Kurt Vonnegut, writing in response to Jonathan Franzen’s April Folio on American novelists, “Perchance to Dream,” claims that “Novelists are people who believe they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.” This makes Vonnegut look humble and lovable, but as a response to the stuff Franzen was talking about is total horseshit.  If Vonnegut’s sound bite were the whole truth, nobody at all would read novels - who would want to devote hours of brain work to something somebody had written just to dampen his own neuroses?

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that a good artist should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception. I thought it was brave of Franzen to offer not only “lofty explanations” but honest and intimate descriptions of how it feels to try to make good, serious art in a culture that doesn’t seem to value it much. And I was disappointed that the Harper’s Letters editor chose to run only sneery, disparaging letters about the essay. I’ve spoken with way too many readers and writers who admired Franzen’s piece to believe disparaging letters were all that Harper’s got. I suppose one reason it was brave of Franzen to publish his essay is that it made it easy for other writers to look humble and adorable at his expense.

David Foster Wallace in reply to a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote w/r/t an article, “Perchance to dream,” Jonathan Franzen published in the April 1996 issue of Harper’s.

(via Printed & Bound)

Over at The Millions, Michael H. Rowe has an awesome essay up which starts out talking about the first paragraph of Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. This paragraph, he says, “remains the most tantalizingly confusing paragraph I’ve ever read.” Given the outcome of the book, which is a weird tale about a murderer, the opening paragraph is interesting:

When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had once been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that moment, and Bloch left the building site. Out on the street he raised his arm, but the car that drove past — even though Bloch hadn’t been hailing a cab — was not a cab. Then he heard the sound of brakes in front of him. Bloch looked around: behind him there was a cab; its driver started swearing. Bloch turned around, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

Rowe goes on to say that:

We only have words for things that bother us. Language is anxiety given material form. Or, rather, words designate those things about which it is possible to think, those things we have to deal with. If things were inert, not worthy of notice, we wouldn’t mention them and wouldn’t be able to. There’d be no words. That there is a word indicates a snag, a hitch we have to consider. In the opening paragraph of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Handke’s narration presumes the meaning of Bloch’s raising his arm before really understanding the intent. Bloch was, after all, just raising his arm. What does anyone know about what that gesture means? What is the word for it? “Hailing”? But, of course, Bloch ended up hailing a cab anyway. The point is: what do Bloch’s intentions matter? Language doesn’t care about us. Conventional meanings are always at the ready. Perhaps it is not so much that the narration is lagging behind Bloch’s actions as lagging around Bloch’s actions.The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, being a novel, will record the forward momentum of a plot in which Bloch goes some “where,” does something, murders someone, wanders some “where” again. But even if a fictional narrative is the case and the context, Handke’s opening paragraph suggests Bloch’s alienation from the plot in which he’s helplessly snared. He tries the gestures for reasons other than their meaning. It’s a stretching of muscles. But it’s raising your hand or opening your mouth that gets you in the worst kinds of trouble.