Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

DEPRESSION, WHEN IT’S CLINICAL, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism — from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it — thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure. But this “cure” is anything but straightforward.

I spent the early nineties trapped in a double singularity. Not only did I feel that I was different from everyone around me, but I felt that the age I lived in was utterly different from any age that had come before. For me the work of regaining a tragic perspective has therefore involved a dual kind of reaching out: both the reconnection with a community of readers and writers, and the reclamation of a sense of history.

It’s possible to have a general sense of history’s darkness, a mystical Dionysian conviction that the game ain’t over till it’s over, without having enough of an Apollonian grasp of the details to appreciate its consolations. Until a year ago, for example, it would never have occurred to me to assert that this country has “always” been dominated by commerce. [1] I realize that this is a dismal confession, and that my managing to slip through college without ever taking a course in either American history or American literature is hardly an excuse. I saw only the ugliness of the commercial present, and naturally I raged at the betrayal of an earlier America that I presumed to have been truer, less venal, less hostile to the enterprise of fiction. But how ridiculous the self-pity of the writer in the late twentieth century can seem in light of, say, Herman Melville’s life. How familiar his life is: the first novel that makes his reputation, the painful discovery of how little his vision appeals to prevailing popular tastes, the growing sense of having no place in a sentimental republic, the horrible money troubles, the abandonment by his publisher, the disastrous commercial failure of his finest and most ambitious work, the reputed mental illness (his melancholy, his depression ), and finally the retreat into writing purely for his own satisfaction.

Reading Melville’s biography, I wish that he’d been granted the example of someone like himself, from an earlier century, to make him feel less singularly cursed. I wish, too, that he’d been able to say to himself, when he was struggling to support Lizzie and their kids: Hey, if worse comes to worst, I can always teach writing. In his lifetime, Melville made about $10,500 from his books. Even today, he can’t catch a break. On its first printing, the title page of the second Library of America volume of Melville’s collected works bore the name, in twenty-four-point display type, HERMAN MEVILLE.

Last summer, as I began to acquaint myself with American history, and as I talked to readers and writers and pondered the Heathian “social isolate,” there was growing inside me a realization that my condition was not a disease but a nature. How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader . My nature had been waiting for me all along, and now it welcomed me. All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world. The hunger felt like a loneliness of which I’d been dying. How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the “real” world? I didn’t need curing, and the world didn’t, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding — without a sense of belonging to the real world — it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between a feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved. Writing, and reading too, had become a grim duty, and considering the poor pay, there is seriously no point in doing either if you’re not having fun. As soon as I jettisoned my perceived obligation to the chimerical mainstream, my third book began to move again. I’m amazed, now, that I’d trusted myself so little for so long, that I’d felt such a crushing imperative to engage explicitly with all the forces impinging on the pleasure of reading and writing: as if, in peopling and arranging my own little alternate world, I could ignore the bigger social picture even if I wanted to.

As I was figuring all this out, I got a letter from Don DeLillo, to whom I’d written in distress. This, in part, is what he said:

The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we’re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it’ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us — we won’t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

DeLillo added a postscript: “If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.”

The strange thing about this postscript is that I can’t read it without experiencing a surge of hope. Tragic realism has the perverse effect of making its adherents into qualified optimists. “I am very much afraid,” O’Connor once wrote, “that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction, for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself. His concern with poverty is with a poverty fundamental to man.” Even if Silicon Valley manages to plant a virtual-reality helmet in every American household, even if serious reading dwindles to near-nothingness, there remains a hungry world beyond our borders, a national debt that government-by-television can do little more than wring its hands over, and the good old apocalyptic horsemen of war, disease, and environmental degradation. If real wages keep falling, the suburbs of “My Interesting Childhood” won’t offer much protection. And if multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life. History is the rabid thing from which we all, like Sophie Bentwood, would like to hide. But there’s no bubble that can stay unburst. On whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, tragic realists offer no opinion. They simply represent it. A generation ago, by paying close attention, Paula Fox could discern in a broken ink bottle both perdition and salvation. The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.

[1996]

The fall of the Chicago post office began before the public could see the portents: before the undead letters rose up in every corner of the city to haunt the guilty management — a hundred sacks of months-old mail in the back of a North Side letter carrier’s truck, two hundred pounds of fresh mail burning underneath a South Side viaduct, more than fifteen hundred pieces of mail moldering in a shallow grave beneath a West Side porch, and a truck-load of mail and parcels in the closets of a Chicago carrier’s suburban condo. The fall began on Thursday, January 20, 1994, at about two in the afternoon, when a woman named Debra Doyle called the manager of her local station and told him that her family had not received mail since the previous Thursday.