An early exchange was typical of the entire interview.
Franzen asked how important meaning was to DeLillo’s writing. “Not much,” the
older writer deadpanned. “I’m a writer of sentences … I don’t know where meaning
comes from.” Franzen was visibly chastened by this anti-response.
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I recently came across this story on Artforum, which interests me insofar as it provides insight into the relationship between Jonathan Franzen and DeLillo, from whom Franzen claims influence. Although I have already published a few posts on the relationship between DeLillo and DFW (see "commemorating the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide" and "DFW's 'miglior fabbro'"), I'll admit that I haven't spent any time heretofore discussing the relationship between him and Franzen. Partly, this is because I haven't much read Franzen -- though, this news story has me itching to do so.
Now, I'll say up front that I'm not sure if the writer of this story, Andrew Hultkrans, has some sort of bias against Franzen, but frankly, I don't care, as he offers enough good points to make up for it.
The best of these points, about the notion of "overexplaining," Hultkrans borrows from the critic James Wood (I've read Wood, yet I'm not exactly sure where this notion springs from -- perhaps a review of Franzen?). According to Hultkrans, Wood has criticized Franzen and other young writers as being "overexplainers." Adding his own two cents to this debate, Hultkrans writes that Franzen will "have to stop worrying so much about meaning and learn how to be coy when interviewed. [...] It's hard to continue the striptease when you're already naked."
While I can only say so much about Franzen, I can comment on how DeLillo has evaded this charge of overexplaining. In short, DeLillo has remarked on his work by saying that it shouldn't much be remarked on -- at least, not by him. By using DeLillo's first published interview, with Tom LeClair in 1982, we can clarify what he means. Responding to the very first question that LeClair asked -- "Why do reference books give only your date of birth and the publication dates of your books?" -- DeLillo offered this deft response:
Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. [...] If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether necessary. The sources weren't deep enough. Maybe this view is overrefined and too personal. But I think it helps explain why some writers are unable or unwilling to discuss their work.
In answer to a later question, DeLillo built on the above point:
There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of it. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
While he may be incapable of being "straightforward and penetrating" about his own work, DeLillo is very much so about writers overexplaining their writing: Don't do it. Instead, DeLillo says, simply cherish and trust the fact that "life is still full of mystery." A writer fails to recognize this truth when he or she attempts to overexplain his or her work.
With this information in mind, perhaps we can better understand why, according to Hultkrans, "DeLillo's eyes widened" when he heard that he "meant more to [Franzen] than any other writer": Franzen, it seems, does not understand the role of the novelist in the same way as DeLillo.
Now, I'm not a novelist myself, so I can't exactly comment on which is the better method, but I can at least say this: If DeLillo, as Hultkrans writes, did indeed designate Franzen as "'the future of the novel,'" then let's hope that Franzen starts coming to class and taking some notes because it's evident that he really hasn't learned anything from DeLillo.
At least, not yet.
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