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being human = being flawed
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we´ve all heard it before, and certainly learnt it by experience: nobody is perfect. that, after all, is what makes us all different and, some would say, human. and it is just such a lack of or inability to attain perfection, however one may choose to define it, that made the characters in jonathan franzen's novel the corrections so real, so tanigible, so believable to me. |
i couldn't truly "like" any of them, nor could i truly "dislike" any of them either. to dislike them based on their failings would be to neglect their strengths just as to choose to like them would entail the need to blind myself to all their glaring deficiencies. much like many people i know and love in my own life (including, i hasten to add, myself). because, as franzen shows in the corrections, to love someone doesn't necessarily mean you have to "like" everything about them or agree with every choice they make. rather, loving someone seems to lie in the contradictory action of knowing inside-out (and being painfully irritated by) their bad choices and personality defects and choosing, despite it all, to love them anyway.
one can see this contradiction going on in the dynamics of the lambert family - two elderly parents, and three adult children - where each member exhibits a different human foible. there´s exasperating enid, the mother; chokingly conservative and moralistic albert, the father; the arrogant and bossy oldest brother gary; the secretive and detached denise; and the wayward and self-destructive chip. and even though each of them does hurtful and stupid and spiteful things to each other at one time or another throughout the book, they all seem to love each other not despite of but, I'd almost go so far as to say, because of these deficiencies. and, when it comes to such hurtful actions, it's not as simple as placing blame. each and every one of the lambert family is to blame for the family's problems and yet, at the same time, no one is to blame because who can blame someone for being human? as franzen so masterfully shows in the corrections there's always more to an action than the doing of it - little shifts in relationships, ripples in the family fabric, throwaway statements made over dinner beforehand can swarm together to create a force greater than themselves.
suffice to say that i found the corrections an excellent read - and for even more reasons than those i've already discussed. in parting, i'd like to leave you with a passage that particularly resonated with me:
"and when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn´t that a strange thing? that absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn´t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? you see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. and it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about god is ever talking about. moments like this." (jonathan franzen, the corrections. harper perennial, london: 2007. pp 350-1)
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