Clare Virginia Eby

The worlding of the American novel

The first sentence of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) describes lower Manhattan in the chaotic minutes after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But it could also be read as a description of Falling Man itself, and perhaps also of the contemporary American novel in general. So read, the sentence would suggest that the American novel has recently become more worldly, whether because of 9/11 or in response to larger causes that 9/11 stands in for. This proposition is gently self-congratulatory, hence open to doubt. But there are also reasons for taking it seriously. The street is what most novels take for their subject most of the time. It is by watching society at street level, so to speak, that the novel reader’s sense of identity and relationship has mainly been formed. Most novels do not train our eyes to look very high or very low, or for that matter very far away; they do not encourage us to look at superstructures, or infrastructures, or the structuring force of the world capitalist system. There are notable exceptions – some of them discussed in Cecelia Tichi’s chapter in this volume – but as a rule, worldliness is not natural to the novel. This does not immediately change after 9/11. Like the protagonist in a suddenly darkened street that has been struck from above and from far away, the post-9/11 novel is first of all disoriented. If we can say that, like the street, the novel takes on the attributes of a world, the first meaning of this statement would have to be (this is how I understand Heidegger’s sense of worlding) that the event has created its own unique local surround, a restricted time/space that replaces and cancels out any abstract planetary coordinates. In this sense the worlding of the novel would leave it less worldly rather than more.

Melville and the novel of the sea

The intermingling of fact and fiction characteristic of Herman Melvilles three Polynesian novels was a hallmark of the early American novel. This chapter discusses Melvilles interest in the generic forms and presumptions of sea writing and of popular novels more generally. It refers in some degree to all of his sea writing, including Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. First, the chapter provides a genealogy for Melvilles sea novels whose trajectory does not presume a logical end in that brilliantly experimental work. Then, it also considers the implications of Melvilles frustration of generic expectations in the form of his domestic novel Pierre and riparian novel The Confidence-Man. Typee tests the limits of respectability in various ways, particularly in its critique of Christianizing impulses and Western senses of sexual and bodily propriety. Moby-Dick models a variety of narrative forms, and references to books or other texts proliferate.

Transatlantic currents and the invention of the American novel

Like all histories, the history of the novel has always been written retrospectively, producing in the celebrated work of Ian Watt and Cathy N. Davidson powerful alignments of theories of fiction with the emergence of national narratives. In Watts case, this involved the valorization of a masculine, middle-class individualism that, in The Rise of the Novel , he took to typify the realistic idiom of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Writing some thirty years later, Davidson identified in the early American novel a predominantly female discourse of sentimentalism, whose “distinctive voice” she understood as combating the “demoralizing derision of Anglo-European arbiters of value and good taste,” and as a counternarrative that constituted a resource for “those not included in the established power structures of the early Republic.” Both Watt and Davidson sought to inscribe generic and national types, but it is equally important to acknowledge the inherent instability of both these typological categories throughout the eighteenth century, with formal and generic mutations of the novel being akin to the amorphous, fluctuating nature of national formations. The Derridaean maxim that the “law of genre” is inherently self-contradictory since it establishes norms only for the purpose of violating them thus has a particular historical resonance in the case of the novel, since, as Homer Obed Brown notes, the novel as an “institution” did not begin to be consolidated or canonized until the early nineteenth century.

The nineteenth-century historical novel

In the history of the novel, the historical novel was a breakthrough genre. Until its arrival in the early nineteenth century, political and cultural elites had dismissed the novel as immature and childish, as “mere fiction.” Educators warned that readers would form dangerous illusions about reality by reading novels. The popular success of sentimental novels contributed to a perception of the novel as a primarily female genre. Literary activities by gentry-elites were limited to “respectable” literary forms such as the heroic verse epic, historical writing, the stage tragedy, the essay, or satirical prose forms in which the “Quixotism” of naive novel readers could be exposed to ridicule. These authors were not yet professional writers but gentleman-amateurs who often did not sign their work by name in order to avoid the suspicion of writing for fame. The historical novel eventually changed all that: by shifting its subject to the serious matter of history, the novel gained cultural respectability and successfully countered charges of frivolous irrelevancy; by depicting a cross-section of classes, social groups, and regional characters, the novel redefined itself as a medium of national representation; by skillfully mixing historical references, sketches of local customs and manners, scenes of adventure, family sagas, as well as love stories in which national and personal fate coincided, the historical novel generated a new reading public that comprised both sexes more evenly and broke down the gender division in readership; finally, by focusing on grand topics such as revolutionary wars or key conflicts in a nations history, the novel could be elevated to the rank of a modern epic that depicted the formation of a nation and captured the soul of its people.

Toni Morrison and the post-civil rights African American novel

African American novelists of the 1950s cast long shadows. In addition to Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, worthy writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Owen Dodson, Chester Himes, Mark Kennedy, Paule Marshall, Ann Petry, and J. Saunders Redding produced books that marked a Golden Age. This era was significant not only because nascent black luminaries received fellowships, access to eminent literary publications, and prestigious civic appointments, but also because even among anonymous neophytes, there was an exponential increase in publication. While this movement waxed through the 1950s, it was waning by the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. On one level, the African American novels declining eminence can be attributed to the rise of the Black Arts Movement, a literary movement known for poetry and drama rather than extended fiction. Yet a more accurate assessment detects an incubatory aspect of the 1960s. Not only were William Melvin Kelley, Frank London Brown, William Demby, and Margaret Walker crafting works that portended the future of black narrative, but also John A. Williams, Ernest Gaines, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, and John Edgar Wideman commenced careers that would flower fully in the next three decades. If a premonitory energy surrounded African American novel-writing in the 1960s, then 1970 signaled a shift. No figure exemplified this transition better than Toni Morrison.