No sooner had American culture bid its sober official farewell to irony than the literary world veered headlong yet again into the gruesome (yet ever comforting) ironies of cultural warfare. The occasion was novelist Jonathan Franzen's widely publicized affront to Oprah Winfrey, who had made his novel TheCorrections the choice of her book club for the month of October. Among Franzen's trespasses was the observation that as a writer "solidly in the high-art literary tradition" he felt a bit squeamish about the Oprah's Book Club imprimatur; indeed, the embossed book-club seal of approval struck him as a unwelcome corporate logo, slapped carelessly onto the cover of a work he still regarded as "my creation." He was also intemperate enough to say that he found some Oprah picks "shmaltzy" and "one-dimensional."
Never mind that all these remarks were followed promptly by appreciations ofOprah as "really smart" and someone "fighting the good fight." Or that they weredelivered nearly in the same breath with self-deflating asides: It's "a perverse,not to say fetishistic response" to the familiar bedlam of American consumerculture, Franzen told his interviewer at the Powell's bookstore Web site, "to say'I don't buy the popular stuff, I buy the small label stuff,' as if that makesyou any less of a consumer... . I'm somewhat guilty of it myself, and it followsa pattern," Franzen said. "As far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry isreally funny. And [The] Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book. But of course everybody who's sold out and been co-opted, as I obviously have, says the same thing, and it makes for a pathetic spectacle."
Yet Franzen had no inkling of the far more pathetic spectacle that lay instore. News of these remarks (or at least the risible parts about Franzen's"high-art literary" self-image) reached Dame Winfrey, and Franzen soon foundhimself, on October 22, officially disinvited from his special book-club segmentof the show. "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because heis seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book clubselection," Oprah rather primly announced. "It is never my intention to makeanyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict." This, mind you, is a woman who,in the course of her day job as a talk-show host, routinely prompts sufferingguests to weep before a mass audience and then places them into the creepy publicsolicitude of her therapeutic aide-de-camp, "Dr. Phil" McGraw, a man all too easyto picture presiding over a show trial.
Yet such ironies make for bad copy when a culture war rages. Commentatorsinstead trained themselves with laserlike fury on the realization that here was awriter who not only believed in a high-art literary tradition but--oh, theperfidy!--placed himself "solidly" within it. With numbing regularity, media wagsenclosed Franzen in a perfect, closed circle of ritual denunciation: His seemingself-regard indicted him as an elitist or a snob; for not rejecting the Oprahselection outright, he was a hypocrite; for not joyfully swooning into the bookclub's mass readership and uttering dutiful gratitude, he was simply stupid.
Once again, in other words, a newly apprehensive, war-torn nation wasrepairing to the bracing, morale-boosting tonic of culture warfare. This meant,first and foremost, that the somewhat complicated response to his Oprahficationthat Franzen tried to voice was not a permissible attitude; never mind that thisvery sort of ambivalent self-questioning is among the signal qualities thatdefine good literature (popular, "high art," and anything in between). One is, inAmerican Kulturkampfs, either with "the people" or their "elitist" enemy (eventhough, in the actual American social order, one is about as likely to encountera genuine self-professed "elitist" as, say, a practicing Owenite). This is theplodding script by which all manner of controversies over public taste andaesthetic standards have played out for decades--from the near-identicalMapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Brooklyn Art Museum dustups to clashes over"political correctness" in the American university. In all such set-pieces, theright claims heroically to defend--even as the left, in populist ardor, claims to"subvert" or "appropriate"--the products of mass culture from the preciousdisdain of the shifty elitists lording over their nasty taste hierarchies.
One of the more painful ironies here is that the ambivalence Franzen voicedover the book club actually meshed quite clearly with the subject of TheCorrections itself. The novel traces the ultimately somewhat redemptive emotionalstruggle of a midwestern family to reckon with all sorts of impersonal marketforces; the title itself puns on the increasingly interchangeable notions ofmarket reversals and lifestyle-cum-family "corrections" that await all strivingAmerican selves. Why, then, should it be so unthinkable to bring up the book clubitself--surely the most powerful market force in American publishing--for thesame kind of discussion? Why not have Franzen appear on the show and air hisviews about the book club with its members? Why not, in other words, use this asa near-unprecedented opportunity to give a mass public a direct stake in aliterary dispute?
But that, of course, would be to mistake a mock-plebiscite on marketing powerfor a literary debate. Amid all the posturing over the holy writ of culturalpopulism and the sinister cunning of its elitist betrayers, the premier rule ofengagement in America's culture wars remains unchanged: The market is alwaysright.