HEARTFIELD
Novelist Jonathan Franzen’s nostalgia for the ‘steadier,’ preTwitter world depends on a distortion of history.
My favourite moment in The Lion in Winter, the play by James Goldman, is the bitter and ambiguous little speech: “Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians.”
In the two movie versions, Katharine Hepburn and Glenn Close play the line for opposite meanings. When Close says it, she is acknowledging the modern viewer’s biases: yes, the 12th century was barbaric, what do you expect? When Hepburn says it, she is fully in character, fully Eleanor of Aquitaine, the brilliant exemplar of the 12th-century renaissance in Europe. She is disgusted, horrified (and perhaps a bit thrilled) by the fact that despite it being 1183, they are barbarians. To her, 1183 is the twilight of the world.
Hepburn understood what novelist Jonathan Franzen apparently does not: time makes the past look smoother to us than it felt to those living in it. It’s difficult for us, now, to fathom the differences between 1183 and, say, 1083. In Franzen’s telescoping of history, generations passed, wars were fought, but fundamentally, nobody disagreed and nothing much changed until the 1950s, when Franzen and his cohort of exceptional Boomers were born.
I refer to the essay Franzen published recently in The Guardian under the headline “What’s wrong with the modern world.” What’s wrong with it, mainly, is that it has technology in it that he doesn’t like. He concludes that this is tantamount to the end of the world — or the end of his world, at least. This is a relatively new malaise, he suggests. He argues that “modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse.”
Franzen’s essay is a particularly infuriating example of a common complaint: kids these days are buried in their phones, so human civilization as we know it is all but over.
“If I’d been born in 1159,” Franzen writes, “when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at 53, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows.”
Yes, the 1950s and 1960s must have been a golden age, when people appreciated and valued natural things, like Thalidomide, DDT and leaded gasoline.
There was never a “steadier” world. In Franzen’s parents’ generation, that age of political and cultural revolution and global war, did anyone feel certain that the next generation would share their values and appreciate what they appreciated?
Perhaps that’s why Franzen threw the comfortably remote date 1159 in there. But the world was certainly not “steadier” then either. I hope someone invents a time machine just so Franzen can go to Europe in 1213, find someone born in 1159 and argue that yes, the Albigensian Crusade is a bit difficult but he’s had to live through the transition to ondemand TV. Sure, Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux had a few philosophical disagreements but nothing compared to the demise of New Criticism in English departments. The Anarchy in England in the 12th century and the baronial revolt against royal power in the early 13th? Well, we have to put up with Amazon’s unorthodox publishing strategies. It’s very unsettling.
In early 18th-century London, when newspapers and pamphlets were everywhere, people were drinking this new thing called “gin” and censorship was in decline and piracy (of both the Blackbeard and book-trade varieties) in the ascendant, many writers were convinced that culture was settling into a cesspit from which it would never emerge. Nostalgia and pessimism never go out of style.
During Franzen’s lifetime, the pace of change (some might call it “progress”) in technology and economic development has certainly been unprecedented. But to call this an apocalypse, a fundamental shift in human values, is ridiculous. Through much of human history, there have been changes from one generation to the next that seemed to throw the old values and ways of life into question, whether it was the Black Death, Genghis Khan or the Reformation.
In a bit of dramatic irony, one of the crimes Franzen lays at modernity’s door is “that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past.” Franzen certainly seems to like dwelling on the past, but it’s a past of his own invention.