The Question of Writing Now: FC2 responds to Ben Marcus

The following five essays form, if not an orderly sequence, then a rhizome. They are moments in a debate—or perhaps moments of questioning whether there is a debate—over the place, nature, and significance of experimentation in twenty-first century American fiction. As presented here, they begin in medias res. Each harkens back indirectly to the October 2005 issue of Harper's magazine, the cover of which touted an essay by novelist Ben Marcus, "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction." Marcus' essay was an argument for the continuing importance of radically self-critical fiction and, more generally, for writing that is not readily consumable. It took a polemical tone, striking out against an array of putative enemies of literary ambition, some as anonymous as global capitalism, others as identifiable as Atlantic Monthly's B. R. Myers, and although its characterization of fiction's relation to political, economic, and social structures was not strikingly original, its occurrence in Harper's seemed significant. Henry James' comment about a similar debate a century earlier expressed how many fiction writers felt: "[T]he era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened . . . and the effect will surely be to make our interest in the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to be—a serious, active, inquiring interest . . ." (165-166).¹ In short, some of us who felt hailed, if not by Marcus' terms, then by our dissatisfaction with them, saw this as the invitation to talk.

In his essay Marcus devoted several paragraphs to FC2, a non-profit publisher of formally innovative fiction with which I and the other four writers here are affiliated. In these paragraphs Marcus recalled a brief 1996 New Yorker article, entitled "FC2," by Jonathan Franzen, in which Franzen made light of FC2 in order to emphasize his own celebrity and devotion to literature. Marcus characterized this New Yorker piece as the first indication of Franzen's developing animus toward radically innovative writing: "'FC2' is a harmless bit of writing with a rigged premise, but in retrospect the piece can be read as a warm-up for a series of sucker punches against an unlikely, powerless target: the high-powered, stuffed-with-cash, culturally tremendous world of marginal, non-narrative writing that secretly controls the world—a target that will, over the next nine years, take so many body blows from Franzen, the future heavyweight pundit, culture straddler, and angry realist, that one can very nearly hear it wheezing its last, dismal, low-sales-figure breath" (44). Over the course of Marcus' essay, his argument turned on a distinction between "realists" and "experimentalists," the former identified with the political and economic dominant, the latter marginalized and neglected, eventually focusing on "difficulty" as the issue dividing them. In the course of this shift, Franzen's essay on FC2 was replaced by a 2002 essay, "Mr. Difficult," in which Franzen attacked William Gaddis. Both shifts seemed significant. There appeared to be an instability, not only in the positions occupied, but in how the conflict was being conceived. That FC2 was at issue seemed to instance deeper uncertainties.

Harper's invited FC2 to make a response. The editors specified nothing to which they wanted FC2 to respond but set a limit of 300 words. I wrote the response that is printed here following this introduction. Harper's promptly rejected it.

Marcus' article generated responses elsewhere, however. In the on-line zine Slate, the fiction writer Jess Row found fault with Marcus, partly for creating division among contemporary writers and partly for doing it over the wrong issues.² Calling Marcus' essay "an unnecessary, and disingenuous, attempt to repolarize American literary culture" (para. 2), Row maintained that the debate over experimental fiction, "if it ever really existed, ended decades ago" (para. 7). His idea was that the "modernist credo," the ambition to radical change, had now become "part of every contemporary novelist's DNA" (para. 8), and he went on to insist that no fiction...