The corrections: narrative structure and literary analysis

Corrections

Jonathan Franzen's the Corrections

What made correction possible also doomed it." (Franzen, 2002, 278)

In Jonathan Frazen's novel The Corrections, the reader is taken into the heart of a dysfunctional American family. Although the novel transpires in real time as well as in flashback, it is fundamentally a novel of memory. The memory of the past reaffirms the inability of the use of an idealized past to correct the future, or to give children and parents a new memory of an idealized family past. One cannot remember something truly and perfectly and recreate a memory, without either erasing some painful truths, or accepting that the past was not as perfect as one might hope.

The idea of 'correction' is usually applied in the singular rather than in the plural. Correction inspires the idea of erasing what was wrong and easily replacing what was right -- even though this might leave a smudge, or tear a page through. Correction also implies engaging in acts of moral rectitude, of obeying a singular moral code. However, the notion of correction exists in this novel on multiple levels, as many individuals from the same family attempt to readdress the mistakes of their pasts, while continually replicating those mistakes, despite their best intentions.

Thus to correct is to edit, to amend, one might say. But how does one edit a living past and a living memory, particularly when that memory is carried by multiple individuals in the same family, all different individuals, all with different memories. The notion of correction also implies the notion of return with some sense of making what was left better than it was, like editing a manuscript before publication. To return to the bosom of one's family during a reunion is to readdress and reassess the past. But to ruminate over that past might often produce an obsessive, one might say fixated manner or focus on that past. Thus, by attempting to return anew to the past with the aim of correcting what was wrong, or recreating what was right (but may not have been) is to do anything put the notion of family return to that past in a positive and regenerative light.

This is why Enid Lambert's quest to see her family return to the small, American Midwestern town St. Jude once again, is like the nature of the saint itself -- a patron saint of lost causes. Enid believes that family togetherness will correct all the ills and all the wrongs that currently hem in her life, and have hemmed in her life since her marriage. By attempting to recreate Christmas in an ideal fashion, Enid hopes to heal her husband Albert, recently diagnosed with the wasting ailment of Parkinson's disease. However, by attempting to recreate the past, Enid only exposes all of her created family's long-standing imperfections. Correcting the imperfect present by re-experiencing the supposedly perfect past only exposes the imperfections of the past.

Furthermore, Enid's attempt to correct Albert's suffering through recreation only exposes how the past itself needed a form of correction she was unable to give. She was not fully emotionally accessible as a mother any more than Albert was a good husband. Furthermore, her attempt to bring her family together for one last Christmas also exposes the fact that correction is really a false form of editing. Reunion on Enid's terms is really a denial of the imperfection of what once was there, a recreation of a false memory.

As the novel shows us the lives of the children of this highly imperfect couple, Enid's notion of correction only becomes even more askew. For instance, one son is an investment banker who has seemingly modeled his life upon an idealized vision of his father, more for ill than for good, and this son's stresses only magnify his father's own many imperfections and his mother's many levels dissatisfactions with his own lives. The other son, named Chip, (as in a chip of the old block) seems bent on economic and legal self-destruction after failing as a screenwriter and a professor (careers that highlight the impossibility of literary correction, of editing away reality with words.) The daughter Denise, engages in numerous sexual escapades, in a demonstration how the physical body cannot be easily corrected -- again, most obviously manifest in Albert's body.