The Great American Novel Partly Seen

Abstract

The Great American Novel Partly Seen John Gatta (bio) The Dream of the Great American Novel by Lawrence Buell ( Belknap Press, 2014. 584 pages. $39.95) Few people today expect the United States as a geopolitical force to retain anything like superpower status by the close of this century. And for several decades now cultural critics have insisted on the need to move beyond claims of American “exceptionalism” or prideful hegemony over other nations on the world stage. Does it still make sense, in view of all this, to take seriously that longstanding ambition of fiction writers to compose “the great American novel,” or the yearning of readers to find such a text? According to Lawrence Buell, the answer is a resounding yes. In his all-encompassing volume of critical commentary on the subject, Buell pursues our “surprisingly resilient fascination” with this notion of the great American novel as tenaciously and as ubiquitously as the leading character in Herman Melville’s contender for the gan title. At 584 pages The Dream of the Great American Novel weighs in as itself great in bulk, as well as in the chronological and generic sweep of its inquiry. [End Page xviii] The notion or dream of the great American novel first gained imaginative currency following the Civil War. Yet Buell starts even earlier in charting his history of the gan’s manifold permutations and interpretations, taking us all the way from Hawthorne and other antebellum writers to contemporary texts by such writers as David Foster Wallace and William Vollman. Granted, one must at least question whether it’s time now to abandon this gan concept—as Henry James first dubbed it—as a pretentious anachronism, a nationalistic cliché open to mockery. Buell concedes as much. Neither does he suppose that the dream of the great American novel can ever be reduced to the waking reality of a single master-text. Yet he also reminds us that the ever-elusive idea or ideal of the gan refuses to die, even in the face of today’s globalized postmodernism. As such it bears an intriguing, multilayered cultural and aesthetic significance worth investigating in the way Buell’s volume aims to do. Why else might the gan idea still merit our attention? For one thing the fictions Buell discusses, though inevitably concerned with one or another aspect of nationhood, are rarely nationalistic in any simple or parochial sense. Neither are they, for the most part, celebratory. Buell demonstrates how the great American novel has often, paradoxically, assumed a decidedly transnational complexion. Early on, for example, in his reading of The Scarlet Letter, he highlights the ways in which Hawthorne’s “imagination of place” in that classic fiction “remains more diasporic than nativized.” Buell’s exposition also reminds us of the perennial disparity between idea and reality in gan productions. So one noteworthy feature of gan fictions, whatever their conceptual or aesthetic or regional variations, is their quasi-transcendental urge to evoke what F. Scott Fitzergald memorably described in The Great Gatsby as “something commensurate” with humanity’s “capacity for wonder.” Some such dynamic within literary imagination to reach beyond itself is evidently what stirred Melville’s own writerly ambition when he reported discovering the potential of an American literature worthy of Shakespeare in his essay-review “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Successive generations of authors in this nation have likewise shown an urge to capture in their prose fictions some equivalent of Whitman’s recognition, in the preface to his 1855 Leaves of Grass, that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Pursuing the implications of such recognition across and beyond usual boundaries of nationhood, Buell’s commentary is similarly vast. So comprehensive, in fact, as continually to amaze the reader, if not at times to overwhelm him or her. References to a multitude of lesser-known writings—or to those rarely suspected today of meriting gan recognition—find a place somewhere in this argument. As one might expect, the book also includes elaborated case studies of gan favorites such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dos Passos’s...