HEY.

YOU'RE 
DOING GREAT 
AND WE 
know you 
can do it. 

Don't give up!

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

ACROSS
1 Alter, as a pet
5 Coif adjusted
with a pick
9 Less uncertain
14 Bring under
control
15 Bar sign light
16 Goodnight girl of
song
17 Poolside hue
18 Big reference
vols.
19 Utah city near the
Golden Spike
20 Tired bowling
groups?
23 Unconvincing
excuse, probably
24 Ballot markings
25 Not strict at all
26 __ Mahal
29 Go on until
31 Buzzers around
blossoms
33 Cornfield
construction
34 Antianxiety drug
36 Relationship __:
Facebook feature
38 Tired janitors?
42 Automatons
43 Refuge in a
desert
44 Physics particle
45 It’s pitched at
camp
47 Security
concerns
51 Beer, to a Brit
52 Driver’s license
datum
53 Cooler in a cooler
55 Lucy of
“Elementary”
56 Tired groupies?
60 Plastic alternative
62 Give kudos to
63 Common
conjunctions
64 Construction site
sight
65 Shoreline-altering
phenomenon
66 Item on an
actor’s résumé
67 Scarecrow
stuffing
68 Vehicle in many
a Jack London
story
69 Black gem

DOWN
1 Place for ponies
2 Anna of “True
Blood”
3 Brought a smile to
4 Slangy assent
5 Battery pole
6 Experiences regret
7 Biked
8 Marked down
9 Sitting Bull’s tribe
10 Hard-to-resist
impulse
11 Republican-
voting area, on
an election map
12 Peoria-to-Detroit
dir.
13 Neurotic toon dog
21 Not destroyed or
lost, as an old
document
22 Fuels (up)
27 France’s Cote
d’__
28 Zooey’s “New
Girl” role
30 Geometric truth
32 Prior prisoner, for
short
33 Pastor’s abode
35 Lipton rival
37 Kept tabs on
from behind

38 Hardly eye-
catching
39 Repetitive
learning technique
40 Better than
expected
41 North-south
coordinate
46 Rejoices
48 Post-rehab
support group
49 “Thank you __,
ma’am”

50 English Channel
county
52 “The Taming of
the __”
54 Formally gave
up
57 Powerful TV
princess
58 Breeze (along)
59 Casino game
60 HP products
61 Word after clip or
pop

By Gail Grabowski and Bruce Venzke
©2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/24/15

11/24/15

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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HELP WANTED

6 — Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

NO FILTER
Why we should kill 
the ‘American Novel’

By KARL WILLIAMS

Online Arts Editor

In 1868, a novelist named 

John William De Forest wrote 
an essay for The Nation called 
“The Great American Novel,” 
wherein he nominated Harriet 
Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s 
Cabin” for the role. While few 
would maintain his evaluation 
of Stowe’s novel and the only 
reason 
anyone 
cares 
even 

slightly about De Forest is 
because of that essay, the notion 
of the Great American Novel 
has persisted.

The Great American Novel 

is, essentially, the idea that 
a novel can be the definitive 
expression 
of 
its 
time, 

capturing a unique American 
cultural and historical milieu. 
It’s a hackneyed version of the 
national epic in the tradition 
of Homer and Virgil, a work 
that attempts to unify a nation 
in a common language. It’s an 
idea also rooted in American 
triumphalism and its timid little 
brother, American insecurity. (I 
once heard someone say James 
Joyce’s “Ulysses” was the Great 
American 
Novel, 
because, 

I think, it’s so consistently 
ranked as the greatest novel 
ever that he assumed it was 
written by an American.) As 
Americans, we want to be the 
best at everything, and we want 
a literature that reflects our 
magnificence while meeting a 
certain criterion of greatness.

Most often, people talk of 

the Great American Novel with 
derision, and occasionally write 
an entire novel satirizing the 
idea. But you can also write a 
novel, name it after the Great 
American Idea, splay it across 
the cover, then get in Oprah’s 
Book Club (the highest literary 
achievement) and receive a 
cover in Time proclaiming you 
as the Great American Novelist. 
The GAN oscillates somewhere 
between absurdity and validity, 
but it’s time it found a secure 
home among the former.

First of all, why can there 

only be one? That’s the single 

greatest 
problem 
with 
the 

entire idea. Literary culture 
isn’t “The Apprentice,” and 
there’s no Donald Trump — 
thank God — to serve as a 
cultural arbiter, deciding the 
fate of American fiction once 
and for all. The Great American 
Novel 
effectively 
works 
to 

delegitimize important novels 
by turning America’s literary 
tradition into a sword fight (not 
swashbuckling) between dead 
white dudes like Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, 
Mark 
Twain 
and 
F. 
Scott 

Fitzgerald.

It’s an obsolete term, also, 

because it historicizes fiction 
at the expense of aesthetic 
value. It’s a convenient idea 
for historical and journalistic 
purposes, and it is used most 
often in these circumstances. 
But literature isn’t made just 
to assimilate into a historical 
narrative, 
and 
the 
best 

literature squirms out of it’s 
historical moment. The GAN 
turns literature into passive 
historical texts, only relevant 
for their ability to transport 
us to a past America so we can 
understand what it was like to 
live in that time.

Thus, 
according 
to 
the 

criteria of the GAN, literature is 
purely mimetic: Its sole function 
is to represent the world in 
which it was created. But all 
literature, 
and 
furthermore 

all art, is critical. To recreate 
the world is to critique it — to 
attempt to perfect it. No writer, 
not even the greatest, can hold 
a mirror up to nature without a 
signature crack.

Every novelist’s vision of 

America is limited not just by 
their 
personal 
imaginative 

vision, 
but 
by 
place. 

Contemporaries Henry James 
and Mark Twain have markedly 
different views of and concerns 
for America, not only for their 
personal differences, but for 
the simple fact they lived in 
different parts of America. 
America is a gigantic country, 
and the reality is that its size 
and diversity of experience 
make the kind of narrative 
unity entailed by the GAN, at 
the very least, unlikely.

Yet valuing the historicity 

of a novel is problematic not 
only 
because 
it 
minimizes 

the efficacy and agency of 
fiction, but also because the 
novels that survive getting run 
over by time’s winged chariot 
become what we know of their 
historical moment. To borrow 
a phrase from T.S. Eliot: They 
are 
that 
which 
we 
know. 

Novelists aren’t historians, and 
we shouldn’t require them to 
be. We can’t trust a novel for 
historical 
accuracy 
because 

it effectively creates it’s own 
historicity. Historical moments 
are 
transformed 
by 
the 

representations that survive 
them. Continuity with the past 
is tricky. While the past is never 

dead, it’s transformed into a 
ghost of what it was. So when 
you take a novel, for example 
“The Ambassadors,” and say 
“This is what it was like to be an 
American in Europe in 1903,” 
you apply flesh to a phantom. 
It’s never going to stick.

Quite 
often, 
American 

novels, 
certainly 
some 
of 

its best ones, serve as overt 
critiques of American culture. 
F. 
Scott 
Fitzgerald’s 
“The 

Great 
Gatsby” 
demolishes 

the 
idealization 
of 
wealth 

and 
unfettered 
capitalism’s 

excesses and failures; Herman 
Melville’s masterpiece “Moby-
Dick; or, The Whale,” my 
vote for the greatest work 
of fiction produced by an 
American, 
subtly 
ironizes 

the idea of the monomaniacal 
entrepreneur, the Rockefellers 
and the Carnegies whom we 
still idealize, who chase the 
objects of their desires free of 
moral concerns; Twain’s “The 
Adventures 
of 
Huckleberry 

Finn” eradicates any ethical 
justification for racism.

Nothing tells us how full of 

shit we are more often than 
our greatest novels. What the 
fuck even is the American 
experience? Here’s the grand 
irony of the Great American 
Novel. In theory, the GAN would 
be a celebration of America. 
But a look at the common 
candidates 
(gunpowder 
for 

any postcolonial or feminist 
critic) shows a list of novels that 
critique the principles and ideas 
at the very heart of American 
life and the hypocrisies that 
lurk beneath the surface. 

More specifically, the battle 

for 
who 
is 
considered 
an 

American and what constitutes 
Americanness is a conflagration 
that has raged for the entirety 
of American history, but the 
novel has always proven to be 
an essential tool for those ill-
equipped for the fight. Fiction 
continuously 
redefines 
who 

and what America is. Contrary 
to the logic of the GAN, there’s 
no America that novelists must 
strive to express. The novel will 
never create a definitive version 
of America: It will continue to 
create new ones.

The GAN provides critical 

criteria 
that 
don’t 
really 

help 
evaluate 
the 
quality 

of a fictional work. “Moby-
Dick” gives insights to what 
America was like in the pre-
Civil 
War 
era, 
but 
these 

insights supplement the artistic 
achievements. 
They’re 
not 

the achievements themselves. 
“Moby-Dick,” 
despite 
its 

greatness as a work of fiction, 
can’t be the Great American 
Novel, because it fails to mirror 
the cultural milieu in which it 
was created.

No one will ever write the 

Great American Novel, but not 
because it’s a great difficulty. 
They won’t, because it was a 
stupid idea from the beginning.

DO YOU HATE THE 
GREAT AMERICAN 

NOVEL?

DO YOU LIKE THIS 

ARTICLE?

VISIT OUR ARTS BLOG,

#NOFILTER

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Stevie Wonder, at 65 years old, performs his Songs in the Key of Life Tour at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit on 
Saturday. Wonder performed all of the songs on his album, Songs in the Key of Life, along with some of his 
greatest hits during his encore. 

RYAN MCLOUGHLIN/Daily

LSA freshman Ethan Altshuler hurls a snowball across the street in a West Quad vs. South Quad snowball fight 
Saturday night on East Madison Street.

LUNA ANNA ARCHEY/Daily

Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh hands the ball off to junior running back De’Veon Smith during warm-ups before 
the team’s game against Penn State on Saturday at Beaver Stadium. 

