“The Kraus Project” by Jonathan Franzen (post 8): Franzen’s dramatic episode of writer’s block is due to conflict between alternate personalities

“At this point I went literally crazy for about fifteen minutes. Tried to pull my face off with my fingers, tried to rip up the bedsheets with my teeth, ran downstairs and tried to leave the building to call W, but I couldn’t unlock the street door, no matter how hard I yanked on it. Some shadow thing in me, some thing that my conscious self could never see clearly but that was no less me than my conscious self was, had momentarily got the upper hand.

“The thing in control of me made me give the street door a despairing kick, and…the lock freed up. Out on the street…I became halfway sane. I met W for a drink and a proper farewell (she was leaving for Spain the next morning), and she told me it sounded as if I was spending too much time alone. The next day, alone, I described to V [another woman] what had happened while I was typing:

“…I’ll tell you what my impulses were: to smash the typewriter, to throw it out the window, to smash the mirror with it, smash the window…to pound the typewriter with the ashtray, to throw the ashtray through the window, to cut my face with a knife, to throw myself out the window, to bloody my fingers trying to rip the typewriter to pieces.

“…But then the thought, the feeling, of wanting to describe what was happening—this became what was happening. The impulse of wanting to control (through writing) this lack of control turned out to be the real source of the lack of control. So that every time I thought of ceasing to be crazy and going back to the typewriter, I became more crazy and more furious with the typewriter…So I gave up the idea of describing this…what was happening, the…fight between the side of me that kept wanting to narrate and the side that refused to be narrated anymore…” (1, pp. 230-231).

1. Jonathan Franzen (translation and personal footnotes). The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus [2013]. Toronto, Harper Perennial, 2015.