'The Novel as Encyclopedia'

4 D AV I D JA M E S The Novel as Encyclopedia To record the world while conceding the record’s insufficiency, to dream of inclusivity while knowing full well the storage limits of representation, to pretend to master subject matter that exceeds taxonomical control, to assume that so long as things can be catalogued they can also be definitively known, and to assume, in turn, that there’s nothing description cannot adequately classify, even if its job is never done – such are the signs of the encyclopedic syndrome, from which the novel across history has never been immune. Some symptoms are easy to spot, especially when they spur writers to admit the implausibility of comprehensive data gathering. “One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,” observes Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851), even “though” the topic itself “may seem but an ordinary one.”1 In a characteristic examination of his own methods of selection and address, Melville’s narrator circles the principal conundrum faced by encyclopedic fiction from all periods: how does one render a massive scale of information? A dilemma we’ll meet again in the pages to come, it serves here as an excuse for the novel’s self-contemplation and, for Ishmael, as a creative incentive. By confronting the task of “writing this Leviathan,” he becomes increasingly self-conscious, often humorously so. With one eye on a reader who could be at once fascinated and fatigued, Ishmael admits that he’s hardly been “at all sparing of historical and whale research, when it has seemed needed.”2 Scaling up his purview, he turns the obligation inherent to all encyclopedias into a duty to his audience, for the novel’s subject makes it seem inevitable that its form will indeed “swell.” And this correlation between matter and structure affects Ishmael’s agency as a spokesman for items he cannot quite encompass: “Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise.”3 As an “enterprise,” it’s exhausting in literal terms as well, precisely because the “Leviathan is the text” – a designation for the novel’s mode as much as for its material – compelling Ishmael to square 74 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia compendious reference with “grandiloquent” rhetoric.4 Toiling “under the weightiest words of the dictionary,” he confesses that in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.5 Though this portrait of the encyclopedic exercise might sound melodramatic, Melville pitches it rather reflexively, drawing our attention to how language itself consciously embodies this formidable venture of “outreaching.” These paratactic lines manifest the snowballing nature of the novel’s task, driven as Ishmael is by the ambition, at once reckless yet compulsive, to transcribe the world’s multifarious and intractable substances into discursive form; to give explanatory shape to objects, species, and ideas while acknowledging that they’re forever in flux across “generations.” Grammar serves to illustrate this endeavor – especially in the accumulative crescendo of successive conjunctions (and) and intensifying quantifiers (all, whole) – and the very construction of Moby-Dick’s narration suggests that the encyclopedic impulse is an obstacle and an impetus, as the proliferation of subjects propels the expressive design of a text that nonetheless admits how illusory allinclusive coverage remains. This admission, this dramatic enactment, of failure is precisely the point of encyclopedias, novelistic or otherwise: a type of self-confession we’ll chart forward in time to modern and contemporary works below. For his part, Ishmael concludes his lightly self-mocking complaints against sheer scale with a positive spin: “Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme.”6 Ultimately upbeat, he celebrates encyclopedism as an authorial crusade, discovering “virtue” in this effort not because the creative labor suddenly seems manageable but because it carries a certain prestige. It turns out that encyclopedic fiction confers on its maker the charisma of heroic extensiveness: “to produce a mighty book,” Ishmael believes, “you must choose a mighty theme.”7 All this exertion in the name of oversized interests may end up as an endurance test for a writer grappling with the “weightiest words” – an undertaking that remains artistically fulfilling owing precisely to its arduousness. In the end, though, any effort such scale demands will be worth it, implies Ishmael, if formal size and thematic scope equate reputational esteem, offering a gateway to literary acclaim. In a sense, this is typical of the way encyclopedic narrative has been critically conceived in relation to the audacity of epic. Yet as we’ll find, 75 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 david james encyclopedism and epic ought to be seen as distinct novelistic genres in their own right. I don’t mean to imply that features of epic are irrelevant to our understanding of how novels operate as encyclopedias. Rather, it seems important to observe that fiction’s absorption of encyclopedism tends to destabilize genres’ clear-cut classifications along with the conventions that typically distinguish them. Moby-Dick is again a case in point. However emblematic it might be of the emergence of nineteenth-century realism, the novel invites us to question some of the fundamental claims of realist representation as such. This much is clear from the self-reflexivity with which Ishmael ponders, as we’ve just heard, his own adequacy before the material he documents, wondering whether he can ever become “omnisciently exhaustive.” That the exhaustion of omniscience is something novelists in more recent times have relished reveals the prescience of Melville’s implicit challenge to what the novel can definitively survey and convey, opening up his work to striking affinities beyond its historical moment. Along these lines, Susan Stanford Friedman has even gone so far as to consider Moby-Dick a “modernist” text, given its engagement with a flashpoint in American modernity characterized by rapid cultural and technological advancement, a move that’s not entirely new insofar as it echoes the revival of interest in Melville among the moderns themselves, with Lewis Mumford declaring in 1928 that “we are nearer to Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance, than we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries.”8 Although Melville has often been grouped among national epics, “entangled in the economies, technology, and geopolitics of whaling,” his novel also “differs categorically from them,” argues Friedman, “because it operates in the realm of the imaginary, symbolic, literary, and linguistic.” Encyclopedism, in short, can make a novel seem well ahead of its time. Recast as a radical innovator, Melville’s anticipation of modernism becomes clear through Moby-Dick’s “heteroglossic ruptures” of convention, its “hybrid blend of genres,” together with its multiple philosophical, scientific, spiritual, and political points of discussion. Not only through subject matter, then, but also in its expansive and expanding modes of telling, the novel evokes “the fissures in the world system of industrial modernity as well as the phenomenological and imaginative dimensions of it.”9 Even if we have misgivings about the critical legitimacy of realigning Melville with modernism, the point is that the structural and thematic exertions of encyclopedism generate startling innovations – reconstituting the very anatomy of the novel and compelling writers to deliberate on the substance of fiction’s mimetic relation to the world. A testament to the novel’s expressive elasticity; a reflection of, also an adventurous response to, the upheavals of modernity’s material and 76 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia metaphysical consequences; a facet of literary narrative’s most ambitious calibrations of coverage – thanks to all these factors, encyclopedic fiction appears to be a most – perhaps the most – viably transhistorical genre. Even when critics have placed it within more standardized periods or nation-based genealogies, encyclopedic writing still associates novelists who would otherwise appear disparate in technique or separated in time. In Edward Mendelson’s seminal account, for instance, seven key “members” of this international genre-club are assembled, including Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, and Melville, as well as the most prominent modernist and postmodern examples of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).10 For Mendelson, the causes for encyclopedism in fiction are virtually organic (and nationalistic): when a culture “becomes aware of itself as a separate entity,” it “produces an encyclopedic author, one whose work attends to the whole social and linguistic range of his nation” (1268). Despite the rigidity of this “national focus,” Mendelson subsequently makes two concessions: first, that encyclopedic novels actually bear a “peculiar indeterminacy,” becoming compositionally “far more diffuse” than “other varieties of fiction” with a regional provenance; and second, that their epistemological reach, especially in the case of more recent works like Pynchon’s, is matched by geographical expansion.11 Therefore, just as Gravity’s Rainbow is “expert in ballistics, chemistry, and some very advanced mathematics,” it also exemplifies Pynchon’s “international scope, his attention to cartels and communication-networks that ignore national boundaries,” showcasing his virtuosity as a chronicler of a “new internationalism” born out of “information, of data, instead of the old order built on money and commercial goods.”12 However global their ambit becomes, though, what all encyclopedic fictions share in common (according to this model, at least) is a propensity to anticipate their own critical reception. So iconic have some of these texts become, contends Mendelson, that in retrospect it seems their creators have inaugurated a “dialect” that preempts their own cultural profiling and eventual canonization, for the works themselves invariably go on to occupy “the focus of a large and persistent exegetic and textual industry.”13 This much seems true if we glance at the voluminous bodies of secondary commentary on Pynchon and his encyclopedic precursors or when we think of the vast critical industry that “Joyce studies” became throughout the postwar era. But even if epic reputations can stem from encyclopedic ambitions, there are nonetheless important generic differences. Key among them is the issue of temporality. Whereas epics “treat of the immediate culture in which they are written only allusively or analogically,” Mendelson suggests that encyclopedic novels “are set near the immediate present, although not in it,” thereby 77 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 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In his incisive analysis of modernist writing of 1920s and 1930s, Paul Saint-Amour looks to such innovators as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford for their “attempt to see the future as other than the here and now – the more so when the moment oncoming looks just like the consummation of present violence.”15 Saint-Amour resituates encyclopedism as peculiarly attractive for “interwar practitioners of the long-form narrative” because it enabled “them to address the problem of epic while rejecting its solutions.”16 Such is the problem with Mendelson’s conspicuously deterministic, “messianic model of encyclopedic narrative”: it remains, “for all its heterogeneity, intolerant of elements that stray from the genre’s conventions or attempt to pull focus from its portrait of the social totality.”17 Saint-Amour offers solid advice here, urging us “to disentangle the genre of encyclopedic narrative from the social-theoretical trellises on which it has so far hung,” whereby it occupies inflexible molds of “undifferentiated narratives” from which novels emerge either fixated with “modernization as national becoming” or else oriented toward “globalization” as a supranational phenomenon. Long modernist fictions did more to disrupt than fulfill the inclinations of epic to “total representation,” using the encyclopedia’s awareness of its own “ephemerality” as a counterpoint to the way epic “conceives of its knowledge-world as fully mapped and integrated.”18 As we might expect, Ulysses is a standout example of this process, for it’s an epically choreographed novel that nonetheless “engages in an immanent critique of any totalizing project, enacting the tendency of a supposedly total model or portrait to refer more insistently, more accurately, and more meaningfully to itself than to the world.”19 As a result, the “essence” of Joyce’s encyclopedic imperative actually derives from “a yearning,” as Saint-Amour describes it, “in the face of violently deranging forces, for continuity and for social portraiture so total as to comprehend the future.”20 Joyce wasn’t the first to exemplify encyclopedism’s twinned priorities of totality and particularity, though. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk have remarked, “it became apparent that the collective body of knowledge stored in the encyclopedic work far exceeded the capacity of individual memory.”21 At the same time, it also became clear that “[a]ny structure pretending to be all-encompassing can only be a rigid and limited system with no room for change.”22 Looking to a British context, we see that some 78 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia of the earliest encyclopedic fictions incorporate into their form a tangible awareness of these internal tensions. They do so by admitting their own structural and epistemic limitations, their own necessarily compromised capacity to carry out the role encyclopedism’s fusion of informational scale and accumulation conspires to engineer. Nowhere does this compromise seem more poignant than in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).23 Defoe’s narrator is as self-conscious as Melville’s Ishmael over the issue of comprehensiveness. H. F., as he’s known, moves as a kind of participant-observer through London’s terrifying epidemic. Alternating modes, he blends visceral episodes of horrified witnessing with sections of verified data. Recreated traumas drawn from his street-level sightings are thus juxtaposed with more dispassionate, concrete information presented in tables, which compare death rates from plague with those of other diseases. By synthesizing emotional and factual responses to the outbreak’s scale, the Journal moves across perspectival “scales” by integrating figures that quantify human costs alongside singularly wrenching instances of loss. Everyday tragedies befalling particular families (witnessed by the narrator or reported to him) become representative of this citywide cataclysm, and Defoe reaches for this universal picture without blunting the affecting specificity of individual cases. In fact, emphasizing the pathos of those cases is also, for H. F., a way of emphasizing the limits of the Journal’s capacity to capture the entirety of the disease’s impact. Acknowledging the partiality of his encyclopedism, he swerves at times toward adynaton – the rhetorical pronouncement of inexpressibility – only then to defend the narrative’s contribution as a story that “may have its uses” in “so many ways as that it will, I hope, never be said, that the relating has been unprofitable.”24 In one respect, then, as a catalogue of social trauma, this encyclopedic journey through the city demotes if not dissolves the primacy of the individual. And yet, at the same time, Defoe requires the subjective presence of an astonished onlooker in order to turn a record of deaths into more than mere data – to novelize, in effect, the grimly repetitive behavior of disease via the simulation of what it was like to observe its local horrors unfold. In performing this doubly duty, aspects of novelistic depiction are placed under the spotlight. More than any other representational component of this “journal,” Defoe subjects description to purposeful examination. For H. F., scenic description is a necessary resource, of course, but it’s an inherently fraught one too, facilitating an emotive picture of dismay even as it falters at the threshold of encyclopedic inclusivity. Though our narrator hopes that recounted episodes “serve a little to describe the dreadful Condition” of infected districts and seemingly futile efforts to resist the spread of contagion, he concedes that “it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true 79 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 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We’re invited to benefit from the encyclopedic breadth of his “journal” while also recognizing – by virtue of his candid metacompositional asides – that the record it offers is authoritative precisely because of its perspectivism, partiality, and emotional involvement, not because H. F. is consistently or objectively comprehensive. Hence he asks the reader not to “tak[e]” it “upon me to either vouch the Particulars, or answer for any Mistakes.”27 What’s more, it’s often by withholding rather than cataloguing information that Defoe’s depiction of the plague’s consequences becomes all the more moving, not least when the narrator returns “to the Case of Families infected, and shut up by the Magistrates.”28 Rather than opt for a typology of effects, he backs away; switching from what’s seen to what’s only heard, the economical level of reference enhances the emotional potency of information left out from this appallingly typical scene of suffering. [T]he Misery of those Families is not to be express’d, and it was generally in such Houses that we heard the most dismal Shrieks and Out-cries of the poor People terrified, and even frighted to Death, by the Sight of the Condition of their dearest Relations, and by the Terror of being imprisoned as they were.29 H. F. proceeds, then, not only in the knowledge of his medium’s limits but also with the sense – potentially, an ethically uneasy sense – that those same limits might affirm the encyclopedia’s advantage. Journal mediates between its obligatory provision of data in measuring the plague’s consequences and its domestic rendition of London in crisis, all the while allowing that the actual experience of plague in its petrifying totality remains indescribable. Hence H. F. operates as though it “were” “possible to represent those Times exactly to those that did not see them,” striving to “give the Reader due Ideas of the Horror that every where presented itself.”30 Embarking on this reconstructive endeavor while ceding the artificiality of transmitting it, Defoe’s Journal suggests that encyclopedism ought to be less about objective fact than descriptive flair if it is to seize an audience and “make just Impressions upon their Minds” that “fill them with Surprise.”31 Defoe’s text seems alert therefore to the ethical dilemmas of giving expressive form to intractable violence. Attuned to the fact that narrative can never extensively enumerate the plight of the vulnerable and dispossessed, Journal 80 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia nevertheless attempts to do just that, translating the concession of failure into a premise for invention. As Defoe’s H. F. documents sudden disappearances of families from one day to the next, he draws an unsettling cartography of desertion whose “vanishings are part not only of the book’s poignancy,” in David Roberts’ phrase, but also constitutive of “its disconcerting modernity, its futile struggle to impose a single, all-encompassing narrative scheme on ‘an infinite variety of circumstances.’”32 To the extent that Journal embraces this struggle as a stimulus, and despite what it says about the encyclopedia’s breaking points, it resembles Melville’s conceit of textual self-exposure: to tackle the leviathan is really to tackle what’s most inventive about MobyDick itself, as the novel negotiates levels of sensation, narration, and specialized matter, with all its diegetic immensity and verbal grandiosity. While “social comprehensiveness, or at least a wide range of social representation,” was one of the “distinctive features” of eighteenth-century English fiction, as John Richetti reminds us, at the same time, “a commanding overview with its promise of a hidden totality is not quite what the novels of the period provide.”33 Instead, they debate, as Defoe implicitly does, the “difficulty of imagining” all-inclusive, durable visions of “social coherence.”34 It’s this self-conscious intimation of deficiency that extends into later modernist and contemporary global fictions, whose tactics of “[i]nternal compartmentalization, conflicted discursive zones and organizational schemata, selfcontradictory systems of internal reference” become the structurally generative mechanisms through which the genre of encyclopedism at once “delimits and impedes the project it nonetheless cannot refuse to undertake.”35 In recent decades, some practitioners of world fiction have taken to staging those mechanisms with great satirical verve and with ideologically incendiary results. In its own version of Defoe’s sensational “hoax,”36 Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996, trans. 2008) offers an acerbic catalogue of politically heinous and self-deluding writers whose adventures and vanities are logged in the potted biographies of individual chapter entries. Divided into thirteen principal sections (bearing classificatory names such as “Speculative and Science Fiction,” “Forerunners and Figures of the AntiEnlightenment,” and “The Aryan Brotherhood”), the book concludes with an “Epilogue for Monsters” listing “secondary figures” not documented in the main entries together with a bibliographic list of titles that comprise Bolaño’s imagined corpus of fascist letters. The entries themselves blend mock factual and interpretive registers, moving from biographic description to literary-critical evaluation. In tenor, Bolaño is consciously mischievous. Swaying from the “objective” proviso of encyclopedic authoritativeness, the text’s narrator – though this term doesn’t seem quite right – speculates on intentions and probable destinies, discriminating between the variable 81 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 david james quality of different writers’ works and even at one late stage breaking the frame of pseudoimpartiality altogether when a character named Bolaño makes an appearance. Through such antics, Nazi Literature advertises its own status as an encyclopedic narrative that embodies, and in so doing reflects explicitly on, the assumptions built into encyclopedism as both mission and mode. Bolaño thus goads the reader into entertaining this “novel” as an encyclopedia even though he clearly takes great pleasure in exploiting the faux reliability, evidentiary instability, and ethical dubiousness of the whole exercise of compiling data about the lives and loves of fascist literati. As Héctor Hoyos has observed, the book’s “paratactical unfolding” enacts three key dynamics by (1) spotlighting the “imaginary cultural formation” of “urfascist” literary production and affiliation, (2) embracing a kind of Bakhtinian “cannibalism,” whereby Bolaño “not only ‘devours’ several genres, but also different artistic media,” and (3) confronting and satirically undermining “the assumed authority of literary space” in its fascination with the most ordinary details through which to portray “Nazism as something that takes hold on the everyday, that stays much too alive, and that lies closer than one may think, if under different garbs.”37 Moreover, the reader himself or herself is implicated; as the Epilogue suggests, the book’s audience consists of those “monsters” for whom a copious bibliography of fascistic periodicals, luminaries, and commentaries will provide rich further reading. And the ethical conscription of the reader happens at the level of affective expression, too, as Bolaño’s entries treat their poet figures not as the subject of factually even-handed biography but as compelling and often disturbingly charismatic characters. Their domestic lives, dramatic longings, and tumultuous affections are plotted in ways that invite fascination, humor, and even sympathetic consideration despite the obscene substrate of ideological values they serve to expose. Some entries in Nazi Literature swell into consuming, self-sufficient mininovels in their own right. This miniaturism might itself be extrapolated as part and parcel of Bolaño’s dissent from encyclopedic conventions in general, since his book ultimately doesn’t align with the standard portrait of that novelistic tradition bookended by Melville and Pynchon, in which encyclopedism is synonymous with a kind of intrepid maximalism. One element of Bolaño’s refusal of grand scale is conspicuously political: his first entry on the gregarious “patroness of the arts” Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce reports that she “longed for the epic and its proportions, a literature unafraid to face the challenge of singing the fatherland.”38 It’s not that maximalism inevitably shares with epic a propensity for messianic renditions of national selfidentity and cultural progress; rather, the hubris of expansionism serves as 82 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia a target of Bolaño’s caustic pastiche, with Nazi Literature pulling taut the perimeter wires of its encyclopedic format. Over the course of its thrifty vignettes, explicit evaluations of literary forms and the ideologies they either harbor or proclaim intensify the book’s cutting manner of highlighting political contradictions at the heart of signal movements – even allegedly progressive, avant-garde ones. Thus we hear of Daniela de Montecristo, a “legendary beauty,”39 who authored just one surviving work, The Amazons, an “epic title” that befits its zealous hybridity. The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avantgarde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires. The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich – with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia – and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions and a gland that produces the feeling of love.40 The enumerative syntax here (in Chris Andrews’ translation) syncs with the literary object it evokes: in this way, Nazi Literature performs its own linguistic mimesis of the encyclopedic phenomena it identifies in the oftenzany, fugitive works whose reputations it catalogues. Yet Bolaño’s narrative also vividly jibes with the notion that encyclopedias, as we’ve seen in the case of Melville and Defoe, are always in some sense reflecting on their own procedures – including the impossibilities of comprehensive data capture those procedures make apparent – drawing attention to the breaking points of representational relevance and the ephemeral currency of collated information. Bolaño lends this inspection of medium, reach, and relevance an added critical function “by recontextualizing national concerns,” as Hoyos puts it, “within the broader history of the tense relation of fascism and the arts throughout the twentieth century.”41 Indeed, the interrogative potential of Bolaño’s “bizarro world” can be found in the way he dramatizes and also comments on “a dynamic image of a totality in constant transformation”: shunning the ideal of coherence and comprehensiveness that modern encyclopedias view as chimerical, he stages an inquiry into the “role of art in regard to such ungraspable totality.”42 This is not to say that encyclopedic fiction is unsuited to more earnest endeavors, that its own self-ironizing preemptions of the genre’s overwhelming desires forestall more urgent and socially immediate interventions. On the contrary, encyclopedism has become for certain contemporary 83 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 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Strecker departs from Mendelson’s model of encyclopedic fiction as wedded to self-sufficient totalities – striving to reproduce “the whole social and linguistic range” of the nation from which it derives – preferring instead the prospect of “narrative ecologies,” whereby encyclopedic fictions build “hybrid networks of information systems linked by narrative.” Indeed, narrative in and of itself is what renews encyclopedism’s range of applications, opening up its social and environmental purview, for when “narrative enters a static encyclopedic system, a living, evolving textual ecology unfolds.”44 Pertinent here would be William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), whose “globalist aspect,” suggests Matthew Hart, is both enfolded and animated by its interlocking, “nesting-doll structure.” For Mitchell – no less than for earlier encyclopedists, as we’ve seen – structure is tightly bound up with plot. Multinational settings, many of them occupied by multiethnic characters, offer apt backdrops and populations for Mitchell’s leitmotif of “decentred relatedness,” a feature that recurs like “a kind of authorial firmware – something akin to an aesthetic ground plan – for a narrative secondary world that is at once generically diverse and structurally systematic.”45 Equally diverse yet systematically organized in its alternating point of view is Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Here another lost book, not a scrapbook this time but a diary, becomes the premise for a transnational plot of displacement, recovery, and environmental consciousness. Ozeki’s novel takes flamboyant pleasure in disrupting the coherence and purpose of its own multiplex system of encounters, histories, and objects of intellection. Centered on the experiences of two women on either side of the Pacific, it also exposes just how outdated Mendelson’s claim now sounds that “encyclopedic narratives find it exceptionally difficult to integrate their women characters at any level more quotidian or human than the levels of archetype and myth.”46 As a physical artifact, A Tale for the Time Being foregrounds its own materiality with 165 footnotes, six appendices, and a bibliography, all of which place Ozeki’s own compositional 84 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia apparatuses on display. Through interconnecting stories of ecological vulnerability, we follow the writer, Ruth, somewhat isolated on Vancouver Island, as she comes across on her local beach a washed-up lunchbox in which she finds the diary of Nao Yasutani. A teenager who has been uprooted from Silicon Valley after the tech industries contract, Nao now lives with her parents back in Japan as their marriage falls apart. As she learns that Nao contemplates what it might mean existentially to step outside of time, Ruth wonders whether this diarist might have become a victim of the tsunami caused in 2011 by the Tohoku earthquake, all the while speculating that the journal could turn out to be recent, so recent, in fact, that it might even allow Ruth to come to Nao’s aid. Crossing continents, A Tale for the Time Being “often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes,” as one reviewer remarked. The novel roils like “a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrodinger’s cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafés, the anatomy of barnacles,” among other topics, “jostle for attention” – all of which amounts to “an impressive amount of stuff.”47 Yet the question of whether sheer, random, accumulated stuff can become sustainable material for narration looms at the heart of all encyclopedic fictions, from Moby-Dick’s exhaustive whale physiologies to Gravity’s Rainbow’s rocket anatomies. Equally pervasive for this genre is the question of whether encyclopedias enable prophetic commentary, something that Ozeki contests rather than dutifully confirms as she brings predictive elements down to the level of character, domesticating the grandeur of messianic prognosis (to recall Mendelson’s terms) within the everyday realm of offhand rumination: “A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.”48 Such speculations lead Ruth to focalize what resembles an encyclopedia entry on “[h]er own name”49 in a register that stands back from the action and brings her closer to the metadiegetic voice of her creator. For “Ruth” in itself “had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life.”50 Mystical though this sounds, we’re then offered a more concrete explanation for the name’s prognostic efficacy. “The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret,” but in Japanese, moreover, “Ruth is either pronounced rustu, meaning ‘roots’, or rusu, meaning ‘not at home’ or ‘absent.’”51 As etymologic facts give way to affecting self-reflections, we move from the realm of raw information toward Ruth’s own interiority, shifting from painstaking definition to the pathos of what pronunciation 85 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 david james implies – given how differently a name can signify across cultures. Objective explanation here modulates into intimate self-excavation. Once again, the narrator’s vulnerability becomes emotively prominent, recalling the paradox we first glimpsed in Journal of the Plague Year: potentially unmanageable information exposes the individual, even as the novel’s evocative uses of data seem to summon a participating individual’s reactions. In the case of Ozeki’s Ruth, as for Defoe’s H. F., vulnerability seems all the more pronounced despite the encyclopedia’s pretensions to calm and collected all-inclusivity. Excavations of world historical events also shape Ruth’s immersion in Nao’s voyage, as she tracks the account of her stay with Nao’s 104-year-old anarchist-Buddhist great-grandmother, Jiko. We learn that Jiko’s son served as a kamikaze pilot in the closing phase of the Second World War, while code writing in French secret letters that scrutinize his own role and culpability in the violence he abhors. Echoing these letters’ plaintive appeal to an unknown and ultimately unplaceable reader, Nao’s diary also reaches encyclopedically across temporal and geographic separation, soliciting compassion from an audience who can engage her panorama of unbelonging and its convulsive familial ramifications. Consequently, it dawns on Ruth that she “couldn’t help but feel a strong sense of almost karmic connection with the girl and her father,”52 realizing how in the very act of reading she has cultivated an indelible kinship with Nao at a moment when the costs of Middle East conflicts become indubitable for Ruth’s own generation. Ozeki’s long narrative arc from the Second World War to the legally controversial second Iraq invasion in 2003 – which in hindsight can be seen as having had a catastrophic impact on the stability of that whole region, exacerbating the rise of militant fundamentalist groups while triggering mass migrations to and throughout Europe of a magnitude not seen since the 1940s – exemplifies how encyclopedic narratives “identify nascent phenomena rather than foretell the advent of unborn ones,” as Saint-Amour observes, even as they seem prone to “make and satisfy predictions.”53 Yet, if nothing is certain in what encyclopedic fictions predict, and if they evidently revel in their own descriptive defects – as though textual flaws and total information go hand in glove – then what’s the appeal? Though not always epic in construction, as we’ve discovered, they do tend to demand a certain tolerance from the reader who entertains their claims, a tolerance that can be put under pressure from all angles, tested by Defoe’s notoriously repetitive journal as much as it is teased by Ozeki’s ludic mass of transoceanic “stuff.” This exigency, however, is intrinsic to the allure of any novel parading around as an encyclopedia: by exceeding its own habits, it cuts across our expectations, reappearing as other to itself. Practitioners of encyclopedism have sensed this attraction, no doubt finding in it some solace amid the slog 86 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia of construction. As indeed Joyce did. Warning of “the enormous bulk and the more than enormous complexity” of his “blasted novel,” Ulysses, he characterized it as “a sort of encyclopedia” in which “[e]ach adventure” might “not only condition but even create its own technique.”54 We’ve seen across literary history how this global mode reflects intensely on its own formal physique – fusing technique, whenever required, with quicksilver shifts in topic. At any time, of course, perpetual variegation may threaten to compromise the compositional integrity of encyclopedic fiction. Unless, that is, one considers the genre along Joycean lines: for him, the coherence and sufficiency of a specific “adventure” from one event to the next needn’t contradict the effect of encyclopedic span, with “every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole.”55 This vision of formal self-cohesion is something encyclopedic novels call disruptively to account as they meditate on the transfer of unstable information and confront the wishful prospect of panoramic inclusiveness. Which is not to say that they throw themselves willfully into the very performance of total description all novels seem destined to be defeated by, indulging the incompleteness that underscores the encyclopedia’s aspiration to chronicle, classify, contain. Instead, as Joyce intimates, that performance alone inspires a compelling scheme of its own, a scheme whose “bulk” does nothing to detract from how seductive it can be for readers to discover how myriad things are “interrelated” after all. If late-twentieth-century globalization shrank the world in postmodernism’s view, then social media now continues this process apace. Far from buckling under the pressure, as some doomsayers of the fate of fiction would have us believe,56 the novel today seems primed to take on the job of evoking what Heather Houser has called the infowhelm.57 In an age of digital bombardment, it’s tempting to see fiction reading as a mitigating defense: an excuse for detachment, for seclusion and cerebral respite, for refusing the entertainment swamp into which web browsing can wander. Perhaps the novel will supply this sort of antiglut therapy in decades to come. If so, it would be pious of criticism to view such literary aid as retrograde. Fiction still has important work to do for our deluged attentions: not merely as a type of affective compensation, but also in directly counteracting the mental “shallows” of diversion and the coercions of internet “filter bubbles.”58 After all, there’s nothing reactionary about valuing our absorption in fiction as a palliative asset, one that intervenes in the perennially crowded experience of our time, where communication technologies have facilitated global accessibility without alleviating personal isolation. Recent novelists have already taken to chronicling the fallout, showing how expanding opportunities for connectivity, whether 87 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 david james professional or recreational, often do little to offset material vulnerability. Not strictly speaking encyclopedic (though they’re both long enough to appear so), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013) plot lives either unfulfilled by virtually initiated intimacies or else seduced by the collective obligation to maintain online identities and transparent habits. They also raise questions that are likely to persist for encyclopedists in years ahead, asking whether novels ought to “reproduce the sensations of information saturation,” as Houser puts it, or “instead depict the singular and specific as an antidote to the aggregate.”59 Such a decision – to envelop the planetary scope of data management or instead to particularize discrete experiences of environments where instantaneous access coincides with physical alienation, the pernicious costs of which seem increasingly difficult to measure – will no doubt endure for encyclopedic writing. If turn-of-the-century figures such as David Foster Wallace indicated that some of the most ambitious “cultural experiments express the anxieties of overload,” then his postmillennial successors are finding poignant ways of capturing the irony that web saturation is now a rather efficient incubator for solitariness. This chapter’s historical arc for encyclopedism hopefully suggests that the aesthetic responses such anxieties produce are by no means exclusive to contemporary writing; our present moment, however, is clearly yielding extraordinary provocations for “info-rich” novels.60 Networked societies today may seem a far cry from the plague-struck city of Defoe, the seafaring adversities of Melville, or the fragmenting Europe of Pynchon. Yet that essential problem, that creative goal of encyclopedic inclusion, which pushes the novel to new formal frontiers while also leading it to the brink of collapse, in so many ways lives on – whenever description squares up to the profusion of things yet to be fully described, whenever style grapples with substance on an unprecedented scale. NO TES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), Penguin, 2003, pp. 496–97. Ibid., pp. 485, 497. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid., p. 496. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid. Lewis Mumford, “The Significance of Herman Melville,” New Republic, October 10, 1928, available at https://newrepublic.com/article/114098/signifi cance-herman-melville-lewis-mumford-stacks. 88 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 The Novel as Encyclopedia 9. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 188. 10. Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 91, no. 6, 1976, pp. 1267–75. 11. Ibid., p. 1270. 12. Ibid., pp. 1270, 1272. 13. Ibid., p. 1268. 14. Ibid., p. 1269. 15. Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 43. 16. Ibid., p. 188. 17. Ibid., pp. 208, 212. 18. Ibid., p. 189. 19. Ibid., p. 258. 20. Ibid., p. 261. 21. Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity’s Rainbow,” English Studies, vol. 90, no. 2, 2009, p. 167. 22. Ibid. 23. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (1722), Oxford University Press, 2010. 24. Ibid., p. 32. 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 52. 27. Ibid., p. 51. 28. Ibid., p. 49. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 15. 31. Ibid. 32. David Roberts, “Introduction,” in A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa and David Roberts, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. xxi. 33. John Richetti, “The Novel and Society: The Case of Daniel Defoe,” in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert W. Uphaus, Colleagues Press, 1988, p. 47. 34. Ibid., p. 47. 35. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, p. 186. 36. Roberts notes that in his “desire to exploit and contain a crisis,” Defoe produced a fictional cartography of plague “masquerading as history and vice versa,” thereby performing “a dazzling hoax that deploys the mechanics of truthful enquiry” (“Introduction,” p. xiii). 37. Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 38, 39. 38. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas, trans. Chris Andrews (2008), New Directions, 1996, pp. 6, 15. 39. Ibid., p. 90. 40. Ibid., p. 91. 41. Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño, p. 50. 42. Ibid., p. 51. 89 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006 david james 43. Trey Strecker, “Ecologies of Knowledge: The Encyclopedic Narratives of Richard Powers and His Contemporaries,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 18, no. 3, 1998, p. 67. 44. Ibid., p. 68. 45. Matthew Hart, “Globalism and Historical Romance,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, ed. David James, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 208, 209. 46. Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative,” p. 1272. 47. Liz Jensen, “Review of A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki,” The Guardian, March 15, 2013, available at www.theguardian.com/books/ 2013/mar/15/tale-time-being-ozecki-review. 48. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Canongate, 2013, p. 59. 49. Ibid., p. 59. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 311. 53. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, pp. 208, 212. 54. James Joyce to Carlo Linati, September 21, 1920, in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Faber & Faber, 1957, pp. 146, 147. 55. Ibid., p. 147. 56. Consider Will Self’s gloomy prognosis, for instance: “The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes” due, in part, he avers, to the “current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form,” given the allegedly more appealing distractions afforded by mobile technologies. Will Self, “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real),” Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture, University of Oxford, May 6, 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-noveldead-literary-fiction. 57. See Heather Houser, Environmental Culture of the Infowhelm, Columbia University Press, forthcoming. 58. I draw these terms from two recent books that have sought to offer critical eyeopeners on the adverse effects of internet use: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read, and Remember, Norton, 2010; and Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin, 2011. 59. Heather Houser, “Managing Information and Materiality in Infinite Jest and Running the Numbers,” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 4 (2014), p. 742. 60. Ibid., pp. 743, 744. 90 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, on 02 Jul 2018 at 10:34:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.006