American Literary History Rescripted

Just shy of a hundred years ago, the critic Van Wyck Brooks called on Americans to “discover, invent a usable past”: to unearth or, if necessary, create a national literature so as to foster the consciousness of an aesthetic heritage that, Brooks thought, was the prerequisite for sustaining a vibrant culture. As numerous figures over the next fifty years responded (directly or indirectly) to Brooks’ challenge, they devised two traditions simultaneously. The first was the American literary canon; the second was the vocation of the Americanist literary historian. Some of those figures, such as Constance Rourke, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Kazin, and Brooks himself, were primarily public intellectuals; others were specialists more closely affiliated with universities. But even many academics exhibited the sweep that Brooks’ imperative presumed. Representative scholarly studies from the 1940s and ‘50s include Robert Spiller et al.'s Literary History of the United States (1948), Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), and F. O. Matthiessen's magisterial American Renaissance (1941).

Everyone knows what happened thereafter. Ever greater specialization, coupled with the explosion of the canon in the aftermath of the 1960s, opened the way for the salutary elucidation of multiple traditions, but it dimmed the prospect—and, in some quarters, the desirability—of recovering a coherent national literature. By the late twentieth century, theoretically based criticism was flourishing: not only the interpretation of texts but also the interrogation of critical practice itself. Although capacious histories of American literature continued to be produced, the rhetorical question that appears as the first sentence of A New Literary History of America (2009), edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, captures both the audacity and the defensiveness that, by the date of its publication, such an effort entailed. It opens by asking, as if in surprise: “A literary history of America?” The answer the volume offers is, “Yes,” but only if “literary” is made synonymous with “speech” in a multitude of guises. In America, the editors aver, “No tradition has ever ruled; no form has ever been fixed; American history . . . has been a matter of what one could make of it” (p. xxiii). To complicate matters, many recent literary scholars (like their counterparts in history departments) have insisted, in their rejection of American exceptionalism, on treating literature by Americans in terms of its transnational sources and impact.

Now Lawrence Buell, while alert to transnational currents and to depicting what he calls “a pluriverse in motion rather than a unitary conception of Americanness or the history of national fiction” (p. 8), has laudably ventured to participate in the older enterprise of the literary historian. The Dream of the Great American Novel stretches back through Matthiessen and Kazin to Rourke and Brooks in its wide chronological scope, in the primacy it accords texts rather than theory, in its author's impressive mastery of more than two hundred years of American fiction, and in its ambition to “discover, invent” and characterize a set of traditions that a large swath of that fiction has constituted.

Buell's framework is “the great American novel,” or, as Henry James abbreviated it, the GAN. Buell explores not the definitive realization of that concept but, instead, literary works that seem to him to be “contenders” for the designation. In part one, Buell charts the evolution of the GAN idea from the supposition that illuminating the “American soul,” as the novelist John W. DeForest put it (p. 24), required narrative realism, to the conviction—temporarily ascendant among mid-twentieth-century critics—that greatness in American fiction inhered in the symbol-laden romances of Hawthorne and Melville. Toni Morrison and John Updike serve Buell as indications that the phrase remains a useful rubric to describe more recent fictional undertakings.

Buell's strategy from this point on is to assemble the “scripts” that inform the four novelistic traditions out of which, he argues, candidates for GAN status have emerged. That strategy rests on the premise, crucial to Buell's modus operandi throughout the book, that...