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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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SERVICES
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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,

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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
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greatest hits during his encore.

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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.

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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.