Why Bother? (essay) - Content

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Franzen recounts his "despair about the American novel" beginning in 1991 during the media assent to the jingoism surrounding the Gulf War and the presidency of George H. W. Bush. During this time, Franzen finds parallels to his own life's ambiguities surrounding a war to those of the Brooklyn protagonist in the novel Desperate Characters dealing with the despair surrounding the Vietnam War. Franzen also notes the novel's possible interpretation that in such times literary representation may fail to rise to desperate settings, surmising that the novel may precede Phillip Roth's declaiming of the realistic novel in the 1980s. During those years however, Franzen believed the aesthetic solution was the push towards the illogical and surreal representations of contemporary culture, using as an example Joseph Heller, particularly in his novel Catch 22. Franzen completed his first novel The Twenty-Seventh City in this style hoping that it might spark social change, having it ultimately published to warm reviews but little attention by the culture at large. Franzen found himself attributing this to the gap presented by magazines and newspapers no longer committing to book reviews in significant numbers due to the market having little use for the individual "final" product of writers, as opposed to more temporary and dispensable forms of entertainment. Franzen suspected up to the time of the late-Victorians, novels still had the cultural role and expectations of instructing and possibly constructively affronting social sensibilities; electronic media from journalism to music having taken both these roles, with the rise of visual media and its quick delivery forcing all recognition to a very literal level.

Franzen finds these developments sharply in contrast to the circumstances and rewards of lasting attention promised in Tom Wolfe's literary manifesto, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. In contrast, Franzen posits that in the current cultural, media, and technological circumstances, major cultural problems are themselves cognitively reduced to surface issues for which immediate cures must be found. Franzen's recognition of these trends, along with the quick rise and cultural saturation of electronic media temporarily left him in despair as to the possibility of universal cultural engagement.

During this period of personal disillusionment, Franzen came to be acquainted with Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist from Stanford. Franzen mentions first his astonishment at Heath's research methods, doing interviews in public places including public transit systems, airport waiting areas and resorts seeking what Heath defines as "enforced transition zones". Heath's interviews generally consist of discovering from individuals reading "substantive works of fiction" why they are reading, rather than using electronic media to stave off boredom. Heath's research found that those who continue reading this type of fiction frequently modeled on the individual enjoying reading first at a young age. Additionally, Heath found that the reading of substantive fiction is done by those of all educational backgrounds and economic positions. Heath's research divided those who developed the habit of substantively reading between those who modeled the reading of their parents, and those who found themselves social isolates as children from an early age. Those who began reading as social isolates are usually classed as more likely to become professional writers when they mature. Franzen notes that modern literature has frequently featured both writers and protagonists as social isolates, from the exiled characters of James Joyce to the self-isolates of J. D. Salinger. Extending this, he finds that many contemporary American authors have been notorious for their publicly recalcitrant nature, giving the examples of Phillip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Denis Johnson.

In the Spring of 1994, while teaching at a small liberal arts college, Franzen recalls his realization that the push towards balkanization of fiction—seeking to place Women's Fiction and Gay Literature at the forefront of curriculum-—is not necessarily decided with the best interests of the authors representative groups in mind, but more often intended as therapeutic against modern malaise, blaming "canonical" work as "Symptoms of Disease". Franzen also expresses great worry that the spread of this process will make young writers expect only to write within the context of their particular "ethnic or gender identity", ironically losing diversity of literature by seeking diverse cultural groups' literature. Franzen also cites some promise in Heath's research, finding that those who frequently read substantive fiction are those who find themselves emancipated from their original cultural heritage, making their reading a source of personal and intellectual integrity. Franzen further cites the work of Anthony Lane suggesting that while the majority of best-selling novels are of low quality, the trend holds true for a good deal of the history of the reading public. However, he does note such exceptions as Norman Mailer's ability to balance publicity with solitary work. Franzen then formulates a long-term opposition to literary culture, beginning with Plato, and extending the trend through to the contemporary arguments that literature is "undemocratic" and not politically viable. He opposes this to the long history of American literary protagonists who, though solitary, have been celebrated as exemplars of American freedom including Huckleberry Finn, Hazel Motes, and Tyrone Slothrop. Franzen suggests that the writing that shares the most political agency and aesthetic dignity would embody the values of expressive language, and urging the reader to look beyond appearances. He believes both values to be features of modern literature as well as western classics such as Oedipus Rex, but finding modern literature most effective in its tragic opposition to modern optimism. Franzen further defends the notion of literature as "depressing" by Flannery O'Connor's formulation that frequent reach for the "other" by reading marks, in fact, the absence of clinical depression. Franzen also notes that while America has always been at least in part, controlled by oppressive commerce, it has also had its victim-conquerors such as Herman Melville, who worked in spite of mental illness to deliver democratic art. Franzen concludes recounting his epiphany at being again able to read and write with a new sense of social responsibility. He advocates the possibility of tragic realism as containing potential for social change. Around this time, he also receives personal correspondence from Don DeLillo encouraging him in the path of writing as both personal freedom, with the—albeit weak—potential of changing culture in solitude as a permanent gift to writers.