Great American Novels and the trouble with literature

[Gomezticator]

I think literature today's suffering because too many people are trying to write the Great American Novel, which is not something you set out to do. Hell, come to think of it, the novels of generations past that people consider Great American Novels are questionable in their quality and relevance at best. Hemingway and Joyce come most quickly to mind. Tell me the average American today could read Ulysses or Old Man And The Sea cover to cover and love it (in other words, English majors, check yourselves; I need real-world opinions from regular people).

Possible flame-bait question: George Orwell wrote stuff that struck us philosophically but is his writing by itself truly great? Look at it this way: if the same subject matter from 1984 was used in a novel by Mark Barrowcliffe ("Who?" you ask? That's kinda my point...), written in Barrowcliffe's style, does it mean Barrowcliffe is automatically a great novelist because he attacked the subject of covert fascist government, whether or not the prose is any good? I wonder if Orwell is proclaimed a great novelist simply because of the subject matter he tackled, rather than his actual writing.

[Johnny Slick]

Eh, I think Orwell's a better straight-up writer than you give him credit for. Check out his short story Killing an Elephant for a good example of this. Overall, though, I totally agree with you, and I'll go on to say that the most successful writers out there are the ones who just sit down and write and don't worry about what they're doing becoming the second coming of The Dubliners (and by the way, I was an English major and find Hemingway's longer work nearly as unfun to read as DFW)(though I do like some of his short stories, especially "The Hills Like White Elephants").

[poochiekafelnikov]

Eh, I think Orwell's a better straight-up writer than you give him credit for. Check out his short story Killing an Elephant for a good example of this. Overall, though, I totally agree with you, and I'll go on to say that the most successful writers out there are the ones who just sit down and write and don't worry about what they're doing becoming the second coming of The Dubliners (and by the way, I was an English major and find Hemingway's longer work nearly as unfun to read as DFW)(though I do like some of his short stories, especially "The Hills Like White Elephants").

I think by some form of association a fugue was created whereby literary eridition and fucking aging male librarians for fine reduction were equated. My suggestion to you would be for you to state both a retraction and apology for all that you posted here...it would be a fine example of the ninth step...poochie

[Johnny Slick]

I think by some form of association a fugue was created whereby literary eridition and fucking aging male librarians for fine reduction were equated. My suggestion to you would be for you to state both a retraction and apology for all that you posted here...it would be a fine example of the ninth step...poochieCould you translate that back into its original language for me?

[seedcake]

Just wanted to point out that English majors are regular folks as well. I think you might be reacting to the fact that a lot of people with a little exposure to lit. criticism (English major or no) tend to adopt a single model which becomes gospel and apply this model to everything: music, movies, etc. I think it can be really annoying when someone with a half digested theory gives their immediate response.

The idea of lists and/or placing something at the top of a list is both very appealing to me and also something I think is very silly. I find it appealing because it is through these lists, I think, that we decided on certain agreed on values. I used to listen to KZOK (Seattle's Best ROCK) in the 1980s and it was a great upset one year when "Stairway to Heaven" was replaced by Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along the Watch Tower."

In Mary Robison's last book, the narrator says better than I can say it:

Martin, some person I know, has compiled a list of the five hundred best rock singles ever recorded. Number 11 on the list is “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks. Or if it’s not number 11, it should be.

Speaking of which, here is a book, Why Did I Ever?, which is trying to be the great american ADHD book. And it is. Why is there trouble with this kind of ambition? I actually wish more writers tried to write books on a huge scale like The Corrections, even if that results, too, in doorstops like Middlesex. Somewhere on the forum someone was praising Margaret Atwood. I think she is a writer who is trying (or is) writing the "great American" whatever.

The problem seems less that they're ambitious writers, but that the terms of what should be placed in a list of "best novels" isn't agreed on. I think we can agree, though, that it would be pretty creepy if everyone agreed that Ulysses was the best novel of the 20th century, that "Stairway to Heaven" was the best rock song, that "Anarchy in the UK," was the best punk record, etc. And so this isn't really a problem, but rather a source of confusion about the terms we use in reacting to a piece of writing.

One problem in this aside from the shattered cannon (shatter away) is that even such essentially basic functions as the convention of how prose renders experience is now a problem.

Used to be that the old saw, "show don't tell," could be pretty much relied on in terms of how a piece of writing operated. But there has been a strain of writing prose that flaunts this idea. All writing is after "telling," in that it uses words and syntax to create the "show." The "show" itself relies on conventions that we must agree to hold with the author. If we don't hold them, then we end up with chunks of languag (i.e., cliches, tropes, conventions.) This might be like going to a movie theater and instead of watching the movie, you are caught up in the dust motes floating through the projected beam, the sound of moviegoers chewing ice and popcorn, the periodic intrusion of the ushers, that is everything in the mechanical function of watching the movie. Your date caught up in "what happens next in the movie," sushes you and tell you to watch the movie.

If you pick up a genre book, like an English Tea Murder Mystery for instance, you tend not to be aware of the conventons and instead are aware of the contrived nature of the art. You are busy wondering if anyone in the world is actually like this? Do people really speak this way? Has anyone ever actually eaten a crumpet?

The problem, to me, seems that state-of-the-art prose (check Conjunctions State of the Art: Fiction) relies on a very self-conscious syntax, and this results in much smaller scale stories. I think the term "great" expands in our minds and we desire books that are grand in scope, like War & Peace or Buddenbrooks or The Sea, the Sea. But these books for the most part have already been written. We already have Sometimes a Great Notion. And so there is a paradox that few novels grand in scope can be accomplished with a self-conscious syntax. (Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans might be one, but I only made it about page 250. Ulysses seems to me a book that establishes its own conventions and at the same time is about the necessity and problems of conventional modes of narration.)

Compare for instance Ben Marcus and Gary Lutz or a local writer like John Olson with some of the naturalistic writers who are currently receiving a lot of attention such as Anthony Doerr.

A sentence from Lutz: She was a milk-warm girl in bad odor with herself, glad to have at last come down in the world.

A sentence from Olson: A spigot. A spigot is that which when examined reveals bees and nails and chains and bits of Tennessee.

But well regarded writers are also writing in a different vein.

A paragraph from Anthony Doerr:

Out on the sea the reflected stars quiver and shake. The crest of each wave is limned with light, a thousand white rivers running together -- it is beautiful. It is, he thinks, the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He watches, shivering, until the sun begins to color the sky behind him, then trots down the beach, into the forest.

And so we end up with a problem. How to combine or fold these two ways of using language into a single style? How can one both tell/show at the same time? And allow the reader access to this problem of showing and telling? At a certian point we are telling a story not telling a story about how we are telling a story.

This is why I find Goerge Saunders interesting. I think he takes Raymond Carver's earlier prose and by placing it into the constructed, contemporary environment of Public Storage Parking Way (to name the location of one of his stories) suddenly introduces a problem. How do we represent the world naturalistically when the world is constructed? So his work perhaps repesents one way of dealing with this.

In any case back to your post.

> Tell me the average American today

Books (great or otherwise) aren't for your average American. Your average American doesn't really read books. This isn't to say they the woman on the street is bereft of narrative or art or that she is somehow stupid, but that the audience for literature has always been a bit elitist and snooty. Books aren't for everyone. They aren't a vital nutrient. In fact they are a bit dangerous. They are a mind altering substances. (Books might find wider audiences if they became a controlled substance.) Reading is a dangerous activity and should requires adult supervision.

> could read Ulysses or Old Man And The Sea cover to cover and love it

Ulysses is a difficult book. It was written to be difficult. If someone likes difficultly, then this is the book for them.

The Old Man and the Sea I read when I was child and the only reason I didn't like it was because is such a transparent allegory without the moments that make fables enjoyable ... the pigs in Animal Farm for instance posting a sign "Two Legs Better." Or Gregor Samsa having trouble getting out of bed because his cockroach legs are waving in the air.

I like George Orwell's writing.

[neatomajick]

Nothing like a little theory to set things straight. We need to reach a mutual understanding of what something is before we can go about knowing why that something doesn't seem to exist, or whatever. Nothing like a little post-structuralism to blow it all to hell with the idea that there is no way we will ever know what anything means. What does it mean to be "great"? How 'bout "American"? And what in the world could anyone mean when they say "novel"? And fiction: are all stories fiction, and are all fictions stories? Let's try to put these all together, and what do we get? Whatever the people in power say, whether anyone agrees or not.

And if this makes no sense, then great! That's the point!

And to address the issues of the "Great American Novel", JAmes Joyce, and Hemmingway. Joyce was Irish, Hemingway was sexist, and the "Great American Novel" is a work of fiction.

[Gomezticator]

Seedcake, you've been warned: this is going to be harsh. After the 4th paragraph or the 5th cited passage, I forget exactly where, I nearly flipped.

THAT is what I was talking about with English majors. I WASN'T LOOKING FOR PARAGRAPH AFTER PARAGRAPH AFTER PARAGRAPH OF THEORY AND PASSAGES. Couldn't you make your point in 3-4 paragraphs? One would think someone with as much of a certified command of the English language as an English Major could be a little more direct in their writing but apparently not. GET TO THE POINT.

The idea with my remark was that I was looking for reasoned opinions that didn't need to reference passages and name-drop/cite dozens of pre-modern authors, use English Lit terminology and consume so many paragraphs to make their point. That's tedious and I will admit I got lost reading all that jargon. No, that doesn't mean I'm dumb and not as well read or whatever as you, it means your post was SO FREAKING LONG and didn't make a concrete point until about 3-4 paragraphs from the end. I wanted an opinion, not a dissertation.

Back to your post:

- More people read than you think. They may be reading Sue Grafton novels, grocery paperback mysteries and so on, but people still do read.
- People can write books for the sake of being difficult. It just won't connect with many people. Relevance is key for the survival of literature, and the problem is that people are writing irrelevant stuff.
- My point was that novelists shouldn't feel the need to write the Great American Novel, try to do it, and should just write a novel. Period. Let history judge your work when you're dead like everyone else.
- I don't hate English Majors. I just want you to make your point without writing like one.

[Johnny Slick]

Ensconsed in that earlier response to gomezticator's rant is the implication that people nowadays are stupider than they used to be. See, that's flat-out not true. I can cite the whole Flynn Effect phenomenon, but even when it comes to reading you can see it. A larger percentage of people read today than they ever did before. Heck, we now have an entire medium dedicated to getting your information by reading it that we didn't really have 20 years ago. In short, folks are more learned, better able to grasp literary ideas, and better equipped to enjoy fiction than ever before in world history.

And yet... folks still go out of their way to write stuff that's difficult just for the sake of being difficult. I don't think that's what Joyce did. I think that what Joyce did was write in the language(s) he knew and about situations he knew. The fact that most people need a companion book or reading group to really grok Ulysses isn't his fault per se. You can make the same case about Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness writing. "The Sound and the Fury"'s first 100 pages are fucking impossible. But they're supposed to be, too. They're a lifetime of reminiscences as remembered by a retard. Retards think funny.

However, the David Foster Wallaces and John Barths of the world aren't trying to establish a milieu, they're just being difficult for difficulty's sake. They're the equivalent of those a-holes at the turn of the century who decided to write classical music with 12-tone rows, or free jazz guys like Ornette Coleman. I simply do not see the point in difficulty for difficulty's sake. In its own way, it's no more powerful than horror for horror's sake (ex: Ann Rice) or fantasy for fantasy's sake (ex. Robert Jordan). Go ahead and like that sort of thing if you will, but don't pretend for a minute that it's in any way "better" than anything else out there. In fact, I would go so far as to opine that literature that doesn't even try to explain to the common man what's going on in its world is *worse* than anything else out there.

[Johnny Slick]

Also, despite my graduated-English-major status, I've read like half of the Sue Grafton Alphabet mysteries. PI stories are fun, especially when they're breaking gender mores in the process.

[Gomezticator]

See? Johnny Slick's response was direct and understandable, and didn't need to make more than a couple name references! And he's an English major!

I see your point, JS. Really, people aren't stupider: their lives are just more complex. And writers back then just wrote: they weren't TRYING to be great. Actually, the reason novels were longer and more complex before was that they were a primary form of entertainment: we didn't have TV and movies and the multitude of distractions we have today, so you had to write longish books so that people had something to do after work for weeks and months.

[Johnny Slick]

Also, there were a LOT more serial novels in the 19th century than now. IIRC Stephen King tried to do that with "The Green Mile" a couple years back. 150 years ago, that was the norm. If you were a Dickens fan, you picked up the latest copy of his rag (for the life of me, I can't remember the name of the thing) and you read the latest chapter of his book in progress. And maybe sampled some Elizabeth Gaskell on the side if she wasn't in it. That is, if you hadn't spent all your money on the penny dreadfuls that found interesting new ways to tell the Sweeney Todd story.

That's one of the things about comparing literature of the past to today: we pretty much by definition only recognize the good stuff. Of course we know who Dickens was: he was the pre-eminent writer of his time. FWIW I think there is a *ton* more intelligent (note: not "purposefully difficult", "intelligent. David Eggers is intelligent. John Irving is intelligent. DFW is purposefully difficult) writing now than there was in England in the 1850s, even controlling for population size. And this despite the increased competition for the attention of the consumer. And if the trash is just as trashy, I'd invite folks to look at literacy levels: 150 years ago, the folks who read trashy romance novels today would, demographically speaking, not have been reading at all back then.

In conclusion, anybody who thinks that literature is on its way down should go back and read some, I don't know, Anthony Trollope (20 pages on fox-hunting and plots you can unravel 15 pages into a 1000 page book). Or Milton's Paradise Lost (bleah!). Maybe the kids of today don't get Biblical or ancient Greek references like they did in the 1700s and 1800s, but they do get science and math and logic a lot more.

[noose papier]

Orwell was a great writer, because he communicated in a direct and transparent manner. An explanation of his views on writing are found in his essay, "Politics and the English Language". He takes to task the creators of verbose rantings, the right wing, and the left for poor writing.

1984 was a commentary on politcal power from a European perspective. If you want something closer to the American expereince, try Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. I read it in 1993 and am amazed yet not shocked at how accurate his cultural observations are on the animal of American totalitarianism.

Hemingway was also great because of his style. His early material isn't so hot, but later on in life he was cranking out some amazing shit. Old Man and the Sea was/is is good. I'm sure it saddens and insults some great writers when their work is the subject of study in public education. How many of us have talked to people who aren't interested in classic literature or poetry because high school killed it for them?

On The Great American Novel, the original subject matter of the first post--I agree that one cannot set out to do it. But maybe the real reason why we haven't seen any in a while is because few have anything to say that people are feeling--or at least, they do not get wide publicity on NPR.

[mudede]

what is the point of writing a novel? the thing is dead. borges knew this years ago, which is why he never wrote anything longer than 20 pages. the novel is a 19th century machine.

[RobCrowe]

the novel is dead, but like the god that Nietzche dispatched (and rehabilitated--"As long as we have grammar, we shall have god.") it continues to have an afterlife. one needn't put down a date when the murder was committed, but perhaps it was the assault of Joyce, Proust, Stein and Musil. rock is dead/long live rock as Townshend once said. what we have now is many sects or rather, "genres," including the literate genre which most of us (I do as well) think of as "the novel" which includes writers as various as DFW, Don DeLiillo, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith, etc. But can any version of the novel be said to exhaust the possibilities of every one of its sibling genres? Does Updike excell Clancy in every sense? When we presume to judge types of writing, we presume too much already.

Ah yes but the literary media persists in retailing the myth of the Great American Novel. Frankly, I think this is more a problem for readers than writers. Writers write what they write. But readers may come wanting to read this version of the literate novel, the GAM sweepstakes. It is indeed a great game to play, but isn't it over by now? After Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, The Sun Also Rises, Absalom, Absalom, The Crying of Lot 49and Look Homeward, Angel, can one really pretend that this genre is not anxious as English majors used to say? And terribly male as well, since a major determinant of the GAN is size, though there are strange fruit like The Making of Americans that could challenge this genealogy.

Yet I think Seedcake has point when they point out the disjunction between precise, lyrical but possibly opaque language with the conventions of novelistic language. We desire precise words and we know longer "believe" in events. Those two were the life blood of the novel and it is their divorce in part that means the novel can only linger on, suppurating and burdened by modernity.


Testy point or two: Atwood is a Canadian writer and probably would say that she was. And Orwell's Shooting an Elephant is an essay, not a story, nor for that matter a novel.

[Johnny Slick]

what is the point of writing a novel? the thing is dead. borges knew this years ago, which is why he never wrote anything longer than 20 pages. the novel is a 19th century machine.No matter what century you liken it to, the novel is most certainly not dead. More people read them now than ever before. It's a still-expanding genre. It's not like, say, poetry, where the only people who write it are university types who are getting a stipend to do so and Tuesday night slammers. Or for that matter short stories, which are nearly all written by that same university crowd. How many non-literary (read: non-vanity, non-published-by-some-state-university- little-known-for-anything-other-than-its-ability-to-get-18-year-olds-to-give-
lots-of-dad's-money-to-learn-how-to-construct-sentences) publications dedicated to the short story are there? David Eggers is doing a grand (if sometimes silly) job with McSweeney's, but that's just about all there is, folks.

And yet you say that the NOVEL is dying? Sorry, man. I love your Police Beat column, but you're way off on this.

[seedcake]

what is the point of writing a novel? the thing is dead. borges knew this years ago, which is why he never wrote anything longer than 20 pages. the novel is a 19th century machine.

The novels we've been talking about in this thread are essentially relics. To talk about Orwell and Hemingway, for example, in a thread about contemporary American novelists would be sure signs of indication of a moribund form.

But, I don't think Borges' stories really prove this point. Borges wasn't able to execute his plans. But Julio Cortazar did a great job of carrying on similar plans. (In any case, always troubling when a book critic makes a proclamation like this. And to split hairs, both are South American and not contemporary.)

The novel is not a dead form. The sonnet isn't dead either. Perhaps the radical restructuring of the the novel as a form is over. We now have a staid and pretty set structure. But I still find 19th century novels very eloquent -- such as Washington Square by Henry James. And I find new novel, as eloquent too. But like the sonnet, perhaps the pleasures of the novel will not find a wide audience. But so what if the form moves away from its roots as a popular one? I believe the American Short Story really sufferers because there is the false idea that it is read by masses of people when really the only people who read short stories are other writers.

But even if the form is no longer evolving, many contemporary novels are not addressing fundamental issues of representation. I think we can agree that a novel is an act of representation. They are not taking into account fundamental changes in the way we live and how this changes representation. A case in point would be Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order. The book illustrates a genetic disorder and one that expresses itself linguistically and offers the potential of talking about what it means to be a person. And yet he choses to write this book using the metaphor of his head as a house and populates the house with characters. This is a 19th century conceit.

When we are talking about "a novel" I think we tend to think of a document that addresses the issue of what it means to be a person. Most people would find, I think, "Rabbit Run," or "Why Did I Ever," are complete in that they are taking on this subject.

But there is a great deal of distance to cover and much has changes in the last fifty years and I'm not sure we have really seen novels that reflect this yet. This doesn't mean the form is dead. Far from it, that the novel still had a great deal of work to do.

[poochiekafelnikov]

american poetry competitions are rigged...friends, students, and sycophants are universally awarded

[Gomezticator]

I can see what CM's getting at, that the novel as an instrument of cultural influence is dead. Go to a bookstore, sit on a bus or check out a coffeehouse and you'll see that many people still read, and quite avidly. People like reading books, but we won't see any more novels that change society's outlook or ripple the fabric of society, as that's now the job of media. Sure, you'll see people line up for the new Harry Potter book, but fandom and cultural influence are rather different things. The closest any book's come to influencing people's lives in the last 20 years is Fight Club, and that's only because the book got made into a popular movie starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. 90% of humanity, myself included, didn't know who the hell Chuck Palahniuk was until well after the movie was made.

[Johnny Slick]

Hmm. At least that's the excuse folks will use until the next ground-breaking, opinion-shaping novel comes out. It's not like they've ever come out every other year or something. Also, it's often hard to gauge the worth of a book until many years after the fact. That being said, how about the following:

Neuromancer (from the mid-1980s, had a HUGE influence on the way the World Wide Web is shaped today... seriously, read this book and I bet you'll think it came out 10 years later because the Internet as we know it today was basically created in Neuromancer's image)
The Lovely Bones (really early to tell with this book but it seems to be this generation's Catcher In The Rye)
The Bonfire of the Vanities (IMO Tom Wolfe's best book, much better in terms of societal critique than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was)
Cat's Eye (pish posh on Margaret Atwood all you want, but IMO this book does a better job of explaining female gender identity than any 10 works by Judith Butler or Donna Haraway)
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven (easy to overlook because he's local, but Sherman Alexie is always thought-provoking, and he represents a culture that has not been represented in this medium a lot before)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (I'm having trouble defining exactly *why* it's such a great book, but it is nonetheless)

I like 19th century lit as much as the next person, but let's not pretend there's nothing good out recently.

[seedcake]

I agree that these are excellent novels and point to the continued relevance (and not death) of the novel. But they are not novels that are innovative in terms of form the way, say, Faulkner's novels were innovative. (Just a note, but Egger's book is a work of nonfiction, but admittedly in that fuzzy edge of memoir.) I guess I feel that innovation is perhaps unnecessary for the life of the novel. Maybe at a certain point a form becomes codified and conservative?

We end up then with excellent executed
novels, but they are kind of staid in terms of style, such as Michael Byers, Long for This World or a similiar novel, Waxwings by Jonathan Raban.

The short story strikes me as a form that continues to be vibrant in terms of innovations in form or representation. A list of writers I find interesting in terms of this:

Ben Marcus
Stephen Dixon
George Saunders
Gary Lutz
Denis Johnson
Lydia Davis
Diane Williams
Joanna Scott
Lois Ann Yamanaka

Someone like Sherman Alexie, whose stories I admire, seems to be working in a different vein. His writing is pretty conservative. And yet, he is incorporating what I think might be hidden or collective structures, myths, or whatever you want to call them. A problem with this kind of writing, though, is that it seems like the only way to get to it is to employ a conventional style. Brian Evenson is another writer like this. What I've read of his writing, the writing is fairly conventional, but it gets to an odd place through these conventions. This is perhaps the problem with Toni Morrison, too. She builds her books on conventions or tropes that at first pass might seem like cliches.

[Gomezticator]

I did read Egger's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering... heh, no comment there.... and IMO it came off as an unknown author trying way too hard to write something great and impress me, which turns me off immensely (see: Frazier, Charles). Trying too hard to write a classic is like trying too hard to get laid: it's blatantly obvious, annoying, and does not accomplish the task. Plus it came through the grapevine that Eggers heavily exaggerated his relationship with Toph and he was nothing more than a Big Brother that saw the kid once a month, while his sister basically raised the kid herself. So between that and Eggers' endless chest-thumping over his place in literature, I'm really turned off, to say the least, towards his work at large.

Meanwhile, Neuromancer and William Gibson's work at large is pretty solid, and I'm surprised he's reached readers beyond the hardcore Cyberpunk fans (until now, they're the only ones I heard referencing Gibson). I suppose I underestimated Mr. Gibson's reach.

I'm looking for some more summer reading, and the last two posts provided some good suggestions. Thanks!

However, I stand by my assertion that multimedia and the internet are sinking literature's cultural influence at large. Only 1 or 2 out of 10 people I meet will bring up an author or someone's work when discussing politics or the world at large, and many of those 1 or 2 are extremely well-read and educated.