The Great World Novel?

[nancylebov]

This discussion of why haven't any women written the Great American Novel, inspired me to wonder whether there are any good nominees for the Great World Novel, and whether it's viewed as a worthy artistic ambition.

Obviously, you can't fit the whole world into a novel (you can't fit America in, either, and if you're really paying attention, you'll realize that you can't even do full justice to Lichtenstein), but it isn't crazy to think that a long novel could have a decent range of geography, time, and sub-cultures across the whole planet.

Link thanks to jtglover.

Comments

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for that link.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

On the initial question, I have one thing to say: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

As for the Great World Novel, if one of the criteria is showing many different cultures and their interaction through the characters of the novel, then I believe there is at least one good nominee: Kim by Rudyard Kipling.

[madfilkentist]

That was my first thought too. My second thought was that Rand would have disdained "the Great American Novel" as an undefined term.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Kim never gets out of India.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that's relevant. If I were a novelist, I think I could write a novel about the world that never got out of New York City—because that city has residents from a huge sample of the world's cultures. Kipling's India is not that diverse, but he has people from most of the world's major religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam are all to be found there. And where most British fiction treated anyone non-British as barely a real human being, Kipling gives vivid life to people from all these different cultures. Surely statistical representativeness is the least interesting quality of a "Great World Novel": an ecumenical sense of humankind is much more important. And I can't think of any Western writing who had that earlier than Kipling.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

Any global utopia would have the same case to be a Great World Novel: to wit, that utopias are expected to treat varied cultures with the same flatness which World Novels are prone to. I would commend rather H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopis, which invented the world-wide utopia, as much better prose than Rand ever aspired to, and which survives - even after Huxley's parody in Brave New World as a far clearer piece of thinking.

[twistedchick]

It's pretty difficult for Americans to even get hold of world novels, considering that Books In Print, the standard reference at bookstores, doesn't even include British or Canadian publications, only US ones.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Getting books from all over the world is important, but isn't the question I was addressing.

Being online gives us more range than Books in Print does.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Would you mind if I did a Tor.com post on this, linking back here? Because I think what I want to say would take too long for this comment.

But the short version is, how about Cryptonomicon?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

By all means-- I'm curious to see what answers a larger audience comes up with.

It's been long enough since I've read Cryptonomicon and The Great World Novel isn't a well-enough formed idea for me to have a strong opinion, but I'd say that Cryptonomicon is at least in the running.

My feeling is that it's iffy to have realistic historical sections with the modern sections being broad parody, but I'm not sure the feeling has a logical basis.

[avram]

Were the modern sections any more broadly parodic than the WW2 stuff? The modern-era bit with the soldier suing over his appearance in a conference poster stuck me as being both as plausible and as funny as the WW2-era bit with the banks swapping money and the singing coolies.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

I see this discussion is here (http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=15519#comments). Some interesting things; I agree with the poster who said that the point of a Great World Novel is transcending boundaries, not crossing them.

This would exclude Jane Austen, for example, who is writing of the South of England, not the world; but it might not exclude Always Coming Home.

I should have thought of Stand on Zanzibar, and there are others who stole their structure from Dos Passos.

[avram]

The concept of the "Great American Novel" was born in this essay by John William DeForest, published in The Nation in 1968. That was shortly after the Civil War, which redefined Americans' notions of what the United States was, and strengthened the central government. (You've probably read about how, before the war, Americans tended to say "the United States are", and after, "the United States is".) So the concept of a novel that could sum up the "American" experience, as opposed to just a regional experience, must have seemed more attractive.

It also occurs to me that wars mix things up. People from a wide variety of places and classes get tossed together and shaken for a while.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is that meant to be "1868"?

[avram]

Eh, all those years starting with "1" look alike to me.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

The problem, of course, is that novels with "a decent range of geography, time, and sub-cultures across the whole planet" come out as world tourism, like Around the World in Eighty Days, which does have a decent range of geography and subcultures. (For time, consider James Michener's Hawaii, which has long chapters on all the cultures which came to Hawaii, from Massachusetts to southern China.

I don't think this is soluble without choosing a genre (like utopia or dystopia) which is already expected to treat cultures as cardboard.

The original discussion on female Great American Novelists points out that the reviewer omitted To Kill a Mockingbird (which is probably the Great Southern Novel) and Ursula Le Guin (who is writing about America from outside, both in The Dispossessedi>Always Coming Home; the latter is a utopia which doesn't downplay cultural variety.

Spiritus Mundi as Great World Novel/Great Global Novel

[sartoriusalex.livejournal.com]

For those who are searching for the Great Global Novel, check out Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard at the following links. He makes the point that English has become the international language of the world and there are more international speakers and readers than native speakers in any one country, including the USA and therefore the novel in English should aspire to be a “Global Novel” rather than a mere national novel as in “The Great American Novel.” Spiritus Mundi takes its actions and themes,to a global level, including a threatened World War Three, worldwide spiritual renewal and establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a global version of the European Parliament. It's action moves between London, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, South Africa, and Mexico City and its cast of characters are the global participants in a Bono/Geldof-style media campaign to create a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. Check it out at: spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com