Quotes of Interest from “The Reader in Exile” by Jonathan Franzen

A short story excerpted from ​How to Be Alone​ (1995)

● “I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David
Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly
lonely.” (165)
● “For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born” (165)
● “Like the readers of this essay, my friends and I belong to that class of well-educated
“symbolic analysts” which Labor Secretary Robert Reich believes is inheriting the earth.
Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the
population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its
children against the worst ravages of electronic media. What he describes as the
self-immolation of civilization is in fact only a partitioning; and the irony of this partitioning
is that those with the greatest access to information are the ones least tethered by the
wires that bring it.” (166)
● “If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask ‘Do we
need this?’ or ‘How might it harm us?’” (167)
● “symbolic analysts . . . like many a ruling class before them, are finding that they have
more in common with the elect of other countries than with the preterite of their own.”
(168)
● “The idea of literate culture is basically a middle-class notion—it’s the gentleman in his
book-lined study with the privacy for reflection. That’s a very elitist notion.” (170)
● “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning
from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the
color, sound, and motion come from you.” (171)
● “The truth is simple, if unpretty. The novel is dying because the consumer doesn’t want it
anymore.” (171)
● “Novels are by no means dead . . . But the Novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is
teetering on the brink” (171-172)
● “Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext . . .
absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation” (172)
● “‘domination by the author’ has been, at least until now, the ​point ​of reading and writing.
The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in
some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the
creative will of another.” (173)
● “the Devil himself, “sleek and confident,” a “sorcerer of the binary order” who offers to
replace the struggle of earthly existence with “a vivid, pleasant dream.” All he wants in
return is mankind’s soul.” (173)
● “I wonder, as I did in high school when confronted with the smooth and athletic ones, the
team captains and class presidents, whether I would not, deep down, trade in all this
doubting and wondering and just be him.” (173-174)
● “He refers to his smoking, his quarts of beer, his morbid premonitions of disaster, his in-
somnia, his brooding. He names as the primary audience for his book his many friends
who refuse to grant him the darkness of our cultural moment, who shrug off electronic
developments as enhancements of the written word. ‘I sometimes wonder if my
thoughtful friends and I are living in the same world . . . Naturally I prefer to think that the
problem lies with them.’” (174)
● “Elitism is the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art, an invitation to the poisoned
arrows of populist rhetoric.” (174-175)
● “Ultimately, if novelists want their work to be read, the responsibility for making it
attractive and im- perative is solely their own.” (176)
● “‘Everything in the culture argues against the novel,’ Don DeLillo said in a ​Paris Review
interview. ‘This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against
power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of
assimilation.’” (177)
● “The paradox of literature’s elitism is that it’s purely self-selecting. Anyone who can read
is free to be a part of it.” (177)
● “I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the
onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain. I don’t
suppose that many other people will give away their TVs. I’m not sure I’ll last long myself
without buying a new one. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.” (178)