‘As the ice shelves crumble and the Twitter president threatens to pull out of the Paris accord’,Franzen reflects on the role of the writer in times of crisisIf an essay is something essayed – something hazarded, not definitive, and not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity – we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night,how you were treated by a flight attendant, what your recall on the political outrage of the day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, and as in a diary,but of sharing with other people. The US president now operates on this presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like the unusual York Times, and has softened up to allow the I,with its voice and opinions and impressions, to recall the front-page spotlight, or book reviewers feel less and less constrained to discuss books with any kind of objectivity. It didn’t exercise to matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable,but the question of “likability,” with its implicit privileging of the reviewer’s personal feelings, or is now a key element of critical judgment. Literary fiction itself is looking increasingly like essay.
Some of the most influential novels of recent years,by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, recall the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a unusual level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, and even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.
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Source: guardian.co.uk