Ecostoicism, or Notes on Franzen

What sort of ethical life is possible in a period we are learning to call the Anthropocene? This urgent question drives contemporary environmental fictions. While many narrative forms allow readers to cast a skeptical eye on the dramas of the present, the affective intensity, engagement with site specificity, and restless moral inquiry of 21st-century realisms address the ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene especially well. Tempering thick descriptions of crisis with subtly prescriptive elements, contemporary realisms firmly anchor an evolving human subjectivity in an observable material world undergoing rapid environmental changes.

Realist motifs also respond successfully to a charge made increasingly frequently by eco-critics — the assertion that the abstract universalism of climate change discourse too often displaces more localized and sensorily rich encounters. This antipathy to planetary perspectives unites a number of green critics who likely disagree on many other points. Stacy Alaimo, for instance, rejects the "God's-eye perspective, this triumphant, purified neutrality" assumed by climate science in favor of ground-level views.1 Ursula Heise similarly associates climate science with formulaic and "apocalyptic portrayals of the future of wildlife" presented in an elegiac mood; she urges an aesthetically more varied engagement with the cultural specificity of core concepts of environmental politics (especially, justice).2 In the same spirit, Ashley Dawson criticizes environmental discussions that "neglect or entirely ignore the urban environment, focusing instead on 'global' problems such as climate change, deforestation, and desertification"; he links this abstract globalism to efforts on the part of highly developed nations to "weasel out of their collective responsibility for carbon emissions" and amply demonstrates in his own excavation of urban politics the merits of deep knowledge of local dynamics.3 Amitav Ghosh largely agrees, too. He wants to see novelists tackle the improbable and extreme effects of climate change (rather than rehearsing its theory), and he insists on the value of realist works that "communicate, with marvelous vividness, the uncanniness and improbability, the magnitude and interconnectedness of the transformations that are now under way."4 For all of these observers, the narrative challenges posed by the Anthropocene require an immersion in the routines of contemporary immediacy, as well as a politically charged contestation of received narratives about the science of Planet Earth.

Among contemporary realist novelists in the US who have heeded this call, Jonathan Franzen is pre-eminent.5 In fiction and essays, Franzen makes no secret of his commitment to environmental matters as well as his resistance to sloganeering. The latter sentiment has often led the author to court controversy by assaulting the common sense of a particular moment. When writing in this vein, Franzen arguably deserves the largely negative reputation among academic readers that he currently enjoys, since his eagerness to overturn truisms can interfere with his political judgment. It is the gamble of this essay, however, that not taking the bait in these polemics allows for the discovery of a relatively coherent ethical and ecocritical stance subtending Franzen's narratives. By offering a consistent and durable approach to urgent issues, Franzen's ecocritical narratives provide a starting point for something like a green politics, even while recognizing that an ethics is not identical to a politics. More specifically, Franzen's work recovers a practice of the self that prioritizes joy, belonging, and wonder at nature over a spirit of austerity and self-abnegation. In a period characterized by insistent environmental challenges, it would be foolhardy to overlook any tools that might aid the reformulation of lifestyles, attitudes, and practices among the elite along more positive and sustainable lines. This, I argue, is what readers can find in Franzen's writing. His prose offers an assist to academic ecocritics because it revives a tradition of nature-oriented ethical inquiry that is here designated "ecostoicism."

Franzen's Habits

If the novel of manners conventionally takes, well, manners as its subject, then Jonathan Franzen's works might be better described as novels of habit. In all of his 21^st-century fiction, Franzen establishes character through accounts of routinized behavior — from Gary's serial grilling in The Corrections to Walter's workaholic tendencies in Freedom and Andreas's obsessive womanizing in Purity.6 Many of these descriptions begin as conventional realist passages; they anchor a character in concretely observable actions and derive much of their pathos from structural ironies surrounding motives. However hysterically overloaded with information about externalities Franzen's narration might be, the psychology only remains comic to the degree that it suggests an inner life available to reason, rather than one in which all human activity is reduced to tragic determinations.7 Although risking farce, Franzen's realism morphs into satire, since sane and reasoned cognition remains a condition for self-improvement in his writing.8 This commitment to reason as a fundamental responsibility ultimately defines Franzen's characters. His satires result from the reader's vicarious experience of absurdly habitual actions that can be changed for the better. Franzen's comedies of habit rest on an ethical foundation that takes the cultivation of the habit of virtue as a primary goal.

A case in point is Chip's relationship to salmon in The Corrections. Gripped by a habitual compulsion to impress his parents by presenting an illusion of sophisticated consumerism far beyond his (and their) means, the panicked New Yorker shoplifts an expensive fillet and impulsively stuffs the clammy package into his pants. This over-extension of a habitual logic forces Chip to grotesque extremes and exaggerates his sense perception in the process. His heightened senses then intensify the shame experienced during a chance encounter with the object of his erotic fascination and her family at the same market: "The salmon paper was sweat-bonded to Chip's skin and tearing open at the bottom. This was not the ideal time to be providing Doug with the intellectual companionship he seemed to crave, but Chip wanted Doug to keep thinking highly of him and encourage Eden to buy his script" (96). Being squeezed between two habits — consumerist display and a confused amalgamation of professional and erotic ambition — Chip is left squeamishly "open at the bottom." This uneasy sensation accumulates until the entire structure topples, and an involuntary transformation begins. Franzen's habit-driven character, in other words, reaches crisis via contradiction. Habits launch mutually disruptive mechanical subroutines from which the satirically deficient character must learn to extract himself.

Entrapment in habitual double binds consistently defines the ethically weakest characters in Franzen's plots. Consider another passage devoted to that emblematic bad habit: smoking. In The Corrections, Chip attempts to overcome an addiction to porn by immersing an overly enticing videotape in dishwater. Chip's motive for this action is noted parenthetically: "(He'd done this with many a pack of cigarettes while kicking the habit)" (47). This aside stresses Chip's habit of kicking the habit, gratuitously emphasizing that he applies his habitual anti-smoking tactics across media. Chip deploys one habit (immersing unwanted objects in dishwasher) against others (smoking, porn-watching), because in his instinctual state he remains essentially habit-bound — a creature of passions, compulsions, and recurring failures of self-knowledge. Chip's depressive pseudo-solution to his contradictory desires only exacerbates his suffering. The narrator ensures that readers witness the limited range of options that Chip's self-pity offers.

A more promising approach to entrapment in habit appears near the end of "My Bird Problem," Franzen's final essay in The Discomfort Zone. This confessional narrative describes the loss of virginity and the dissolution of a marriage, but in probing these queasy Chip-like shames, Franzen shifts the ground by identifying his own voice with the not entirely glamorous behavior of birds. He discovers:

To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird (emphasis added, 189).

The passage sounds a note of mildly surprised estrangement, not self-castigation. It turns on the performative contradiction involved in revealing an apparently personal habit of being short-sighted and habit-bound. By observing that habit, rather than unthinkingly enacting it, the essay's narrator triggers a new relation to the bird-like self; Franzen's satire pushes the contradiction to the point where it dissolves. At the site of this absence, a new disposition emerges — one that converts carefully observed habits into the foundation of a more tranquil and virtuous self. Neither Franzen's essay nor his novels fully explain the process of that self's emergence, though. That is an ethical project for which (as we shall see in the next section) a turn to a more coherent Stoicism is required.

For birders and smokers alike, however, the emergence of a virtuous self is constrained by the system that Franzen calls "technoconsumerism."9 He outlines this concept in his 1996 essay "Sifting the Ashes."10  Here, Franzen again establishes the contradictory foundations of a habit-bound self:

To take control of their lives, people tell themselves stories about the person they want to be. It's the special privilege of the smoker, who at times feels so strongly the resolve to quit that it's as if he'd quit already, to be given irrefutable evidence that these stories aren't necessarily true: here are the butts in the ashtray, here is the smell in the hair (145).

Like Chip, the essay's smoker confronts shameful evidence of contradictions within his story about himself; his foundation as a subject lies in the way he handles the confrontation between the idealized self-concept of the quitter and the sensory evidence of continued indulgence. Franzen then explains at length the economic and institutional factors that led Liggett Myers, RJ Reynolds, and other cigarette manufacturers to worsen the smoker's dilemma by obscuring health evidence, manipulating the levels of nicotine in their products, and advertising deceptively. The essay firmly establishes the means by which technoconsumerism stacks the deck against the smoker's well-being.

Detailed as Franzen's dissection of corporate malfeasance may be — and the essay is lousy with evidence — the argument soon swerves away from the latent fatalism of pure entrapment narratives, revealing a commitment to utopian and ethical principles. It introduces an objection to "all narratives that pretend to unambiguous moral significance," including the simplistic story of evil Big Tobacco (145). This point is crucial to the punch line of the essay: "There's no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there's one thing I'm sure of: they don't do it because they're slaves to nicotine" (160). Franzen's anti-entrapment argument leads him to imagine various alternative explanations for smoking — chalking up his own attraction to the habit, for instance, to a freelancer's need for reassuring order and routine — before extrapolating to "the United States as a whole," an entity that Franzen asserts "resembles an addicted individual, with the corporate id going about its dirty business while the conflicted political ego frets and dithers" (161). Franzen's "corporate id" unscrupulously uses all available tools to satisfy consumer desires; it is not subordinate to the "political ego" and regularly corrupts political will with money. This id is, however, not omnipotent. Both the id and the ego give way to another principle, one that does not turn out to be the expected superego. Franzen confronts the antinomy between id and ego with a virtuous self that has achieved a fully-fledged change of habit: the quitter or abstainer of the future. This figure of the happier, ethical self flickers in the background of most of Franzen's essays and fiction; it anchors his narratives without coming fully into view.11 Franzen's narrator does not reveal how or why he quit smoking; the meat of his satire attaches mainly to the bone of bad habits. What is clear, though, is the new self's emergence from a willful drive to survive rather than any dependence on the superego's moral or intellectual critique of capitalist consumerism.

That said, even though technoconsumerism does not foreclose all forms of self-actualizing behavior, for Franzen the capitalist institutionalization of bad habits remains menacing because it monetizes many of the social and psychological contradictions that form the self, thereby limiting options for self-improvement. This diagnosis responds to the ideology that the political economist William Davies calls "punitive neoliberalism."12 Succeeding antiregulatory and ideological phases of neoliberalism, Davies argues, the punitive moment bypasses the admonition to invest in human capital and other projects that intentionally align human cognition with capitalist imperatives. The punitive phase instead strips away resources from the cognitively alert subject and converts the subject's biopolitical, autonomous, and involuntary processes into a zone of capital accumulation. Sleep, footsteps, heartbeats, synaptic connections — these largely autonomic processes attract capital investment in a punitive phase, Davies asserts, extending the regulation of everyday life by capital into some of the most involuntary aspects of human embodiment. Submitting to capitalist processes of extraction at these intimate sites provides the natural resources extracted and remarketed by FitBit, psychotropic pharmaceuticals, heart monitors and more, and the subject that is the object of their gaze experiences a punishing degree of invasion and regulation. While not employing terms identical to Davies's, Franzen diagnoses a technoconsumerism that advances destructive habits at the cellular level of the id and, in so doing, restricts the effectiveness of political projects based on intellectual commitment to disembodied ideals. As in Davies's analysis, the capitalist monetization of autonomic processes prevents homeostasis and accelerate crisis in Franzen's plots.

The Corrections certainly relies on this punitive logic in its pharmacological plot. The addictive mood elevator variously referred to as Mexican A, Aslan, and Correcktall throughout the novel links the geographically dispersed members of the Lambert family. The professorial Chip ingests it during a sordid hotel sexual encounter with a student. His siblings Gary and Denise attend an investment seminar extolling the profitability of the drug, while mother Enid samples the wares on board a cruise ship and arranges for an internationally traveling friend to deliver additional supplies that arrive on Christmas Eve. Alfred, the father, is the only member of the family who does not partake, although the others regularly discuss the drug's likely effects on him and the contribution that his patented discoveries made to its development. A hypothetical composite of Xanax, Ecstasy, and an SSRI, Franzen's imagined psychotropic diminishes the toxic shame that plagues his characters and mutes the alarm bells of anxiety that sound throughout the novel's opening pages. It is also entwined with the questionable mutual fund schemes promoted by the parents of Chip's student lover, among others — the same schemes that extract massive royalties from an invention developed by the Lambert pater familias in his basement laboratory.

In Franzen's novel, in other words, the nearly unbearable passions of the id drive the Lambert family into the arms of faceless speculators who exploitatively commodify the means of regulating the same passions. Short-circuiting willpower, this "corporate id" empties out the dated ethics of the older Lamberts' Midwestern Christianity (with its focus on thrift, temperance, and loyalty to the clan), but this is only the most obvious habit of thought the punitive drug banishes. Each of the adult children's intellectual routines also attracts scathing satire that reveals them all as subordinate to and, to some extent, dependent on sensory habits that fold them back into the technoconsumerist id. Chip's intellectual pretensions, Gary's efforts to maintain paternal authority, and Denise's aestheticism all conflict regularly with their id-driven dependencies on destructive habits (alcohol, porn, expensive toys, illicit affairs, etc.). In fact, the more apparently cognizant of consumerist menace the adult children's habits of thought appear, the more dependent on the id each character turns out to be. Hence, the brutal opening take-down of academic critical theory — an off-putting sequence for many students and teachers, if my own classroom is any indication. There is no habit of thought more indicative of a self-deceiving entanglement with technoconsumerism in Franzen's fiction than a blanket commitment to socially sanctioned social critique.

The Corrections does not simply serve up a fiction writer's conventional anti-theory harangue, though. Another impulse is at work, as is evidenced by the related take-downs of ethical perfectionism in Freedom and Purity. In these later novels, the targets shift away from academic pieties and toward political projects with which Franzen has repeatedly and publicly affiliated himself. These essays test Franzen's personal ideals and demonstrate the compromises he understands himself to have made. "Inauguration Day, January 2001," for instance, describes the author as caught between a socialist street politics and the norms of his career as a writer.13 Like Walter (the misanthropic environmentalist hero of Freedom), the first-person narrator of this essay "is spared but not redeemed"; he experiences a conflict between abstract ethical norms and a legacy of white middle-class failures and hypocrisies that shape their expression.14 Franzen's writing, in other words, does not parody the ethical shortcomings of others, but rather documents the shameful embeddedness of the author's own leftist leanings within technoconsumerism while still reserving room for a kind of ethical progress (on which more below) that makes this situation visible. In his essays and fiction, Franzen repeatedly exposes the self-constituting conflicts that ground his approach to literary authorship, and he invites his readers to recognize similarly constitutive contradictions in their own situations.15

This deep investment in contradiction grounds Franzen's writing in a version of Stoic ethics. After a brief aside explaining classical Stoic theories of habit — a tradition that itself requires some fine-tuning to address the context of global capitalism and the Anthropocene — this essay returns to Franzen's most recent writings, assessing the effects of his engagement with modern stoicism. Framing Franzen's concerns in this manner allows us to identify more clearly the relationship of his ethical project to environmental politics, even when explicitly green themes are not foremost. From this perspective, we can also glean hints of the common ground that Franzen shares with other contemporary writers who turn to the Stoic tradition for help navigating the Anthropocene.

The Habit of Stoicism

The philosopher Franzen quotes most regularly is Søren Kierkegaard. Although this Christian existentialist was emphatically not a Stoic, he studied the Greek tradition closely and embraced some of its principles. In particular, Kierkegaard adopted Stoic descriptions of emotions, while rejecting their normative ethics.16 He understood the Stoics as seeking a remedy for suffering in the cessation of all emotion, while his own philosophy gave pride of place to intense emotions — including suffering and humiliation — because he found in these episodes opportunities for revelatory self-transformation.

The tormented soul trembling before the divine is not, however, the Kierkegaard that Franzen cites. In fact, when his characters reach the bottom of their shame spirals (as in Chip's salmon scene), the narrative often hits its most satiric notes and swerves away from ecstatic revelation. This aversion to insights deriving from bottoming out relates to Franzen's rejection of the stance he calls "depressive realism"; for Franzen, a depressive fixation on suffering hinders perceptions of truth.17 Franzen views depression as a serious and destructive illness that inflicts intense pain on the self and those close to the affected person. He describes the depressive's chronic return to humiliation and shame (i.e., contemporary variants on Kierkegaardian trembling) as an impediment to insight, not an opportunity.

What Franzen takes from Kierkegaard, then, is not his theory of emotion but rather the more temperate admonition to pause the daily flow of distractions in order to launch scrutiny of the self. He paraphrases Kierkegaard's argument in Either/Or, describing him as making "fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning."18Instead of indulging in this often technologically mediated avoidance, Franzen recommends situating the self in a complex natural environment. In working out his response to David Foster Wallace's suicide in the essay "Farther Away," for instance, Franzen notes his friend's dull response to the long-billed curlew. Wallace's reaction to "a species whose magnificence is to [Franzen] self-evident and revelatory" betrays his "patent boredom" and "hollow politeness."19 For Franzen, setting aside busyness and obsessive inwardness so one can remain open to natural magnificence is crucial to well-being, joy, and even survival, and Wallace's detachment from nature is a symptom of deep suffering. These are Stoic themes.

The primary goal of classical Stoicism is to live in accordance with nature (symphona me ti physis).20 Stoic nature (physis) is a dynamic system permeated by reason and divinity. In this system, the sage discovers a humanity continuous with and active within nature. The Stoic term for the condition of belonging to one's situation is oikeiosis.21 Often translated as familiarization or appropriation, oikeosis names a condition of feeling at home and well-integrated with one's environment. It is toward this achievable condition of contentment that the Stoic sage aims.

To progress toward oikeiosis, the Stoic sage detaches herself from habitual busyness and cultivates new habits that situate the self in a more ecological, multispecies, multi-temporal universe. The Stoics developed many techniques for achieving this detachment. In his late lectures on the Stoics, Michel Foucault stressed the priority of techniques of self-care for their work. He identified nightly meditation, self-testing, correspondence with a truth-telling mentor, and purposeful withdrawal from familiar routines as crucial Stoic exercises for reforming habit.22 This is the spirit in which the famous Stoic and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius repeatedly recommended to himself, for instance, the habit of taking the long view — i.e., asking how significant particular concerns might appear after a century or from afar:

Take a view from above — look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes; and how many have never even heard your name, how many will very soon forget it, how many may praise you now but quickly turn to blame. Reflect that neither memory nor fame, nor anything else at all, has any importance worth thinking of.23

In addition to these distantiation tactics, Marcus also cultivates the habit of dissolving an apparently desirable object into its elements: "How good it is," he reflects, "when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!"24 Shifting one's perspective away from immediate impressions in this manner, and moving toward reflection on one's reactions to initial impressions, is crucial to the Stoic project of releasing oneself from the grip of socially endorsed habits, such as overvaluing commodities, reputation, or sensation. One approaches the more desirable habits of oikeiosis by defamiliarizing conventional social reactions and finding a home in an observant, meditative mind embedded in the long and impersonal cycles of nature.

That said, Stoicism posits not full-blown antipathy to ordinary pleasures so much as a preference for moderation or temperate habits as the ground of virtue. After all, the main philosophical antagonists of the Stoics included not only the Epicureans (who prioritized happiness derived from pleasure) but also the Cynics and their more stringently ascetic rejections of social norms. Seneca, another influential Roman Stoic, wrote at length in his letters of his distaste for the spectacular displays of asceticism that he associates with the Cynics. "Avoid shabby attire, long hair, an unkempt beard, an outspoken dislike of silverware, sleeping on the ground and all other misguided means to self-advertisement," he counsels his mentee.25 Stoics like Seneca sought to live according to a rationally organized nature, not in obedience to any abstract principle that required dramatizing self-abnegation. Although in modern English usage the word stoicism usually designates an attitude of stolid endurance, the classical Stoics advocated a philosophy of happiness — even joy — achieved through virtue. Their Stoicism is thus eupathetic (seeking good feeling), not apathetic (averse to feeling).

As noted, Stoic sages achieve joy by cultivating the habit of attending to nature; in Foucault's words: "The study of nature enables us to free ourselves from this [busy] type of relationship to the self, from this system of obligation-indebtedness, if you like."26 To release herself from a system of debts, the Stoic becomes an observer, a thoughtful narrator who finds "all that happens" to be "as habitual and familiar as roses in spring and fruit in the summer," according to Marcus Aurelius.27 In a state of acceptance, the Stoic witnesses the continual mutability of the natural world, and if for a time she reverts to inadvisable social norms, she can return patiently to Stoic habits "as a man with ophthalmia returns to his sponge and salve, or another to his poultice or lotion."28 The Stoic finds a balm in new habits, and her vision improves after the application of philosophical salves and lotions.

Foucault is not alone in finding contemporary relevance in the Stoic art of living. The Stoics' active ethics are undergoing a revival in the 21^st century, and a number of scholars have emphasized their compatibility with current accounts of psychology, physics, language, and politics.29 The influence of Stoic philosophies of nature on later materialisms from Marx to Deleuze has also been well documented.30 This commentary regularly hints, as well, at the compatibility of Stoicism with environmentalism, although to date this theme has not been fully developed.31 This is, however, a territory that Franzen's most recent writing probes — suggesting how a modern subject originating in the contradictory habitus of technoconsumerism might build a new ground beneath its own feet.

Franzen as Ecostoic

The Stoic treatment of habit outlined in the previous section provides a substrate for Franzen's satire. It allows the author to distinguish between the slave of capitalist habit (i.e., the self-deceiving smoker) and the professionally self-protective writer (i.e., one who smokes to regulate his day). The techniques of ecostoical ethics also explain how Franzen's subjects shift from unreflective and highly conflicted creatures unresponsive to their environment to relatively more rational and self-preserving actors cognizant of their own natures and capable of establishing habits that enable their own and others' thriving.

In Franzen's most recent writing, the classical Stoic theme of self-care is attached with increasing frequency to explicitly ecological concerns, a development anticipated in "My Bird Problem." In this piece, as we've seen, the essayist identifies his own bird-like avidity and shifts toward a self-observing project as both bird and birdwatcher, and this attentiveness is then extended to his physical environment: "right there, on mulchy ground behind the weather station" or "five feet away from a busy footpath" or "from the windows of generic motels ... [looking] at the cattails and sumac by interstate overpasses," he develops a new "sense of the world's being full of possibility" (180-181). This enlivening of inglorious scenes proximate to down-market commercial locales awakens in Franzen's narrator an ecostoical joy. The breath of a living world blows the observer out of the orbit of shame and its intolerable self-regard. Turning outward, Franzen's essayistic narrator discovers himself inhabiting a lively continuity with a directly observable non-Romantic nature, and, in so doing, he reinvents a self that is committed to transforming its habits.

This ecostoical perspective explains some of Franzen's more controversial statements on climate change and green politics, especially his New Yorker essay, "Carbon Capture." Strongly condemned by the Audubon Society among others, the piece takes aim at the abstract reductiveness and puritanism of certain politicized accounts of climate change. "As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as 'Markets are efficient,'" Franzen writes. "The story can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We're taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we're fucked."32 In a manner reminiscent of his pointed antipathy to one-note discussions of Big Tobacco, Franzen rejects not the facts of climate change (a point he takes pains to emphasize), but rather the political use to which they have been put. He is concerned that the rhetoric of fighting climate change too readily lets any particular individual off the hook by remaining abstract, distant, and global: "Like globalism, climatism alienates," Franzen proclaims. In opposition to a climate problem taking place at a great distance from immediate ethical action, Franzen recommends "appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats," adopting what he calls a "novelistic" approach to nature. From this perspective, Franzen imagines specific and local conservation efforts (and describes two in great detail) that generate not only scientific expertise but also everyday "parataxonomists" and other engaged mediators between science and the populace. Such efforts do not replace a politics devoted to fighting climate change; they importantly supplement it by producing grounded ethical actors.

In other words, paradoxical as it might initially sound, Franzen's arguments against an exclusive focus on the rhetoric of long-term and global climate change demonstrate his reliance on an ecostoical perspective. Franzen seeks engaged ethical action that preserves the subject's creativity in relation to an immediately perceptible and degraded environment. This environment is perceived from the point of view of a reasonable person situated in a complex and changing cosmos — hence, its "novelistic" specificity and Franzen's continuing commitment to situating himself within the scene. For this reason, he opens each foray with accounts of his own path toward a particular idea, site, or scientific project. He then reassesses the habitual or conventional interpretation of a situation in light of what he understands to be its relevant facts and derives "an ethical argument" from the encounter between those facts and the rational preference for what he calls an "irreplaceable, non-monetizable good" (such as a thriving and diverse populations of undomesticated animals). Both Franzen's critiques of what he elsewhere describes as the purity of single stories and his corrective approach to ethical questions are embedded in an implicitly ecostoical logic. His analyses are materialist, determinist, and ultimately virtue-oriented.

Many readers of Franzen's climate essay responded to its tone rather than its logic, and they were not entirely wrong to do so. As Franzen admitted in a November 2017 reconsideration of "Carbon Capture," he wrote this piece while in a state of outrage at activists' apparent optimism about prospects for staving off climate change — an optimism that he is not alone in considering unwarranted and counterfactual. In his later reflection, Franzen praised his editors at the New Yorker for tempering his rhetoric, and he expressed regret that he did not seize the opportunity to bolster those working assiduously to advance environmental policy goals. He apologized for his selfish fit:

In a better essay ... I would have found my way to more sympathy for ... the climate activists, who for 20 years had watched their path to victory narrow sickeningly, as carbon emissions mounted and the necessary emissions-reduction targets grew ever more unrealistic, and for the alternative energy workers who had families to feed and were trying to see beyond petroleum, and for the environmental NGOs that thought they'd finally found an issue that could wake the world up, and for the leftists who, as neoliberalism and its technologies reduced the electorate to individual consumers, saw climate change as the last strong argument for collectivism.33

In light of Trump's election, Franzen underscores his role as a realistic pessimist — one who hopes to offer dark humor, clarity, and some solace to the climate activists, environmentalists, and leftists among whom he counts himself. In other words, since "My Bird Problem," his self-appointed task has shifted from situating the self in relation to nature for the purpose of diminishing its own suffering to one that takes greater account of responsible action in a cosmopolitan and conflicted social logic. Franzen here signals his desire to move from ethical self-discovery to a more engaged (i.e., political) project of action derived from ethics.

The same shift is evident in Purity, the novel Franzen published in 2015. As the title suggests, the novel takes as the primary object of its satire the artificial purity of single stories, regularly complicating these with close attention to the contradictions in which they are embedded. Like children raised by single parents (a central issue in the novel), supposedly pure stories have more than one origin and more than one effect. Whether they recognize it or not, they are entangled in contradictions at psychosocial and structural levels. Early on, Franzen attributes alertness of this condition to his title character, who is nicknamed Pip in a transparent allusion to Dickensian genealogical plots:

[T]he word purity ... was to her the most shameful word in the language, because it was her given name. It made her ashamed of her own driver's license, the PURITY TYLER beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture. The name had accomplished the opposite of what her mother had intended by giving it to her. As if to escape the weight of it, she'd made herself a dirty girl in high school, and she was still a dirty girl, desiring someone's husband (48).

In this passage, Pip's mother's goal of purifying her own conflicted story (by withholding all information about Pip's father and her own inherited wealth) produces a dirty counter-reaction in the daughter and an overflow of linguistic shame that congeals in the driver's license. Pip's confrontation with her doubled self in the act of filling out paperwork redoubles the shame, forcing, as it does, awareness of her own efforts to outrun her heritage by purifying herself of Purity.

The novel's antagonist Andreas Wolf (the predatory lupine to Purity's innocent Red Riding Hood) is similarly cognizant of his situation. "It was so easy to blame the mother," he reflects in the opening pages of the portion of the novel narrated from his point of view. "Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life?" (102). We noticed this habit of embedding characters in logical and situational paradoxes that trigger their distinctive neurotic responses in The Corrections, and it definitely continues to characterize Franzen's plotting in Purity.
The difference, however, is that in Purity the main characters all demonstrate an early alertness to their condition. That "life" is a miserable contradiction is not a discovery so much as a dully familiar — or "easy" — observation from which reflection begins in Purity. Furthermore, this novel takes a stab at pulling its main character's transformation into something closer to a contented ethical subject onto the main stage of the narration. By the close of the novel, Pip has shifted her habits enough that she can enter "an absolute groove" playing tennis:

[T]he ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball's inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough (545-546).

Recovered from shame to the extent that she can experience sensations of satisfaction, sufficiency, and sweetness, Pip is described as having been released into unthinking yet skillful action in tandem with another; she occupies a court suffused with light. Her "perfect contentment" recalls other moments of prior pleasure and extends into a timeless continual "heaven." The moment is sufficient to itself in this moment and beyond. It requires no witnesses, no fame, and no consequence. It simply consists of right action undertaken in a manner appropriate to its context. This is oikeosis, the Stoic ideal.

Unlike The Corrections, then, which sends the tormented Chip off into the backstory for his conversion into a good son, Purity narrates at least one character's bumpy transition from mortal shame to a state that permits some satisfaction. Nonetheless, the travails of the more disturbed Andreas occupy the novel's center stage for the longest time. From consciousness of its own contradictions, Andreas's plot line veers into extremely distressed states; while digging a grave for a sexual predator he has murdered, for instance, Andreas has "extraneous and postponable thoughts" and in a misapplication of Stoic doctrine "from a great distance ... [he] observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was," he concludes, "an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety" (136). The process of self-splitting occurring in this passage is later routinized, as Andreas comes to think of the horrific portion of himself as The Killer. "Ashamed of everything, every particle of himself, right up to this moment," he begins to cry, and at this moment "the Killer stirred in him again, sensing opportunity in his tears, his regression. The Killer liked regression" (463). Plagued by "unbearable anxiety" and unable to manage a self deeply at odds with the conditions of its own existence, at the end of the 66-page section of the novel entitled "The Killer," Andreas finally commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. In his final moment, he "look[s] down at the tropical treetops, the large shards of fallen rock, the green surf of the undergrowth crashing against them," and in so doing "he hear[s] all the human voices in the world" (513). This deadly resolution illustrates the horrific consequences that Franzen envisions resulting from a punishing attachment to habit and a misunderstanding of one's place in nature. Andreas's character is so consumed by obsessive self-regard that he cannot inhabit or return to a natural or social world without self-destructing. He does not know how to orient himself as a rational subject in a dynamic cosmos. Consequently, lacking an ethical guidance system, the only option he imagines is opening the "emergency valve" and drowning himself in the surf of the world.

By moving both the contented tennis player and the suicidal sufferer to the foreground of his narrative, Franzen strikes different notes in Purity than we heard in his earlier work, while retaining his concern with shame and, in both sequences, granting pride of place to the green imagery of light, trees, and rock. His earlier absurdist satire gives way to a more polarized realism. In the Pip passages in particular, he narrates a shifting scene and underscores the value of rationally mastering habits — replacing old, bad routines with those that reinforce virtue — so that release from entrapment may occur. It is in this mood that we can interpret one of the novel's final set pieces, a passage that finds a reformed Pip in her mother's cabin, meditating on birds:

To Pip, no bird could surpass the excellence of brown towhees ... They were a perfect medium size, more substantial than juncos, more modest than jays. They were neither too shy nor too forward. They liked to be around houses but retreated under shrubs if you disturbed them. They didn't frighten anything except little bugs and her mother. They preferred hopping to flying. They took long and vigorous baths ... They stayed together in one spot year-round; were Californians. Pip could imagine a whole lot of worse ways of being to aspire to (555-556).

Pip's towhees exhibit modest, temperate, lightly ascetic, and loyal virtues. It is difficult to imagine an ethical ideal, or a "way of being to aspire to," that more closely approximates the Stoic approach to habit. Identifying a contented Pip with the hopping brown towhees, Franzen distinguishes her sustainable self from Andreas's more tragic failed flight, and he brings the novel to a close on a positive note. The social, vigorous towhees also improve on the identification with birds in general expressed in "My Bird Problem," because they replace the bird as id with an avian ego-ideal. In Purity, in other words, Franzen attempts to provide a kind of salve for selves damaged by the various causes examined in subplots of the novel — loss, isolation, ideological closure, debt, and a scandalous concentration of wealth. He turns to the logic of Stoicism and the language of environmentalism to produce an ethical stance accessible in the present.

In advancing this project, Franzen's particular attitudes do not fully exhaust the potential of ecostoicism — if, indeed, they perfectly illustrate this stance. As the distinguished scholar of modern Stoicism Lawrence Becker writes, "There is no developmental story we can tell, running from healthy to virtuosic agency, that eliminates the possibility of radical differences among people who approximate the [Stoic] ideal."34 Any specifically ecologically minded Stoicism deriving from Becker's approach would necessarily also remain open to radical differences in expression, while still remaining "benevolent but also reciprocal, cooperative but committed to their own agendas, principled but not rigoristic."35 Other expressions of such a sensibility might well take the quieter and more meditative turn that we find in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016), or they might follow Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God (2017) in placing a greater emphasis on the cooperative and reciprocal aspects of Stoicism. Some might verge closer toward theistic treatments of the cosmic whole (perhaps drawing on Calvin's readings of Seneca, as does Marilynne Robinson in her Gilead trilogy, or Rimbaud's ecstatic visions, as Patti Smith does throughout her oeuvre). Still others might work from a deeper store of facts, reaching out through wider circles of human and nonhuman relations than Franzen sketches. Richard Powers arguably adopts this approach in his magnificent 2018 environmental novel The Overstory. Ecostoic writing, in short, can range from maximalist and information-loaded realisms to more lyric and laconic modes.

Whatever the style, though, writing through the wreckage of an actively changing and damaged nature allows ecostoics to develop patterns detached from capital's default pseudo-self. This shared project helps to denaturalize habituation to a degraded environment and triggers the rebuilding of more integrated selves on the basis of eco-rationality. Committed to action on behalf of the common good, ecostoics — among whom we must count Franzen — work to renew human sense of belonging in a dynamic, vital, yet endangered natural system. This ethical task supplements a green politics in the public sphere.

 

Caren Irr is Professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the 21st Century (2013), Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (2010), and The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (1998).

 

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