The Responsibility of the American Novel: A Dialectic

Over the past week, I’ve been fortunate to be in communication with a very intelligent friend about this article on the state of the American novel, published in Guernica last month. I recommend reading the article in full, but if you’re in a rush, here’s a poor man’s version: using a multitude of pertinent examples, Erik Raschke decries the lack of political risk-taking in contemporary American fiction, wondering why our novelists aren’t spearheading national discourse like their European counterparts. He postulates, in essence, that we don’t have the cojones to do it.

Raschke’s argument stymied me. On one hand, I agree that American literature (at least what’s popular) has gotten frightfully out of touch with what’s actually going on. On the other, Americans are notoriously unafraid of offending anyone. I think the problem lies not in cowardice, but in complacency.

My friend added some depth to the analysis. Always an incisive critic, he steered our deconstruction to some of Raschke’s erroneous assumptions. Specifically, he cited the fourth paragraph from the bottom, where the foibles of the article’s argument really come home to roost.

“[Raschke] actually is advocating some things about art (at least written narrative art),” he said. “That it be subversive, that it be ‘leading the national dialogue,’ and that it be able to be written from afar, from that bizarre writer's window that allows him to avoid the masses of humanity. This is all just kind of incoherent and weak.”

I agreed. The argument is scattered and a bit distasteful, particularly when Raschke asserts in the same breath both that an honest writer must descend from his desk and live among his people, and that he himself requires alcohol to do so. The booze bit, though a parenthetical throwaway, is telling: to Raschke, the writer is a being of superior worth whose mission it is to communicate the plight of a nation’s people without lowering himself to become one of them.

Obviously reeking of classism, this point is also deeply inaccurate: the very authors Raschke cites as “wield[ing] power with their sharp commentary” lived night and day among the people whose situations they chronicled. Steinbeck worked alongside migrant fruit pickers. Kesey tapped the borders of human consciousness in his brain and others. Wiesel and Kosinski (not Americans, remember) survived the Holocaust. These were not people who needed a drink or two to stomach some time spent among commuters.

Another of my friend’s points had to do with the development of the European novel vs. that of the American one. “European novels started as fictional interpretations of history and politics,” he says. “These novelists called their earliest novels ‘histories’ of something or other. Oroonoko, Tom Jones, all those novels have ‘history’ in the subtitle. The novel in Europe has a rich tradition of commenting on the broad goings-on of society and the historical course a country or region was taking. The novel in America, however, is more concerned with the overall weirdness of America, and the course of American culture as this young, protean force -- not a historically bound set of traditions…I feel as though Raschke is taking European sensibilities about the novel and forcing them on America.”

This argument made me want to stand up from my desk chair (where I have been watching people file to work for the past few hours, though I’ve managed to lose the pajamas) and cheer. But while that line of reasoning is a perfect way to take down Raschke’s article, it leaves the question of American fiction’s political responsibility unanswered.

While it’s impossible (or, at least, too limiting for my taste) to say that American fiction should be one thing or another, we can always look to our history to see what it’s been. And though I do think that literature in this country is more about attempting to explore and define our environment than to change it, novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fahrenheit 451 serve distinct political ends. I like these three novels specifically as examples because the events they relate take place in the present, recent past, and distant future, respectively.

American political fiction tends to take the strategy of holding a mirror up to our ugliest sides—what we’ve done, what we’re doing, or (a particularly American strength) what things will look like if we keep living as we are. It might not be the only or even the predominant literary tradition here, but it certainly exists, and it’s something that’s been muted over the past decade or two.

Perhaps that’s what Raschke is getting at. If that’s the crux of his point, then I’d agree. But instead of comparing us to Europe, of cloaking himself in the Old World sexiness of exiles and court hearings and lifetime imprisonment (and where was his consideration of Latin American literature in all of this?), he should be comparing American novels to themselves. If that doesn’t suit him, perhaps he can exile himself to Amsterdam.