Jonathan Franzen: Why do you find ignorance interesting? | Big Think
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- čas přidán 22. 04. 2012
- Jonathan Franzen: Why do you find ignorance interesting?
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Endless stuff of comedy.
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Jonathan Franzen:
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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TRANSCRIPT:
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 [by Vladimir Nabokov], Charles Kinbote [a character in Pale Fire] 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 wonderful. So much of that is the comedy of not knowing.
When one of the kids at school passes Kinbote the note that says, “Man you got H-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash--S real bad,” and the word is obviously halitosis. But of course what Kinbote tells us is, “That’s not enough dashes for the word hallucinations." It’s so perfect.
You don’t know where to begin with how extraordinary that is because, of course, Kinbote 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 foul lie he's having hallucinations. But of course he knows he is.
So 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; 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.
So it’s impossible to imagine real comic scenes without a high degree of unknowing, of hilarious lack of self knowledge, lack of awareness. Otherwise, you just get wit or you get slapstick or some less interesting sub genre of comedy.
But, 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 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 [Franz] Kafka’s very funny. “Man Who Loved Children” [a novel by Christina Stead] is very funny. Dave Wallace [David Foster Wallace] is very funny.
Most of these people I’m mentioning are very funny. [Rainer Maria]Rilke not so funny, but not entirely unfunny.
In that novel of Rilke’s [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge], there’s this great scene where young Rilke, there’s this family, there’s some family friends that they have to go and visit, and 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 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: [Nikolai] Gogol, yes. Although 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.
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/why-do-yo...
Pale Fire is a frickin' hilarious book. I would probably be losing it too. :)
What he said about Gogol is spot on, I would add Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of humor, but bravery. I think only someone so incredibly brave like Dostoevsky was, could have plunged himself in the darkest corners of the human soul, which are scarier than any fucking horror novel ever written...
Interesting. I just finished Dead Souls yesterday and googled Franzen and Gogol and came here. I get why he would say that about Gogol, there's a heartlessness in his humor that you can only arrive at through a lot of loneliness and alienation. There's a lot more of that heartless humor in Taras Bulba, and he puts it out there with gusto, almost as if he were trolling any Westernized readers among his audience.
This should be titled, "Jonathan Franzen Talks to Himself."
If every interviewer cut themselves out of videos, the world would be a better place.
* Looks directly at the camera like in The Office. *
"He was a chilly motherfucker" hahahaha his weirdness cracks me up
Yes "The idiot's life among morons" by George Pinkerton documented his experience in a mining town where the chemicals in the drinking water left the people with brain damage. The horror often had comical moments in that distant town cut off from the rest of the world.
I couldn’t find this book or author anywhere, where is this from?
This is not really one of his "better" videos. As someone else said, he doesn't come off as a great speaker in it. The Netherlands interview with Wim Brands is much better.
Nonetheless, the percentage of dislikes is quite unusual, and likely many of the people who disliked don't have good reasons to.
He must be an excellent driver.
Why do people not like this guy?
For me the reason is mostly because of his horrible essay about his supposed best friend, David Foster Wallace. I remember looking forward to reading his essay, Farther, in the New Yorker. The first two thirds of it were him name dropping authors and books he'd read, then he went on to reveal just how jealous he was of DFW's writing, vocabulary, and ability to connect with people through his writing. Saying David, "Kurt Cobained" his way into history through his selfish suicide and repeatedly referred to him as, mentally ill. He's pathetic in my opinion.
It thought we may be bored. It was right.
He’s actually pretty spot on about Pale Fire. You have to know the context to get at what he’s talking about. If you haven’t read Pale Fire you’ll obviously not get it but it’s not Franzen’s problem.
Dan Jenkins was very funny. At least Alex Haley, author of "Roots" said so. Little known but widely reviewed Don Robertson, a non-horror favorite of Stephen King was very funny. FYI: "Pale Fire" is my favorite novel. "Nothing beats a fig leaf."
He's not high at all, he's just explaining how someone that is unwittingly funny rather than knowingly funny is better.
Truly... but for me, I understood the guy and I don't see why an unusual amount (for youtube) of dislikes is present. It truly is weird(?). I don't know...
Think of Allen from The Hangover.
I think it would be safe to disregard any comments that don't mention the quality of the thoughts expressed in this video clip. Having said this, Franzen is 100 percent right: Kafka is hilarious. I mean, it's really high-end comedy and not low-brow at all. It helps to actually read Metamorphosis to 'get' that at all.
I find a neutral like/dislike bar interesting!
I'm sorry, I was gonna make a coherent reply to your comment but I saw your picture and was like "wow he's adorable!" and completely forgot what I was gonna say. So this is an apology I guess. xD
LOL your right
i used to be on bigthink, but then i got high. da da dat. dat. dat. dat.
I for one love this dude.
Yeah why everything gotta be so extreme all the time. Where is the middle way?
TOO DAMN HIGH!
SPIT IT OUT!!! C'mon, Franzen!
This is like watching someone in a mental hospital who thinks they are alone in a room and no one else can hear.
+John Miller So, quality entertainment?
The interviewer is completely cut out. With interview edits you never get the real interview in context with the actual Q&A.
People hate Franzen. Hate him, hate him, hate him. If Franzen saved a child from being molested, certain people would say it was only to make himself look good.
ikr!!! wtf happened!?
I'm not qualified to speak on the content of this presentation (apart from it not being necessarily accessible unlike other bigthink talks, and me not feeling like the title was suitably chosen), but I can say that - at least in this video - he does not come across as a very good speaker.
WTF big think... STARSHIPS were ment to flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
how high is this guy?
We're the only comments. lol :)
Jonathan Franzen was documented in Ripley's Believe It or Not as "I am my own fan club!"
Why am I not surprised.
"Why do you find ignorance interesting?"
"I don't know."
"How about apathy?"
"Who cares?"
The fuck?
Thomas Berger is funny. Rilke is the least funny man.....
He just has this ultra-pretentious lilt to his voice--like his last buddy David Foster Wallace. You can be a great writer and talk like a normal human. Don DeLillo talks like a guy from the Bronx who calls WFAN to complain about the Yankees middle relief for God's sake.
You write like an Irish.
That's why I like him... and DFW.. it has that so unabashedly pretentious and un-self aware literary snobbishness
Yes he really drips smug superiority. Which might be tolerable in a better writer. But with him it suggests he is painfully insecure about not being as talented as the pose.
@@charlespeterson3798 Not sure if you meant that as a compliment, but I'll just take that to mean I'm the Joyce and Yeats of CZcams!
Big think just had a big fail
Not the greatest storyteller of a generation.