What is the Great American Novel?

(March 2022. An attempt to concisely express some of the core, broad-stroke ideas behind my Great American Novel Project. It took on a vaguely poetic, line-based format. An essential piece for understanding my life, my dreams, and what I am working on.)

What is the Great American Novel?

The Great American Novel is not a physical novel, at least not yet.
The Great American Novel is an ideal, something to strive towards.

What if one work of art represented America?
What if one work of art re-presented America,
Recreated America?
Impossible, surely. 
America changes with every birth.

But what if the point isn’t perfection, or a novel, or nouns,
But process?

What would happen if an artist put themselves through that process
Of approaching the evergrowing limit,
Of striving for the ideal,
Of living towards the Great American Novel?

The goal is not perfection, but a work of art,
Not containing everything, but representing
As much as possible
Of what is most essential,
Given constraints of time and form.

What sort of image would be refined by such a process?

It’s a grandiose dream, surely— too big,
As arrogant as America itself,
Yet have humans not grown to fit grand dreams?
Is that not the only way grand dreams have always come true?
They say the Great American Novel is a meme, a cliche;
If so, where is it?
It is a present absence, a lacuna, a glaring need,
A prophecy long unfulfilled—

What is needed is an attempt to tie it all together,
To channel the central streams of American thought
And in so doing create America anew.

What would happen if a writer read everything,
Everything relevant to the essence of ‘America’,
Or at least as much as possible?
What would happen if they read all the greatest American novels,
All the greatest American poetry,
All the most important American philosophies,
Histories, arts, cultures, stories, myths, and more,
Everything that makes up the fiction that is America,
Everything that makes up the ideas that are America?

Creation is what happens
When two parts of the universe smash together,
When two authors enter dialogue in one mind,
When twelve poems write a new poem in my hand,
When something I read meets something I see
And a new adaptation comes to be
In the presence of all environments
My mind has met across time
All at once.

What would happen if an artist had faith in creation,
Faith that there is invisible form,
Faith that everything touches, that anything can mean everything,
Faith that there is a great web of dialogue
Stretching across time between every mind,
And that all the artist must do is follow these threads
Long enough to see the crystal take shape?

The Great American Novel already exists in a sense—
It is a latent possibility, it is implied, it is there—
It only needs to be realized, to be lived, to be written. 

Has this not always been the task of the artist?
To absorb the wisdom of the ancestors,
To bring the past to bear the present,
To make the tradition alive, to make it respond to a new environment,
To make a new mind to match a new world?

What would happen if a life was lived as the Great American Novel,
Consciously, with the whole tradition watching?

It would have to be exciting, of course—
The ancestors don’t want to be bored any more than the living.
There must be genuine adventure, a little romance,
A true exploration of the unknown, a touch of danger, a relish of risk,
The stakes must be real, the characters must be real, the subject must be real.
The best stories are never pure fiction, they are based in real experience,
For fiction is only created by recreating real experience.
The mark of a truly great story is that you could never have made it up.

In 21st century America, I’ve had adventures you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve hitchhiked all over the country,
Talked to hundreds of kind strangers over more than 20,000 miles.
You wouldn’t believe the stories they tell.
You wouldn’t believe how far you can go with a thumb and a smile,
And what it teaches you about independence
And interdependence, yourself and others,
Communication and community and openness and humanity.

You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to ride the roads,
How many truckers bared their souls to me at 18,
How I slept on a mountain in Missoula, the forests of Shenandoah, a California beach,
How I went from a free mansion to almost dying in the desert in a day.
How I crossed vast swathes of the west faster than you can imagine.
How I trusted a believable murderer and saw an unbelievable sunset,
How I slept with an accomplice and told them they were innocent.
How I crossed the Sonoran in the back of a pickup,
How I saw the solar eclipse in a lake in Tennessee.

You wouldn’t believe the stories of how I escaped LA twice,
Or of the crazy and brilliant vagrants of Ashland,
Or of Winn the Cowboy or the Hell’s Angel or the amazing Gay Cajuns,
Or of jumping off a grainer traincar near Glacier,
Or of the sunburned and freezing Yosemite threesome,
Or of the chain of serendipity through Bernie and the monk
Which led me to the man who sold me my school bus.

These are a few drops of a few months of hitchhiking—
Imagine how many more adventures I’ve had
In two years now of living nomadically out west
Building a school bus into a home, entirely free?
I won’t share them here, I want to leave you wanting more.

I dropped out of Harvard to pursue my destiny,
To live in a bus, to adventure and read and write,
Because I simply knew what I needed to do.
Some call it foolish— I prefer romantic.
I’m willing to bet on my values as all heroes have,
Even if that means giving up comfort within the system.
I believe all education is self-education,
And I believe the needed change will come
From those who reject the easy Golden Ticket.

Although I’ve struggled and suffered more than I’ll say,
I have no regrets— I believe in myself—
I accept my tragedies as I accept my joys,
And I make meaning out of everything I go through.
I believe it is all part of the plot.

The last five years of my life have been wild enough
For many Great American Novels.
I have more crazy stories than any 23 year old I know.
I’ve seen endless beauty in the land,
And I’ve been touched by more kindnesses than I can count.
There is so much more to come.

Everyone I meet is the Great American Novel,
Everything I see is the Great American Novel,
Everything that touches us is the Great American Novel.

Of course the Great American Novel must be a road novel—
How else can everything connect
But by beaten paths, and beatin’ paths?
Are the roads connecting the states that different
From the neural paths between states of mind?

The Great American Novel will be arranged associationally,
Spatially, temporally, not necessarily either,
For progress is not always linear,
And beaten paths touch across time.

The Great American Novel will be a mosaic,
And I will share essays, poems, pieces as I go.
I will bear the responsibility that the Great American Novel entails,
And I will not wait for the novel to be finished before sharing my voice.
I will connect with brilliant people who want to change the world.
I will represent truer American values, better American values.

The Great American Novel is not limited to America,
For America is the international nation,
Made up of all peoples and flavors of the world.
America was born of the old world and has birthed a new world.
I know foreign thinkers are essential context to my reading,
And I know my adventure will eventually take me around the globe,
Though I know a lifetime could be spent within these broad borders.

The Great American Novel is an experiment
As America is an experiment,
As all life is experiment,
And I am willing to bet on my will to believe.

I believe that the best of America
Is necessary medicine for the worst.

The Great American Novel is about more than a novel,
It is about what it means to be American,
About the power of cultural change and acting in the real world,
About embodying the democratic spirit and participating in public life,
About the value of learning, and the value of doing.
It’s about growing freedom, creating harmony, generating novelty.
The Great American Novel must inspire people
To read, to learn, to believe, to act.
It must make people conscious
Of their role in our great story.

To live the Great American Novel means to live certain questions,
To think about freedom, responsibility, democracy, liberalism,
Individuality, sociality, and the relationship between the two,
Politics and economics, how to organize a society,
Nature, civilization, and ecology,
The species’ problem of imperfect eusociality,
Progress and conservation, memory and prophecy,
The weight of history and the hope of utopia,
Sin and redemption, failure and greatness,
And what it means to be human here and now.

The soul of America is at stake.
America hangs in the balance
Like a feather and a heart.

Our soul is staked
In every choice.
Our soul is staked
To what we love.

What if the hero’s journey is just as necessary now as ever?
How could history be over? How could myth be over?
How could there be no frontier?
The sun rises today also,
And the new world is beatin’ paths.

To forge a tribe, you need a story.

The most surefire way to write a Great American Novel
Is to live a Great American Novel.

The Great American Novel is the story of my life,
And yours.