What the hell is 'The Great American Novel?'

A logical place to start as any is 'what is a Great American Novel'? I'll start by saying I am in search of a Great American Novel not The. It would seem GANs are seen as singular, the definitive representation of their time. Population growth is accelerating, and now with blogging everyone can be a writer. There is a whole lot of people. The world is a seemingly bigger place then it used to be, so to expect one book of thousands to be the GAN of our time seems silly.

Furthermore, I can't help but think the perspective of 'the great' is rolling over to the Great Man theory of history. The theory suggests history is the story of great human after great human and what those humans have done to change the world. The counter argument is that man is shaped by his society, and ultimately man would not exist without it. While not denying the influence of individual actors, I am wont to believe that history is a collective tale.

Anywho, A good place to start as any would be to define my parameters of a GAN. I am going to suggest the revolutionary thesis that it should be great, american and novel. I am using these words in a broad sense.

1. Great: For now I will put aside the notion of great as qualitative. The Great in GAN explicitly refers to this sense of the word, but the quantitative definition of great better serves my purposes. The GAN should be great in scope. It could be a microcosm of American experience, but ultimately should reflect our larger whole. In some way it should be an encapsulation of our time. Here are some features of current day America/Earth I am hoping to find discussed in a beautiful, revolutionary manner:

-The economy. Y'know, unemployment, the financial crisis, all that.
-The burgeoning revolutionary spirit. What I always found interesting about the Occupy movement was that it actually exists, that there are some people are showing outspoken dissent. I think this feeling is growing world-wide. See: Greece riots, Middle-Eastern revolutions, etc.
-Technology and its implications. This means the internet (Youtube, Google), smart-phones, social media, video games, all of it.
-Late/post/whatever Capitalism. We've been doing this capitalist thing for a while and it only seems to be furthering. Advertising is getting into everything. There are ads everywhere. I am waiting for the day that there are ads in videogame loading screens.
-The apocalypse as predicted by the scientists, Christians, Mayans and others.

2. American: The novel has to be American. The topic, place or theme should be explicitly related to the USA. One can write about alienation, but ultimately it should be about American alienation. Does the writer need to be American though? I don't necessarily thing so. As globalization increases it seems more and more legitimate that the writer of a GAN could be unamerican. What if they have never been to America and it is only a hypothesis of what it is like? A critique? What if the novel doesn't take place in America but regardless is explicitly about America? Perhaps I am being a bit open about the whole thing, but as far as I see this whole GAN debacle is up in the air.
3. Novel: There should be something explicitly new about it. Be it style, genesis, content, ideas, or formatting it needs to be at least a bit of a game changer. Break post-modernism to pieces, make a newer sentence, redefine the definition of prose, beautifully express the current human condition, any of these things.

The ever reliable Wikipedia basically states it should be an accurate zeitgeist of the times. It goes on to say that though the term is singular, the book that is the GAN is constantly changing.

The provided list is as follows:

19th century

• 1851: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
• 1884: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

20th century

• 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• 1936: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
• 1938: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy
• 1939: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
• 1951: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• 1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
• 1953: Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March
• 1955: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
• 1960: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
• 1973: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
• 1975: William Gaddis's J R^[17]
• 1985: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
• 1987: Toni Morrison's Beloved
• 1997: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

21st century

• 2010: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
  
  In my research I stumbled upon a fellow blogger taking on the respectable pursuit of reading all these books.
  
  I'm going to peruse the internet, compile some lists, and get back to you all. Additionally, I plan to investigate criticism, and contemporary candidates for a GAN. My hope is to split this 50/50 between old and new.
  
  What are some additional candidates you might add to this list? 

The Great American Novel huh?

A Preface: Unfortunately (?), my career as a meta-blogger has come to an end. It seems pressing and necessary to find Great American Novels (GANs) in today's time. Literature is in a state of confusion. We may just be in the age of post-post-modernism, people's novel reading is limited to airplane novels and pop-fiction, and indeed the physical novel is becoming a relic of sorts. Interestingly people still read (see: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games), but they do not read literature.

My mission is to review those books already established as GANs, and those that have the potential to be such. In addition, I plan to contemplate what it means to be a GAN, and toss out some ideas for forms it could take. I wonder if it is possible for a book that is actual literature, that actually has the qualifications of a GAN to be popular today. I would imagine it would need immediate accessibility to disguise its vile literary intentions. People's attention spans are growing shorter. It is rare to find someone who has the patience to let a book have its say.

An idea: An idea I had was a book like Hemingway's In Our Time: a collection of short stories ultimately connected by the cross-section of the post WW1 world they all provide. Perhaps we could have In Our Time. There is something to be said for rehashing an idea. I don't know if that is something bad or good but there is definitely something to be said.

A note: I find the acronym GAN appropriately silly for a topic as serious as this.

What do you think? Does the next Great American Novel need to masquerade as pop-fiction? Is there room for literature to be reborn yet? Is there anyway to stop (in my eyes) the perpetual cheapening of culture?

The Currency of Ideas?

I begin this blog because as a writer an outlet to express my ideas is, naturally, helpful. My issue is I have many ideas, and for a 'mainstream' blog I don't quite have something worked out. What better place to start then at a completely silly meta-blog about my pursuit of something to blog about.

I started reading a book titled 'The Post-Modern Aura' today. It is making me contemplate the nature of ideas and culture, their value, etc.

The author points out that with the advent of Modernism and Post-Modernism we feel 'freed from our limitations', that art does not need to be a social reflection but can foremost be a thing unto itself without restraint. History plainly demonstrates that greatness has already been created in our previous 'limits', and furthermore we may be overestimating ourselves if we thing that no limitations means better art. Without parameters, where do we start? If everything is legitimate, then nothing is illegitimate. If there is no reference point of what is 'not', how is there even such a thing as legitimacy? I suppose we are left solely with qualifiers of good and bad.

In the modern age, ideas are abundant. In fact they're in excess and we are still short on solutions. Nowadays any position you can take seems shaky: someone has probably written an excellent researched and well thought-out rebuttal of any stance you may take...and likewise there is a rebuttal to that rebuttal. I can't believe something based solely on faith that it is right. So what am I left with? I suppose I accept an idea temporarily, until proven wrong. As I ponder how to deepen my own life philosophy (a kind of pseudo existentialism) I realize the alternatives are infinite.

Anyway, with a blog the possibilities are also endless. I can write about my life which is seemingly trite. Certainly I have ideas of the world, but to express them in a manner interesting to anybody? I don't even know if their is something inherently interesting in them by themselves. I suppose something trite can seemingly be made into something captivating. It has certainly been done.

I have been reckoning lately that the 'next great American novel' would be something timely. To my knowledge no one has written anything with ground-breaking style and selection about this economic downturn, the fervently expanding age of information we are in, political confusion, hipsters (and their simultaneous cheapening and reverence of culture), Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other corporation that has managed to penetrate or day-to-day lives. I think people of this generation, maybe roughly now 22-35, are in a prime position to be this author. I chiefly suggest this because of the advent of the internet and social media.

The internet has changed the world. Everyone is part of one network now. The aforementioned age range  grew up in a world without the internet, a world with comically crappy internet, a world with beepers, a world with no-texting phones, a world with no smart phones, no MySpace, no auto-tune...and now we have today. A kid who had the internet in his household since age 5 likely didn't quite get the chance to experience the feeling of internetless fully (I'm sure there is a yet undiscovered neologism for this). Those older than my 23 years of age grew up without these things, but at their introduction were young enough to comfortably integrate them into their lives.

Once we start getting older than mid-30s there is a generation gap. Those are people who are part of a different time. If they were to evaluate our society through fiction or otherwise it would by necessity be partially removed. While entirely fascinating, it is not quite the looking glass people need to see through (it could be).

I think the foggy memory of the 'old times' experienced in childhood is more potent. That is, after all, when we were pure, and God knows that this technology has been corrupting. People learn about sex for the first time from the internet nowadays, not from their parents, or experience. They learn about it rather graphically I might add. A kid can go on Xbox Live and be called non-nonsensical amalgamations of bigotry simply because fellow players heard the high frequency of his voice. I am sure as kids become more savvy, parental controls will become less effective. For example all one has to do is go to the options of their browser to turn it off (I think). My 3 year old niece knows how to use an iPad. Granted they're more intuitive than the traditional computer, but that is the way things are going. Even my 1 1/2 year old niece is starting to figure it out.

I once saw something startling. I was on the LIRR, and as we drove parallel to a train going the opposite direction I made it a point to observe the number of tablets, smart phones and books I saw. It was astonishing. A good 65% of people were on some sort of device, and a rather small percentage had books.

My thoughts are jumping this way and that, and frankly, I am unconsciously stylistically limiting myself because this is a blog that may one day be visible by others. Hopefully with enough writing this may be fixed.