In response to Lawrence Buell’s essay on the “Great American Novel,” David L. Ulin calls the term into question, writing that, as a concept, the GAN “misreads the fundamental function of literature, which is less about the grand defining statement than it is about empathy”:
What literature offers is not an overview; it is not a way to understand the broad movements of the world. Such aspects may be represented — we can learn a lot about what it was like to live in 19th century London by reading Dickens, or St. Petersburg under the czars by reading Gogol — but they are not the point. No, literature is a connection-making mechanism: We read about people, individuals, and inhabit their lives, their struggles, their desires. We see that they are not unlike we are. This creates both identity and identification, allowing us to step (for a moment, anyway) outside ourselves.
The Great American Novel is something different; it signifies a belief in literature as all-encompassing, as able to gather the diverse strands of an inexplicable and unruly nation, and make sense of them in a single work. That this is impossible should go without saying; it’s more than a little reductive as well. Consciousness is chaos and life has no meaning, and the stories we tell — including the big ones: faith, statehood, family, history — are just a series of dreams we make up to give shape to the shapeless, to build a firewall against the void. That it all falls to pieces is part of the point; we are alone together, after all.
Though he says he would “rather talk about a novel in any other conceivable terms,” Scott Esposito sees some significance in the concept of the GAN:
There are places out there that are both small enough and have young enough literary scenes that such-and-such an author can legitimately be considered the “Great _______ Novelist,” having written the “Great _______ Novel.” One upon a time this was what was meant by the epic, though that’s long, long over now. So in a sense it maybe was possible somewhere, although, in a completely different literary genre and back when people sacrificed bulls. … [A]t some point way, way back, the literary world was small enough that a single figure could dominate a literature for a even a large and diverse country like the U.S. in a way that’s just completely incomprehensible now.
The Dish 