Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

[alice wellintown]

Now, mixing in the mix here, that chapter in AGTD that begins in the hard
cover on p 418, with the crew and that Invisible Trespass of narrative that
did not define, the passage of the day, where Pynchon writes like a manic
Hamlet, punning away on to the thin ice of the day ay ay ay ay...dare I say
Shakespeare, so soon or later, and with P it was quite young that he
started, ambitiously and foolishly playing with Shakespeare's Magic,
Shakespeare pressing in on the aging ceiling wax, as with Melville's
greatest speeches and narrative digressions, when Ahab, for example, morphs
into Lear and Milton's Satan, a captain of Capitalism on the iron rails of
Robber Barron Business and forges the chains that Marley holds up to
Scrooge, the chains of the Cross, the gallows...so too our Mighty P now, an
old man with drying voice, has Eliot buries where the Dogs dig, and turns
to Shakesepeare, but turn us back now to the New York Warf and Woof, there,
p397, is New York's central park, a Strret Arab with a stiff hat and
tattoos. Notice that EAR! The lad has tongue that puts in fricatives at the
end of the swah so common to the Gilander like P, so listen to his sonding
like Art Carney, but here, his boy is a live, and contrasted with the
stilted phoney theater boyz in balloon & Co.

So we here NYC here. Don't we? And what NYC do we here?


On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 8:51 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> The idea of a "Great American Novel" or "the Great American Novel" is
> useful, even if it serves an argument that no such novel exists or has ever
> existed or can ever exist, that is, a Platonic Ideal or,
> anti-Platonic...anti-Cannonical...etc...argument. To dispense with it is to
> acknowledge that it needs dispensing with and this might follow the common
> approach of tracing its origins to an essay by De Forest, and then
> examining how the Americans, writing in a language that was around long
> before they were, one that is named after their Mother oppressor, and so
> on...so American novel and the Spirit of forming a novel, American voice
> and theme and character and plot and so on, distinct from and equal to, if
> not, as with all other things, greater than the fading Empire's
> productions, past present and future. The novel that holds in its womb and
> loins the Zeitgeist, as surely GG does more than any other great work
> of the period, is yet another way of defining the phrase, and on this and
> on many other counts, one can certainly argue convincingly, given academic
> generosity, that Fitzgerald's little book is a Great American Novel or,
> novella, at least.
>
> It has been argued that GR or M&D are Great American novels, but I would
> have to go with AGTD, were I too argue that P has written one. Though V.
> and GR are, in many respects, more like Moby-Dick, and Confidence Man, two
> candidates for the accolade, AGTD has Twain in the mix, and all manner of
> other things that make it a far better Graet American Novel than GR or M&D.
>
>
> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 1:56 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I thought it was How to Make Love like a Porn Star
>>
>>
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/01/is-great-gatsby-great-american-novel
>> >>
>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#Reception
>> >>
>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>
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