IJ study archive

Freedom is Overrated: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace

source

TL;DR

A 2012 blog essay by the Cistercian theologian who writes as Sancrucensis, staging the Franzen–Wallace friendship/rivalry as a philosophical disagreement about love and freedom, read through Aquinas. It is primarily non-IJ DFW criticism — its texts are Franzen's Freedom and "Farther Away", Wallace's Kenyon speech, and Brief Interviews #28 — so its value here is mostly contextual, but it turns on one Infinite Jest passage: the Marathe–Steeply exchange on whether one "cannot choose but to love", which Sancrucensis reads as Wallace's clearest statement that love unmoored from a higher common good collapses into "a slavery to passion", making one "a citizen of nothing". The reading lands squarely on the much-argued question of whether Marathe speaks Wallace's own ethic of chosen worship.

Key claims

  • The Franzen frame: "The characters in Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom have lots of freedom, but their experience seems to teach them that freedom is overrated." Sancrucensis argues Franzen means to move Patty Berglund from a first, empty "freedom of choice" to a second freedom that comes through accepting necessity — but that Franzen's account of necessity is "insufficient."
  • Franzen's critique of Wallace, quoted from "Farther Away": "Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe" — Franzen citing the "cranial-fluid-dripping wife" in Infinite Jest and the BIWHM psychopath as evidence.
  • The Thomist counter: love is a political virtue "based on the sharing of those common goods in which human perfection primarily consists"; a love not grounded in a common good "remains a blind passion." "This is something that Wallace saw very clearly."
  • The Infinite Jest hinge: Sancrucensis quotes the Marathe–Steeply dialogue (IJ p. 108). Steeply: "What if you just love? without deciding?" Marathe: "Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment… You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself." He reads this as Wallace's diagnosis that love ungoverned by a higher good is a flight into "a slavery to passion."
  • Against Franzen's "abstract love": Franzen dismisses Wallace's gesture toward "some sort of god or spiritual-type thing" as "dehumanizing moralism and theologizing", but Sancrucensis argues that a love of another with no higher ordering is "in danger of being just as selfish."
  • The Bustillos wallace-l datum: he quotes Maria Bustillos (with permission) contrasting Franzen's love of birds with Wallace's love of difficult dogs: "Franzen's is a worldview that essentially condemns humanity, and Wallace's despite all the fear and horror is one that still embraces, despite everything."
  • The Kenyon landing: Wallace's freedom, though he "remained vague" on the transcendent reality, is "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them" — quoted from This is Water.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Marathe's rebuke to Steeply — that love chosen without reference to a higher good makes one "a citizen of nothing" — is Wallace's own position, aligning Infinite Jest with This is Water's argument about what to worship

  • Crux: this-is-water-connection
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Marathe–Steeply exchange (IJ p. 108): loving "without deciding" makes "your temple is self and sentiment" true of you, "a citizen of nothing" (scene 035, pp. 105-109). [sec. mid-essay]
    • [secondary] Read alongside Wallace's gesture toward "some sort of god or spiritual-type thing" and the Kenyon "really important kind of freedom" passage, as one continuous Wallace argument. [sec.]
    • [secondary] BIWHM #28 ("what women really want") cited as Wallace's portrait of passion-as-selfishness, the same evil in a different key. [sec.]
  • Notes: Sancrucensis endorses reading Marathe as carrier of Wallace's view — a strong stance the novel itself complicates, since Marathe's fanatical-devotion argument is in tension with Steeply throughout and with Marathe's own compromised loyalties. That in-source dialectic is not weighed here (the essay takes Marathe straight). The theological framing (Aquinas, common good) is the essay's own, not the novel's.

Themes

Love and its objects (the Franzen/Wallace disagreement); freedom vs necessity; worship and the transcendent (the Kenyon argument about what to worship); solipsism (love collapsing into "kneeling to yourself"). The Quebec/AFR politics of the Marathe–Steeply scene are incidental to the essay's use of it.

Cross-references

  • A theologically-framed endorsement of the reading that Marathe speaks Wallace's own ethic — the question at the center of the archive's Marathe–Steeply and This-is-Water commentary.
  • The Franzen "Farther Away" memorial essay and the Bustillos wallace-l thread it quotes place it in the same 2011-12 moment as the other posthumous reassessments.
  • Novel anchor: scene 035 (the Marathe–Steeply dialogue on choice and love, pp. 105-109; the quoted lines sit at p. 108).

Notable passages

  • "The characters in Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom have lots of freedom, but their experience seems to teach them that freedom is overrated." (Sancrucensis)
  • Franzen, quoted: "Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe."
  • Marathe, quoted from IJ: "Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment… You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself."
  • Bustillos, quoted: "Franzen's is a worldview that essentially condemns humanity, and Wallace's despite all the fear and horror is one that still embraces, despite everything."

Advances