Jonathan Franzen and Dostoevsky: The Freedom of the Will as A Product of Style
On The Agency of Fictional Characters
“'I read an interview with an author who says at a certain point in writing a novel, his characters take over and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?” “This one always raises my blood pressure,” Franzen said. “The novelist’s primary responsibility is to create meaning, and if you somehow lose track of your characters, you would necessarily be avoiding it yourself … everything under the sun is imaginable in the abstract, but the writer is always limited by what he or she is actually able to make work on the page.” - Franzen Frets Four Questions (Leader Publications)
Can a literary character break out, wreak havoc, against its creator? Is it craft, and craft alone; is writing a question of what the writer is able to make work on the page?
Can the character “take over and tell him what to do?” For Jonathan Franzen, the answer is a definitive No.
Perhaps that is the essence of the unlikeability of Jonathan Franzen’s characters. It is like watching a character in a movie continuously fall for the wrong person or do something stupid which the viewer would instinctively not do. The viewer throws up his hands in frustration, but the character made the major decision, as it were, thanks to outside intervention. Franzen has already decided that that’s when the decision has to be made in the plot.
To read a Franzen character is unpleasant because one is reading a thesis on the soul. One feels dirty afterwards because the reader has been subject to a trove of data which is anti-agency. The novelist’s totalitarian world creates meaning, his craft constructing the situations in which, by intelligent design, the characters follow the creator’s circuits, outlines and cleverly interweaving plots.
The question of “does the character take over,” which Franzen considers a blood-boiling cliché, is actually more than a literary question. At its heart is a question about free will. As a proxy battle, it becomes a theological question: the battle of character versus creator is a proxy for the battle between man and God.
***
The view of writing as “what a writer can make work on the page” is antithetical to the mystical view of writing, as divine inspiration, or, in Yeats, as automatic writing, as possession by a character who might be a dead friend. Is writing craft, or is it mysticism and prophecy?
You have to decide. Unfortunately, for you it’s already been decided. The disposition a writer feels to the world already determines his answer to the question, of whether writing is craft or prophecy. In Jonathan Franzen, we see the apex of modern writing as craft or as constructed art. In no other living writer are plots and characters constructed with as much skill and care and vivid imagination. Is he missing something? Is the world of writing limited by the human imagination, if so, if there is nothing standing outside the sphere of writing as a secular activity, if there is no divine or absolute irrational dissident, then we might as well ordain the current state of literature, we might as well give up on the quest for new books written by living authors.
Indeed, from Franzen’s formulation, from the idea that writers are responsible for their writing, that writers create the text, we can directly pull out the present “social-oriented” censorship of writing. A socialist critique of writing insists that writers must be moral and that their writing must be for a good cause. This view relies upon the claim that writers write their writing. If divine possession were responsible for the writing, then the writer cannot be judged or punished for his creations, he cannot be called a social contagion. His moral status is irrelevant; his only job is to make himself so clean a glass vessel that the light shines without impurity.
And so we are in this moment subject to a double censorship that has killed genius in contemporary writing.
Writers must be moral, but they must also be marketable. Writers must be good people, and their books must read fast. We are subject to not just socialist censorship, but capitalist censorship as well. A query letter turns a book into a proposition about how this book can improve society, and why people ought to buy it. It turns the writer into the conscious agent of his book, the one who executed a plot in order to tell a particular story. But if, on the other hand, we view writing as a peculiar swaying of the wind, as a distant whirl on a cool day, and the writer as nothing more than the well-read scribe who kneels before the wind and transcribes what he can guess he heard, then we will see that a writer is only a good writer when he is unconscious, and that messiness, unpredictability, even poor art, are marks of the throes and bleeding twinges of the madman caught in the dance of God, of the sensual life-neglecting delirium.
In no other writer was this battle between character and author more evident that in Fyodor Dostoevsky.
***
Dostoevsky’s characters are much worse human beings: murderers, thieves, and patricides: but one feels better accompanying them because, wherever they take you, at least they struggle against Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s over-accelerating prose style is a way of writing so fast that the unconscious takes over and the characters begin to react, and overhear themselves, faster than Dostoevsky himself can anticipate.
In Dostoevsky, we see the God-author drag his character into doing things that the character does not want to do; the character struggles against Dostoevsky. The plot is predetermined (the murder must happen), but an endless procrastination can extend the struggle beyond what Dostoevsky intended.
First, there are four similarities between Dostoevsky and Franzen that should be dispelled. Since Dostoevsky is a major influence on Franzen, these similarities are deceptively obvious.
1. The thesis that the unconscious controls us more than the conscious
2. Dark, dirty thematics
3. Unlikeable characters
4. Big novels of ideas that are meant to represent a culture (Russia/America)
Dostoevsky was probably the first writer to repeatedly make the point that that the unconscious defeats the conscious. This thesis came as a reply to the Russian rationalists of the 19th century, and it came out of a revelation, an intense suffering that was forced upon him.
When the rationalists of his time claimed that, day by day, man was becoming more rational and only needed to act in his self-interest to attain happiness, Dostoevsky, controlled by his moods, saw firsthand the falsity of this thesis. Humans not only did not act in their self-interest, actually, reveling in the fact that they were acting self-destructively, humans thrilled and took a perverse artistic enchantment in the displaying of their self-awareness while they destroyed their own lives.
“And do you know, Alexie Fyodorovich, just how one loses one’s mind?” Ivan asked in a voice suddenly quite soft, quite unirritated now, in which suddenly the most ingenuous curiosity could be heard.…“And can one observe oneself losing one’s mind?”
As Ivan feels himself going mad, he observes himself; he acts as if he were gathering details for a future literary study. He is going to commit suicide, or feels the urge to, but it is not a noble suicide, it is not a suicide out of his free will.
Something is making him kill himself; he observes it slightly, but can do nothing about it. His curiosity speaks to the fact that he finds the situation interesting, but it is a useless, helpless interest…
Dostoevsky was a sinner, but a sinner who sinned while knowing that he sinned; a sinner who loved nobility, and beauty, all the more because he knew that he could not attain them. The beautiful life was something that he cherished precisely because it left him.
After marrying his second wife, addicted to gambling, he reduced himself to such poverty that his wife pawned her last piece of property and the family fled to Europe.
But, first, the demon had to persuade him that he had discovered the secret of gambling. Here’s Dostoevsky, clearly in the throes of a manic episode, explaining with incredibly sound “logic” how he has, through careful, precise observation, discovered a way to profit infinitely. Note the helpless deflections of a useless self-awareness.
Tell this to no one, dear Varvara Dmitryevana. You can’t, it is true, tell it to anyone, for you don’t meet anyone… During those four days I watched the gamblers closely. Several hundred persons took part in the play, and only two knew really how to gamble—my word of honor! … But please don’t think that, in my joy at having won and not lost, I am swaggering, and imagining that I know the secret of play. I do know the secret, and it is extremely stupid and simple: it consists in controlling one’s self the whole time, and never getting excited at any phase of the game. That is all; in that way one can’t possibly lose and must win.
A gambling addiction later, his wife Anna Grigorovna has to follow him into exile, running from debtors:
I risked again, and lost. I lost not only what I had won, but also my own money down to the last farthing; I got feverishly excited, and lost all the time. Then I began to pawn my garments. Anna Grigorovna pawned her last, her very last, possession.
Just this, this feverish excitement, is Dostoevsky’s literary revelation, his curse in life, and ultimately his immortal blessing. It forced him to see that there was no such thing as a rational thought that is not built on a foundation of sand.
Moodiness, like in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, forces the narrator to act in ways that he can slightly make sense of while the events are happening. But, even if he is aware—I know that I don’t know the secret of gambling! Dostoevsky proclaims—already something about him is getting carried away, an idea, an image, snatches of fascination, already own him, and even as he smiles sadly at his wife, and says quietly, I know I am a horrible man and am losing everything, that very day he must go out and do the thing…
It is as though the plot had been laid out beforehand, and he can only struggle against it. Franzen, too, believes in the dominance of the unconscious. But, in the same way that some generations inherit their atheism unthinkingly, so did Franzen receive this thesis without discovery; by Franzen’s time, it was already a revealed truth, something taught in MFA’s.
For Dostoevsky, it was a discovery and revelation that the irrational held the upper hand over the rational. For Franzen, such a thing was already a cooled-off brand, long ago pulled from the forge.
But there is a strong difference between the styles of unconsciousness.
What’s strange about Franzen (and MFA style “unconscious”-driven narratives) is that they are actually retrogressive. This style harkens back to Milton, in which anxiety and humor argue over something, and whoever wins the argument controls the character. Here’s Franzen’s character plotting a murder:
He made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing, not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It still wasn’t even nine thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water.
It is superficially true that, in a Franzen character, the unconscious is a stronger force than the conscious. But, in his prose, the elements of the unconscious are like Milton’s angels and demons. Here, Anxiety speaks, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time— notice the repetition of “what time it was” attempts to make it appear as if it was happening in real time. Then, winning the battle, despite Wisdom’s reminder to not think, Anxiety prevents him from holding his shovel. However, luckily, the Character can force himself out of the hole. Eating shows up: Eating which can distract him from Anxiety. He eats. However, Thirst shows up on the scene, preventing him from swallowing.
The prose of this unconsciousness reveals discreet elements battling for the action of the character, but the end result is never in question; the angels and demons battle, but only because Franzen has already decided the result. This strict realism shows the computer code of the character after the actions have taken place; we see the steps of the proof. Each step has already cooled off from the live decision.
Franzen’s pessimistic Schopenhaurism is another one of those inherited ideas. It seems ridiculous to talk about free will with respect to a Franzen novel: free will has been banished from the Franzen novel not with force, but with laziness, ease.
The absence of the free will is embedded within Franzen’s style. Franzen’s style is pure description. The free will, which only functions on the tip of the pen, on the microsecond of the split-reaction, does not even make an appearance. When the character forces himself to do something, that is Franzen making the character force himself to do something; it is all part of the solidified, dead-letter description of the scene. In Franzen’s style, description builds on description; characters are hyper-vivid, but they are not alive, not because Franzen does not believe in free will, but as a function of his style.
Key decisions in a Franzen novel often happen abruptly and between paragraphs, suddenly shepherded in by Franzen.
Consider the fateful decision by Chip, a professor, to sleep with his student Melissa. Initially, Melissa attempts to seduce him in his office. Chip resists the urge. “Code,” he said, pulling free. “There’s a code.”
After he successfully manages his lust, he has the week to himself. He spends the week trying to be free of Melissa’s seduction. But when he returned to Tilton Ledge, where the last of the utility lights had burned out, he was swamped by loneliness. To erase the tactile memory of Melissa’s kiss, and her lively warm feet, he phoned an old college friend in New York and made a date for lunch the next day.
But bad news strikes when he finds his advisor’s had a stroke, dampening his chances at tenure.
Chip rested his forehead against his kitchen window and turned his head so that he could open one eye directly against the cold, damp glass. He knew what he was going to do. And he of course arranges a tryst with his student.
There is something very static about this style of description. No part of it is wrong; everything is believable. He has told the story of Chip’s failure, but he has told it in complete sentences. Does this make sense?
He hasn’t allowed Chip to prevaricate according to Chip’s tempo of thinking. We have remained within the tempo of Franzen’s authorial sentences and the fated action is, sentence by sentence, laid down by Franzen. The character has no opportunity to insist that he won’t do the thing to Franzen, if he hesitates, that’s because Franzen has decided it’s realistic for such a character to hesitate. The character cannot stand up on the page, like a grammatical error, and clear his throat, and try his best to say, No, I’m not like that, I don’t want to do that. Franzen predicts the character at every turn with the masterful description that cloaks the character completely and becomes him. The description of the character utterly obliterates him and destroys him. The description is the character, but the glove that creates the character also suffocates him.
In a Dostoevsky novel, on the other hand, under the glove that creates the character, the little figure can try to lift the heavy invisible glove— he fails, but in his resistance to the author’s descriptions, there he is. In Dostoevsky’s feeling that he can’t quite make the character perform the illogical action, then we have a character who grabs a break in the logic of the plot, then we have an immortal character.
In the same way, T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Hamlet, claims that Hamlet is a failure as a character because his emotions and hesitations are not germane to or produced by the actual conditions of the plot. Hamlet’s emotions are superfluous and are in excess of what is logically required by the crimes of his mother: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” A proper drama, according to T.S. Eliot, would create simply the conditions required for the emission of the emotion, the airtight structure that by itself automatically gives rise to the emotion. Hamlet’s soliloquies, in his view, are Shakespeare’s attempts to give himself emotional relief and solve an unsolvable artistic problem, namely, that Gertrude’s insignificant crime cannot give rise to Hamlet’s overdramatic expression.
But this very excess — the fact that Shakespeare himself is carried away while narrating as Hamlet — just this failure of art, is where the moment of excess can come into play, the excess that stands outside the logical and secular sphere of art.
In the Eliot/Franzen view of art as craft, the author seems to be laying down sentences as a brick-layer might, fulfilling an outline that he has already conceived of beforehand.
In Franzen, the decisions that the characters make are not “decisions,” but things that passively happen to them. This seems extremely true to life, and is no doubt part of Franzen’s philosophical point about how we are passive to our urges. This is a point he prosecutes throughout his works: his characters, like Gen Z, often “feel the need,” or “feel the urge.” Everything is located in their feelings that compel them, their preferences— a perfect picture of privileged Americans who only act by their urges and not out of principle or will.
But, while these characters seem relatable and realistic, they nevertheless do not convey the experience of living as a human being. It’s true that, when we turn around and retrospect, we see that our actions were predetermined, mere fatalistic chemicals, nevertheless, in the moment that fades away, we still feel an undeniable, probably incorrect sense of our will and freedom. Thus, while Franzen’s novel is correct on an empirical level (that there is only chemical description), it fails on the experiential level.
We dislike his characters not because they are bad people, but because they are hypnotized zombies who seem seem extremely vivid but lack the “realness” of human beings. They have all the trappings of humanness, details, personalities, dialogue, but they lack that essential thing, that silliness of acting out. They are actors without the leeway to improvise on the script.
When Franzen writes a sympathetic character, when Franzen writes an unlikeable character, it makes no difference: the reader will dislike them because it feels as though the reader were confined with the character—there is no air—the decisions the characters make are made by the author.
As for Dostoevsky, whose whole life showed him that he did not possess free will, the feeling of the struggle of the will emerges as a product of his style. Consider Fyodor Karamazov walking into a room:
“That is exactly how it all seems to me, when I walk into a room, that I’m lower than everyone else, and that everyone takes me for a buffoon, so ‘Why not, indeed, play the buffoon, I’m not afraid of your opinions, because you’re all, to a man, lower than me!’ That’s why I’m a buffoon, I’m a buffoon out of shame…”
Dostoevsky’s characters are always acting, acting out, being an actor, playing a character, refusing a characterization.
Franzen is a much better writer of vivid characters; his characters are built out of immaculate research, each representing a type we find in society. But he lacks Dostoevsky’s third dimension, the point at which the character, like a grammar mistake refusing to get crossed out, simply stands up on the page and refuses to do whatever Dostoevsky is forcing him to do. Franzen is like a director who insists on his way and forces every actor to follow the script; meanwhile, when Dostoevsky directs a scene, five creators are in a room together, a loud coterie of imaginary friends, and the spilled-out guts of the novel are the argument they are having over which direction the script should take.
In Dostoevsky’s prose, the computer code of the character’s brain is live and running, pulsing, and, while the “ink” dries off, while the code still solidifies as soon as the sentence is finished, at the very tip of the pen, a live wire of freedom and electricity can be felt, seeming to exist.
It’s not as if Dostoevsky believes in free will. He wishes to. But, in that feverish excitement, that ability of the tip of the pen to be silly and evade any preconceived outline, any preconceived notion of the character or of himself, something, something, just …. ….. just, in the ellipses, where Dostoevsky cannot think of what to say, where he’s searching for just the right word … when the ellipses shows the computer stalling … just there, just there—didn’t you hear it?—just there is that thing that does not exist at all and about which it’s stupid to talk, but which! don’t you understand, don’t you understand that without it there’s no human being, there it is, that um… Just say it. No!
***
Free will is that thing that cannot be said, that noumenon that exists only at the tip of the pen. And the reader can feel it. Its dominant emotion is: silliness. Not comedy or irony, but that squirming, that evading of the parental command.
Silliness has no motive; it is not rebellion precisely, but childishness; it lacks pretension; it is inspired but spontaneous, it is a form of acting out. In the Freudian picture, silliness is the childish rebellion that the parent can never defeat, because greater seriousness only inspires more annoying silliness. Silliness has no place in the category of Greek Drama; silliness has no place in a rigid outline. It is, rather, that freedom of the character to be self-indulgent, to speak about himself without anyone listening, to refuse the characterization that other characters place on him.
Fyodor Karamazov is the silliest and most creative of characters. He is a novelist, generating characterizations of himself randomly, radiating out self-characterizations that he takes back in the next sentence.
The freedom Dostoevsky’s characters have the edge, the contact-point of the pen scratching against the paper—a freedom that solidifies into reductionist necessity once the ink dries, but which, again and again, the character tries, willing himself against God-Dosteovsky, to strain free from the plot that Dostoevsky is forcing onto him.
The plots feel unexpected because the writer, as he is writing, is allowing his own mood to oscillate and vary; whatever outline the author has created for the plot is subject to sudden changes in schedule, because the internal weather of the author is unpredictable; the timetables of the plot must account for the character’s suddenly having a different notion of what to do. Like in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, the narrator continuously oscillates between moods, so that in the morning 10 a.m. he is benevolent and gives all his money to a stranger, and at 10:30 a.m. he is stalking a woman to her home. Characters suddenly possess entirely different worldviews and motivations depending on the change of light.
Hamsun and Dostoevsky’s characters are unreliably unreliable for precisely the reason that the author is unreliable, the author’s weather is unreliable; the author is following his mood as he generates the reality of the story. On one hand, the author has certain fixtures—the place—the roads, the streets, the architecture, the people—but for everything else he follows his spirit in the second as it changes color, as it alters in temperature. The ocean of the mood wave lifts the character slightly up, displacing him an inch from the author.
This livingness is not a matter of writing with speed alone. David Foster Wallace writes manic prose and at speed. But to be able to operate at that high speed, while maintaining one’s own sense of how people interact, while continuously keeping to the laws of one’s psychological principles, this is what separates writers who deal in revealed truths and writers who reveal truths.
Something very strange has happened in literature to make some think of Wallace and Franzen as radical writers. Here’s a Franzen character killing himself by jumping off a cliff:
He turned back to the precipice and looked down at the tropical treetops, the large shards of fallen rock, the green surf of undergrowth crashing against them. When they began to drift slowly closer, and then moved rapidly closer, and more rapidly yet, he kept his eyes open wide, because he was honest with himself. In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices of the world.
The ground begins to come closer, and closer, and “more rapidly yet.” This framing of experience is clearly authorial and literary, rather than the character’s perception of falling—it is so precise. “The green surf of undergrowth”—listen to that! It sounds so good. But Wallace and Franzen are inherently retrogressive writers. When this character is about to die, he keeps his eyes wide open, “because he was honest with himself.” And, then, dying, he hears “all the human voices of the world.”
Isn’t this just 18th century sentimentalist romantic literature—soap?
The character’s death is the author’s mouthpiece. Guess what! Franzen likes community (“all the human voices of the world”) and sincerity (“he was honest with himself”). Profound.
Even in his death, a Franzen character is manipulated by the author. The reader never tires of this because Franzen keeps the plot-beans one after another spilled carefully, because Franzen knows that, without these plot-beans, he has nothing to offer the reader.
But to read a Franzen book is to be subject to an encounter of vague nonconsensuality: we keep reading, because of the plot-beans, but we come out of it slightly sicker and somehow duller the whole while.
We have been sitting back on our couch engaged in something that is supposed to be profound but out of which no memory will remain. We are with a writer who is supposedly a pessimist and cynic but, in his worst moments, reveals himself as a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist with such small sentiments: community, sincerity.
Who is Jonathan Franzen in a Dostoevsky novel?
A successful and talented man without visions, whose opinions can be published in The New Yorker, whose thoughts on climate change can be appreciated broadly and without much dissent. He would be a man with broad, unironic concerns about the direction society is heading. He would take on the dominant theology of his time (pessimism, atheism). He would represent perfectly the various quotidia of his society, producing marvelously accurate and readable Americana. He would ruffle the feathers of Oprah, an act of bravery for people who cannot imagine intenser problems.
His problems would be grand, large, important, social, and, about them, nothing can be done. He would be a curmudgeon whose ideas would seem either self-centered, unimportant, or laughably small. But, at the same time, he would succeed for precisely the same reasons that somebody whose ideas were intense, horrifying, or obsessive cannot succeed: his ideas are just provocative enough, just new enough, to not bother his readers who are flipping through the marvelously plotted soap drama that he has led them into. Franzen’s novels are narcotics, drugs with which to feel an unfeeling empathy, and soon thereafter, one falls asleep.
He would be, in a Dostoevsky novel, Pyotr Miusov, a landowning liberal with popular ideas about which he feels great concern, but whose very existence is underlined, sinewed with hypocrisy because, unlike Dostoevsky, he is here, and his ideas over there; he is a man who possesses fine ideas; whereas, for Dostoevsky, the idea drives him to suicide.
The idea possess more life than the man; there is no separation between him and his thoughts; the thoughts invade him. One man philosophizes; the other is the gerbil in which thoughts perform their experiments. One man is a landowning liberal who reads The New York Times; the other’s very life has become the problematic which he must resolve or else he must die.
A man can go wildly careening into the snow tortured by the thoughts of whether or not God exists; but it much harder to go wildly careening into the slightly hotter summer day concerned with climate change.
One of these is an existential question at the core of his foundation; the other, climate change, is an idea that Franzen desperately tries to raise to the sphere of an existential question, but it always gives off that smell of Franzen, that housewifely, American concern of small-sized imagination…
***
When Dostoevsky names his hero “Alyosha” after his dead son, this is, yes, a literary technique, but it is more than that, it is internal work.
When Dostoevsky names his hero Alyosha, there, he sets the stakes for himself; against every instinct in his body, he is going to write, as his last novel, a work in which a slender goodness remains, even if this goodness will never be as compelling as the contradictions of Ivan.
That straining for hope and beauty, which, properly speaking, in Dostoevsky, is a near literary failure (the Grand Inquisitor is more vivid than the Reverend Father), nevertheless forms a pure seed, scattered throughout the book, that serves as a contrast to the darker Blakean elements.
Precisely that contrast is lacking in Franzen, whose work, undoubtedly the product of enormous talent, is like old food, yellow jello, a capitulation of melted candles, unused silverware, soggy inwardly-collapsing cakes, living material sinking into itself, into a mire, in which nobody can aspire to be anything, in which even the attempts at aspiration and change mold over, turn yellow, sink into themselves again.
Dostoevsky, like black coal gazing at the pure sky, is Franzen’s good and bad dilated, extremified into perfection and evil. In no other comparison do we see such a vivid example of similar writers, twins; but in one of them, the possession of a spirit has transformed and disfigured him; in him the contradictions are clarified and extremified, such that mediocrity of feeling is impossible.
Franzen is a great writer of mediocre spirit. In this day and age of craft, how badly we yearn for bad writers whose backs are broken by the power of a spirit which they do not want to possess. We want revealers of truth, not secretly conservative sanctifiers of revealed truths that they have misunderstood.
Samuel Liu is a writer and artists living in France and Marginalia's Assistant Editor for Culture.
Read more by Samuel Liu at Marginalia: James Wood and the Visionless Age
