Why not do a group read of THE great American novel? Moby-Dick?

[John Bailey]

Why is Moby-Dick a Great American Novel? Honest question. I've never
understood it as a novel that grapples with the Americanness of
America the way so many other novels try to. The way M&D does, or so
many of the others you list do. Moby-D is a frickin' GREAT novel
written by an American. If I were one for leaderboards, I'd call it
one of the greatest books ever written. But it's about the human
condition as a crisis between epistemologies and ontologies, not what
it means to be American, right?  But, not being an American, I may be
missing something.

And while I'd love a group read, we got about a quarter of the way
through the last novel written by the feller we're all subscribed here
for. The IV read at least managed to limp across the finish line; the
AtD was a long march that lost many good soldiers by the way. None of
this is a reflection on the books, just on the world of digital
disengagement in which the Pynchon List is a Web 1.0 relic. We've been
offered too many mindless pleasures to engage in the kind of deep and
ongoing group read these volumes merit.

Prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong.

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 9:36 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Traditionally, though, the typical GAN candidate requires heft, range,
> verisimilitude, and--lest we forget--popularity. While beautifully
> written and constructed, both William Gaddis's demanding The
> Recognitions and Peter Matthiessen's Faulknerian Shadow Country have
> failed to drum up a widespread readership. Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
> Dixon is, by most measures, a better attempt at a GAN than Gravity's
> Rainbow, but the latter boasts a hundred times as many fans.
> Similarly, works on the margin, no matter how fine or insightful about
> American life, seldom make the grade. One could argue strong cases for
> the GANship of John Crowley's Little, Big; John Sladek's Roderick, or,
> The Education of a Young Machine; Thomas Berger's Little Big Man; or,
> with just a slight stretch, Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My
> Lovely--but, even now, they all remain tainted with the dread word
> "genre." Yet if Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind can be proposed
> for GAN honors, why not Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? Not that I'm doing
> so, by the way.
>
> http://www.vqronline.org/big-read-can-single-book-sum-nation
>
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 7:35 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Only problem is with the idea of the great American novel, a concept
>> that has, if nothing else, made for pulp and grist to/for/from the
>> mill, but it's difficult to dismiss Melville's great white whale as
>> candidate, and for Pynchon fans, in the world of great books,
>> Moby-Dick or The Whale is a great influence. The common whiteness
>> theme alone needs further development, and, as Melville's monstrosity
>> gained critical mass when the excesses of market capitalism capsized
>> the nation and the world's economy, it's seem a revisiting Melville
>> now makes much ado of something, though what that something is has yet
>> to be defined, though some will name it and paint it in clear shades
>> of blackness, it seems so  like the mysterious whale itself that
>> smashes down on the masts of industry and greed, then suck all down in
>> a Vortex to the bottomless perdition where God's foot weaves the
>> tapestry, the mantle of Varo's Earth.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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