Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen's Midwestern Poetics
2008; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoWHAT IS WRONG with St. Louis? It is not that the city is not nice, ruminates Melinda, the tragic heroine in Woody Allen's recent film Melinda and Melinda (2005). Melinda wonders whatever drove her move from Park Avenue this Midwestern place where after some terribly boring years--and after a broken-up marriage, the lost custody of her children, and shooting her lover--all she was left do was kill herself. We don't know whether she will in the end. Allen's complicated narratives never give simple answers. We do get the assertion, however, that St. Louis and thus the Midwest represent something you should get away from better sooner than later before empty boredom and daily routine drive you crazy and into seemingly blissful suicide. Woody Allen's Manhattan-located films always serve as semi-comic, semi-tragic social comments. In this, Melinda and Melinda makes no exception. But in splitting the title character into two different personas exemplifying comedy and tragedy respectively, this specific film works like a strategic subterfuge: the two Melindas are acting out authorial fantasies of a diametrically separated into tragic and comic universalities. And in choosing the Midwestern persona of Melinda as the tragic part of her character, Allen leaves it the viewers make their own conclusion about both the source and the outcome of her malady. But the question unasked--and therefore remaining unanswered--is striking: Why would the Midwest act as backdrop for depicting the tragic version of contemporary American life? Allen's film is but one example within an array of recent works that focus on Midwestern ways of life. There are melancholic, tragic, and even sardonic films like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Fargo (1996), Boys Don't Cry (1999), The Straight Story (1999), or About Schmidt (2002). And there are equally disturbing visions of the Midwest in recent novels like Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991), Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (1993), Siri Hustvedt's The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) and finally and perhaps most notoriously Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001). Not only has the Midwest resurfaced as highly contested region where conceptions of 'being American' are negotiated; this regionally restricted interrogation has broadened its scope embrace transregional issues and engage in a dialogue with an international audience. Jonathan Franzen's for many surprising success novel The Corrections (winner of the National Book Award) is a key case in point in that this work has been hailed as the first great novel of the 21st century. This accolade in turn implies staking out the claim of the novel entering the realm of world literature. The Midwest as viewed through cinematic and literary works of art has moved the core of reconsidering long-established American artistic as well as moral values. The region herewith returns its function of figuring as the nation's heartland, forever caught in the schism between always remaining the same and reluctantly admitting change. Literary historian Diane Quantic claims that a trademark of Midwestern fiction is to describe life in a region where the threat of change is the only constant. Midwestern novels serve the effort sustain family and community on the Plains, and the narratives register the land's transformation from wilderness usable space (Contemporary Fiction, 720, 726, and 'Midwest, 641). This is, however, only a small part of the literary formulas of the Middle West, albeit the most enduring and stereotyped. Approaching the region from this angle alone, one easily forgets that there also was and is an urban Midwest. The region's cities cannot be grasped with this agrarian imagery and they have had their very own cultural history, which is very different from the canonized Midwestern agrarian historiography. As early as the 1920s, there was a failure--or denial--to incorporate booming urban centers like St. …
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