Winfrey chose it as a book club selection.

Being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club was a gift from the gods, manna from Heaven. Sales of the book shot up from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.

Authors, publishers, editors, and publicists would have sold their souls to have a book chosen by Oprah.

Not so Jonathan Franzen. The new star of the New York literary scene went into tantrum mode. He was not honored to be selected; he felt it was demeaning, beneath the aesthetic greatness of his novel.

If I may interrupt myself here, I will tell you that if you, as a writer, have to proclaim the greatness of your fiction, then you are saying that your novel cannot do it on its own.

Anyway, Franzen did not just believe that being selected for Oprah’s Book Club compromised his literary seriousness. He also declared that he feared that people would now mistake his book for a girly exercise, not quite up to the more manly novelists in whose company he sought to place himself.

As it happened, The Corrections is a domestic tragicomedy. It is not really a guy’s book. Domesticity, the inner workings of a family, these belong to the genre of advanced chick lit.

Perhaps Franzen thought that his efforts at jejune social commentary would raise his book to the ranks of Dickens and DeLillo. It didn’t.

As I explained in a prior post, I found the book to be boring beyond endurance. I stopped reading at the quarter pole. I will mention in passing that I used to teach English literature in college. I am not an amateur consumer of literary fiction.

Franzen was not done ranting against Oprah. Cringing in anguish,  Franzen declared that now, each book jacket was going to sport the Oprah seal of approval. Too corporatist, said Franzen, whose book was being published by an American branch of a German conglomerate.

If he wasn’t going to be a great novelist, Franzen seemed to be trying to compete for the title of the world’s most ungrateful cur. He told the world that he had never stooped to watch Oprah’s show, that the segments he had taped for it were bogus, and so on.

You cannot get very much more offensive. One must wonder what kind of world Franzen lives in, where such behavior might be considered to be clever and cool.

Anyway, Oprah was sufficiently put off to cancel Franzen’s appearance on her show.

I don’t know for a fact, but I do not imagine Franzen’s reputation suffered from his emotional incontinence. He might even have been expressing elite opinion in the New York publishing world.

However clever they are, and many of them are extremely clever, no matter how much effort they put into selling books, some editors and publishers must have rankled at the fact that the greatest marketer of books was this African-American woman on a daytime television show in Chicago.

I have no idea why people care about what a man with such an obvious character deficiency thinks about anything, but Kenyon College invited Franzen to deliver its commencement speech. The speech was reprinted in the New York Times, so it is going to receive some serious exposure.

Franzen begins with a metaphor. It’s not a very good metaphor, but, what did you expect?

He starts out by recounting his passion for a hand-held device. Which hand-held device might that be? Why, his BlackBerry. You weren’t thinking of something else, were you?

Apparently, Franzen was. Infatuated with his own cleverness he goes on to talk about how, when you use an iPhone, you can enlarge the image by spreading your fingers.

Getting the picture?

Franzen himself is trying to explain to these college graduates that you can have a love affair with these hand-held devices, and that they treat you better than real women do when you throw them out.

From there Franzen offers a reflection about Facebook.

It’s worth quoting in full, not because it is an exemplary prose passage, but because it’s so poorly reasoned. And besides, we should allow Franzen to speak for himself.

In his words: “A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

“But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.”

Where to begin....

Franzen is arguing that it is bad to be likable because it makes you less lovable. He wants young people to live their lives with wild gusto, to engage in mindless passions, because being madly in love is better than getting along with other people, fitting in with the group, and living as a functioning member of a community.

After opening his talk with a slew of erotic images about his relationship  with hand-held devices, he now tells us that these gadgets are more on the side of like than lust.

Not only does Franzen’s lecture have a special place in the annals of bad advice, but he himself has certainly qualified as a charter member of the gang that couldn’t think straight.

It is simply idiotic to say that Facebook has changed the meaning of the word: like.

Franzen claims that people who want to be liked have no integrity, thus, no character, that they are narcissists,  and that they merely want to keep up appearances in order to be liked by others.

But isn’t Franzen himself a monster of self-centered narcissistic preening, a man so thoroughly lacking in integrity that he is capable of insulting and demeaning the woman who is most responsible for his financial success and security.

Narcissist, heal thyself!

Narcissism involves a failure to respect the feelings of others. Only someone as confused as Jonathan Franzen could say that a narcissist is someone who tries to like other people and to be liked by them.

Because likability simply means having friends and acquaintances, colleagues and associates, and getting along with them in order to engage in productive enterprise.

You cannot accomplish any of those without showing tact and consideration. You cannot be a narcissist and be tactful at the same time. You can do as Franzen does and be tactless and narcissistic at the same time.

People who have a close and expanding circle of friends are not desperate to be liked. Quite the contrary. A person without friends is going to feel desperate to find the kind of true passionate love that Franzen prescribes.

If you have isolated yourself from other people, if you feel like a misfit, you might follow Franzen’s bad advice and attempt to cure it all by finding true romantic love.

You will not succeed. No single person should ever be expected to compensate for your failure to sustain good relationships with a large variety of people.

A mad passionate love affair is not a substitute for a social life. If you try to make it into one, you will soon discover why the poets declared this kind of love to be a type of madness.

As Franzen explains it: “The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.”

Again, this is idiotic. If you not have a goodly number of friends, people who like you but are not in love with you, then your love affairs will be desperate, frantic, and frenetic.

You can love someone without liking them, but such passions usually burn out rather quickly and violently.

If you do not have friends who you like and toward whom you make every effort to be charming, tactful, courteous, and considerate, you will, as does Franzen, find yourself saddled with the kind of bad character and emotional incontinence that turns your adventure in true love into a “hideous, screaming fight.”

Franzen rails against being a consumer-- which he somehow associates with likability-- but he fails to notice that he is recommending that these young people become desperate to the point where they allow themselves to be consumed by some mindless passion.

As you might imagine, following Franzen’s formula is not going to make you very many friends. It is also not going to get you involved in very many sustainable love affairs.

Given that failure is built into the system, Franzen needs a fallback lover. He finds one in birds: “But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.”

His heart overflows with love... who is he trying to kid? If this were not risible, it would be pathetic.

Of course, birds, like other handheld devices, do not get into screaming fights with you. If you decide to drop them, they simply fly off. They do not expect you to like them. They do not much care.

Is there a better definition of narcissism than this injunction to abandon human companionship and to fall in love with pigeons?