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  • >> I am going to start with two quotes.

  • "The 'Great American Novel' continues

  • to be announced every year;

  • in good years there are generally several of them."

  • "Might as well get to work on the Great American Novel."

  • The first comment is by Edith Wharton,

  • writing in some annoyance in 1927,

  • the second by a fictional character

  • in the cult television series The Wire,

  • a veteran journalist facing the sack who bears more

  • than a passing resemblance to the show's creator, David Simon.

  • These remarks 80 years apart suggest two things, I think:

  • first, that in the United States it seems

  • as if a novel is never enough; and secondly,

  • that the novel -- although announced for as long

  • as there have been novels to announce --

  • has not yet been written.

  • Parodied almost as soon as it was conceived, always a tribute

  • to - as emphatic as it is ambiguous,

  • the Great American Novel, or GAN,

  • project has proved monumental.

  • It remains the benchmark

  • for literary ambition, prestige, and sales.

  • And it sometimes also feels

  • like fiction's equivalent of proper man's work.

  • As one reviewer put it, "There comes a time in the midlife

  • of every male American writer when he feels compelled

  • to make his big statement about the state of the union."

  • A recent example -- and I'm sure you'll guess [inaudible] --

  • is Jonathan Franzen, who,

  • following the publication of Freedom in 2010 was showcased

  • on the cover of Time magazine as "Great American Novelist."

  • "I always hated the expression," he said,

  • "mostly because I encountered it in stupid or sneering context."

  • Franzen was not the first writer

  • to approach the Great American Novel equivocally.

  • On the one hand, he chose to write a very long book

  • with a title suggesting national interrogation.

  • On the other, he seemed a bit embarrassed to have done so.

  • And indeed, for every writer who turns 40

  • and buys an extra-large stack of paper,

  • there is another admitting ruefully

  • to having outgrown his Ahab-like -- perhaps Ali-like --

  • obsession with a heavyweight book.

  • Bill Henderson, for example,

  • confessed that while once he'd thought

  • that in Planning Again he would be exposing the crucial

  • facts of the age -- things like Americans are greedy,

  • the Bomb is bad -- what he'd really wanted, he said,

  • was "literary stallionship."

  • For that reason, the GAN is also a bit of a joke,

  • as these deflating cartoons suggest.

  • And perhaps maturity, then, is deciding simply to scale back,

  • as it - another cartoon says,

  • and just write the Mediocre American Novel.

  • Or maybe all that's required is a display of some irony

  • about a still-lingering ambition --

  • say, by wearing a T-shirt inviting others to,

  • "Ask me about my Great American Novel."

  • I have some of this stuff as research.

  • But what was -- what still is -- the GAN?

  • It begins with the partial displacement of epic poetry

  • by the long novel in the second half of the 19th century

  • and extends, I would argue, to the partial displacement

  • of the novel in the 20th and 21st centuries by cinema

  • and other media, from D. W. Griffith's The Birth

  • of a Nation in 1915 through -- as I have already suggested --

  • to David Simon's Zolaesque "visual novel" --

  • his term -- The Wire.

  • And nowhere, I think, is the power of the idea

  • of the GAN more apparent, perhaps, than in its migration

  • from one medium to another.

  • But I also want to ask, "Why the Great American Novel?"

  • Exactly what needs -- social, political, aesthetic,

  • commercial -- does the enterprise serve?

  • Exactly what purposes might its realization be expected

  • to fulfill that so many writers have put

  • so much effort into realizing it?

  • And the obvious answer,

  • the answer that the writers themselves give,

  • concerns national identity.

  • One of the distinguishing features

  • of the Great American Novel is how explicitly, how loudly,

  • it announces that concern.

  • Through titles -- say, USA or Vineland

  • or even America America.

  • Through characters' names --

  • Christopher Newman in Henry James's The American,

  • Undine Spragg, whose initials, of course, are 'U.

  • S.' in Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and all sorts

  • of people whose names begin with an A,

  • such as Willa Cather's My Antonia, the girl -

  • the character notes, who seemed to mean to us the country.

  • The edges of text, conclusions and openings, also do a lot

  • of anxious work in signaling an author's desire

  • to belong to the GAN club.

  • Consider, then, the first episode of The Wire --

  • the first episode of the first series of The Wire.

  • We see a body and then the detective, McNulty,

  • on a stoop questioning a boy who has witnessed a murder.

  • McNulty asks why the boy and his friends kept playing dice

  • with the dead man even though they knew -

  • even after they knew he was a thief.

  • [ Video plays ]

  • >> I've got to ask you.

  • If every time, Snot Boogie [phonetic] would grab the money

  • and run away, why did you even let him in the game?

  • >> What?

  • >> I mean Snot Boogie always stole the money.

  • Why'd you let him play?

  • >> Got to.

  • This is America, man.

  • [ To end of scene ]

  • >> I'm sure everyone would

  • like to spend their lunch hour just watching The Wire.

  • But I mean - but I wouldn't say more about the scene except

  • to point out the way in which this brief exchange serves

  • as a kind of prelude to the series

  • or to the several series -- an announcement that what we are

  • about to watch is more than gritty neighborhood realism.

  • The Wire also has its eye on national allegory.

  • That episode was broadcast in 2002.

  • In 2006, the New York Times Book Review conducted a survey

  • in which they asked a group of luminaries

  • to name the single best work

  • of American fiction published in the last 25 years.

  • From 125 replies, the top five were: Morrison's Beloved,

  • 15 votes; DeLillo's Underworld, 11;

  • McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Updike's tetralogy,

  • Rabbit Angstrom, with 8 each;

  • and Roth's American Pastoral with 7.

  • "To ask for the best work of American fiction,"

  • observes the paper's journalist A.O. Scott, "is not simply

  • to ask for the most beautifully written

  • or the most enjoyable to read.

  • The best works of fiction, according to our tally,

  • appear to be those that successfully assume a burden

  • of cultural importance.

  • They attempt not just the exploration

  • of particular imaginary people and places,

  • but also the illumination of epochs,

  • communities, of the nation itself.

  • America is not only their setting,

  • but also their subject."

  • And that last sentence sounds like a plausible definition

  • of the Great American Novel.

  • But for some people it bets a lot of questions.

  • What about America itself?

  • During the last 20 years or so,

  • critics have become increasingly uneasy with the idea

  • of an essential or exceptional American-ness expressed

  • in a unique fictional style or structure.

  • Surely, they argue, big novels

  • of national interrogation are a feature

  • of many literary traditions --

  • something that was pointed out by Shashi Tharoor

  • in his satirical The Great Indian Novel.

  • Moreover, they ask, aren't the most interesting novels those

  • that reflect our increasingly globalized lives?

  • Shouldn't we rather be reading hemispheric novels --

  • works like these, which I am going to talk about --

  • most notably though, perhaps,

  • Robert Bolano's total novel 2666, praised for its vision

  • of our terrifyingly post-national world?

  • I wonder, though, whether the opposition of national

  • and post-national fiction really makes a lot of sense.

  • National literatures, like nations, have always existed

  • in relation to one another.

  • And great American novelists have always used foreign models.

  • The first plea for the GAN --

  • which I'll discuss in a moment --

  • was for a realist with the scope of Balzac or Manzoni.

  • Later, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair openly emulated

  • Shincovich's Polish national trilogy.

  • John Dos Passos borrowed elements

  • from Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Eisenstein's film montage,

  • and Baroja's Madrid trilogy.

  • Roth's Human Stain is partly modeled on the Iliad.

  • And most recently, both Franzen's Freedom

  • and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children pay homage

  • to Tolstoy's War and Peace.

  • And it's also, I think, misleading to claim somehow

  • that contemporary fiction such as Franzen's,

  • which features trips --

  • its characters take trips to Lithuania in one book

  • and Paraguay in another --

  • initiates - this fiction initiates some kind

  • of novel of globalization.

  • Perhaps the most persistent subject

  • of the Great American Novel --

  • at least since the international crew of the Pequod took

  • to the oceans in Moby Dick -- has been the mechanisms

  • and consequences of global capitalism.

  • To consider just one other example --

  • something I like to promote since not many people read it --

  • Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, an expiration

  • of the intricate networks of money, politics, culture,

  • and sex, at the heart of which can be found Frank Cooperwood,

  • who Dreiser describes as "a rude, raw titan

  • and wandering yokel with an epic in his mouth."

  • In the first book, The Financier,

  • is set in Philadelphia --

  • which we are told had once been the heart of the nation;

  • the second, The Titan, in Chicago,

  • which had become all America.

  • And the final volume, The Stoic,

  • takes its protagonist abroad to Paris, to London, and to India.

  • But having said that, the cosmopolitan-ness

  • of these novels shouldn't be exaggerated.

  • As Bruce Robbins has recently argued in an essay

  • that specifically queries claims for a New Worlding

  • of the American Novel, "Other countries are more often

  • than not simply the means

  • to a more parochial end, more provincial end.

  • It's American lives that must be made sense of."

  • So I want to now kind of go a little -

  • into a little background to the idea

  • of the Great American Novel.

  • The idea was first expounded -- the phrase was first used --

  • in 1868 in an article by John W. De Forest, a novelist

  • and former Union Army officer.

  • In a - in terms that made the writing of fiction sound

  • like a patriotic duty, De Forest called for " --

  • a single tale which paints American life so broadly, truly,

  • and sympathetically that every American of feeling

  • and culture is forced acknowledge the picture

  • as a likeness of something which he knows."

  • The unification of the country -- the United States --

  • becoming, after the Civil War,

  • for the first time a singular noun, required the unification

  • of the novel into a singular tale.

  • The GAN had to " -- bind up the nation's wounds --

  • " in Lincoln's famous phrase.

  • Its job, in other words, was not merely to reflect,

  • but rather strenuously to consolidate national identity.

  • What De Forest wanted was a novel of national breadth,

  • then -- one that would offer a portrait

  • of American society comparable to the European tableau

  • of Balzac or of Thackeray.

  • More particularly, though,

  • he felt that the GAN should represent -- and I quote -- "--

  • an eager and laborious people which takes so many newspapers,

  • builds so many railroads, does the most business

  • in a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion

  • of its population, believes

  • in the physically impossible, and does some of it."

  • The "believes in the physically impossible and does some

  • of it" could also be a definition of the GAN, I think.

  • Although he discusses many, many novelists in his essay,

  • De Forest's piece is in some ways an advertisement

  • for himself.

  • The previous year he'd published Miss Ravenel's

  • Conversion from Secession to Loyalty,

  • a novel that's now largely forgotten except, perhaps,

  • by Civil War historians.

  • And on the one hand it is simply a love story set

  • against the background of the war.

  • The first page presents a woman, Lillie Ravenel,

  • and a man, Edward Colbourne.

  • And nearly 500 pages later, they marry.

  • But things are more complicated.

  • Lillie is from New Orleans, and Edward from New Boston --

  • his term for New Haven.

  • And so the relationship is a romance of reunion

  • through which national unification is naturalized.

  • Rather than the legal matter of contractural obligation,

  • the South's capitulation to the North is presented

  • as comparable to nuptial consent.

  • Although Edward makes a few concessions in the relationship,

  • the conversion -- as the title suggests -- is Lillie's.

  • And I could say more about it.

  • But the main thing, I think, to mention here is

  • that this allegory of progress --

  • De Forest's allegory of progress --

  • also concerns the novel itself.

  • As marriage means a wife's conversion

  • to her husband's ways, and union means the South adopting

  • Northern ways, so the GAN means the sentimental novel --

  • a literary form associated both with women and the South --

  • converting to a masculine Northern approach of realism --

  • a style consonant, as one character put it,

  • with an age that communicated with the railroad,

  • electric telegraph, and printing press.

  • The Great American Novel

  • as De Forest hoped it would become was able

  • to combine the impulses of national documentary

  • and national allegory, the daily paper and --

  • as the allusion in the title suggests -- pilgrim's progress.

  • And I think that's also what The Wire is up to.

  • And in the time that's left, I want briefly

  • to consider how the GAN goes about this business.

  • Why, for example, does it have to be so long?

  • Well that's obviously the national documentary coming in.

  • The oft-declaration of the Great American Novel which knows -

  • is never fully realizable is to put a line around the nation

  • and kind of make a record and an inventory of all

  • that exists within it.

  • Circumscription can be geographical or historical

  • or some kind of combination of both.

  • And the challenge, as Tom Wolfe put it, is always one

  • of complete and whole articulation.

  • If we follow De Forest's contemporary,

  • William Dean Howells, in equating realism with --

  • in his phrase -- "democracy in literature," we might argue

  • that the GAN, in pushing to an extreme the realist project

  • of full description, is declaring its commitment

  • to an inclusive democracy or perhaps a manifest destiny

  • as forcefully as possible.

  • And of course there are various modes

  • in which one might attempt democratic inclusiveness,

  • the most basic of which is probably the picaresque,

  • or the picaresque buildings [inaudible].

  • A young person travels around the United States --

  • perhaps even abroad; has adventures; and in the process,

  • as it were, inadvertently assembles an inventory

  • of the state of the nation and a sense of his

  • or her own American identity.

  • The sentimental education of a single character --

  • think of Wolfe's Eugene Gant, Bellow's Augie March,

  • Kerouac's Sal Paradise, Ellison's Invisible Man --

  • this sentimental education is presented as a form

  • of collective knowledge gathering.

  • And I'm going to show, as an example,

  • something a little less well known:

  • Clyde Brion Davis's 1938 satire,

  • The Great American Novel, the nature [phonetic]

  • of which is a young journalist who wants

  • to write an all-inclusive novel.

  • "I want my novel to be America.

  • I want it to hold the romance of the Pilgrim fathers.

  • I want it to hold the romance of the Spanish conquistadores

  • and of the French padres.

  • I want it to picture the pushing westward

  • from the Eastern Seaboard.

  • I want it to hold the California gold rush and the bones

  • of pioneers bleaching on the desert.

  • I want in it the building of the railroads.

  • I want it to picture the drama

  • of the cattle kings and the cowboy.

  • I want the gold miners and the venturesome farmers

  • and the growth of the iniquitous trusts

  • which threaten dissolution of the founding fathers' work.

  • On the surface this all appears

  • to be too ambitious a program for one man."

  • Brion Davis makes fun of the ethic ambition of his hero,

  • the aptly named Homer Zigler, but he also shares it.

  • Homer's first attempt is called Restless Dynasty

  • and begins shortly after the War of 1812

  • in the Lake Champlain region.

  • He never writes the book,

  • although having supplemented his reading of Owen Wister

  • with some Dreiser, he offers a detailed account

  • of a revised plan, Brutal Dynasty.

  • What Homer does write, though, is his diary,

  • which details his life as a reporter

  • on a daily paper moving steadily west from job to job.

  • Each chapter is set in a different city --

  • Buffalo, Cleveland, Kansas City,

  • San Francisco, and finally Denver.

  • And by the time we have absorbed his account

  • of political speeches, prizefights,

  • and Edison's inventions, we realize that we have read a kind

  • of Great American Novel after all --

  • one which De Forest would have been glad to see reads

  • like a stack of daily papers perfunctorily framed

  • by a love story.

  • But of course there is only so much that the perspective

  • of a single traveling man can accomplish.

  • And many GANists choose to supplement his position -

  • his perspective with other voices

  • and indeed other rival modes of discourse.

  • Robert Coover said that with The Public Burning,

  • his novel about the assassination of the Rosenbergs,

  • he was striving, he said, "--

  • for a text that would seem to have been written

  • by the whole nation through all its history.

  • I wanted thousands of echoes," he said,

  • "all the sounds of a nation."

  • And other forms of inventory --

  • other forms of kind of supplementation in a way --

  • might include Melville's systematized cytology,

  • Don DeLillo's data-spew history,

  • David Foster Wallace's Endnotes,

  • John Dos Passos's newsreel Ripe for Digital Display,

  • in which his - somebody has just started trying

  • to reconstruct all the stuff in Dos Passos digitally,

  • and Franzen's aggregation of chemical, botanical,

  • financial, and industrial facts.

  • "Franzen is seldom happier," wrote one reviewer,

  • "than when coursing along in cataloging mode."

  • But what's the point of all this accumulation of information?

  • Is it, as James Wood complains, simply a way

  • of telling the culture things that culture already knows?

  • Or is it rather - or also a homage to authorial labor?

  • In Freedom, Franzen's character Walter sort

  • of interrupts one long speech to say, "Are you bored?"

  • And the other character says, "No, no.

  • I'm not bored."

  • And then he kind of launches on into further cataloging.

  • But of course none of these works can ever achieve what

  • Gertrude Stein -- reflecting in 1934 on her 550,000-word,

  • 925-page novel The Making of Americans --

  • termed "complete description.

  • "If I could only go on long enough and talk and hear

  • and look and see and feel enough and long enough," she said.

  • "But one can never go on long enough."

  • And there are two excuses, really, that are given apart

  • from the impossibility of just going on long enough:

  • too much and too fast.

  • "Document the billion forms of the nation,"

  • as Thomas Wolfe said, "and

  • by the time you are done another billion will have emerged."

  • The idea that life across the United States as opposed to,

  • say, in Trollope's Barchester won't hold still was first

  • proposed by De Forest in the 1860s.

  • "Can a society which is changing

  • so rapidly be painted anywhere except in the daily newspapers?"

  • he asked. "Has anyone photographed fireworks

  • or the shooting-stars?"

  • So that was 1868.

  • Writing in 1992, Sven Birkerts agreed: "The rate and magnitude

  • of change have outstripped the integrating powers

  • of the psyche," he said.

  • No one thinks any longer

  • about writing the Great American Novel."

  • So is there any point between 1868 and 1992

  • in which it wasn't going too fast?

  • I don't know.

  • De Forest's second obstacle was the fact

  • that the nation had far too many component parts.

  • "When you have made," he said, "your picture

  • of petrified New England life, does the Mississippian

  • or the Minnesotian

  • or the Pennsylvanian recognize it as American society?

  • We are a nation of provinces,

  • and each province claims to be the court."

  • "Perhaps," responded one critic,

  • "the Great American Novel will be

  • in the plural -- thousands, perhaps."

  • And this was a kind of common argument at the end

  • of the 19th century, particularly.

  • Another, though, thought it might be best constructed

  • like a single anthology of short stories.

  • And in 1892, an editorial in The Journal

  • of the Nation offered a suggestion.

  • "Wouldn't it be peculiarly American," it asked,

  • "to bring mechanical labor-saving devices

  • into the service and creation of the Great American Novel?

  • Are there not calculators and tabulators in the Census Office

  • which work via electricity?"

  • But supposing the tabulators

  • and calculators did manage to get it all down.

  • What then?

  • "Everything described," said Stein, "would not do any more

  • than tell all I knew."

  • Which essentially is James Wood's complaint.

  • It's all - it's just telling you what you already know.

  • Description, in other words, was not --

  • as Stein had previously thought -- explanation.

  • And a concern with explanation, I think,

  • is what motivates the GAN's kind

  • of perennial interest in history.

  • The GAN is historical because it's diagnostic.

  • Seeing the nation as ailing today --

  • and that's a frequent starting point --

  • the Great American Novel habitually seeks

  • to identify the causes of what Philip Roth calls

  • "the national disease."

  • In other words, the GAN's tone is usually less one

  • of self congratulation --

  • what Richard Evans dubbed "the Wonderfulness of Us model" --

  • than "argumentative national self-consciousness,"

  • which is Henry James's phrase.

  • The argument, however, has no preordained resolution.

  • Dos Passos ends his in disgust with the striking image

  • of a transcontinental passenger flying over the desert

  • above Las Vegas and vomiting the steak he ate in New York.

  • Others follow De Forest and opt for reconciliation

  • and hope for the future.

  • "We resume," says Richard Ford, " at the end

  • of the lay of the land.

  • It's not over yet."

  • Toni Morrison ends Paradise in her great American trilogy

  • by allowing her characters to rest before they get back to --

  • and here I quote -- "--

  • shouldering the endless work they were created to do."

  • So a GAN often ends with a kind

  • of pause before the work resumes.

  • A novelist's sense of an ending depends, of course,

  • on the genre, which conventions he or she rely upon

  • to turn description into explanation.

  • Biblical allegory offers one kind

  • of usually hopeful solution,

  • Zolaesque naturalism another, less hopeful.

  • Coverage across time as well as space has led the GAN

  • to the family saga as national saga and into the trilogy,

  • the form in which Dos Passos was able, he said, "--

  • to graduate from story, the daydream of a single man,

  • to history, the daydream of a nation, the daydream of race."

  • Eminent in the early decades of the 20th century has become -

  • became pre-eminent at its closure [phonetic].

  • For Morrison, Ford, McCarthy, Roth, and Ellroy,

  • some of these will be familiar to you.

  • Trilogy installed kind of ritualized time

  • as the explanatory medium of a whole

  • if not complete articulation.

  • De Forest said that when confronted

  • with a Great American Novel,

  • every American would recognize it as a likeness

  • of something which he knew.

  • One way to ensure this recognition --

  • De Forest's own way and that I have been outlining so far --

  • is kind of just circumscribed national breadth to try and get

  • as much - as many people in as possible.

  • But another way, though,

  • is to look for a representative microcosm

  • to present a case study of someone typical

  • who not only lives someplace typical but whose behavior,

  • thoughts, and even feelings represent

  • and just diagnose the national character.

  • The manners and morals as well as the race and gender

  • of that character have changed considerably

  • since the 19th century, but I think a belief

  • in its existence has been remarkably persistent.

  • "But where to find the native who has the consciousness

  • of his people and nation in him?"

  • as Thomas Wolfe asked in 1936.

  • And I can give other examples.

  • "But what," pondered Gish Jen in 1991,

  • "makes a typical American?"

  • And many examples have been given,

  • some of which I have already mentioned:

  • Dreiser's Financier, Willa Cather's Nebraska Farm Girl.

  • Richard Wright's Native Son,

  • who was from the South Side of Chicago.

  • Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho worked on Wall Street.

  • Omar Little, in The Wire,

  • declares himself the American Dream.

  • In 1903, Gertrude Stein began The Making of Americans only

  • to temporarily abandon the project

  • because she felt her subject matter -- and I quote --

  • "niggers and servant girls

  • and the foreign population generally" was inappropriate

  • for the national epic.

  • "I am afraid," she said, "that I can never write the Great

  • American Novel."

  • But 28 years later, as we have seen,

  • her big book was published.

  • And so as the century went on were many others

  • which from diverse points

  • of view depicted the foreign population

  • and claimed whole-nation spokesmanship.

  • "I am an American," Augie March declares at the start

  • of Saul Bellow's 1953 novel.

  • And at the novel's end he refers to himself as a sort of Columbus

  • of those near at hand.

  • The book's final word is "America."

  • "I am an invisible man."

  • begins Ellison's novel from the previous year --

  • which doesn't sound promising.

  • But when he concludes by asking, "Who knows but that,

  • on the lower frequencies I speak for you?"

  • we know that he means, "I am an American, too."

  • Bellow was Jewish, from Chicago -- Montreal, Chicago;

  • Ellison black, living in New York.

  • And each was keynote to assert that he spoke not simply

  • as Jewish or black, Chicagoan or New Yorker.

  • They spoke for you.

  • And as Don DeLillo updated it in Underworld, "--

  • in your voice, American."

  • When Augie March came out, one reviewer complained

  • that Bellow was aiming too early and too directly

  • at the Great American Novel, another that he was hustling

  • for literary promotion in an unseemly fashion.

  • But one can - but can one really claim representativeness

  • without hustling for literary promotion?

  • Don DeLillo described his first novel, Americana --

  • his title, he admitted, says something -- as "--

  • a kind of journey into the broader culture.

  • A curious unintentional form of repetition

  • of my own parents' journey, my immigrant parents

  • who came to the US from Italy.

  • This was their way out of a certain narrowness."

  • The Great American Novel does not only take

  • as its subject matter the narrow-to-broad conversion

  • narrative that is Americanization.

  • Its form, its claiming

  • of whole-nation spokesmanship also performs that conversion.

  • But more than that -- and I'll kind of come to it

  • and I'll close now -- the GAN also wants to convert the novel,

  • to "untrivialize" -- to use another DeLillo word --

  • a genre whose practitioners have often worried

  • about a certain narrowness.

  • Mighty themes might require mighty books.

  • But as Ishmael pointed out in Moby Dick,

  • the reverse is also true.

  • Might the novelist need the nation, then,

  • more than the nation needs the novel?

  • Does the GAN enterprise tell us more about the development

  • of American literary culture

  • than about the United States itself?

  • And what is the relation between the two senses

  • of great size and merit?

  • Back in 19 - back in 1868, De Forest began his essay

  • by evoking "-- a friend of ours who, having written articles,"

  • he said, "and other things which he calls 'trivialities,

  • wished to try something more demanding.

  • Though a fairly clever person, and by no means lacking

  • in common sense," he said, "on common subjects,

  • this friend had the craze in his head

  • that he will someday write a Great American Novel.

  • Writing such a book would involve vast labor

  • and even suffering.

  • But it would be worth it.

  • 'If I can do it," he said,

  • 'I shall perform a national service --

  • the American people will say "that is my picture",

  • and will lavish heart and pocket in remuneration.'" 150 years on,

  • the Great American Novel's duel promise of national service

  • and lavish remuneration still continues to inspire.

  • Thank you.

  • [ Applause ]

  • >> Thank you very much.

  • We have a few minutes for questions.

  • Do we have any questions?

  • >> Yeah.

  • >> Yes, we have one here.

  • Mic's just coming to you.

  • [ Pause ]

  • >> Yes. It's actually by way of being a suggestion.

  • I'd be interested in your thoughts on it.

  • And that is the possibility that at one time it was possible

  • to have a Great American Novel.

  • And what I am thinking

  • of particularly is in the 19th century.

  • And it seems to me one could have put up an argument

  • that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was a Great American

  • Novel, because the journey down the Mississippi, learning

  • and growing, and then at the end not settling down but having

  • to light out for the territory.

  • And that seemed, to me, to speak

  • of a fundamental national issue about America.

  • And as we have moved on, even relatively early

  • in the 20th century there wasn't anything as definable as that,

  • and there never has been since.

  • So it's almost as if the time

  • when there could have been a Great American Novel has now

  • passed -- well in fact long passed.

  • >> Yeah. I mean Huck Finn is sometimes brought

  • into the lists.

  • I mean one of the things that, I think, connects this subject

  • with my past [inaudible] book is that it's a kind

  • of sporting activity and that, you know, you find lists

  • of the Great American Novel in order in Amazon -

  • not just on Amazon but everywhere.

  • Everybody wants to read them.

  • And Huck Finn often appears --

  • and Huck as a kind of representative figure.

  • I am not sure that there haven't been subsequent attempts

  • in other [inaudible] books that's sometimes brought in:

  • I haven't mentioned The Great Gatsby, say, as -

  • in somebody's linking from Huck.

  • And - but certainly it's hard to beat Huckleberry Finn.

  • >> We have another one.

  • Go ahead.

  • >> Oh. I wonder if the Great American Novel has been actually

  • - or the attempt has been more fruitfully created

  • by a middle-brow novelist like Edna Ferber, who does things

  • like - she covers the entire United States: Come and Get It,

  • Alaska, Giant -- all -

  • every single region of the United States.

  • And she was a great best seller, very influential.

  • >> Yeah.

  • >> So I wonder if that is something

  • that could be considered.

  • >> I think that the idea of the Great American Novel,

  • that most of my -- I suppose --

  • examples have been kind of canonical.

  • It's something that really goes across more popular fiction.

  • And Gertrude Stein, you know, expands it.

  • And I think, in fact, the division between the kind

  • of popular and half experimental sort of breaks

  • down when you consider it in some ways in relation

  • to project letters [phonetic].

  • But there is a - I have forgotten his name now,

  • but there is a guy at the moment

  • who is writing alternate histories -- Trueblood?

  • No. Does anyone know?

  • -- who does these kind of sequences.

  • >> We have someone.

  • >> Yes, who maybe knows it.

  • [ Pause ]

  • >> Hi. Thanks for a really interesting talk.

  • I was struck that a few of your examples are from the 1930s,

  • and I was wondering if there is something about that decade

  • that crystalizes this problem or - kind of in terms

  • of representation, maybe the rise of the documentary --

  • and also if, kind of like the end of the Civil War,

  • there are other kind of particular periods that kind

  • of dramatize - where the urge

  • to write the Great American Novel is really strong.

  • >> I think that's definitely true in that -

  • I mean that particular periods of kind

  • of national anxiety interrogation have resulted

  • in a kind of clusters of these works.

  • The 20s through the 30s:

  • I mean it's not only the Great American Novel.

  • There are lots of other kinds of works

  • of national interrogation are going on --

  • the essays and poetry and so on.

  • But certainly, I think, the kind of popular novel and the kind

  • of experimental novel both were drawn to that -

  • those questions in the 30s.

  • Particularly in the 18 - there is a period from the 1870s

  • through 90s, in the immediate postwar periods, 1950s again.

  • And, you know, some people would argue a kind

  • of post 9/11 there -

  • is one reason why there is suddenly a revival of interest.

  • But actually if you start kind of tracking them,

  • there doesn't seem to be any moment

  • when there is none at all.

  • So it kind of implies that there is something kind

  • of going on all the time.

  • But certain the 30s was a kind of boom period,

  • particularly also for the trilogy.

  • I am quite interested in the rise of the trilogy

  • as a form really in the 1890s through the 30s,

  • and why that became so popular

  • and why people later were drawn to it as well.

  • >> There is a --

  • [ Pause ]

  • >> Excuse my voice.

  • Thanks for the interesting talk.

  • I'm wondering what you think about the dissemination by film

  • of the Great American Novel helps to categorize it.

  • For instance, Gone With The Wind,

  • which is probably the greatest

  • and most widely global film of all time.

  • And I wondered if you'd thought, actually,

  • Angelina Mayo [assumed spelling] had written anything

  • that would be described as a Great American Novel

  • in her series, because you haven't mentioned many women.

  • >> No. I haven't mentioned many women,

  • I think because there are fewer women who are interested

  • in doing this kind of project.

  • I think recent writers - Morrison is one,

  • and back in the 30s someone

  • like Josephine Herbst is also interested.

  • Joyce Carol Oates probably would - some of her books would kind

  • of come into this category.

  • But I mean women have more often debunked the idea

  • of the Great American Novel than attempted it.

  • There was quite a lot of controversy

  • when Franzen's Freedom got a lot of publicity from a group

  • of women writers who were saying,

  • "Why is this book suddenly on the cover of every magazine

  • and reviewed so much?"

  • Because he gives it this kind of title.

  • Because he kind of markets himself in that way.

  • To come up to the film question, I think absolutely.

  • As well as kind of individual films like Birth

  • of a Nation or Gone With The Wind, often dealing

  • with the Civil War and over a long period and the kind

  • of North-South questions, there are I think,

  • kind of -- again -- trilogies.

  • Orson Welles, I think, was so interested in trying to kind

  • of create a trilogy of -

  • sometimes called The Mercury Trilogy from Citizen Kane,

  • The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Stranger as a kind

  • of - the fall of the Lincoln Empire --

  • his equivalent of Dos Passos.

  • Or more recently, somebody like Oliver Stone, say,

  • with both the kind of Vietnam trilogy and his kind

  • of presidential trilogy.

  • So there are different ways.

  • I think film - and, you know, one could talk about again -

  • and television, sort of those long Ken Burns documentaries

  • which are in some ways of the Civil War but do other things --

  • the kind of narrative history that they provide overlaps,

  • I think, with the Great American Novel in certain ways.

  • >> Well I think that's the end.

  • We can't have - we don't have time for anymore questions.

  • So I'm sure you'd like to join me in thanking Electra.

  • [ Applause ]

>> I am going to start with two quotes.

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The Great American Novel: how and why? !

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    Why Why に公開 2013 年 03 月 25 日
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