The Dream of the Great American Novel

Lawrence Buell

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674659896, 9780674051157
• eBook ISBN: 9780674727489
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

The idea of "the great American novel" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself.

The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In fresh, in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward in conversation with hundreds of other novels, Buell delineates four "scripts" for G.A.N. candidates. One, illustrated by The Scarlet Letter, is the adaptation of the novel's story-line by later writers, often in ways that are contrary to the original author's own design. Other aspirants, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, engage the American Dream of remarkable transformation from humble origins. A third script, seen in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved, is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions. Finally,mega-novels from Moby-Dick to Gravity's Rainbow feature assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy.

The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction.

PART ONE

THE UNKILLABLE DREAM

1

Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline

He couldn’t argue with America. It was one of those balloon names. It kept stretching as it filled up, getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner. What kind of gas it was, stretching the thing to its limits, who could say. Whatever we dreamed. And of course one day it would pop. But for now, it served its purpose. For now, it was holding together.

—COLSON WHITEHEAD, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)

He was afraid the great American novel, if true, must be incredible.

—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)

OFTEN WE CAN’T SPECIFY when a new idea gets put into circulation. In this case we can. It’s one of the few things that’s clear-cut about the history of the dream of the Great American Novel. The idea has a prehistory, as we’ll soon see, but it was introduced as a critical concept in an essay of January 1868 by the novelist John W. De Forest. Today De Forest is remembered chiefly, if at all, for a book published the year before that anticipates his big idea, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, a landmark in its own right as the first significant Civil War novel, although fated to become one of those honorable subgalactic achievements that keep getting rediscovered and then falling off the critical radar screen (more on that in Chapter 7).

The phrase itself was already in the air, its odor already somewhat tainted. A few months before, the publisher of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict (1867), another Civil War fiction, today chiefly remembered for its gingerly engagement of the taboo subject of white-black miscegenation, had touted it as the Great American Novel. Even before that, we find the legendary showman P. T. Barnum spoofing such puffery as cliché lingo: “the land agent with his nice new maps and beautiful descriptions of distant scenery, the newspaper man with his ‘immense circulation,’ the publisher with his ‘Great American Novel.’ ”¹ De Forest was the first to take the GAN idea seriously and to try to give it substance, although his essay too was part hype, ending with a plea for the international copyright protection that he and many other American writers believed was crucial for authorship to flourish in the United States.

The Birth of the Dream

De Forest envisaged a work that would capture “the American soul” by portraying “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence” in a “tableau” that would grasp the full geographical and cultural range of national life, with the amplitude of a Thackeray, a Trollope, a Balzac. To date, he argued, American fiction had been overwhelmingly “local” or sectional; even its best fiction writer, Hawthorne, had captured “little but the subjective of humanity.” The closest approximation so far had been Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which, whatever its defects, did have “a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, … drawn with a few strong and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait.”²

De Forest risked self-contradiction in taking for granted that there must be such a thing as an “American soul” when the literary evidence to date, by his own say-so, argued the opposite. His assessment of American fiction was also doctrinaire, ruling out “romance” and positing that regional and national fiction were antagonistic. So too his judgments of particular books and authors. That he didn’t even think to mention Melville reflects the then-prevailing view of him as a once-popular novelist who had long since lost his audience by perversely writing unreadable books. De Forest’s praise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also conventional in singling out the previous era’s most famous fictional achievement in a distinctly postbellum and tribalist way, showing no interest at all in its passionate concern for the plight of African American slaves—an issue that northern whites preferred to believe war and constitutional reform had resolved—much less in the possibility that an African American writer might see things differently from a white one. Such limitations mark De Forest as the product of a specific background and time: a white Anglo-American Yankee working in the immediate aftermath of the war, with the vogue of fictional realism just coming into its ascendancy, long before the critical establishment began to take serious notice of the large and increasing body of literature by writers other than white Protestants.

Yet his manifesto was timely as well as time-bound. Calls for an autonomous national literature dated back to the Revolutionary era, but nothing like a consensus as to what might actually constitute national fiction had congealed. Why not? One key reason was the long-embedded provincialism that De Forest deplored. As the divisive impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had proven, during the run-up to the Civil War, the imagined or “virtual” nation had ironically become more fragmented in inverse proportion to the early industrial era’s strengthening of the very transportation and communications networks that enabled people, books, and other commodities to circulate faster and farther around the country.³ Indeed, traveling north to south, east to west, or vice versa, still felt like traveling to a foreign place. Unlike Germany and Italy, the United States was a political unit before it was a nation, and not until after the war did it become common to speak of it in the singular. Before then, recalled the critic John Jay Chapman in the 1890s, “there was no nation,” “only discordant provinces.”⁴ But now, with war behind and continental conquest and settlement in sight, the prospect of a pan-national fiction at last seemed feasible. Considered in the light of cultural politics, then, the dream of the GAN as first launched was at once the literary edge of what U.S. cultural historians have called the “romance of reunion” between northern and southern whites,⁵ and part of a broad multifront push toward pan-national consolidation that also included a stronger hand for the federal government (especially through the Reconstruction years), the creation of public university systems, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the subjugation of Native Americans in the trans-Mississippi west, and the advent of standard time zones. Not that De Forest would have endorsed this whole bill of particulars. He was neither a militant nationalist nor a devotee of the national penchant for brag from which his essay had rescued the GAN catchphrase. But his excitement at the idea of a pan-national novel marks it as a product of that expansionist moment.

The essay was timely in a more aesthetic sense too, as a barometer of prose fiction’s rising critical prestige. Less than 5 percent of all works of American fiction before 1850 were marketed as “novels”; the preferred label was “tale,”⁶ a term triply advantageous as a self-effacing disclaimer of pretense to strict accuracy, a gesture of solidarity to the lingering power of romanticism, and a gentle insinuation of a moral thrust. The closest student of antebellum fiction criticism persuasively suggests that by mid-century American reviewers had accepted the novel as the defining “literary art form of the nineteenth century,” yet the emergence of the GAN idea required broader public acceptance of prose fiction as a high art form.⁷ Sure enough, I have unearthed only a few scattered antebellum references to “the great American novel,” the earliest an advertisement for an 1852 London penny edition reprint of (fortuitously) Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a promotional hype that simply touts its status as runaway best seller—and an 1853 plea for financial assistance on behalf of an African American family at risk of being sold into slavery, published in the newspaper where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first serialized.⁸ Stowe’s publishers never used the term “novel” to market the book, promoting it rather as the “greatest of American tales,” “the Greatest Book of the Age,” or “the greatest book of its kind ever issued from the American Press.”⁹ This notwithstanding that reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic immediately classified Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel in the Dickensian vein and that Stowe herself declared from the first her aim to achieve utmost mimetic accuracy, the very effect that came to be seen as the distinguishing mark of “novel” as opposed to “tale” or “romance”: to portray slavery, as she put it, “in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible.”¹⁰ But after the Civil War, prose fiction established itself decisively as the literary form of preference, with “novel” as the paradigmatic form of prose fiction. At century’s end, the novelist-critic William Dean Howells, then-esteemed dean of American letters, could insist with confidence that fiction had become “the chief intellectual stimulus of our time, whether we like the fact or not.” “To-day is the day of the novel,” Frank Norris agreed.¹¹ Posterity has confirmed the verdict. No span of U.S. literary history before or since the half-century between the Civil War and World War I defined itself and remains defined so predominantly in terms of its fictional output.*

De Forest’s essay was also timely, whether or not he meant it to be, in its concurrence with a rising tide of cultural nationalist theory abroad. The conception of national literature as national expression in Hippolyte Taine’s just-published Histoire de la litérature anglaise (1863) would strongly influence later formulations of American literary and cultural difference.¹² This too was the eve of Ernest Renan’s seminal “What Is a Nation?” (1882), which defined “a nation” as “a soul, a spiritual principle,” entailing “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” and “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.” That personification is the remote origin of the most influential recent treatise on nationalism, anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983, rev. 1991), which reconceives nationalist ideologies as collective fictions.¹³

Contrary to Renan and nineteenth-century nationalism theory generally, Anderson conceives nations as artifacts, as products of collective imagination, not as organic entities primordially present in embryo. By the same token, however, Anderson’s model has energized critical thinking about the role of literature and the arts in the work of nation building; and it’s instructive to apply it to the formative years of U.S. fiction theory. Although Anderson erred in holding that modern nationalism began with New World independence movements and that countrywide print networks were crucial to its emergence (the United States lacked anything like a national newspaper until long after the Revolution), still Imagined Communities and its sequel The Spectre of Comparisons (1998) did demonstrate the importance of print institutions generally and of narrative invention specifically to the construction of the sentiment of nationness. Through an Andersonian prism, one might even dare to contend that nations “depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature,” and novels in particular, “plays a decisive role.”¹⁴ De Forest himself would never have made such a claim about the American novel, which for him barely existed. His view was closer to Renan’s: that national fiction registered a national soul in the making, not that fiction was a nation-building force. He showed no interest whatever, for example, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s nation-changing intent or its fabled influence in precipitating the Civil War, in which he himself had served with honor on the Union side. Nonetheless the GAN as he first framed it took the notion of fiction making and nation building as coordinate projects to a level of assertiveness that haunted later critical and novelistic practice. The very naïveté of Taine’s, Renan’s, and De Forest’s hypostatizations relative to Anderson’s demystification of nation as a produced effect abetted the mentality that a nation’s artifacts might embody nationness even if they did not create it.

Defining the Terms, Somewhat

Despite the skepticism it predictably provoked, the dream of the Great American Novel soon entrenched itself as a staple of American literary journalism: as a mantra for publishers, reviewers, and critics. A mere three years after De Forest’s essay, critics were speculating that the dream of the GAN must date back to the early national era, when “the absence of a fully developed literature” was first felt. Before long it was affirmed that “several generations … [had] died” waiting for the great national novel to appear.¹⁵

Unfortunately for clarity, although fortunately for opportunity, few who brandished the slogan, whether pro or con, tried to articulate more fully than De Forest had what a GAN might be. It was less “a theory” than “an obsession” or “mania.”¹⁶ At first sight, the plethora of critical assertions makes the GAN look rather like the allegorical figure of Giant Transcendentalist in Hawthorne’s tale “The Celestial Railroad,” whose chief trait is that nobody can distinguish his features, including himself. What Colson Whitehead’s protagonist (an expert on brand naming) in Apex Hides the Hurt wittily thinks about “America” itself holds for the GAN with even greater force: it feels like “one of those balloon names,” full of hot air, surely destined to pop some day, yet somehow miraculously “holding together.”¹⁷ But the vagueness with which it was bandied about during its early years at least should come as no surprise given that Anglo-American fiction criticism was still in its precritical infancy, “with no air of having a theory,” as Henry James declared, as if “a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding,” and “our only business with it could be to swallow it.”¹⁸ Wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One. The Unkillable Dream
• Part Two. Script One: Made Classic by Retelling
• Part Three. Script Two: Aspiration in America
• Part Four. Script Three: Romancing the Divides
• Part Five. Script Four: Improbable Communities
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index