Is the Literary Novel Dead?

There may be too much to say about the novel in America. Maybe too little.

One must wonder if the literary novel is dead. But, then again, there is Thomas Pynchon. Though his purposeful obscurity seems to prove something negatively about the state of the literary novel.

An aspiring writer should not be writing these things. To think them is defeatist. The old hands may have said that the novel was dying. They were killing it. Killing it by playing the form out in its various modes until, they must have assumed, there was nothing left to explore.

A reader has to disagree with the purported point that the novel - as a form - has been completely explored. Neither has it been perfected. If either of these things were true then why would the poets of the American world still cry out in their dark anguish and giant ambition, "I will write the great American novel!" Speaking, of course, to the moon and its background of empty sky. Speaking to the empty space inside themselves that, by some obscure necessity, must be filled with literature.

The only adequate literature to fill this void resides in these new poets, a seed, with the acorn's passionate, necessary single-mindedness, an idea that has one nature - to grow into a flowering tree.

If the novel were over with, then these poets would groan no more. They would take the much easier path of accepting the already written Great American Novel into their bosoms and the poets' weight of artistic need would be lifted. They would be free to take jobs at the grocery store and steal home in the evening to clutch that book in both hands and look to the sky with thanks. The journey would be accomplished.

If the literary novel were a thing of the past, then we would certainly have heard of its finality. The glorious and tragic supernovae of the written word.

Faulkner wrote very, very well. He paved the way, as Whitman did, for a generation of artists to see Man anew, to look upon this creature with pity, fear, awe. But the life on his pages was almost too powerfully imagined. It was so dominated by imagination and metaphor and mythos that it existed on a plane beyond what we know as real.

Hemingway leaned the opposite way. He extended his stories, not into the circus world of gothic imagination as Faulkner did, but into the sweet agonies of real life. The life on his pages is very real, but, in its way, fails to become mythic.

And this is where Whitman succeeded above both the novelists. His poetry and the persona he projected through it were both real and mythic. The figure of Whitman straddling the Brooklyn Bridge and looking into the darkly moving water as he straddled time itself to look into the darkly moving future and straddled his darkly moving America is, somehow, the goal and project of the American novel: to create a character that supersedes time and that takes on an identity, which is only American; rooted in this "rootless" continent; admiring the follies of the Jefferson's, the Bushes, the Oprah's, the Rockafeller's, and honoring them as part of the self. Part of the whole, quintessential American Self.

"This novel", the poets scream in their ambition and ecstasy and pain, "this novel has not been written because the emptiness inside me is the absence of identity."

"Where are the models to follow Whitman into fiction, into life, into an imagination that gives example to us of a myth, for today, which is real? That is Real!?

"Show us a way to go toward the future where we won't have to carry this burden in our chests. Give us a way into a culture that will claim us unconditionally. Give us a home between that Atlantic and the Pacific! Rend the way of bitterness that separates California from Maine - and we all know it's there when we hear the word 'California' destroyed in the mouths of the winter-bearers of the north - and make us to know what brotherhood we have, what bond is undeniable between neighbors and between our languages and our religions and our shopping and our news and our wars and our epitaphs and our treaties and our holidays. Give us a mirror that is not broken and which will show us something more than our inadequacies."

Are they right to shout out like this?

Are the poets our great folly? Do they deny Faulkner for no good reason, even as they follow him as the dogs would follow the alpha male who can best lead them to food, knowing that hound might not save them in the end from death by starvation?

Should they find in Hemingway the identity that would replace the stone emptiness weighing a shadow so frightfully between themselves and the future?

Can they lay down under the stars and think that the light and the dark there are not bleak in their opposition to one another but are instead perfect counterpoints - the points of light relying on that sea of black in order to be, in order to exist at all, as stars? Will the poet be able to clutch this vision as he would that Great Book, and say, "Yes," say, "Yes, this is enough; to know that the stars rise and fall from a necessary blackness," and, "Yes, this is good to know..."?

And the real question is, can this night lesson teach the poet to better embrace his brother? To better understand him? Can he make himself into the blackness from which his brother's light might grow? Is this his missing identity?

Is this his art?

And if it is his art, is there still a need for it, beyond knowing his place next to the thousand marbles of light spread across the dome of existence that we call the night, and that we might learn to call the new America?