Alena Titterton

It’s all been done

Jonathan Franzen: photographed at the Brooklyn Book Festival by David Shankbone (Wikimedia Commons)

I keep thinking about this really interesting interview on Lateline on 30 November 2010 with the author Jonathan Franzen and in particular, what he was saying about getting the sense more and more that the language you speak is going dead on you and that it’s oppressive.

Sure, I’m not a famous author or Barack Obama and I don’t have to do 20 TV interviews back to back but I completely understand the sentiment and it struck a chord with me.

Mr Franzen limits his comments to his experience as a writer – because of a writer’s affinity with (and for) language I presume.  But is the sentiment one that is limited to writers? I suspect not. Anyone else sometimes feel this way?

The more articulate, longer version of the point as made by Mr Franzen from his interview went like this:

“But there is something about the process – particularly of doing interviews like this, frankly – that it begins to empty you out and you start to feel as if more of the language you speak is going dead on you.

I was very fortunate, very grateful, to meet with president Obama some weeks ago and I was trying to talk with him about what does it feel like to be you? Because he was in school in Boston around the same time that I was living there. We could very well have known each other and suddenly here he is the president of the United States.

And it was like “how does it feel to be you?” because I was trying to cut beneath that sense of “oh, everything he said he’s already said a million times”. And he was very smart, very nice, very incisive and yet I felt “nope, he’s said all this too – many times – and he says it very well”.

But for a writer that sense that more and more of the language you speak is in some way dead – it’s used, it’s canned, it’s been done – that becomes oppressive quickly because we are sensitive to the language that we use.”

I wonder how it is we can cut beneath the stories we tell a million times to hundreds and thousands of different audiences over time: the narrative we give to our lives that we are also prepared to give to other people? Maybe it’s one of the positives of social media. The opportunity we’re given when Facebook asks* us ‘What’s on your mind?’ or when Twitter asks* us ‘What’s happening?’ or when a woman asks her partner ‘What are you thinking right now?’.

Anybody else have ideas of how we can make the language we speak more alive? To shake off the sense that it’s all been done before?

If you want to read the full transcript of Leigh Sales’ interview with Jonathan Franzen, click here.

* I say ‘ask’ as if Facebook and Twitter themselves have a consciousness.