In her recent volume of essays, The Din in the Head, Cynthia Ozick includes a piece titled “Highbrow Blues” whose point of departure is the Jonathan Franzen-Oprah Winfrey dust-up from a few years back. As you may remember, Oprah selected Franzen’s novel The Corrections as her book of the month (or whatever), and Franzen vented his ambivalence in the media, along the way throwing in the disobliging remark that Oprah’s picks tended to be ”schmaltzy, one-dimensional” works that made him “cringe.” Franzen would have you know that he doesn’t write Johnny-one-note schmaltz; to the contrary, he notoriously intoned, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition.”
Many boots, metaphorically speaking, found Franzen’s groin after that one. My god, what an elitist. What a preening snob. And I have to admit (speaking of cringing) that I recoiled a bit myself. Something about the baldness of it, the self-satisfaction, smacked of imposture, even though I do believe that there is high-art literary material that reason can clearly distinguish from the sort of book Oprah typically picks. (I have to take my hat off to her, though, for last year’s “Summer of Faulkner.” It’s probably safe to say that tens of thousands of people who otherwise would never have touched a Faulkner novel were exposed to one of the highest of the high-art literary tradition’s high priests, and may have gotten something out of it, too, thanks to her.) Franzen later sought to mend fences and agreed to go on Oprah’s show, but by then she had already disinvited him.
Ozick, I was glad to see, had the same discomfort I did with Franzen’s comment. She puts it this way:
Like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition. Never mind that the “high-art literary tradition” generally shuns the use of “like” as a conjunction: the remark was off the cuff, presumably under a journalist’s pressure, and nothing if not informal. It was the telltale phrase itself–the high-art literary tradition–that shot Franzen through the cannon of doleful celebrity, if not into the Western canon. What did it mean? What was it? Why did it sound so awkward, so out of tune, so self-conscious, so–one hesitates to say–jejune? Why did it have the effect of a very young man attempting to talk like the grownups? And [here she gets to the interesting point] what had become of those grownups anyhow? Why were they, by and large, no longer on the scene–so little on the scene, in fact, and so little in anyone’s thoughts or vocabulary, that a locution like high-art literary tradition took on the chirp of mimicry, or archaism?
What, why, and where indeed–especially where. Who today will speak up for that tradition with full throat and without apology the way Mailer and Sontag used to? Love them or hate them–and I love and hate both Mailer and Sontag–they and a few others like them had a place in the culture that, as many have noted, no artist or intellectual can claim today. You probably have to go back 30 years for a glimpse of that lost world, the world you enter through, say, Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Imagine three writers of the present moment comparable in stature and seriousness to Mailer, Robert Lowell, and Dwight Macdonald being principal figures of media interest in an anti-war march on the Pentagon. It’s impossible. Today instead of Mailer, Lowell, and Macdonald we have Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen. Instead of Dick Cavett we have Bill Maher. And if it’s the engage artist we seek, we have to settle for the bleached mummeries of a bigot in liberal’s clothing named Jane Smiley–Mailer’s equal in nothing save possibly self-promotion. That’s why Franzen’s comment was such a lightning rod. No one dares talk that way anymore out in the open. Even people sympathetic to what he was trying to say found themselves wincing at it.
I’m really not as old as I sound. In fact I’m not even old enough to remember that lost world all that clearly. But that’s what books and documentaries are for–no?–books like The Din in the Head, whose author is plenty old enough to remember those days:
Only a short while before the Franzen brouhaha, Philip Roth published a little volume called Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues Discuss Their Work. … A writer of Roth’s stature–one of the shapers of the novel in our time–engaging with ten of the significant literary figures of the twentieth century!
Fifty years ago, we can be sure, this would have been taken as an Event, as a cultural marker, as an occasion for heating up New York’s literary stewpots as much as, or even more than, Franzen’s explosive–and ephemeral–wistfulness. … What is notable is that Shop Talk was not notable. It was born into silence.
And back to Franzen. It’s just possible of course that he sounded like a self-infatuated jerk because he really is one. Loath as I am to take on faith anything Michiko Kakutani says, I’d say the odds are she’s on the money with Franzen’s new memoir, The Discomfort Zone, which she reviewed a week or so ago. I’ve never read any of Franzen’s fiction, just an essay here and there (one of them a whiney piece in Harper’s lamenting the marginality of artists like himself). But the quotes Kakutani produces from this book paint a stark picture of a prize ass. Hit the link and see for yourself.
