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Chapter 10 - Novel, nation, community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Marina MacKay
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

She had dedicated herself … to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

What seemed a private quest on the part of Pynchon's Oedipa Maas has suddenly turned public. The dead Pierce Inverarity has left behind not a private game for a former girlfriend, but a shared legacy: even in this atomized and narcissistic postmodern culture Oedipa sees that she remains part of a community, one among many of the collective inheritors of “America.” Perhaps this comes as an unexpected revelation in a novel so preoccupied by what divides rather than unites people, but it is also a deeply significant one because it speaks to the novel's resources as a form. That is, because novels are typically both subjective and intersubjective, about social existence but also about individual experiences of social existence, among all the major literary genres this is the one most strongly associated with the imagining and perpetuation of communities. If there's one reason why the novel is the dominant literary form in the world today, this may be it.

Representing the part and the whole

A novel makes a part of something stand for the whole thing. Rhetoricians call this trope “synecdoche,” the figure of speech by which a poem's sheep are “fleeces” and its ships “masts.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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  • Novel, nation, community
  • Marina MacKay, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781544.020
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  • Novel, nation, community
  • Marina MacKay, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781544.020
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Novel, nation, community
  • Marina MacKay, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781544.020
Available formats
×