Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

For six years the antidepressant drug Prozac has been lifting the spirits of millions of Americans and thousands of Eli Lilly shareholders .

— lead sentence of a New York Times story, January 9, 1994

IT’S HEALTHY to adjust to reality. It’s healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner wrote is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television and educated in the new orthodoxy of identity politics and the reader’s superiority to the text, are almost entirely deaf and blind to. It’s healthy to stop giving yourself ulcers and migraines doing demanding work that may please a few harried peers but otherwise instills unease or outright resentment in would-be readers. It’s healthy to cry uncle when your bone’s about to break. Likewise healthy, almost by definition, to forget about death in order to live your life: healthy to settle for (and thereby participate in) your own marginalization as a writer, to accept as inevitable a shrinking audience, an ever-deteriorating relationship with the publishing conglomerates, a retreat into the special Protective Isolation Units that universities now provide for writers within the larger confines of their English departments (since otherwise the more numerous and ferocious lifers would eat the creative writers alive). Healthy to slacken your standards, to call “great” what five years ago you might have called “decent but nothing special.” Healthy, when you discover that your graduate writing students can’t distinguish between “lie” and “lay” and have never read Jane Austen, not to rage or agitate but simply bite the bullet and do the necessary time-consuming teaching. Healthier yet not to worry about it — to nod and smile in your workshops and let sleeping dogs lay, let the students discover Austen when Merchant and Ivory film her.

In describing as “healthy” these responses to the death sentence obsolescence represents, I’m being no more than halfway ironic. Health really is the issue here. The pain of consciousness, the pain of knowing, grows apace with the information we have about the degradation of our planet and the insufficiency of our political system and the incivility of our society and the insolvency of our treasury and the injustice in the one-fifth of our country and four-fifths of our world that isn’t rich like us. Traditionally, since religion lost its lock on the educated classes, writers and other artists have assumed extra pain to ease the burden for the rest of us, voluntarily shouldered some of the painful knowing in exchange for a shot at fame or immortality (or simply because they had no choice, it was their nature). The compact was never entirely stable, but there was a certain general workability to it. Men and women with especially sharp vision undertook to be the wardens of our discontent. They took the terror and ugliness and general lousiness of the world and returned it to the public as a gift: as works of anger or sadness, perhaps, but always of beauty too.

For better or worse, ours is now a technological society, and whatever the benefits to the health and affluence of the upper half of society, it would be difficult to argue that either technology or the free-market capitalism that is its Siamese twin has done much to solve the ancient problems of mortality and the world’s unfairness. Moreover, they have created, exacerbated, or at least glaringly failed to address a whole host of further anxieties that give pain to thinking people. It’s easy to see how a technoconsumerism that creates lots of Wal-Marts and inexpensive dishwashers will have vastly higher approval ratings than a system, such as the former Soviet Union’s, that does not. But why must the bad cultural currency drive out the good? Why are former readers now renting videos? Why are families that never read books and never bought classical-music recordings suddenly going ape over CD-ROM?

There are familiar answers. Television and other modem technologies are ingratiating and effortless, are designed to enable and promote passivity, and, being corporate enterprises, are burdened with none of the troublesome scruples or complexity that individual talents are. The answer on a deeper level, however, is that a new compact has been made. We have agreed to let technology take care of us . Technology takes its cue from medicine, which, when it cannot cure, seeks to relieve suffering as efficiently as possible. And so we have a society in which the pain of knowledge is only increasing (because the society is getting more savage and less controllable, and the future ever less imaginable, and — most important — the individual worrying consciousness ever more isolated from others like it), which already puts a nearly impossible burden on structures such as the Bible and The Brothers Karamazov and Beethoven and Matisse, which were designed to account for everything in humanity but not for science and technology. And, relations between the public and art never having been exactly comfortable, it’s understandable that a large segment of the population not wait around for some genius writers and artists to come up with more adequate structures, but should instead take comfort in the powerful narcotics technology offers in the form of TV, pop culture, and endless gadgetry, even though these narcotics are addictive and in the long run only make the society’s problems worse.

The more popular these narcotics become, the more socially acceptable their use. Though it hasn’t quite happened yet, though some books are still read and much lip service is still paid them, we writers now easily foresee the day when the old generation of readers has gotten tired and no new generation has taken its place: when we ourselves are all that will remain of our audience. And this is where that pain of knowing comes in. The pain is real, the burden of carrying the knowledge is real. Look what happens when the compact between society and art is abrogated. We lose most, then all, of our audience to television and its similarly ingratiating cousins. We don’t blame the audience for defecting, we know it hurts to have to stay conscious, we understand the need to drug yourself, to feel the warmth of up-to-the-minute hipness or whatever. But the loss of that audience makes us feel all the more alone. Aloneness makes the burden of knowledge heavier. And then the quest for health begins to claim some of our own. Claims more and more of them. They deny that literature is threatened. They make their peace with the new technology. They decide it’s exciting. They swallow the idea that if infinite choice is good in the marketplace it must be good in a reading experience. They find it a relief to reconcile themselves with striving always to please their audience, as the market insists they do; what a load off the shoulders! They begin to take the “characters” that corporate culture offers — various Kennedys, Arnold Schwarzenegger — and tell stories about them. They call themselves postmodernists and imagine they’re using the system rather than its using them. They make the case that these “characters” are more interesting than anything you could invent, and indeed it’s getting harder, in a nation of couch potatoes, to imagine an interesting life. .

And there remains an ever tinier core of us who are temperamentally incapable of deluding ourselves that technology’s “culture” is anything but a malignant drug. We feel how scarce we are. And the work of showing the malignancy, and of reclaiming some perspective from which again to represent human hearts and minds within a society of their own making — this work has been left to us, along with the attendant pain of knowing how important such work is. And at some point the burden becomes overwhelming. It becomes a torture each time you see a friend stop reading books, and each time you read of another cheerful young writer doing TV in book form. You become depressed. And then you see what technology can do for those who become depressed. It can make them undepressed. It can bring them health . And this is the moment at which I find myself: I look around and see absolutely everyone (or so it seems) finding health. They enjoy their television and their children and they don’t worry inordinately. They take their Prozac and are undepressed. They are all civil with each other and smile undepressed smiles, and they look at me with eyes of such pure opacity that I begin to doubt myself. I seem to myself a person who shrilly hates health. I’m only a phone call away from asking for a prescription of my own. .) so ENDS THE FRAGMENT of essay that I’ve scavenged in assembling this one. I wrote the fragment two years ago when I was alone and unable to write fiction — unable, almost, to read a newspaper, the stories depressed me so much. The world hasn’t changed much in the last two years, but I feel as if I have. Who knows if I can generalize from my own experience. All I know is that, soon after I wrote that fragment, I gave up. Just plain gave up. No matter what it cost me, I didn’t want to be unhappy anymore. And so I stopped trying to be a writer-with-a-capital-W. Just to desire to get up in the morning was all I asked.