Question: Why do you find ignorance so interesting?
Jonathan Franzen: To allude to one of the great comedies about unknowing ever written which was Pale Fire, Charles Kinboat and amusement park across the street while he’s tried to concentrate on his own annotation of a thousand line poem. Nabokov’s characters are wonderfully, I mean that’s all-- so much of that is the comedy of not knowing when one of the kids at school passes Kinboat the note that says, “Man you got H-dash-dash-dash-dash-S real bad” and the word is obviously halitosis but he said but of course what Kinboat tells us is “That’s not enough dashes for the word hallucinations, you know, it’s <laughs> I mean it’s so perfect, you don’t know where to begin with how extraordinary that is because of course Kinboat is having hallucinations and the entire piece is filled with all of these faulty memories and these completely hallucinated scenes. But his response when someone passes him a note about his bad breath is to misread it as accusing him of having hallucinations in order to of course, I mean this is a <inaudible> on hallucinations but of course he knows he is. So that I mean that kind of play I really like for instance but it’s there in a lot of writers. Most comic characters are unknowing, they can’t be funny, I mean bad, unfunny comic characters can, but genuinely comic characters don’t know how funny they are, that is then they would just be witty or something or they’d be stitches. But so it’s impossible to imagine real comic scene without a high degree of unknowing, of hilarious lack of self knowledge, lack of awareness, otherwise, you know, you just get wit or you get slapstick or some less interesting sub genre of comedy. But, you know, somebody who comes out and thinks he’s incredibly important but is not, well that’s very funny, that’s a genuinely comic situation and we’re laughing because we see something that that person doesn’t, to take two examples. I think it has to do with my own taste for comic writing which I think tends to track pretty closely with the presence of real literature because that comedy of not knowing is so close to the tragedy of not knowing and so it’s just yeah, it grows out of my own sense of what literature is and what my taste in it is.
Topic: Good comic writers
Jonathan Franzen: Other good comic writers, well Kafka’s very funny, “Man who loved children” is very funny, Dave Wallace is very funny. Most of these people I’m mentioning are very funny, Rilke not so funny but not entirely unfunny in that novel of Rilke’s there’s this great scene where young Rilke, there’s sort of there’s this family, there’s some family friends that they have to go and visit and it’s like it’s okay except this family is crazy and occasionally it comes because in the middle of a nice social evening, they all fall silent and go (nose sniffing) and they will all kind collectively hallucinate this ghost smell and the entire room will kinda go still and the family, I think they’re called the Schulan’s they all start creeping around sort of smelling, where’s that smell coming from, that’s a funny scene, so even Rilke could be funny.
Question: Is Gogol funny?
Jonathan Franzen: Gogol yes, although yeah I admit I got a little bogged down when I went back and tried to reread “Dead Souls” not that long ago, I felt like I’d gotten “Dead Souls” on my first half reading and then full reading and it wasn’t quite working for me so much anymore. But yeah, very, very funny, but there’s a real bitter taste to Gogol’s humor I have to say, he was a chilly motherfucker and so even somebody who’s very, very dark and bleak like Kafka, it’s a much more humane and self implicating humor and I’m sure it’s there in Gogol too, it’s chilly stuff and kind of yeah one feels bad for how bad he must have felt to create that kind of humor and that’s not the best reaction to be having to the implied author I don’t think, feeling like whoa he must have been doing some real suffering to write that scene, like that’s not where you want the mind to be as you’re reading the scene. I don’t know, maybe just again a taste thing.
Recorded On: 4/1/08
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Jonathan Franzen is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Franzen was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Swarthmore College. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany. He lives on the Upper East Side of New York City, and writes for The New Yorker magazine. Franzen’s “The Corrections,” a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States. It became one of the best-selling works of literary fiction of the 21st century and won both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
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