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The Great American Novel -- my pick
So what qualities must The Great American Novel have?...
1. It must reward successive rereadings and get better each time.
2. It must be canonical and grip the imagination.
3. It must be linked to American history and letters in some essential way.
4. It must span the intellectual, the emotional, the religious, and the metaphysical.
5. It must be fun. You must be sad when the book is over, and wish it had been longer than it was.
6. It must be about a large white whale and have numerous Biblical allusions.
That leaves us with Moby Dick at the top.
The most indicative chapter for the book's strangeness is "A Squeeze of the Hand." Has anyone done a better literary treatment of a homosexual ******-****, much less when writing about whale spermaceti? Excerpt:
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, - literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, - Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Here comes the best part:
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Get the picture? But do read the whole (short) chapter at the link, just in case you are confused about the context...
The method of the novel, if you can call it one, is madness. It is a collage of impressions, tales, facts about whaling, erotic interludes, and observations about social science. Occasionally the plot resurfaces but this can involve less rather than more tension. Moby Dick also can be read as pure commentary on the Bible or Shakespeare. Melville knew who his competitors were.
I've talked to many people who find the book offputting. Delve right in and embrace the strangeness. Take the ostensible masculinity and interpret it, and all the other foibles, as over-the-top. Dig out the implicit theology. Think of it as a new literary model. And best of all, read only one short chapter a day.
Tomorrow you get the near runners-up. Do feel free to offer your first place picks in the comments.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 10, 2006 at 07:21 AM in Books | Permalink
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Comments
Huckleberry Finn.
I'm sure it'll make your runners up list.
Posted by: Brock at Feb 10, 2006 7:55:41 AM
Tyler to fill all 6 criterion, I have to choose two books. For 1-5
I pick "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. To get #6 I add
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/clinton/images/tradecvr.gif
Posted by: Kevin at Feb 10, 2006 8:15:21 AM
I second Huckleberry Finn.
If I were agreeing to Tyler's criteria, I would pick the Old Man and the Sea, which offers a big fish as well.
Posted by: DK at Feb 10, 2006 8:18:33 AM
Moby Dick is my first pick also. As it is for a lot of people.
Posted by: John P. at Feb 10, 2006 8:31:37 AM
James Woods has a fascinating review of Andrew Delbanco's new book on Melville in the last december issue of the New Republic. 12/26. In one characteristically insighful passage he writes:
Again and again, Melville stretches his similes and metaphors, risks their formal success, pushes them to the rim of the plausible, so that rather than simply asserting that x is like y, he seems often to be floating a hypothesis: suppose that x were seen as y.
Check it out....Of course, on the more banal side, we also have Melville to thank for giving Starbucks its name.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Feb 10, 2006 8:45:05 AM
Is there really any question about whether you're right about this? I think not.
Posted by: Zac at Feb 10, 2006 9:22:59 AM
Moby Dick is the obvious choice and one that gets little argument. My 10th grade English teacher (he was one of the greats) held it as his bible. When a hapless classmate tore out a page in class to blow his nose, we all feared for the boy's life.
But your earlier post asked for darkhorse candidates which Melville's opus certainly is not.
Posted by: Martin at Feb 10, 2006 10:07:37 AM
Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton.
Posted by: Tom Anger at Feb 10, 2006 10:25:01 AM
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Posted by: anonymous at Feb 10, 2006 10:29:52 AM
Ugh. Gravity's Rainbow. I've always seen this as a parody of the English major's view of the world.
Q: What is the greater moral, intellectual, and social significance of the V-2 missile, which travels faster than sound and thus explodes before the target is aware of its arrival?
A: If it was a girl, some guy would want to **** it.
Posted by: Zach at Feb 10, 2006 10:43:08 AM
Sadly, "The Adventures of Augie March" doesn't have a white whale. But it does have some satisfyingly bizarre eagle-training.
Moby Dick, for all its many virtues, is not an easy read. And at the risk of being insufficiently elitist, that matters. Should the Great American Novel be one with the greatest impact on the most people? In that case To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, or Gatsby are more likely, simply by ease of use.
Melville was a genius (and I love Typee, too), but can something be the Great American Novel if most Americans can't be bothered to read it? And accuse them of being lumpen Xbox players if you like, but there is a very large book-buying and book-reading population. (Thanks, Oprah.)
Books and plays help to teach us how to live-- that's where the impact is. So if not many people can/will get the lessons from it, it hurts its case as Great American Novel significantly.
Posted by: Adrian in Omaha at Feb 10, 2006 11:04:11 AM
The Sun Also Rises
Posted by: josh at Feb 10, 2006 11:34:56 AM
Gravity's Rainbow gets a bad rap because so many people are SO pretentious about it. It's a really FUNNY book though, and it fits all of the criteria, except for #6.
I would vote for GR, but I wouldn't complain about Moby Dick's inevitable victory.
Posted by: The One True Josh at Feb 10, 2006 11:50:06 AM
I had read Moby Dick twice. In the fall of 2001, the following paragraph began to replay itself in my mind:
==============================
And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand program of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."
*****
"Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael."
*****
"Bloody Battle in Afghanistan."
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
=======================================
I re-read it again.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at Feb 10, 2006 11:54:28 AM
There hasn't been one that deserves the title, and there probably never will be.
Posted by: Tom at Feb 10, 2006 12:27:09 PM
Rabbit?
Posted by: dominic at Feb 10, 2006 12:28:31 PM
Another vote for Infinite Jest. Aside from #6, it fulfills the requirements with flying colors. Gravity's Rainbow horribly fails #5, for me -- I like to secretly tell myself that Wallace had the same reaction to the end of GR that I did and designed IJ, with its circular never-quite-reach-the-end conclusion, to address it.
Posted by: Mike at Feb 10, 2006 12:52:37 PM
Moby Dick. Yes. Among the (relatively few) contenders that I've read, yes it's at the top.
Obligatory passages:
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."
And from "Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales":
==============================
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens."
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
==============================
"burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman" ... it kills me every time.
Posted by: weichi at Feb 10, 2006 1:23:22 PM
If only Ahab had access to a Nozick:
nozick, n. (from nostrum + physick) Political snake oil, a patent medicine, esp. a cathartic or purgative. "Waste not logick, not yet strong physick, on the Leviathan; serve it nozick, and stand back." - Hobbes.
From the philosophical lexicon.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Feb 10, 2006 2:02:05 PM
um. what does "******-****" mean?
will
Posted by: will at Feb 10, 2006 2:02:43 PM
I read Infinite Jest and loved it, but doesn't it fail the first clause of #2? It's not canonical, and I think it has a very small chance of ever acquiring that status.
I go back and forth between Moby Dick and Gatsby, occasionally thinking Gatsby is too narrow in scope, until I reread it and realize it's not. Ask me again in 20 years, though, and Blood Meridian may have overtaken them both. It clearly meets criteria 1-5 and the second clause of 6. It also arguably meets the large white whale clause, since many critics have drawn parallels between the giant albino Judge and Ahab and/or the Whale. Finally, I was struck the last time I read it by how applicable its themes are to our involvement in Central Asia, and I think that is an essential quality of a classic work of literature/the GAN--it should always remain relevant even as the world changes.
Posted by: halleck23 at Feb 10, 2006 2:11:17 PM
I'll take Huck Finn over Moby Dick in the 19th century.
Ada from your earlier post is a brilliant example, but
just too off for Great American Novel.
Early 20th century, no one has mentioned Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury.
And for more recently, I'll take Gravity's Rainbow,
despite its oddities.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Feb 10, 2006 2:34:01 PM
Moby Dick is a bad pick. (No pun intended.) Its a far too difficult read to be a great book.
A great book should work on several levels. Ie when you read it the first time you read it for the plot. Accordingly the plot should be understandable and interesting. Then when you reread it you should discover the other layers.
Take Shakespeare as an example. You can read his works in mindless way and get great satisfaction from the plot and the language. But you can also read it in a thoughtful way, looking for hidden symbols and references and you discover something new every time you do this. Moby Dick fails to be interesting the first time when you read the book for its plot.
Anyway the interesting question is of course not finding the good books but the bad ones. To exclude Serbian pornographic novels and the like, the question should be the following: "Which literay work, that is commonly considered a classic, is the worst you have read?" Maybe your next blogging subject, professor?
Posted by: Johan Richter at Feb 10, 2006 5:26:28 PM
I would Second Sound and the Fury or Perhaps Absolom Absolom (SP?). Afterall what better line can you have then "I don't hate it, I don't hate it." Or paraphrasing from memory, "Because they [Southerners] had not built their economy upon the rock of moreal rectitude but instead upon the shifiting sands of opportunism..."
Posted by: Michael at Feb 10, 2006 5:31:58 PM
Grapes of Wrath.
Posted by: Seth at Feb 10, 2006 6:21:05 PM
