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The Dream of the Great American Novel

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-2920087

1527-1943

Paul Giles,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Though he perhaps remains best known for his landmark book The Environmental Imagination (1995), which helped both invent and formulate the field of American environmental criticism, Lawrence Buell has more characteristically sought to set a quizzical theoretical frame around relatively traditional objects of study, thus inviting readers to see old forms in new ways. This was the method of New England Literary Culture (1986), which historicized the growth and institutional development of transcendentalism, and of Emerson (2003), whose focus on the Sage of Concord’s broader philosophical dimensions might be seen as a productive reexamination of its subject in relation to what was then the embryonic field of world literature. Buell’s big new book, written from his recent translation out of teaching to Powell M. Cabot Research Professor at Harvard, similarly takes a familiar theme in the annals of American literature and probes it from a variety of angles. The result is a compelling if somewhat elusive study, a magisterial work that is sure to become the standard treatment of its topic.Such elusiveness is apparent in the book’s very title, taken from Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1989 prediction that “the dream of the great American novel” would be superseded by “the global novel” set “in the United States, destination of journeys from everywhere” (344). As Buell explains it, the Great American Novel—or “GAN,” in Henry James’s ironic diminution of 1880—was always a chimera, for this ambivalence about the feasibility of the GAN and its implied “promise of national destiny” (447) was inherent to this fictional form. The Scarlet Letter, for instance, systematically critiques whether “the nation should be the fundamental reference point of collective identity, fantasy, and practice” (90). Hence Buell’s carefully reflexive work is very far from engaging simply in boosterism of the “dream” of national fiction. Instead, he takes four “scripts—“Made Classic by Retelling” (about American refurbishment of European and other prototypes), “Aspiration in America” (the “up-from” model of individual success), “Romancing the Divide” (about overcoming sectional interests), and “Improbable Communities” (involving the reinvention and replenishment of the body politic)—and analyzes how these concerns are worked out consistently, albeit problematically, across a vast array of American literary narratives. Though the main focus is on seventeen well-known texts, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the book’s most attractive features is its eclectic range across a wide chronological spectrum. While privileging “individual literary works” exhibiting “unique qualities of craft and vision that deserve closest attention” (6), Buell’s book skillfully links his close readings to broader contextual and conceptual contours. One especially interesting chapter, for example, juxtaposes William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, both published in 1936, so as to consider the complicated relationship between “parody and aspiration” (43) in these self-consciously national narratives that speak in different registers—one “high culture,” the other “middlebrow”—to the legacy of the Civil War (300).Buell generously acknowledges a multitude of secondary sources and indeed seems not to disagree with any of them, affably embracing contributions from many academic positions. His tone is all-inclusive and conciliatory, a career summa dedicated to his “students at Harvard University and Oberlin College, from whom I’ve learned at least as much as I’ve taught” (v). To be sure, a commercial rationale also informs this book, which, like some other recent Harvard University Press titles, is manifestly directed toward both an academic and a public audience. Buell indicates early on that he hopes to interest “comparative newcomers to literary criticism” by keeping “technological terminology to a minimum” while providing “surprises even for specialists” (6). Valuable though this approach may be in terms of public “impact,” it inevitably slows the academic argument, requiring a panoply of plot summaries and identity labels: “critic Sianne Ngai” (40), “historian Gordon Wood” (121), and so on. It also involves consigning key theoretical discussions (around genre, for example) to lengthy footnotes. Buell contends that one characteristic of candidates for GAN status is that they “often seem to have had it both ways, achieving both idiosyncratic complexity of style and architecture and robust market appeal” (57), and his own critical book on the GAN would appear to fit within this ambidextrous pattern. It may be a good thing in principle to write for the general public as well as for an academic audience: Buell is clearly as conversant with Leo Bersani’s poststructuralist work on Moby-Dick as with the novel’s commodification through the Starbucks coffee chain (359), and his graceful style comfortably accommodates both points of this compass. But catering to such a wide readership while covering such a broad range of material certainly adds to the organizational challenge.As Buell reports, the Great American Novel has been a “surprisingly resilient” formation (1), even though critically the idea has often been treated with levity. The term was introduced in 1868 by John W. De Forest, a post–Civil War novelist, and the calls for literary and national identity to be mutually reinforcing peaked “during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century” (29). The idea of the GAN also obsessed some modernist writers, even though it was often presented in humorous ways, as in “physical fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden’s short-lived Great American Novel Magazine” of 1929, tantalizingly mentioned here (41). The mythical allure of the GAN seems to have reached its apogee during this period—The Great Gatsby refers obliquely to this notion in its very title—and perhaps the most controversial aspect of Buell’s argument turns on his claim for its continuing contemporary relevance. The suggestion, for example, that in Don DeLillo’s Underworld “national history is made inseparable from world history” (3) risks replicating an old rhetoric of exceptionalism, through which American and world perspectives were conflated seamlessly. Like Kingston’s globalizing rhetoric, such assumptions should be handled, as Buell himself wryly notes in his discussion of Vladimir Nabokov’s “romance with American pop culture,” with “tweezers” (52). Though Buell’s wide range is valuable—I encountered several writers here for the first time—his book possibly passes too lightly over various theoretical pressures on the prospect of national formation, with his argument leaning more toward integration and continuity. He cites Chinese scholars asking, “What ties U.S. literature together? Where’s the coherence?” (16), but that imaginary form of national “coherence,” often so appealing to outsiders, necessarily risks oversimplification. Indeed, I thought that the book perhaps tended to underplay the institutional constraints that have propped up the GAN legend, the funding and curriculum issues, sometimes sponsored directly by US diplomatic interests, that have helped preserve space for the symbolic apparatus of the Great American Novel.Overall, this is a rich and engaging book, with many of its most interesting discussions being the product of its systematic heterogeneity. There is a thought-provoking passage about Mark Twain’s position “in the forefront of the new surge of regional realism” during the late nineteenth century, alongside the British Thomas Hardy, the Australian Joseph Furphy, and the American Sarah Orne Jewett (269), together with illuminating comments on the rhetorical direction of George Washington Cable’s Grandissimes in the light of his “interest in then-new phonograph technology” (276). There is also an intriguing treatment of similarities between The Scarlet Letter and George Eliot’s Adam Bede, published nine years later and again portraying “a pair of illicit lovers named Hester and Arthur” (47), an example that testifies to how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel “has catalyzed writers and artists in every generation since” (72). Buell’s unparalleled ability to make intellectual connections across both geographic and discursive space has rightly made him one of the most influential Americanists of his generation, and this book is remarkable above all for its illuminating conjunctions, the meshing of its overarching argument with a telling textual or contextual detail. Such cross-referencing capacities can arise only out of an encyclopedic command of the subject, and the book of which this one most reminded me was Raymond Williams’s English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), another synthetic work (based on Williams’s undergraduate lectures at Cambridge) that spoke powerfully to a synoptic view of literary tradition beyond the confines of individual texts. Buell’s emphasis on a “defining takeaway” (387) from his discussions similarly lends this book a pragmatically pedagogical tone, though the particular view of the English literary canon expounded in Williams’s typically self-deprecating volume has been widely influential in teaching and scholarship over a long period, and Buell’s account is likely to enjoy a similar longevity. In its determinedly optimistic view of the American novel—“Almost certainly, the best is still to come” (346)—this work also brings to mind F. O. Matthiessen’s deliberately Emersonian positioning of himself “in the optative mood” at the beginning of American Renaissance, with Buell’s enthusiasm for the “sheer possibility” of science fiction (365) speaking in a principled manner to a future-oriented position.All of this carries a paradoxically valedictory air, like Walt Whitman at the end of Song of Myself bequeathing himself “to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” involving perhaps a farewell to the concept of the Great American Novel in its current form. It is certainly surprising, as the author notes, that “no book has yet been written” about “this distinctive and durable preoccupation for US literary and cultural history” (14), yet in one sense Buell’s work might be said not only to categorize this subject properly for the first time but also to finish it off once and for all. The curiously spectral phenomenon of the GAN is, I feel, not a topic on which we are likely to want to hear more anytime soon, but this book makes for a fitting and enduring tribute to Buell’s distinguished career as well as to a “dream” that has persevered across more than a hundred years of American literary history.