The Great British Novel

[RiverNotch]

I think of it as a bit like "being cool".  Every school has the "cool kids" who look, dress and act in predictable, prescribed ways. They are cool because consensus says that's what cool is.

For the most part, those cool kids peak in high school, when they're living the stereotype that was created for them before they were born.  The Great American Novel might well have been written last week, but we won't know it until enough university professors have read it, applied the filter of hindsight, and determined that it did in fact capture the zeitgeist.  Then the New York Times will feel confident that it can proclaim it to be excellent, and all the critics will pick it over until there's nothing left to do but read it to see what everyone's talking about and compare your reading experience with what you were told to feel.

I probably should have entered the discussion talking about how, as far as I know, the Philippines doesn't have the concept of the "Great Filipino X", or even a national epic. We have two national novels, sure, in the form of Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, but the one thing that really pulls them away from the former concepts is that they can't be used to aggrandize the supremacy of our native culture, considering they were both written in Spanish. The challenges to the supremacy of Rizal more or less focus on the political implications of celebrating a supposedly feckless bourgeois pro-colonial hundred-year-old heresiarch, rather than its aesthetic merits, which most folks who have read it in translation agree is fairly up there, while those who have read it in its original language (at least according to what I've heard) complain it's almost substandard. I suppose, from this experience, I'd say "the Great American Novel" is what Americans and America-watchers say it is (which, in the case of not just America, but most everywhere else, corresponds with a guiltless high sales output), coupled with a proper examination of just how influential it is to later American and America-watching authors; and with "Novel" being less about how the genre's any better or more American than Poetry, than how Novels have simply taken over Drama and Poetry as the dominant literary genre, with America (and, considering my discussion of Rizal, the Philippines) having a history that can only reach so far.

In fact, considering just how young the actual concept of "nation" is, and how our country doesn't quite care about its national x's the way Americans, Russians, and Brits, the great Imperial powers that they are, seem to care about their novelists, novelists/Pushkins, and Shakespeares/Miltons, respectively (keeping in mind that Russia, although old as balls, entered the whole world domination game at around the same time America was born), it'd probably be even more prudent for me to lean into the idea of this whole "national epic" and "Great American Novel" business as cultural propaganda, as if that's a point that's anything new or helpful. I think perhaps a more fruitful discussion would do away with such silly national and genre distinctions, and just discuss what one would consider as "canonical", which is a great foundation for discussing the rather juicy book I'm currently reading, titled "The Western Canon"...

PS I'm pretty sure the Bible is not kind on any human community, even the Church, considering St. Paul and St. John's constant polemics -- or, considering those same polemics, it's kind to every sinner's community equally. I'm also pretty sure that, as a literary work, it's unfair to consider the Bible as one work, its authorship is so vast (or, if one subscribes to the theory that it did not pass through human hands, (notwithstanding how the New Testament writers more often than not quoted the Septuagint rather than the Jewish manuscripts of their time, which according to the evidence of the Vulgate and the Dead Sea Scrolls, among others, is as not-entirely-identical as the Septuagint is to the manuscripts modern translators often work with) its authorship is comparable to the rest of the created world, which would push a very unfair burden on the works this discussion considers) and its style so varied, not to mention how even its own self considers itself as a collection of books rather than one gigantic book (and here I cite the discovery of the books of the Law in Chronicles, or even the etymology of the most common term for it). But perhaps you're talking about something else -- although War and Peace is only a couple of hundred years old or so.