Interview with Lawrence Buell 1

How do you see the relationship between GATGAN and American
literature as a transnational whole?
The relation is double-sided. My original working subtitle for the book,
later dropped at the request of the publisher as sounding too pedantic,
begins to suggest that broader conception: “Rethinking National Nar-
rative for a Post-National Age.” On the one hand, the GAN as this very
impressionistic phrase/concept has been used during its 150-year exist-
ence must be understood as referring to a complementary set of recur-
ring “scripts” for representing the distinctive character of U. S. national
experience. On the other hand, some although not all of these scripts
were either formatively influenced by or developed in coordination with
other literatures of the world, especially in the first instance Europhone
literature. To take the most outstanding example: my second script,
what I call the “up-from” narrative that follows the career of a social-
ly representative protagonists who rises or seeks to rise from obscurity
to prominence, is an Americanized variant of the European Bildungs-
roman tradition that has developed as much in conversation with it as
from its “native” roots in the so-called American Dream myth.

Would you agree with those critics who see this book as a com-
parativist project?
Yes definitely. To be sure, I make no attempt to give equal time to any
other national literature or to generalize more than intermittently
about world literature and the place of U. S. literary history therein. Yet
I operate throughout from the assumption that U. S. literary history is
inseparable from the rest of world literature, and that even its points of
distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy cannot be fully understood except by
comparison with other national literary histories. Only through such
research, for example, was I able to discover the combination of family
resemblances between the GAN idea and certain other postcoloni-
al literatures, as well as the near-uniqueness of the specific GAN idea
among all national literary histories of the world, except for Australia.
Later on, when discussing regionalism(s) as an important dimension
of U. S. literature history, I benefitted from awareness of comparable
subnational movements in Europe and the English-speaking world at
large, and beyond that the history of debates within other national lit-
erary cultures concerning the relative claims of regionalism vs. “main-
stream” writing as definers of national imaginaries. Finally and most
importantly, both the hybrid-syncretic stylistic makeup of many GAN
contenders and the investment of many of them in such transnation-
al phenomena as immigration and globalization made it necessary to
conceive of most if not all of my novels as being about far more—both
in subject and in texture—than US-ness. Both Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter and Toni Morrison’s Beloved for example, demand to be read as
diasporic narratives, of sharply different kinds.

In that sense, is history a key to the dynamics of national literature
and national identity itself?
Yes indeed. Most obviously this is so by reason of history’s self-con-
scious presence as a driver of the narrative project, as in Hawthorne
and Morrison, not to mention several other among my featured novels:
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Dos
Passos’ U.S.A. to name just three examples. I did not set out expecting
that such a large number of the leading GAN candidates would be his-
torical fictions, but it makes perfect sense, insofar as fictions or fables
of history are so obvious a recourse for literary projects that seem to
represent, analyze, explain national experience. But history potentially
figures no less importantly in national literature when it is shown to be
repressed or distorted or misconstrued, as again in the early twentieth
century of Faulkner’s imagined white south, or in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby, or in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Indeed, as these
last three examples suggest, although “reinvention of tradition” (in the
luminous phrase of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger) is common
to all national ideologies, the will to repress or reinvent the past may
be especially salient — and at worst especially toxic — in U. S. culture.
“American innocence” has, for good reason, become a byword for will-
ful blindness to the continuing force exerted by precedent and custom-
ary social practice on life in the present.

How else can GAN be redefined?
This question needs to be reframed more specifically in order for me to
give you a substantive answer.

Which issues in the history of American literature determined
most of all your division into four main types of potential GANT?
I don’t pretend to be able to provide a complete list. Two that were es-
pecially influential for me were the two canon shakeups that occurred
during the twentieth century: first, the winnowing of the U. S. liter-
ary canon down to a limited number of super-texts by the so-called
New Critics in the mid-1900s and then (even more importantly) the
late century canon wars instigated by advocates for bodies of literature
by women and/or nonwhite authors that the New Critics had banished
or overlooked. This one-two sequence of controversies, the latter of
which is still playing its way through, created a dichotomy between
“mainstream” and “minority” literature that increasingly dissatisfied
me both as scholar and as teacher. My second and especially my third
script (“the romance of the divides” as I call it, meaning divides both of
region and of race or ethnicity) attempt to mediate such false dichotom-
izing by arguing that although both these scripts originate in a literary
scene dominated by white writers, they have proven highly amenable
over time for minority fiction. Indeed, one of the big GAN story-lines
during the twentieth century is that by century’s end writers from the
ethnoracial margins had become to a large extent the definers of the
national literary “mainstream.”

Then too, another consideration behind my first script in particular was
the historical durability of a particular novel—its after-life as a text that
gets retold, recast, elaborated, simplified, or in whatever sense perpetu-
ated so that it enters, seemingly for good, the bloodstream of American
culture as a variously-understood key to its meaning. The earliest four
examples I discuss at length are cases in point: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The
Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn.

Which most outstanding cannonical questions has this division raised?
The biggest question has to do with the relation between “canon” and
“GAN.” The GAN as a concept, or as a tradition of critical talk, is dis-
tinctly sub-canonical, in the sense that most credentialed critics have
avoided it as a kind of amateurish enthusiasm, a promotional hype, or
(oppositely) as a kind of standing joke that indeed U. S. fiction writers
have bandied about for decades. (My introduction cites the case of the
novelist-father of one of my students who had the practice of excusing
himself from the family dinner table by saying “I’ve got to get back to
writing the great American novel.”) So the durability of the GAN dream
is more a demotic or “grassroots” phenomenon than it is a top-down,
critical-establishment-driven phenomenon. And yet many if not all the
serious contenders have been novels that most academics would consid-
er canonical today, or were so considered in a former time. Generaliz-
ing more broadly, the two domains of GAN and (novelistic) canon are
(1) overlapping categories; (2) self-evidently by no means coextensive (eg
Melville’s Billy Budd and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula are
all clearly canonical, but also clearly not GANs); and (3) sharply differ-
ent however with regard to the kind of cultural capital to which they lay
claim. “Canon” is traditionally and still today the more “elite” category,
implying for example a degree of stylistic control and refinement not
necessarily found (or even expected) in leading GAN contenders gener-
ally, as evidenced for example by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Theo-
dore Dreiser’s American Tragedy. On the other hand, to introduce a
further complexity, it’s also true — counter-intuitive though it may seem
— that the aesthetics of difficulty, which offhand might seem to exclude
a novel from claims to GAN, in some cases hasn’t proven a barrier at all.
Consider Moby-Dick, for example. It’s an extremely challenging text, yet
it’s on just about everyone’s top-five list of GAN candidates.
_______________
1) Interview was done on the occasion of publication of a very significant
theoretical study on American novel: Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the
Great American Novel, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. He is
Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, and an
outstanding author of a few books of criticism on Ecocriticism, American
Romanticism, and American Literature and Culture.