“The Reader in Exile” by Jonathan Franzen

I’ve been flipping through Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, How To Be Alone, and I’m really enjoying them. I like Franzen a lot so that’s not a surprise. “The Reader in Exile” was the first one I checked out—yes, because the word “reader” is in the title; the second one I read was “Books in Bed” which is not about what I thought it would be—and it was really surprisingly smart. You see, it was written in 1995, and it’s all about how the internets are going to make us too stupid to read. Or not, because Franzen isn’t that silly.

He discusses a few things, including the then-impossibly-hip Wired magazine, and the book The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. I haven’t read that book, and based on this I don’t think I ever will, but I’m so impressed with what a cool and thought-out take Franzen had on the whole business. On Birkerts:

His nightmare, to be sure, “is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference.”…Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd.
…
It’s no accident that Birkerts locates apocalypse in the arch-hip pages of Wired. He’s still the high-school loner, excluded from the in crowd and driven, therefore, to the alternative and more “genuine” satisfactions of reading. But what, we might ask him, is so wrong with being an efficient and propserous information manager? Do the team captains and class presidents really not have souls?

It’s funny; I could not agree more with Franzen here. Which I think is probably unusual for a “reader”—of course he is one too. But he’s right to call out the elitism here, which is mostly baseless and also bizarre—“an aristocracy of alienation.” I mean shit, I love books, I love reading, I love what it brings me. But I know better than to assume other people are soulless. And more importantly, I don’t think there’s anything inherently better about reading just-any-book than about playing online or watching TV or movies, both of which have some pretty incredible writing these days.

On to Franzen’s last point, which I also loved. After the aesthetic elitism, Birkerts moves on to the idea “that while technology is merely palliative, art is therapeutic.” Franzen likes this idea, but knows better. I quote at length, because I say, “Right on!”

Unhappy families may be aesthetically superior to happy families, whose happiness is all alike, but “dysfunctional” families are not. It was easy to defend a novel about unhappiness; everybody knows unhappiness; it’s part of the human condition. A novel about emotional dysfunction, however, is reduced to a Manichaeanism of utility. Either it’s a sinister enabler, obstructing health by celebrating pathology, or it’s an object lesson, helping readers to understand and overcome their own dysfunction. Obsession with social health produces a similar vulgarity: if a novel isn’t part of a political solution, it must be part of the problem. The doctoral candidate who “exposes” Joseph Conrad as a colonialist is akin to the school board that exiles Holden Caulfield as a poor role model—akin as well, unfortunately, to Birkerts, whose urgency in defending reading devolves from the assumption that books must somehow “serve” us.

I love novels as much as Birkerts does, and I, too, have felt rescued by them. I’m moved by this pleading, as a lobbyist in the cause of literature, for the intellectual subsidy of his client. But novelists want their work to be enjoyed, not taken as medicine.

And again, this was in 1995. Fourteen years later there are still people worrying about those soulless neotroglodytes. I think we’re okay.