Abstract
This chapter discusses The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, two novels which attempt to create links between a materially grounded emotional sphere and a conception of the unique, individuated space of the novel. Human emotion is understood in these two anti-consumerist fictions as the driving force of society, and a proper respect for emotion is promoted as being the crucial element underlying any successful moral framework. Not only does their interest in the materiality of the affective realm place these novels in a position which moves away from literary and cultural theory, it also develops a new type of literary transcendentalism, one which understands morality to be grounded in nature because it exists as part of naturally occurring affective phenomena. Emotion in these two texts precedes, outlives and underlies the systems it has spawned, and the novel is depicted as being a vital arbiter between affect and effect.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Baker, Science Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2.
- 2.
Patricia Waugh, “The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17–35 (pp. 23–24). MyiLibrary eBook.
- 3.
Colin Hutchinson, “Jonathan Franzen and the Politics of Disengagement”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50, no. 2 (2009): 191–207 (p. 191).
- 4.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics”, in Essays and Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100.
- 5.
Emerson, “Nature”, in Essays and Lectures, 9.
- 6.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 5.
- 7.
Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (London: Continuum, 2008), 19.
- 8.
Jonathan Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”, The Paris Review 195 (2010), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/the-art-of-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen, accessed 15 April 2014.
- 9.
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 4, 5. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 10.
Jonathan Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”.
- 11.
Jonathan Franzen in interview with Christopher Connery, “The Liberal Form: An Interview with Jonathan Franzen”, Boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 31–54 (p. 36).
- 12.
Franzen in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”.
- 13.
James Wood’s view that Franzen’s work is at its best when ‘cleaving to the human’ is representative here, as is Ty Hawkins’ assertion that Franzen has the ability, through his skilful characterization, to write the type of novel which ‘effectively challenges the hegemony of self-interest’. James Wood, “Abhorring a Vacuum”, The New Republic Online, October 18, 2001, http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_18, accessed 15 April 2014. Ty Hawkins, “Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzen’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of ‘Refuge’”, College Literature 37, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 61–87 (p. 82).
- 14.
David Gates, “‘The Corrections ’: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic”, New York Times Online, September 9, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/review/09GATESTW.html, accessed 15 April, 2014.
- 15.
Franzen in interview with Christopher Connery, 46.
- 16.
This is not the only occasion in The Corrections on which The Chronicles of Narnia is referred to—Gary’s youngest son Jonah, for example, is an avid reader of C. S. Lewis. In this instance, perhaps, Franzen draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which pharmaceutical drugs have replaced religion, as represented by the Jesus like figure of Aslan the lion, as the opiate of the masses.
- 17.
Franzen has spoken of feeling ‘an unattractively extreme rage against literary theory and the politicization of academic English departments’ around the time he was composing this novel (in interview with Stephen J. Burn, “The Art of Fiction No. 207”).
- 18.
The Roths’ Christian names suggest a further literary reference, this time to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, although not with any apparent comparison intended between the two sets of marriages.
- 19.
When Alfred is charged with the task of checking each mile of the Erie Belt railroad for faults, he thinks of it in terms of ‘cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies’ (p. 283).
- 20.
Jonathan Franzen, “Why Bother? (The Harper’s Essay)”, in How to Be Alone (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 91.
- 21.
Ralph J. Poole, “Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics”, The Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 263–283 (p. 280).
- 22.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14.
- 23.
Esposito charts this trend in the last two hundred years specifically (p. 39).
- 24.
Atwood, somewhat notoriously perhaps, chooses the term ‘speculative fiction’ for her own work over that of science fiction. For her, ‘science fiction proper […] denotes books with things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet and places we can’t go – and speculative fiction […] employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on planet earth’. Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in context”, PMLA 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 513–517 (p. 513).
- 25.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004), 29. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
- 26.
Coral Ann Howells notes that this novel ‘unsettles’ the boundaries between science and art, but situates Jimmy in the realm of ‘emotion and imagination’. Shannon Hengen suggests that Atwood’s voice ‘has become admonitory as she uses her writings to urge us to curb the godlike power of science before it is too late’, yet does not elaborate upon Jimmy’s complicity with this power. Mark Bosco, S. J. argues that the novel reflects a trend in post-World War II literature relating to the ‘preoccupation with catastrophe and hope’, with the hope that Jimmy-Snowman can ‘become something more’ providing a key motif, yet he, too, does not focus on Jimmy’s involvement with the catastrophe. Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 172, 177; Shannon Hengen, “Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake”, in Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson (London: Continuum, 2010), 129–140, (p. 139); S. J. Mark Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake”, in Margaret Atwood, ed. J. Brooks Bouson, 156–171 (pp. 159, 166).
- 27.
Oryx is unaware, it seems, that Crake intends to wipe out humanity, but she knows he plans to drastically reduce the population (380).
- 28.
Natasha Walter, “Pigoons Might Fly”, The Guardian Online, May 10, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003.bookerprize, accessed 21 August 2014.
- 29.
Valeria Mosca, “Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood”, Other Modernities 9 (2013): 38–52 (p. 49).
- 30.
Mosca, “Crossing Human Boundaries”, 42.
- 31.
Howells, Margaret Atwood, 179.
- 32.
Ralph Pordzik, “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction”, Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 142–161 (p. 156).
- 33.
Margaret Atwood in Coates Bateman, “A conversation with Margaret Atwood”, https://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0503/atwood/interview.html, accessed 7 August 2014. Atwood makes a similar point in “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context”, PMLA 119, no. 3 (May, 2004): 517.
- 34.
Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 194.
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Poole, Ralph J. 2008. Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern Poetics. The Midwest Quarterly 49, no. 3: 263–283.
Pordzik, Ralph. 2012. The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction. Utopian Studies 23, no. 1: 142–161.
Waldo Emerson, Ralph. 1983. Literary Ethics. In Essays and Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walter, Natasha. 2003. Pigoons Might Fly. The Guardian Online, May 10. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003.bookerprize. Accessed 21 August 2014.
Waugh, Patricia. 2013. The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel. In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock, 17–35. New York: Routledge.
Wood, James. 2001. Abhorring a Vacuum. The New Republic Online, October 18. http://www.powells.com/review/2001_10_18. Accessed 15 April 2014.
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Holland, R. (2019). Scientific Transcendentalism: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. In: Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_5
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