Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[jd]

Mal, it's just that literary taste is relative... a lot of people
think Pynchon sucks because GR isn't straightforward enough (for
example a few people I tried to get to read the book)...  I think
they're a little closed-minded but I can't really condemn them for
having what I consider bad taste.

Now, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, for example, I can make an
explicit statement about - it's not non-fiction (this was a book that
was discussed in a class of mine, in which I was told I was intolerant
of asian culture because I refused to consider it non-fiction, which
is partially where my touchiness on this sort of subject comes from).
For those who haven't read it, it's a memoir that consists partially
of fantasy and partially of long-ago conversations with second-hand
sources... which I don't think can be considered non-fiction (though
it won an award for best non-fiction of the year when it came out) -
like simply a novel that spoke of asian (I believe Chinese, if I
remember correctly, just to not be quite so broad) culture wasn't good
enough, and she had to qualify it by claiming it as non-fiction.  It
was a class in which I was the only guy and pretty much everyone
disagreed with me, but it doesn't make me feel so bad since one of the
lines someone in the class wrote about the book was something like
"Maxine Hong Kingston's writing haunts me and makes me want to puke
and the more I want to puke the more I'm convinced of her talent",
though with many mis-spellings and improper grammer (and she wasn't
foreign).

On 5/23/06, jbor at bigpond.com <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> On 24/05/2006, at 7:58 AM, MalignD at aol.com wrote:
>
> > << And those words were? We still don't know, because the report we
> > got  was
> > that Toni Morrison (an African American women) complained that the
> > Venus de
> > Milo was a misogynist work while labouring under the mistaken  belief
> > that it
> > was created without arms. You found it "a funny story"  >>
> >
> > If it's true, and I have no idea regarding its truth, it is a funny
> > story
> > about Toni Morrision.  But not therefore about African American Woman.
> >  Isn't
> > equating one with the other -- individual with group -- a little ...
> > racist?
> > Sexist?
>
> Sure it'd be funny story if it were accurate. But if it isn't accurate,
> which seems likely enough, then how come it's getting the mileage? I
> mean, it does make her seem ridiculous. That was what it was intended
> to do, isn't it?
>
> Most complainants about Morrison and her work in this thread have been
> careful to say that they'd say the same if it were anyone, Bono or an
> albino on steroids, for example. I'm not saying that they wouldn't.
> However, because Morrison's work is explicitly about "correcting the
> record", as you yourself note, then it's important that we're clear
> about which "record" it is that she's trying to correct.
>
> The comment (not yours, note) that "there's a percentage of those who
> get caught up with the fact that she's black and female and fail to
> make an honest judgement based on her written text alone" runs both
> ways.
>
> best
>
>