Not totally sure what you mean here. I don't really understand what you mean by social information or what makes them higher in that than other books - or, if they are higher, what does that convey on them?
I'm not criticising you or disagreeing with you here by the way (apologies if it comes out that way), I'm just failing to grasp what you're saying, probably my fault.
Whenever I think of Freedom I remember an article or essay or something by Will Self in which he attacked Freedom (or not so much the book, but the fact that people were praising it and giving it awards) as a sad indictment of how modernism had failed in the novel. I think he was claiming that in other fields new forms had come along and replaced old forms and there was a kind of progression....
(I couldn't remember precisely what he said about it in the end so I googled)
> One of the bestselling literary novels of last year, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, self-consciously models itself on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and toddles realistically along like modernism never happened. It's as if a contemporary composer were to rescore the Eroica, making the melodies more saccharine and the harmonies more schmaltzy, then premiere it at the last night of the Proms to rapturous applause from the musical cognoscenti. To complete my trope at the outset: for a century or so the symphony and the novel made love to each other, quite beautifully. But now its artistic partner has died, the novel, instead of moving on, lies there in the dark summoning up past pleasures while playing with itself in a masturbatory orgy of populism.
My take is...
1. If he's asserting that all other fields have stayed true to the ideas of modernism and have been progressively advancing through further experimentations with form etc while literature alone has stagnated, then he's taking a very optimistic/generous view of all other fields.
2. I'm not totally sure that Self himself is single-handedly carrying the torch for progressive literature in the way that he thinks he is
3. Dunno why he should pick on Freedom as particularly regressive, it was no more so than any other kinda middlebrow big seller from that time and as far as I remember it wasn't as though it represented any big change in attitudes, it was just another book that fitted in perfectly well with everything else at the time, there was no way it represented any watershed or philosophical change or such
4. I dunno if that is relevant to what you're saying about the books or not
Yeah sorry I'm probably not being very clear! Thanks for taking the time to ask for clarification. I think #1 and #2 of your take are right on, though I'm gonna push back on "middlebrow" and say that the critical mentality which equates accessibility with compromised quality is itself a product of modernism, specifically the aristocratic, Mandarin, "pure" aesthetics folks like TS Eliot championed. In that light, and given the theoretical discrediting of formalism (incl. New Criticism, aesthetic autonomy, etc), I don't think we should take modernist taxonomies of taste too seriously.
I think Will Self's account is borderline wrong on some fronts, and at the very least needs disclaimers/context added to it:
1) Maybe Anna Karenina is the only Victorian novel Self's ever read, but the book's a very self-aware pastiche of the entire genre; it has as much to do with the Bronte sisters in form as it does Tolstoy (
Wuthering Heights is definitely woven through it, e.g.). And it opens, on the very first page, with the main characters, a married couple, moving in to a new house:
They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. This is a very self-aware novel—which Self doesn't deny—but it's worth noting.
2) I'm not sure why Self feels like there can only be one form at a given moment, that there is one form appropriate to a given age and all makers in a discipline need to follow its telos. (This is a myth from art history, where the only canonized works are those that exhibit its "characteristic form," eg impressionism or what have you—ignoring the many skilled artisans who dabbled in different styles.) Anyway, whether we wanna call it a medium or form or genre or style, I think we can agree that different "forms" do different "things"—they have different strengths and functions. To me, the style that Austen kicks off, and that culminates in someone like Tolstoy, is fundamentally a
social novel. That is its form. It has large casts of characters whose lives are interwoven; it is interested in the status games and etiquette maneuvers and conversational microtransactions that play out in the social sphere; in some sense, it is a dignified form of social gossip. Here's the opening to
Freedom:
> The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up local—he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now—but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the
New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the
Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation's capital.
This is what I meant by "social information." Human beings are probably hardwired at some level to love hearing about their neighbors, to love hearing about the minutiae of local customs, pecking orders of who's who in the neighborhood, intrigues and scandals among their own.
