Books: The Great American Novel

LitHub has two essays on the Great American Novel. I read one, WHAT IS THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL? by Annika Barranti Klein, while I skimmed Emily Temple's A Brief Survey of the Great American Novel(s). Of the list, there were many I have read others I would read, and most I agree with.

But it is Ms. Klein's article interests in proposing that there is not a Great American Novel but there could be Great American Novels. Could it not be there will be novels building upon and interrogating themselves as they explore the meaning of America?

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1/13/22

PS:

Since reading the articles noted above, I read today The Mythology and Mythologies of the Great American Novel The roots and dangers of the quest for America's literary masterpiece by Richard A. Rosengarten. Rather than a separate post, I am appending the following excerpts dince this essay starts from the same source, covers some similar territory ideas before bringing up these points I find different and interesting:

De Forest’s essay references Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a possible candidate only to reject it, and strongly intimates that the GAN is forthcoming. In fact, however, history scooped De Forest: in addition to Stowe, at least three other novels that preceded his essay are widely recognized as eminent candidates for the GAN prize: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the Whale, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. De Forest’s mythology of GAN has not one but at least four historical antecedents, and each provides its own distinctive mythology of America. If De Forest proposed the mythology of GAN, what GAN has turned out to be is an ongoing set of mythologies – not one “national epic,” but in fact a great many.

***

 These mythologies each have deep religious resonances. For Hawthorne, it is the question of the elect and the damned, and whether a social order can reflect the implied righteousness of that distinction. For Melville, it is the complexity of the theological options for America, conveyed in the vexing family resemblances of deism, pantheism, and paganism with Christianity that render null, indeed overwhelm, particular doctrine and dogma. For Stowe, it is the inexorable recognition that the brute facts of the specifically American institution of slavery upend the nation’s ready association of itself with ostensibly Christian values of charity and neighbor love. And for Alcott, it is the premise that the only secure orderliness is in the cultivation of a distinctively American form of monasticism (led by an abbess rather than an abbot) that seeks to remove citizens from the disruptive and disorderly realms of capitalism and city life.

***

 There are also the unmistakable candidates that fulfill all the requirements for GAN but render its lack of specificity dismaying rather than merely disarming: much the best example is Thomas Dixon’s The Klansman, the novel which spawned D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It is possible, in other words, to fulfill the GAN format with overtly racist messaging. The first step toward correcting for the dismaying exemplar is to notate its claim to singularity—to status as the GAN—and to force it into direct dialogue with novels that afford a mythology but don’t require the definite article. There is no guarantee that reading GANs will put you on the right side of history, but there is also no denying that reading can be both for and against the GAN tradition, for and against a particular vision of America. The best way to do this is to read these novels precisely for their religious dimensions. This is one essential way to live up to Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that Americans live in a republic –  if we can keep it.

Two short thoughts:

1. The Great American Novel still has importance for interrogating America and its ideals; and
2. These three essays justify Raintree County as a Great American Novel. 

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1/15/22