Ruins of the Realm – James McMurtry (from Just Us Kids)
Trailer Trash – Modest Mouse (from Lonesome Crowded West)
Tis of Thee – Ani DiFranco (from Up Up Up Up Up Up)
Ongoing discussion of Moby Dick in particular, and the greatest American books in general going on here, here, and here. To really get things rolling, Matt Yglesias says (with admitted hyperbole): “Every American should read Moby Dick, it’s our great national epic and you can’t understand the country without it.”
I can’t really agree with that. I say this as someone who has started Moby Dick twice and just couldn’t get through it. I appreciated what he is trying to do, and I’m sure that it is everything and more for some people, but for my money I’ll take Billy Budd or “Bartleby the Scrivener” when it comes to Melville.
And as for the question of what truly constitutes the Great American Novel, I think there are three candidates – one for each of the three major eras of our history. First, Huck Finn. The pre-Civil War pastoral story, two people on a raft engaging in reckless adventure and building a friendship. The dream of something that might be just over the horizon. The glory of the individual facing the frontier of possibility, tempered by the absolute necessity of someone to share it with.
And, of course, the most honest and powerful recognition of what it means to come to a realization of the problem of slavery from within the system rather than from without. Because it’s important to remember that Huck is not meant to embody some sort of abolitionist, or a lost soul who comes to see the moral case against slavery as a practice. Instead, he is steeped in a culture which teaches the morality of slavery, to the extent that he finally sits down and writes a note turning in Jim as an escaped slave. He hates himself for it but feels like it is the only moral thing to do:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking–thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
And in the end, it is only the bonds of friendship that he has forged with Jim that change his mind. He resolves to free Jim, to fight against the system – not because he decides that slavery is immoral – but because he decides that the obligations of friendship trump his abstract obligations. He sees it as anti-moralism, and in so doing reveals the best part of the American Dream: that we only can find within ourselves the values that truly matter:
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell”–and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
Huck Finn has plenty of problems. But none of them change the incredible significance and power of the story.
Second possibility: The Great Gatsby. It embodies the absolute peak of the gilded age, the long period of expansion and endless possibility that would very soon after be torn apart by the Depression – and the re-balancing of the world that followed. Once again, it’s a book with many flaws: notably the contrived plot and the general awfulness of every major character.
But really, those don’t really have anything to do with it. You are most definitely meant to empathize with the characters, but it is an empathy that must be tempered by a large degree of revulsion. You feel sorry for them in their pathologies, in what they represent about the darker parts of ourselves. The plot as well is meant as little more than a thin pretense around which the edifice of words may be constructed. More than anything else, Gatsby simply about the beauty of the prose. It’s what provides the counterpoint to the deep sadness and futility you get from the central theme: there’s no real happiness, only the imagination of it which provokes all of our worst aspects. The deep pessimism works because it’s conveyed through words so beautiful they make it impossible to truly believe that everything has to be so bleak.
Just a couple examples:
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—“ I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Third possibility: Invisible Man. Sheer brilliance. Deeply philosophical, intense, beautifully written, and still the best summation of how badly this country (still) misunderstands what’s really going on with race. Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it paves the way for everything that was to come later in the 20th century, and beyond. Here is found the tension of MLK and Malcom X, between the struggle for an assimilation that holds onto what makes people unique and an antagonism that risks destroying everything that is beautiful.
The important contribution Ellison makes is to capture how the idea of America in this (post)modern world is hidden within itself. We imagine ourselves to have moved beyond race but instead we have just made those who embody it invisible. We imagine ourselves to have transcended our mistakes but instead we bury those mistakes deeply within ourselves – walking around with stakes in our hearts covered over by a dress shirt and tie.
In the conclusion, the protagonist ponders back to his grandfather’s advice to “agree ’em to death and destruction” and wonders if he now – after gaining a new perspective on his own invisibility – might finally understand it:
And my mind revolved again and again back to my grandfather. And, despite the farce that ended my attempt to say “yes” to Brotherhood I’m still plagued by his deathbed advice . . . Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought, perhaps his anger threw me off—I can’t decide. Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm, the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean say “yes” because he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the numbers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name? Did he mean to affirm the principle which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds? Or did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the men as well as the principle, because we were the heirs who must use the principle because no other fitted our needs? Not for the power or for vindication, but because we, with the given circumstance of our origin, could only thus find transcendence? Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed—not because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunistic, but because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others and because they had exhausted in us, some—not much—of the human greed and smallness, yes, and the fear and superstition that had kept them running.
And that, truly, is the American Dream in all of its glory and sadness. The desire, the need, to find a way to keep saying ‘yes’ even when we know how much damage has been wreaked in the name of our ideals. We affirm those ideals in spite of this – no, because of this – as a way of calling attention to the disconnect between ideal and practice.
And the circle returns to Huck Finn. When morality is deployed to justify slavery, the solution is not nihilism but affirmation. We bear fidelity for the possibility that life may have a purpose in its living. For Huck it was friendship with Jim that established an obligation that transcended his learned morality. For the protagonist in Invisible Man it is a sense of social responsibility – that while he may find power in his invisibility, that only his unique situation gives him the possibility of creating something that can stand in opposition to the lifeless and restricted morality of comfortable (white, bourgeois) society.