In his adventurous experiences to Masafuera, Chile, foretelling speeches to college students, and emotional letters to best friend David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen’s essays in Farther Away delve into personal experiences that take a deeply haunting stance on a vast number of modern societal issues. He claims that hopeless isolation clouds individuals in their search for meaning, further perpetuated by the increasing dependency and materialistic pursuit of technology and consumeristic goods. However, in all this, Franzen remains optimistic as he reveals hopeful possibilities for authentic connections through the bonds he forms with birds. The interaction between hopeless isolation and the yearning for authentic connections produces a profound internal conflict within the individual. What is to resolve this battle? Ultimately, Franzen believes that this interminable isolation is cured through the intertwined processes of reading and writing.
Isolation is a focal concept in Franzen’s work that he elucidates through his personal history. On a drive back to St. Louis from Minneapolis, Franzen recounts his past: he had just “spent an outstandingly fun week” with his cousins, but loathed his return to his home, back to isolation (“Our Little Planet” 273). His home was the “quiet, dark, air-conditioned house”, and his cousin’s home was “the convivial planet” (“Our Little Planet” 274). Coincidentally, the historical landing of the Apollo 11 occurs on the same day, leading Franzen to draw similarities between Neil Armstrong’s unforgettable achievement of stepping out into the isolated wilderness of the moon to his own metaphorical journey from the inhabited earth to the barren outlands. Franzen ends with the notion that the historic phrase: “the eagle has landed” became synonymous to his own feeling of being ”back home on the moon” (“Our Little Planet” 275). His home, supposedly the most comfortable and invulnerable place in the world, nevertheless evokes the trepid emotions of loneliness and isolation. In an interesting turn of events, however, rather than communicate with the individuals of the society he lives in, he invests in “gadgets [that] are actively privacy-enhancing” (“I just called to say I love you” 143). Privacy, he argues, is about “sparing [him] from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives” (“I just called to say I love you” 143). In spite of his isolation, Franzen somehow prefers loneliness over the choice of interacting with the problematic individuals of modern society. This predilection stems from what that interaction represents to Franzen. While in the past, individuals seemed to “demonstrate respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it”, the current “commercial culture” that Franzen is thrust into points toward the “attractively priced program of freedom and mobility and unlimited minutes” (“I just called to say I love you” 145, 146). This new privacy-breaking lifestyle influences Franzen greatly, as he refuses to adopt the values of the changing times.
Consequently, Franzen points out the modern societal disposition towards materialism and technological dependence. Franzen argues that the impossibly daunting problems that modern society faces stems from the incapability to form authentic connections because they no longer love. It is a techno consumerism movement that is filled with BlackBerry’s and iPhones, leading to the use of the phrase “to like” as “commercial culture’s substitute for loving” (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 7). He argues that consumer products are “designed to be immensely likable”, and thus proliferate to the population, as people begin to “dedicate their existence to being likable”with “sexy Facebook interface[s]” (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 8, 9). Love, while losing its appearance in modern society, exposes the lie that liking creates. Love requires that we “identify with [people’s] struggles and joys as if they were [our] own”, while liking forces us to manipulate and “adopt whatever cool persona is necessary” to be likable (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 9, 7). Franzen ultimately argues that a world of liking is an “anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology” (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 11). Even more so, with the ever-increasing amount of technological devices in people’s lives, Franzen believes that “the technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance… is the cell phone” (“I just called to say I love you” 145). Franzen observes the change firsthand, as he notes that “one the day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros. the next day it was Motorola” (“I just called to say I love you” 145). While Franzen chooses to reserve love and the notion of loving for the perfect situations, the technological revolution that sweeps the world creates “off-putting little clouds of private life” that make the phrase “I love you” commonplace, mundane, and no longer private (“I just called to say I love you” 148,149). This materialistic and technological society not only harms us in our ability to love and create meaningful relationships, it also creates an even more dreadful isolationist relationship that Franzen desperately attempts to cure.
In spite of this condemning of modern society, however, Franzen ironically notes, through humorous and subtle sentences, a reliance on technology in his own ventures, as he was “entirely isolated and alone”, except for the inventory of “a two-way radio, a ten-year-old GPS unit, a satellite phone, and several spare batteries” ( “Farther Away” 20). Furthermore, Franzen does also recognize the consumerist reaction to his stance on technology, in which they make fun of his inability to adapt and accept the changing nature of modern society through the use of the one word sentence of “Grampaw” (“I just called to say I love you” 148). In the end, he realizes that he not only understands, but also adheres to some of the very same principles that he denounces.
While Franzen constantly criticized the perpetuation of isolation in the consumerist society, it is interesting to note that he was able to find the authentic connections he exalts in the depths of isolation that the reader is taught to despise. Because he was continuously inspired by “individualism - the search for meaning”, he consciously decided to seek out isolation in an attempt to find solace, and in this expedition, developed two life-changing connections (“Farther Away” 18). His journey to Masafuera, Chile, under the inspiration of Robinson Crusoe: “the story of an ordinary persons’ practical and psychic survival in profound isolation”, was met with “three-thousand- foot drops” and “wind gusting above forty miles an hour”, without a soul to be found (“Farther Away” 18, 37). Yet, while in complete isolation, he was able to find solace in his first connection, as he turned his hopeful gaze to the “Masafuera rayadito”, a species of bird (“Farther Away” 35).
In this newfound hope, Franzen seemed to develop what many others hadn’t-- a meaningful and authentic relationship in his life: A passion, “one half… obsession, the other half… love”. for birds (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 12). Franzen developed his feelings so that when he “looked at a bird, any bird” he could feel his “heart overflow with love”. In fact, he believed that when he left for Chile, “seeing new bird species was the only activity” he could count on to not bore him (“Farther Away” 25). In the physical qualities, birds represent beauty, intricacy, and even freedom in the ability of flight, but for Franzen, birds mean something more. They symbolize a unique quality that brilliantly exemplify what society has lost: love. Love, he argues, is the key to forming passions and authentic connections. Without that distinction, “the world and its problems are impossible daunting” (“Pain Won’t Kill You” 14).
Franzen gives us an example of what happens when an individual is forced to confront those impossible daunting issues without the aid of the authentic connections that are our lifeline. David Foster Wallace, Franzen’s closest friend and rival in prose and rhetoric, also struggled with the depths of isolation. And, like many others, he was unable to dig himself out. While Franzen could escape himself “in the joy of birds”, Wallace seemed to lack that luxury. From Franzen’s perspective, Wallace was unable to cope because “close loving relationships...have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe” (“Farther Away” 39). While readers of David’s fiction recognize “how loved” they feel when reading it, Wallace did not reserve any for himself (“Farther Away” 40). Wallace “never quite felt that [he] deserved to receive it” and was “a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself” (“Farther Away” 40). Even when Franzen spoke to Wallace and agreed that fiction was meant as “a way out of the loneliness”, Wallace could not accomplish it (“David Foster Wallace” 164). In the end, Wallace went down into “the well of infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story, and he didn’t make it out” (“David Foster Wallace” 168). Wallace’s inability to search for love and hope in the world left Franzen in a state of fear and withdrawal. as Franzen even realizes that when Wallace’s wife Karen gave him some of Wallace’s ashes to place on Masafuera, it was not for her sake, but for Franzen’s sake, as his “current state of flight from [him]self had begun soon after David’s death, two years earlier” (“Farther Away” 19).
After Wallace’s death, Franzen’s relationship with birds were not enough to guide him through his hardships. While they were a love and a passion that developed, it was only a segway for a larger love that would go on to define his life. When he most needed a way out of loneliness and isolation after Wallace’s death, birds would not suffice as an authentic connection to bring him out of the hole he had dug himself in. What, then, filled the void for Franzen?
While on Masafuera, Franzen explains that “for the first time all day, [he] was happy” when he settled down to read Robinson Crusoe (“Farther Away” 29). Additionally, “what enabled [him] to stick it out - and to feel, moreover, that [he] could have stayed alone for longer than a day - was writing” (“Farther Away” 22). Perhaps, then, the true love and authentic connection, the second one that he finds and embraces on Masafuera, that filled the void in his heart was in fact that of reading and writing. Franzen ultimately claims that reading and writing are the cures to the depths of isolation that modern techno consumerism society is currently knee-deep in.
Franzen’s love for reading is exhibited as he shows a loving penchant to comment and give accolades to many novels. This tendency to reflect on his fellow writer’s work demonstrates the love and exhilaration he experiences from reading them. He argues that reading and even writing are “a way of being and becoming” (“On Autobiographical Fiction” 124). Aptly shown in an encomium to James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works and commenting of Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers, Franzen displays a tone of reverence and excitement that are not as prevalent in his other essays. This tone is uniquely exhibited in the face of novels that he enjoys. Franzen admiringly notes how Purdy expertly “takes up where the rest of us leave off” as he makes the “extreme margins of the stable, familiar world” of other authors into the “extreme normal end” of his own (“Love Letters” 267). Furthermore, Purdy’s expert ability to make it feel like “a miracle...that love is ever requited, that two compatible people ever find their way to each other other” and transform “a moment of ordinary peace and kindness… [into] an act of divine grace” leaves Franzen in awe (“Love Letters” 267). To be “entirely absorbed in his characters” is the basis of the novel, and Franzen notes that as a reason why writing and reading is a cure for isolation. In addition, Antrim’s work is considered by Franzen to be “the most representative of novels…[as] it speaks like none of us for all of us” (“The Corn King” 113). Antrim’s novel “seduces you with its beauty and power and then maddens you with its craziness” (“The Corn King” 114). Franzen argues that “our willing suspension of disbelief in it- is in fact one half of the novel’s essence”, leading to his conclusion that “The Hundred Brothers speaks for all of us because we inescapably feel ourselves to be the special center of our private worlds” (“Farther Away” 32; “The Corn King” 115). To create or explore a world that is all your own allows you to wander, investigate, and excite all at once. Franzen is able to achieve all of this with his indescribable love for reading. For him, and others like him, it creates a scapegoat for emotions that is desperately sought after by many.
Reading- and by extension, writing- allows Franzen to empathize in an isolating world. It would seem unsurprising that an individual whose profession is writing would make it seem that way, yet it may not always be the case. David Foster Wallace, considered by Franzen to have “the most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive”, presents undeniable evidence that writing may not always be a writer’s solace and way out of the darkness (“David Foster Wallace” 164). Since his death, Franzen, in his writing, constantly reminisces about the fond memories he shares with Wallace. Perhaps this was because Franzen found a comfort and coping mechanism for the loss of his friend through the writing of his letters. the writing of his books, and even the body of essays in Farther Away. He believes that when he writes, he feels “like a member of a single, large virtual community in which [he has] dynamic relationships with other members of the community” (“On Autobiographical fiction” 123). This culminating sentiment is what enables Franzen to be freed from the bleak isolation that others are crippled by.
Ultimately, the expansion and advancement of modern society through the lens of technology creates a changing environment for individuals to adapt to. This obsession and addiction to technology perpetuates, rather than cures, the isolationism that modern society has created. This isolationist culture, however, answers to the power of reading and writing. The immersion of self into a world that is created and shared with all those around you, the connection that is made with others, the heart and soul poured into the pages, that is the ultimate redemption to isolation. In the end, we can choose what to do, fall into the false pit of hope that technological development offers us, or turn towards the budding light of reading and writing that Franzen attests to.