Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[Paul Mackin]

A. O. Scott thinks he knows what's going on (in tomorrow's NY Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html? 
pagewanted=all

Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel  
has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any  
of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less  
than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college  
literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is  
commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in  
writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American  
literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead  
white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. When the  
book first began to be assigned in college classrooms, during an  
earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase of the culture wars, its  
inclusion on syllabuses was taken, by partisans and opponents alike,  
as a radical gesture. (The conservative canard one heard in those  
days was that left-wing professors were casting aside Shakespeare in  
favor of Morrison.) But the political rhetoric of the time obscured  
the essential conservatism of the novel, which aimed not to displace  
or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some  
extent correct them.

It is worth remarking that the winner of the 1965 Book Week poll,  
Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," arose from a similar impulse to  
bring the historical experience of black Americans, and the  
expressive traditions this experience had produced, into the  
mainstream of American literature. Or, rather, to reveal that it had  
been there all along, and that race, far from being a special or  
marginal concern, was a central facet of the American story. On the  
evidence of Ellison's and Morrison's work, it is also a part of the  
story that defies the tenets of realism, or at least demands that  
they be combined with elements of allegory, folk tale, Gothic and  
romance.

The American masterpieces of the mid-19th century - "Moby-Dick," "The  
Scarlet Letter," the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, for that matter,  
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" - were compounded of precisely these elements,  
and nowadays it seems almost impossible to write about that period  
without crossing into the realm of the supernatural, or at least the  
self-consciously mythic. This is surely what ties "Beloved" to "Blood  
Meridian." Both novels treat primordial situations of American  
violence - slavery and its aftermath in one case, the conquest of the  
Southwestern frontier in the other - in compressed, lyrical language  
that rises at times to archaic, epic strangeness. Some of their power  
- and much of their originality - arises from the feeling that they  
are uncovering ancient tales, rendering scraps of a buried oral  
tradition in literary form.





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