Great American

I held off for a minute articulating an opinion on the latest cover of Time, not only because I’ve no doubt Mr. Franzen is a fine writer but also because I’m quite sure that my opinion among the thousands of others on that matter, in my humble no-name hermitage in the South, weighs very little.  But he’s coming to my neck of the woods soon, which gives one further reason to chew on the issue.  And I don’t quite want to say it, because my Daddy would have told you three years ago–and I’d have agreed–that he would not live to see a black president, but I wonder if we can imagine that a woman of any race (these ladies sufficiently laid the subject to rest) or anybody outside the white one could ever be called, no matter the prowess of his or her pen, Great American.

So I’m realizing that what troubles me in his recent designation as “Great American Writer” is not the well-warranted word “great,” but the word “American.”

We all know that this is one of those terms–a lot like any word ending in -ist or -ism, and much like the word “freedom” itself, upon which Franzen’s new novel meditates–that a lot of people and groups of people play tug of war over, in the contest to determine exactly who has the right to use the word.

I’m not saying that nothing beautiful has ever been or can ever be written from the perspective of Franzen’s work, only that it’s past time for us to find a more definite qualifier than “American” to describe the white upper-middle class experience. Though it’s one to which we’ve all been taught to aspire, it is in fact the experience of a minority, class and race considered. There are actually poor white Americans. Come to Georgia, I invite you.  And there are actually–annoying fact, I know, and it pains me as much as you to continue to hammer it in–plenty of Americans who aren’t white.

There’s also this suspicion: how can the fact that Franzen is the newest laureate to be crowned “Great American Writer” have nothing to do with his other claim to casual household notoriety in America–here I use the word as it’s best and most precisely used, to designate a certain geographical expanse–which is to say, his noble wresting of his Great American reputation away from that sorceress, the Negress Oprah Winfrey? Who is no small threat to Great Americanism, with her billions of dollars and her firm hold on the minds of moneyed and marginalized women everywhere? By taking the stance that had Oprah withdraw him from her Book Club–for what reason again? He didn’t want to be read by women? or considered one who wrote for women?  Dilemmas of Great American Privilege, I assure you–he placed himself squarely in opposition to any changing of the Great American guard form its usual sentinels. And joined a far more distinguished club than Oprah’s, it seems.

I won’t take time to voice my personal qualms with his”rules” of fiction writing, recently published online, or the ways that these rules fit into the same extremely masculinist ideals for the writer as the Time article’s designation.  I just want to quote  a comment the illustrious, wise, and very jazzy Opal Moore left for this blog ages ago, in reference to Toni Morrison:

The interviewer wanted to know when TM would write a novel that was substantially about white people, something in the mainstream of literature. Toni Morrison said, in a bit of pique, that the interviewer did not realize how racist her question was. She said, ‘It never would occur to you that maybe I AM the mainstream.’

Great Chronicler of the White Middle Class Experience, Whose Recognition as Great is Particularly Predicated on his own Maleness. Can we just leave it at that? It’s not his fault, either, and it shouldn’t take away from the rightful recognition of his work as worthy and interesting and beautiful.  It’s only a matter of what pedestals upon which we, America, place him.