Universidad de Córdoba Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana The Romance of Community: Form and Ideology in Jonathan Franzen’s Fiction Tesis doctoral presentada por Jesús Blanco Hidalga Dirigida por Dr. Julián Jiménez Heffernan Dra. Paula Martín Salván VºBº Directores de la Tesis Doctoral Fdo. El Doctorando Dr. Julián Jiménez Heffernan Jesús Blanco Hidalga Dra. Paula Martín Salván Córdoba, 2015 TITULO: The Romance of Community: Form and Ideology in Jonathan Frazen's Fiction AUTOR: Jesús Blanco Hidalga © Edita: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba. 2015 Campus de Rabanales Ctra. Nacional IV, Km. 396 A 14071 Córdoba www.uco.es/publicaciones [email protected] Index: Description of contents: Aim, scope and structure of this work………………………...5 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………….14 1.1. Justification of this work…………………………………………………...14 1.2. The narrative of conversion………………………………………………..15 1.3. Theoretical coordinates and critical procedures…………………………...24 1.3.1. Socially symbolic narratives……………………………….……..26 1.3.2. The question of realism: clarifying terms………………….……..33 1.3.3. Realism, contingency and the weight of inherited forms………...35 1.3.4. Realism, totality and late capitalism……………………….……..39 1.3.5. The problem of perspective………………………………………43 1.4. Community issues………………………………………………………….48 2. The critical reception of Jonathan Franzen’s novels………………………………...53 2.1. Introduction: a controversial novelist.……………………………………..53 2.2. Early fiction: The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion……………….56 2.3. The Corrections and the Oprahgate……………………………………….60 2.4. Hybrid modes and postmodern uncertainties……………………...………66 2.5. The art of engagement…..………………………………………...……….75 2.6. Freedom as the latest Great American Novel?.............................................81 2.7. Latest critical references…………………………………………………...89 2.8. Franzen’s reception in Spain……………………………………...……….91 3. The realist novel: A socio-historical approach...…………………………………….92 3.1. Introduction: what we talk about when we talk of realism.………………...92 3.2. Take thy neighbour seriously: novelistic populism in a fallen world…........95 3.3. Historical present: the novel and the development of historical thought....108 3.4. Symbolic artefacts: the social and psychological functions of the novel....117 3.5. Totality and fragmentation: realism and quest for meaning in the modern world......................................................................................................121 3.6. The cracked kettle: the bad reputation of realism…………………….…..134 3.7. The decline of totality: realism in our time….…………………………...139 4. Knowable conspiracies: The Twenty-Seventh City…………………………………146 2 4.1. Introduction: striking up a conversation……….…………………………146 4.2. Mapping “the inner city of fiction.”……………………………………...149 4.3. Vanishing city: the wasteland of vacant lots…….…………………….....155 4.4. City of boredom: highways, malls and the hunger for the Event….…......161 4.5. Visions of (second) nature: songbirds and concrete...……….…………...165 4.6. Suburban sprawl and the quest for orientation…………………………...168 4.7. Conspiracy or the end of the public sphere………………………………170 4.8. The (non-)politics of irony: agency and apathy………………………….178 4.9. Systemic paralysis and Utopian drives………………………….………..184 4.10. Nostalgias of the industrial age………………………………………....190 4.11. History, form and ideology……………………………………………..193 5. Strong Motion: Activism of the private sphere…………………………………….198 5.1. Introduction: reassessing Franzen’s disavowal……...…………………..198 5.2. Family affairs and ideological pressure………………...………………..202 5.3. Geophysics of the Other………………………………...……...…….....210 5.4. Natural history and historical nature……………………...…...…….......216 5.5. The quest for truth in Risikogesellschaft…………………..……...…......226 5.6. Urban novel and novelistic city…………………………..………...…...230 5.7. Agency and community: liberals and radicals……………………..……238 5.8. Perspectives of salvation…………………………………………..…….249 5.9. The novel and the problem of alterity……………..…………………….253 6. The Corrections: A family romance for the global age…………………………….257 6.1. Introduction: The Corrections as the outcome of a conversion…………..257 6.2. Topography of the system: global perspectives and (sub)urban ambiguities…………………………………………………………….262 6.3. From the city to the suburb and the family house………………………...267 6.4. Charting totality: conspiracy vs. synthesis………………………………..278 6.5. Family elegies, social pictures (and vice versa)………………………..…290 6.6. Sympathetic types………………………………………………………...302 6.7. Problems of perspective in postmodern politics………………………….307 6.8. The search for community in post-historical times………………………317 7. How to close a (meta)narrative: Freedom………………………………………….329 7.1. Guilty (liberal) pleasures…………………………………………………332 7.2. Beaten up by rednecks: class discourse and ideology…………………...336 3 7.3. Aurea mediocritas: Franzen’s middle-class ideal………………………..355 7.4. Untying the knot of ideology: salvation and reconciliation……………...357 7.5. Keeping it in the family………………………………………………….360 7.6. The politics of environmentalism…………………..…………………….365 7.7. The elephant in the room………………………………………………...372 7.8. The Ring of Life: How to Live. What to Do……………………………..380 8. Conclusion / Coda………………………………………………………………….384 8.1. Conclusion………………………………………………………………384 8.2. Coda…………………………………………………………………….390 9. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………...394 4 Description of contents: Aim, scope and structure of this work. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a thorough ideologico-formal account of the fictional work of American novelist Jonathan Franzen (1959, Western Springs, Illinois), embedded in an analysis of relevant aspects of its historical, cultural and political context. The present study includes the examination of certain rhetorical devices of self-legitimation present in Franzen’s work, previously unaccounted for in the existing critical literature devoted to the novelist. In addition, I will examine the most important elements of the critical reception of Franzen’s four novels to date. In the following section the reader will find a succinct delineation of the contents of this work in the form of a brief summary of each chapter. Chapter 1: A critical introduction to Franzen’s fiction. The introductory chapter begins with a statement of the objective of this project, which is to contribute to fill in the rather noticeable gaps in the critical response to Franzen’s novels. The specific form of my contribution will focus, as already noted, on social, ideological and formal aspects. The theoretical framework of my approach is also specified in this chapter: since narrative is a social activity, I have mainly relied on critics that have dealt with the social dimension of literature. Some of the fundamental critical references of this study can be inscribed with more or less precision within the Marxist tradition. In particular, the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti and Pierre Macherey has been fundamental in the articulation of my critical method, which concentrates on the symbolic role of Franzen’s narrative with respect to ongoing social, historical and ideological circumstances. In the introduction I discuss at length though in general terms several concerns which will be treated more specifically later in the chapters concerned with the analysis of the novels. Taken together, these concerns form the main thesis of this study, which could be summarized as follows. As some critics have noticed, Franzen has deliberately presented his literary evolution in terms of a quasi-religious narrative. This narrative, which serves a self-legitimating purpose, 5 involves an initial state of corruption, a moment of revelation, an act of conversion and finally the attainment of personal salvation after the necessary self-amelioration. As this study seeks to demonstrate, Franzen replicates this pattern in the biographical trajectories of the main characters of his novels, thus drawing legitimation for his own literary and ideological evolution. In this process, he relies on formal and generic elements from genres such as romance, Bildungsroman and melodrama. This is a textual strategy which certain critics, sometimes overly influenced by Franzen’s own presentation of his case, have tended to interpret in rather simplistic terms as a straightforward transition from postmodernism to realism. This book also analyses the political significance of Franzen’s deployment of narratives of individual salvation—a move which, following Jameson, I interpret as an attempt to solve inescapable social and ideological contradictions through the symbolic power of narrative, and particularly through the symbolic substitution of the more manageable community of the family for a public sphere perceived as intractable. In the first chapter of this work the key aspects of our examination of Franzen’s use of realism are introduced. In this respect, my inquiry is based on the theoretical work of Jameson, György Lukács, Terry Eagleton and Peter Brooks, among other critics, and draws on our diachronic study of the realist novel, to be introduced below. Particular attention has been paid, following Lukács, to issues of perspective and class discourse. Finally, the introduction presents the points of view informing this work’s social approach. The general assumption of contemporary culture being a manifestation of the mode of production known as late capitalism derives from Jameson’s already classic studies. In addition,