"The technology I like is the American paperback edition of FREEDOM. I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model... Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough."
-Grumpus in chief Jonathan Franzen -- though he has a point about the technology -- speaking at a book festival in Colombia over the weekend.
3 days ago
4 comments:
Gotta love Franzen's thinly veiled elitism. It's great that you have a multi-million dollar corporation publishing nice paperback editions of your books, Jonathan. The authors without book deals have to settle for eBooks, unfortunately.
After Freedom, it became clear what Franzen's role in the literary landscape would be. He'd come along every nine or ten years and remind everyone that lengthy, old-fashioned, linear stories about characters can actually be good. I think these types of books will only be more and more unusual in the future, and Mr. Franzen probably couldn't be more psyched--he revels in his "throwback" status, you can tell.
But his comments here smack of fuddy-duddyism. A good book is a good book, regardless of whether it's printed on a screen or with a press. As for complaining about the form it takes, I'd invite Franzen to think about filmmakers of the last couple decades. If a whole generation of artists working in an arguably more vibrant medium can get over people viewing their art in radically attenuated form (VHS/DVD compared to 35mm film? And we claim to have "seen a movie" when we watch it at home? I mean, seriously?), then I would hope Franzen could get over his words being displayed on an e-ink screen.
Well, just like Franzen, some filmmakers are rebelling against digital -- and I've seen a PSA about how movies are so much better at the theatre. (This was rather ironic considering that I was AT a movie at the time.) But you're right in that he definitely has the luxury to be concerned about the way that people are consuming his books, when a lot of authors are still striving for ANYONE to read them in ANY format.
Then again, it's not as if you can't buy Franzen's books in digital format, so on what principle is he standing?
He'd come along every nine or ten years and remind everyone that lengthy, old-fashioned, linear stories about characters can actually be good.
I'm not sure this really is his purpose. The vast majority of the fiction I read is linear stories about characters, much of it is reasonably lengthy, a lot of it is widely read and has received critical adulation and awards, and none of it is by Jonathan Franzen. Hilary Mantel and A.S. Byatt, to name just two, are both more prolific in this particular literary tradition than Franzen is.
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