Economies of Reputation: Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and Practices of Disclosure in the Information Age

Abstract

A central project of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) is the attempt to situate the development of the Internet and of technocratic corporations within the historical context of Marxist efforts in the postwar era. There remains a dearth of critical work on Franzen’s Marxist interests, and he retains a reputation of literary conservatism, though Purity shares with other Franzen novels, like The Corrections (2001), an interest in the possible directions that remain for leftist ambition in the aftermath of failed radical projects and in modes of collective action that would account for the practical limitations of a neoliberal age. Following what one character refers to as the “mania for secrecy” that characterizes digital media in the era of Wikileaks, Purity has at its center the relation of the human user’s social ties to a medium dominated by corporate giants and by new measures of governmental surveillance. Franzen’s novel is suspicious about the possibility that there are ways of interacting with digital media that can minimize the ideological effects on human relationships, with various subplots of the novel emphasizing the power of a technocratic Internet to manufacture and revoke perceptions of an individual or cause’s ideological purity, as secrets can be indefinitely stored and achieve viral status with immediacy upon reveal. Acts of confession and the voluntary disclosure of traumatic and criminal histories are thus given a privileged status in Purity, with the novel suggesting that the establishment of any collectivist projects necessitates transparency, but must resist the urge promoted by contemporary Internet culture to fetishize such exposure or assume its inherent radicalism.