Giving Voice to Shame and Fear: The Millions Interviews Jonathan Franzen
“There is infinite hope, only not for us.”
Jonathan Franzen began his New Yorker piece, “What if We Stop Pretending“ with this quote from Kafka. Franzen was referring, of course, to climate change, a topic he has been obsessed with for several years. His outlook was depressing: we wouldn’t be able to save our planet, and the symbolic expressions of unrealistic hope—ride your bike to work and the climate won’t get hotter—only served to deny the imminent disaster.
Not surprisingly, he was butchered on social media soon afterwards. People called him a “climate fatalist.” This new label was only one of many other labels people had given to him. When he warned that Internet utopianism was a lie technological oligarchs had fabricated to manipulate users, people mocked him as a “technophobe.” When he handed out 10 rules for novelists on Literary Hub, young people turned up their noses at his “elitist” and “condescending” attitude.
During my recent self-quarantine, The Initium Media in Hong Kong asked me to interview Franzen about his engagement in the public discourse. I had mixed feelings about the assignment. With the Covid-19 pandemic, the last thing I needed was for someone to take away whatever remaining hope I’d been clinging to. Nevertheless, I dialed his phone number. We talked about his experience in the crisis, the unsolvable problem of death, the notion of literary salvation, freedom of thought in the digital age, and humanity. I had expected to meet a much angrier man, bitter and cynical from everything that Twitter had said about him. Instead, he was patient, calm, and sincere. He was curious what I was doing in his hometown of St. Louis.
I find Franzen’s views sobering, rather than depressing. He rejects wishful thinking, but I do find a profound sense of hope in his words. “Freedom of thoughts persists,” he told me, when I expressed concern over the pressure to conform on social media, “but whether we are able to express them and whether we dare express them is a very different question.” Moreover, since death is
