It’s become easy to dismiss Jonathan Franzen as a crank. In his modes as a novelist and essayist, he seems to be locked in apocalyptic struggle with elements of the everyday that most either take for granted or adore. This in turn makes him ripe for parody as a kind of snobbish street-corner prophet railing against the supposed tyranny of social media and the threat of global warming, like a paranoid luddite who finds as much to despise in Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg as he does in those captains of industry who seem bent on pushing the world to economic and environmental collapse.
While these complaints often seemed reductionist, the publication of his article “What’s Wrong with the Modern World” in The Guardian back in September of 2013 seemed to justify his critics’ disdain: an absurdly titled and breathless scree that seemed to lash out against a string of disconnected antagonists, from authors on twitter (Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Weiner got the worst of it) to women who’d scorned him in his 20s, to Macintosh computers, “What’s Wrong…” presented an image of Franzen that seemed distilled from caricature.
It was also a caricature any of his normal readers might not recognize. Franzen might have once written book-length raves like “Perchance to Dream”, otherwise known as the infamous Harper’sHow to Be Alone and Farther Away would reveal that Franzen’s voice as an essay writer is much more measured and much more logical than the one adopted for “What’s Wrong…”.
The essay, “Pain Won’t Kill You”, even ends with Franzen lamenting the angry youth he was, and cautioning his readers to reject the kind of mindless wrath he’d once unquestioningly embraced: “When you stay in your room and rage or sneer and shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting.” At best it seems a lapse in judgment and at worst a hypocrisy that he would publish an essay that reeked of the resentment and vitriol he’d so recently cautioned against. Had things really gotten so bad in the ensuing two years that Franzen had retreated to the attitudes of his youth, had decided not to “go out and put (himself) in real relation to real people?” but instead squirreled himself away in his own resentment? There seemed a missing piece to the puzzle.
The Kraus Project, the footnotes of which “What’s Wrong…” had been cobbled together from, turned out to be that exact piece. Ostensibly an attempt by Franzen, translator Paul Reitter and Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, to offer readable versions of Austrian satirists Karl Kraus’ more famous essays, the abundance of page-long footnotes that document the story of how Franzen came to discover Kraus and why he feels such a personal kinship with him make it clear that this is more than a simple translation. The choice of essays — with literally hundreds of works to choose from, Franzen and his collaborators decided to settle on two in particular, “Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity” (the “Afterword,” “Between Two Strains” and “Let No One Ask…” are book ends more than proper essays) –- prove it. While the first finds Kraus assaulting the legacy of Heinrich Heine, the famous German poet and essayist, and the latter finds him not only defending but building the legacy of the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, both find him engaged in an attempt to define his own legacy, something Franzen, in his own way, is attempting to do by aligning himself with Austria’s infamous “Great Hater”.
It’s not that Kraus is identical to Franzen or that Franzen finds Kraus without fault. There’s a major difference in style and attitude that Franzen is quick to note. For unlike Franzen, whose simple and direct style often reads conversationally, Kraus emphasized a prose style that was often abstruse (more than once Kehlman mentions “this line isn’t fully translatable”), always challenging (Franzen remarks that “you can’t move much farther away [from readily graspable language] than Kraus did and still hope to convey coherent thought”) and, at worst, nonsensical. There’s a lovely moment where Kehlmann throws up his hands and asks “who the hell knows what Kraus is really saying here?” Thank goodness the translation is always readable and often as uproarious as the translators claim it should be; this is no rush job. Commentary makes clear the wordplay, the references and the thornier phrases, while often providing a much needed shift to a more inviting syntax.
It seems not unlikely that Kraus, himself a proponent of the aphorism, might have had Nietzsche’s dictum that “one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood” in mind at all times. “…It’s actually a reasonable and defensible (style) for an aphorist and densely allusive satirical glosser like Kraus,” Franzen contends, since “the lack of an audience whom he could respect was a foregone conclusion.” But it’s also a marked contrast to Franzen’s own admission that fiction, his genre of choice, and novels in particular lend themselves to empathy and to a desire for clear communication.
A point of concern since he wrote “Mr. Difficult” (one he recalls here by taking a few more snipes at late-era Gaddis), it’s vintage Franzen but also a remarkable distinction, since it questions exactly why he might find the exclusionary and elitist Kraus to be such a kindred spirit. There are a few superficial similarities that suggest the two might have found something to talk about if they’d lived at the same time — both writers seem as disdainful of cheap irony as of cheap sentimentality, both share an abiding love of the German playwright Frank Wedekind, and both have been openly critical of the militaristic policies of their respective nations. But these are hardly parallels worthy of explicating especially when the two seem to have very different agendas.
But while the differences in language and in styles might not escape even Franzen’s notice they are, to Franzen, secondary. Kraus’ packed, inaccessible prose and Franzen’s own open and easy style seem opposed, yes, but in many ways both represent different means to the same end. For Kraus, like Franzen, railed frequently against the superficial, image-obsessed culture of his nation and against the growing industry of the vapid, the shoddy and the false, all of which evils seemed embodied, perpetuated and so championed by the shoddy language of his contemporaries. For Kraus, no one represented this plague on words as clearly as the glut of feuilletonists who, seemingly inspired by the famous German poet and journalist Heinrich Heine, had adapted many of his mannerisms and begun to interlace their journalistic work with clumsy philosophical asides and showy linguistic tricks that disguised the real paucity of ideas. “Everything suits everything always,” he notes at the end of a particularly vitriolic attack on these writers and their styles, and in doing so allows Franzen the perfect excuse to interject and draw attention to how the same stylistic sins are committed even now, especially on the internet where “the click-imperative engenders” its own horde of “asininities”.
Writers guilty of loosening language — a favorite metaphor of Kraus’; he is quick to and often does compare the French language to a prostitute and Heine and his followers to her customers – are not, to Kraus and Franzen, simply lazy: they present a kind of moral challenge. For Kraus, who saw the power of writing to change mass opinion as a real danger, for Franzen, who views writing as one of the only routes left for true connection in a world so cluttered with noise and distraction that genuine, intimate contact is often impossible, this kind of flippant disregard looks less like mere laziness than evidence of poor moral character and a gauge of where the culture as a whole is headed. Hence, Kraus’ decision to latch on to Nestroy, a writer he considered second alone to Shakespeare. Hence, Franzen’s decision here to align himself with a personality as stringent, as sharp and, tellingly, as combative, as Kraus.
These connections are clear, yes, but it’s not until Kraus begins to make clear his own hatred of Heine and his adoration of Nestroy that Franzen begins making most explicit the origins of and the reason for his infatuation with Kraus. There are hints between these points – Franzen’s potshots against all of the sins of modernity are not a breathless scree, as “What’s Wrong…” mistakenly portrays it, but parallels made in footnotes that draw distinct parallels between Kraus’ own pre-war Vienna and contemporary America, which does added justice by demonstrating just how prescient Kraus was — but it’s only when Franzen begins to explore the very personal origins of his connection to Kraus that the story becomes clear and the mission statement of the book becomes most obvious. “I wasn’t born angry…It may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it’s accurate to say that I knew nothing of anger until I was twenty-two,” Franzen opines, before examining both the roots of his own frustrations as well as Kraus’. After all, both, he notes, were from privileged families and both were allowed to seek the life of their choice, so why then the anger? Why the impassioned rants against seeming trivialities and minutiae that earned Kraus the appellation “The Great Hater” and Franzen the unfortunate tags of “crank”, “neo-Luddite”, and (the one he seems to hate most of all) “grammpaw”?
Because, as Kraus would say, “acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only corrosive.” Far from the product of misanthropy or of a reactionary mindest, Kraus and Franzen’s anger arises out of a fear that what is good in life is being devalued by what is crass and cheap and tawdry. Neither Franzen nor Kraus is short-sighted enough to suggest that their respective worlds are the only ones of merit. A telling passage even finds Franzen expressing serious doubts with regards to his mindset: “Maybe this [apocalypse] is not such a bad thing. Maybe… apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal…Maybe [my world] wasn’t necessarily a better world… but it was the only world I knew…” It’s a revelation that comes on the heel of tens of pages of personal exploration, with Franzen dissecting ruthlessly the callow and callous youth he was during his time as a Fulbright scholar living in Germany and first discovering Kraus.
Far from celebrating his sexual exploits, his pettiness and his anger, as he might have seemed to be doing in “What’s Wrong…” Franzen is here reflecting on exactly what the process of personal apocalypse looks like, how much major change it entails, and how Kraus, who seemed always to view the world on the verge of collapse (his one major play,The Last Days of Mankind, was perfectly titled), was instrumental in Franzen’s own personal growth. He is not suggesting that one should demand an eternal stasis, but a recognition that real growth comes at great and painful personal price; real, permanent change is not hip, stylish, sexy and necessarily positive, as the modern-day equivalent of feuilletonists – the tech-boosters, the permanently optimistic progressives, the peddlers of the trendy and the hawkers of the cool – that Franzen hates so much may sell it as but something that takes as much as it gives. In a culture, in Franzen’s as in Kraus’, where the dialogue is dominated by people selling progress through relentless mass-media machines and catchy but ultimately hollow marketing, the kind of “spirituality / imaginativeness that, as Kraus saw it, makes us human” is in permanent danger, as it is constantly reduced to a fashion-statement or a commodity. Careless communication leads to careless thoughts, which leads to careless behavior. It’s a point that isn’t always clear and is sometimes lost in the frequent asides and the rambling length of later footnotes but it’s an important note that Franzen illustrates by his deliberate writing style.
The sad irony is that by tying Kraus’ life and work to his own, Franzen reduces his hero to the footnote. No definite count exists but it’s likely that Franzen’s pages-long asides make over 60 percent of the book. It’s not unexpected. This is the same Franzen who kicked off a college address by noting, “I’m going to do what literary writers do, which is to talk about themselves, in the hope that my experience has some resonance with your own,” but Kraus is no slouch himself and, for all of his difficulty, often provides a relief from Franzen’s musings. Kraus is a top-notch satirist with a crackling wit that Franzen, for all of his sincerity and intelligence, is often lacking: Franzen’s work might ring truer because it engages more honestly with the reader but it’s never quite as electric or as much fun as Kraus’ own writings.
Franzen might have done well to take on a bit of the wicked joy that there is to be found in the best of Kraus and less of his moralizing. As it stands, The Kraus Project is clearly Franzen’s work before it is Kraus’; hence, why it bears Franzen’s name on the spine. It’s a worthy effort, but one that ends with the hope that Franzen, Reitter and Kehlmann might team up again in the near future to deliver a more traditional collection of a wider range of Kraus’ work. Franzen’s explained himself with Kraus’ help; now it’s time to turn back around and repay the favor.