Roth’s book — a satirical novel about baseball — is one of several, by various hands, called The Great American Novel. All were responses to a challenge laid down in 1868 by the writer John William De Forest, in an article in The Nation entitled ‘The Great American Novel’. In it De Forest said that a true depiction of American life had yet to be written: This task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted, and has never been accomplished further than very partially — in the production of a few outlines. Washington Irving was too cautious to make the trial; he went back to fictions of Knickerbockers and Rip Van Winkles and Ichabod Cranes; these he did well, and we may thank him for not attempting more and failing in the attempt. With the same consciousness of incapacity Cooper shirked the experiment; he devoted himself to Indians, of whom he knew next to nothing, and to backwoodsmen and sailors, whom he idealized; or where he attempted civilized groups, he produced something less natural than the wax figures of Barnum's old museum. If all Americans were like the heroes and heroines of Cooper, Carlyle might well enough call us "eighteen millions of bores." As for a tableau of American society, as for anything resembling the tableaux of English society by Thackeray and Trollope, or the tableaux of French society by Balzac and George Sand, we had better not trouble ourselves with looking for it in Cooper. [...] Hawthorne, the greatest of American imaginations, staggered under the load of the American novel. In "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance" we have three delightful romances, full of acute spiritual analysis, of the light of other worlds, but also characterized by only a vague consciousness of this life, and by graspings that catch little but the subjective of humanity. Such personages that Hawthorne creates belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality. They are as probably natives of the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of America. They are what Yankees might come to be who should shut themselves up for life to meditate in old manses. They have no sympathy with this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it. [...] The profoundest reverence for this great man need prevent no one from saying that he has not written "the Great American Novel." The nearest approach to the desired phenomenon is "Uncle Tom's Cabin." There were very noticeable faults in that story; there was a very faulty plot; there was (if idealism be a fault) a black man painted whiter than the angels, and a girl such as girls are to be, perhaps, but are not yet; there was a little village twaddle. But there was also a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling. Though comeliness of form was lacking, the material of the work was in many respects admirable. [...] Then, stricken with timidity, the author shrank into her native shell of New England.It is a remarkable essay, considering what was to come. Melville, Wharton, James, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe – all were in the immediate future of 1868 (Melville was in the past, but had not yet flitted across De Forest’s radar). Most (if not all) of these writers must have been aware of De Forest’s famous challenge, must have known of the phrase ‘The Great American Novel’, and been aware of the implicit lack that it described. All were goaded into action, at least in part, by the challenge of De Forest.
But the definitive Great American Novel proved as ungraspable as America itself. By the time Roth attempted it, all hope had gone. Talking about his book in a 1973 essay, he said: ‘I don’t claim to know what America is really like.’
Consulted:
DeForest, John William: 'The Great American Novel', The Nation, 9 January 1868: online at http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/articles/n2ar39at.html
It's an interesting issue, but you left out the one author -- and book -- with a serious claim to GAN: Mark Twain, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While it doesn't contain baseball (the novel is set before baseball reached Missouri), it does largely capture the nature of America, and the major issues that confronted it, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. It wasn't published until twenty years after the essay in question, but it pretty well meets the definition.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, there is the matter of why we need a GAN. Where is the Great Finnish Novel? Where is the Great Portuguese or Chadian Novel? Why does America need a defining narrative when other countries don't? All right, Finland has the Kalevala and Portugal has Os Lusiadas, and Huck Finn is not an epic in that manner -- but part of the point of Twain's masterpiece is that we are different from traditional Europe and should not need the same kind of epic. The American epic saga was told in the dime novels, not in verse; our central myth is cowboys and Indians, and that is not the same as a defining narrative.
Interesting point. Why does America need a Great American Novel? Well, in a sense it doesnt, and if it had not been for De Forest it might never have occurred to anyone that it did. If however America is special it might be that as a recently-formed nation there was a sense of inadequacy, as the country that had 'gone from barbarism to decadence without being civilized in between.' Or perhaps there was guilt at being a nation founded on slavery and genocide, as Vonnegut put it, and the Great American Novel was an attempt to justify America's existence and create health and vitality, at least in the artistic sphere.
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