Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel

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READING CRUFT

A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE MEGA-NOVEL

DAVID LETZLER

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2014

DAVID JOSEPH LETZLER

iii

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the

Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Gerhard Joseph

_______________________ ___________________________________________

Date Chair of Examining Committee

Mario DiGangi

_______________________ ___________________________________________

Date Executive Officer

Gerhard Joseph

Nico Israel

Mario DiGangi

Supervisory Committee

HE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Abstract

READING CRUFT: A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE MEGA-NOVEL

David Letzler

Adviser: Gerhard Joseph

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model for examining a genre vital to modern

literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and

cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a

substantial amount of pointless text (“cruft”), which it uses to challenge its readers’ abilities to

modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five

chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped—the

dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale,

and the epic and allegory—it demonstrates how these books make substantial use of their generic

elements but also include text that fails to either fulfill or subvert their most crucial elements,

rendering much of their text into excess that cannot be deeply processed. However, mega-novels

also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, is actually quite important, forcing readers to

subtly distinguish between the text that does require deep attention and that which does not. This

requires readers to develop more sophisticated procedures of attentional modulation in text

processing. Reading Cruft argues that the education of attention this process prompts can aid

readers in learning to manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes every

aspect of contemporary life.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the following individuals—

To Gerhard Joseph, Nico Israel, Frank L. Cioffi, and Mario DiGangi for their supervision

of this project,

To Jay Barksdale and New York Public Library for granting me access to the Wertheim

Study while I researched,

To Marc Dolan, Edmund L. Epstein, Reagan Lothes, Nikolina Nedeljkov, Josh

Schneiderman, Judd Staley, and Alaya Swann for reading and providing feedback on drafts,

To Russell Backman, Ben Barber, Martin Brick, George Derk, Abram Foley, Laura

Hensch, Stephen Hock, Teffany Hunley, David B. Olson, Gavin Pate, and Kyle Smith for co-

presenting with me on various conference panels where I introduced much of this material and

for generating conversation helpful for developing it,

To H. Porter Abbott, Stephen Burn, and William K. Wootters for graciously responding

to my emails with important suggestions and references,

To Robert Bell, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Stephen Fix, and David Greetham, in whose

classes many of the ideas expressed in this dissertation took root,

To Carrie Hintz and Gloria Fisk for their mentorship over the past several years,

To Jim Shepard and Samuel R. Delany for shaping my academic prose style more than

any literary scholar ever has,

To everyone I’ve cited in the dissertation for being just right enough to prevent me from

making some extremely silly mistakes and just wrong enough to allow this book to come into

being,

And to Katie, for everything else.

People think I’m crazy ‘cause I’m worried all the time

If you paid attention, you’d be worried too.

You better pay attention or this world we love so much

Might

Just

Kill

You…

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii

Introduction—Information and Attention in the Mega-Novel ........................................................ 1

The Agony and Ecstasy of Big Books ........................................................................................ 1

The Significance of Insignificance: The Cruft of Fiction ........................................................... 3

Attention, Overload, and Boredom ........................................................................................... 11

Reading in the Information Age ................................................................................................ 20

Cruft and Genre in Poststructuralism and Cognitive Theory .................................................... 25

What This Book Does and Does Not Do: Some Caveats on Cruft ........................................... 29

Chapter One—The Dictionary ...................................................................................................... 40

The Unreadable Dictionary ....................................................................................................... 40

Text Processing, Literary Convention, and Information Theory .............................................. 44

Error: Is J R Readable?.............................................................................................................. 52

Redundancy: Is The Making of Americans Worth Reading? .................................................... 64

Correction: How Does One Read Finnegans Wake? ................................................................ 74

Chapter 2—The Encyclopedia ...................................................................................................... 87

The Paradox of Encyclopedic Fiction ....................................................................................... 87

The Three Casaubons and Moby-Dick ...................................................................................... 94

The Unhappy Retirement of Bouvard and Pécuchet .............................................................. 100

The Deadly Endnote: House of Leaves and Europe Central .................................................. 110

“Handling Information in a Grown-Up Way”: Navigating Infinite Jest ................................. 118

Chapter 3—The Menippean Satire ............................................................................................. 130

“Dull, Difficult, Dreary, & Disgusting” .................................................................................. 130

The Fallacies of Exposure and Subversion ............................................................................. 135

The Menippean Grotesque ...................................................................................................... 139

Comic Overload: A Few Words on The Sot-Weed Factor...................................................... 142

The Public Burning and the Butts of Satire............................................................................. 152

The Fraudulent, the Satiric, and The Recognitions ................................................................. 163

Chapter Four—The Frame-Tale, the Picaresque, and the Circumfabulation ............................. 176

viii

Too Much Plot ......................................................................................................................... 176

Plotting Space and Time in the Picaresque and Frame-Tale, and Introducing the

Circumfabulation ..................................................................................................................... 182

The Line and the Tangle in Mason & Dixon ........................................................................... 187

The Useless Room: The Frame-Tale and Life A User’s Manual ............................................ 194

On the Picaresque Road to 2666 ............................................................................................. 205

Chapter 5—The Epic and the Allegory ...................................................................................... 222

The Problem of Contemporary Figural Narratives ................................................................. 222

Allegory, Epic, Metanarrative, and Paranoia .......................................................................... 225

How Is Everything Connected in Underworld? ...................................................................... 235

World War II as the Contemporary Allegorical-Epic Event ................................................... 244

Varieties of Catachresis: LETTERS and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle .................................. 247

The Elephantiasis of Midnight’s Children .............................................................................. 259

Us and Them in Gravity’s Rainbow ........................................................................................ 270

Conclusion—The Fate of the Mega-Novel ................................................................................. 290

Notes ........................................................................................................................................... 298

Permissions ................................................................................................................................. 320

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 321

Introduction—Information and Attention in the Mega-Novel

Something strange is creeping across me.

La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars

Of “I Thought about You” or something mellow from

Amadigi di Gaula for everything—a mint-condition can

Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy

Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile

Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged

Stock—to come clattering through the rainbow trellis

Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland

Fling Terrace. He promised he’d get me out of this one,

That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he’s

Done to me now!

— John Ashbery, “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”

The Agony and Ecstasy of Big Books

Why do we respond so strangely to big books?

I mean a certain type of big book: the extremely literate, erudite tomes around which one

must plan one’s life for a month; the books one hesitates to approach without the assistance of a

university course, a reading circle, or at least a Reader’s Guide; the books whose spines stare

down from bookshelves, holding dominion over entire rooms; the books that inspire fanatical

devotion and revulsion in equal parts, though totally out of balance even with the scale of their

own elephantine materiality. I mean the books Frederick R. Karl calls “mega-novels” (155),

most notably including ambitious work by postwar American writers like William Gaddis, John

Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, but also, if we take a more

catholic view, earlier titanic works like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and James

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake through contemporary global novels ranging from Haruki Murakami’s

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

I ask this question because mega-novels’ most distinctive quality, even more than their

inimitable heft and learnedness, is the way they prompt otherwise sensible readers into

hyperbolic responses, vacillating wildly with respect both to the books themselves and others’

attitudes toward them. In some readers, mega-novels inspire love and reverence, exemplified by

Tom LeClair’s declaration that “our big books are our big books” (vii), because they “gather,

represent, and reform the time’s excesses into fictions that exceed the time’s literary conventions

and thereby master the time, the methods of fiction, and the reader” (1)—or at least the

enlightened mega-novel reader, since “other consumers in Mediamerica” are merely “amusing

themselves to death” on mass-produced entertainments (vii). For other readers, though, words

like “disgust,” “illegitimate,” and “frauds” are more likely to be used to describe mega-novels

and their devotees—though perhaps not without feeling “deeply ashamed” at their own inability

to appreciate these books (see Lapidos). It is not uncommon, in fact, for these contradictory

responses to be produced by the same readers: Jonathan Franzen, for instance, credited the

inspiration for his bestseller The Corrections to his devotional reading of Gaddis’s The

Recognitions, but subsequently railed that most other mega-novels (including Gaddis’s) merely

“punis[h] the reader,” their excess and difficulty just a “smoke screen for an author who has

nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say” (110). We might understand, then, why Mark

O’Connell’s widely-read essay about mega-novels should claim that reading them experientially

resembles Stockholm Syndrome and that the discourse surrounding them “has at least as much to

do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the

author’s achievement in having written it,” causing us to conceive such books as “monumental”

even if they involve “long, cruel sessions of boredom-torture”; conversely, Raymond Federman

seems on point in making the complementary observation that, whereas once upon a time one

needed to have read the latest ambitious novel to appear cultured, a reader now need merely

declare on which page of the most recent mega-novel he decided to give up (66).

What causes this array of responses? Their length only goes so far in forming an

explanation. While size and scale, as Alastair Fowler points out, have always been among the

most powerful elements shaping how we respond to a narrative (62-64), most long novels do not

provoke the kind of reactions described above—consider V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr.

Biswas, for instance, or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, to say nothing of the Harry

Potter or Twilight sagas. Difficulty and its relationship to pleasure seem important, too, but

explaining exactly what we mean by these terms is not easy, especially since many mega-novel

admirers deny that mega-novels are either particularly difficult or unpleasurable (see Marcus).

Our inability to clearly lay out exactly why mega-novels provoke these reactions, I suspect, is

why existing conversations around them get so wound up in circular logic and polemic (e.g.,

regarding the conflicts between realistic and experimental fiction, the competition of commercial

and artistic interests, the place of entertainment in the reading process and in contemporary

capitalism, the indisputability of taste, etc.). To circumvent such discourse, this book instead

will offer a somewhat counter-intuitive theory: mega-novels cause such outsized responses

because they all contain substantial text that is, basically, pointless.

The Significance of Insignificance: The Cruft of Fiction

There will be immediate objections: What do I mean by “pointless”? According to what

standards? Why need literary text have a “point” at all? Let’s consider two foundational essays

in narrative theory by Roland Barthes addressing the idea of literary purpose. In 1966, Barthes’s

“Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” argued, in fact, that literary text could

never be without purpose, writing, “everything has a meaning, or nothing has. To put it in a

different way, Art does not acknowledge the existence of noise (in the informational sense of the

word). It is a pure system […] Though a particular notation may seem expendable, it retains a

discursive function: it precipitates, delays, or quickens the pace of discourse, sums up,

anticipates, and sometimes even confuses the reader” (249). Even in its blandest moments, in

other words, a literary text could not help but do something. However, several years later,

Barthes substantially revised this position in his famous essay on “reality effects,” the concrete

details of realist fiction (e.g., the wall barometer in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart) that do not seem

to signify anything at all. Asking, “if there exist insignificant stretches, what is, so to speak, the

ultimate significance of this insignificance?” (12), Barthes eventually concluded that such effets

de réel negotiated the aporia in nineteenth-century bourgeois realist fiction between narrative

meaningfulness and mimetic reality by creating a “referential illusion” that says “only this: we

are the real. It is the category of the ‘real,’ and not its various contents, which are being

signified” (16).

This might be construed as a kind of purpose. However, once we grant the existence of

such text, we may observe that there are many other instances of apparently purposeless literary

text that do not qualify under this rubric. Decades earlier, in fact, Henry James had perceived

stretches of such writing within the extremely long books of his era, rather than his own

quintessentially realist novels:

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is,

moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of

health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There

may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois

Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi’s Peace and War, have it; but what do such large,

loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the

arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that

such things are “superior to art”; but we understand least of all what that may

mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will

come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life

sacrificed and thereby prevented from “counting,” I delight in a deep-breathing

economy and an organic form. (84)

Tolstoy’s philosophical fantasies, Dumas’s pseudo-romances, Thackeray’s quasi-metafiction:

these cannot be construed as attempting to convey unmediated reality in the manner Barthes

describes. Their volume and variety might be interpreted as mimicking the richness of life’s

connectedness more generally, but as James points out elsewhere, “Really, universally, relations

stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of

his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (5): in other words, since

one can always add more material to a novel, indefinitely, at a certain point additional material

generates not a greater sense of life, but waste.

James would surely ask similar questions of contemporary mega-novels, all looser and

baggier in construction than any that Tolstoy or Dumas ever envisioned.

As Frederick R. Karl

writes, the mega-novel “is long, but lacks any sense of completion; while it has no boundaries for

an ending, of course it does end; it seems to defy clear organization—it seems decentered,

unbalanced—yet has an intense order; it is located outside traditional forms of narrative, but still

employs some conventional modes” (155). This unwieldy balance is why, as Mark Greif puts it,

mega-novels “feel stuffed, overfull, or total; they feel longer than their straightforward story

would require, and bigger than other books of similar length or complexity of plot” (27). While

Greif believes this plenitude is designed to stave off longstanding portents of the death of the

novel (28-29), to say a mega-novel is overfull implies not liveliness but that its parts are

excessive or even nauseous, as with an overfull stomach. Certainly, that is the argument James

Wood makes when suggesting that “all the many thousands of pages of the big, ambitious,

contemporary books” do not “lack for powers of invention,” but “there is too much of it,” as if

each mega-novel is merely “a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed

into velocity,” their “glamorous congestion […] almost succeed[ing] in hiding the fact that they

are without life” (Irresponsible 179-185). Even Franco Moretti’s generally positive analysis of

mega-novel prehistory in Modern Epic acknowledges that large swaths of them “do not really

work all that well” (5).

It would be one thing were this charge of excessiveness purely pejorative, but, oddly, it is

also assented to by mega-novel supporters: ironically, the mega-novel’s gratuitous text appears

essential to its nature. It is quite telling that LeClair’s book in praise of mega-novels (which he

calls “systems novels”) is named The Art of Excess, as it suggests the way in which mega-novel

readers have embraced the idea that large parts of mega-novels are unnecessary or don’t quite fit

together. However, while there have been a number of moves in recent narratology, as Pekka

Tammi has written, “away from general model-building and standard definitions, toward

studying, rather, the subversive and strange, previously untheorized or insufficiently theorized

cases: the glorious exceptions to the rules” (29; see also Alber and Heinze), to my knowledge, no

one has identified and explored this case of how to adequately explain the literary place of mega-

novel excess.

To undertake such a study, then, we should start by naming this phenomenon. I will

suggest “cruft,” a half-slang/half-technical term from programming circles that has expanded

into general Internet culture. Defined by The New Hacker’s Dictionary as “Excess; superfluous

junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code,” cruft is generally characterized as code that is

“Poorly built, possibly over-complex” (135). Cruft is not technically wrong, per se, but it is

unnecessary, inelegant, or too complicated for its own good. The term has widened to cover

several digital phenomena, especially within wikiculture, where it has been applied to

encyclopedic text that editors feel to be trivial, overwritten, redundant, or unreadable

(“Discussing cruft”). Although the term is almost always intended negatively, it is associated

with a certain obsessive attractiveness, most obviously in the case of “fancruft,” excessively

detailed wiki entries about minor elements of a subculture lacking much general interest

(“Fancruft”).

What does cruft look like in a mega-novel? Consider this excerpt from Gaddis’s

dialogue-loaded J R, about a sixth-grader wheeling and dealing his way into a Wall Street empire

from his school cafeteria’s phone booth:

—Tell them he’s been wait give it to me can’t tell what he’s been,

hello…? Not here right now no he’s been … Davidoff yes Davi … Cohen oh

calling on Nepenthe yes ran it up to sixteen today think the Boss is sitting tight on

about nineteen percent of the issue just wants control so he can … wait no wants

to work the nursing homes into this Health Package made to order outlets for

Nobili got Hopper here now with his cemetery Brisboy bringing in his funer …

what? General who? One thing we need right now anoth… Oh why didn’t you

say so without the h yes why didn’t you say so, thought you were on your way up

brought in one of our own legal boys waiting here now to go over your figures

had Piscator run down your Dun and Bradstreet told the Boss you looked a little

overextended mentioned controlling interest in another company sounds dead on

its … Don’t worry about it no just took it as security on the loan help this man

Skinner out with his option on a publishing deal got him under management

contract real topfli…don’t know no joint tenant said the gal he just married picked

it up in her div…whose name hers? (532)

This passage, merely the beginning of a characteristic multi-page stretch of direct discourse,

almost entirely comprises verbal static and interchangeable bits of financial jargon. We will

examine why this may be dubbed cruft more rigorously during Chapter 1, but for now, it should

suffice to say that another writer might easily have compressed almost all of this passage into no

more than a sentence of summary with little loss: while several of its references have some larger

relevance to the book (e.g., those involving General Haight), most of its ephemeral schemes are

basically meaningless, even to J R himself, except as mere words. Furthermore, the noise of

everyday speech represented in this passage is almost always edited out of literary discourse, for

the same reason that characters’ flossing habits are: it takes up space without saying anything

meaningful.

Even more obviously, consider the passage reproduced on the next page from

Danielewski’s House of Leaves, recounting an expedition through the physics-defying labyrinth

that has emerged within its protagonist’s house. Down the left margin we see a list, containing

dozens of entries, of every architectural style that does not describe the labyrinth, while down the

right is a similar, inverted list of every architect who would not have built it, and slightly off-

center on each page is an equally-long catalog of furniture that is not to be found. In fact, the

labyrinth signified by these elaborate marginalia, it turns out, is nothing but an empty sequence

of rooms. Text does not get much more meaningless than this: it is hard, really, to imagine any

sane reader processing more than the first few entries of any of these lists.

Reprinted from House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-

Published by Pantheon Books. Used with permission of

Random House, Inc.

Reprinted from House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-

Published by Pantheon Books. Used with permission of

Random House, Inc.

What exactly are we supposed to do with such text, then? Literary studies may have

traveled a long way from the purer forms of Jamesian organicism, formalized by Percy

Lubbock’s argument in The Craft of Fiction (from which this book adapts its name) that a

narrative must be built around “A subject, one and whole and irreducible,” with anything

deviating from that subject being “wasteful” (41), but even allowing that we need not be so rigid,

how would we explain why good novels would include text that seems merely to gum up and

lengthen their already-very-long narratives?

There are several possible arguments. One, exemplified by Steven Moore, suggests that

this text is not actually excessive, but merely appears that way to those without sufficient

knowledge of the history of prose fiction:

I remain convinced that negative reactions to unconventional modern fiction can

be blamed partly on ignorance of the novel’s long, colorful, and decidedly

unconventional history. No one familiar with Lyly’s Euphues is likely to accuse a

contemporary writer of being showy and pretentious; Lyly makes them all look as

modest as nuns. Gaddis’ alleged difficulty is a walk in the park compared with

Subandhu’s Vasavadatta. Those who balk at the length of some of today’s

literary mega-novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, 2666) might be chastened

to learn that the best novels in China, Arabia, and France during the late medieval

period are thousands of pages long. (Novel 30)

We will take up this perspective’s emphasis on tradition and genre in a moment. Another view,

though, takes precisely the opposite approach, as exemplfied in this passage by John Johnston:

[Mega-novels’] value, therefore, would seem to lie in the fullness with which they

bring to awareness and propagate the complexity of this cultural moment. They

do this, as I try to show, by transforming the novel into various ‘writing-down

systems’ that articulate and render visible a postmodern discourse network

defined first by the formations of information theory and cybernetics, and only

secondarily by textuality and simulacra. At the same time, inasumuch as they

remain novels, they model and reflect a new form of postmodern subjectivity.

They do this most fully by serving as exemplary instantiations of a contemporary

psychic apparatus, registering material and semiotic processes that are not yet

entirely assimilable but which continue to shape—or to make impossible—what

we still call human experience. (Information 8)

This view, which might be aligned broadly with poststructuralism, claims that mega-novels,

rather than unearthing the narrative structures of the past, create an entirely new, and at least

partially emancipatory, form of writing for the contemporary moment, in which the entire

conventional concept of purpose is “short-circuited or exceeded such that the novel no longer

makes sense” (16).

Between them, these two perspectives will sketch out much of the trajectory by which the

rest of this study proceeds. However, both have serious weaknesses. While many mega-novels

do clearly draw upon narrative forms predating the modern novel, as Moore suggests, in doing

so, as we will see, they almost always distort or omit narrative elements crucial to those genres’

goals, rendering many of the other generic elements extraneous or ineffective. On the other

hand, celebrating mega-novel text for defying all previous schemas, as Johnston does, fails to

distinguish mega-novel text from garden-variety incoherence: after all, “unassimilable semiotic

processes” that “no longer make sense” more typically characterize bad writing than good (e.g.,

in our students’ hastily written papers).

We need a better way to articulate how cruft can provide value to a narrative, one that

acknowledges cruft’s insignificance without suggesting that proliferating chaos itself constitutes

a meaningful response to a chaotic world. I believe we can do so via a subject frequently

invoked when discussing mega-novels but thus far not explored systematically: attention.

Attention, Overload, and Boredom

That mega-novels pose substantial challenges to readers’ attentions has long been

acknowledged. LeClair, for example, argues that “the dominant strategy in systems novels is, at

least initially, overload. […] In a systems novel, overload—or what I call excess—can stop the

reading, cause scanning, or produce a reorientation to the novel’s information” (14-15). As

Joseph Tabbi points out, this feeling of being overwhelmed by stimuli is closely related to the

classical sublime, wherein the mind’s immediate perceptual capacities collapse and yield to

alternate cognitive modes, just as the mega-novel’s excessive and apparently pointless text

“keep[s] readers from understanding too quickly” what they perceive (Postmodern 24).

However, both subsequently suggest that these attentional challenges should be overcome

relatively quickly by a competent mega-novel reader, as a prerequisite to decoding the text.

Mega-novel critics often, in fact, exhibit disdain for those who have any prolonged attention

difficulties, as might be exemplified by Moore’s retort to a critic complaining of the demands J R

made upon its readers’ attentions: “as though a better novelist would make allowances for

daydreaming” (Gaddis 64).

This sentiment has its roots in an attitude, going back at least to Victorian England, that

conceives the principal goal of all literary education to be the development of sustained attention.

As Stephen Arata notes, John Ruskin’s 1864 lecture “Of King’s Treasures” codified the now-

standard attitude that the classroom should inculcate in students attentionally-intensive reading

habits (200-201), while as John Guillory has observed, I. A. Richards’s epochal emphasis on

“close reading” in the 1920s derives from his concern for the “vigilance” of readers’ stimuli-

response mechanisms (see Richards 182) and his related fear that mass media were eroding

students’ abilities to maintain close attention by conditioning “stock responses” (Guillory,

“Close” 24). Such concerns, Guillory further points out, extend today to the worries expressed

by humanists like N. Katherine Hayles that media streams like television, video games, and the

Internet have caused “Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the

humanities, […] characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods […], ignoring

outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high

tolerance for long focus times” to be displaced in younger students by “Hyper attention […]

characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information

streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (Hayles,

“Hyper” 187; Guillory, “Close” 25).

The corollary to this notion—that contemporary readers’

attentions might become degraded to the point where they will soon not be able to read long

books at all, termed by historian William Cronon “the Anna Karenina problem” (qtd. in Parry

A27)—is often invoked by mega-novel critics as a diagnosis for why mega-novel detractors

consider them unduly difficult, frequently citing J R’s PR executive Davidoff’s remark about

“longer works of fiction now dismissed as classics and remaining largely unread due to the effort

involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages” (527).

However, though current cognitive research has confirmed that attentional control is vital

to the development of reading abilities (see Savage et al., Conners) and that attention lapses

while reading can cause serious processing failures and misconceptions (see Smallwood), the

idea that all serious reading must be done in a cognitive mode of unbreakable attention—

particularly in contrast to the supposed distractibility inculcated by contemporary media—has a

number of problems. For one, as those like Cathy N. Davidson have argued, a rigidly-focused

attention can itself cause cognitive failures, like those associated with “attentional blindness,”

and conversely, a looser attention can engender greater creativity (1-11). The later Barthes, as

respected a reader as any, put himself forward to exemplify the latter point, writing, “My

pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the

whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions, seductions, and

intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that

binds me to the text (to the world)” (Pleasure 18-19). Moreover, given the emphasis of those

like Hayles on the proliferation of video games and ADHD as harbingers of attentional decline, it

is important to note that current research actually suggests that when those who have ADHD

play video games, not only do they have little difficulty sustaining their focus on them, they have

a hard time getting themselves to stop: in other words, their attention becomes too sustained

(Bioulac, Arfi, and Bouvard). This finding generally jibes with the current academic paradigm

surrounding ADHD, suggesting that the disorder derives not from any inherent deficit in basic

attention but rather an underdeveloped ability to self-regulate where one’s attention is placed

(Barkley 78, 86). An optimal attention, then, is not one that can focus indefinitely, but that

knows when to increase and when to decrease its focus.

The biggest problem, though, with suggesting that the mega-novel’s excessive text must

all be processed in deep attention, and that those who do not appreciate it simply lack sufficient

attention span to do so, is that human brains simply do not work that way. As George A. Miller

famously demonstrated, our working memory is usually limited to about six or seven represented

objects, which means reading any non-trivial piece of writing requires both constantly chunking

text into abbreviated representations and strategically allocating attention to text that seems more

important at the expense of text seeming less important. (By the way, since attention is closely

related to memory, especially working memory, all my discussions of the former should be read

as implicating the latter.) In other words, our minds have limited channel capacity and are

subject to “cognitive overload” whenever that limit is exceeded (Tsur 36-37). As Gaddy, van

den Broek, and Sung’s study of reading cycles puts it, any cognitive analysis of the reading

process must acknowledge its selectiveness:

When attempting to comprehend text, readers must devise ways to condense the

wealth of information that is presented to them. Limitations on working memory

or attentional resources make this task particularly important, for without the

ability to selectively attend to particular textual information, readers would be

faced with the burden of trying to retain every piece of information that is

presented in text throughout the reading process. Successful comprehension of

text therefore involves a reader’s ability to appropriately allocate his or her

attention to the most important aspects of a text, and at the right times, during

reading. (89)

In fact, our default method for attending text is probably one of shallow processing (Sanford and

Emmott 103-110). Noting that most of the text we do read passes out of our consciousness

almost immediately, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read points out that

“When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that

portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear,” rendering our elaborate

discussions of literature into mere charades constructed around mostly-forgotten text fragments

(48). This is especially so for long novels: as Barthes observed, “it is the very rhythm of what is

read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read

Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the

next, we never skip the same passages.)” (Pleasure 11).

To counteract this basic fact about the reading process, writers have long used certain

devices to cue readers’ attention toward their texts’ most important passages. We might find a

taxonomy of these techniques—repetition, section breaks, segmentation, beginnings and endings,

the use of titles, etc.—in any book on the craft of writing, and empirical work in stylistics has

generally confirmed that they function as traditionally intended (Sanford and Emmott 72-131).

Discussing such “Rules of Notice” in Before Reading, Peter Rabinowitz points out that the very

standards of our discipline require us to analyze text cued by these methods more readily than

text that is not: an interpretation of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” for instance, that ignored the

ending to emphasize several passages from the middle would be considered unacceptable, but

one that passed over several passages in the middle to emphasize the ending would not be (47-

75). This is not mere mindless conventionality: it is necessary for any coherent discussion of

texts that otherwise far exceed our capacities to process them. As Rabinowitz writes, “If one

assumes that all features of a text are to receive close attention from an interpreter, then a text

(even a lyric poem, certainly a novel) becomes an infinite and impenetrable web of

relationships” (51).

If some readers need further convincing of the necessity of selective attention to higher

cognitive processes, consider the cases of the legendary mneumonists who lacked these apparent

limitations on attention and could absorb large amounts of information into working memory at

once, like A. R. Luria’s patient S., the autistic savant Kim Peek, or Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional

Ireneo Funes the Memorious. As neurologist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga notes in Borges and

Memory, despite their impressive memory banks, they were all strikingly inept at basic pattern

recognition and logical inferences: the sheer volume of data they could process rendered them

incapable of establishing relationships between that data or hierarchizing it for practical use

(101-116). In fact, S. at times became so overwhelmed by all that he naturally memorized that

he could only remain sane by consciously learning to “avoid paying attention” (47). Higher-

level thought, in other words, requires attention to focus on certain things very closely and to

compress or ignore everything else. As Borges pointed out, someone with Funes’s capacious

attention and memory would “not [be] very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget)

differences, to generalize, to abstract” (137).

What we need to develop, then, is not the ability to pay closer attention to everything, but

a sophisticated attentional modulation, the process Jesse Prinz argues is at the basis of all

consciousness (89). This entails not only learning how to focus our attention on any given target,

but when to reduce it. As Michael Posner puts it, “a major factor in allowing coherent behavior

in the social world is the ability to suppress brain activity” (73). Indeed, Warren Thorngate

writes that our whole conscious life might be conceived as operating within an “attentional

economics,” in which we must choose how to best spend fixed attentional resources upon an

ever-growing number of possible attentional targets (249-252). This process becomes

increasingly important, and more difficult, as we progress further and further into the

information age, as many cultural critics have expressed sentiments similar to Orrin Klapp’s that

the benefits brought by the increased diversity of and access to information might be negated by

the problems posed by how to adequately attend all this information: “By taking in too much

noise, a person becomes cluttered, not integrated. The result for our information society is that

we suffer a lag in which the slow horse of meaning is unable to keep up with the fast horse of

mere information” (2).

Klapp also raises another point that will be important in a moment: overload, counter-

intuitively, tends to cause boredom. Though classically characterized as occurring when we are

“(a) prevented from doing what we want to do or (b) forced to do what we do not want to do”—

in other words, when we experience stimuli deprivation—recent research points out that

boredom can also be “a condition of apparent freedom in which the individual is nonetheless

unable to maintain attention on, or interest in, any object” (Cheyne, Carriere and Smilek 580).

As Klapp writes, this attentional paralysis is most likely to derive from an overload of choices

(1). Boredom, after all, unlike subjective deficits like apathy and anhedonia (Goldberg et al.), is

at least partly dependent upon environment (Eastwood et al. 484): someone who is bored has the

capacity and desire to pay attention, but cannot figure out what to do with it. That is why our

mental image of a bored person is not the superfluous Russian or ennui-filled Frenchman, but an

active yet unfilled individual, restlessly fidgeting, yawning, or struggling to hold up a drooping

head (Toohey 34-45). As Otto Fenichel once noted in his classic analysis of the subject, a bored

person “is searching for an object, not in order to act upon it with his instinctual impulses, but

rather to be helped by it to find an instinctual aim which he lacks” (293).

What does this tell us about reading the mega-novel? As a glance at the passages from J

R and House of Leaves will suggest, mega-novels often flagrantly violate any Rules of Notice,

barely distinguishing between relatively important and unimportant text. Moreover, unlike the

terse, oblique social dioramas of late-realist/early-modernist fiction, which similarly do not

foreground key passages at times, mega-novels multiply the unimportant text beyond its usual

proportion and render it even more purposeless than usual. The resulting overload is almost

certain to create attentional confusion leading to lapses in focus, difficulties in consolidating

short-term into long-term memory, and boredom. Against the critical tendency to assert that all

mega-novel text is equally and fabulously interesting, then, we need to examine how, as Samuli

Hägg puts it, mega-novel “overwriting” induces boredom and how “part of the ‘interest’ […] is

witnessing everything becoming a blur and attempting to figure out ways of enjoying the event—

and conjuring out its interpretive significance” (“Boredom” 78-79, 86).

I do want to be careful about the extent to which I generalize this point. Boredom is,

after all, as dependent upon its subject as its object, and generally speaking, something that one

reader might find boring another might not find boring at all. As Patrick Colm Hogan notes in

his discussion of the relationship between cortical stimulation and aesthetic appreciation, we

experience art as “boring” when we find it “too easy” or repetitive, since it does not provide us

with any “novel stimuli,” but we also become bored when it is “too hard,” because we

experience it “as random, thus as noise,” making it “an experience, not of novelty, but of

sameness.” Furthermore, Hogan adds that “judgments of both excessive difficulty and excessive

simplicity vary from person to person, and for different ages” (9-11). Lionel Trilling’s witticism

about the modernist canon is instructive on this point, that “these books at first rejected me; I

bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy

with me and to understand my hidden meanings” (Beyond 7). Usually when someone (e.g., a

student) tells us that a great book is boring, we should attribute the problem to the reader rather

than to the text. There is in fact a way in which, as Moore claims, parts of mega-novels can be

read as thrillers once one has gotten into them (Novel 9). That said, one cannot claim that cruft is

merely the subjective illusion of readers with insufficient attention for great writing, because it

often tends to be both “too easy” and “too hard” at the same time. For instance, in the passage

above from House of Leaves, a reader with a low threshold for textual stimulation will surely be

overloaded into boredom almost immediately, but a reader looking for higher degrees of

stimulation will soon realize that all this text, despite its overwhelming appearance and

substantial volume, is so mechanical as to say virtually nothing, and will become equally bored

with it. Consequently, it is objectively pointless, and objectively boring. We can categorize this

passage and text like it as cruft, because—as if to invert the famous joke about Catskills resort

food from Annie Hall—it doesn’t mean enough, and there’s far too much of it.

Why should cruft be useful in a mega-novel, then? There are, after all, clear negative

cognitive and emotional impacts to experiencing attention lapses, since an inability to sustain

attention tends to generate prolonged negative affect (Fenske and Raymond; Eastwood et al.487-

489) and causes the regions involved in higher-order thought to disconnect from neural activity

(Weissman et al.). While there are arguments that boredom conditions character (see Russell

63), inspires creativity (see Svendsen 58-59), and provides relief from overstimulation (see

Spacks 261), even these perspectives frame boredom as a temporary condition functioning either

as a repellent to or an inoculation from worse mental states, not something one ought to actively

seek out for itself. In fact, as Sianne Ngai notes, boredom is almost never construed as a positive

element of the reading experience by literary critics, because it “tend[s] to be written off as

unsophisticated: from this point of view, only a philistine would be bored by the later Beckett”

(262). Even Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of a literary history of boredom (which, like most

similar studies, emphasizes the representation of boredom rather than how text bores readers),

insists that reading itself “resists boredom” (1): even of writers with whom boredom is an

“aspect of discourse,” like Donald Barthelme, she writes, “I know readers who declared they are

bored by him […]. Such readers do not include me” (256). Ngai attempts, like Tabbi, to recover

this experience as a variation on the sublime (the “stuplime,” in her terms), believing the

ineluctable materiality of excessive text “perform[s] a doubling-over of language that actively

interferes with the temporal organization dictated by conventional syntax” (260) and drives us

toward “new strategies of affective engagement and to extend the circumstances under which

engagement becomes possible” (262), but does not describe how this is any different from

reading merely stupid text: again, most text that constantly reminds us of its own materiality does

so because it is badly written.

In fact, as Travis Jeppsen notes, there often is not a

straightforward distinction between prose by mega-novelists like Stein and Joyce and mere “bad

writing” (136-137) at all.

Reading in the Information Age

To address what is going on in the mega-novel—or, at the least, why anyone ought to

read its cruft-laden prose—we must contextualize with respect to reading’s role as a mediator of

attention and information in the contemporary era. As noted earlier, it has become commonplace

to speak of our age as characterized by information overload. Ironically, despite several decades

of humanist hand-wringing about the coming dominance of the image over the word, most of this

information has turned out to be text (see Goldsmith 24-27, Koepnick 233). As James Gleick

writes in his history of information, anxiety about information overload has been expressed

practically since the invention of the printing press (402-403), but the current moment poses

particularly acute problems regarding how to collectively manage information, with serious

social and political ramifications. As the narrator of Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, a

fanciful take on the lives of IRS tax examiners in mid-1980s Peoria, IL, puts it:

Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible

PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of

governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for

officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay

enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will

be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues’ monumental

dullness. (84)

There is simply so much information to process in the digital age—and so many alternative,

entertaining sources of it available to distract and hold our attention when we become bored—

that any sufficiently overwhelming or boring material will be ignored, even if there is some

legitimately important information contained within it. This is, sadly, probably why the result of

increased information tends not to be greater engagement with other perspectives but more

reliance on preconceived schemas (Yoon, Sarial-Abi, & Gürhan-Canli), because the mind must

resort to confirmation bias to filter the information with which it is faced.

As Gleick puts it,

“The old ways of organizing knowledge no longer work. Who will search; who will filter? […]

Which is worse, too many mouths or too many ears?” (410).

It would be tempting to argue that depicting this contemporary situation requires mega-

novelists to write in a commensurately excessive and boring style.

However, as Tabbi notes,

“The excess to be found in technological systems […] is scarcely of a type with literary excess;

the individual writer, often a loner with pen and paper, could never compete with the high-

budget productions of the various corporate media. Excess in this fiction is not simply more than

but other than the technological mechanisms, media, and categories it deforms” (13).

Furthermore, this view would lead us toward the mimetic fallacy, which, in fact, Terry

Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem exemplifies as “the belief that, say, a poem about boredom

should be boring” (167). After all, if information overload is a serious societal problem, a

mimetic treatment of it threatens to exacerbate that problem rather than alleviate it, as Lev

Grossman suggests when remarking that the mega-novel “treats the world as an infinite network,

but we already have an infinite network, the Internet, and our nose is rubbed in it on an hourly

basis. We don’t need more of that—more hysteria.” Moreover, it is quite possible to be brief

about complex subjects, just as it is to be lengthy about simpler ones: as Thomas Pavel put it,

“The classic question […] ‘why is a long novel long?” cannot be answered in a purely referential

way, by making the dimensions of the text depend on those of the world about which it speaks.

The fictional universe of [Borges’s five-page story] ‘The Approach to al-Mu’tasim’ may exceed

in size the worlds of Remembrance of Things Past” (94).

I will argue, instead, that mega-novel cruft’s value is in how it helps us develop our

abilities to modulate attention when processing large amounts of information. What I mean by

this might be exemplified well by The Pale King’s tax examiners, who are placed in as pure a

battle of attention against information overload as can be imagined, as they must cull through

endless pages of data, bureau jargon, and coded cross-references in search of the rare hidden

narrative of tax evasion. However, the task’s dullness makes any breakthrough from dulling

trivia to hidden discovery ever more valuable, because it is so unlikely to be found. This causes

one of the examiners to conclude that the only essential skill in the modern world is “the ability,

whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless,

the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be in a word, unborable. […] It is the key to modern

life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish” (438).

However, believing that “To be able to reach a state of total concentration means gaining

the possibility of transcending boredom,” and that this state will enable us “to parse social,

political, and cultural narratives for relevance and meaning” as some essays on the book

have suggested (see Clare 441, 444), is not as purely positive a result as it might seem. This

might be demonstrated by the one character in the book who has achieved this state:

Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are

trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been

sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all

right.

Frederick Blumquist, 53, who had been employed as a tax return examiner

with the agency for over thirty years, suffered a heart attack in the open-plan

office he shared with twenty-five coworkers at the agency’s Regional

Examination Center on Self-Storage Parkway. He quietly passed away last

Tuesday at his desk, but nobody noticed until late Saturday evening when an

office cleaner asked how the examiner could still be working in an office with all

the lights off.

Mr. Blumquist’s supervisor, Scott Thomas, said, ‘Frederick was always

the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused

and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that

time and didn’t say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to

himself.’ (27-28)

This passage’s significance is not that the tedium of Blumquist’s work gave him a coronary—it’s

that Blumquist’s state of unbreakable attention was not distinguishable from death. To have

perfect focus on one thing, after all, means that one is totally shut out from the rest of life. One

must not be unborable, then—one must instead have a high resistence to boredom as well as the

ability to become bored by totally useless data, allowing one to break attention and move on in

search of more important information. Though Chapter 1 will critique Kenneth Goldsmith’s

argument that linear reading has become obsolete in the information age, there is something to

his claim that our task as contemporary readers involves “parsing” (i.e., skimming, browsing,

filtering) text as much as analyzing it word by word (158-174). Our attentional modulation,

then, must function like Maxwell’s Demon, sorting relevant from useless information as it enters

the consciousness. To develop this ability, though, we must seek out text whose important

material is sometimes contained within large amounts of pointlessness.

This ability, furthermore, will be most pressured when there is minimal apparent

difference between important and unimportant text. That, I argue, is the function of cruft in the

mega-novel: it takes up a great deal of space to no apparent purpose, but in doing so, it masks

similar-looking text that does have purpose, challenging readers to refine the way they modulate

their attention in processing it. That is why these books tend to be suffused with tropes like

waste, immensity, and perceptual failure: doing so draws attention to the importance of the

distinctions we must make in processing their enormous and often wasteful text. The Pale King,

in its unfinished state, often experiments with extreme levels of cruft—e.g., the chapter

describing different examiners turning pages in their files (310-313), or the 100- and 70-page

chapters devoted respectively to the narcissistic monologues of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle (154-

252) and Meredith Rand (444-509)—but while it is not yet clear how well such passages can

beneficially train attention, I will argue that the more integrated cruft of Wallace’s earlier Infinite

Jest clearly can,

as can the best works of Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, and the other great mega-

novelists.

More than anything, I believe the extremity to which mega-novels push this process is

responsible for the characteristic affective responses noted at the introduction’s outset. These do

not merely result from differences in taste: they arise from more serious disputes over the

adequacy of readers’ information-processing abilities. Readers’ attempts to rapidly modulate

through different cognitive modes in response to the overwhelming text will already cause an

initial vacillation in affective states, but this affective complex will be further complicated by

readers’ more or less frequent self-perception of having either failed in adequately attending the

text (e.g., having passed over a plot point that becomes important two hundred pages later, or

having gotten bogged down trying to deeply process a passage that turns out to have minimal

importance) or having achieved a particularly hard-won success. Furthermore, interacting with

others’ self-reports of the reading experience will complicate that affect even more by either

confirming one’s self-evaluation of success and failure (or alternately, corroborating one’s sense

that success is entirely impossible) or by implying that one’s method for evaluating one’s own

cognitive successes and failures of attention is faulty and demonstrate an incapability of

managing information. This, I believe, is what constitutes the agony and ecstasy of reading the

mega-novel.

Cruft and Genre in Poststructuralism and Cognitive Theory

We still have yet to establish, though, exactly how to determine “purpose” in fictional

text. The past few decades of debate in narratology have more or less established that there is no

perfect way to determine what is or is not important or interesting about a particular text for a

given reader, or whether individual readers are right or wrong in ascribing that importance (see

Herman and Vervaeck). I believe we can address this problem, though, through genre. One

need not go so far as E. D. Hirsch’s claim that “an interpreter’s preliminary generic conception

of a text is constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands” (74) to acknowledge the

importance genre plays in how we ascribe purpose to narrative. As Michael Sinding points out,

genre is a fundamental instance of categorization, without which, as Ireneo Funes demonstrates,

cognition could not proceed (468). John Frow further notes that genre establishes relevant

knowledge bases and intertextual schemas for a text and at the same time specifies which

elements we should and should not pay attention (6-9): for instance, Rolf A. Zwaan famously

demonstrated that readers who are told that a given narrative is a news article will read it

relatively quickly and with little attention to the specific language, but with high attention to its

real-world situational implications, whereas those told it is a work of fiction will read relatively

slowly, with more attention for specific text and less to situational implications. As such, genre

allows us to combine the objective elements of narrative theory with the subjective aspects of

reader-based models of literary study by establishing how readers generally anticipate, organize,

and respond to certain narrative phenomena.

Genre is especially important for discussing mega-novels because they frequently violate

the standard schemas that readers bring to narrative, prompting them to grasp for alternate

models. That is likely why, as Sinding notes, early criticism on mega-novels often invokes

genre, because “such large-scale framing” is vital for initial comprehension, subsequently

“clearing the way for finer-grained interpretation” (474). For instance, one tradition of criticism,

most often associated with Edward Mendelson, has dubbed mega-novels “encyclopedic

narratives,” explaining their non-novelistic proliferation of technical data (e.g., mathematical

equations, documentary materials, scientific terminology) as an effort to organize and explain

their cultures via specialized fields of knowledge. Another, building primarily upon Frye’s

Anatomy of Criticism, identifies them with the classical Menippean satire, understanding their

outlandish and often grotesque representations as large-scale critiques of society (308-312).

Similarly, mega-novels’ fabulating tendencies have been described by many critics via the

picaresque and frame-tale genres, just as their enigmatic figural structures have been explained

using the epic and allegory. In fact, these genres—alongside one new one, which I am

introducing to categorize mega-novels bearing unorthodox linguistic structures, the dictionary

novel—will provide the organizational structure for this book.

However, though these schematic purposes may initially appear to be fulfilled by mega-

novels’ excessive text, each chapter will demonstrate how they often omit or distort key elements

necessary to achieve those genres’ goals, on the basis of which I categorize their excessive text

as cruft. It is not enough to say that such moments might be justified simply because they

“violate expectations”: again, unless accompanied by some alternate positive effect, which

would cause us to recategorize the text and lead us back toward genre, the failure to fulfill

expectations is much more characteristic of bad writing than good.

We might conceive this

book’s structure as arranged around the career of Roland Barthes, whom I have invoked several

times already, as perhaps no other individual’s criticism has so thoroughly explored the different

possible purposes of literature: Chapter 1, for instance, will discuss how mega-novels gesture

toward, but often do not realize, the textual jouissance pursued by the later Barthes; Chapters 2

and 4 respectively analyze how the referential indexing of systematic knowledge and

development of plot functions explored in Barthes’s middle period are often not put toward any

meaningful end in mega-novels; and Chapters 3 and 5 look at how mega-novels at first invite but

then rebuff the early Barthes’s alternate interests in burlesquing and seriously engaging with

societal mythologies. These may not exhaust literary text’s possible purposes, but they cover

most of the justifications traditionally offered for mega-novels’ excessive elements. To invoke

Barthes once more, these apparent narrative purposes serve as a studium to orient our attention,

but the text’s cruft then becomes a peculiar kind of punctum, text that stands out not because it

draws but actively resists the attention (see Camera 25-27).

As may be becoming apparent, this book attempts to supplant what has been the

academy’s dominant poststructuralist approach to the mega-novel and replace it with one

grounded in the cognitive experience of reading, albeit while keeping in mind poststructuralism’s

valid criticisms of what I will call the Reader’s Guide approach exemplified by Moore’s

insistence that if we “keep reading […] even the most difficult novel will eventually make some

sense” (Novel 22). This proposal might meet with some resistance, not least because criticism on

many mega-novels has typically taken for granted that they express poststructuralist ideas:

hopefully, among other things, this book will demonstrate the separability of postmodern fiction

from postmodern theory. Others might object, along the lines laid out by Ellen Spolsky in

“Darwin and Derrida,” that cognitive approaches to literature are not only compatible with, but

the logical extension of, poststructuralist analysis. Spolsky’s position, though, defines

poststructuralism very broadly, essentially as including any approach in which categories are

perceived as mutable. In practice, especially regarding the mega-novel, poststructuralism tended

to produce literary criticism demonstrating how the text resists all categorization, producing a

Deleuzian rhizome that resists all plotting or the Barthesian experience of bliss—after all, when

one categorizes, according to Jacques Derrida himself, “a limit is drawn. And when a limit is

established, norms and interdictions are not far behind” (“Genre” 56).

It is one thing to argue

that categories are not given a priori, though, and quite another to believe that a critic’s default

position should be to dismantle all categories as rhetorical mystifications. Bruno Latour has

articulated the problem of conflating these two perspectives well in his mournful comment on the

history of Theory: “Unwittingly, constructivism had become a synonym of its opposite number:

deconstruction” (92). To refuse categories entirely is almost certainly more cognitively harmful

using rigidly defined ones. As Sinding notes, in response to Derrida, “I am unashamed to say I

like categories: I use them every day, all the time; they enable me to make sense of things; they

keep me sane, and they are essential to the ‘madness’ of creativity; they are part of who I am. I

do not know what I would do without them” (472-473). Considering genre instead, as Wai Chee

Dimock suggests, a way to see and create “kinship networks” among texts otherwise divided by

temporal boundaries (1380)—an approach commensurate, incidentally, with the actor-network

approach recently championed by Latour—can engender valuable conceptual blends, as was

demonstrated decades ago by Frye’s preemptive anticipation and superseding of Derrida’s

approach to genre by treating prose fiction as not comprising separate categories but generic

strands capable of combination (303-314).

Such an approach will equally demonstrate, though, that many concepts don’t blend well.

Our mental apparatuses need to be ready to recognize and discard failed blends when necessary,

because otherwise a procedure designed to organize and make navigable our world will instead

render it even more chaotic and unreadable. The best blends deserve our attention; the rest need

to be discarded as cruft.

What This Book Does and Does Not Do: Some Caveats on Cruft

The argument of this book, even in its formative stages, has shown a tendency to create

misconceptions, so I wish to clarify a number of points before commencing it in earnest. Most

importantly, one should keep in mind that there are a wide variety of possible critical

applications of attention to the reading process: as I write, in fact, interdisciplinary fMRI projects

are underway at a variety of institutions to study what actually happens to our brains when we

read, several of which involve attention (see Goldman). I suspect the data from such

experiments will have a significant impact on our field over the coming years. However, their

possible implications spread much more widely than this study’s focus. This book deals with

only one kind of attentional interaction, as it applies to one specific kind of text.

How the relationship of difficult to attention pertains to this study is also a complicated

issue. Difficulty, of course, implies some struggles with attention, as it creates a situation in

which one cannot figure out exactly how to orient one’s focus, and certainly, learning to

modulate one’s attention so as to better manage these difficulties is an important process for this

book. However, as the typology presented George Steiner’s famous essay “On Difficulty” might

remind us, not all difficult text is cruft. For instance, while Steiner’s “contingent” and “modal”

difficulties—respectively, when a reader does not understand either a factual reference or its web

of connotations—play into the issues raised in Chapters 1 and 2 of how we manage textual

information, the word “contingent” tellingly suggests how these difficulties are dependent upon

the individual reader’s knowledge rather than the text itself. A reader unfamiliar with, say, the

probabilistic or engineering equations of which Gravity’s Rainbow makes figural use (not to

mention Against the Day’s archaeology of turn-of-the-century mathematics) will likely find

managing the book’s information more difficult, but this difficulty is not quite the same as the

more universal challenges posed by the purposeless encyclopedic information Chapter 2

discusses. Though such reader-dependent difficulties probably exacerbate the problems posed

by cruft and influence the ways that individuals strategize to manage it, my lack of access to

imaging technology and test subjects prevents me from speaking to it. Conversely, Steiner’s

“tactically” and “ontologically” difficult text—respectively, when a text is ambiguous in

meaning or when it gestures toward the ineffable—are, like cruft, difficult to assimilate into the

larger work, but they possess an eventual literary purpose that cruft does not have. While

ambiguous and ineffable text delays us in figuring out its purpose, cruft’s difficulty derives from

how, though it may entice us to devote attention to analyzing it, it has none.

We should also distinguish cruft from another related difficulty that I earlier claimed was

necessary but not sufficient for characterizing the mega-novel, the difficulty in maintaining focus

on many hundreds of pages’ text over the indeterminate amount of time it takes to read them.

We might group alongside this difficulty the congruent challenge in reading the mega-novel’s

inordinately intricate sentences and paragraphs. As all human brains regularly experience lapses

in attention and working memory (see Cheyne, Carriere, and Smilek),

the cumulative strain

upon concentration and memory caused by reading a novel requiring dozens of hours of attention

is enormous, especially if the narrator does not periodically remind us (à la Fielding or Dickens)

about text from earlier in the novel that may have been understandably forgotten in the interim.

I am not quite sure that Moore is joking when he suggests that J R (which lacks any explicit

section divisions) should be read more or less in one sitting, with breaks only taken at designated

points for sleep (Gaddis 66), but for many obvious practical and cognitive reasons, that approach

is not feasible. Again, though, these questions cover a larger territory than the one this book

examines, as they might be applied to not only any long book but to the struggles many viewers

feel in watching certain grand operas and epic films.

There is much that might be explored

regarding these issues—for instance, why 18

-century readers rarely reported boredom in

reading Richardson’s million-word Clarissa even though many contemporary ones (who have no

trouble with the similarly-long Harry Potter saga) find it unbearably tedious—but these are

highly dependent on individuals’ capacities, like Steiner’s modal and contingent difficulties, and

thus unfeasible to analyze using my methodology. Great length does, however, heighten the

attentional problems related to cruft to the point where they become inescapable parts of the

reading process, which is why I am solely studying its role in the mega-novel.

All of this is to acknowledge that, though this book discusses the boring parts of

excessively long books, I refer only to certain types of excessively long books, and to certain

types of boredom. Consequently, many texts associated with boredom that aim for the languid

rather than the overwhelming (e.g., much of Beckett’s work), will not be considered here,

because their text is boring in a somewhat different way than is cruft. The relationship between

any of these works and attention may well be worth pursuing elsewhere, but that relationship is

different enough from what I am discussing that to treat them would probably be more confusing

than helpful. Moreover, while I suspect that it is possible to apply some of the arguments I make

here to a number of other long, quirky books frequently cited as mega-novel predecessors (e.g.,

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, and especially Tristram Shandy), I think that those

earlier books are sufficiently different in their overall structures from mega-novels that I need

only mention them in passing. Lastly, contemporary books written deliberately in the tradition

of the pre-novel genres I invoke but do not make use of cruft, such as picaresque-like “road

novels” or contemporary epic poems like Derek Walcott’s Omeros, will not be addressed either.

This brings us to periodization. As indicated at the outset, the book primarily addresses a

number of major works of American postmodern fiction, suggesting that the way they treat the

relationship of information to attention may tell us something about the contemporary moment.

On the other hand, it also deals with books seemingly external to this periodization. In

particular, the early chapters reach back into the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries,

while the last two address contemporary works from around the globe. There are several ways to

explain this incongruity. One is that I am primarily interested in the mega-novel less as a

representation of the contemporary era than as a cognitive tool for contemporary readers, and

therefore I am less intent upon creating a cogent historical narrative using mega-novels than in

selecting several texts that provide the most illuminating examples of how cruft functions.

Another is that there is, actually, a loose historical narrative compatible with my organization.

Because the first two chapters, addressing the dictionary and encyclopedia, deal with purely

textual overload, which has been an obtrusive phenomenon for some centuries, it makes sense

that we might use relatively older novels to engage that subject. As Hugh Kenner notes, post-

Enlightenment Europe’s attitude toward books and knowledge is increasingly marked by how

“The Encyclopaedia, like its cousin the Dictionary, takes all that we know apart into little pieces

[…] No Bacon, no Aquinas is tracing the hierarchies of human knowledge which he has assumed

the responsibility of grasping. If the Encyclopaedia means anything as a whole, no one

connected with the enterprise can be assumed to know what that meaning is” (1-2).

On the

other hand, the later chapters’ emphasis on the overload of textual representations of persons,

actions, and concepts are more characteristic of the contemporary, globalized world, and so it is

useful to compare books written in the United States or Europe during this time with those

produced in Asia or South America to see how these ideas have begun to converge.

But perhaps most importantly, I approach periodization the way I do because, as Thomas

Pavel has written, “ontological systems […] rarely command an unqualified loyalty,” more

typically yielding to “ontological fusions” (138): in other words, people inhabiting the same

temporal, material world often do not inhabit precisely the same imagined one, while those living

in different material realities can have overlapping imagined worlds. Especially since we no

longer inhabit a world in which, say, an artist like Beethoven would have little access to the

scores written by his countryman Bach less than a century earlier, but instead one where books

from many eras and traditions are available to many people worldwide, lines of literary influence

and affinity are rarely as clear as chronology and geography would imply. As Dimock has

suggested, viewing periodization this way “mudd[ies] temporal, spatial, and generic lines” and

“invites us to rethink our division of knowledge” (1386). Consider, for example, how we would

periodize Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, a book set in the rural nineteenth-century

American Midwest, but written in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century,

published only two decades after that, and only come to the peak of its critical prominence upon

being adopted by the twenty-first-century American avant-garde. Where does it really belong?

To all these places and times, I think.

Along these lines, readers might notice that there are relatively few mentions of

“modernism” or “postmodernism” in this book. I spent some time attempting to make the mega-

novel function as a subcategory contained by one or the other, but while I oppose the sentiment

that there are few clear distinctions to be made between modernism and postmodernism, I think

it is best to consider all these terms as generic strands that may or may not be blended in given

books. I believe this viewpoint is supported by how, even though many contemporary writers

have rejected hallmark postmodern techniques, they seem as attracted to excess and overload as

ever (see Burn, Franzen 5-9). Adopting this perspective will also prevent my argument from

suggesting that the interaction between cruft and attention subordinates all other elements of

mega-novels, as they usually have other valuable features as well. For example, Rushdie’s film

adaptation of Midnight’s Children jettisons nearly all the material I address in Chapter 5, but the

rest of its narrative, which is otherwise faithful to the book, still has significant aesthetic value

(and uses its new medium to accomplish several things the book cannot).

Finally, I would like to make a few remarks on the nature of cruft. Since it is a pejorative

term in its original context, some have been taken aback by my argument that mega-novels

contain it. Certainly, to call any text pointless or excessive is usually not a compliment: if one

notes, for instance, that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is an excessively long novel with lots of

pointless, drab text, it is usually understood that one is making a serious criticism both of the

novel and its many devoted fans, even though the same description might be applied in a more

positive context to Gaddis’s The Recognitions. It is illustrative, though, that even a veteran

Pynchonist like Luc Herman admits he could not really decide whether his boredom with

Pynchon’s Against the Day was a valuable part of the book’s aesthetic or simply a sign that it

wasn’t all that well written (Herman and Vervaeck 126-127): the line between the two is

exceedingly thin. There are certainly many attempted mega-novels that generate substantial

cruft but don’t do anything that interesting with it, making them merely excessive in the bad

sense (e.g., Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew). Similarly, I have debated whether cruft might

also be defined so as to include ham-handed, repetitive uses of symbolism or hyperrealist

dialogue. While one might characterize these as cruft, though, they are not really the kind of

thing I am examining here, because in these cases something meaningful appears to have been

attempted yet not necessarily achieved, while the instances of cruft that I want to discuss are

those in which the purposelessness has some positive value.

The word “pointless” as a descriptor of cruft may cause some further confusion, since if

this supposedly pointless text contributes positively to the text, in what sense is it really

pointless? We might better define cruft by inverting Kant’s famous formula that objects of

aesthetic interest are those that have “purposiveness […] without any purpose” (66): cruft is text

that has purposivelessness with purpose. Cruft is text of some length that cannot be deeply

processed, but whose resistance to deep processing might have an interesting attentional impact

for the work as a whole. In other words, cruft does not have any purpose or significance in the

narrative—at the very least, the amount of space it takes up is vastly out of proportion to its

importance (after all, cruft has different densities)—but its lack of significance may have a

benefit to the reading process. A good comparison might be the purer forms of the mystery

device known as the red herring. For instance, early in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the

Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes identifies three leads he believes will lead him to the killer of

Charles Baskerville: a threatening note to Henry Baskerville with text cut from a recent issue of

the Times, a black-bearded spy who resembles the Baskervilles’ caretaker Barrymore, and the

number of the cab in which that black-bearded spy had been tailing Holmes. However, all three

end up being dead ends: the original newspaper is never found, a telegram confirms that

Barrymore has an alibi, and the cab driver can only tell Holmes that the black-bearded spy had

identified himself as “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” (691-698). Not only do none of these clues lead to

the killer, they provide minimal information about anything else—especially the threatening

message, whose author is only revealed as an afterthought after the mystery is solved. Why,

then, does Doyle delay Holmes’s thrilling trip to the moors with these three broken threads in

London? I believe the answer to be due to the misdirection they provide, because these three red

herrings obscure the one clue in the chapter that does help solve the mystery: Henry’s new brown

boot, which is stolen from his hotel only to be returned and switched with his old black one.

Were this incident treated by itself, readers might be able to deduce its significance—i.e., that

only the old boot has Henry’s scent—but when placed amidst the other pointless clues, the

puzzling affair of the missing boots seems as if it might be every bit as opaque to plotting as the

threatening note. As with many mysteries, then, the goal of The Hound of the Baskervilles’

readers is not to try to make all the clues fit together so that each decodes equally into the

solution, but to distinguish the useful clues from the red herrings and solve the mystery using

only the former.

Though mega-novels do not have “solutions” in quite the same way that

mysteries do, putting together their information in a cogent manner is perhaps the biggest

challenge their readers face.

I would also like to add a few minor notes regarding the structure of this book before

beginning. Obviously, since I have chosen to use several in-depth examples from mega-novels

rather than to create a historical survey, this book is not meant to be exclusive: that I have not

addressed certain authors or certain novels is not meant to suggest that they do not contain cruft

or achieve the effects I describe. My most notable omission is probably Joyce’s Ulysses, which,

though I considered treating it at various points in several different chapters, dissuaded me with

its famously unwieldy mountain of commentaries. I will instead take the escape route Frye

chose in his generic scheme for prose fiction by simply asserting that it combines all the

phenomena I discuss (313-314). Furthermore, that I analyze a book in one chapter does not

mean that it doesn’t also engage the issues discussed by the other chapters, merely that I thought

it was most usefully examined there: a different organization, for instance, might easily have

swapped Infinite Jest into Chapter 3 and The Recognitions into Chapter 2. There may be other

possible varieties of cruft that I have not addressed, too, though I believe I have covered the

major types that exist empirically. As a last caveat, while I have attempted to be diligent in my

interdisciplinary reading (and I do have a degree in mathematics to support my information-

theoretical work in Chapter 1), I do not have formal training in neuroscience, and what I say

regarding that subject should be read as the work of an educated layman.

I would like to conclude this introduction by establishing what I hope to have

accomplished. As many of the quotes in this introduction suggest, there has long been an

attitude expressed by mega-novel admirers that, while one might initially face some minor

attention lapses during the reading process, these difficulties should soon be cast aside so one can

diligently decode the book’s disorienting text. Boredom, this view assumes, is a condition

suffered only by weak minds, and need not be given any serious thought by the committed mega-

novel reader: only if it has been rejected can the serious work of understanding what the book

reveals about culture, politics, and existence begin. I argue instead, however, that it is not only

acceptable but crucial to be occasionally bored by mega-novels: to paraphrase the old skin cream

ads, that’s how you know they’re working. Consequently, the way we establish the reading

“rhythm” about which Barthes wrote—that is, the balance between what we pay close attention

to and what we attend more shallowly—becomes of paramount importance to describing their

peculiar value. That many readers only establish this rhythm upon rereading a mega-novel is

likely not only because they have, upon the second attempt, committed to reading more closely,

but because their first reading has cued them toward specific ways to better modulate attention to

the book’s needs, as with how readers on their second tour through Ulysses often have learned to

note the man in the mackintosh at Dignam’s funeral—but also probably know they needn’t

devote much attention to the tailor George Mesias, mentioned several paragraphs later (90).

As a result, though this book will by necessity refer to individuals mega-novels’ oft-cited

hermeneutic key-phrases,

it will also attempt to give closer attention to the passages that critics

have usually learned to ignore or summarize. Similarly, because most criticism on these books

treats their status as masterpieces as a given (or, alternately, as Text requiring Interpretation), I

will often engage with contemporary reviews and other initial responses to mega-novels, because

whatever these analyses lack in the sophistication that accretes over time in criticism, they make

up for in their honest consideration of the possibility that stretches of a book might not have

much of a point. That consideration of the strategic decisions by which our brains choose how to

evaluate and process text is, in many respects, what I wish this book to recover. I do not dispute

in the least that many passages of mega-novels are brilliant and worthy of substantial close

attention; I will examine a few of these, also. At the same time, though, many other passages are

not, and any reading of these books must acknowledge that. I cannot articulate as a general

principle how the mind does or should determine which is which, or when to modulate back and

forth between modes best suited to these different kinds of text, but given its extreme plasticity

and adaptability, I am confident it can train itself (consciously or not) to better perform that task

as we read, and that as it does so, it can learn to apply these methods to the information overload

we face in our everyday lives. Instead of feigning thralldom, then, to every nonstandard usage,

gratuitous datum, broad parody, wandering subplot, and enigmatic symbol that a mega-novel

contains, we ought to investigate how our minds manage an overwhelming amount of narrative

text, how they work through material that is often pointless and boring, and how they adjudicate

the intelligent use of stupid text.

Chapter One—The Dictionary

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become

unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand

—Marianne Moore, “Poetry”

The Unreadable Dictionary

Unique among the generic categories structuring this book, the term dictionary novel has

not, to my knowledge, been generally used to describe mega-novels.

This, I believe, is an

oversight, because at least one major strain of mega-novel shares with the dictionary its most

distinctive characteristic: the desire to expand of the boundaries of language. Dictionaries, after

all, especially those in English, have long been used to open new avenues of communication for

their readers. The original English dictionaries, for instance, were bilingual translating

references, while the first ones written entirely in one language were designed not to be

exhaustive compendiums but to enlarge readers’ vocabularies with “hard” words (Winchester

20-23), a function that can still be seen in the dictionary-browsing habits of poets, crossword

aficionados, spelling-bee contestants, and otherwise inquisitive readers. The modern English

dictionary’s attempt to formalize this impulse by seeking out and compiling all the language’s

words into one place is, as Simon Winchester notes, an endeavor peculiarly appropriate to the

capaciousness of our language, which, unlike the rigidly-policed French or Italian tongues,

“changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter

their sense and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need” (29).

The resulting volumes might appear overwhelming, filled as they are with alien combinations of

letters and sometimes even more obscure definitions regarding their usage, but this is necessary

for them to disseminate and facilitate the language’s development, so that readers may eventually

become acclimated to the new linguistic possibilities they present. We might say something

similar about the experimental language of certain mega-novels, like James Joyce’s Finnegans

Wake: with its dozens of polyglot neologisms per page, ranging from “aardappel” to

“zyngarrettes,” not to mention many other linguistic phenomena outside of everyday usage, the

Wake might seem excessive or nonsensical at times, but this may only be due to our initial

slowness in assimilating the marvelous advances it brings to the language.

However, as with the dictionary, mega-novels’ all-embracing expansiveness swiftly

encounters a potential problem: their text can very quickly dissolve into unreadable junk. For the

dictionary, the trouble is not merely because, as Umberto Eco notes, the language that a

dictionary instantiates cannot be decoded on its own terms: that is, if one wants to have a

complete dictionary, one must define complex words via combinations of simpler ones, and

those simpler words by even simpler ones still, but eventually one must start defining simpler

words by the more complex ones that they had decoded in the first place, causing perpetual

regression (Semiotics 46-86). More importantly, the dictionary’s principle of linguistic accretion

tends quickly to produce a large amount of increasingly pointless text. As Winchester notes, for

instance, among early English dictionaries, the competition to produce ever-higher word counts

caused lexicographers to stuff them full of ephemeral slang and jargon with no practical value

(25-27). Similarly, mega-novels’ impulse to experiment can quickly generate language that

cannot really be understood: a reader of the Wake, for instance, who wishes to explicate

“Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!” (15) will find no elucidation among even the book’s most

thorough commentaries.

In some avant-garde writing, this kind of text can go so far as to

produce merely an effet du surréal, which does not communicate anything except “This is an

experimental text.” Such language often impedes communication without replenishing it, and so

we should be suspicious of claims made on its behalf.

The tension between these productive and destructive forms of innovation highlights the

basic conundrum upon which Dr. Samuel Johnson stumbled when composing his famous

Dictionary of the English Language: the competing tendencies in language toward an expansive

descriptivism and a compressing prescriptivism. As Johnson realized, “Those who have much

leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge,

whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations or words” (41), but at the

same time, “Change […] is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. There is

in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the

slow improvements of gradual correction” (28). In other words, while linguistic innovation

always offers new possibilities, if it is not restrained by some stable conventions, it quickly

becomes bloated gibberish. Writing on this problem several centuries later, David Foster

Wallace observed, “The most obvious problem with [descriptivist grammar] is that not

everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Because you can’t observe every last bit of

every last native speaker’s ‘language behavior,’ and even if you could, the resultant dictionary

would weigh 4 million pounds and have to be updated hourly” (Consider 84). Even in an era

when many dictionaries (notably including the Oxford English Dictionary) have moved online

and the logistical problem of size no longer looms, the potential for linguistic entries of lasting

value to get crowded out by local ephemera and idiotic junk (as appears to have occurred, say, to

the online Urban Dictionary) remains quite real.

This chapter, then, will examine the frequent charge that mega-novels are overwritten

with pointless experimentation to the point of being unreadable. Is it possible to process such

writing, and if so, is there any benefit to it? For instance, consider William Gaddis’ J R, which

even George Steiner, who praised modern poetry’s inscrutable, “ontologically difficult” text in

“On Difficulty,” excoriated for its unreadable incomprehensibility:

It is well known that suburban matrons and clubmen are haunted by the

conviction that they could, given necessary willpower, typewriter ribbon, and

shamelessness, produce an erotic scenario, a thriller, or a domestic saga as fine as

any on the bestseller list. […] But what, then, of the truly unreadable book?

This, surely, must be in every man’s reach. Yet again, the answer is no. To

produce an unreadable text, to sustain this foxy purpose over seven hundred and

twenty-six pages, demands rare powers. Mr. Gaddis has them. (“Crossed” 106)

Steiner goes on to characterize the novel’s rarely-broken blocks of mimetic dialogue (such as the

one quoted in the Introduction), filled with the phonetic/syntactic errors of everyday speech and

numerous other irregularities, as an “autistic” clutter of “interminable direct address, […] patches

of narrative and an auxiliary stream of P.A. interjections,” so chaotically unstructured that the

book could be “dipped in nearly at random and skimmed” (106). Given the credentials of its

author, this critique cannot be dismissed as mere philistinism. After all, given that, as Norbert

Wiener pointed out long ago, human communication depends upon “pattern and organization”

(21), and since, according to Steiner, J R fails to produce any, we might well wonder if it simply

descends into nonsense.

On the other hand, though, too much pattern can cause an equally unreadable excess by

limiting communicative possibilities to the point where a text cannot say much of anything.

Several decades earlier, Edmund Wilson, while otherwise valorizing the famously obscure

modernist canon in Axel’s Castle, located this form of unreadability in Gertrude Stein’s 925-page

The Making of Americans. Despite his general appreciation for Stein’s writing and his well-

known interest in experimental literature, Wilson suggested her self-proclaimed masterpiece was

unbearably repetitive. Of the way in which its grammatical structure seems to rigidly and

endlessly replicate the same phrases, Wilson wrote, “Stein’s patient and brooding repetitiousness

[…] is here carried to such immoderate lengths as finally to suggest some technique of

mesmerism. With sentences so regularly rhythmical, so needlessly prolix, so many times

repeated and ending so often in present participles, the reader is all too soon in a state” (240).

This argument critiques extreme prescriptivism much as Steiner does extreme descriptivism,

suggesting that when a book has no allowance for novelty, it will evacuate readers’ abilities to

process text. As a result, regarding the work as a whole, Wilson concluded, “I have not read this

book all through, and I do not know whether it is possible to do so” (239).

How do we establish the point at which experimental writing collapses into nonsense, and

if a mega-novel’s text really does become unreadable, is there any positive function the resulting

cruft might serve? To answer these questions will require a more rigorous definition of

“unreadable,” and as such, we will need to briefly examine a few aspects of how we process text

and how we determine what depth of attention to devote it.

Text Processing, Literary Convention, and Information Theory

Of course, as far as at least one strain of literary theory is concerned, to argue that certain

innovative text might be unreadable is not necessarily a criticism. After all, one of the central

principles of the last hundred years of poetics has been the idea that literary text is supposed to

impede, rather than facilitate, our ordinary reading processes. A century ago, Viktor Shklovsky

claimed that when perceptions becomes habitualized, “life fades into nothingness,” and that

consequently the purpose of literature is to “mak[e] perception long and ‘laborious’” by delaying

our text processing through unconventional devices to the point where we become conscious and

attentive to the stimuli we perceive (5-6). Some decades later, Roland Barthes made a related

point when distinguishing between “readerly” text, which emphasizes simple and unimpeded

decoding, and “writerly” text, which enables its readers to pursue the “infinite play of the world”

(4-5), a division he adapted later to one between texts that generate “pleasure” and “bliss”

(Pleasure 51-52).

As Reuven Tsur has since pointed out, such arguments are essentially about

cognition, since they prioritize text that commits “organized violence against cognitive

processes” (4). Under this reasoning, a text that appears unreadable may be all the more valuable

for being so. Raymond Federman, in fact, made this argument explicitly, quipping that

reviewers leveled charges of unreadability at long novels simply because they never got around

to reading them (66) before inverting the usual readable-unreadable distinction:

If readability is the pleasure of recognition (easy pleasurable referential

recognition), then unreadability must be the agony of unrecognition.

Unreadability: what disorients us in a text (especially in an experimental novel)

in relation to ourselves (and I do not mean here the bulk, the thickness, the degree

of difficulty, the self-reflexiveness, the tediousness of the text—these are weak

excuses for not reading a book). Unreadability: what prevents us from

recognizing that something is happening, but also prevents us from looking up

and away from the text to relocate ourselves in the world. Unreadability: what

locks us into the language of the text. (70)

Federman might agree with Steiner and Wilson’s respective descriptions of J R and The Making

of Americans as unreadable, then, but would suggest that that is their most valuable attribute.

However, this thesis needs to be heavily qualified, because inducing failures in the

cognitive process is often a bad thing. As Anthony J. Sanford and Catherine Emmott point out,

creative deviations often do disrupt text processing and consequently increase neural activity—

but so does unintentionally bad writing, because we must waste mental effort to figure out what

the text is saying (25-27, 99). Furthermore, while they show that unconventional writing can

produce deeper processing in this manner, they also show that the reverse effect occurs if text

becomes too confusing or convoluted, because the mind necessarily disengages from text it

perceives as unreadable (112-114). After all, how would one process the sequence

ooeqpcqpovfnxffipsbxpezlqgkxmqtptwubplhfixluipuctqjjchegrqqrwhjjbqtplvsorevdbrhrns

puwjqilscvdfqlptsk? Even an ardent Joycean, I suspect, will tend to pass quickly over this

randomly-generated string of one hundred characters (as you probably did just now), because

outside of a few brief distinguishable English sequences, none longer than the four-letter “sore,”

there is no pattern that might be recognized by Anglophone readers. Contra Federman, such text

is much more likely to prompt “looking up and away from the text” than to “lock us into [its]

language,” because its random letters so obviously refuse the possibility of significance.

This is not a trivial point. Randomness, after all, is text’s normal state, as is demonstrated

by Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel,” which figures the textual world as an

enormous library of identical hexagonal rooms whose bookshelves contain “all possible

combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably

vast, is not infinite)—that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language” (115). However,

this abundance does not lead the librarians toward a greater richness of understanding, because

“[f]or every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal

nonsense, and incoherency” (114), like the string produced above. Certainly, this situation

forces the librarians to be creative and active readers, constantly constructing ciphers and

systems to create meaning out of senseless material, but instead of providing them rich reading

experiences, the librarians are plagued by madness and violence due to the futility of their work

(115). The librarians consider it nigh-miraculous when they find anything conventionally

readable at all, as with the line “O Time thy pyramids” that appears suddenly toward the close of

an otherwise entirely nonsense volume (114). At the same point, pure pattern without variation

equally frustrates their reading efforts, as the Babel librarians realize upon finding a volume that

simply reads “M C V” for 410 pages, which they cannot imagine even “belong[s] to any

language, however dialectical or primitive” (113-114). Even though a book of “M C V”s

possesses enough structure to signify (e.g., the number 1105), it is not much more readable than

the books of random characters, because it ceases to make any semiotic differentiations: after

one reads the initial pattern, one will necessarily skim through the rest. The Library, that is,

ought to remind us how valuable and rare is the conventionally readable text so often excoriated

by experimentally-minded critics, and how much less impressive linguistic transgression appears

when viewed in the context of the Library’s vexing books.

If unconventional text only sometimes affects cognition positively, though, how can we

analyze the benefits or drawbacks of linguistic innovation? To answer that question, we should

follow N. Katherine Hayles’s advice and replace the presence/absence dialectic that has

dominated poststructuralism with one derived from information theory, namely

pattern/randomness (Posthuman 25-26, 247-249). Formalizing our analysis via information

theory will allow us to more rigorously evaluate the extent to which a given passage deviates

from normal textual structure, as well as to identify which passages are all too predictable, when

we discuss how readers process them. This will require a few key terms. In information theory,

the message intended by a sender is called its signal, while any text not part of the signal is

called noise. In Claude Shannon’s foundational essay in information theory, that message’s

information is a measurement of its statistical unpredictability with respect to its receiver’s

expectations (“Mathematical” 10-11): for instance, a string of 100 digits that strictly alternates 1s

and 0s has less information than a string of forty random digits, even though it is longer, because

while each digit of the second string provides a new, unpredictable bit of information, the first

one is largely predictable. Alternately, one might refer to information as roughly measuring a

text’s complexity. In Andrei Kolmogorov’s definition, complexity is a measure of the minimum

text naming a string, which will almost always decrease as the text becomes more predictable: in

our previous example, all the second string’s forty digits are needed to describe it, while for the

first, the compressed phrase “10 50x” will do (see Li and Vitányi vii). Information’s

complement is redundancy, a measure of its predictability: for instance, after its few digits, the

forty-digit string above is almost totally redundant, since we could easily predict what will come

next. Redundancy is obviously increased by adding textual structure, since it makes text less

random, and some redundant text often can, if necessary, be eliminated from the message,

allowing compression. Moving between any given message and the concept or interpretant with

which the receiver’s dictionary associates it we may call encoding or decoding, while any

message that does not decode with respect to the dictionary must have one or more errors.

Errors are frequently caused by noise and tend to increase information by refusing any

predictable structure. If we can confidently change an errant message to a decodable one, we

call this a correction, which is made easier by higher redundancy, because redundant text can

provide the information the errant text fails to produce.

An important aside to these definitions is that, in Shannon’s formulation, information is

calculated using an equation formally identical to that for physical entropy (i.e., the energy

unable to do work in a thermodynamic system), and so the magnitude of a text’s information is

often referred to as its entropy.

We need to be careful about this term, though, because

substantial confusion has been caused by humanists’ muddling of its technical uses and popular

overtones over the past six decades, conflating the physical and informational definitions and

further dragging in Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, which declares that entropy in a

closed system increases over time.

While informational and physical entropy are similar—both

measure disorder, and since information must be transmitted in a physical channel that often

adds noise, both tend to increase—their distinctions are significant enough that jumbling them,

as we will see, may confuse us into misidentifying some text as highly entropic even if it isn’t.

Additionally, we should recognize an important corollary to Shannon’s equation: since

any ordering principle imposes a pattern on a text, it will consequently make the text more

predictable, causing the magnitude of the text’s information to fall. This leads to the

counterintuitive result that a) the text with the most order (i.e., the most predictable text) has the

least information, and b) the text with the least order (i.e., the most random text) has the most

information. For literary critics, who tend to associate complexity and information with order,

this may be confusing. Even Hayles gets turned around on this point, claiming “in some

instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of

complexity” (Posthuman 25). If we are addressing text, though, the definition of complexity we

ought to use is Kolmogorov’s, in which case Hayles is exactly wrong: while noise typically does

make a text more complex, it does so because it disorganizes; if it reorganizes the text, it lowers

complexity. After all, as librarian Jan O’Deigh articulates in Richard Powers’ 1991 The Gold-

Bug Variations while researching the work of pioneering geneticist Stuart Ressler, though we

may celebrate such noisy mutations for their innovative effects,

mutations are almost never beneficial. A message, carefully crafted over time, is

altered at random. The text will almost certainly suffer, if it remains intelligible at

all. The introduction of noise into a signal is much more likely to garble than

improve. Failure is lots more probable than anything else going.

Typing too late at night, I begin to insert letters that distort my words

diseasterously [sic]. Rereading, I piece some alterations back into partial sense.

Only an infinitesimally few typos—the lucky comma that leaves a sentence more

comprehensible—will produce clean, let alone enhanced copy. (330)

Deliberately increasing a text’s information/entropy/complexity, then, is frequently destructive.

This property of textual entropy complicates the relationship of information to literary

value. Some critics have attempted to address this problem, such as Eco in The Open Work,

which on the one hand argued that literary text could primarily be distinguished from ordinary

language by its high information density, as “certain unorthodox uses of language can often

result in poetry, whereas this seldom, if ever, happens with more conventional, probable uses of

the linguistic system” (53-54; italics Eco’s), but qualified this by noting that an artist who

opposed conventionality too much put himself “constantly in danger of losing the thread and of

becoming a mere photographer of the unrelated and the uniform” (119). Even this position,

though, proved insufficiently nuanced when Eco considered postmodern art two decades later,

which seemed to depend less on innovation than on replicating previously extant patterns

(“Innovation”).

It is difficult, then, to make sweeping categorical judgment about texts’ quality

from their abstract level of order. However, we may assert three points generally: a) all

worthwhile literary texts must be, at least in part, patterned and decodable; b) all readable texts

are characterized by a balance of textual information and redundancy that, in its absolute value,

remains constricted to a conservative band, no matter how “radical” its devotees claim it to be; c)

there exists no readable text that enacts anything near an absolute principle of order or disorder.

If J R and The Making of Americans are great novels, then, the former’s apparent

randomness must be counterbalanced somehow by pattern, and the latter’s maddening

redundancy offset by some entropy. How they achieve these mixtures, as I will demonstrate,

comes via the unusual manner in which their pattern and randomness are mixed. Where standard

English more or less efficiently alternates its unpredictable elements with more strictly patterned

ones (e.g., consonants with vowels, nouns and verbs with connectives), J R and The Making of

Americans’ patterns and randomness are frequently disentwined, allowing each to proliferate to

the point where many passages contain locally unreadable cruft. Often, this causes the text to

expand, as additional text is required to render at least parts of the excessively random or

patterned text readable. Subsequently, readers’ abilities to process the language are challenged

by this unusual balance, because it becomes difficult to immediately determine whether a given

passage meaningfully contributes to communication or is simply nonsense. In this chapter, then,

by examining some characteristic passages that demonstrate how their text accumulates with

respect to their balance of pattern and randomness, we will examine how non-readable text is

used in the dictionary novel by seeing how J R’s purported entropic errors are undercut by

regular redundancy and how The Making of Americans’ repetitions are broken up by underlying

variety, before concluding with how error and redundancy work together to allow correction in

Finnegans Wake.

Error: Is J R Readable?

Certainly, J R’s text frequently appears disordered. Consequently, the book’s main

narrative—in which a mathematically gifted but academically unengaged sixth-grader named J R

Vansant becomes inspired by a school trip to Wall Street to play the stock market’s esoteric

system of regulations, tax credits, and loopholes against each other until he has built his class’s

single share corporate stock into a financial empire—features frequent communication

breakdowns: information is not received as intended, is sent with errors already embedded, or is

decoded improperly. Consider this exchange, where two teachers at J R’s school, aspiring

composer Edward Bast and frustrated writer Jack Gibbs, run into each other after the

aforementioned Wall Street trip, during which they had both been pressed into service as

chaperones by J R’s ailing teacher, Amy Joubert:

—Yes but, Mrs Joubert is she all right?

—Momentary recovery Bast, got inhaled each momentary recovery

thought I had a newspaper.

—It’s under your arm yes but was she, what happened …

—Got lost in the dark caverns of her throat Bast, bruised by the ripple of

unseen muscles ought to be ashamed of myself, told me I should apologize to you

how’s that.

—Well no but that’s not what I …

—Told me you’re talented sensitive purpose Bast sense of purpose need

help and encouragement lock yourself in write nothing music, take defeat from

any brazen throat get to be like Bizet only not Bizet where the God damned doors

… he hunched as though with cold, hands buried in pockets —dum dum

dedum…

—Over here yes, but …

—Don’t spit upon the, garden path lead the whole God damned wait,

Bast? Something I’m supposed to give you these right here she forgot to give me

wait, forgot to give them to you here. (130-131)

We may observe that, at least as written, several passages here are unreadable. Gibbs, drunk as

usual, slurs his phrases into a disordered mess, produces phrases that do not parse (e.g.,

“sensitive purpose”), and can’t even keep track of all the text on his person, such as the

newspaper he can’t find and the student train tickets he belatedly remembers to give Bast at the

passage’s end (which, moreover, he has accidentally mixed with his horse-racing stubs). For his

part, Bast speaks at cross-purposes with his interlocutor, failing to pick up on the latter’s

encouragement of his musical endeavors and never finding out about the health of Joubert (with

whom Gibbs is beginning a romantic attachment). Adding to the confusion, no narrative voice

steps in to summarize either man’s garbled speech more cogently, nor explain their thoughts, nor

even identify who is present in the scene: in fact, the narrator’s only appearance in this

passage—“he hunched as thought with cold, hands buried in pockets”—is so unmarked as to

initially appear another incoherent remark by Gibbs. Given all the unintended noise presented

directly in this passage, producing near-random sequences of words, it’s no wonder that the

novel gets as long as it does.

Many critics celebrate this strategy, though, believing it enacts the entropic effects

characterizing the global socio-economic collapse caused by, in John Johnston’s words, “the

destabilizing and entropic effects of capitalism” (Carnival 205), creating a world

“catastrophically disorganized, as if it had fallen under the baleful spell of some disruptive and

noisy machine and that operates by inefficiency, producing only accidents, spillage, waste,

breakdown, and misunderstanding” (Information 126).

Invoking Wiener’s characterization of

entropy as a force destructive to the higher-level forms of order he associated with meaning and

a functioning humanist society (see Comnes 108-109; Schreyer 82-84), they believe entropy

corrupts the very surface of the book’s language, often seeming to follow a Wiener quote cited

by Gaddis himself as an inspiration for the book claiming, “We are always fighting nature’s

tendency to degrade the organized, and to destroy the meaningful. The more probable a

message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great

poems” (qted. in Rush 130; see also Wiener 21). More philosophically, they also often claim

that this disordered text mimics “the essential indeterminacy of contemporary epistemology”

(Comnes 14), especially emphasizing the minimal presence of the narrator, which is argued to be

a sign that Gaddis has abandoned all “authorial mediation” and only serves as a mute “collector

and transmitter” of voices (LeClair 103), which are “thoroughly transmuted and dispossessed”

(O’Donnell, “Master’s”) and “decontextualized” into pure transaction (Tabbi, “Technology”) by

a runaway system.

There is a problem with this view, however, which is rooted in both the aforementioned

sloppiness with which humanists discuss entropy and a contradiction within Wiener’s own

characterization. As the quote above shows, Wiener attempted to make meaning equivalent to

information in his version of information theory, opposing both to entropy. However, signifiers

and signifieds do not line up so easily, as Shannon realized in his approach, causing him to insist

that meaning could not be incorporated into any mathematical study of information and

redundancy (“Mathematical” 1). We may observe why by using Wiener’s literary example:

while clichés are somewhat more predictable than great poems, great poems—which must follow

some basic structural principles with respect to their language—are far more predictable than a

string of random text, which Wiener certainly would not argue to be maximally “illuminating.”

The magnitude of entropy and information must always be equal, not opposed, then, and greater

textual meaning, however we define it, cannot always be produced by minimizing entropy.

Inasmuch as passages like those above are entropic, in fact, they actually “increase the technical

information value of any one word” (88), as LeClair notes, which might well require readers, as

Steven Moore suggests, to attend each letter more carefully so as to fully understand the

complexity of the system it describes, thus potentially making the text more meaningful (Gaddis

64). This dilemma sits unresolved in the criticism on the novel: does J R’s entropic text

represent a world in which all meaning has been sapped away, prompting us to reduce our

attention so as to escape its mindlessness, or does its increased information instead enhance the

text’s meaning and prompt us to focus all the more?

We may begin to answer those questions by observing that J R does not actually increase

entropy everywhere, but adds redundancy in subtle ways to balance out its more obviously

unpredictable textual elements.

Consider the passage below, set at J R’s Long Island school, in

which Principal Whiteback simultaneously discusses another field trip with Joubert and

maintains a phone conversation:

—Yes well of course they’re not taking the ahm, they’re taking buses that

is to say the last time we used the train there seems to have been one less

youngster coming back out than ahm, yes well that was your trip wasn’t it you

don’t happen to remember the number of youngsters that ahm, of tickets that is to

…

—I don’t offhand no but, but you don’t mean a child may have been …

—Yes well no we probably would have heard from a parent by now but of

course these days you can’t always excuse me, hello … ? Yes just a minute

Leroy where’s, yes here if you just take this schedule Mrs Joubert you can ahm, I

can tell them you’ll meet them at ahm, whatever it says there yes …

—Thank you I do appreciate …

—Yes well thank you for ahm, for coming in Mrs Joubert excuse me,

hello…? Yes excuse me I have someone on the other phone here, hello Leroy…?

But what happened to them that many, even that many picnic forks can’t just

disap … yes but where transshipped where, who auth … I know it said six J yes

she just left I meant to ask her what … no well then do they know where the rest

of the shipment went that never got here in the first pla … No I know it, I know

we never found them in the budget that’s why they must have something to do

with the cafeteria lunch program, if it looks like we’re turning down a federal

subsidy they might withhold funds like they’re threatening on the milk if this

Coke machine’s installed in the … What…? No now wait a minute just tell him to

wait a minute Leroy, we … no there’s nothing in the curriculum that calls for

brake linings unless Vogel of course ahm, how many … How many? No well

even Vogel couldn’t use that many bra… No I’m not coming down to the freight

office no, you … no well that can’t … no now wait a minute, what caliber …?

No well that’s no, no we don’t even have a rifle club unless of course the

government is ahm, yes well just tell them to … no no I don’t want to talk to

Agent Teets, no just tell him to … no I have someone waiting on the other phone

here just tell him to, to hold everything there I have somebody at the door, yes…?

(237-238)

There are many obvious errors in this passage, which render it less predictable and more

entropic. Some are simple noise, like Whiteback’s ahms, while others are more complex, like

transshipped, probably the result of Whiteback’s initial intention to say transported and mid-

word shift to shipped. Similarly, auth, disap, and pla appear to be the beginnings of English

words but do not themselves decode into English, while many clauses don’t parse because key

syntactic elements are left out: verbs are missing (“wait a minute Leroy, we…no there’s

nothing”) or lack necessary objects (“Thank you I do appreciate…”), articles never find nouns

(“if this Coke machine’s installed in the …What?”), and punctuation is skipped over (“what

happened to them that many, even that many picnic forks can’t just disap…”).

Yet large swaths of this passage work against that entropic tendency. After all, much of

the rest of Whiteback’s dialogue comprises predictable repetitions, multi-word fillers, and

clichés. In this brief passage alone, he repeats consecutively or in parallel the phrases that many,

how many, wait a minute, and just tell them to; he also uses of course four times and that is to

[say] twice, while beginning eleven clauses with yes (three with yes well) and many others with

no and no well. Furthermore, he often deploys clichés like these days, compressible

circumlocutionary phrases like seems to have been, and phrases that decoding would simply

erase (e.g., wasn’t it, which signifies nothing). Such text has astonishingly little information and

complexity, lowering the text’s average entropy. Since critics usually tend to associate entropy

with any kind of collapse, they tend to see the book’s “elliptical, fragmented dialogue and a

heterogeneous discourse made up of incongruent diction, specialized jargon, mixed metaphors,

and tortuous syntax” (S. Moore, Gaddis 109) as interchangeable, but while they all impede

meaning in some way or other, their differences with respect to information are extremely

important to articulate, because they work to stabilize each other and make text processing

possible.

How do we process this passage, then? We can recalibrate our attention so that the

redundancy can establish patterns to counterbalance the entropy. For instance, in the absence of

speech tags and narrative depiction of consciousness, Whiteback’s clichés provide, strangely, the

closest thing to an identity he possesses, and furthermore, they are the only control he can exert

on his frantic communications, which otherwise move at a speed, multiplicity, and

unpredictability beyond his (and likely our) ability to keep pace. This property is not unique to

Whiteback’s speech, as J R’s “I mean” and “holy shit,” as well as Gibbs’ “God damned”

function much the same way. Similarly, important material that is not foregrounded in a

traditional way is usually repeated several times, as with how the missing child that Whiteback

mentions in passing stands out more for having been already been brought up earlier by Bast and

J R (136) and how Gibbs’ otherwise incoherent reference to the “garden path” in the passage

previously cited echoes a comment he’d made in a previous scene about Wagner’s fear of the

outside world (116). In other cases, syntactic context renders errors legible. For example, when

Whiteback says auth he clearly intends to say authorized, because the only other standard past-

tense English verbs beginning with those four letters are authored and authenticated, neither of

which decodes in context. (We will discuss this more regarding Finnegans Wake at the chapter’s

end.) In fact, if we know that the word will be the ten-letter authorized after only four letters,

then the word’s last six letters must be totally redundant, and in streamlining out such

redundancy with its increased entropy, perhaps the text’s errors are beneficial, which might be

what Moore has in mind when he otherwise bafflingly calls J R “lean and economical” (Gaddis

65).

However, while disentwining information and redundancy allows the novel to be more

concise in some places, more often it generates cruft, as the amount of redundancy needed to

offset the book’s myriad errors veers into its own unreadability without fully correcting many

other problem spots. Whiteback’s many ahms are the most obvious case of pure white noise, as

are several clauses too incomplete to be decoded or corrected at all, like “no well that can’t ….”

Undoubtedly, this excess is what Jonathan Franzen meant when he scoffed at Moore’s claim,

arguing instead that the book “suffers from the madness [of information overload] it tries to

resist” (109). It is not enough to say that Gaddis is simply reproducing and thereby critiquing the

speech of real life: this, again, is simply the mimetic fallacy, and as Steiner notes, “A governed

irony crystallizes; it does not reiterate the object of its anger” (“Crossed” 109, and see Ch. 3).

Furthermore, the resulting cruft can cause readers to lose focus on important text, especially

when that text’s importance is only clear later, as with how Whiteback’s hemming and hawing

throughout the passage nearly overshadows the fork shipment that will propel forward J R’s junk

empire. In such places, it is not always clear what separates the book’s text from sheer

incoherence.

The best gesture toward explaining the distinction might be Moore’s, who claims the

book’s real art is in “how this particular idiotic comment is chosen from many others and placed

next to that one, so that together they echo a remark made in a dissimilar context elsewhere, and

in turn anticipate a line from Tennyson, and so on” (Gaddis 109). This point needs to be

explicated further. In an environment in which so much text is being constantly circulated, and

much of it is either so redundant or incoherent as to require substantial processing effort to derive

any meaning (much of which turns out not to be that important anyway), one needs to find ways

to modulate attention so that white noise can be filtered out and more important text can emerge

from the background to be placed in readable relationships with the rest of the book. Just as J

R’s characters struggle to retain personal coherence without falling into mere sequences of

clichés, J R’s readers must struggle with discovering and keeping track of, over the course of

seven hundred pages, which of the text’s errors and redundancies might be eventually rendered

readable and which should simply be ignored. The articulation of that valuable text,

furthermore, can only come as a result of developing a filtering method capable of identifying

and skipping over cruft.

These challenges to our attentional abilities are pushed furthest by the novel’s use of

jargon, a textual category that muddies the relation between information and meaning more than

any other. Famously, George Orwell lambasts jargon in his essay “Politics and the English

Language,” which, like J R, addresses the “political and economic causes” of the “decline of a

language” (156). As far as I know, Gaddis critics have not highlighted affinities between the

two, though, likely because, despite their shared aims, Orwell’s essay ends by prescribing a prose

style at odds not only with J R’s but that of Gaddis’s academic defenders: clear, concise, jargon-

free (170).

While many have criticized Orwell for what seems to them an endorsement of anti-

intellectual simplifications in these pronouncements,

Orwell does not, in fact, attack jargon

because it is too difficult to read—instead, he attacks it because it is too easy. Though

unreadable to outsiders, jargon is quickly breezed over by insiders, for whom it reads as filler,

albeit filler that makes them feel very erudite. Consequently, Orwell notes, it allows those who

use it to believe their thoughts are sophisticated while “sav[ing] mental effort,” because jargon

“will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you” (164-165). It

deceives by presenting redundancy as complexity, allowing it to become “an instrument for […]

concealing or preventing thought” (170), because when one uses such language, one may

“defend the indefensible” without deeply processing what one is doing (166). If one avoids

jargon, at least, “when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself”

(171). Not only does jargon obscure its status as information, then, it also obscures its meaning,

hiding whether its author means to communicate or to conceal. How we allocate attention to it in

a given situation, then—whether we simply eliminate it to focus on the rest of a text, as is the

wont of the symbolic logicians in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (63-64), or examine it all the more

for underlying motives, as Orwell does with totalitarian rhetoric (166-167)—profoundly tests our

abilities to process language.

This property of jargon may be exemplified best by J R’s climax, a twenty-five-page

scene set in the hospital room of J R’s aging, ill corporate rival Governor Jack Cates (Joubert’s

father), in which Cates barks into the telephone while simultaneously firing off orders to his

assistant Beaton. Many pages read like this:

—Planned to miss three dividends in the first place, didn’t we? No damn

voting rights on it unless we miss the fourth one, pay that everything’s under

control got Beaton here keeping an eye on the … who Freddie? Any word on

Freddie Beaton?

—You mean the actual reconstituting hasn’t even excuse me, no sir Mrs.

Cutler is placing ads in the pap…

—Still out loose Monty no Wiles thought he saw him in Tripler’s elevator

while back with Emily must have been wrong, Beaton says she’s got ads in the

pap…must have got it from the doorman when she moved that drunk into their

old place up on Seventy…Joubert no don’t know she…don’t know must have

paid him off, damn lulu need it for lawyers job in a Swiss bank there dipped in the

cash drawer bought back into Nobili when this outfit ran it up to nineteen turned

right around wiped it out with their own Far East market nothing left but what…?

—Lost in transmission but that’s prepos…

—Same damn fool yes got the bit in his teeth there tried to give them

away too, launched a big drug donation dates running out thought they’d deduct at

retail, IRS disallows it lets them write off at cost under eighty thousand wholesale

value damn near two million, drugs show up in every black market in the Pacific

dates expire damn druggists returning them hand over first get the wholesale price

back nothing left of the company but this happy pill Zona’s on lose that patent

suit all they’ve got’s this damn green aspirin FDA’s got them up on not worth …

Depends what Broos comes up with Beaton standing here gossiping on the damn

phone trying to reach him on … what, called Broos…? (704)

As Johnston notes, “this is not a human being talking, but money itself” (Carnival 204). The

language of cash drawers, deductions, and write-offs comes so easily to Cates that he appears

barely to think about them. For many readers, on the other hand, this barrage of technical and

otherwise irrelevant financial detail may seem extremely complicated, yet it will still encourage

skimming, because each deal’s individual meaninglessness to Cates is matched by its blurred

incomprehensibility to us. Yet if we skim these deals so as to focus on events that appear more

important to the main plot, we will miss the train of action leading to the novel’s climactic

moment, where the heretofore milquetoast Beaton suddenly uses this dialogue’s most wonkish

element, the delayed fourth quarter dividend, in combination with Zona’s dangerous “happy

pills” to wrest away the dying Cates’s holdings and transfer them to Joubert. As Moore notes, it

is easy to overlook this sequence of events (Gaddis 83-84), likely because their setup occurs

within such otherwise apparently interminable cruft. Only by an extremely subtle filtering can

the important details be emphasized and the unimportant ones skipped.

In other words, though the book’s famously erudite financial, scientific, and artistic

allusions might present real obstacles to the reading process, as might its sheer length, the most

substantial difficulty in J R comes from processing the relationships between its highly entropic

and highly redundant passages so as to determine which are actually worth attending. In doing

so, J R sits just on the right side of the line between productive and destructive difficulty. We

ought to keep that in mind, incidentally, when we read about Gibbs’s desire to write a book on

the history of the player piano that will be as “Difficult as I can make it” (244), because its

difficulty appears less due to any productive delay it induces to text processing than to its

incoherent mixture of broken sentences and unincorporated quotes (see 603-605): simply

because both Gibbs’s and Gaddis’s books are equally confusing, that is, does not mean they are

equally profound. Conversely, we should not praise the frequent mid-novel speeches about the

value of art and beauty made by Gibbs, Bast, Joubert, and novelist Thomas Eigen, which are

every bit as cliché-ridden and empty as are Whiteback’s and Cates’s dialogue, simply because

they happen to fit our aesthetic predispositions. It is the cognitive process that the text forces,

rather than its propositional content, which ought to be most important to us, because without the

former the latter is likely to quickly decline. When, for instance, I see that the organizers of the

Los Angeles Review of Books’ recent online discussion of J R, a book so crucially about the

dangers of mindlessly replicating text beyond its meaningful context, decided to name the project

“Occupy Gaddis,” I wonder to what extent we are, in fact, capable of consistently managing text

in the way that both J R and contemporary life require.

Redundancy: Is The Making of Americans Worth Reading?

Substantially different challenges to processing are presented by Stein’s

multigenerational family epic The Making of Americans, which narrates the lives of two wealthy

families from the Eastern city of Bridgepoint, the Herslands and the Dehnings, that have moved

to the Midwestern town of Gossols. Where J R makes use of an expanded vocabulary and

fractured syntax, The Making of Americans deploys instead a limited arsenal of short words and

repetitive sentences.

These, however, can prove no less difficult to read. Why that should be

so is difficult to articulate, though, given that the most popular estimates of textual difficulty,

such as the Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid grade-level tests, are derived from word/sentence

length and perversely evaluate Stein’s writing as extremely easy (see Marcus 48-49).

How do

we discuss, for instance, the difficulty of a passage like this one from the beginning of the

“Martha Hersland” chapter?

To begin then again with a few of them who slowly come to be each one

of them a whole one to me.

Each one slowly comes to be a whole one in me. Each one slowly comes

to be a whole one in me. Every one always is repeating. As I was saying

sometimes it is very irritating hearing, feeling, seeing repeating in some one, in

every one. More and more then when such a one is a whole one to me, more and

more then as loving repeating is all my being, more and more then I am happy in

my loving repeating being. Now then.

Each one slowly comes to be a whole one to me. Each one slowly comes

to be a whole one in me. This is now a description of learning one. (306)

Unlike JR, no words in this excerpt are errant or even unusual, and while it possesses a few

syntactic irregularities, most of its sentences are short, single-claused, and correctly-constructed.

Gunning-Fog grades it just under 7, but there is near-universal agreement that not only should

one not expect a seventh-grader to read The Making of Americans, but that the book constitutes

one of the most challenging reading experiences in Anglophone literature.

The main cause is likely the one cited by Wilson, both exemplified and described by this

passage—the book is always repeating itself, to the point where both its redundancy (and

consequent extreme length) is likely to wear down its readers’ attention and shift text processing

toward skimming. This redundancy is most apparent in those phrases and even whole sentences

that recur verbatim through the text, like “Each one slowly comes to be a whole one in me,”

which soon become so predictable as to venture toward cruft. Furthermore, other phrases, such

as “seeing repeating in some one, in every one,” seem quite compressible (i.e., “in every one”

covers everything signified by “in some one”), while still others contain meaningless filler

expressions like “More and more” and “Now then.” On first analysis, the text appears

information-poor and to resist very deep attention.

In fact, even some Stein scholars seem receptive to the notion that the book is not really

readable. Janet Malcolm, for instance, notes that among critics the book “is believed to be a

modernist masterpiece, but is not felt to be a necessary reading experience” (111), and even

Marianne DeKoven’s monograph celebrating Stein’s experimental language claims that reading

the whole book is “an arduous and unrewarding task” (50).

This perspective is widespread

enough that Tanya Clement claims in her digital corpus study that close reading of the book has

“yi el ded l imi ted materi al f or schol arl y work” (378). Perhaps poet Kenneth Goldsmith articulates

the non-reading approach to The Making of Americans most boldly, identifying its enormous text

as a precursor to the Internet and arguing that since that our daily textual interactions in the

digital age face us with text so overwhelmingly abundant as to render concepts such as close

reading obsolete, cutting-edge literature should ask us, as he believes The Making of Americans

does, to “parse” rather than to read: that is, to skim, filter, and browse text instead of processing

it word by word (158). “Trying to read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of American linearly,” he

asserts, “is like trying to read the Web linearly. It’s mostly possible in small doses, dipped in

and out of” (159).

If this view of The Making of Americans were correct, then the necessary balance of

pattern and randomness I have articulated for literature might no longer apply, and cruft-heavy

text of low complexity—e.g., Goldsmith’s own Day, whose 800 pages may be compressed, as he

essentially acknowledges, down to a phrase like “one day’s New York Times converted to a

plaintext monograph”

—

might become literature’s future. But the notion that close reading is

obsolete in a text-overloaded world has already been confronted and rejected by John Barth,

whose 1967 “The Literature of Exhaustion,” despite its reputation as a manifesto of

postmodernism, is largely a defense of traditional literature against conceptual writing like

Goldsmith’s. Barth points out that since conceptual literature is intended primarily to provide an

occasion for aesthetic discussion rather than to be read, then “for intellectual purposes [one]

needn’t write it at all” (Friday 69), which means that the distinction between conceptual writing

and literature is really one between “things worth remarking […] and things worth doing”

(Friday 66). To illustrate that there still exists literature “worth doing,” even at a point of

apparent exhaustion, Barth invokes Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which

centers on a fragmentary Don Quixote by a French writer seeking to independently reproduce

Cervantes’ work. Such a book might be interesting to contemplate as an illustration of the

problems of originality and interpretation in an age when so much text circulates so readily, but

as Barth points out, Borges’ story is emphatically not that book. Instead of creating nine hundred

pages of compressible text—i.e., a volume reducible to “Don Quixote’s textual double”—Borges

creates his own brief narrative about an artist’s struggles with originality and, paradoxically,

achieves originality in doing so (Friday 66-71). In this way, Borges and Barth demonstrate that,

despite our age’s rapidly mounting archive of extant textual patterns, a reserve of uncompressible

unpredictability still remains available to writers.

Along these lines, The Making of Americans incorporates randomness within the more

apparent large-scale pattern it articulates and rewards those who do attempt to read it in a mostly

linear way. As Randa Dubnick has pointed out, Stein’s “obscurity” does not derive merely from

repetition, but from a manipulated balance between the two axes of language identified by

Roman Jakobson, the “vertical” axis of vocabulary (“selection”) and the “horizontal” axis of

syntax (“contiguity”). When Stein pushes one axis toward greater unpredictability, she makes

the other more predictable. In The Making of Americans, Stein severely limits her selection,

causing some repetition, but in turn makes her contiguity nonstandard and errant (8-15), as might

be seen in the above passage’s brief but unexpected prepositional phrases and irregular

participle-gerund sequences. These sorts of moves distinguish The Making of Americans from

the Library of Babel’s “M C V” volume: its syntax is too strange to be skimmed, even when

many individual word-sequences repeat. We may take this point even further by noting that the

book’s selection and contiguity also feature an internal dialectic of pattern and randomness. On

the one hand, William Gass demonstrates in his introduction to The Making of Americans that

while isolated sentences may feature odd syntax, these syntaxes are often paralleled in adjacent

sentences (ix), as with the above passage’s six phrases beginning with in or four clauses using is

constructions. On the other, the book’s repetitive words often shift in meaning, altering the way

we process identical text, as may be seen in this passage’s use of the word repeating itself, which

shifts the meaning of later uses of whole one.

(We will come back to this point later.)

DeKoven acknowledges that “the fact that it is semi- rather than ungrammatical”—e.g., that

conventional word choice stabilizes unconventional syntax—“is what makes it readable, valid as

an option for literature” (11).

The concept of repetition, in fact, long fascinated Stein, and we might conceive The

Making of Americans as exploring the boundaries of what repetition can express, how variation

can be introduced into it, and how it can be read. Stein actually claimed to be “inclined to

believe there is no such thing as repetition,” believing that upon words’ reuse they acquire an

“insistence” that differentiated them in emphasis (Lectures 166-167), remarking elsewhere upon

“how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and

over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell

all that that there was inside them” (Lectures 138). How recurring words may acquire

“insistence” in a novel, though, is unclear, since written text lacks the vocal emphases to which

Stein alludes. Many Stein critics invoke the concept of the “continuous present” Stein derived

from her psychological studies with William James to explain this phenomenon, claiming that

these repetitions represent the constantly shifting and reformulating mind at work (see

Sutherland 52-66, Farland) or even access presymbolic language and the pure sound of the

unconscious (see DeKoven 61, Steidele). However, as perhaps the most important job of

extended consciousness is to subordinate or eliminate repetitive and irrelevant mental activity, it

is not clear why a mimetic representation of immediate consciousness would be valuable: indeed,

a consciousness that rigorously attended this process would verge on collapse. Sianne Ngai

argues, alternately, that Stein’s “hyperbolic uses of repetition, reflexivity, citation, and cliché

[…] tend to draw us down into the sensual and material domain of language and its dulling and

irritating iterability” (266), but why this should be a positive affective result is unclear, especially

since she argues the same holds for relatively unreadable books like Goldsmith’s (257-259).

Other critics emphasize repetition’s ability to parody that which it repeats (see Taylor, Bean), but

while Chapter 3 will discuss how repetition is vital to satire, a glance at the passage above should

demonstrate that this argument is neither sufficient to explain many of the book’s individual

repetitions nor the sheer lengths to which they go in the work as a whole.

To see how Stein creates “insistence” out of apparent redundancy, let’s examine this

passage, from the book’s penultimate chapter, describing the final days of the youngest and most

philosophical of the central characters, David Hersland:

He was not really needing anything. He was not needing being certain

that being living is existing. He was not needing being one going on being living.

He was needing understanding that he was being living. He was almost

completely needing being one completely clearly thinking. He was almost

completely wanting to be feeling needing that any woman he was seeing was

completely beautifully something. He was almost wanting to be giving advice

strongly enough to some. He was almost being one coming to be beginning

succeeding in living. He was completely clearly expressing something. He was

completely understanding any one’s understanding anything of that thing.

He was not really needing anything. He was not needing being one going

on being living. He was almost completely needing being one completely clearly

thinking. He was not needing being one remembering that any one can come to

be a dead one. He was not needing being certain that being living is something

that is existing. He was not needing to be remembering anything. He was not

needing to be forgetting something. He was understanding that he was being

living. He was almost needing to be one almost only eating one thing. He was

being living. He was understanding that thing. He was clearly expressing

something. He was not forgetting anything. He was not forgetting everything.

He was not needing to be one remembering anything. He was not needing to be

one remembering everything. (900)

The passage’s limited vocabulary causes words to recur frequently. Need and needing alone

appear sixteen times (nearly 7% of the total word count, roughly the frequency of the in standard

English), which leads to both repeating phrases like “He was not really needing anything” and

redundant ones like, “He was not needing to be one remembering anything. He was not needing

to be one remembering everything.” This suggests low information density and substantial cruft.

Yet “He was not really needing anything” is not quite the same phrase in its two

appearances. When beginning the first paragraph, it may decode into an expression of

independence (e.g. “David lacks nothing, because he is self-reliant”), rendering the next two

sentences, which merely provide examples of “anything,” apparently redundant. A few

sentences later, though, the narrator describes something David does need: “understanding that

he was being living” and “being one completely clearly thinking.” To avoid the contradiction,

we might wonder if we should’ve placed greater emphasis on the qualifier really in decoding, or

considered anything as referring merely to physical things, or emphasize the past-tense

formulation of was. Similarly, we could consider how different decodings of understanding,

being, living, and thinking (especially into their gerund forms) might alter our take on David’s

needing. Regardless, when we come upon the second “He was not really needing anything,” we

cannot repeat our original decoding. Under the force of the syntax, the words’ meanings and

their attendant probabilities have changed—as, for that matter, they have been changing all

throughout the nine hundred pages of the novel leading up to this point. In this manner, The

Making of Americans redefines the words of our language even as we read them.

However, just as J R’s redundancy does not fully balance its error, not all of The Making

of Americans’ recurring phrases have this kind of dynamism. The most egregious example

appears on pages 443-444, recurring almost exactly on page 480. I overlay the two here—the

single bracketed letter is the only text from the first occurrence not to appear in the recurrence,

and the underlined words are the only text that the recurrence introduces:

Some as I am saying have sure feeling in them, have honor in them and

religion from the nature of them when this is strong enough in them to make it

their own inside them. Some can make their own honor, some their own

l[i]oving, some their own religion, some are weak and can do one thing, make one

thing their own, some are strong enough and all of it, loving, honor, certainty and

religion in them, all of it is some one else’s, of some one else’s making, some can

just resist and not make their own anything, there are many of them. Some out of

their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a terror to them. Out of their

own virtue they make a god who sometimes later is a terror to them. Some make

some things like laws out of the nature of them, out of the nature of some other

one. Some are controlled by other people’s virtue, and then it scares them. Listen

to each one telling about their own virtue and that grows to make a god for them,

grows to be a law for them and often afterwards scares them, some afterwards like

it, some forget it, some are it. Some honor what is right to them for them to be

doing. Some separate honor from the doing of the thing, have it as a feeling.

(443, 480)

This is not all that repeats: the next paragraph does as well, differing only by one added comma

in its recurrence.

Since some of the passage’s sentences are already redundant (e.g., “Some out

of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a terror to them. Out of their own virtue

they make a god who sometimes later is a terror to them”), their recurrence seems even more so.

Though the two versions of this passage do appear in dramatically different contexts—the first

comes as part of a description of Martha’s husband, women’s rights advocate Phillip Redfern

(who, upon receiving a university post, has become attracted to a young woman named Cora

Dounor, herself desired by the dean, Hannah Charles), while the second appears at the start of

the next section, centered on Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning, more generally describing the

narrator’s plan to make a “history of every one”— the potential for an insistent difference

between the two is defused by the vague some and sometimes: since some’s relation to loving,

honor, and religion is decodable in so many ways, it dissipates any syntactic pressure that might

create insistence. The minimal altered text does little to generate insistence, either, especially as

the living-loving distinction deployed in the first version is weakened in the second.

Interestingly, despite the tremendous extent of the repetition, this passage has only been rarely

noticed by critics (see Clement 367), but perhaps that all the more highlights how so much of the

book is flatly repetitive: not even such a lengthy repetition as this really stands out.

We might understand why such repetition might have value in the larger scheme of the

book, though, by returning to the final passage about David, especially the claim that he is

“almost completely needing being one completely clearly thinking.” Is David actually

“completely clearly thinking” here? It is difficult to say, because while on the one hand the

passage is constantly repeating, as in phrases like, “He had not been one needing that thing really

needing being a dead one. He had not been one needing that thing really at all needing that thing

needing being a dead one. He was then understanding something and understanding any one else

who was understanding something of that thing” (903), it also frequently self-contradicts, as

when the narrator claims “he was one who did not remember everything,” then several sentences

later that “[h]e remembered everything” (899). While elsewhere the relation between repetition

and contradiction can insist that we produce nuanced shifts in the meanings of words, in these

cases the contradiction is so absolute, and the repetition so vague and invariant, that it does not

seem to allow any such subtle processing, moving the passage toward an incantatory vagueness.

The text, then, seems to live on a very thin border between very precise and very muddled

expression. Inasmuch as that language partly characterizes David’s consciousness, it seems that

he cannot always tell the difference between the two in establishing his own thoughts, and

consequently, we cannot really tell whether he has established a profound peace with himself in

his dying days or simply collapsed into a confused rambling.

Finding the line between profundity and rambling is an extremely tricky problem, one

that produces probably the biggest challenge in reading Stein’s novel. In describing David’s

inability to consistently maintain insistence within the patterns of his thought without falling into

contradiction on the one side or repetition on the other (a problem shared by many of the book’s

characters), The Making of Americans shows us the hidden richness possessed by the mundane

words than govern our lives, but also what muddled use we often make of them, and how

maddeningly hard it is to distinguish between our most insightful and most nonsensical thoughts.

The tightrope our minds walk in attempting to establish the necessary patterns making

consciousness possible without simply becoming calcified and habitual, while at the same time

allowing in enough new stimuli without those patterns collapsing, is a treacherous one.

Correction: How Does One Read Finnegans Wake?

No mega-novel, though, presses our ability to rapidly modulate modes of attention more

relentlessly than Finnegans Wake, a book without which any discussion of allegedly unreadable

text would be incomplete. Where J R may tweak several clauses per paragraph, few sentences

pass in Finnegans Wake without several words being warped into near-unrecognizability; while

The Making of Americans may repeat many phrases, the Wake constantly repeats the entire

Viconian life-cycle through the trope of the Liffey’s daily flow inward and out. Regarding this

circularly-plotted, neologism-loaded tome, even Joyce’s friend Ezra Pound—certainly no

stranger to long, impenetrable literary works—found himself forced to admit bafflement:

I will have another go at it, but up to the present I make nothing of it

whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new

cure for the clapp [sic] can possibly be worth all the circumambient

peripherization.

Doubtless there are patient souls, who will wade through anything for the

sake of the possible joke …. But … having no inkling whether the purpose of the

author is to amuse or to instruct …. in somma ….

Up to the present I have found diversion in the Tristan and Iseult

paragraphs that you read years ago … mais apart ça … And in any case I don’t

see what which has to do with where .... (qted. in Ellmann 584)

It is hard to criticize Pound for this attitude. After all, what would it mean to “read” the

following passage:

In the name of anem this carl on the kopje in pelted thongs a parth a lone

who the joebiggar be he? Forshapen his pigmaid hoagshead, shroonk his

plodsfoot. He hath locktoes, this shortshins, and, Obeold that’s pectoral, his

mammamuscles most mouseterious. It is slaking nuncheon out of some thing’s

brain pan. Me seemeth a dragon man He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is

Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the

ramping riots of pouriose and froriose. What a quhare soort of a mahan. It is

evident the michindaddy. Lets we overstep his fire defences and these kraals of

slitsucked marrogbones. (Cave!) (15-16)

Of this passage’s 110 words, thirty-one do not belong to the dictionaries of any known language,

so how can they be read? Finnegans Wake, more than any other book, makes critics ask what it

means to “read” a text at all, as the cognitive modes that processing it requires are so unusual and

markers of success so frequently difficult to establish.

As impenetrable as it may appear, however, the Wake, like J R and the The Making of

Americans, is characterized by an unusual mixture of information and redundancy, though each

is allowed to proliferate to an extreme degree within its own domain. The relationship between

the two may be explicated via the tension Margot Norris long ago articulated in Wake criticism

been those critics predisposed respectively toward “a radical and a conservative interpretation of

the book” (1). The radical strand emphasizes the text’s entropic randomness, describing its

language with terms like “chaos and complexity” (see Rice) to the point of ascribing to it a

“quantum” textual status (see Vanderweke, Theall).

The conservative strand, conversely,

points out how incredibly repetitive are the book’s motifs and symbols (see Hart), observing, in

Edmund L. Epstein’s words, that the book “repeats its stories and symbols dozens or hundreds of

times,” often seeming simply to replay one “basic story” (71). Even the confusing passage

above manages to allude to the overarching Viconian cycle and to one of Joyce’s paradigmatic

examples of that narrative pattern, the rise and fall of Charles Parnell (McHugh 15). Given how

we earlier established the necessity of balance between information and redundancy, any

adequate method of reading the book requires us to balance the two: that is, the radical and

conservative approaches are not enemies but absolutely depend upon each other. To accomplish

this, we must look to the textual feature upon which both camps establish their arguments, the

book’s errors, described by Vicki Mahaffey as the Wake’s “most far-reaching […] innovation”

(246), which the radicals view as instances of linguistic subversion and the conservatives as

guideposts to the book’s structural patterns. Addressing them will require a technique that places

the pattern and randomness of error in dialectic: correction.

Some Joyceans might balk at the idea of correction, though, because while Wake studies

have long engaged with errors, they are not the kind that readers are supposed to correct. Critics

who address errors made during the book’s composition believe that textual scholars should do

the job, not ordinary readers, if indeed the errors should be corrected at all (see Conley 59-80;

Rose and O’Hanlon); those of the conservative position tend to discuss readers’ errors in

misinterpreting the text, believing that the Wake corrects us, not the other way around (see Senn

59; Sailer 4); and those of the radical position believe that the book’s errors should be celebrated

for their liberating playfulness, not corrected (see Attridge 189; Borg 152). To discuss how

readers correct the text, one must assert a division between correct and incorrect language that

the radicals in particular resist, as may be seen in Derek Attridge’s claim that the Wake “insists

that the strict boundaries and discrete elements in a linguist’s ‘grammar of competence’ are a

neoplatonic illusion” (205). Yet this binary is not dispensed with so easily in practice. Indeed, if

anyone could have deconstructed the notion of correctness for the Wake, it would have been

Jacques Derrida, and tellingly, his essay on the Wake’s phrase “he war” begins by correcting the

text into several grammatically valid variations (“he wars,” “he was,” etc.) before proceeding to

analyze its fecund possibilities (“Joyce” 145). One cannot process text at all, after all, unless one

has some sort of internalized dictionary with which to at least partly decode it, and any

dictionary requires distinctions between correct and incorrect uses of the language.

As we already saw with J R, correction can be undertaken with ordinary English because,

as Shannon once demonstrated, our language has a high level of built-in redundancy. Using

letter frequency tables alone, in fact, Shannon calculated a baseline redundancy in English text of

at least 54% and experimentally demonstrated that, in practice, ordinary English text could be

guessed correctly by literate readers about 70% of the time (“Redundancy” 250-254).

This

inherent redundancy is not merely waste, in fact, but helps protect communications from being

corrupted: codes without redundancy, after all, are vulnerable to noise, because while, for

instance, a simple binary code in which 1 denotes yes and 0 denotes no may be maximally

efficient, a single error will cause the receiver to decode the message incorrectly (e.g., 1 is

altered to 0). To detect and correct even one error, consequently, requires substantially more

redundant text (e.g., 111 to signify yes and 000 for no) (Loepp and Wootters 128-145). For a

book like the Wake, though, which introduces many errors, there is often not sufficient

redundancy left in the language’s structure to allow correction. As an experiment I conducted on

Joyce’s prose demonstrated, while educated readers are generally able to predict the letters in a

sentence from Portrait of the Artist at a rate consistent with Shannon’s findings, a representative

Wake sentence lowered their accuracy to 24% (“Redundancy”). 24% redundancy is not total

randomness, but it reduces our ability to correct to the point where it is very frequently difficult

to process the text, as might be clear by comparing the Wake passage above to any of the

passages from J R.

However, the Wake’s entropic errors are partly counteracted by several other sources.

Most prominently, the redundancy the Wake loses in its vocabulary is partly replaced by its

underlying structure of motifs, which, following the mathematician Charles Bennett, we might

call its “buried redundancy,” referring to the patterns underlying apparently complicated text

(227-230).

These would include repetitions like the character sequences HCE and ALP, the

closest thing the book has to protagonists, as well as references to Tristan and Isolde,

Huckleberry Finn, and the drinking song from which the book takes its name, among many other

constantly-recurring bits of text. Furthermore, the redundancy provided by English syntax

remains more or less intact, giving us a stable structure into which to place our corrected words

(Greetham 21).

Lastly, the text’s implied phonetics also assist the correction process,

especially in the case of the Wake’s famous puns, as in how the tipsy “Comestipple” arriving in

“febrewery” mentioned above are easily corrected to the heteronymic, but nearly homophonic,

“Constable” and “February.” These structures often help error to be corrected.

As an example, take this relatively uncomplicated (by Wake standards) clause in which

Jarl van Hoother gallops out of his castle: “And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch” (23).

Prior to the Wake, eacy belonged to no known language, so unless we wish to discard it as

unreadable, we must try to correct it. The syntax requires an adjective, and there are several

common English ones with a “Hamming distance” (the number of digits differing between two

strings of text) of 1 to eacy, such as easy, lacy, racy, or each. Though written English give us no

mandate as to which we ought to choose, most Wake readers will likely correct to easy upon

analyzing not only the candidate words’ lexical Hamming distances (the difference in letters,

henceforth d

) but their phonetic Hamming distances (the difference in phones, henceforth d

Phonetically, changing e to the consonants l or r would not only add another phone but also

change the vowel from a long e ([i]) to a long a ([eI]), while correcting to each would remove a

whole syllable; meanwhile, changing the c to s to make easy would merely swap two similar

consonant sounds.

Furthermore, this error in eacy suggests that other words in the clause may

also have at least one error within them, even those that decode in English, which should cause

us to mentally scroll through the words or phrases that might be created by changing one letter or

sound in the passage. The most interesting result comes when we change the initial vowel sound

in hitch from a short i ([I]) to a long a ([eI]), which turns “eacy hitch” into ECH. In any book

other than the Wake, this would be unremarkable—we might as well note that those words are an

anagram of “Hey, I catch!”—but the HCE sequence and its permutations are repeated so

frequently throughout the book that we ought to anticipate it any time a sequence of

letters/sounds within a small Hamming distance appears. In inducing this correction process, the

Wake draws together this specific scene of Jarl van Hoother on horseback with the larger male

principle embodied through the book, also embodied by Napoleon and Washington.

The way that these parallel corrections, separately creating two related phrases that blend

their meanings into a deeper one, enrich the book’s linguistic richness has long been established

in criticism on the Wake, most notably in Eco’s early analysis of the book’s semantic web

(Aesthetics 61-87). This conflation of similar-sounding phrases into a single image occurs most

famously in the book’s portmanteaus, such as the “violet indigonation” that Jarl feels later in this

passage (23). This phrase’s second word may be corrected, with one additional space, to “indigo

nation,” but if we delete the middle o it becomes “indignation” (d

= d

=1). Merging the two

corrections together, we may conjure a vision of the powerful Jarl growing so angry that his face

becomes not just red but indigo and violet, an event that, given his position, might have great

national implications—and, since we are allowing one error, possibly “violent” results. The

conceptual blends created by the process of correcting such text are the backbone of the Wake’s

literary value.

However, the results of correction usually are not as straightforward as this. After all,

many other words in the “eacy hitch” passage also have d

= d

=1 alternatives: we could change

hand to band, clopped to clipped, or rude to prude. We would create further semantic links in

doing so, but these new semes both fail to blend particularly well with the existing language and

multiply out the sentence’s possibilities so far that it becomes difficult to process it at all. And

what do we do with those words possessing more than one error, or that correct to words from

non-English languages, or where different kinds of redundancy push us in different directions?

For instance, the same passage describes Hoother’s legwear as “panuncular,” which Wake

annotator Roland McHugh corrects to “peninsular” (23). This seems reasonable, given that

Napoleon’s Peninsular War is a minor motif in the Wake, but peninsular requires not a single

correction from panuncular, but three. This implies a much noisier transmission: if we had to

consider all alternate words with differences of three letters or more to each other word of this

section, we would have to cycle through so many different possible permutations as to make the

text incomprehensible. The Latin panuncula, or bobbin-thread, is closer, at d

= d

=1, but that

doesn’t seem especially relevant to the passage, and reaching into another language adds further

distance between these words. What about avuncular, which has d

= d

=2 to panuncular but

seems a bit alien from the military context; or a drawling American-South nucular, which is

relevant to that context but has a larger Hamming distance and is slightly anachronistic; or some

conceptual blend of pan and uncle? Which of these are appropriate corrections? If all, which is

to be emphasized most? If all are to be treated equally, at what Hamming distance do we finally

refuse to add more interpretants, so as to keep from rewriting the book entirely?

The belief that adding semantic value automatically improves the text, that more meaning

is better meaning, has not been questioned in Wake criticism for some time: even otherwise

opposed views on the Wake’s language, such as Eco’s structuralist valorization of the Wake’s

production of an “infinity of allusions” from its “cunningly organized network of mutual

relationships” (Aesthetics 67) and Attridge’s deconstructive claim that “the portmanteau

problematizes even the most stable signifier by showing how its relations to other signifiers can

be productive” (215) agree on that point. Yet it is time that it is. Why should it be so

unambiguously good that the Wake’s language is so energetically productive of relationships,

what it produces is not necessarily of any value? Certainly, that two words happen to be

connected by a few shared letters or sounds doesn’t mean that they provoke any real insight.

Consider the ambivalence about such wordplay expressed by the Anglophone literary critic most

responsible for expanding our attunement to semantic richness, William Empson:

It is in the third type of ambiguity, when the two notions of the ambiguity are

most sharply and consciously detached from one another [e.g., puns], that one

finds oneself forced to question its value. […] When there is no connection

between the two halves of an ornamental comparison, the two meanings of a pun,

except that they are both relevant to the matter in hand, one would think that the

comparison can only give trivial pleasure and the pun not be particularly funny.

[… To think otherwise, o]ne must assume that n + 1 is more valuable than n for

any but the most evasively mystical theory of value. Those who adopt this view

are taking refuge in the mysterious idea of an organism, of all things working

together for the good. (131-132)

Like the other linguistic innovations we have considered in this chapter, the Wake’s

portmanteaus will tend to produce mostly junk, and given the enormous amount of error in the

book, the volume of that junk can drown our abilities to see any more meaningful connections

almost immediately if we are not careful. That the Wake’s language may be made to decode and

correct polyvalently is not a good unto itself, but only valuable when the polyvalence it produces

is actually meaningful. How we determine which combinations are beneficial and which must

be ignored, though, is a difficult matter. Inasmuch as the Wake’s fascinating use of error,

however, gives us the opportunity to examine that question in greater depth than any other book,

we can use it as a starting point to examine the processes by which we make those decisions.

How the Wake’s disruption of normal English communication with puns, errors, and

polyglot incursions sometimes impairs dialogue, but sometimes aids the emergence of something

more profound, may be seen in the early dialogue between the inebriated Irishman Mutt and the

approaching Danish explorer Jute, which in its representation of communication difficulty

displays the impact of noisy, errant messages:

Jute.—Are you jeff?

Mutt.—Somehards.

Jute.—But you are not jeffmute?

Mutt.—Noho. Only an utterer.

Jute.—Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you?

Mutt.—I became a stun a stummer.

Jute.—What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! How, Mutt?

Mutt.—Aput the buttle, surd.

Jute.—Whose poddle? Wherein?

Mutt.—The Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he.

Jute.—You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more

wiseable, as if I were you.

Mutt.—Has? Has af? Hasatency? Urp, Boohooru! Booru Usurp! I trumple from

rath in mine mines when I rimmimirim! (16)

This passage might recall Franco Moretti’s contrasting of Mikhail Bakhtin’s otherwise closely

related notions of dialogism and heteroglossia by noting that “if people don’t speak the same

language, after all, how is dialogue ever going to be possible?” (Way 194). There is much that is

linguistically innovative about the pidgin resulting from the encounter of these two, but because

Mutt and Jute have no common language, they cannot communicate with each other extremely

well. Further impeding communication, Mutt admits to being a little deaf and soft-spoken: “jeff”

corrects to “deaf” (d

)

=2, d

=1, aided by the proceeding “jeffmute”), and “stun a stummer” not

only sounds like a stutter but includes the German word for “mute,” which Jute seems to mock

with his “hauhauhauhaudibble.”

As a result, the messages they produce end up having many errors in them, yet these

errors end up producing some communications more profound than would have been possible

were they speaking the same language fluently. For instance, Mutt’s “Aput the buttle, surd,” is

already errant as soon as he speaks it, because not only are Aput and surd not English words,

buttle is a verb rather than the noun the syntax requires, causing most commentators correct to

bottle and/or battle. Buttle acquires even more noise when Jute mistakes it for poddle in his

follow-up question, making it doubly errant.

Interestingly, however, Mutt’s response, “The

Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he,” despite its own errors, is mostly adequate for

responding to each of the questions, “Whose bottle?” “Whose battle?” and “Whose poddle?”

One might acquire a bottle at an inn, after all, and one might have a battle at “Dungtarf,” which

commentators associate with the Battle of Clontarf, a bloody conflict between the Vikings and

Irish which saw the death of the latter’s chief Brian Boru and the precipitation of debilitating

Irish territorial wars, including some battles over the Poddle River. As Mutt’s “Boohooru!”

suggests, this had a historically negative effect on the Irish, and thus by combining these three

words in the exchange, the Wake suggests how the Irish drown themselves in the bottle in grief

over their battles for the Poddle. In the heteroglossic dialogue, this three-way confluence occurs

by chance, the result of a noisy channel, yet the correction generates a complex metaphor about

Ireland’s aimlessness could not be so well expressed otherwise.

On the other hand, the word Mutt actually says, buttle, does not appear to contribute to

this blend at all, nor do many other words within smaller Hamming distances to buttle than

poddle, like bustle, huddle, and cuddle. Other words are nearly unreadable, like Somehards, and

even words that correct easily seem to acquire little additional meaning in the correction process,

such as inedible (presumably correcting to inaudible). That these errors are not entirely

beneficial should not be especially surprising: the felix culpa, after all—or foenix culprit, as the

Wake has it (23)—is the rarest of culpas. While Mahaffey’s endorsement of Stephen Dedalus’s

comment on Shakespeare that “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional

and are the portals of discovery” (242-243) is true to a point, we should revise Stephen’s

characteristically romantic aesthetic: his errors are sometimes the portals of discovery, but often

they are portals to nowhere. The substantial cruft produced in the process can swiftly overload

readers attempting to make sense of the text, especially if they are convinced it can be corrected

to produce some deeper meaning. Even the most ardent Joyceans, staring at a Wake sentence for

the hundredth time, will find themselves anxiously wondering whether they have missed an

important joke, or whether the real joke is that a long-dead Irishman has gotten them to spend

hours of their time trying to locate a joke where none exists.

But even in failing to be portals to discovery, the Wake’s errors are important to the

book’s project. To read the Wake requires a mindset constantly warping and deforming words to

see how they might be corrected, which each error keeps in motion, even if it leads nowhere. It

is a draining process, one that needs a lifetime’s effort to attend adequately. I have not yet

devoted the requisite thousand hours that Thornton Wilder recommended to speak to the book as

a whole, so I have limited myself to the Wake’s first chapter, yet this should not be too

problematic, because the cruft in Joyce’s book does not only, or even primarily, derive from

actual text’s many errors and constantly-repeating motifs. The book’s six hundred and twenty-

eight pages are only the beginning of its real text, because for each word we must also process

the entirety of language, searching out possible corrections and connections that might enrich it.

Almost all of what we come up with will fail to add to what we read, with only the rare

breakthrough. All the attempted connections that don’t quite work are the book’s real cruft, as

our effort to read it inevitably, in Ruben Borg’s words, “produces a hesitation […] between work

and waste” (162). Like the other dictionary novels, the Wake places us on the edge between all

that should be said but has not yet been formulated and all that has not been formulated because

it should not be said, challenging us to stay as close to the line as we can without, like HCE’s

avatar Humpty Dumpty, falling off it.

Chapter 2—The Encyclopedia

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.

One beats and beats for that which one believes.

That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all

Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear

To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear

Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear

Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,

Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds

On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,

Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:

Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say

Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull

The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

—Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump”

The Paradox of Encyclopedic Fiction

Having in the last chapter treated “information” in its technical sense by analyzing the

dictionary novel, this chapter will treat the more colloquial usage of the word by examining a

different type of mega-novel, though one similarly drawing upon a reference genre for its form,

the encyclopedic novel. That term has been more commonly used in critical parlance over the

past six decades, referring to mega-novels that incorporate substantial specialized information

from the sciences, the arts, and history into their narratives.

Most famously, Edward Mendelson

defined encyclopedic narratives as those that “attempt to render the full range of knowledge and

beliefs of a national culture” (162), echoing Northrop Frye’s earlier claim that encyclopedic

fiction presents “a total body of vision that poets as a whole class are entrusted with” (55). Even

less traditionalist takes on the genre, like that of Tom LeClair, still argue that only such

“extraordinarily knowledgeable” works (1) are able to “give readers an intellectual mastery [of

their culture] and, in their bulk, an aesthetic tower to counterbalance the towers of material

culture” (17). In gathering and organizing so much data, furthermore, Hugh Kenner notes that

such books exploit not only the encyclopedia’s educative concept but the “technological space”

of the printed reference book (contra the conventional novel, which resembles a script for oral

performance) by inviting annotation and cross-reference, thus creating the conditions under

which book like Joyce’s Ulysses can “contain, as Homer’s work was reputed to contain, a

systematic compendium of arts, sciences and moral teachings; symbols, rituals and practical

counsels” (35). Given these ambitious objectives, an encyclopedic novel obviously must be

extremely long, and if readers complain that this makes it excessive or too difficult to process,

this may merely be a sign that they have yet to adequately comprehend the enormous complexity

of contemporary culture.

There are several problems with this argument, however, as might be observed in how

other critics have inverted such claims by framing the genre as a critique, rather than a

celebration, of the encyclopedic project. Countering Mendelson, Stephen Burn argues, “the

encyclopedic urge emerges from a culture’s awareness of its own fragility rather than from a

sense of national coherence” (“Collapse” 51), occurring when the “mass of data exceed[s] the

synthesizing powers of even [the encyclopedic novelist’s] encyclopedic grasp” (“Collapse” 59);

as such, a good encyclopedic novelist “does not simply use the novel to store data, but rather

explores the negative impact endlessly proliferating information has upon the lives of his

characters” (“After” 163).

Other critics, taking up a more overtly poststructuralist attitude,

lambast those encyclopedically-minded authors “who bombard us with the certainty of their

knowledge” (Strecker 296), asserting that the encyclopedic novel can only present “the illusion

of a totalizing system” (Herman and van Ewijk 167) and is at its best where it “debunks totality,

highlighting a contemporary shift to fragmentation” (van Ewijk, “Encyclopedia” 220). Most

conclude that encyclopedic novelists should not try to use their fictions to encyclopedize in a

conventional way, but instead seek more “open” approaches to knowledge, often invoking

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome (see Burn, “Collapse” 61; Strecker 296; van Ewijk,

“Encyclopedia” 215; Deleuze and Guattari 3-25).

Though these approaches to encyclopedic fiction obviously conflict with each other, what

may be more interesting is the underlying paradox to which they both ascribe, namely that of

asserting the qualities of an encyclopedia, which is by nature a reference book, to a work of

fiction, which is (in Dorrit Cohn’s formulation) a “literary nonreferential narrative” (1). In other

words, if an encyclopedia’s value requires that it accountably and more or less accurately

describes referents within the real world,

how can its goals be either achieved or criticized by

fiction, which has no real-world referents? This is not a trivial point, to be resolved through an

appeal to common-sense distinctions of facts from fiction, or even to the theoretical analysis in

reader-response and possible-worlds theory that has demonstrated (with confirmation from

empirical research) that because no fictional text can tell us every single fact about its fictional

world, readers must constantly make use of information from both real and fictional worlds when

reading (see Iser 163-179; Pavel 43-72; Sanford and Emmott 45-52). In fact, this necessarily

blurred boundary between the factual and the counterfactual can severely impair our ability to

handle information. For instance, research shows even when readers know they are reading

fiction, they will often accept the inaccurate information it presents as true, and furthermore will

sometimes believe that they had “known” this information beforehand (Marsh, Meade, and

Roediger 525-535). Ideally, of course, we would associate any information we encounter in

fiction primarily with its fictional world, but since, as Lisa Zunshine notes, this kind of “source

tagging” is cognitively taxing (47-54), we tend not to mark such information that thoroughly,

which can lead to misconceptions.

Combined with the fact that a narrative’s ability to shape its

readers’ beliefs has been demonstrated to depend more upon whether it immersively “transports”

them than whether it is factual or not (Green and Brock 708-712), we need to be extremely wary

of trying to learn about the external world from fiction. We cannot believe what we read without

performing additional research, and if we go that far, we have rendered the novel-as-

encyclopedia redundant anyway.

As we see discuss in later chapters, fiction best addresses the

real world through its alteration of perception, rather than through reference.

Fiction’s rejection of any standard of truth, however, also prevents it from really

critiquing encyclopedism. It can burlesque it, of course, as might be demonstrated by Jorge Luis

Borges’ description in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a

reference guide to a loopy alternate world ruled by the extreme subjective idealism of George

Berkeley, but this says nothing about either the real world we inhabit or our systems for

organizing knowledge about it. Michel Foucault, famously commenting on another idiosyncratic

Borges encyclopedia that divides the animal kingdom into categories like those “belonging to the

Emperor,” that are “fabulous,” and “that from a long way off look like flies,” praised such

parodic fictions for “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are

accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things” (xv), but as neuroscientist Rodrigo

Quian Quiroga points out, what is really important about this example is how it is individually so

“bizarre and clearly useless” (198). To dismantle all forms of order, after all, does not free our

minds to access limitless new thoughts, as implied by Foucault, but instead handicaps our

cognition, because as Quian Quiroga demonstrates, such categorization is “the key to thought” in

the first place, prerequisite to identifying similarities between our disparate perceptions so that

we may gradually learn how to group and respond to them (198). As an analogy, consider the

labyrinthine drawings by Giovanni Piranesi and M.C. Escher: by taking advantage of the surreal

possibilities of their medium, these can play with space to marvelous effect, but for precisely that

reason they cannot critique the law of universal gravitation.

Fictional encyclopedias, consequently, can say very little about the capabilities of real

encyclopedias, and while they can use their data for amusement or to develop plot, as

information that data is empty. That makes it all the more puzzling, though, that many

encyclopedic mega-novels do contain lengthy accounts of obscure subjects that do not seem to

serve any diegetic purpose. One example, generally classified as encyclopedic and frequently

exhibiting early mega-novel technique, is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, especially in Chapter

32, “Cetology.” Mendelson, who claims that each encyclopedic novel must “include a full

account of at least one technology or science,” believes that this chapter helps qualify Moby-Dick

as one of only seven true encyclopedic novels (164), echoing mid-century claims like that of

Howard Vincent that, “In Moby-Dick we have the best popular introduction ever written on the

subject of the American sperm-whale fishery” (124).

Yet one cannot construe Ishmael’s

account of cetology as an accurate account of a science. Early in “Cetology,” Ishmael writes:

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in

the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot

point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A. D. 1766, Linnaeus

declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own

knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and

herring, against Linnaeus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession

of the same seas of the Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales

from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart,

their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem ferminam

mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturae jure meritoque.” I submitted all

this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both

messmates of mine on a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the

reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were

humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned

ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. (136)

It should be clear that dismissing the founder of modern biology in favor of one’s minimally-

educated lunchmates is not how one should begin an account of a science. For that matter,

Ishmael’s only argument for his position, the whale’s habitat, is so easily dispatched with (Are

plankton, sponges, and ducks also fish?) that it is hard to think that he means this seriously, and

nearly impossible to think Melville does.

This is not the only glaring error, either, even from

the perspective of 1851: Ishmael also insists, for instance, that the sperm whale is the world’s

largest, instead of the actual title-holder, the blue or “sulphur bottom” (138-141).

The poststructuralist approach to this chapter, however, fares no better in explaining it.

Critics often claim that the book’s cetological sections present a “farcical mass of pseudo-

erudition and specialization” that reveals our world’s “epistemological fragmentation and

disarray” (Greenberg 1-2), believing that Ishmael/Melville expresses here “the encyclopaedist’s

despair over the impossibility of attaining to perfect knowledge” (H. Clark, Fictional 37) and

eventually the discovery that “cetological insight […] can never be acquired in the gesture of

mastery” but only “through the renunciation of logic, syllogism, and traditional study” (Duquette

42). However, Ishmael’s failure to achieve a coherent cetology is less due to the inherent

limitations of science than because of his own lack scientific ability. As Lionel Trilling argues,

there is a tendency in fiction whereby, “if any abstruse discipline is confronted with an actual

human being, no matter how stupid—and, indeed, the stupider the better—it is the person who is

justified against the discipline,” even though the problem is usually with the human’s stupidity

rather than the discipline’s (Opposing 167). Ishmael does not achieve scientific mastery, in other

words, because he does not adequately attempt it; it is Ishmael’s pseudoscientific

pronouncements that are farcical, not cetology itself.

Still more puzzlingly, though, this farcicality is not consistently developed in Ishmael’s

encyclopedia. Consider this representative entry in Ishmael’s taxonomy of whales:

BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER IV. (Hump-Back).—This whale is often seen on the

northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into

harbour. He has a great pack on him like a pedlar; or you might call him the

Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does not

sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump, though a

smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most

gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white

water generally than any other of them. (141)

Though there is some whimsy to the taxonomy’s figurative formulations, especially the folio-

octavo-duodecimo system for grouping whales by size, for the most part this entry merely relays

information in a straightforwardly encyclopedic manner, even though Ishmael has already

discredited himself as an accurate source of such information. Since “Cetology” not only effects

a halt to Moby-Dick’s plot for the next four hundred pages, but dissolves its narrative voice to the

extent that critics often cease treating Ishmael independently from Melville, we would be

justified in wondering what purpose there could be to the apparently useless blocks of

information on the science, art, and history of whales presented by this and subsequent chapters.

No wonder that the greatest challenge reported by those teaching the novel is handling students

who are “impatient with these long desert stretches of information” (Milder 37) and find them

“boring and irrelevant to the book’s progress and outcome” (Bergstrom 100), to the extent that

many teachers let them skip the cetology chapters entirely (Axelrod 70). So what is this

encyclopedic cruft doing?

The Three Casaubons and Moby-Dick

To answer this question, we will need a more specific account of how information is

organized by encyclopedias, processed by readers, and incorporated into fiction. Though many

approaches to encyclopedism have emphasized the impulse toward total knowledge as its

defining characteristic, Hilary A. Clark more subtly argues that encyclopedism is better

characterized by the discrete processes of “discover[ing],” “ordering,” and “retriev[ing]”

knowledge (“Encyclopedic” 99): for our purposes, we will say that information is discovered by

a researcher, ordered by an encyclopedist, and retrieved for practical use by a librarian. This

division emphasizes knowledge’s collaborative and practical elements: after all, while

information cannot be used if it is never discovered, it is equally worthless if it is never placed

into context with other information or if it is not readily retrievable.

Furthermore, it shows the centrality of critical selection and compression, rather than

total accumulation, to a coherent encyclopedic approach. Though the medieval encyclopedists

may have believed they could compile all that had been discovered into one coherently

structured work (Yeo 4), by the Renaissance, they realized that one had to select only the most

important information to encyclopedize, or else the encyclopedia would grow unfathomably

large (Yeo 6-9).

For that matter, the Enlightenment Encyclopédie headed by Diderot and

d’Alembert acknowledged that, because its entries were generating so many unruly webs of

cross-references, the encyclopedia could no longer be adequately ordered into discrete subject

headings; subsequently, the alphabetical arrangement that it and future encyclopedias adopted

requires the librarian to be as selective as the encyclopedist, because retrieval now can only be

conducted by scanning through different sections of the encyclopedia while avoiding being

bogged down by individual articles’ many references (Yeo 16). Though the recent history of

encyclopedias has made retrieval somewhat easier through the tagging system first envisioned by

Paul Otlet and now implemented in the contemporary electronic database (Reagle 20-24), in

other ways, the librarian’s task has become even more complicated, because the many cross-

references linking to any given tag might lead to so much data from so many various sources as

to be overwhelming. In a world increasingly characterized by the billions of brief and largely

inconsequential documents it generates every day (see Guillory, “Memo”), navigating this

abundance actually becomes the chief problem of knowledge. Perhaps the most prominent

example of this is the great encyclopedic project of our time, Wikipedia, whose highly cross-

referenced and up-to-date information on almost every conceivable subject frequently causes its

entries to become extremely disorganized and confusing to read.

The goals and challenges involved in these three processes might be illustrated by well

examining three literary Casaubons. The first is Isaac Casaubon, the sixteenth-century

philologist and literary researcher widely regarded as the most learned man of his time, who

made path-breaking translations of many classical texts into modern languages and whose

knowledge of Greco-Roman culture was unparalleled in Europe (Considine). Though the

Genevan’s work relied upon ordering and retrieval, his original linguistic discoveries were

perhaps his most important contribution to knowledge, which introduced substantial and

otherwise unknown data about classical languages to his contemporaries, including the historical

derivation of the word satire (see Ch. 3). Indeed, given how we earlier demonstrated that the

referents of literary language are generally nonexistent, such linguistic discoveries are probably

the most valuable knowledge that any person of letters can contribute to encyclopedism.

Ordering, on the other hand, is better exemplified by the encyclopedically-minded

Reverend Edward Casaubon from George Eliot’s weighty Middlemarch, who works to compose

a “Key to All Mythologies”:

[H]e had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not

with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at

which Mr Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical

fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having

once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of

mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light

of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or

speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of volumes, but the

crowning task would be to condense these voluminous still-accumulating results

and bring them, like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.

(47-48)

Casaubon has not discovered original facts, but surveys and collects the facts that have already

been discovered. Furthermore, despite the claims of some Eliot scholars, he does not do so to

express the totality of all that is known, but instead to judge how these facts may be combined

and condensed into a cogent encyclopedia. However, he is unable to achieve this goal, because

in the quarter-century he spends gathering his citations and considering how they should be

arranged, his methods are rendered obsolete: even if the project were not ultimately scuttled by

his death, Casaubon realizes toward the end of his life that the publication would likely have

drawn only ridicule (243-245, 314).

Our third Casaubon, the narrator of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, exemplifies the

work of the librarian.

We will examine his struggles more in Chapter 5, but for now we may

consider the section in the novel’s middle when the underemployed scholar-protagonist decides

to create a bibliographic detective agency catering to befuddled researchers. His clients lack

neither information nor the ability to order it, but often cannot retrieve a given datum’s context

when encountering it amid their daily mass of heterogeneous facts. For instance, a confused

economist comes to Dr. Casaubon to identify a Lord Chandos whom he cannot locate in any

historical record, while an Italian publisher is puzzled as to where to fact-check information from

an English author about a similarly evasive St. Anselm of Canterbury; Casaubon retrieves out of

his elaborate index-card system that Chandos is a fictional Hugo Hofmenstahl character and that

Anselm is known as Anselm d’Aosta outside the Anglophone world (215-216). These are not

themselves arcane facts, but knowing how to look for them when encountered out of their usual

specialized context is not always easy.

The real problems of knowledge presented by encyclopedism, then, are at least as

practical as they are theoretical. The futility of projects like the Rev. Casaubon’s are caused not

by the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, as Thomas Pynchon implies regarding a similar omnibus

on European politics assayed by Gravity’s Rainbow’s Brigadier General Pudding (279), but by

limited resources, such as the reverend’s mortal lifespan and his necessarily slow pace of work.

In many cases, these are historically contingent conditions: were Rev. Casaubon to labor with not

merely the aid of his wife Dorothea but modern academic institutional support, his speed would

be multiplied to the point where the project might become feasible.

Similarly, as Eco’s Dr.

Casaubon already intuits in the 1980s (217), computer databases and search engines would soon

substantially decrease the difficulty in searching for out-of-context information that plague his

clients. Yet these advances always create new difficulties. Making material more easily

accessible leads to more material overall, and while one might have better tools with which to

manage that material, the demands upon one’s ability to filter become increasingly large. Rev.

Casaubon would have vastly more mythological texts available to peruse today as he did two

hundred years ago, while Dr. Casaubon’s “strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then

finding the connections” (217) would cause him to get constantly lost in the endless web of

hyperlinks created by millions of unhierarchized facts.

Since everything is preserved in the

archive and has equal intrinsic value, it becomes increasingly hard to separate junk from useful

material.

Encyclopedism is not, then, primarily about epistemology, totality, or mastery, but about

organizing, searching, and filtering an unmanageably vast amount of data into a form wherein it

can be retrieved and used for the everyday practical purposes requiring it. Given the ever-

increasing amount of information to which we now have access, how we process that

information, and especially how we separate out important data from junk, is a vital element of

contemporary life. Consequently, while encyclopedic fiction cannot contribute to our discovery

of knowledge, because we cannot reliably learn about any subject from reading it, it can engage

and test our abilities to order and retrieve given material.

Since the cognitive acts involved in

reading fiction and nonfiction are, as we saw earlier, closely related, an encyclopedic novel can

engage readers’ information-processing apparatus by challenging us to comprehend its vast

amount of fictional data, modulating our attention so as to prioritize and group important pieces

of information while deemphasizing less important information.

This is where cruft comes in. Cruft is an inevitable byproduct of encyclopedism, as even

the best encyclopedic processes will not be able to ignore or excise every piece of minimally

relevant material entirely. Though Middlemarch and Foucault’s Pendulum discuss this

encyclopedic cruft, they do not produce examples of it, as Eliot spares us from having to read

Rev. Casaubon’s library of notebooks and Eco does us the same favor for Dr. Casaubon’s

mountain of index cards. Other encyclopedic novels, though, do present us with such text

directly, as with Moby-Dick’s “Cetology” chapter. What should we do when faced with this

pointless encyclopedia? I think that Jed Rasula’s claim that this chapter does not derive from an

abstract drive to knowledge but instead from “indigence [..] delay, meander, filibuster”

(“Textual” para. 23) is a good place to start. After all, Ishmael has gone to sea to escape the

“honorable respectable toils” of Manhattan (7), whose rat-race of prudent Protestants has been

simultaneously so overwhelming and so predictable as to leave him with “nothing particular to

interest me on shore” (3-5). When he finally reaches the water, his desire to purge himself of the

draining cognitive practices of clerical life requires him to dramatically reorder his relationship

to information, which he achieves by creating an encyclopedia that is, by contrast, useless,

leisurely, and idiosyncratic. It does not have value as an encyclopedia per se, and outside of its

occasional poetic sentence I am not sure that it contains any text worth deeply processing. It

does, however, provoke a kind of boredom antithetical to that of the boring productivity required

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on land, one that consequently reorients Ishmael’s and the reader’s modes of attention. How we

react to this new boredom may vary: many may wish that the plot get back to work, while others

may find the encyclopedia’s aimlessness pleasing in relief to the frenzied land life, but only by

establishing this opposed pole of cruft can the novel slow down and radically alter its readers’

cognitive modes so that they are prepared for the ruminating, philosophical essays that comprise

much of the novel’s middle. Granted, quasi-scholarly chapters like “The Whiteness of the

Whale” and “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish” have too much poetry and economy to be true cruft in

the manner of “Cetology,” but without that chapter’s assault on novelistic reading, we would not

be able to process these essays at a pace commensurate to the mystical questions they raise.

This is a relatively limited use of encyclopedic cruft, written as a reflection of a society

whose abilities to generate and transmit text were beginning to accelerate but were nowhere near

as vast as they are today. For the rest of this chapter, we will examine in some more detail

several more recent and complex cases of cruft created by authors concerned with progressively

later periods’ astounding powers to proliferate information. The next section will primarily

involve problems of ordering information, as fictionally undertaken by two befuddled clerks who

simply want to retire pleasantly to the country, while following ones will examine some more

contemporary examples involving data retrieval in the information age.

The Unhappy Retirement of Bouvard and Pécuchet

Described in his notes as “two rather lucid, mediocre, and simple souls” (xx), the

protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s final, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet (initially

projected as having two substantial volumes, with only the first completed before his death),

meet one evening on the Boulevard Bourdon after finishing their respective days’ clerical work,

become friends, then unexpectedly inherit money and merrily retire to the countryside, only to

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end up spending their final decades caught in cyclical, ill-fated investigations through various

fields of human knowledge. Each time they decide to investigate a subject, they inevitably

become so overwhelmed and confused by their reading that they make disastrous decisions

leading to financial ruin and personal misery. As a result, due to the pair’s frequent confusion,

the novel’s summaries of their attempts to synthesize the age’s encyclopedic information often

turn into blank, self-contradictory messes. For instance, in a characteristic passage, Pécuchet has

these thoughts while arguing with the Abbé Jeufroy over the source of the Catholic Church’s

authority:

But who granted it this infallibility?

The councils of Basel and Constantine attribute it to the councils. But the

councils often differ: witness what happened to Athanasius and Arius. The

councils of Florence and Lateran confer it on the pope; but Adrian VI asserts that

the pope can be as mistaken as anyone else.

Mere pettifoggery! All this has no bearing on the permanence of dogma.

Louis Hervieu’s book lists the divergences: Once, baptism was for adults

only. Extreme unction became a sacrament only in the ninth century. Real

Presence was decreed in the eighth, Purgatory recognized in the fifteenth, and the

Immaculate Conception dates from practically yesterday.

And Pécuchet got to the point of not knowing what to think of Jesus.

Three of the Gospels call him a man. In a passage from John, he seems to be the

equal of God, but in another passage by the same author he recognizes himself as

God’s inferior. (228)

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Even though Flaubert’s free indirect discourse minimizes some of the text’s tendencies toward

nonsense (see Ch. 3), many critics have still concluded that such catalogs of disordered quasi-

facts are pure and near-unreadable junk, only characterizing the heroes’ repetitive failure to

understand anything. For instance, Franco Moretti asserts that any honest reader will

acknowledge that such text is “boring” and goes so far as to “abolis[h] the difference between a

book on stupidity, and a stupid book” (Modern 68-72), echoing the earlier comparison made by

Flaubert’s contemporary Hippolyte Taine between reading about Bouvard and Pécuchet’s

failures and watching two snails repeatedly try to climb Mont Blanc: “The first time they fall is

amusing; the tenth is unbearable” (qted. in Flaubert xiii). Similarly, Leo Bersani claims the style

of Flaubert’s narrative voice makes the information it summarizes self-negating and

meaningless, as “Human knowledge is cut off from both its sources and its reception” (130).

Is there any value to such text? The best way to answer that question to discover why

Bouvard and Pécuchet’s efforts are always doomed to become nonsense. Famously, at the

beginning of the twentieth century, René Dumesnil posed the question as “Are Bouvard and

Pécuchet Imbeciles?” More recently, critics have surmised that the problem is not stupidity itself,

but a hubristic encyclopedism emblematic of post-Enlightenment Western culture, one abstractly

seeking “truth for its own sake.” Bouvard and Pécuchet’s “magnificent dream of scaling the

heights” (Sumberg 242) and “Odyssean zest” (Kenner 4) to “master their age’s knowledge”

(Codebó 103), they believe, leads them to a “naive reliance on expertise and erudition” (Swigger

356) that is bound to failure.

As Burn writes, encyclopedizing as they do can become “a

potentially dangerous addiction,” arguing that instead of systematically encyclopedizing, it

would be better instead to “take data pretty much as it comes,” because those who do “may seem

to know less, but they are in many ways more alive” (Reader’s Guide 21).

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However, though Bouvard and Pécuchet are in fact described as seeking “truth for its

own sake” once in the novel, Flaubert’s use of that phrase implies something slightly different

from what the critics suggest. During the fourth of the novel’s ten complete chapters, when the

pair discover that historians disagree profoundly on the French Revolution’s relevant causes,

events, and results:

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that

time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history,

every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could

foster and error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up.

But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake.

Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? (105)

It is true that this passage describes Bouvard and Pécuchet’s pursuit of ancient history as

motivated by an abstract desire for knowledge, yet this motivation only arises after a chapter and

a half of futile and disillusioning research in other fields, ranging from chemistry to anatomy to

architecture. If they are only pursuing “truth for its own sake” now, what have they been doing

for the past fifty pages?

They have been trying to achieve very mundane goals, in fact: as Bersani notes, “The

relation of Bouvard and Pécuchet to knowledge is highly practical” (130). The great irony in

evaluating Bouvard and Pécuchet’s project as one of overweening ambition is that Bouvard and

Pécuchet are tremendously unambitious characters. When they meet, the copyists express no

desire more profound than to escape the urban bourgeois boredom caused by loneliness, noise

(4), and the grind of work (11). They may wish to gain some culture (10-11), but lack real

intellectual goals. When Bouvard’s “uncle” (really his biological father) dies and leaves him a

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considerable fortune, Bouvard’s first thoughts are not—as are those of Henry James’ heroines

and Flaubert’s own thoroughly mediocre Fréderic Moreau of A Sentimental Education—of the

great life he might now live, but to exclaim “We are going to retire to the countryside!”, a

statement Pécuchet considers “beautiful in its simplicity” (14). Upon settling in a new home in

Chapter Two, their main concern is merely to tend some crops and a garden (23)—a task that, a

century earlier, another encyclopedically-minded French novelist had presented as the

exemplarily humble and self-contained activity for avoiding the snares of Western philosophical,

political, and scientific optimism. Questing for total knowledge is the last thing Bouvard and

Pécuchet seem interested in doing at this point. How do such characters, then, move from this

blissful desire for leisure to spending their retirement agonizing over books?

They do it because, as it turns out, even Voltaire was too much the optimist. Tending

one’s own garden is not as simple as it sounds. Bouvard and Pécuchet misuse manure, sow too

densely (27), and light their flowers badly (29). They do “tak[e] data pretty much as it comes”:

they follow their neighbors’ planting advice (30), purchase recommended tools (31), and follow

practical farming wisdom (26), but nothing works—at least not consistently, as their occasional

successes only prompt overconfidence and new failures. Finally, when their homemade liqueur

still explodes at the second chapter’s conclusion, Pécuchet makes the fateful exclamation:

“Maybe we just don’t know enough about chemistry!” (51). Their fruitless learning, then, is

prompted not by some abstract drive for total knowledge, but because the motley bricolage that

is common sense fails them. As the book’s chapters proceed, Flaubert recounts not merely the

clerks’ encyclopedic reading, but alternates episodes of scholarly study with those describing

practical endeavors making those studies necessary: they study beauty and literature in Chapter

Five with an eye toward courting the women with whom they are infatuated in Chapter Seven;

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they study political science in Chapter Six when their town is wracked by the 1848 revolutions;

they study religion and spirituality in Chapter Nine because it had led them away from a suicide

attempt at the end of Chapter Eight. That their self-education is no abstract exercise is clearest in

Chapter Ten, when they try to use all they have learned to raise and educate the orphans Victor

and Victorine. These encyclopedic efforts all fail, but only after not encyclopedizing has also

failed: their love lives, for instance, had also been unsuccessful before their investigation into

literature, the ’48 revolution fizzled elsewhere without their help, and Victor and Victorine

terrorized their previous foster household before Bouvard and Pécuchet’s.

Still, why does their encyclopedic research meet with so little success? Some assert that

it is the fault of bourgeois society, which has alienated the clerks from everyday life (see Kovács;

Codebó 101-118), while others refer to “the contradictions of scientific systems” (Koren and

Kauffmann 211; see also Tadié 134), but these charges do not stand up. As Trilling writes:

We therefore naturally suppose that the savageness which the book was intended

to express is to be found in the exposition of the studies which the two friends

undertake—this surely will constitute the fierce indictment of the bourgeois

democracy.

But again our supposition is disappointed. The horrors of the culture of

the bourgeois democracy play a considerably smaller part that we anticipate. […]

If their tenant farmer cheats them, if their handyman diddles them, we cannot

conclude that rural cupidity and the unreliability of rural labor have been brought

about by the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. If Bouvard, in two wonderful scenes,

witnesses the terrible power of sexuality, in human beings and in peacocks, and

cannot himself go much further in the direction of passion than a warm flush of

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inclination, or if Pécuchet contracts gonorrhea from his first sexual experience,

we are not exactly being given examples of the effect of the bourgeois

swinishness. When the hailstorm destroys the fruit which the two beginners have

been almost successful in bringing to maturity, the phenomenon is not cultural but

meteorological and, in its context, cosmological. (Opposing 166)

And regarding Flaubert’s supposed indictment of science:

In any vaudeville dialectic the intellectual advantage always rests with the obtuse

or primitive person; the straight man, the patient teacher who believes in the

subject, is always discredited. No discipline which is confronted with the

simplicity, the intellectual innocence, of Bouvard and Pécuchet can long maintain

its pretense to value.

Then we must have in mind the large part that is played in the book by

intellectual and quasi-intellectual absurdities which are as ridiculous as we want

to call them, but about which it is impossible for a sensible man to be seriously

troubled. (Opposing 167)

The last point is slightly overstated but basically sound. There is, finally, a deconstructive

argument that the real villain is language itself, which can never truly capture reality

(Bernheimer; McKenna), but given what we see of their activities, surely Bouvard and Pécuchet

would be even more befuddled without language to connect their disparate experiences into

some sort of pattern.

No, their real problem is the obvious one, the one that we least like to admit: that the

world itself, and not merely its political, epistemological, or linguistic framing, is simply too

complicated for any individual to understand. It is not that the world doesn’t make sense—what

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tortures Bouvard and Pécuchet most is that from time to time they do understand something—but

that there is too much of the world for any person (or pair of persons) to systematically order it.

Bouvard and Pécuchet’s troubles are perhaps best addressed by Italo Calvino, who concludes

that “However much effort they put into [their studies], the two scriveners are lacking in the kind

of subjective gift that enables one to adapt ideas to the use one wishes to put them to, or to the

gratuitous pleasure that one wishes to derive from them, a gift that cannot be learned from

books” (114). “Gift” is the right word, because it emphasizes the arbitrariness of Bouvard and

Pécuchet’s struggles, so many of which seem rooted in nothing more than “the downright

unpredictability of nature” (Swigger 356) or “because life is as it is” (Trilling, Opposing 166).

That they fail to understand their chosen subjects either by logic or intuition seems no fault of

their own: as Dumesnil noted so long ago, after all, Bouvard and Pécuchet are not actually

imbeciles, and as Ronald T. Swigger further points out, they “have a knack […] for penetrating

to the very conceptual center of whatever field they are studying, for finding the paradox, the

circular argument, or fatal antinomy” (357). They simply cannot order together their information

well enough to have consistent success.

It does not matter that their encyclopedizing is doomed to fail, though, because they have

no alternatives. Encyclopedism might not reliably produce thoughts adequate to the real world,

but without it, as we noted earlier, thought is not possible in the first place. As Robert Burton

wrote in his own futile encyclopedia, The Anatomy of Melancholy, “too much learning (as Festus

told Paul) has made thee mad” (260), but at the same time, there is “no better remedy” for such

melancholy “than this of study, to compose himself to the learning of some art or science” (462).

It is this melancholic, encyclopedic cycle in which Bouvard and Pécuchet are caught, where one

is miserable if one does not encyclopedize, but yet is not made less miserable by

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encyclopedizing. Encyclopedizing is not an abstract activity divorced from life, then; it is simply

life by another name.

If Bouvard and Pécuchet’s encyclopedizing is fated only to produce gibberish, though, is

there any use in our reading it? Trilling is right to an extent when he claims that there are few

points in the novel that present real philosophical conundrums for “sensible” readers:

professional historians can navigate around conflicting perspectives on historical eras without

losing faith in their discipline, for instance (105), while theologians might argue plausibly why

one might have faith despite the scriptural contradictions (228), and Balzac scholars can explain

why his novels are more than simple ethnography (118). However, Trilling’s “sensible” reader

is not likely a theologian, and if so he is not likely also a Balzac scholar, and if somehow he is

both, he is certainly not also a political scientist. As articulated by Warren Thorngate’s theory of

attentional economics discussed in the Introduction, understanding any subject requires

specialized study that precludes time spent at other subjects, and one’s ignorance of those

subjects may at some point prove debilitating. Bouvard and Pécuchet may be mediocre, but all

of us are necessarily mediocre at almost everything, and yet somehow we have to muddle

through life anyway.

Lacking expertise on most subjects, our confusion will likely bring us to

a great deal of information that we will be unable to order into context, and as such will be

rendered nonsense. However, even if we do stumble onto something insightful, as Bouvard and

Pécuchet occasionally do, how will we know that it is insightful, and not merely more gibberish?

That is the great problem the novel presents, and indeed the one that prompted Flaubert himself

to accidentally recapitulate the activities of the characters he set out to satirize, reading a reported

fifteen hundred books over his final six years in trying to understand the subjects the clerks could

not (Flaubert vii). We need to read Bouvard and Pécuchet’s confused thoughts, then, so that we

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can distinguish the confusion caused by their lack of knowledge from that which derives from

some profound realization about their subjects.

Let’s return to the passage quoted at the beginning of this section from the Pécuchet-

Jeufroy exchange. The passage might be considered pure idiocy by two types of readers, one

who believes Pécuchet too stupid to understand the clarity of Christian doctrine and another who

finds Christianity as whole to be nonsense and believes that Pécuchet wastes his time (and

Flaubert ours) trying to make it coherent. Though I am more partial to the second view than the

first, neither is quite right. Consider the final passage, in which Pécuchet—who, let us

remember, has only been dissuaded from suicide by hearing a hymn to Christ in the previous

chapter—begins to question the Gospels. What does their apparent contradiction mean? Does it

mean that Jesus was not God, or does it simply point to human writers’ confusion in the face of

the divine? Either way, does it imply that Pécuchet’s decision against suicide was illegitimate,

or might the hymn have revealed to him some greater spiritual truth independent of Christ?

These are not stupid questions—Pécuchet has a vital interest in figuring out the second—but

unfortunately, the illogical contradictions of Catholic doctrine swamp this thought so thoroughly

that he is unable to focus on it, causing his reasoning to become a disordered blob. As readers,

we need to attempt to manage the contradictions of the different sources more adeptly, lest we

fall prey to the same conundrums.

Bouvard and Pécuchet, however, are finally unable to distinguish anymore between sense

and nonsense. They revert to the simple copying of their working days, jotting down everything

they see and collating into alphabetical order, no matter how stupid or trivial, the entries that

were to comprise the novel’s unfinished second volume.

Doubtless, this would have been even

more boring and cruft-laden than the first. While Trilling believes that at the book’s end,

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“Bouvard and Pécuchet, sitting at their double copying desk, having a work and each other, but

stripped of every idea, every theory, every shred of culture beyond what is necessary to keep

men alive and still human, are […] intended by Flaubert to be among the company of saints”

(180), I do not know that it is wise to praise such uncritical mindlessness. Much of what

Flaubert did produce, after all, appears a dull collation of his time’s readymade popular wisdom,

as with entries like “DARWIN: The fellow who said we descended from apes” (293), most of

which deserve skimming. In some cases, though, it does seem as if Bouvard and Pécuchet are

almost able to reassert critical judgment and even irony, but it’s not actually clear whether this

judgment or irony is intended. Is “CORN (foot): Predicts changes in weather better than a

barometer. Removing one carelessly can be very dangerous: cite examples of horrible accidents”

(292) a parody of a folk wisdom or an unselfconscious perpetuation of it? It’s difficult to say,

and that indeterminacy is perhaps what characterizes the book’s encyclopedic difficulties more

than anything else.

This is Bouvard and Pécuchet’s tragedy: they realize the importance of this information

to their lives but never develop the ability to order and filter it. Instead of mocking the pair’s

stupidity and wondering whom to blame for it, then, we should try to find ways to manage the

information, both valuable and useless, that they cannot. Their failed enyclopedizing may be

arcane and obscure at times, but it is far more relevant to practical life than we may wish to

acknowledge.

The Deadly Endnote: House of Leaves and Europe Central

Such are the struggles with knowledge faced by the late nineteenth century. While many

of these problems still remain in some form a century and a quarter after Flaubert’s death,

though, the accessibility of both data and the expertise necessary to order it has grown

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substantially, limiting some of them. This has come, however, at the cost of exponentially

increasing the cruft through which we must wade to retrieve any information, furthered first by

the expansion of print culture at the end of the nineteenth century and later the introduction of

various new forms of media (radio, film, TV) throughout the twentieth, reaching new heights in

the early twenty-first with the growth of the World Wide Web. Consequently, the ability to

retrieve information from amid all the new cruft that digital culture generates has become an

important part of twenty-first-century existence. Though it might seem that the print novel

would have increasingly little to say to the cognitive problems presented by this state of affairs, it

remains resourceful, as it is more capacious than film or television but more self-contained than

the Internet, and in many ways, despite technological advancements in all those media, it

remains the most easily manipulated medium among them. We will conclude this chapter, then,

by looking at a device unique to the printed book (see Kenner 39) that nonetheless has interesting

applications to digital culture, and which has lately become the mega-novel’s exemplary method

of incorporating encyclopedic cruft: the note.

This use of notes in literary fiction is a strange development. After all, the note has

typically been a scholarly tool for confirming that one has represented factual information

accurately and for facilitating its retrieval (which is how it is used in this volume), with the

traditional view being, as Anthony Grafton puts it, that “the text persuades, the notes prove”

(15).

This would seem to render the note especially unsuited for fiction, which, again, is non-

referential. Furthermore, even in nonfiction, as Grafton points out, notes are rarely processed

with much depth, as they are likely to go unread entirely by anyone but the most invested

scholar, meaning that “In the end, the production of footnotes sometimes resembles less the

skilled work of a professional carrying out a precise function to a higher end than the offhand

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production and disposal of waste products” (6). After all, notes break one’s attention, moving it

to a different part of the page or even to the back of the volume, and if there is not likely to be

much of interest, one is best served cognitively by ignoring them. If they seem like waste

products even in scholarship, of course, they must be even more so in fiction, which is why their

literary use is still, in Shari Benstock’s words, “an aberration, a highly unconventional use of a

prescribed and specialized device” (205).

Even in scholarship, though, the note’s history is not wholly drab. As Hugh Kenner

notes, the development of the footnote allows one “a way of speaking in two voices at once”

(40), which, as Benstock argues, can create a complex, self-reflexive tonal texture not unlike the

kind found in literary narrative (Benstock 204). Such uses have inspired a minor tradition of

notes in literature. While Gérard Genette, in Paratexts, describes a wide variety of possible

types, spanning many authorial intentions and implied recipients (319-343), and Edward

Maloney has divided them more manageably into nine categories with different rhetorical

functions, for our purposes they may be divided into two chief, diametrically-opposed categories.

The first mimics the traditional scholarly use, most famously exemplified by T. S. Eliot’s The

Waste Land, in which an author, though writing fiction, still seeks to establish a factual basis for

its text by referring back to scholarly sources and documents, thus bolstering the authority of his

voice by showing where readers might themselves retrieve the information he uses. The second

type, though, takes advantage of the note’s bivocal possibilities to layer the narrative by letting

playful narrators insert undermining asides, and even can allow additional narrative voices to

chime in. The erudite 18

-century writers who employed it (Swift, Pope, Fielding, Sterne) found

this type of note useful for parodying the scholarly voice, a use taken up in the twentieth century

by the nutty annotators in Borges’ stories (see Fishburn) and in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

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This use is obviously opposed to the first, as the note’s creation of multiple narrative planes and

potentially conflicting voices are typically construed as “subverting the unity of the text and

destabilizing, rather than affirming, the central narrative” (Fishburn 287-288).

Over the past several decades, both mega-novels and other subgenres of experimental

literature have made increasing use of notes, which, as Larry McCaffery observes, is due partly

how the spread of digital word processing has made inserting them technically easier (qted. in

Hemmingson). Furthermore, notes’ similarity to hypertext has made them appealing to writers

with an eye toward the digital (see Hayles and Gannon), allowing them to simulate the way

readers retrieve online data. What is different about the recent use of notes in encyclopedic

fiction, however, is that they combine elements of the two incompatible types described, both

piling on mounds of apparently genuine information while also producing inaccuracies,

nonsense, and narrative inconsistency. Because the resulting third type of note can neither be

processed as accurate information nor read for a consistently duplicitous literary effect, it creates

a texture of cruft that gums up the novel, rendering retrieval of information extremely difficult.

We may observe this in the ninth chapter of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a

novel framed as a commentary by twentysomething ne’er-do-well Johnny Truant on a

manuscript he’s discovered (one already loaded with notes, fragments, and comments) by a blind

old man named Zampanó, which purports to describe a documentary film by photographer Will

Navidson (fictional, even within the world of the novel) about a labyrinthine haunted house. (If

this were not enough narrative layering, there is an additional editor commenting on Truant’s

work.) As this description might suggest, many of these notes can be categorized in the second

type described above, but as the passage reproduced in the Introduction might show, many of

those in Chapter IX, in which Navidson’s acquaintances explore the labyrinth’s physics-defying

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space (107-152), work somewhat differently. Of the chapter’s first twelve pages, fewer than four

are part of the main narrative, with the rest taken up by marginal notes, and while half these

pages are taken up by Truant’s digressive comments and another two present a blotted footnote

about the Minotaur, the rest of Zampanó’s marginal text identifies quotations and suggests books

for further reading, many of which are invented. What are we to make of this reading list?

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For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santacangeli’s Livre des

labyrinths; Russ Craim’s “The Surviving Web” in Daedulus, summer 1995;

Hermann Kern’s Labirinti; W. H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths; Stella

Pinicker’s Double-Axe; Rodney Castleden’s The Knossos Labyrinth; Harold

Sieber’s Inadequate Thread; W. W. R. Ball’s “Mathematical Recreations and

Essays”; Robinson Ferrel Smith’s Complex Knots—No Simple Solutions; O.B.

Hardison Jr.’s Entering the Maze; and Patricia Flynn’s Jejunum and Ileum. (109)

Five entries really do exist (Kern’s, Matthews’, Castleden’s, Ball’s, and Hardison’s), but the

other six are unique to the novel. These aren’t particularly funny—as are, say, the fake entries in

Michael Martone’s fictional, comic tourist manual The Blue Guide to Indiana, which lists both

actual Hoosier features and inventions like the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline (39-40) and

Musée de Bob Ross (109-110)—nor can they really toy with narrative unreliability in the manner

of Nabokov’s demented Charles Kinbote, since the annotating voice is so devoid of personality.

The reason for this cruft grows clearer as Chapter IX progresses. As alluded to in the

Introduction, its margins quickly become overloaded with notes listing dozens of architectural

terms, but while these are initially overwhelming, the notes turn out to be almost all cruft,

mechanically cataloguing only objects and styles not contained by the labyrinth. A quick scan

demonstrates in each case that there will not be any surprises, insights, or even moderately useful

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information as they proceed from one page to the next. The insignificance is further underlined

by our gradual realization that, while the labyrinth’s rooms continue near-endlessly, each is

completely empty, enabling later chapters to represent them by simply replacing this ornate

marginalia with large swathes of white space. The notes’ apparent function, then, is not to be

deeply processed in their entirety, which even the novel’s greatest partisans acknowledge is not

really feasible (see Chanen 171-172), but to disorient, giving readers the sensation of being

overcome by an impossibly labyrinthine void. After realizing that there is little worth retrieving

from this glut of data, we can adjust our attention accordingly, skip much of the marginalia, and

follow the main text onward.

This is an interesting and playful use of cruft, if not an especially taxing one. Once one

has oriented to the space and realized that its long lists are simply blocks of junk information,

there is no need any longer to undergo any complex attention modulation in retrieving data from

them, allowing one to rapidly move forward through the chapter. This use of scholarly notes in a

fictional context, though, becomes more problematic when used in other encyclopedic novels.

For instance, William T. Vollmann’s 800-page Europe Central, which depicts in impressive

historical and aesthetic depth German-Soviet relations from 1914-1975, ends with over one

hundred pages of endnotes and bibliography documenting his extensive research for the novel.

From these and his author’s note, which insists that though his novel is made up of “parables,”

his depiction of the two societies “derive[s] entirely from the historical record” and that he has

“researched […] carefully” and tried to be “accurate […] as possible” so as to allow “poetic

justice [to be] rendered” (753), it may appear that Vollmann intends to seriously use the endnotes

to verify his authority to educate readers.

However, Europe Central’s endnotes often have an

ambiguous relationship to the factuality of the data they supposedly aid readers in retrieving. For

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instance, the author’s note admits that though the endnotes document some of the novel’s central

moments, they are unable for practical reasons to rigorously cite every historical element of

which the novel makes use (753). Consequently, it often becomes unclear, even on important

matters, which incidents from the novel are based on the historical sources and which Vollmann

has made up. Some scholars of Dmitri Shostakovich, for instance, have complained that nearly

everything in the novel about the composer’s romantic life, a major plot thread, has been

fabricated (Christensen 97), even though Vollmann’s frequent reference to real biographical

resources give the impression of historical accuracy (Christensen 100). Similarly, the crucial

chapter on the Russian general Andrey Vlasov’s defection to the Nazis is substantially endnoted,

but these notes are littered with disclaimers that Vollmann “loosely” adapted his sources and

sometimes even changed them altogether (774-777). Exactly how loose was this adaptation? It

would take substantial independent research to find out, and, again, this would render the book’s

encyclopedism redundant, raising another question: what is the function of an endnote that

explicitly admits its source does not verify the main text?

This is a serious matter, because any claim that the novel’s encyclopedic use of notes

helps transmit knowledge about how modern Europe was shaped by the moral dilemmas faced

by those caught between these two “impossibly evil” regimes (278) depends upon the fact that

they adequately index their underlying data for retrieval. This problem might be circumvented if

the notes more self-consciously undermined the narrative voice, but as Michael Hemmingson has

observed, Vollmann’s notes, in stark contrast to those of House of Leaves or Pale Fire, are

usually devoid of polyvocal play or metafictional layering, with far more Waste Land-esque

erudition to their bland (and usually quite accurate) citations than there is postmodern

gamesmanship. Granted, Vollmann’s frequent references to the standard German and Soviet

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encyclopedias of the time, Meyers Lexikon and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, do nothing if not

demonstrate how works that are held, like the latter, to “contain the entire sum of useful

knowledge” (372) may be corrupted when designed by perverse power systems: as one character

ominously pronounces, to such entities, “encyclopedias are subject to revision” (646). The

former’s prewar entry on Adolf Hitler, for instance, is quoted as asserting, “He is no dictator,

suppressing the disenfranchised, but Führer of a believing people, who fully trust in him and

enclose him in their utter love” (104), while the latter is cited to justify postwar Soviet atrocities

like the blockade of Berlin by construing them as a defense against “the Western Powers [who]

increasingly sabotaged the work of the Allied Control Council, and in March, 1948, wrecked it

completely” (640). Yet our rejection of the German and Russian encyclopedias likely derives

not from disapproving of their overweening grasps at unreachable knowledge, but, conversely,

from our own confidence in knowing that they are factually wrong about Hitler and Stalin. They

do not, that is, seem to make any critique of encyclopedism itself.

It might still be argued that Vollmann’s endnotes validate his effort at “poetic justice” by

assuring us of his deep study of the historical period, yet such poetic justice regarding this

darkest of subjects can and has been achieved on this topic with much less pretense to historical

veracity. Roberto Bolaño’s brief fictional encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas, which

presents thirty short narratives in the form of encyclopedia entries describing American Nazi

writers, is every bit as profound as Vollmann’s, even though each of Bolaño’s tales is fiction: by

inventing literarily-minded aristocrats, aesthetes, and psychopaths whose reprehensible political

views are treated as artistic eccentricities, Bolaño attacks the same psychic insulation most of us

have constructed against the allure of Nazism as Vollmann does by emphasizing World War II’s

Eastern front. While Bolaño’s book also concludes with an extensive bibliography, though, the

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hundreds of secondary resources it lists in its “Epilogue for Monsters” (205-227) differ from

Vollmann’s endnotes in one key respect: none of them actually exists. Considering Bolaño’s

scholarly references beside Vollmann’s, though, should highlight that the latter might as well be

made up, given how freely he has adapted them, how rarely readers will consult the works he has

listed (or even read the endnote text at all), and how little they are capable of communicating

within their fictional context.

The primary function of both Europe Central and Nazi Literature in the Americas’ notes,

then, seems not to be facilitating the transmission of any particular information, but implying via

their vast catalogs of supplementary titles the overwhelming amount of information available on

this most overwhelming of subjects. There are so many different cross-references emanating

from their bibliographies, and so little context to provide a sense of which may be significant,

that they ought to impress upon us some humility in the face of the incredibly voluminous

information that any scholar must face in retrieving information about it—and, perhaps, a similar

humility upon anyone who presumes to comment upon the enormous and intricate nature of Nazi

crimes against the world. The limitations against which our attentions are likely to come in

processing even all the titles of such books suggest how cognitively draining it can be to try to

retrieve adequate data about anything related to an issue of such consequence. Their cruft is a

reminder that while books remain our most potent tool to communicate information, so many are

being published at a given time, and on so many subjects, that retrieving sufficient information

on even the most important topics can be unfeasible.

“Handling Information in a Grown-Up Way”: Navigating Infinite Jest

Even Vollmann and Bolaño’s elaborate bibliographic cruft, though, has limited impact on

how we process their novel’s information on a word-by-word basis. This is not the case for

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David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which centers respectively on the obscenely gifted

Incandenza family that runs the Enfield Tennis Academy, the recovering addicts at nearby Ennet

House, and geopolitical intrigue involving legless Québocois terrorists’ search for a film

cartridge so pleasurable it permanently supersedes its viewers’ desires for anything else. Many

critics have described at length how the book’s unusual and encyclopedic structure, comprising

not only 981 pages of multi-threaded and chronologically-scrambled narrative but a further 388

endnotes covering subjects as diverse as pharmaceutical chemistry, calculus, political history,

and tennis has a disorienting effect upon the reading process. As Frank L. Cioffi writes, “As I

read on, I realized that this novel was having a curious impact on me, was penetrating my

consciousness in a way that struck me as unusual,” because “it is at once an easy, pleasurable

novel to read—full of narrative action, excitement, local delights— and at the same time a trying,

annoying, difficult novel that is constantly interrupting itself,” admitting, “I did not abandon it,

though I confess I was tempted to” (“Anguish” 162).

These difficulties are probably posed most potently by the endnotes. As with the other

fictional encyclopedic notes we have discussed, they do not fill a traditional literary-note

function, as on the one hand they undermine the authority of the narrative voice too seriously to

be used for regular data retrieval—as when the nutty Dr. Dolores Rusk’s reference to the

“Coatlicue Complex” keys to a note that merely glosses “No clue” (516, 1036)—but on the other

present too much straightforward, minimally relevant information to really parody

encyclopedism, like that “B.P.D.” stands for “Boston Police Department” (251, 1000) and that

fake B-Movie blood is made of potassium thiocynanate and ferric chloride (711, 1054). In many

cases, this data is barely even readable. Early in the novel, for instance, when the narrator

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introduces us to Enfield, he provides a categorization of its students’ recreational drug

preferences keyed to five rapid-fire endnotes (53). Note 8 is a representative example:

I.e., psylocibin; Happy Patches

; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various

low-tech manipulations of the benzene-ring in methoxy-class psychedelics,

usually home-makable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA, DMMM, 2CB,

para-DOT I-VI, etc.— though note this class doesn’t and shouldn’t include CNS-

rattlers like STP, DOM, the long-infamous West-U.S.-Coast ‘Grievous Bodily

Harm’ (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 or -32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm

for this stuff seems independent of neurologic type.

a. Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS

or the over-counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier. (984)

How does one read this note? If one does not have a background in pharmaceutical chemistry

and/or practical knowledge of synthetic street drugs, one simply can’t. Since the narrator

declines to explain the distinctions between, or qualities common to, the drugs he lists, the note’s

sequence of acronyms and Greek prefixes will be illegible to uninformed readers. At the same

time, those with the knowledge to successfully differentiate these terms have nothing to learn:

for them, the passage is entirely redundant. In either case, the note adds nothing of practical use

to our understanding of the narrative, appearing to be pure cruft.

One might decide, then, that the notes are similarly unreadable to those we examined

from House of Leaves. However, one should not merely skip through the notes, because as it

turns out there actually is quite a lot of important data in Wallace’s endnotes. As Marshall

Boswell writes:

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Readers of the book quickly learn that the notes can provide useless information,

essential information, extra but nonessential narrative, or even, at times, narrative

that is more important to the ongoing novel than the passage to which the note is

attached. Readers can, and even must, devise some way to read through the book

that allows them to keep their focus on the story while also mining the notes for

all their information, comedy, and readerly pleasure. (120)

Though he mentions this merely in passing, I think Boswell may have identified the novel’s most

strange and profound narrative element. How we “devise some way to read through the book” is

not just an interesting side-effect of the novel’s structure: it is central to the way our minds

interact with Infinite Jest’s data. Some of the most important information for understanding the

book’s overall narrative is contained in the notes, yet to identify it one has to wade through lots

of cruft, which threatens to terminate any attention one might try to spend on it. Consequently,

the notes’ alternating pointlessness and importance require a constant modulation in the rhythm

of one’s reading between focused attention and different levels of skimming in seeking out vital

information.

Note 24, the filmography of the alcoholic and self-destructive auteur James O.

Incandenza, provides a microcosm for how the endnotes deploy cruft. Taking up eight and a half

pages, it comprises the production details and plot summaries of all Incandenza’s 78 films. The

note is loaded with cruft, the extent of which has not been fully appreciated: even Jeffrey

Karnicky, who claims that the filmography’s entries reveal the work’s “asignifying stasis,” really

claims that they represent that stasis via how the films’ characters are made catatonically passive

by the spectacles they watch (91-123). However, many entries do not even signify so much as

this, like the five that merely read “Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED” (990, 992). These

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entries are pure cruft: their inclusion cannot further or enrich the novel’s plot or characters,

because Wallace tells us nothing about them, nor are they are necessary for factual completeness

as in a real filmography, because these unfinished films only exist inasmuch as they are invented

by Wallace in the note. Such entries do not represent pointlessness—they are pointlessness.

Other entries are barely less insignificant, like the eight undescribed, hyper-ironically self-

negating and “conceptually unfilmable” works called “found dramas” (989-990).

Even some substantial entries are clearly cruft, because as Wallace’s narrator

acknowledges, “a lot of [Incandenza’s oeuvre …] was admittedly just plain pretentious and

unengaging and bad” (64). Consider this one:

Fun With Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy

Tolan, Pam Heath; 35 mm.; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/ non-human

screams and howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch)

performs sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic (Tolan) he

suspects of involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO,

PRIVATELY RELEASED BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD. (987)

Like most of the entries, almost half of this entry comprises boilerplate technical specs, which

are basically cruft. But the film summary is not much more significant itself, since the way that

Fun With Teeth merely reproduces, at enormous length and redundancy, its targets’ clichés rather

than exaggerating them into a reductio ad absurdum is precisely the sort of empty postmodern

irony against which Wallace railed in his essays (see Supposedly 21-81 and also Ch. 3). Other

films approach cruft for other reasons. Kinds of Light—a sequence of “4,444 individual frames,

each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each

reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection speeds

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by the hyperretinal speed at which they pass” (986)—is described explicitly as so sensually

overwhelming that a reader cannot train focus on it without attention breaking. Such passages’

near-unreadable overload and redundancy ravages cognition while diverting reading from a main

narrative—which, incidentally, has been interrupted while in the midst of its vital overview of

Incandenza family history—to which they seem largely irrelevant. It becomes very tempting to

skip the note and return to the main text.

Yet amid the cruft, many entries are important to examine. For instance, if one abandons

note 24 at Fun With Teeth, deciding that the note’s next six pages will likely be no more readable

than the earlier notes’ pharmaceutical catalogs, one will not read the summary of It Was a Great

Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (992-993), a filmed version of a scene

described earlier in the book wherein Incandenza posed as a therapist as a pretext for having a

conversation with his eleven-year-old son Hal, which fails after Hal recognizes him (27-31).

This entry is not mere redundancy, as it not only recounts the prior scene but adds material about

Incandenza inaccessible in the main text, where Incandenza comes off not only as bewilderingly

overbearing but as both so poor at responding to his son (whose speech he seems at times unable

to hear) and so bafflingly inept at disguising his appearance that readers would be justified in

questioning his sanity. The film summary, however, acknowledges that the father-therapist

character is “suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son […] is

pretending to be mute” (993), demonstrating both that Incandenza is aware of how unhinged his

own behavior appears and that he understands that the discussion’s failure rests largely with him

and not Hal. This insight into Incandenza’s recognition of his inability to communicate is

necessarily incommunicable elsewhere in the novel. Other entries similarly reflect on other

events in Incandenza’s life—As Of Yore (991) appears to be a filmed version of a rambling

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monologue delivered by Incandenza’s father during the former’s childhood (157-169), while the

passage in which Incandenza describes his inspiration in developing annular fusion (491-503)

becomes fodder for the film Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed (990-991). In particular, a

perusal of the films starring an actor named Cosgrove Watt—alluded to only a handful of times

otherwise (16, 941, 944-945, 971)—creates a sequence of meditations on Incandenza’s anxieties

about the difficulties of fatherhood nowhere else in the novel articulated so well, not even when

Incandenza tries (in wraith form) to discuss the issue directly with Don Gately late in the novel.

Retrieving this portrait of an artist unable to express his emotional intelligence anywhere except

his films, however, requires readers to dig through lots of junk data that does not contribute to it.

Again, “taking data as it comes” is insufficient to achieve this result: one needs to be

disciplined and systematic to keep moving through the endnotes’ cruft without becoming bored

and skimming so as to return to the main narrative. That system, however, must allow for the

modulation of attention, because trying to analyze the whole maddeningly “pretentious and

unengaging and bad” filmography at constant focused attention—especially this early in the

novel—would be so frustrating and overwhelming as to prevent one from seeing the honest

anguish behind it. This difficulty in modulating between levels of attention is itself represented

in the novel, during the scene in which we see how the teenaged Hal is only able to watch his

father’s touching (though not brilliant) film Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat (687-689) as part of

a wallowing “weird self-punishment” (689) marathon of the latter’s work, also involving Fun

With Teeth and the putrid Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, whose amalgam of endless genre

clichés proceeds at such excruciating, soul-sapping length as to render the movie’s intent to

satirize religion totally invisible to Hal and his fellow spectators, who must retreat into a mode of

glazed-over, passive sarcasm to cope with its inanity (703-706, 711-714). That Hal’s own mode

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of self-insulating irony is not sufficiently flexible to allow modulation is among the chief reasons

he suffers a nervous collapse near the book’s climax.

Furthermore, how these films test readers’ cognitive processes figures how the notes

work in the novel as a whole, especially regarding its political background. For instance, the

larger motives of “Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents” are only revealed at the end of an

otherwise tedious seventeen-page note mixing unrelated (and at times extraneous) documents

and dialogue about the Incandenza family (1004-1022). Note 304’s description of why the

A.F.R. are legless in the first place (1055-1062) is even more cumbersome to retrieve, as the note

is only keyed at page 732 despite being q.v.’d in no fewer than four earlier endnotes, 39 (994), 45

(995), 173 (1031), and 302 (1055), the middle two of which do nothing but q.v. the later note.

This offers readers the dilemma of either losing focus on the main narrative to skip ahead or

maintaining attention on the main narrative while remaining ignorant of a key fact, gratuitously

making data retrieval more cognitively onerous. That the novel’s baroque politics are only

visible to those who have found some way to modulate their attention to effectively retrieve data

is perhaps best exemplified by note 114, keyed from an otherwise innocuous description of

Incandenza’s father’s career as the Man from Glad (313), reading “© B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad

Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite

corporatese, we are suddenly and unceremoniously told that the last year recounted

chronologically by the book is also the final year of the novel’s dystopic North American state’s

calendar. It is not clear as to whether this proclamation portends the restoration of political

sanity or the end of civilization as we know it, yet in a book whose plot is left largely unresolved,

this is one of few clues we have toward the fate of the novel’s characters and imagined world.

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The ability to filter out pointlessness resonates outside the endnotes, too. Cruft’s

distinctive combination of expansiveness and emptiness also characterizes the recursive,

paralyzed thoughts of the novel’s many addicts. One character describes (in, what else, a

footnote to endnote 269) the cycle of “Marijuana Thinking,” in which many of the novel’s

characters are caught, as a tendency to “involuted abstraction” wherein addicts are

hypermotivated to the point of being functionally unmotivated, stuck fighting through

“labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical

functioning” (1048). Not only are the self-negating thoughts this attitude produces essentially

cruft, but in attempting to escape this state (which is experienced analogously by the novels’

overachieving student-athletes, crazed politicians, and manic depressives), addicts often veer into

a different type of cruft, exemplified by the clichéd mantras of the novel’s 12-Step programs. As

one disgruntled AA member points out—again, in an endnote, number 90—“If you have some

sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-

problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-

busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem” (1002). Such

formulations pointedly circumvent all critical or independent thought.

Interestingly, though critical response has recognized the dialectic between these two

states and how dangerous the addicts’ encyclopedic overthinking can be, it has tended to naïvely

champion the 12-Step programs’ approach (see Aubry; van Ewijk, “‘I’ and the ‘Other’”;

Freudental).

In fact, the enthusiasm amongst admirers of a novel as enormous and wildly

inventive as Infinite Jest for a philosophy that one addict, Geoffrey Day, approvingly describes

as turning one’s “will and life over to the care of clichés” and associates with the Reader’s

Digest (270-271) would be extremely puzzling were it not for the way those clichés provide

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relief from the manic textual overload that the addicted characters produce in the novel’s other

sections. It’s probably not an accident that, in the Ennet House scenes, the endnotes are cut back

significantly, nor that the clinic is not introduced until two hundred pages have passed and we

have had time to absorb how overwhelming Infinite Jest will be. Only after having endured the

inescapable involutions of Kate Gompert’s depression (68-78), the coked-up violence and semi-

decipherable English in yrstruly’s monologue (128-135), and the painfully detailed analysis of

how Americans’ endlessly reflecting physical anxieties destroyed the videophone (144-151) can

the mantras that Day recites seem even remotely appealing (see Aubry 210).

Fundamentally, though, Ennet’s clichés are nearly as meaningless as the addicts’

overthinking, tranquilizing attention to the point of making it incapable of modulation. Their

cruft should be tolerated only as a temporary cure for the greater destructiveness of addiction.

Perhaps this is best seen in how Day himself—not a week after praising AA’s focus on clichés—

goes on the rant quoted above from note 90. While the endnotes always bring with them the

possibility of endlessly proliferating junk, they also allow the possibility for independent critical

reflection, because to read them at all requires the kind of subtle attention modulation at the basis

of all higher-level thought. If readers seek to escape not just the hyperactive mindlessness

exemplified by the addicts but mindlessness entirely, they cannot simply be repelled by the

endnotes’ frequent overload but must keep returning to them, hopefully better able to skim and

filter out the junk to retrieve valuable information. James Incandenza himself realized this

principle late in life, understanding how AA forced its members to simply exchange one “slavish

dependence” for another (706), characterized by intolerable “vacant grins and empty platitudes”

(1053). He sought to overcome both forms by addressing them in his films—as we are told most

directly in an endnote, number 289—but attempting to create meaning from waste is an unstable

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and dangerous process, something surely known by the designer of the annular fusion program

employed in the novel’s Great Concavity, a multi-state trash heap that vacillates dangerously

between desiccated wasteland and mutation-inducing verdancy as it processes garbage to power

the continent. That Incandenza finally sticks his head in a microwave, however, is as much

caused by submitting to recovery-program clichés as by resisting them, because they have

rendered his mind incapable of distinguishing the language necessary to sustain a meaningful life

from cruft.

In reading through Infinite Jest, we can only hope to develop our attention modulation to

the point where we can avoid Incandenza’s fate. Whether we can reliably do so is unclear. In

the years prior to his own suicide, Wallace expressed increasing anxiety about the mounting

obstacles to adequate information ordering and retrieval posed by the information age. In his

forward to the 2007 volume of Best American Essays, Wallace chastises Americans that “There

is just no way that 2004’s re-election [of President George W. Bush] could have taken place […]

if we had been paying attention and handling information in a grown up way” (xxi). Yet as soon

as he makes this criticism, Wallace acknowledges that this grown-up information-handling is all

but impossible. For each of the major world issues that a twenty-first century American would

need to consider when making such informed decisions, he notes, “the relevant questions are too

numerous and complicated” to adequately investigate: if one really wants to understand any of

the important political issues of our time, one would have to pore over so much specialized

economic, historical, and sociological research in search of the core problems that “You’d

simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the

fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no

longer exist” (xxii).

That’s probably true, unfortunately. The difficulties that rendered

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Bouvard and Pécuchet incapable of managing their lives’ information in the nineteenth century

have so dramatically escalated that it’s not clear how anyone can confidently avoid the sorts of

catastrophes that befell them.

This insight is one that Wallace critics, trained professionally to reject the kind of critical

subjecthood to which the quote above aspires, have appeared reluctant to embrace. In his essay

on encyclopedism in Infinite Jest, for instance, Matt Tresco suggests that the inconsistent

importance of the endnotes’ information reveals “the absence of an ordering or categorizing

principle,” which allows the “release and an enlargement of possibilities,” favorably comparing

the novel to Wikipedia in that both are “are always threatening to overspill, to negate the purpose

of their organizing principles” and thus challenge hierarchization (120-121). Though the

similarities between Infinite Jest and Wikipedia are interesting, more important is their markedly

divergent incorporation of cruft. Wikipedia’s frequent inability to distinguish between important

and trivial information, which often results in unchecked cruft,

does little to help its users to

keep from drowning in the “tsunami” of information of which Wallace writes: in fact, it becomes

part of that tsunami. Infinite Jest’s much more carefully and centrally calibrated use of cruft

could not be more different in this respect, because its directed impact upon attention is better

able to reveal the inadequacies of our cognitive processes and guide us toward developing better

ones. Inasmuch as there is any hope of mitigating the worst effects of information overload, we

must develop our abilities to order and retrieve information to their maximum capacities, and

encyclopedic novels are a powerful tool for doing so, not because they include information that

is valuable itself, but because they force us to learn how to navigate around their junk data to

find text that is actually important.

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Chapter 3—The Menippean Satire

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter

and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a

talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at

each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her

throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter

with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white

checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady

and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and

gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden…” I decided that if

the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments

of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my

attention with careful subtlety to this end.

— T. S. Eliot, “Hysteria”

“Dull, Difficult, Dreary, & Disgusting”

Though the previous chapters have used mega-novels’ relationships to two non-literary

genres to examine how cruft can overload readers’ attention capacities and subsequently prompt

them to modulate their methods of text processing, cruft is not limited to the small-scale cases of

the incoherent word and the irrelevant datum. The following three chapters will examine how

mega-novels’ incorporation of elements from several literary genres produces more extensive but

equally pointless cruft, inducing the same characteristic frustration and boredom to provoke a

similar reorientation of attention. We will begin by looking at cruft’s place within a genre whose

reputation for scale and heterogeneity has encouraged its application to several otherwise hard-

to-categorize works in the mega-novel canon, the Menippean satire.

Before we examine the genre’s particulars, however, we must start by justifying our

investigation into cruft’s relationship with humor at all. To be sure, as the chapter will observe

later, mega-novel humor is frequently described as excessive and overwhelming, implying the

presence of cruft, but since we have defined cruft as objectively pointless text, to call it cruft

must imply it is somehow objectively not funny, and since even cognitive researchers

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acknowledge that “no one seems to know exactly what a sense of humor is” (R. Martin 193)

except inasmuch as it “is not a unitary construct” (R. Martin 225), our basis for analytically

examining whether or not something is funny might seem questionable. After all, the common-

sense view of humor has always been that we must leave most judgments to individual readers’

subjective impressions rather than trying to determine them objectively, an attitude famously

expressed by E. B. White’s quip that “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in

the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind” (xvii). Anyway,

since many mega-novels have undeniably amused a large number of readers with their

outrageous gags and set-pieces, why should we doubt that their text is funny?

We may do so because there is a type of gratuitous text within mega-novels that, though

apparently comic, resists this latitudinarian principle by being flagrantly dull and stupid.

Consider this excerpt from Part II, Chapter VII of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, depicting a

Christmas party held for New York’s artistic set by Esther Gwyon, estranged wife to protagonist

Wyatt Gwyon:

–Who’s Esther?

–Why, my dear, she’s our hostess. There, talking with the tall fellow in

the green necktie. She turned, as her husband approached with a martini. –What

an interesting group of people, she said. –And what interesting music.

–It’s Handel, he said, handing her a glass. –The Triumph of Truth and

Justice.

She looked around her, and raised the glass to her lips. –Do you think

next year we might get to the Narcissus Festival in Hawaii?

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Drinks were spilled, another brown line burnt on the mantel, people

collided, excused themselves and greeted one another, and Ellery, tucking the

green silk tie back in his jacket, said, –Just stop talking about it for a while.

Who’s that? He added, nodding at a blond girl.

–I don’t know. She came with somebody. She’s going to Hollywood.

–I want another drink, Ellery said, and went toward the blonde.

–Ellery, please … But he was gone. She sat, holding her kitten.

–What does it mean, said a heavy voice near her. –The garbage cans in

the street, the kids on the East Side playing in the gutters, swimming in that filthy

river, see? What does that mean?

–Well she says Paris reminds her of a mouthful of decayed teeth, but I

think Paris is just like going to the movies …

–A lovely little hotel near Saint Germain, I don’t think I crossed the river

more than twice all the time I was there. I really lived on the left bank, it’s so

much nicer, the architecture, the cloud formations over there …

–Of course if you like the Alps. I found them a fearfully pretentious bore

myself … I mean, what can you do with an Alp…

–He’s still in Paris. He wrote that he’s just bought one of those delight

Renaults…

–Oh yes, I do love them. An original? (568-569)

These inane, disconnected sputterings by superficial twits dominate the astonishing seventy-three

additional pages of this scene. While one might suppose that the rest of chapter’s context would

clarify the narrative purpose of this dialogue, most of the characters, in fact, are as faceless in the

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larger work as they are in this excerpt, and their speech is equally irrelevant to the novel’s main

events.

Consequently, the scene is usually explicated by scholars as social satire, ridiculing the

“Cliques of dishonest critics, backbiting literati, the entire rout of cocktail-party intellectuals and

pen-pushers” that comprise the chattering classes (Salemi 50). But is this supposed mockery

actually funny? Its only real joke, after all, appears to be the unnamed husband’s Superman-

influenced corruption of Handel’s The Triumph of Time and Truth into The Triumph of Truth

and Justice, which might provoke a chuckle only from those few readers with extensive enough

knowledge of Handel’s second-tier oratorios not to need Steven Moore’s Reader’s Guide to

explain the reference, and who would furthermore consider the husband worthy of derision for

his mistake. If most of what is said in this passage is simply banal rather than humorous, isn’t it

simply propogating idiocy instead of satirizing it?

The few principles that have been established by systematic research in humor further

suggest how this passage might be objectively unfunny. Though there is no generally accepted

definition of humor, many believe that it can be broadly characterized as “nonserious social

incongruity,” often based in “bisociation” (R. Martin 6-7): in other words, we consider

something funny when we are primed for certain cognitive processes by one social schema, but

then suddenly see those expectations violated. This causes us, according to Reuven Tsur, to

become disorientated and undergo a rapid “shift in mental sets” (11-12; see also R. Martin 85-

101). The most important subclass of this social incongruity is the one articulated a century ago

by Henri Bergson, who claimed we laugh when we see human behavior lacking the flexibility

commensurate to the flux of consciousness, instead displaying a “rigidity” that “reminds us of a

mere machine” (29; italics his). The primary sign of this mechanism, Bergson continues, is

repetition, since “a really living life should never repeat itself” (34)—though this repetitive

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behavior itself is often not funny itself, but simply a symptom of lifelessness until made more

obviously incongruous by a comedian’s exaggeration (32).

Looking back to Gaddis’s dialogue,

then, we may see that while it has plenty of mechanism, it is not actually made incongruous by

comic exaggeration or schema-switching, as it simply continues its parade of shallowness

unimpeded over dozens of pages. Indeed, this scene is characterized not merely by clichés but

clichéd representations of clichés: there is no more ham-handed a remark, after all, for Gaddis to

have put into the mouth of a bore than the one about how “interesting” she finds everything,

except, perhaps, to have her call something else “such a pretentious bore” moments later. The

text appears not merely about dullness or stupidity, then, but is dull and stupid itself. Given this

point, it is understandable that the novel’s initial critics, to quote the alphabetic pastiche made by

Gaddis’s pseudonymous proselytizer Jack Green, considered The Recognitions “baffling, and a

Bore […] dull difficult dreary—&disgusting […] repulsive or repelling” (17).

This kind of excess, which occurs throughout not only The Recognitions but a number of

mega-novels, should suggest how we can discuss the role of cruft with respect to humor, rather

than simply leaving the matter to taste. To understand what exactly is going on in this sort of

text, however, will require us to more rigorously analyze both the satiric genre as a whole and

the specific Menippean variety. Ever since Juvenal, after all, satire has built its reputation upon

depicting the vicious, ugly, and stupid, and to articulate how mega-novel satire differs from this

traditional satiric writing demands some explanation. In particular, we will need to go over

several important aspects of and misconceptions about the genre so as to examine what function

cruft might serve when incorporated into it.

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The Fallacies of Exposure and Subversion

Historically, satire’s depiction of the worst of social vices has made it controversial

among moralists (see Griffin 24). Just as frequently, however, it has been defended on the

grounds that it does not approve of, but rather censures, those vices by mocking them, with even

John Dryden celebrating the genre by writing, “’Tis an Action of Virtue to make Examples of

vicious Men” (lxxiv). Yet the constant tension between these two positions may suggest how

tenuous is satire’s rhetoric. Its duality may be best appreciated through Edward Rosenheim’s

famous definition of it as “an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic

particulars” (31; italics Rosenheim’s).

Satirists, in other words, always say two things at once:

they must claim that their narratives are made up, but also that they depict the real social world;

they must make their characters behave in deleterious ways, but only because they believe

themselves superior to such behavior and wish to criticize it. That is why juxtaposed comic

incongruity, whether of the relatively benevolent Horatian kind designed to “laugh men out of

their follies” or the more caustic Juvenalian invective “composed to carp at human vices”

(Griffin 7-9), is so crucial to satire—especially, as Frank Palmeri notes, in prose narrative satire,

which deemphasizes the central satiric voice (1-5). Satire’s best method for signaling this

duality is first to prompt one preconceived social script, but then derail that script by

exaggerating and distorting it to the point where it no longer functions (see Rosenheim 21),

which, as Tsur notes, is aimed to disorient and alter its audience’s cognitive patterns, because,

“When something suddenly seems to go wrong, one has to check the tuning of one’s own

schemata” (24). Laughter, in other words, is the body’s way of discharging cognitive dissonance,

which is why it is so useful in responding to social hypocrisy.

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In producing this calibrated incongruity, however, satirists walk a fine line: should they

make their material too incongruous, the satire might be dismissed as a perverse or even libelous

fantasy, but should they make it not incongruous enough, they might be charged with either

heavy-handed dullness or, worse, insufficiently distinguishing themselves from that which they

depict. The list of satires threatened with censorship resulting from overly fanciful exaggerations

is considerable— including, for instance, Robert Coover’s fantastic mega-novel satire on the

Rosenberg execution, The Public Burning. For that matter, dangerous confusions have been

caused by satires that were not sufficiently incongruous to cause cognitive dissonance, as

famously occurred when Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters mimicked the

voice of a blowhard Anglican zealot so closely that many contemporary readers took its

argument for the mass execution and banishment of dissenting congregations seriously; indeed,

even after it was revealed as satire, those congregations’ members felt endangered (J. Martin

126). As Michael Seidel notes, “Satire is ‘easy’ because its subjects are so tantalizingly

manifest, but it is difficult because it strategies are so deceivingly imitative of what it purports to

attack” (10). Put a bit differently, Kurt Vonnegut, introducing his Mother Night, about an

American double agent working undercover as a Nazi radio propagandist, writes, “We are who

we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (v). As with many of the

textual experiments discussed in Chapter 1 and the faux-encyclopedic information in Chapter 2,

badly-executed satire can cause serious cognitive problems. It is apt, then, that Fredric Bogel

should observe that satire’s closest aesthetic relative is the counterfeit, since two genres share the

ability to create “a space where distinctions are rendered problematic rather than reinforced”

(23), making crucial the ability recognize what is similar between the real and the fake while still

distinguishing them.

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Given the essentialness of fictional incongruity to satire, then, we must preliminarily

reject as fallacies two common critical justifications for satire’s most dreary elements, both

especially common when addressing mega-novel satire. The first is that a satire’s wildest

exaggerations may be justified on the grounds that they “expose” society’s faults. That verb,

echoing the muckraking “exposé,” is obviously ill-suited to the novel. As Bogel notes, a satirist

does not “expose the satiric object in all its alien difference,” but instead invents it as a fiction

(42). After all, the satirist is deprived of the journalistic social critic’s two most valuable tools,

the ability to cite evidence directly from the real world and the authority to unequivocally present

an argument in his own voice. As we saw in Chapter 2, though reading fiction can and should

affect our overall information-processing apparatus, we must be vigilant against our natural

tendency to accept the facts presented by fiction as if they were true, especially in a genre that

muddies the boundaries so much. Indeed, even literary scholars appear vulnerable to this

tendency, as might be seen in how The Public Burning’s critics bash conservative intellectual

Norman Podhoretz for calling it “a lie […] because it hides behind the immunities of artistic

freedom to protect itself from being held to the normal standards of truthful discourse” (34), even

though they make the same mistake by trumpeting how the novel “exposes the American spirit

that overlooks no opportunity to dominate, dehumanize, and humiliate the vulnerable” (Estes

255), especially when they believe it presents of “a huge amount of verifiable historical

information and multiple coiled patterns connecting the facts” (LeClair 111) that ought to make

us question specific historical details regarding Eisenhower and the Supreme Court (Gordon 55).

To debate the historical veracity of a book which sets the Rosenberg execution in Times

Square—a Times Square connected by a magical swinging door to Sing Sing, no less, and one

attended by a cavalcade of VIPs including the “Rat Pack” of Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy—is

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clearly ridiculous: the problem with Podhoretz’s conclusion is not his politics but the belief,

apparently shared by Coover’s supporters, that a satire may be judged by how well it proves a

“thesis” (27).

Similarly, when Joseph Salemi claims that, in the The Recognitions’ party scene,

“the world of shallow art and intellectual falsity […] is parodied and attacked, mostly through

the devastating technique of quoting its representatives verbatim […]—all are mercilessly

exposed” (Salemi 50), he does not seem to realize that since these characters are Gaddis’s

inventions, Gaddis’s dialogue does not “quot[e] verbatim” their stupidity but independently

creates it.

It is equally fallacious, however, to justify satire’s ugliest elements on the mimetic

grounds that, in an effort to accurately represent of the state of contemporary existence, they

must dissolve all stable distinctions between truth and falsity or between moral and immoral, as

is frequently argued by partisans of both the “black humor” trends of the fifties and sixties and

their postmodern descendants. In its most basic form, this position often argues that reality has

gotten so dreary and grotesque that any representation of it could not help but itself be dreary and

grotesque, too (see B. Friedman 20-23). More philosophically, Max Schulz claims that while in

traditional satire “there are false versions of reality and true versions,” black humor, best

exemplified in his view by mega-novelist John Barth, reveals that “all versions of reality are

mental constructs” (Black 17): if a satire is absurd, it is only because reality has become absurd.

Similarly, Steven Weisenburger argues that the traditional view by which satire rhetorically

corrects specific social vices by reference to universal norms is rendered obsolete by postmodern

satires like those by Gaddis and Coover, which present only “degenerative, subversive fantasy”

(Fables 14-29). If satire actually did this, however, it would necessarily render itself incapable

of any kind of critique, even of the mainstream culture that most partisans of this view wish it to

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excoriate. Indeed, summations like Weisenburger’s of The Public Burning as, “An outraged

catalogue of American self-deceits and lies masking themselves as genii of progress […] the

single most unrestrained condemnation of American civic identity to appear in the postwar

decades” (Fables 198) seem to suggest that when faced with specific works, such critics are

more committed to universal norms and clear rhetorical opposition than they let on.

The Menippean Grotesque

For all its limitations, however, the postmodern perspective does try to account for the

excessiveness we find in mega-novel satires like The Recognitions in a way that most traditional

approaches to the genre do not. Historically, satire has emphasized concision and targeted focus,

as in Dryden’s insistence that satire must “only to treat of one Subject; to be confin’d to one

particular Theme” (xcvi). However, mega-novels bearing a satiric impulse tend to increase their

breadth in an almost uncontrolled manner—indeed, to the point that Alastair Fowler goes so far

as to call them “generically inept, as well as too long” (64).

Only one traditional satiric

subgenre, in fact, has typically expanded to any real length, namely the Menippean satire.

Though named for a Greek Cynic who wrote three centuries before Christ, this term only became

absorbed into mainstream literary-critical discourse after mid-twentieth-century reclamations by

Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye, both of whom stretched the term to cover a wide range of

prose narrative satires of substantial size and variety. Frye, for instance, identifies the genre as

an exemplar of the “extroverted intellectual” prose fiction strain that he dubs “anatomy,” noting

the genre’s “tendency to expand” its “single intellectual pattern,” so as to “overwhelm [its]

pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon” (309-312). Bakhtin, meanwhile, uses the

term to group works that are “multi-styled and hetero-voiced” (Dostoevsky 108), addressing

“current and topical issues” while creating a hybrid of opposed tendencies such as “slum

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naturalism,” “philosophical universalism,” and “experimental fantasticality” (Dostoevsky 114-

119). Even Howard Weinbrot’s more recent attempt to curb Bakhtin and Frye’s broad

inclusiveness makes no effort to restrain the scope of individual works, asserting that a

Menippean satire targets no less than the whole of “a dangerous, false, or specious and

threatening orthodoxy” (6).

The lack of a consensus definition for the term, however, has created a certain ambiguity

in how its satiric rhetoric is to be experienced. For Frye and Weinbrot, the Menippean is simply

satire writ large, its subject not one vice but society as a whole. For Bakhtin, though, Menippean

satire derives less from classical satire than the medieval carnival (Dostoevsky 108):

Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is,

first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some

isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people.

Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the

carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay

relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same

time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the

laughter of carnival.

Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people’s festive

laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude

themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also

die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the

people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose

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laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed

to it. (Rabelais 11-12)

Via a “grotesque realism” aimed at total “degradation,” carnivalesque laughter is based in a

“material bodily principle” that mocks our upper halves’ pretensions by submitting them to the

lower half’s ineluctably corporeal fallibility and fecundity (18-19). In other words, unlike in

classical satire, mocker and mocked are identical in the Menippean: no specific vice or ideology

is attacked, but all humanity sprawls out into total ridiculousness. Along the lines of Tsur’s

suggestion that, instead of allowing a witty resolution between two incongruous schemata, the

grotesque “prevent[s] the reader from achieving any kind of consistent orientation” with respect

to their cognitive mechanisms (439), this seems to deconstruct satiric rhetoric in a manner

consist with the postmodern approach to satire described above.

However, crucially for

Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter is as rejuvenating as it is degrading; were the former affirmative

principle removed, he argues, we would be left with only “cold humor, irony, sarcasm” (38),

adding that “A grotesque world in which only the inappropriate is exaggerated is only

quantitatively large, but qualitatively it is extremely poor, colorless, and far from gay” (308).

Gargantua’s drunkenness, for example, does not merely cause him to urinate all over Paris, but

inspires his characteristic merriment and love of companionship. Yet this affirming principle

often appears absent from mega-novels, whose grotesqueness at times evinces both the

carnivalesque’s omnivorous maw and the satire’s cool distance, leading to what Bakhtin would

surely consider an impoverished sensibility. For long stretches, there is no incongruity, resolved

or otherwise, but merely catalogues of the trivial and inane.

In this chapter, I will argue that the mega-novel Menippean satire, though sometimes

engaged in conventional satire or Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, often experiments with unbalancing

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the former’s calibrated distortions and the latter’s encompassing scope to create monstrosities

either so fantastic as to be indecipherable or so dull as to be boring. In other words, I will

examine how they deploy cruft that, instead of satirizing, creates a grotesque text that challenges

less society’s ills than its reader’s ability to attend a bloated representation of them. By creating

a counterfeit world too expansive to process, in fact, what they satirize is the limits of their

readers’ own minds. Their cruft places us into a state in which, no matter how hard we try, we

are likely to lose focus on what we are reading, causing our attention to fluctuate and our

processing to lose its depth. The incongruity might provoke laughter, but mostly an unfocused,

disoriented kind deriving more from the termination of processing than its continuation.

Consequently, we can easily lose track of what exactly we are laughing at, how we ought to

process it, or what is even going on at all.

Comic Overload: A Few Words on The Sot-Weed Factor

Some relatively straightforward examples might be seen in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed

Factor, a comic künstlerroman set in the 1690s about a naïve and resolutely chaste poet named

Ebenezer Cooke who is sent to manage his father’s Maryland plantation. Based upon a colonial

satiric poem by a self-proclaimed laureate of the same name, The Sot-Weed Factor is frequently

a very conventionally funny book: opening to a random page, for example, I come upon the

scene where a rum-peddler who has intoxicated a justice, cheated him at cards, urinated onto

him, and had sex with his similarly-inebriated wife takes the couple to court so that he may sue

for the price of the rum and the recovery of coins that fell from his pockets (389-392). However,

the book also presents some more unusual instances of humor, especially in the form of

incredibly long lists. The list, of course, has an extensive history as a device within Menippean

satire: Dustin Griffin notes how the genre often transforms the ugly into the pleasurable via a

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“great feast of words” (167-169), especially list-like devices such as the contest (89) and the

catalogue (109). Though the list might tend toward repetition and thus encourage skimming, the

lists of a great Menippean satirist, like Rabelais, are usually varied with invention and fancy to

comic ends.

Mega-novel lists, however, are often longer as a whole and more predictable item-by-

item. Hugh Kenner has dubbed this technique “the comedy of the Inventory,” which is a

“comedy of exhaustion, comic precisely because exhaustive” in the way it aims to include the

entirety of long, finite lists within the novel’s text, as with the ninety-four figures of speech

scattered through one chapter of Ulysses or the six hundred rivers included in one from

Finnegans Wake (54-55). Kenner believes these are inherently funny, invoking Bergson’s essay

by asking, “what is more mechanical than a checklist?” (55). However, we must remember that

while for Bergson the mechanical is worthy of mockery, it is not funny itself until it is made

obviously incongruous by a comedian—though, paradoxically, among the comedian’s chief

tactics for generating such incongruity is further repetition of the mechanism (90-93). This

raises the tricky question of when the length of a list is funny and when it is simply becomes

boring— “the continuity of custom,” in Bergson’s words, “having deadened […] the comic

quality” (39).

The Sot-Weed Factor’s famous insult contest provides a good case study on this question,

especially as it derives directly from a scene in the original poem, which will help us distinguish

between the structures of traditional satire and those of mega-novel excess. In the original poem,

the real Cook attempts to lambast a lawless colony “Where no Man’s Faithful, nor a Woman

Chast” (31) by stringing together several vignettes about a tobacco merchant’s misadventures

among the colonial populace, including this encounter with some women playing cards:

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I thought them first some Witches bent,

On Black Designs in dire Convent.

Till one who with affected air,

Had nicely learn’d to Curse and Swear;

Cry’d Dealing’s lost is but a Flam,

And vow’d by G——d she’d keep her Pam.

[…] D——m you, says one, tho’ now so brave,

I knew you late a Four-Years Slave;

What if for Planter’s Wife you go,

Nature designed you for the Hoe.

Rot you replies the other streight,

The Captain kiss’d you for his Freight;

And if the Truth was known aright,

And how you walk’d the Streets by night

You’d blush (if one cou’d blush) for shame,

Who from Bridewell or New gate came:

From Words they fairly fell to Blows,

And being loath to interpose,

Or meddle in the Wars of Punk,

Away to Bed in hast I slunk. (26-27)

This is a traditional, if not especially virtuosic, instance of satire, wherein the perceived tendency

of uneducated women, especially when away from supposedly polite society, to descend into

uncouth violations of social custom is ridiculed and made incongruous by exploiting its

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similarities to both a brothel and witches’ coven. Though the gags regarding the women’s social

class and sexual promiscuity have aged, their intended rhetorical goals should still remain clear.

Barth’s revision of this scene, however, creates its comic effect differently. It does begin

similarly, with Ebenezer coming upon the women at cards while seeking out Susan Warren

(whom he will later discover to be his beloved, Joan Toast) inside his father’s estate, Malden,

which has been turned in his absence into an opium den and brothel. He proceeds to ask the

women for assistance:

“I beg your pardon,” Ebenzer interrupted. “If you are servants of the

house—”

“Non, certainement, I am no servant!”

“The truth is,” said the dealer, “Grace here’s a hooker.”

“A what?” asked the poet.

“A hooker,” the woman repeated with a wink. “A quail, don’t ye know.”

“A quail!” the woman named Grace shrieked. “You call me a quail,

you—gaullefretière!”

“Whore!” shouted the first.

“Bas-cul!” retorted the other.

“Frisker!”

“Consoeur!”

“Trull!”

“Friquenelle!”

“Sow!” (441)

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Though its comedy has more dirty-minded delight than the original’s moralizing stance, Barth’s

version initially works similarly to Cook’s, exaggerating bad behavior to satiric lengths.

However, this changes when readers turn to the next page and see—

“Usagère!”

“Bawd!”

“Viagère!”

“Strawgirl!”

“Séraune!”

“Tumbler!”

“Poupinette!”

“Mattressback!”

“Brimballeuse!”

“Nannygoat!”

“Chouette!”

“Windowgirl!”

“Wauve!”

“Lowgap!”

“Peaultre!”

“Galleywench!”

“Baque!”

“Drab!”

“Villotière!”

“Fastfanny!” […] (442)

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—and another two hundred further insults, filling up the following six pages with an almost

perfectly symmetrical, invective-laden layout (441-447).

A half century of criticism confirms that many readers find this scene funny, but what are

we actually laughing at here? To an extent, it is probably at the satire on a recognizable cultural

obsession with generating insults based on female sexual promiscuity, as well as both the

psychosexual release from social custom discussed by Freud (97-102) and readers’ appreciation

of Barth’s playful linguistic facility. Mostly, though, I think we laugh at our own inability to

read the text. After all, it is only upon perceiving the multiple facing-page complements of

arcane pejoratives as a whole, far surpassing what one would’ve suspected available to both

languages, that most readers really begin to guffaw. As Charles B. Harris asks, “how many of us

read carefully every item in these catalogs? And need we? Is it not, rather the idea that Barth

has matched 114 English synonyms for whore with an equal number of French synonyms that

interests and delights us?” (62). Indeed, that the passage’s humor derives from overloading

readers’ processing abilities rather than simply exhausting the inventory of French and English

epithets (see Schulz, Black 25; Walkiewicz 48) may be seen in the fact that one insult that would

not only would fit comfortably in this exchange, but is in the original “Sot-Weed Factor” scene,

is absent, namely “punk.” Even William Gass, as indefatigable a reader as any—and while

writing an essay on his pleasure in the linguistic fecundity of lists, no less—claims that within

this scene, “invention flags, the name calling becomes mechanical, vocal exhaustion ensues, and

it’s over” (38). What does it say about our cognitive abilities, though, that merely looking at

these pages makes us start chortling at our inability to read them? Laughing and skipping to the

end might demonstrate healthy text processing, but it ought to remind us how easily our limited

channel capacity can be overloaded.

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In fact, the ease with which the world’s abundance can overpower our abilities to process

it troubles Ebenezer throughout the novel, as he is constantly forced to determine whether his

mind is too rigidly narrow to understand the world or whether the world itself simply possesses

far more possibilities than it ought to. Though the contest above is The Sot-Weed Factor’s most

excessive list, the book features not only several similar catalogs—such as Ebenezer and his

chameleon tutor Henry Burlingame III’s extended contest of rhyming one-upmanship involving

near-universally unknown words like “autoschediastic” and “catoptromancy” (384-385),

Burlingame’s catalog of twins worshipped by foreign cultures (most with polysyllabic names

unlikely to catch in Anglophone ears) (496), and the page-long menu of the number and species

of fish, fowl, rodent, fruit, and vegetable consumed at an Ahatchwhoop tribal feast (563-564)—

but many other narrative passages similar in spirit, prominently the dozens of proleptic and

metaleptic plots whose apparently gratuitous convolutions and fantastic events endlessly frustrate

its hero’s efforts to make sense of the New World (see also Ch. 4). If at his journey’s outset in

England, Ebenezer had been so exasperated by the shopkeeper Bragg’s elaboration of the sixteen

types of notebook for sale as to attack the wares with a sword (108-113), he is nearly driven mad

in America by the much more various possibilities hidden within what appear to be simple

matters. Just as the would-be poet attempts twice during the whores’ insult contest to cut them

off and return to the question with which he had started, he often attempts to arrest others’

extended stories from elaborating any more monstrously, like during Burlingame’s account of

Maryland’s history while in the guise of Lord Baltimore (77-93) and the narration of his life’s

adventures (129-157), his valet’s Bertrand’s story of the events that caused him to gamble away

Malden (271-273), and Mary Mungummory’s tales of her mother’s sexual initiation at the hands

of a lecherous priest and her own wild escapades with Burlingame’s half-brother Charley

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Mattasin (405-423). However, just as the card players “possessed with mirth […] paid him no

heed” (443), no one will stop for his sake, and his comic inability to keep up with the elaboration

of possibilities proceeds unabated.

We ought to sympathize with Ebenezer’s situation, though, because we are not immune

to these problems. After all, that Ebenezer seeks to limit the range of his world’s possibilities is

not because he dislikes variety, but because he understands its implications all too well. During

his student days, he writes to his sister, “it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all

Time to live in! I should be fifty years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Solider! Aye, and fifty

a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another

[…]: to choose ten were no Trouble, to choose one, impossible!” (10), and as he shuttles about

Maryland, perpetually forced to change identity and allegiance, he finds the matter of how to

manage life’s over-abundance no easier to negotiate. As Manfred Puetz has noted, while some

strains of philosophy may emphasize how “human beings inevitably fall into despair when they

lack possibility […] Ebenezer Cooke has found out […] that the reverse is valid too: human

beings invariably fall into despair when confronted with too many possibilities” (455). His

classical education encourages him to seek the Golden Mean (see 213), but to even attempt to

calculate the Golden Mean would require him to comprehend the scale of his unlimited options

as a whole, and that is well beyond his, or anyone’s, capabilities.

Confronted with this same variety, many of the novel’s early critics similarly suggested

the whole book might be too overcomplicated to bother with. Gerhard Joseph, for instance,

wrote that in the novel’s

erudite catalogues of ideas, or in his name-calling contest between the prostitutes,

Barth tries to convey the impression that sheer exhaustiveness for its own sake

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contributes to a meaningful comic order. The longer and more contrived the

shaggy-dog fiction, the better. But because of Barth’s intellectual passion […] his

characters frequently do not have much emotional depth. (29-30; see also Hipkiss

89)

Yet one can achieve an emotional sympathy with Ebenezer if one seriously attempts to manage

the cacophony of words that he must face, instead of either dismissing or absorbing it. That the

book is wonderfully comic, after all, derives from how one cannot merely skip over all these

expansive catalogs, since many passages that at first appear unreadably byzantine end up being

important. As David Morrell notes, when Barth’s editors, assuming the book’s episodic nature

would make it easy to trim, suggested cutting out several chapters, they found “The Sot-Weed

Factor was so carefully and integrally plotted that no part could be eliminated without damage to

the whole” (47). Ebenezer’s sensible impulse to ask Mary Mungummory to skip over the

subplot she wishes to tell about her sister’s conception (410), for instance, serves him poorly

when it later causes him to have her withhold the tale of Charley Mattasin’s carnal secrets, which

might’ve helped him learn sooner about the eggplant aphrodisiac required to avert Maryland’s

war with the Ahatchwoops (414, 421).

For similar reasons, though, we cannot simply embrace the book’s profusion of language

and ideas, either. While many critics describe the book as a satire on “remaining obstinately

constant in a changing world” (Morrell 55) by enacting a “metaphysics of multiplicity” (Schulz,

Black 17), in which Ebenezer’s stubborn fidelity to core principles finally yields to Burlingame’s

openness to fluctuating “cosmophilist” possibilities (see Walkiewicz 53-57), this view ignores

that, as with most satire, the book eventually does depend upon establishing clear distinctions

between the real and the counterfeit, the authentic identity and the mask, meaningful language

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and wasteful blabber. Constancy’s opposites, after all, are insanity and hypocrisy, and surely

were Burlingame as inconstant in his attitudes toward Ebenezer as toward his own personae, he

would win far less critical approval. In fact, the satire’s apparent rhetorical attitude toward

Burlingame’s constant multiplicity of identities is complex, because throughout the book, its

characters’ abilities to recognize each other as stable individuals are both absurdly unreliable and

entirely crucial. Despite perceiving their likenesses, for instance, Ebenezer frequently fails to

recognize the three people dearest to him when disguised (72, 264, 301, 599), yet in the end, the

coherence of their identities not only does not remain in perpetual doubt but is necessary to the

book’s affective resolution. Similarly, it may be endlessly amusing to see yet another character

revealed to be Burlingame incognito, but his identity finally does possess some essential qualities

beyond that of a simple sequence of masks.

Facing our own inability to reliably manage these multiplying possibilities, there may be

nothing to do except laugh. Perhaps the novel’s oddest feature is the way both its most

mechanical and its most grotesque events—the violent deaths, the frauds and robberies, the

countless attempted rapes—somehow all dissolve into the general comedy. Reflecting on the

transmogrification of Don Quixote’s similarly disturbing moments, Erich Auerbach writes, “So

universal and multilayered, so noncritical and nonproblematic a gaiety in the portrayal of

everyday reality has not been attempted again in European letters” (358), and he might have

come to a similar conclusion about The Sot-Weed Factor. The laughter is made possible, though,

because the inability to manage life’s fecundity is so general among the characters, as are the

subsequent humiliations to which they are subjected, that power relations are leveled, as in

Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, preventing anyone from laughing at others without laughing at

themselves. The pirate Boabdil, for instance, may violently rape a prostitute, but he proceeds to

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contract her debilitating venereal disease and appears absurdly diminished whenever he later

shows up (266); similarly, Tom Tayloe, who makes his living swindling migrants into indentured

servitude, gets hoodwinked into servitude by his own techniques (434-436). In the novel’s later

stages, Ebenezer, having been taken captive by the Ahatchwoops and hearing his fellow captives

admit the ways in which they have impersonated him in hopes of gain, remarks, as if channeling

the end of The Marriage of Figaro, “’Tis too late in the day for aught but general absolution”

(536). The world’s variety—much valuable, most pointless—is too much for us, but after a

certain point that goes equally for us all: since none of our brains is any more than a clunky

machine liable to break down at any moment, we might at least share a laugh over it.

The Public Burning and the Butts of Satire

Just like The Sot-Weed Factor, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning is an engagement

with the very nature and limits of comedy and satire. Not only do its two central characters—a

fictionalized Richard Nixon and an embodied Uncle Sam—respectively derive from the

traditions of classical clowning (see Pearce, “Circus”) and American folk humor (see Estes), but

the novel’s central event is surrounded by a sequence of routines Coover has imagined for mid-

century American comedians like Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and the Marx Brothers (447-456).

It is easy to see why Thomas Pughe writes of the book, “At the centre is laughter itself” (81).

Much of the book, granted, is conventional satire, targeted, to the annoyance of conservatives

like Podhoretz, at the Eisenhower’s administration’s prosecution of the Rosenberg case. This is

especially so in its early chapters, where, by setting historical documents to verse—e.g., articles

by the “national poet Laureate” Time magazine and the “Spirit of History” New York Times, as

well as portions of Eisenhower’s speeches and the Rosenbergs’ letters—Coover makes

incongruous the theatrical elements of public speech, even though this does not really “expose”

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anything about the case.

Even the famously grotesque scene in which a cinema-goer fails to

take off his 3-D glasses after seeing the film House of Wax and perceives Times Square as an

extension of the grisly film creates a satiric duality via its use of altered perception (282-288).

However, also as with Barth’s book, The Public Burning’s catalogues and contests

progressively spill beyond their traditional satiric use and generate cruft. Speaking for many

initial reviewers, Robert Towers observed the ways in which the book seems to invoke satiric

convention without really fulfilling it: on the one hand, he points out that though the novel lists

many historical particulars surrounding the Rosenberg case, it often does not make them

especially incongruous, and consequently “the documentary effects of The Public

Burning degenerate into mere cataloguing or recitation”; on the other, the more overtly fictional

elements are often so incongruous as to be merely bizarre fantasy, and that consequently

“Coover, relying upon the strategy of excess, puts the reader in the position of a jaded sadist who

must devise more and more exquisite elaborations of his tortures in an effort to catch up with a

fast receding gratification.” Even Tom LeClair, in celebrating the book, agrees that the novel’s

panorama of American society at times presents “too much elaboration, too much information”

(114-115). Collectively, this excess engenders a grotesque more strange and disturbing than of

the conventional satire, and as a result, in many passages toward the novel’s end, one’s cognition

can become so disoriented that it becomes difficult to know where the book’s satire is directed

and how to process it.

From the book’s beginning, its comic excessiveness is rooted in the voice of Uncle Sam.

Towers articulates this well, both complimenting the “foulmouthed and amusing” pastiche of

Americana comprising Uncle Sam’s dialogue, but subsequently adding, “how tiresome and

unrelenting that voice becomes in the long haul!”

To claim a satire has too much humor is an

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odd charge, but it does well to describe the overwhelming nature of Uncle Sam’s voice. Take

this characteristic monologue, uttered shortly after his introduction:

Time is money! No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless

continent is ours, it’s as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow

to the sea or that trade follers the flag! Fear is the fundament of most

guvvamints, so let’s get the boot in, boys, and listen to ‘em scream, let us anny-

mate and encourage each other—whoo-PEE!—and show the whole world that a

Freeman, contendin’ for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-

jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-

lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that’s ever

set his onfortunate kickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to

overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our

yearly multiplyin’ millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow

ripstavers, we cannot escape history! (8)

This amalgam of American quotation contains funny satire, drawing out the tendentious

exuberance latent within even the highest-minded American rhetoric by using dialect and

distortion to tweak its recognizable quotations into a coarse redneck tone (e.g., “manifest dust-in-

yer-eye”). Arnold Weinstein probably puts it best when he says Coover “take[s] clichés of the

coarsest and plumpest sort and […] make[s] a rich rhetoric of them” (239). However, we should

observe that not all are converted to “rich rhetoric.” At times, the passage’s repetitiveness

approaches cruft, as with the list “out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less,

out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick.” As with Barth’s lists, one laughs less because

one has deeply processed its jokes than out of astonishment that it keeps going as long as it does.

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However, because these repetitions are so closely mixed with conventional satire, the

passage develops a sort of propulsive, infectious laughter, complicating our ability to understand

exactly what we laugh at. For instance, do we mock Uncle Sam for how his official decorum

descends into unsophisticated jingoism, or do we laugh with him for successfully fusing a wide

swath of American culture and tradition into a single voice? After all, though many criticize

Sam’s catchphrase-laden dialogue as the blabbering “rants” of a mere “cartoon figure” (see

Anderson 124), John Ramage notes that “Sam also seems to contain the best of the American

psyche—humor, spirit, resourcefulness” (55). It may be overstating the matter to say that Uncle

Sam’s voice provides “most complete replenishment of the language since Whitman and (in a

different way) Mark Twain” (Green, Greiner, and McCaffery 5), but perhaps not by much: there

is something to be said for a sensibility that so effortlessly achieves a seamless national whole

from many individual parts. As Richard Walsh notes, “if satire is to remain functional as a

critical tool, a distinction between laughing at and laughing with must be retained. Uncle Sam

problematizes this distinction” (345). Put another way, the overwhelming barrage confuses our

ability to recognize to what extent Sam represents either our ideal or real conceptions of an

authentic American myth and, as a result, how we should understand ourselves with respect to

him (see also Ch. 5).

The novel’s catalogues of historical data also contributes to this disorientation, though in

a somewhat different way. Often invoking the “overabundant flow of events” in contemporary

life (320), the narrator sometimes presents this flow directly, as shown by this account of the

articles laid out around The New York Times’ daily Rosenberg coverage:

Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars

in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”), a

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movie review of Devil’s Plot, and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman

strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads

for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30.

“Something to fit every taste.”

[…] What compels the attention and taps the wellsprings of prophecy on

these pilgrimages is not this announcement that little Arlene Riddett, 15, of

Yonkers, won the girls’ championship in the 28

annual marbles tournament in

Asbury Park, New Jersey, nor that picture of two East Berlin demonstrators

throwing stones at Russian tanks on Leipzigerplatz, but the fact that these things

touch each other. […] The government of Argentina orders the price of theater

tickets cut by 25% and the President of the United States is given a large toy

model of Smokey Bear. The execution of an unemployed housepainter in Berlin

takes shape beside the report that a new collection of wall coverings and shower

curtains offers a variety of choices to homemakers who wish to decorate the

bathroom: BATH WALLPAPERS / ARE EASY TO CLEAN. “Panorama” is one

of the wallpaper designs, made up of impressionistic scenes of the country against

a background of abstract motifs reminiscent of ancient calligraphy. (190)

Even while acknowledging these stories’ inapplicability to the rest of the novel, however, the

narrator suggests we should find consider these passages part of the general humor of the event,

calling them an expression of “Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic”

(190). Why laugh at the tragic and arbitrary, though? Presumably, for reasons similar to those

that make us laugh in The Sot-Weed Factor: even sorting through all the irrelevant information in

the news required to recognize the tragic events of the day is more than we are able to reliably

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manage. As Elisabeth Viereck Bell writes regarding the novel, we are faced with “Uncertainty

no longer springing from the lack of information but stemming from information itself” (77).

Similarly, a Sing Sing guard tells Nixon later in the novel, “It’s funny, isn’t it, Mr. Nixon? […]

How billions and billions of words get spoken every day, like all these we’ve been speaking on

the way down here, for example, and for some reason—or for maybe no reason at all—a few of

them stick, and they’re all we’ve got afterwards of everything that’s happened” (409). All we

may understand from these mostly pointless words is our likelihood of focusing on the wrong

ones, and since this failure of filtering is unavoidable, perhaps it’s best to laugh.

However, the equalizing force of The Sot-Weed Factor’s carnivalesque cannot take hold

because of the presence of Uncle Sam. Barth’s characters, no matter their pretensions, are each

at the mercy of plot strings and internal coils beyond their control, with even Burlingame’s

fantastic impersonations always reduced to the fallible uncanny; Coover’s Uncle Sam, though,

appears legitimately marvelous and will not be so readily leveled.

His authority over the nature

of authentic American identity forces other characters to constantly fear being made the butt of

everyone else’s mockery. In The Sot-Weed Factor, the ungoverned New World finally allows

everyone some authenticity because, in the still-forming nation, no one can really make a claim

to total authenticity, but in the Cold-War-era United States of The Public Burning, featuring both

an incarnated American spirit and an apparent threat to it—as Molly Hite reminds us, the

Rosenbergs were often tarred as “inauthentic,” impostor Americans (“Parody” 87)—the

characters are unable to reach that resolution.

This becomes most obvious in the novel’s final part, taking place at the ritual Times

Square public execution, where the cruft produced by the excessive spectacle causes ceaseless

laughing, but frequently shifts that laughter’s focus. As the execution approaches, readers are

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initially overloaded by excessive lists. In the scenes recounting the preparations in Times

Square, beginning in earnest around Chapter 20, the heretofore controlled back-and-forth

between cruft and satiric commentary soon becomes unbalanced in the former’s direction.

Chapter 20 names seventeen categories of VIP in attendance (355), as well as fifteen human

movie stars, several more cartoon ones (356), and dozens more popular singers, athletes, and

other celebrities. This, however, is nothing in comparison to Chapter 24’s list of the nicknames

of thirty-four presidents reanimated to parade on the square, adjacent to a list of fifty-four

American archetypes (e.g., “[…] Roving Gamblers, Lumberjacks, Johnny Rebs and

Damyankees, Sheepherders and Cattle Kings […]”) (423-424), all marching while the crowd

affirms an avalanche of the blandest Cold War slogans (“Our world is now divided into two

groups […] Communism with hammer and sickle, and America and Christians with cross of

Christ!” [418]). Even Chapter 24’s excesses, though, appear concise next to Chapter 26’s

account of dozens of generic functionaries from dozens of generic institutions on hand (e.g., “all

the auxiliary personnel who serve the three federal branches, all the agencies, bureaus,

departments, commissions, institutes, foundations, boards, councils, societies, administrations,

appeal and claims courts, funds, organizations, banks”), or to Betty Crocker’s roll call of forty-

two Congressional Representatives and ninety-six Senators (458-461).

When this cruft is combined with a series of absurd comic sketches, produced under the

conceit of a contest among the nation’s celebrities to make entertainment out of the Rosenbergs’

letters, the scene becomes overwhelming to the point of being infectiously funny, yet the very

overwhelming nature of the laughter makes it difficult to understand the direction of the humor.

Though several critics have claimed that these comedy routines suggest Hollywood’s ideological

complicity with the government (see LeClair 127, Viereck 72, Pughe 70), the bits that Coover

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invents are too zany to either scapegoat the Rosenbergs or satirize American ideology. For the

most part, the stars’ characteristic physical and linguistic creativity—e.g., the Astaire-Rogers

dance number incorporating a mesh visitation screen, an Abbott & Costello number about “who

goes first” to the execution, a Hope-Crosby-Lamour “Road to Radiance” sketch (425-427)—

comprises not hostile mockery or exaggerated self-parody but the slapstick, punning comedy of

vaudeville, creating grotesque incongruities out of the execution materials. This approach

climaxes during the Marx Brothers’ routine, paced so quickly (in the brothers’ characteristic

style) that the audience laughs mostly at the pure speed of schematic switches. Here is Groucho

as Julius Rosenberg and Chico as the jailkeeper:

GROUCHO: I’ll name anybody! My mother, my agent, even my mistress!

CHICO: Whatta you sayin’? You ain’t got a misteriss! You ain’ even got a

cockyerbine!

GROUCHO: I’ll name her too!

CHICO: Whatta you gonna name her?

GROUCHO: (singing and rolling his eyes) I think I’ll name her “Jasmine”…

CHICO: Jas’yours?

GROUCHO: (continuing) … Cuz she’s mighty lak’ a rose!

CHICO: Oh, a Pinko, eh? We’re getting to da bottomma dis!

GROUCHO: You been there, too, hunh?

CHICO: She’sa da one what’s stole-a da bum’ eh?

GROUCHO: She didn’t steal it, she was born with it!

CHICO: And she gave it to da Russians?

GROUCHO: She gave it to everybody! (454-455)

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These jokes—combined with the juxtaposed image of Harpo (as Ethel) playing with the electric

chair’s wires—less satirize the Rosenbergs than send up the usual targets of both the Marxes and

the carnivalesque, the frailties of language and the body.

Consequently, the citizens expecting to mock the Rosenbergs in this scene—and the

critics wishing to vindicate them—find laughter directed back from their intended targets toward

themselves. The citizens themselves attempt to submerge themselves within the communal

experience of laughter, but the conflicted aims of their laughter prevent them from realizing

Bakhtinian rejuvenation:

Out front, a hundred million mouths open wide, a hundred million sets of

teeth spring apart like dental exhibits, a hundred million bellies quake, and a

hundred million throats constrict and spasm, gasp and wheeze, as America laughs.

At much the same things everybody laughs at everywhere: sex, death, danger, the

enemy, the inevitable, all the things that hurt about growing up, something that

Americans especially, suddenly caught with the whole world in their hands, are

loath to do. What makes them laugh hardest, though, are jokes about sexual

inadequacy—a failure of power—and the cruder the better[.] (450)

While some critics believe that the scene satirizes the crowd’s mindless conformism (Maltby

102), the crowd does nothing stupid or immoral here by laughing at dirty jokes: their laughter is

explicitly universal rather than particular to a historical moment. It is unclear, though, whether

they are laughing at themselves communally, implicating everyone’s sexual inadequacy, or

targeting others to assert their own superiority over them. To do the former would require them

to identify with the soon-to-be-executed Rosenbergs, which the political context forbids, even

though some may recognize how closely their uncontrollable spasms of laughter resemble those

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shortly to be provoked by the Rosenbergs’ electrocution. Given the stakes, they would likely

prefer their laughter to be more clearly oriented, just as most critics would prefer Coover’s scene

make a clearer satire of the American establishment, but the question of who or what is being

mocked here is not clearly resolved.

Likely for this reason, everyone is relieved when a bewildered Nixon stumbles onto

stage—magically transported from his encounter with Ethel at Sing Sing, where he has achieved

a parodically overwrought epiphany about the American Dream during an inept and messy

seduction (429-446)—with his pants down, the words “I AM A SCAMP” written across his ass

in Ethel’s lipstick, allowing him to become (appropriately) the joke’s new butt. Ever the clown,

Nixon is unable to get his pants back up, but manages to convince the crowd that, since the

Rosenberg affair has demonstrated national vulnerability, they ought to recommit America to

openness together with a communal gesture, and with the rhetorical flourish, “I am asking

everyone tonight to step forward—right now!—and drop his pants for America!” (482), he

successfully redirects the laughter away from himself. But where has the laughter now been

turned? The crowd is uncertain: many appear enthusiastic about a carnivalesque communal

nudity, “staggering about in tight little circles to cheer the others on,” but others seem ashamed

of the coerced exposure, as there are “scattered screeches of protest from the timid,” especially

Nixon’s wife Pat, “the strain showing on her thin sad face from trying to hold back the tears”

(483). Meanwhile, Nixon’s novel-long vacillation between identifying with the Rosenbergs as

fellow Americans and demonizing them in hopes of political advancement makes his intentions

in diverting the crowd similarly muddled.

Uncle Sam’s arrival onstage to refocus the event on the Rosenbergs finally settles the

confusion. When Nixon and the crowd insist that Sam drop his pants too, he objects they are

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“going too far!” (484): Sam may be willing to let individual Americans degrade themselves by

exposing their lower halves, but America itself will not do so. Though the crowd does badger

him into exposure, the revelation of his penis causes a blackout, at which point the fiction shoots

so far into the marvelous that any satiric recognition becomes impossible. Flying through the

darkness and casting fireballs like a mad genie (485-494), Sam regains control of the situation

and brings the event back to its original purpose of executing the Rosenbergs—though only after

the first attempt to electrocute Ethel fails and the event’s VIPs rush to the stage to re-pull the

switch, sending Ethel’s body, in a final opaquely grotesque image, “held only at head, groin, and

one leg, […] whipped like a sail in a high wind, flapping out at the people lie one of those trick

images in a 3-D movie” (516-517).

What exactly are we to take from this bizarre conclusion, whose assault of comedy, cruft,

and the fantastic prevents either crowd or readers from understanding their own laughter?

Regarding this ambiguity, Pughe notes that “there is nothing that is truly liberating, nothing that

is ‘other’ about this episode […]—it appears merely bizarre and ridiculous” (67), adding that, the

“comedy confronts us with the problem of working out our own position” to the point where

readers “will laugh a halting, painful and lonely laugh, provoked by the crisis of his or her

reading experience” (80-81). I think this conclusion is basically correct, though actual readers

will often dodge this crisis by simply asserting clearer satiric motives. I would only add that its

comedy’s ambiguity is propelled by its submergence within cruft. The general disorientation

caused by the overwhelming cruft prevents readers from processing the scene as a clear satire or

carnivalesque.

That may be why the final scene—in which Uncle Sam sodomizes Nixon so as to

“incarnate” his spirit for a future presidency—is more repulsive than the rapes in the The Sot-

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Weed Factor,

yet also more narratively pat. It is repulsive because, unlike Barth’s rapists,

Uncle Sam does not share his victim’s weaknesses: when he concludes the book by quoting

George M. Cohan’s “Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye” (534)—a patter

song, incidentally, about an estranged father who advises his son to keep acquaintances in

stitches with rapid-fire slapstick so as to avoid being tied to them emotionally—the laughter to

which he refers appears less about communal acknowledgment of weakness than overwhelming

and exercising power over others. The narrative stability, though, derives from how the rape

returns the book to conventional satire, creating a bisociational incongruity by rooting the source

of our presidents’ recognizably wearied and damaged mannerisms (“Hoover’s glazed stare,

Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile” [533]) in their penetration by the extreme weight of

American heritage and culture. If the climactic spectacle is too overwhelming for us to

recognize what relationship we hold to our nation, we can at least recognize that its power is

incomparably beyond that of our individual minds, and if we try to mock it, the joke will very

likely be turned back at our expense.

The Fraudulent, the Satiric, and The Recognitions

Still, this discussion of cruft and laughter will not help us explain the passage with which

we began the chapter, from the party scene in The Recognitions. It is excessive inasmuch as its

lengthy dialogue goes on much longer than appears necessary, and it is might be construed as

satiric inasmuch as it depicts socially negative behavior it appears, but it simply isn’t that funny.

Even Moore admits that “the ferocity of Gaddis’ satire, the contempt he heaps upon nearly

everyone in the novel, betrays the stern moralist who doesn’t so much invite the reader to laugh

at the human foibles of his characters as to recoil in horror” (41). The rest of the plot’s events,

for that matter, nominally centered around a commercially unsuccessful mid-twentieth-century

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painter named Wyatt Gwyon who is recruited to forge “newly discovered” pictures by fifteenth-

century Flemish masters, but also featuring myriad subplots involving frauds and duplicities

crafted by other aspiring criminals and artists, are simply too bleak and brutal to create much

genuine humor. It would have probably been impossible to sustain the leavening impulse of The

Sot-Weed Factor’s carnivalesque, after all, through a thousand-page parade of (by my

approximate count)

four rapes, two castrations, eight characters institutionalized or otherwise

gone insane, four attempted murders (three successful), four deaths by gruesome disease, five

deaths by gruesome accident (including two in separate building collapses), and countless

suicide attempts, not to mention many other fates so bizarre as to defy categorization.

Given the caustic invective of the narrative voice, though, there might be an argument

that it is of the harsh, Juvenalian variety of satire. In fact, excepting some critical dispute as to

whether any positive values, like the redemptive power of love or art, are implicit in the narrative

(see Weisenburger, Fables 210-222), there seems to be general consensus that that is the book’s

goal, aimed at “exposing” the fraudulence of a whole range of things, including contemporary

mainstream society (Safer 112), New York’s upper-class and bohemian subculture (C. Knight

16-19),

religious and scientific epistemology (S. Moore, Gaddis 15; Comnes 49-50), and

modernist concepts of authenticity, tradition, and originality (Weisenburger, Fables 216).

These views are perhaps best summed by John Johnston’s claim that the book is “an extended

contemporary Menippean satire directed against everything sham, fake, and imitative—artworks,

ideas, identities, products, even languages—in the nascently consumerist, mass-media-directed

American society of the 1950s” (Carnival 152). The incongruence is highlighted primarily by

Wyatt, who is praised more than any other character in the novel for the “transformational power

of [his] artistic imagination” (Comnes 81), which uniquely enables him to make the “symbolic

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voyage from spiritual darkness to enlightenment” (S. Moore, Gaddis 17), highlighting by

contrast the other characters’ depravity. Scenes like the party cited at the chapter’s start, then,

might be justified as bleak diatribes against behavior that is, in Johan Thieleman’s view, “all

embedded in one overall thought. They are all signifiers with one signified: the decline of all

values” (“Energy” 109).

However, valorizing Wyatt in this way is problematic if we are to consider The

Recognitions as a satire on fraudulence. Wyatt’s most distinct characteristic, after all, is his

ability to create forgeries indistinguishable from paintings by his Flemish idols, which, in Klaus

Benesch’s words, all but destroys the “clear-cut division between originals and their

reproductions” (30-31), and, according to Johnston, “goes so far as to throw into question even

the existence of some founding first or authentic version,” erasing the original-reproduction

distinction via the poststructuralist notion of “simulacra” (Carnival 7). As we noted earlier,

however, that distinction between real and fake is necessary to any definition of fraudulence in

the first place. In other words, critics appear to first justify Gaddis’s swaths of banal text on the

grounds that they expose fraudulence, but then apotheosize the book’s protagonist for entirely

deconstructing fraudulence as a coherent concept.

As Tony Tanner asks, “if the best artist is

the best forger, what does ‘originality’ mean?” (City 394), and we may extend his question by

asking why, if the character most skilled in falsehood is the one critics most admire, they are so

confident in attacking inauthenticity. This paradox extends more generally toward the novel’s

satiric status. To again invoke Bogel, if the counterfeiter and satirist are analogous, then they

both possess the ability to make distinctions between false and true problematic, but if that

distinction vanishes, they cannot produce their desired effects. Postmodern critics may be wary

of reifying a distinction between authentic and inauthentic,

but if one deconstructs the distinction

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entirely, one does away with the difference between satire and satirized, too. As a result, one

could no longer argue that the representation of doltish characters critiques superficiality,

because the clear norm from which that superficiality is critiqued vanishes; instead, one must

believe, to recall Franco Moretti’s comment on Bouvard et Pécuchet, that the book “abolish[es]

the difference between a book on stupidity, and a stupid book” (Modern 72).

Yet outside some hostile early reviewers, no one argues The Recognitions has done this.

It is among the book’s great achievements that its readers can neither consistently rely on nor

reject its characters’ personal authenticity, and consequently must struggle to consider how

seriously to consider their attitudes on art, morality, finance, religion, and every other issue of

importance. What do we do, though, about the long stretches of purely stupid dialogue that the

book contains? Thielemans’s claim that each is designed “to deal with chaos, by being chaotic

in itself” (105), will not suffice to explain this tactic, because Western literature has spent

centuries developing literary techniques by which satire may treat the dull without being dull.

As we suggested in Chapter 2, for instance, despite Moretti’s comment, Flaubert’s last novel is

an example of how these tactics may be skillfully deployed, as in the passage below, in which

the title friends survey their new country estate:

Bouvard, passing near the arbor, discovered the plaster statue of a woman

beneath its branches. She was pulling up her skirt with two fingers, her knees

bent, looking over her shoulder as if afraid of being discovered.

“Oh, pardon me! Don’t mind us!”

And they found this joke so hilarious that, twenty times a day, for more

than three weeks, they kept repeating it. (21)

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The passage’s satiric craft is especially apparent in its final sentence’s use of the free indirect

style to compress the tedious repetition of a drab joke yet still exaggerating those repetitions

enough to satirize, while its close focalization maintains enough proximity to the friends’

mindset that it becomes easier to recognize our own tendency toward mechanism. In Gaddis’s

party scene, though, no remark is treated as dull or stupid enough to warrant elision into

narration: they read the way Flaubert’s vignette might have if the he’d directly represented each

of the four thousand utterances of Bouvard’s joke over dozens of pages, each accompanied by a

line or two of approximated laughter and inept explanation to baffled acquaintances.

This style is particularly striking because The Recognitions’s first chapter, a searing

novella about the Puritan Rev. Gwyon’s confrontation with the shadows of older traditions,

brilliantly employs such Flaubertian nuance and concision. This approach, though, all but

vanishes after the first chapter—indeed, from Gaddis’s corpus entirely—and the remaining

scenes’ following Wyatt’s artistic career feature substantially more direct discourse.

Here I

must make an argument that will not be popular among The Recognitions’ admirers, but which is

necessary to articulate the book’s weirdly brilliant innovations: as a result of this shift, much of

the novel’s middle suffers, and particularly fails as satire. This is not to say that there are not

good satiric moments—the fates of Rev. Gwyon and Stanley are only two among many of the

novel’s ironically incongruous parallels (see Lathrop)—but the narrative voice does not play off

recognition and exaggeration as masterfully as it does in the opening. At its worst moments, it

devolves into heavy-handed diatribes, themselves little more than the warmed-over clichés

spouted by postwar highbrows about the impact of mass media and capitalism on a mass public

they clearly held in contempt.

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However, this strategy allows Gaddis to cultivate an idiosyncratic cruft in the lengthy,

lackluster dialogue created by his refusal to write traditional satire. These passages first occur

early in the second chapter, where after following Wyatt to Paris, the narrator scans the city’s

cafés and reports several sets of disconnected speech like these: “–Voici votre Perrier m’sieur. –

Mais j’ai dit café au lait, pas d’eau Perrier … A small man in a sharkskin suit said, –Son putas, y

nadas mas. Putas, putas, putas … Someone said, –Picasso … Someone else said, –Kafka … A

girl said, –You deliberately misunderstand me. Of course I like art. Ask anybody” (65). Given

that this chapter begins by proclaiming the city’s “infinite vulgarity” (63), it would seem this

dialogue intends to satirize Parisian superficiality, yet upon inspection there is nothing

blameworthy or even interesting about it: it reflects upon no one poorly to have mentioned

Picasso or Kafka, mistaken a drink order, insisted on their own appreciation for art, or called a

few women whores. Perhaps the narrator has so little regard for the Parisian intellectual climate

that he assumes the mere mention of Picasso ought to suggest vacuity, but this would be an

extremely conservative and presumptuous form of critique.

What the passage even more notably lacks, though, is Wyatt, whom the narrative has not

yet rediscovered in Europe. Given that none of these voices appears to develop into anything

more than a line of dull speech on its own, we likely assume that our protagonist must be among

them: why bother describing such dull café conversation at such length otherwise? Only after

unsuccessfully seeking some attribute of Wyatt’s voice in these bland exchanges over four and a

half pages do we learn that, “With no idea of Paris when he arrived, [Wyatt] had been fortunate

enough to find quarters in this neighborhood which maintained anonymity in the world of arts”

(67). In other words, while prompting us to scan for a sign of recognition, the book has not only

delayed providing one but has placed it somewhere unexpected, first heightening our attention

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but then discouraging it by making the text through which we comb so little worth attending. As

Gregory Comnes notes, among The Recognitions’ odder stylistic moves is how it does “not

distingui[sh] between meaningful and irrelevant background detail, as most traditional novels

do” (70): the textual space taken up by the novel’s events is often far out of proportion to its

importance, with unimportant passages given enormous space and important ones minimized.

As befits the novel’s title, then, as the novel moves to New York, it constantly uses

imbalances like these to impede readers’ ability to recognize the importance of what they read.

That clutter’s cognitive (or recognitive?) impact is the real source of the novel’s famous

difficulty. It is telling that while the vast majority of Recognitions criticism focuses on Wyatt, he

appears in only about forty percent of the book, and his name goes unmentioned after the third

chapter: the narrative both proliferates inconsequential exchanges among minor characters to an

extreme degree while consistently obscuring the presence of its most important plot thread,

forcing us to look for telltale behavioral tics or speech patterns to register his presence and even

going so far as to refer to him in the later chapters only by his adopted pseudonym Stephen

Asche.

Many similar tactics may be observed throughout the book. For instance, in one mid-

novel subplot, the would-be playwright Otto seeks to have a reunion with his father, who turns

out to be the otherwise undistinguished company man Mr. Pivner, the subject of several brief

scenes otherwise unrelated to the plot. Though most criticism treats this relationship as self-

evident, Gaddis delays making it explicit for three hundred pages after Pivner’s first appearance.

In particular, Otto’s last name is never stated, and Pivner is only described as seeking to meet his

son just before their planned meeting. There are several hints tossed in during this time about

their relationship, but these are extremely oblique: the narrator mentions, for instance, that Pivner

wears rimless glasses (286), and later Otto hears his father describe those glasses so that the

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latter may be recognized when they meet (309); similarly, Otto hears that he should wear his

green scarf to the meeting to match his father (309), and Pivner is later described as wearing a

green scarf (505). Not only are these very minor details, however, listed among the novel’s great

many other unimportant ones (e.g., Pivner’s receding hairline, the color of his suit), but Gaddis

goes to especial lengths to obscure them, as the rimless glasses are mentioned in each case only

parenthetically and the references to the green scarves are made two hundred pages apart. This

seems designed so that readers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of surrounding activity and

fail to make the recognition—just like Otto, who misrecognizes counterfeiter Frank Sinisterra as

his father when Pivner has a brief seizure outside the hotel where they are to meet (514-520).

This tactic of disorientation via unimportant details is most evident in the extended party

and bar scenes, featuring large casts of intermittently-identified minor characters engaged in dull

cross-conversations over subjects of little importance, culminating to a head in the one with

whose opening exchanges we began this chapter. Again, this scene’s dialogue is characterized

not by clichés but clichéd representations of clichés, combined with context-free non sequiturs

that are neither insightful nor satiric (e.g., “–Mendelssohn Schmendelssohn, someone else said.

–I’m talking about music” [574]).

As pointed out at this chapter’s start, it cannot succeed as

satire because it does not generate incongruity between different schemas for social behavior, but

simply plays out one tedious script to great length. What it does do, however, is to be so stupid

and dull as to render the characters and readers unable to pay attention to or recognize more

important things going on around them.

For instance, after appearing and disappearing several times in the scene’s first half (see

578, 585, 593), Esther’s kitten gets lost. This already speaks to how distracted the hostess has

become, since earlier in the book she is described as “threatening the strain of life in [the kitten]

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with her attention” (367). After going unmentioned for over thirty pages, the kitten finally

reappears at the chapter’s end, when a fight breaks out between Anselm and Don Bildow. The

partygoers’ response begins here with the Argentine trade commissioner, to whom Ed Feasley

has been trying to sell a battleship:

–Yes I was told to expect this sort of thing in New York.

–Yes but I mean Chrast don’t go away, or we’ll both go, let’s both go to

your hotel, I’ll stay there tonight.

–But in another room.

–Chrast yes.

–I was warned about that sort of thing in New York, his companion

commented, adjusting his perfectly adjusted tie.

–Oh Rose, Esther said to where her sister sat on the floor in the dark with

the records. –Aren’t you tired?

–Are you having a nice party?

Esther put her face in her hands, and felt her sister’s arm round her neck.

–Oh Rose. Rose.

The hand under her became rigid, the paralysis ran up her arm, through

her shoulders and neck, her face yellowing as the blood drained from behind its

bronzed canvas. –Stanley … Agnes Deigh whispered, staring at him bent over

Anselm, an arm around Anselm.

–You see, it’s all right now, Stanley said, gripping his shoulder but unable

to raise it from the floor. Anselm opened his eyes.

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In the hand she drew from under her, the white nails clutched a limp

cinnamon-colored body. –I thought…it was something. Agnes Deigh said

weakly to herself. Then she looked around quickly, opened her bag and pulled

handfuls of things out which she stuffed in her coat pocket, to snap it closed a

moment later upon the lifeless kitten. She summoned her voice in, –Stanley…

–And now, you don’t have to fight it any more, you … Anselm’s arm was

flung around him, and Anselm’s unshaven face tore at Stanley’s face with the

kiss. (637)

As with most speech throughout the scene, the dialogue communicates nothing to anyone:

Feasley and the Argentinian simply repeat phrases they have thrown at each other for the past

forty pages, which finally go for naught; Esther speaks to her mentally-impaired sister merely for

the sake of speaking, since she has nothing to say and her sister would not understand her if she

did; Stanley mutters clichés to Anselm. However, though no one is saying anything of

importance, their propagation of the party’s chatter prevents anyone from realizing what has

happened to the cat, whom Agnes has sat on and killed.

Gaddis works hard to obscure this moment from his readers as well as his characters.

There is so much chatter, so many comments filling space without being worth listening to, that

everyone’s ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant is crippled: even Agnes

does not realize what she has done, apparently, given her worried reaction to her purse being

stolen several pages later (643). Furthermore, the cat’s death is only recounted in a prepositional

phrase concluding an aside between speech tags, and the previous paragraphs’ anticipation of the

event are misleadingly described: when Agnes reaches beneath her and suspects what she has

done, the her (“The hand under her”) is placed so that its antecedent appears to be Esther, not

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Agnes, making the sentence about the former’s embarrassment rather than the latter’s horror;

similarly, most of Agnes’ reaction to the kitten’s death is reported before what she has done has

been revealed, prompting us to misattribute it toward one of the other things that has been

disturbing her through the novel, like her relationship with Stanley or her anxiety over her lapsed

Catholicism. Even the phrase “cinnamon-colored body” does not express exactly what has

happened, since the cat’s coloring has not been previously described. In other words, the cat’s

death is only clearly reported to readers by two words dissolved into an entire scene’s worth of

cruft misdirection, to the extent that it becomes very easy to glaze over and miss the dead cat as

entirely as the partygoers do.

This is not the only example in the chapter. None of the scene’s three most consequential

plot threads—Agnes’s accidental crushing of the kitten, Maude Munk’s abduction of the

unexplained baby crawling around the apartment, and Charley Dickens’s unsuccessful suicide

attempts—take up more than a page of text, most of which is scattered several lines at a time

scattered across the scene’s four-score pages, almost all of which pointless jabber. Frankly, this

includes many passages popular with critics, including Stanley’s stuttering thoughts about

fragmentation and tradition (616-617), Benny’s blather about how the intellectual class doesn’t

understand “real life” (602-603), and Otto’s conveyance of Wyatt’s half-baked criticism of

America’s youth-centered culture and the need to do something “crucial” (591-592, 620-621).

To take any of these passages as either serious philosophical statements or as satires of their

speakers’ self-importance would reflect poorly upon the book’s craftsmanship; better we see

them as blending into the rest of the stupidity to disorient readers. As with the Brueghels that

Wyatt forges, the scene’s suffering, in Auden’s famous lines, “takes place/ While someone else

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is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (3-4), unnoticed as Icarus’s leg in the

bottom right corner of his most famous landscape.

The Recognitions’ readers, then, must decide how to avoid getting bogged down in the

constant hum of idiocy while also observing the important events that occur in that background.

As the novel comes to its close, moreover, this process becomes quite hard. On the one hand,

some sections descend so purely into cruft that any concerted attempt to recognize anything

within them would be wasted mental effort. Agnes’s five-page letter of apology to Dr. Weisgall,

whom she’d accused of child abuse, may go unread by its diegetic recipient because her

handwriting is so poor (757-763), but even the book’s readers will be unable to make much of its

typed transcript, because it contains barely a coherent sentence. Yet abandoning such totally

recalcitrant text is dangerous, too, as may be seen in two of the book’s final scenes, in which

Arny Munk and Stanley each decide to ignore a brief, incomprehensible message they assume is

too unimportant to be worth bothering about, respectively a warning in French encountered while

the former is trying to put out a hotel-room fire and one in Italian while the latter is practicing an

organ composition; we all ignore stimuli like this every day, of course, since we are constantly

faced with a million sources of white noise beyond our understanding, almost all of which are of

no consequence. Arny and Stanley are not so fortunate, however, because ignoring these

messages causes each to have a building collapse upon and kill him (942, 956). These warnings’

difficulty is contingent, of course—their opacity is not necessarily experienced by readers who

understand French and Italian—but this is illustrative of why The Recognitions is relatively

humorless when compared to the other two novels we have discussed in this chapter. First,

unlike the enormous catalogs in The Sot-Weed Factor or The Public Burning, The Recognitions’

cruft is not always so obviously and universally overwhelming: individual readers may at times

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be able to recognize potential importance within apparently tossed-off text, and though the odds

are that at some point we will fail. Second, moreover, the penalties Gaddis administers upon his

characters for even the briefest slips in attention and memory are more sadistic and arbitrary than

in the other books. One hopes that Gaddis did not mistake the asymmetrical relation of author

and audience for an exemption from human limitations, knowing when the satirist returns to the

real world, his mind does not so easily encompass its unimaginable variety as it does in his

fictional one.

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Chapter Four—The Frame-Tale, the Picaresque, and the Circumfabulation

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,

Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,

Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,

To the Kimmerian lands, and people cities

Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever

With glitter of sun-rays

Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven

Swartest night stretched over wrecked men there.

—Ezra Pound, Canto I

Too Much Plot

At one point during the twentieth century, the most common complaint about literary

fiction was that its over-absorption with artistry prevented it from “telling a good story.”

Summarizing this view in his 2001 “Reader’s Manifesto” for the Atlantic, critic B. R. Myers

groused that “any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be

‘genre fiction’ […] never literature with a capital L” (108). Given that several touchstone

twentieth-century theories of the novel significantly deemphasized story in favor of character or

language (see Ortega y Gasset 80-87, Forster 42), this criticism is not totally without

justification, but it is markedly inapplicable to many mega-novels. Instead of being devoid of

story, they are often stuffed with it, sometimes to the point of inducing critics who have argued

for story’s importance in other contexts to criticize them for having too much. For instance,

James Wood has pejoratively termed extravagantly-plotted mega-novels as “hysterical realism,”

because these books, Wood claims, “want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence—as it

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were, a criminal running endless charity marathons. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page,

as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion” (Irresponsible 179). For Wood,

Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon provides a case study in this phenomenon, because its

profusion of subplots—which, as Wood notes, detail the adventures of “a talking dog, a

mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a conversation,” among many

others (Irresponsible 178)—end up not increasing but depleting the book’s richness, because

“however dissimilar each new adventure is from its predecessor, it resembles it in its mere

adventurousness. The variety becomes homogeneous” (Broken 204). They may have plot, but

in Wood’s view, that plot is so excessive as to be gratuitous.

What does it mean to suggest a novel’s story is pointless, though? After all, if one takes a

classically structuralist narratological perspective, there can be no such thing: though any

narrative might be reduced to a single sentence representing primary plot motion, as in Gérard

Genette’s famous boiling down of the two million words in À la recherche du temps perdu to

“Marcel becomes a writer” (Narrative 30), structuralists generally believe that, in Roland

Barthes’s words, “there are no wasted units, and there can never be any, however long, loose, or

tenuous the threads which link them to one of the levels of the story” (“Introduction” 249).

Obviously, some plot functions are more important than others for achieving that overall

syntactic expression, as even in a conventional novel like Pride and Prejudice, Franco Moretti

notes, a full ninety-seven percent of scenes are low-importance “catalyses” rather than major

“turning points” (“Serious” 369-370), but even the least important vignettes provide some small

movement toward achieving the plot’s realization.

If one instead adopts the “natural narratology” put forward by Monika Fludernik,

pointlessness becomes more possible, but only at the cost of more or less disqualifying a text as

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narrative. Following the work of William Labov, natural narratology elevates a story’s “point”

into a theoretical concept, namely the unusual or surprising segment of experience that motivates

a speaker to recount a story and gives its audience something to focus upon (244-248). A

narrator could fail to establish a point, but in that case, the story would lack tellability and

readers would neither be especially inclined or able to pay it much attention. Fludernik

acknowledges that some well-regarded literary texts do not quite hit this threshold of tellability,

especially experimental works lacking a stable narrative voice, but that is because their aesthetic

effects are essentially poetic, not narrative (259). Such texts have recently been described as

exhibiting Brian McHale’s notion of “weak narrativity,” which he claims is a way of “telling

stories ‘poorly,’ distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such a way as to

evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it” (165), but as

McHale explicitly suggests, these poorly-told stories are recounted not for their own sake but to

create a space for the kind of unconventional, avant-garde literary effects we discussed in

Chapter 1.

However, mega-novel plots are not adequately accounted for by either of these

approaches, because they are clearly more focused on narrative than on poetry, yet still

frequently manage to tell irrelevant and indeterminate stories. Returning to the example of

Mason & Dixon, for instance, while we might condense its overall narrative into a schema like

“The Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke tells a family gathering about how Charles Mason and

Jeremiah Dixon surveyed their eponymous line,” we would have difficulty assimilating all of the

book’s stories into that formulation. It is not merely that the novel subverts the logic of both plot

construction and narratorial stability by frame-breaking, most prominently when it introduces as

an excursus from Cherrycoke’s tale the captivity narrative of Eliza Fields in an issue of the

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sensationalist series The Ghastly Fop, as read by the children Tenebrae and Ethelmer, but

transitions that story back into Cherrycoke’s voice without signaling any shift by the end of the

next chapter; this sort of thing, after all, might be put down as “antinarrative” or “unnatural

narrative,” its point relying upon readers’ consciousness that the book is upending typical

narrative rules (see Alber and Heinze). More importantly, some sections of the novel generate so

many possible stories at once that each is rendered indeterminate and irrelevant.

For example, when the aforementioned Fields arrives at Mason and Dixon’s camp, she

brings with her the Chinese feng shui devotee Captain Zhang, who fears that he has been

followed by his Jesuit nemesis, Father Zarpazo. Since the latter is purportedly a master of

disguise, Zhang begins to suspect that the most unlikely members of the company might be him,

and at one point, disguised in Jesuit robes so as to better anticipate the Spaniard’s motions, he

accuses a woman of being Zarpazo. That prompts this exchange:

“He’s [i.e., Zhang’s] not a real Jesuit,” Mason assures her.

“Or, perhaps, all too real!” the Captain with a look of evil glee,—“for

suppose I never was Zhang, but rather Zarpazo, all the Time! HA, —ha-ha!” His

Laugh, tho’ hideously fiendish enough, seems practis’d.

“Or,” replies Mr. Barnes, “that you are neither, but yet another damn’d

Fabulator, such as ever haunt encampments white or Indian, ev’ry night,

somewhere in this Continent.”

“Too many possible Stories. You may not have time enough to find out

which is the right one.” (552)

At least four plotlines are suggested here—that “Zhang” is really Zhang, that “Zhang” is really

Zarpazo, that “Zhang” is neither of them (both, perhaps, simply being characters from The

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Ghastly Fop) and has been deliberately playacting, or that “Zhang” is merely, as he is described

a few pages later, “crazy” (573)—and as Zhang implies, we might with a little creativity expand

these possibilities much further. All of these indeterminate plots, however, are mutually

exclusive, effectively negating each other and providing no basis on which to even begin

considering which is most accurate.

If we take any of them seriously, we must also take

seriously an indefinite set of others, which would render any processing of this scene

meaningless. As these possibilities are furthermore never revisited as the novel progresses, what

is the point of suggesting them?

Now, obviously, interpretive indeterminacy does not necessarily render narrative

pointless. As Umberto Eco long ago noted, the narrative questions raised by a movie like Michel

Antonioni’s L’avventura might be constantly left open, but their very lack of resolution is what

ends up driving its plot, redirecting frustrated characters’ and viewers’ energy toward new

narrative motion (Open 116-118).

Furthermore, as H. Porter Abbott notes, the necessary

incompleteness of any fictional world means there will always be narrative gaps in which

“multiple incompatible stories, together with their incompatible worlds, reside […] but only as

possibilities,” which he calls “shadow stories” (“Shadow” 1). However, we cannot merely

accept all these story possibilities as equally and positively enriching the narrative, because their

ability to iteratively generate further possibilities quickly overrides our ability to process them.

As Abbott points out, “It would, of course, require a mind of great and inhuman capability to

entertain more than a fraction of all possible event sequences together with all the exponentially

increasing numbers of possible event sequences nested within them” (“Shadow” 4).

Were we to

capitulate entirely to the terms of Zhang’s game, that is, we would have to pose further

perhapses and supposes ad infinitum: in addition to questioning Zhang’s identity, for example,

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we would have to wonder whether Mason has really been Dixon the whole time, or Dixon

Mason, or both of them other people entirely

and both not really in America but Mongolia,

which the other characters have artificed to exactly match the pair’s expectations of the New

World. Such possibilities, of course, tie themselves into dead ends so immediately that they can

have no purpose to either the plot or to a speaker, and since they may be thrown into any

narrative at any time with no particular cost, they are purely gratuitous.

How we process and compress an excess of narrative possibilities has significant

implications for the relationship between narrative and consciousness. As Antonio Damasio has

suggested, consciousness itself may be the product of internal neural narrative, generating the

self out of a sequence of observations of the organism’s state and sensory perceptions (see 168-

171). Furthermore, Reuven Tsur points out that this self-generating narrative depends upon

linearity, as “without this, we could not be conscious of stable objects” (16). Of course, the

ability to non-linearly imagine alternate states of affairs is crucial to any mind’s successful

planning and directed action (M. Turner 3-11), but when those alternate realities multiply to the

point that the main linear narrative dissolves into one of indefinite possibilities, the basis of the

conscious self begins to erode. The stakes of this problem might be illustrated best by Jorge Luis

Borges’s Dr. Yu Tsun in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” whose adoption of his ancestor Ts’ui

Pen’s view of space-time as a timeless, infinite array of co-existing possible worlds allows him

to suspend any feelings of personal agency or culpability in murdering his friend Stephen Albert,

since he would have done so in some other possible plotline anyway (123-128). Analogously, if

a fiction’s sequence of events becomes too overloaded with alternate possibilities, the conscious

mind reading it can very quickly begin to fail.

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For many years, “linearity” was a dirty word in studies of twentieth-century fiction, and

describing a narrative as “non-linear” doubled as a positive aesthetic evaluation: that position

needs now to be reevaluated. We must realize that the non-linear possibilities presented by

mega-novels are constantly engaged in dialectic with the linear needs of consciousness, and

subsequently ask how one distinguishes between storytelling that creatively exploits the alternate

worlds of fiction from that which is simply tangled nonsense. Mason & Dixon, in fact, is an

excellent place for us for to do that, because while the book’s disparate subplots sometimes

appear about as linear as freehand doodles (Duyfhuizen, “Reading” 140), the novel is, of course,

very much about the establishment of linearity, its plot guided by the two near-exactly

perpendicular lines its title characters survey between Pennsylvania/Delaware and Maryland

(Clerc 124). To do that, however—and, more broadly, to examine how we can adequately

process excessive mega-novel story—we will first need to examine two narrative genres that

have not only both been frequently linked to the mega-novel but have historically included

abundant and relatively inessential plots without being charged with pointlessness or boredom,

the picaresque and the frame-tale.

Plotting Space and Time in the Picaresque and Frame-Tale, and Introducing the

Circumfabulation

Both older narrative forms than the novel—the one by at least some decades, the other by

many centuries—the picaresque and the frame-tale are perhaps the exemplary genres of episodic

narrative. As a result, they often appear less like coherent linear narratives than boundless

structures for story, meandering arbitrarily in all directions and consequently often increasing

their narrative threads to an arbitrarily large size, as may be seen in the seven hundred pages of

Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache or, to even greater extremes, the thirty volumes of the

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shelf-filling Indian classic The Ocean of Story. Moreover, though, despite the Aristotelian

objection that “episodic [plots] are the worst” because “the sequence of episodes is neither

necessary nor probable” (51b), both the picaresque and the frame-tale demonstrate how narrative

may retain the potential to generate a wide variety of possible stories while still maintaining

coherent narrative purpose.

The picaresque and frame-tale sustain their episodic plot structures by taking analogous

but opposed approaches to what Bakhtin referred to as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal

and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” or “chronotope” (Dialogic

84). Picaresque and frame-tale chronotopes, appropriately, are grounded in the differing

storytelling situations of their narrators. For instance, the picaresque, though often defined

within the Anglophone world simply as any narrative about wandering adventures,

initially

grew its plot structure out of a specific need to narrate the lives of pícaros, peripatetic social

outcasts roaming from town to town in search of work, food, and money, who often got involved

in various illegal activities along the way.

The resulting “loosely episodic” plot—“strung

together,” in Claudio Guillén’s words, “like a freight train and apparently with no other common

link than the hero” (84)—has frequently been critiqued as lacking structural cohesion, for

instance in René Wellek and Austin Warren’s claim that, “In the picaresque novel, the

chronological sequence is all there is: this happened and then that. […] A more philosophic

novel adds to chronology the structure of causation” (215). However, in critiquing the genre,

this objection articulates well how the pícaro’s chronotope sustains its stories’ point. The

pícaro’s spatial progress is so discontinuous, and consequently so episodic, because he is forced

to experience only the most stable, linear progression of time: pressed by his moment-to-moment

needs for survival, and lacking any education or intellectual sophistication, he is incapable of

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contemplating pasts, futures, and other worlds. For this reason, incidentally, Peter Brooks sees

in the picaresque not an exception to conventional plot but a quintessential example of how

plotting is driven by the narrator’s desire: the “tricks and strategems” comprising the disparate

adventures of a pícaro like Lazarillo des Tormes are held together because they are each

“devised to overcome a specific form of the threat [i.e., the unifying fear of starvation], and thus

literally to enable life, and narrative, to go forward” (38).

The frame-tale’s chronotope, on the other hand, is precisely reversed. As Robert

Clements and Joseph Gibaldi have described, the “cornice”/“novella” structure of the frame-tale,

where a skeletal outer frame recounts how one or more storytellers narrate several autonomous

tales to an audience, guarantees that even tales whose temporality diverges wildly from

chronological time must be mediated through a static ground state restraining the storyteller(s) to

a single spatial location (5-6).

The tales of the Thousand and One Nights, for instance, no matter

how far they reach into legendary time or how freely their adventures seem to proceed, are told

only in Shahryar’s bedchamber,

and while the Florentine aristocrats of The Decameron might

visit a different bucolic setting on some days during their plague-induced exile and Chaucer’s

pilgrims might advance gradually on the long journey toward Canterbury, for all intents and

purposes they stay in the same space.

Furthermore, as Clements and Gibaldi suggest, the

individual novellas are each granted a point by the cornice’s establishment of that spatially-

restrictive situation, which is often a national disaster, because it allows the storytelling either to

help resolve that problem or at least soothe its audience by allowing them to explore a wide

range of temporality (42-49). Like the pícaro, Brooks notes, frame-tale storytellers like

Shahrazad provides an archetypal example of plotting, even though the structure of their stories

seems to wander aimlessly at times, because their temporality-manipulating storytelling is “life-

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giving in that it arouses and sustains desire, ensuring that the terminus it both delays and beckons

toward will offer what we might call a lucid repose” (60-61).

However, there are two reasons why the picaresque and frame-tale’s justification of

multiplied story possibilities do not necessarily transfer to mega-novels like Mason & Dixon.

First, despite the balances these genres strike between spatial and temporal freedom, each does

still bear the potential for cruft. As Ulrich Wicks notes, while picaresques’ individual episodes

usually have coherent plots, as a whole they can tend toward a “Sisphyus rhythm” leading

nowhere (55), while frame-tales, as Bonnie Irwin points out, can similarly tend toward boring

repetitiveness because they were not expected to be read from start to finish the way

contemporary novels are (36-39): after all, not only were frame-tales often performed aloud

(with varying faithfulness to the manuscript) rather than read privately (34-35),

individual

editions were cobbled together out of different manuscripts, causing stories to be added or

removed from a given edition haphazardly (Gittes 146), so it did not matter as much if a given

story was redundant or disconnected from the whole, because that whole tended to be

“paratactic, open-ended, and unfinished” (Gittes 14). To maintain their points in a contemporary

context, then, each story in a frame-tale or picaresque would both need to stand on its own as a

distinct tale and serve a purpose either in the rogue’s progress or the cornice ground situation.

Second, moreover, many mega-novels, though often identified as picaresques or frame-

tales, are better described as belonging to a third genre combining elements of the pair, which,

though it has been long established, has been little theorized. Mason & Dixon, for instance, may

seem at times like a picaresque, with its main section following the historical Mason’s episodic

logbook chronologically across the diffuse space of a lawless border territory, but on the other

hand seems also to be a frame-tale, as their story is only recounted to us decades later by

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Cherrycoke, with his distillation of the duo’s chronology frequently broken up both by his own

parenthetical asides and by other characters’ embedded tales.

To my knowledge, this structure

does not even have a generally-accepted name, though Walter Reed may have come closest

when constructing a genre he called the “quixotic novel,” which, in contrast with what he

perceived as the picaresque’s total anti-conventionality, dialogically engages narrative

conventions to their fullest extent (71-92): certainly, he is right to name Don Quixote as

belonging to this genre, given that book’s alternation between temporally pedestrian but spatially

expansive episodic adventures and spatially static but temporally complex interpolated

narratives. It would be misleading, though, to imply it was invented by Cervantes, as Homer’s

Odyssey, after all, contains these features as well, as do many other works ranging across

centuries and national borders, including Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones,

and, as discussed in Chapter 3, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

Due to these books’ roundabout methods of storytelling, we might call them

“circumfabulations.” To adapt Cherrycoke’s description of History, a circumfabulation’s

narrative might be conceived as a “great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and

strong” (349), given its individual episodes’ freedom in both the temporal and spatial axes.

Distinguishing the circumfabulation from the picaresque and frame-tale is useful, then, because

its profuse narrative possibilities are designed not to prolong the hero’s life, as in the picaresque

and frame-tale, but to challenge the hero—or more typically heroes, as the circumfabulation’s

dialectical structure usually benefits from having two central characters—to maintain stable

identities in the face of story conditions that shift constantly in both time and space. Consider,

for instance, how Quixote must struggle with the cognitive dissonance caused by his vacillations

between material and fantastic worlds, or how the obstacles Odysseus faces in various different

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lands question his status as a man, husband, and king. Lacking either chronological or spatial

stability, then, circumfabulations must rely all the more upon the protagonist’s identity-seeking

process to create linearity: each individual episode, no matter how strange, can be given a point

if we view it as part of the hero’s progressive admission of new perceptions into his

consciousness and subsequent attempt to maintain a consistent self in light of the encounter.

Obviously, however, such freedom on both the spatial and temporal axes can tend the

circumfabulation toward gratuitousness, just as with picaresque and frame-tale. Tangles, after

all, often contain superfluous individual threads that merely gum up the whole to no real end, and

frequently, the mega-novel circumfabulation includes threads that twist in too many directions

for either protagonist or reader to attend coherently. This chapter will proceed, then, by using

Mason & Dixon to discuss how episodic narrative pressures the consciousness’s abilities to move

linearly forward, which will allow us, later in the chapter, to examine how mega-novel

picaresques and frame-tales, though often lacking such reader-figuring central characters,

similarly present readers with episodes lacking any apparent point, challenging them to plot out

their mysterious overall structures without having their attention deadened by narrative cruft.

The Line and the Tangle in Mason & Dixon

Let’s return to Zhang’s suggestions about his true identity. The realm of possibilities

Zhang opens up in this passage bear significant implications for how we read the whole book,

because the problem of trying to plot “too many possible stories” figures the novel’s entire

central section. In surveying (i.e., plotting) the territory between Pennsylvania and Maryland,

Mason and Dixon have wild, episodic encounters with settlements stretching into the interior of

the prenatal United States, which, though officially belonging to either the Calverts or Penns, are

ruled ambiguously in practice: what occurs is bound to no particular rules of law and order, nor

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even, as Wood notes, to rationality. As is mentioned several times in the novel, the land exists in

a “subjunctive” state of many possibilities. By structuring the novel’s central section this way,

Pynchon allows himself to incorporate limitless variety, ranging from a castle that functions on

quantum principles (410-435), to an Indian golem supposedly created by one of the lost tribes of

Israel (485), to a garden of enormous produce purportedly left by a race of ancient giants (656-

657)—even though, by the novel’s end, the gradual extension of European settlements and

scientific progress, both furthered by Mason and Dixon’s survey, has necessarily erased many of

these possibilities.

Most critics treat this erosion of possibility as a great loss, often citing Cherrycoke’s

suggestion that the survey’s very linearity corrupts America, altering the land “from subjunctive

to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments” (345).

As Francis Collado Rodriguez argues, “in Mason & Dixon the term line is frequently used to

suggest its pernicious and finally useless condition. Lines are continuously trespassed not only

in the main story but, as we have seen, also between narratorial voices and different narrative

levels” (75). Similarly, many critics endorse Zhang’s claim that the Mason-Dixon Line does

violence upon the authentic spiritual power expressed by the land’s jagged natural boundaries:

Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,— coast-lines, ridge-tops,

river-banks,—so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape

ever takes its form. To make a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the

Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who

live out here the year ‘round to see as other than hateful Assault. (542; see

Thomas 36)

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Consequently, then, many believe the Pynchon’s circumfabulating redeems the surveyors’ work

by retangling the border territory. “If surveying is conceived as a process of codifying the

landscape,” David Seed, for instance, writes, “Pynchon’s novel subverts its apparently

straightforward representational purpose by proliferating signs and signifying systems” (96).

At the same time, however, as Zofia Kolbuszewska notes, “the subjunctive offers not

only utopian possibilities but also demonic ones” (205),

and we must observe that the more

nonlinear plot possibilities the novel encompasses, the more it tends toward nonsense. After all,

Zhang, the guru of subjunctivism, becomes “dement[ed]” and “oblivious” by the book’s

conclusion (630),

and Mason and Dixon are at times vulnerable to that fate as well. For

instance, midway through their commission, Dixon postulates that “something invisible’s going

on” and that the pair are “being us’d” to profit vested capitalist interests, to which Mason

responds with these baroque speculations:

If it were all true, — ev’ry unkind suspicion, ev’ry phantastickal rendering, —

would we, knowing all, nonetheless go on? Do what’s clearly our Duty? [… ]

Then as we’ve no choice, I may speak freely and share with you some of my

darker sentiments. Suppose Maskelyne’s a French Spy. Suppose a secret force of

Jesuits, receives each Day a summary of Observations made at Greenwich, and

transcalculates it according to a system known to the Kabbalists of the Second

Century as Gematria, whereby Messages may be extracted from lines of Text

sacred and otherwise, a Knowledge preserv’d by various Custodians over the

centuries, and since the Last, possess’d by Jesuit and Freemason alike. The

Dispute over Bradley’s Obs, then, as over Flamsteed’s before him, would keep

ever as their unspoken intention that the Numbers nocturnally obtain’d be set side

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by side, and arrang’d into Lines, like those of a Text, manipulated till a Message

be reveal’d. (478-479)

Like Zhang’s hypotheses, none of these paranoid allegations is ever corroborated elsewhere: they

are, in Mason’s words, “Drivel, of course” (479) (see also Ch. 5). However, their sheer

abundance has a paralyzing impact, as not only is the plot Mason puts forward too convoluted to

which to adequately respond, its implicit suggestion of infinite other ifs evacuates all of meaning.

If plotting is integral to the maintenance of self, such tangles are not only incomprehensible

themselves but erode Mason and Dixon’s identities in contemplating them, which is likely why

the pair ask several times some version of the multivalent question, “What are we about?” (253).

If such moments demonstrate why perpetual subjunctivity is generally not a good thing,

perhaps they might also suggest the benefits of linearity. After all, the Mason-Dixon Line

represents not merely the destruction of natural potential, but the creation of connections

between that which was previously incommensurable: while the parallel may divide North from

South, creating the division that would later engender the Civil War (Greiner 81), it also unites

East and West (Huehls 34-35), bringing realms as diverse as Philadelphia’s coffee houses,

outlying colonial farms, and independent settlements into a sense of shared community.

When

Mason and Dixon begin moving West, the territory is defined by the lawless, violently anti-

Indian Paxton gang that kills wantonly and without check (304); by the end of their survey, one

can see the beginnings of something “already, unmistakably, American” (see 570-571).

Samuel Cohen notes, “lines are not simply to be condemned,” because they allow “[t]he

possibility of connection across difference” (280). Just as measuring the parallax in the Transit

of Venus brings together scientists “all over the World all day long that fifth and sixth of June, in

Latin, in Chinese, in Polish, in Silence,—upon Roof-Tops and Mountain Peaks, out of Bed-

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chamber windows, close together in the naked sunlight” (97), watching different communities

become drawn together by the Mason-Dixon Line is among the book’s greatest pleasures. This

requires, however, fidelity to the surveyors’ precise calculation of what does and does not belong

on the Line. The multiplicities of “all that may yet be true” must be diminished when

possibilities are converted to reality, but the ranks of the realized will remain forever empty if

one does not eliminate nonsensical or incompatible possibilities: one cannot subjunctively have

one’s cake while indicatively eating it, too.

What to make, then, of all the quirky, digressive episodes and shadow stories encountered

along the way? Are they beneficial for allowing us to imagine alternate worlds, or merely cruft

that threatens the maintenance of consciousness? Interestingly, many of Wood’s examples share

a certain indeterminate value for the characters, because as the Line progresses they become

partly “disnarrated,” Gerald Prince’s term for when events “do not happen, but, nonetheless, are

referred to” (2). For instance, Mason implicitly begins to doubt the existence of Chapter 3’s

talking Learnèd English Dog when a similar-looking Norwich Terrier refuses to speak to him

later (644), while the French chef Armand Allègre loses faith in his miraculously animated

mechanical duck, who spends so much time invisibly flying into the western frontier as to fade

into myth (666-669). To plot one’s experiences into a narrative that can sustain consciousness,

after all, requires coherence between them, and since the advance of the Age of Reason is finally

not compatible with talking dogs and flying robotic ducks, these stories must eventually be

erased. However, because the world’s ideas about what may and may not be resolved into a

scientific worldview are being so massively revised during the time the novel is set, this is not

immediately clear: after all, Prof. Voam’s electric eel Felipe, at first, appears every bit as

supernaturally marvelous to Mason and Dixon as does Allègre’s duck.

How to decide what

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may be plotted cogently and what must be cast away as nonsense, then, vexes the surveyors to

the ends of their lives, with Dixon maintaining a heterotopic but somewhat incoherent

perspective in which scientific calculations can coexist with incompatible theories about hollow-

earth underground civilizations (739-741) and Mason dying while attempting to devise “a great

single Engine, the size of a Continent” that will plot all the wonders of existence without

contradiction (772).

Similar decisions must be made by the audiences for Mason and Dixon’s narrative, which

includes not only Mason & Dixon’s readers but also Cherrycoke’s audience and even

Cherrycoke himself. The stories may seem equally amusing and preposterous as they happen,

but they accrete meaning differently: some become indispensable to characters within the

narrative (and to readers outside it), while others are easily disposed. Which of the novel’s many

fanciful-sounding stories have resonance for America’s future, like Mr. Everybeet’s search for

the semi-mystical Oölite ore that will later be mined for munitions (547)? Which end up being

nonsense but attract motivating emotional interest nonetheless, like Allègre’s duck (371-381)?

Which are merely gratuitous, like the Scandanavian ax-man Stig’s yarn about a nation of albinos

living north of Sweden (612-613)? The answers only become clear after we have progressed

through the whole novel, by which time these possibilities must be whittled down from all those

that may be imagined to all those that may be held together in a plot. Even the subjunctivist

Cherrycoke realizes this principle upon reviewing for his audience his Day-Book speculations

regarding the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta. Though he had imagined for himself in detail

the various difficult ways one might survive such an experience, as “one might either transcend it

spiritually, or eroticize it carnally,” his elaborations are abruptly interrupted by the narrator’s

parenthetical disnarration, “(Tho’ he does not of course read any of this aloud,— choosing rather

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to skim ahead to the Moral.)” (152-153). Some possibilities, after all, whether because they are

too painful or too perverse, are simply cannot be considered for long by a sane mind.

Yet imagining counterfactual possibilities is often all that propels consciousness onward,

as may be best seen in the ambiguous coda to the novel’s climax. Upon returning east, Mason

and Dixon may have become convinced that, due to the Line’s conduciveness to colonization, it

is a “conduit for Evil,” (701), but the narrator’s recounting of a “more hopefu[l],” counterfactual

version of their journey in Chapter 73 is somewhat at odds with this view, because instead of

destroying the Line, it imagines its complete extension toward Ohio, the West Coast, and around

the world (706-713). The possibility of new discoveries, after all, is what has always driven not

only the scientific but the social and political mind to venture forward. However, while these

unexamined possibilities might be conceived as coexisting ifs, they can only be pursued as linear

thens—if we followed this path, then we might discover that, etc. That is why this passage,

despite being little more than a collection of nearly arbitrary stories—an encounter with a half-

breed sidekick named Vongolli, a visit with a tribe that worships the newly-discovered planet

Uranus, etc.—is so touching and yet so melancholy. Necessarily propelled by Mason and

Dixon’s desire to keep discovering more of that which may exist, the Line must eventually run

out of space, all possibilities finally validated or excised. The pair’s minds have linearly

resolved all they have encountered, but there is nowhere else for them to proceed. That is why

all that is left, in this alternate plotline, for Mason and Dixon is to retire as mid-Atlantic

ferrymen, unable to settle upon exactly where in such a various and yet fully-mapped world they

belong, but they know that they have no choice but to try to determine the answer by navigating

upon their line.

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The Useless Room: The Frame-Tale and Life A User’s Manual

Hopefully, this illustrates plotting’s stakes for the conscious self, especially regarding

how it must deal with cruft. We may now move our focus to the mega-novel picaresque and

frame-tale, which can experiment with cruft significantly more than can the circumfabulation.

After all, since these genres derive some narrative stability from their respective cornice and

chronology, they are able to remove their central narrative voice without falling below the

threshold of narratability.

However, in doing so, the point of the narrative may frequently

vanish, causing certain episodes to appear excessive. Consequently, readers encounter numerous

mini- or pseudo-narratives that seem to require plotting but are too bizarre or disjointed to allow

it. Such episodes recall Brooks’s famous claim that in all narrative, the reader plays the role of

detective, deducing fabula from the clues within sžujet (23-29), as these mega-novels implicitly

ask readers to puzzle out whether these stories may be plotted at all. The mega-novel reader,

then, must learn to sort out the plottable events from those that suggest either too few or too

many possible plots to be understood.

The frame-tale mega-novel might be well exemplified by Georges Perec’s Oulipo

masterpiece Life A User’s Manual.

As with the frame-tales of Boccaccio and his imitators,

which are not labeled as singular works but as groups of “novellas,” Perec’s book is subtitled

Romans (“novels”) rather than Roman (“a novel”) (Burgelin 173-174). Also like the

Decameron, Life A User’s Manual is programmatically divided into a ten-by-ten structure,

though where Boccaccio gave each of ten storytellers ten days in which to spin a fiction, Perec

creates a ten-story apartment building at 11 Rue Simon Crubellier with ten rooms on each floor

(counting the staircase as two), each of which is the focus of one’s chapter’s story. As if to

further establish its debt to the tradition of Shahrazad, the book’s voluminous index

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alphabetically labels the book’s stories as if they were entries in Thousand and One Nights (e.g.

“The Puzzle-Maker’s Tale,” “The Tale of the Actor who faked his own death”) (649-653), and

like that work, the actual number of chapters just misses a round decimal number: since Perec

intentionally skips the left-most room of the cellar, only ninety-nine rooms are the subjects of

stories.

However, unlike in the classic frame-tales, Life A User’s Manual has no explicit,

dramatized storyteller whose personal situation gives the tales a point, so consequently, the

book’s only cornice is the literal one atop the building. There is a narrator of a sort,

but we learn

little about him directly (see Magné, Perecollages 63-98) except through the Preamble, a sly

three-page essay on the relationship between the makers and solvers of jigsaw puzzles. The

narrator hints at his purposes by noting that “despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary

game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before” (xviii), and we might

infer that if constructing a book like Life A User’s Manual is like creating a jigsaw puzzle, the

narrator’s motivation may be his desire for this intimate relationship. Such an urge, however, is

less clearly purposeful than that expressed by either Shahrazad or Boccaccio’s aristocrats: at a

given moment, after all, the puzzle-maker’s intentions might be loving or hostile, cooperative or

antagonistic, evident or ambiguous. In fact, the Preamble notes that the puzzle-maker’s guidance

to the puzzler must be interspersed with “falsified elements, carrying false information,” perhaps

in the form of pieces that appear to fit in one part of the puzzle but belong somewhere else

entirely (xvii-xviii). When we add that the satisfying closure achieved by a puzzle’s completion

is far neater and more exact than the resolution of even the tidiest fiction,

it should be clear

how Life A User’s Manual’s stories have the potential to generate cruft.

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Chapter 4, describing the outer room of the fourth-floor-right apartment, is a good early

example of this phenomenon. In later chapters, we learn that this flat is inhabited by the record

producers Caroline and Phillipe Marquiseaux, who have inherited it only after the death of the

former’s miserable mother and who are currently having sex in the inner room’s shower while

two musicians await them in the middle room (152-155, 205-209). Chapter 4 tells us nothing

about any of this, though. Instead, it merely comprises—

An empty drawing room on the fourth floor right.

On the floor there is a woven sisal mat, its strands entwined in such a way

as to form star-shaped designs.

On the wall, an imitation of Jouy cretonne wallpaper depicts big sailing

ships, Portuguese four-masters, armed with cannon and culverins, making ready

to put into a harbour; the headsails and spankers billow in the wind; sailors have

climbed up the rigging to clew up the others.

There are four paintings on the wall.

—followed by descriptions of the paintings (a still life, a cityscape, a mythic beast, and an

English narrative painting) (15-18). As with many similar descriptions in the book, they have

little apparent connection to the rest of the narrative. Given the book’s all-but-explicit self-

identification as a frame-tale, not to mention the frequent critical valorization of the novel’s

richness of storytelling (see Schwartz 98), this chapter’s has puzzlingly low narrativity. Similar

chapters occur throughout the book, notably including the scenes on the staircase, such as

Chapter 68’s list of things dropped there over the years (369-371), which Myoung-Sook Kim has

termed narrative “black holes” (59-64). As a result, no less a lover of baroque frame-tales than

Barth wondered whether the whole thing was an indulgent exercise in style (Final 116). As one

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initial reviewer complained, “by withdrawing himself from his creation, has the creator not left it

empty?” (qtd. in Bellos 647).

The enigma posed by these useless rooms becomes especially important when we

consider that uselessness is itself central to the novel’s most prominent storyline, about the

building’s British millionaire Percival Bartlebooth.

Even more than the narrator, Bartlebooth

lacks clear motivation: unlike the heroes of most frame-tales, he is not under any spatial

restriction, because he has inherited an enormous fortune from his great-uncle James Sherwood

that not only satisfies all his material needs but allows him to travel anywhere he likes. Though

for Bouvard and Pécuchet such a windfall meant an opportunity to retire to the country,

Bartlebooth finds he needs something more substantial, and yet less purposeful, to motivate him.

“[I]n the face of the inextricable incoherence of things,” the narrator tells us, “Bartlebooth

resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily

constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion” (133), one which would be

“useless […] a series of events which when concatenated would nullify each other” (134). This

program develops into is a fifty-year plan involving several of the building’s other residents, in

which Bartlebooth spends the first ten learning to paint watercolors with Serge Valène; the next

twenty painting five hundred seascapes in locations around the world, which are sent to puzzle-

maker Gaspard Winckler to be converted into jigsaws; and the last twenty reassembling the

puzzles in his apartment, after which they are chemically restored and sent back to their place of

composition to be dissolved. Lacking intrinsic purpose, in other words, Bartlebooth decides to

plot the rest of his life so that each of his actions is directly negated by another, rendering his

entire existence useless.

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Ironically, the relationships Bartlebooth forms with those whom he has enlisted in his

scheme, most obviously Winckler, end up motivating many of the book’s tales. As Paul

Schwartz points out, “the gratuitous perfection envisioned by Bartlebooth” is not possible in “a

universe obsessed with traces” (87). However, the questions about uselessness he raises become

more interesting when considered in light of those chapters, like the one about Marquiseaux’

outer drawing room, whose tales have nothing to do with it. How useless must a room be, after

all, when it does not even relate to a plot about uselessness? Such chapters may be Perec’s best

attempt to realize a thought experiment he posed in his reflective essay Espèces d’éspaces about

the possibility of a truly useless room—not a spare room, a junk room, or an all-purpose room,

but one with absolutely no purpose at all. He imagines many rooms that asymptotically

approach this condition, like “a room reserved to listening to Haydn’s Symphony Number 8 in C

[…], another devoted to reading the barometer or to cleaning my right big toe […] a room

without either doors or windows” and so on, but finds that “Language itself, seemingly, proved

unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful,

and functional” (33-35).

Life A User’s Manual attempts to achieve this goal by generating each room out of an

elaborate Oulipean constraint system. As displayed by the novel’s Cahier des charges, Perec

prepared the book by developing forty-two themed lists of ten elements (e.g., fabrics, colors,

nationalities, furniture, famous authors), from each of which one element would be incorporated

into every chapter. Though Perec rarely managed to include of all his intended constraints, the

strategy still gives much of the book’s narrative a nearly arbitrary quality, which is likely what

provokes the conflicting suggestions from the book’s critics that the novel is devoted to purely

mimetic descriptivism (Motte 68-83) and that its self-conscious construction renders it “an

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emphatically anti-mimetic text” (P. Harris 56). For instance, if we return to the paintings in the

Marquiseaux drawing room, we may see that the fourth is generated almost automatically out of

a score of near-comically disjunctive constraint elements: the painting, a reproduction by the

British painter Forbes, depicts an outlandish 19

-century scene in which a white-leather-

uniformed domestic who is climbing a Chinese-style chair accidentally smashes an alabaster

jeweled egg (one he had spent much time repairing) that is owned by his mistress, an old lady,

with whom he had developed a late-life romance (à la Philemon and Baucis), believing it to be a

rat hidden behind the muslin curtain (alluding to Hamlet).

This capricious construction not only makes some chapters appear pointless, but makes it

difficult to plot larger narratives between chapters. While the flats of any urban apartment

building often might as well be on different planets for all that their inhabitants have to do with

each other, in Life a User’s Manual, even chapters set in different rooms of the same apartment

sometimes have no apparent connection. This is furthered by the “Knight’s Tour” structure

Perec planned for the novel, in which the chapters are not sequenced by the flats’ horizontal or

vertical order in the building but by how a knight chess-piece would visit each in turn, constantly

breaking readers’ attention on what is going on in each apartment and obscuring how its rooms

might be related. For instance, the apartment directly below the Marquiseaux’—justly labeled a

“ghost flat” (525), since no one has ever seen its purported owner, M. Foureau (15)—is

represented by three chapters, respectively the twenty-ninth, ninety-second, and third, which

have no apparent relation to each other. In the outermost room, two unidentified young girls

recover from a party, with most of the chapter devoted to a list of uncleaned junk that tells no

story and seems largely designed to satisfy constraints (e.g., “several odd shoes, a long white

sock, a pair of tights, a top hat, a false nose, cardboard plates in piles,” and so on for two and a

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half pages) (148-151); the middle room contains little besides twenty-one wall engravings

apparently filling a similar purpose (525-527); and the inner room features an unusual scene in

which a Japanese pseudo-guru initiates three victims into an elaborate pyramid scheme called

“The Three Free Men” (12-14), the potential interest of which is largely counterbalanced by its

utter opacity. How these men got into the apartment, whether either the girls or initiates are

related to Foureau, or if any of these people are aware of the others’ presence goes unmentioned.

These chapters decidedly resist plotting.

However, despite such apparently pointless tales as these, it is not quite right to argue, as

Gabriel Josipovici does, that in Life A User’s Manual “time and chance […] emerge with the

force they have in life but which the traditional novel, committed as it is to a metaphysic of

destiny and revelation, is never able to convey” (191). Though the constraint system does give

much of the book the air of chance, many of its other stories are plotted with flourishes so

sensational as to match the most melodramatic novel.

Consider the tragedy of Elizabeth de

Beaumont, who runs away from home, takes a job as an au pair, flees upon accidentally

drowning the child she has been asked to watch (causing his mother to commit suicide), and is

later tracked down and killed by the child’s father, though not until after she has fallen in love

with François Breidel and borne him two daughters—a sequence later reconstructed by the

vengeful husband and then re-reconstructed by Madame de Beaumont’s lawyer Léon Salini

(156-173). Can such a story really be construed as contributing to an anti-teleological narrative?

In fact, one key element of the Bartlebooth plot, the swindle that two con men perform on his

uncle Sherwood, succeeds only because Sherwood believes that the discovery of a valuable

manuscript and the “lucky” sighting of the possessor of a legendary vase by an Massachusetts

workman are related only by “time and chance,” when in fact they have been set up by the

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swindlers (94-109). Life a User’s Manual is a book, after all, that begins by telling us that

Gaspard Winckler “is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not

finished yet” (6) and ends with that devious plot being realized when Bartlebooth dies holding a

single W-shaped piece for an X-shaped hole in one of his final puzzles (565): its plot cannot be

construed as lacking destiny and fate.

What does one make of this set of tales, then, in which some episodes are intricately

plotted, some are autonomous but interesting on their own, and some seem simply useless?

Well, for one, as with much cruft we have discussed, many episodes that at first appear wasteful

end up having some importance. For instance, the painting of the coachman is revealed, sixty-

two chapters later, to have been given to the Marquiseaux as a wedding present by the antique

dealers Clara and Léon Marcia; furthermore, it is suggested that its morbidly Gothic narrative

sheds light upon their attitude toward Caroline Marquiseaux, who had rejected their son David

before marrying Phillipe (366-367). What had seemed a detail expressing life’s randomness,

then, turns out to be relevant to the rest of the narrative: it only appears random because Perec’s

chapter structure challenges his readers’ ability to remember and plot it. This attention-straining

strategy even impacts how we plot together scenes that do not appear individually pointless: for

instance, when we first visit the Réol apartment in Chapter 12, we see a merry middle-class

family cleaning their dining room furniture, forming a sharp contrast to what we hear of the life

the prior working-class tenant, Mme. Hourcade (46-47), a scene that may easily be forgotten by

the time we return in Chapter 98 and learn of the years of financial strain their furniture caused

them (550-560).

Plotting such stories against the grain of the Knight’s Tour structure is made even more

difficult by how so much of the book’s narrative does not have similar hidden significance. For

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instance, none of the Marquiseaux’ other three paintings from Chapter 4 appears to have a

meaningful story behind it the way that A Rat Behind the Arras does, nor do the score of pages of

antique junk housed in the Marcias’ private and shop rooms (116-120, 173-175, 359-367, 393-

395, 518-519). We can try to plot them, but doing so would either be totally fruitless or would

generate so many uncorroborated shadow stories that we would never continue on with the book.

This problem is faced in exemplary form within the novel by Cinoc, the building’s dictionary

employee, who is responsible for pruning from the dictionary those obsolete terms no longer in

use. While mourning the “hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs,

sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures” that he feels responsible for

eliminating, Cinoc decides to restore eight thousand of them in a “dictionary of forgotten words,”

but soon realizes that, no matter how mysteriously alluring they are, these words—“ursuline,”

“loquis,” “ruisson”—only “contain, obscurely, the trace of a story it has now become almost

impossible to hand on” (327-329). Whatever tale might have been behind them once can no

longer be plotted, and so they must be abandoned.

Determining when these “traces” may be expanded into plots and when they cannot, of

course, is not a simple process. As Bernard Magné notes, the most important tool in

distinguishing the cruft from the plottable material, is the Index, which tags and cross-references

the book’s proper names and other key terms so that we may more easily make connections

(“Index” 88). If we wonder during Chapter 4, for instance, whether A Rat Behind the Arras will

be mentioned again, or for that matter cannot recall in Chapter 66 whether it had been previously

mentioned, we need only look up “FORBES (Stanhope Alexander), English painter” in the Index

(593). Just as importantly, the Index can help us decide what stories cannot be plotted: for

instance, of the twenty-seven items listed as having been left on the stairs in Chapter 68, the

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Index only marks further cross-references for one, the empty blueberry tart box from Aux Délices

de Louis XV, which the Index helps us discover was the longtime workplace of Mme. Crespi and

a favorite eatery of Winckler’s (31, 458, 576). Similarly, the Table of Contents and Floor Plan

facilitates connecting stories from the same apartment treated in separate parts of the book, while

the Chronology at the book’s end helps us to create linear temporal narratives out of the

chapters’ constant prolepses and analepses.

The paratexts also help reveal that many parts of the narrative do not fall neatly into

either the categories of pointless cruft or useful plot, prompting us to decide how much attention

we ought to spend trying to plot them. On the one hand, cruft and plottable narrative frequently

appear in close proximity, as in Madame de Beaumont’s cellar, which looks like a mere

collection of broken furniture and discarded papers until we discover the photos establishing the

friendship between Véronique Altamont and Anne and Béatrice Breidel (413-415), which, when

considered alongside their entries in the Index and Chronology, emphasizes the girls’ shared

interest in plotting their family’s genealogies and histories, a key theme running through the

book (202, 495-500; see also Ribaupierre). On the other, the paratexts sometimes suggest weak

shadow stories that we may or may not want to develop. How much attention should we give,

for instance, to the Breidel girls’ speculations on their grandmother’s dressing gown, which bears

the image of a cat and a spade and keys to several cross-references in the Index (199-200)?

Should we, for example, spend any time plotting a connection between Madame de Beaumont’s

professorial lover Arnold Flexner, to whose thrillers about a cat burglar Anne thinks the robe

alludes, and the other Ohio professor to whom the Index directs us, the Nazi chemist Wehsal

(336)? Probably not, but it is a tempting coincidence—one wants to do something with it. That

problem is emblematic of the one faced by all of Life A User’s Manual’s many collectors and

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specialists: we do not lack material with which to work, but are at a loss regarding how to

manage it all. The jigsaw puzzle may be an apt metaphor for the book, but if one were to design

a jigsaw correlate to Life a User’s Manual, it would not look like those available at a store:

instead, such a puzzle would contain a thousand pieces (or thousand and one, perhaps), of which

only two hundred would actually connect, and those pieces that did connect would form not a

rectangle but a starfish, or a giant W, or something even more irregular. To correctly solve the

puzzle would entail not only linking up the pieces that fit, but staying away from those

intriguingly misleading little chards that appear as if they should slide in somewhere but don’t.

Arguing against those who found Life a User’s Manual overstuffed yet empty, Perec’s

fellow Oulipo member Italo Calvino claimed:

Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of

possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer,

his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who

are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information,

books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an

inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled

and reordered in every way conceivable. (124)

Of course, the “unicum of self” and the messy inventory of objects are always in dialectic with

one another, related by the shuffling and reordering process we alternately call consciousness or

plot. Putting more objects into the inventory might give it a greater range of possibilities, but it

may also impede our ability to make a self out of them. This may best be seen in Bartlebooth’s

death, holding a final piece to a puzzle in which it does not quite fit. Winckler has tricked him,

but whether he has done so by supplying Bartlebooth with a piece that cannot be placed or by

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getting him to put the puzzle together the wrong way is not clear (see Bellos 632-635). The

puzzlemaker’s revenge is not only that Bartlebooth can’t fill the hole in his puzzle; more cruelly,

it is that he can never know whether or not he has completed it correctly. If the book’s narrator

is a puzzle-maker and we are his puzzlers, this is an ominous place to be left, as for all our

reader-detective work, it may be impossible to know if our plotting is adequate.

On the Picaresque Road to 2666

In fact, if a mega-novel’s reader plays the role of intrepid detective, then the narrator

must be his nemesis, the master criminal working to obscure the story hiding behind the

narrative. The original literary narrator-criminal, of course, is the pícaro, though precisely for

this reason his narrative is minimally mysterious: since the criminal tells us his actions and

motives so straightforwardly, there is little for readers to puzzle out. Creating a picaresque

mega-novel, then, would necessitate removing the pícaro’s direct presentation of motive and

plot, or indeed removing his narrative voice entirely, perhaps by closely tracing his episodic

actions at a remove, without ever providing an explanation of the immediate purpose motivating

each one. Such a structure might produce substantial cruft, as the pícaro’s desires would remain

constantly distanced and perhaps never be brought to resolution.

This is the approach taken by Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño’s two mega-novels, The

Savage Detectives and 2666. Both deal with the episodic activities of outlaws on society’s

margins, the former addressing the global journeys of “visceral realist” poets Arturo Belano and

Ulises Lima (modeled on Bolaño himself and his friend Mario Santiago) as they flee the

repercussions of a violent encounter with a well-connected pimp in the Sonora Desert, and the

latter centered on hundreds of separate, unsolved murders of women around a border city near

Arizona. That both novels are set principally in late twentieth-century Mexico, where official

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institutions’ practical jurisdiction dissolves quickly into a large periphery of extralegal

economies, contributes to the picaresque atmosphere: as Frederick Monteser notes, the

picaresque thrives in a state whose bureaucratic structure is so non-functioning that there is a

“[s]urplus population, in the sense of human beings to be thrown away as useless” (118).

Perhaps this is why Bolaño’s two mega-novels also feature searches for lost literary figures,

Belano and Lima’s quest for visceral realism’s spiritual godmother Cesàrea Tinajero and several

European professors’ attempt to track the mysterious German novelist Benno von Archimboldi,

as the contemporary world does not seem to have much of a use for them, either.

That lack of purpose contributes to a proliferation of cruft in the novels. Though Javier

Cercas is correct to distinguish Bolaño from some other great Latin American writers by noting

that he “was never a hermetic or difficult author […] busy with autophagic experimentalism,” his

subsequent claim that Bolaño was “a compulsively legible narrator, an immediately cordial,

captivating, and endless storyteller” (qted. in Medina 551-552) is mistaken. As we have

discussed, non-standard prose is not the only text that poses challenges to reading: when large

parts of a text lack apparent purpose, no matter how straightforward their sentences might be,

they can quickly become difficult to focus on. In the central sections of Bolaño’s mega-novels,

we encounter dozens of distinct episodes, but they are narrated only by faceless investigators

seeking something that they never quite find for purposes that they never quite explain while

running into numerous dead ends along the way. In a given episode, it is often difficult to know

precisely what the point is supposed to be, and even in retrospect, it can be either difficult or

impossible to establish the story’s function in the overall novel.

The Savage Detectives’ link to the traditional picaresque is probably the closer of the two,

and as such it generates less cruft.

Its first hundred and forty pages, set in 1975-1976, do have

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a dramatized narrator, Juan García Madero, and though he is a relatively well-off law student

rather than a classic pícaro, his diary entries evoke the picaresque’s chronological,

autobiographical nature, especially when his involvement with the visceral realists brings him

into contact with the Mexico City underworld and eventually causes him to flee from the pimp

Alberto along with Belano, Lima, and a prostitute named Lupe. However, this relatively

conventional plot cuts off as soon as the visceral realists drive to the desert in their Chevy

Impala. The ensuing four hundred pages track them not through a chronological narrative but

instead present interviews conducted by unnamed detectives over the following twenty years

with Belano and Lima’s friends and associates. As such, though most passages recount episodes

in Belano and Lima’s travels on society’s margins, they only do so at a distance: the subjects

describe occasional encounters with the pair without being able to regularly pinpoint their

whereabouts or understand their motivations, sometimes making the episodes seem aimless.

Some, like English student Mary Watson’s story of her hitchhiking trip through France, meander

for many pages before eventually discovering Belano or Lima (253-269), and others don’t

involve Belano or Lima at all, but only figures peripheral to their circle, as with Luis Sebastián

Rosado’s stories about the tribulations of minor visceral realist Luscious Skin (see 173-177, 287-

291, 366-373, 384-386).

As the interviews proceed almost entirely along chronological lines,

and as Belano and Lima’s long-term trajectories frequently become no clearer as a result of

them, the novel can sometimes evoke Wellek and Warren’s denigration of the picaresque as

merely an arbitrary “this happened and then that.”

However, the episodes rarely descend entirely into cruft. Though their functions in the

larger plot are sometimes tenuous, each of the interviews does, eventually, connect back to the

visceral realists’ philosophic quest. They are aided in doing so by the one exception to the

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interviews’ chronological arrangement, the account of Amadeo Salvatierra, which is also the

only interview spread out over the entire middle section rather than recounted in its entirety at

once. Conducted in January 1976, prior to the showdown with Alberto finally recounted at the

novel’s end, Salvatierra’s narrative both begins and ends the novel’s second part. In defying the

otherwise linear chronology, the interview’s topic—Belano and Lima’s search for Cesàrea

Tinajero—is suggested as the key to all that spirals around it and helps suggest the point of the

pair’s otherwise aimless wanderings, the lack of fulfillment in their quest for poetic truth and a

larger meaning to their generally marginal existence.

2666, though, takes this approach further, employing episodes so disconnected as to

appear entirely pointless. This is especially true of its middle third, “The Part About the

Crimes,” based on the notorious wave of “femicides” over the past two decades in Ciudad

Juárez, Mexico. According to Daniel Zalewski, this section “may be the grimmest sequence in

contemporary fiction,” because it provides a “sickeningly comprehensive account of the killings,

written in the frigid tone of a forensic report” (88): 110 narratives, presented one by one, of

female corpses discovered between 1993 and 1997 in the fictionalized border city of Santa

Teresa. Their grimness may come less from the detached tone or forensic detail, grisly though

its litany of crushed hyoids and vaginal bruising may be, than by the scenes’ sheer obtuseness to

plotting. The description of the last murder, presented here in its entirety, might exemplify why:

The last case of 1997 was fairly similar to the second to last, except that the bag

containing the body wasn’t found on the western edge of the city but on the

eastern edge, by the dirt road that runs along the border and then forks and

vanishes when it reaches the first mountains and steep passes. The victim,

according to the medical examiners, had been dead for a long time. She was

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about eighteen, five foot two and a half or three. She was naked, but a pair of

good-quality leather high heels were found in the bag, which led the police to

think she might be a whore. Some white thong panties were also found. Both this

case and the previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted

investigations. (632-633)

As the final sentence implies, we discover nothing more about this body, just as with dozens of

other corpses described in almost identical fashion. Though some murders have a little more

detail than this one—the victim’s name, say—for the most part, their information is little more

than differing permutations of physical attributes, crime scene locations, and causes of death,

signifying nothing. In seventy-seven cases, there is not even a chief suspect. While some do

spin out into more capacious individual narratives, whether because the police manage to solve

them (as with the case of Erica Mendoza) (509-512), or simply because they put in more effort

(as with the headline-grabbing dual kidnapping of Estefanía Rivas and Hermina Noriega) (527-

534), most of these accumulations of pointless facts cannot be plotted.

The summaries cannot even be imbued with clear purpose by being grouped under the

larger rubric of “the Santa Teresa murders.” From the very first murder, the narrator admits that

the list has no real criteria other than pure chronology. Regarding the “first” victim, Esperanza

Gómez Saldaña, we are told “Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the

first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women

who died in 1992. Other girls and women who didn’t make it onto the list or were never found”

(353). In other words, the section title “The Part About the Crimes” is misleading, because it

implies the murders it lists are a coherently-linked group of killings, when in fact the section

simply records every violent female death discovered between 1993 and 1997. The start date

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could easily have been moved back a year, or for that matter forward to 1995, when the murder

rate doubles (i.e., there are twenty-eight deaths described in 1993-1994 and about twenty-eight

per year in 1995-1997). It also likely misses many bodies never discovered, as highlighted by

the case of Kelly Rivera Parker discussed by reporter Sergio Gonzalez and congresswoman

Azucena Esquivel Plata toward the section’s end, while also including several that clearly have

nothing to do with the others, as with the eccentric La Vaca, who starts a fist-fight with her two

best male friends when they interrupt her movie and is accidentally killed in the process (417-

419). This is not to mention the unresolved affair of the “Demon Penitent,” a man who visits

several churches to urinate upon their sacred objects and occasionally attack their inhabitants

(361-372), apparently unrelated to the killings but nonetheless recounted along with them. As

only thirteen cases are successfully brought to conclusion by the police,

and as these have so

little to do with each other that they provide little insight into the remaining ninety-seven, it can

be almost impossible to see what purpose each new, repetitive murder bears.

One might speculate that the episodes’ disconnectedness is unintentionally exacerbated

by the fact that Bolaño was unable to finish the novel prior to his death, but the book’s editor,

Ignacio Echevarría, insists that “the novel as it was left at Bolaño’s death is very nearly what he

intended it to be. […N]ot just the foundations but the whole edifice of the novel had already

been raised” (2666 895). In other words, there is no missing, unwritten resolution, à la Charles

Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, that would have explained everything. One might also

suggest that, due to the historical Mexican authorities’ lack of progress in solving the killings

upon which the section is based, the narrative could not have been made any easier to plot, but

the lack of a real solution to a historical mystery has rarely hampered authors from positing one

in fiction: for instance, one of Bolaño’s favorite American writers, Edgar Allan Poe, offered a

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solution to his era’s unsolved Mary Rogers murder in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and indeed

there seems to be an entire subgenre of popular fiction based on the Juárez killings that generally

lacks the indeterminacy of 2666. The individual murders’ strung-out parataxis, in other words,

appears to be a deliberate literary choice by Bolaño.

Critics’ preferred method to render these episodes legible to plotting, of course, has been

to attribute them to large-scale societal factors rather than surreptitious individual actors. Sharae

Deckard exemplifies this view by claiming, “Bolaño replaces the political violence of the

dictator novel with the systemic violence of millennial capitalism, staging the femicides and

narcoviolence attendant on structural adjustment in post- NAFTA Mexico in relation to the

ascendancy of neoliberal capital after the fascist and Stalinist political cultures of World War II”

(354). That several of the victims are found in dumps or trash cans literalizes how their deaths

might be viewed as industrial byproducts. While the shifting global economy obviously plays

some role in the murders, however, to refer to the crimes as “the maquiladora murders,” as Grant

Farred does (694), is misleading. Not only are just twenty-seven of the victims current or former

factory works, and only nineteen others even linked to the maquiladoras in any way, in several of

the cases about which we know most, neoliberalism is clearly not the problem. For instance,

fifty-year-old Felicidad Jiménez Jiménez does not seem to be a victim of global capitalism—

even though she is a maquiladora worker—because her killer appears to have been her mentally

disturbed son Ernesto and his motivations no more complicated than the usual domestic ones we

might find in any culture (392-393).

Similarly, while a misogynist “climate of impunity” regarding violence against women

certainly contributes to the killings as well, as is argued by many of the novel’s female characters

(see 607), this is not an adequate explanation either. Granted, as Yolanda Palacio, the only

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member of Santa Teresa’s Department of Sex Crimes, notes, ten women are raped every day in

the city, and her division receives little support from the rest of the department (563), whose

male members seem to spend much of their time sharing uncreative misogynist jokes (552-553).

However, even Palacio admits that the murders have only raised the male-female murder victim

ratio from 10:1 to 10:4 (563): in other words, while the aforementioned 110 women listed in

“The Part About the Crimes” are being killed, a further 275 men have also suffered violent

deaths, yet receive little mention. In fact, the narrator comments that, in early 1997, “the city got

a break” because there were no violent deaths of women, only of men, which was “to be

expected”: “people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic

deaths, deaths from the real of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn’t scare anybody” (540).

If attacks on women have become disturbingly routine, it only underlines how long this had been

true for Santa Teresa’s men.

The flaws in these large-scale societal explanations illustrate the challenges to plotting

that this section poses. On the one hand, in hopes of responding to the killings as whole, they

overstate their own explanatory power, clearly attributing the wrong cause to a number of deaths.

On the other, their emphasis on cultural and ideological factors ignores evidence pointing to a

group of persons committing a significant percentage of the murders. One must not get carried

away with this idea, as the police do when, infatuated with the modus operandi of Hollywood

serial killer films, they decide the key to all the murders is the “signature” breast mutilation that

has occurred by then in only three cases (470-471). To attribute the deaths to a single twisted

psychopath might reassuringly absolve the city of larger social responsibility, but, as becomes

clear every time the police awkwardly try to pin additional murders on the suspects they arrest,

many separate actors are responsible for the killings. However, the similar methods of death and

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disposal among many of the killings, not to mention the frequent presence of mysterious black

sedans, suggest that some subset might well be committed by one or several of the city’s

powerful criminal organizations, consciously taking advantage of elements within Santa Teresa’s

culture that allow them to get away with murder.

How could we actually plot out the causes of these crimes, though, when so many of the

narratives tell us only meaningless details? Perhaps, as Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin notes in

analyzing the Roget case, “a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly

irrelevant. […] The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral,

or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and valuable

discoveries” (752). Of course, we ignore this “collateral” material most of the time because it

usually is irrelevant, and so vastly out-masses useful information as to make devoting any

attention to it cognitively prohibitive. That approach, however, will often lead us to arbitrarily

focus on the handful of attention-catching murders that settle most easily into our working

memory, which may not be representative of the aggregate problems in Santa Teresa. What this

situation may call for, instead, is to abandon close reading and to practice a more distant and

shallow form of processing so that we might mine the passages for certain types of details useful

to plotting the crimes as a whole.

We are not guaranteed clear results from such an analysis,

but given our minds’ inability to simultaneously process dozens of distinct narratives at once, it

is, I believe, a substantially better way to orient our attention for this part of the novel.

What does the data tell us? First, that all but three of the victims are girls or women past

puberty and under the age of thirty-five, with twenty-five being sixteen or younger. Second,

most of these inhabit a vulnerable societal position: of the seventy-three identified bodies, thirty-

nine have low-wage hourly jobs and six more are sex workers. Third, except for the two

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murders committed in public, there are no independent witnesses to any of the murders, and

except for ten found in their homes, the bodies are dumped in public but secluded areas, most

often by the side of a road (twenty-nine) or in an industrial or waste area (sixteen). Fourth, at

least forty-eight victims show signs of rape, and six victims’ are breasts mutilated in a consistent

pattern. Fifth, though the causes of death are sometimes ambiguous, thirty-nine appear to have

been strangled, thirty-three stabbed, fifteen shot, and seven beaten, with the strangling and

stabbing victims several times more likely to have been raped than the others. Lastly, ten cases

report sightings of expensive and otherwise mysterious black sedans near the last place the

victims were seen.

These details are not much to go upon; in many cases, in fact, they tell us almost nothing.

Based upon them, however, I believe we can make a few modest but specific conclusions. The

deaths fall into roughly seven groups. Group 1 contains four deaths that are clearly not part of

any larger pattern of deliberate violence toward women: La Vaca, Jiménez, Perla Beatriz

Ochoterena (who hangs herself, albeit possibly in response to the killings), and Esther Perea

Peña (who is shot accidentally). Group 2 contains five deaths that may be related to various

underworld activities but diverge from the others in key respects, including the method of death

and the demographic of the victims: reporter Isabel Urrea (shot while getting into her car), Sofia

Serrano (overdosed on cocaine in a hotel), nightclub owner Marisol Camarena (dropped in a vat

of acid), and the drug-running Reynolds sisters (shot near Pueblo Azul). Group 3 includes

twelve domestic disputes that, though they might be related to an atmosphere of misogynist

violence, appear isolated otherwise. These three groups seem largely independent of the other

murders, except in the broadest sense, and if we add to their twenty-one deaths some of the nine

cases in which evidence is so sparse that even whether the body was murdered is not clear (we’ll

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call this Group 0), we end up with a figure approximating the twenty-seven violent female deaths

that Palacio implies would have been typical in a five-year period for Santa Teresa prior to the

crime wave.

Though the remaining eighty cases may be divided into three more groups, each is

grounded in an overall set of shared characteristics. Generally, they involve the corpse of a

socially-vulnerable young woman, found either strangled or stabbed to death, usually in a partly-

obscured public area, with her body bearing signs of sexual abuse. Group 4 contains thirteen

cases, which share some characteristics of the larger wave of murder-rapes but go against them

in others; for instance, the lab reports may be confident that the woman had definitely not been

sexually abused. Group 5 comprises twenty-six killings that, according the narrator’s summary

of the official reports, share most key characteristics of the larger pattern, but lack (for reasons

we will discuss in a moment) confirmation of some others. Finally, Group 6 contains forty-one

murders, each of which bears all the killings’ common characteristics. Given the close match

between the total number of these murders comprising Groups 4-6 and the increase in violent

deaths during the period in question, it is primarily here that we probably ought to look for the

influence of larger societal forces; tellingly, too, these groups also contain all ten sightings of the

ominous black sedans. Furthermore, it is particularly in Groups 5 and 6 that we we ought to look

for the work of a specific organization of actors perpetrating a particular kind of murder-rape

among at-risk young women, given the similarity of the crimes.

These conclusions are obviously not iron-clad, especially as my categories are entirely

dependent upon information supplied by a dozen different investigators who, despite the

narrator’s uniform tone in summarizing their accounts, have wildly different approaches to and

competence at police work. Unlike the unified vision provided by the classic picaresque, or even

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the unnamed investigators of The Savage Detectives’ middle section, the differences in Santa

Teresa’s detectives has a significant impact on the way we can process the murders. Though this

is never explicitly stated in the text, distant reading makes clear that the better the investigator

assigned to the case, the more plottable is the evidence is produced by it. For instance, Epifanio

Galindo, among the police force’s most effective and least corrupt members, manages to collect

and put together enough evidence to successfully close several cases, though his zeal to plot

connections out of his leads him to some unsound conclusions, as when he wrongly pins several

unsolved murders on Klaus Haas. Other investigators range in ability from the talented Juan de

Dios Martínez to the inept Ángel Fernández and José Marquez, the former of whose case reports

often fail to recount vital evidence and the latter of whom rarely even manages to bring in a

suspect. Consequently, the cases investigated by the better detectives are more likely to fit into

Group 1 or 3 (most of which are solved), implying that some number of the Group 4-6 murders

(almost none of which are solved) might be classified elsewhere were their investigators more

adept at their jobs. In other words, we should not assume limited evidence implies a shadowy

conspiracy especially skilled in covering its tracks: some of the Group 6 deaths might easily be

mundane killings that, due to chance or incompetence, simply produced few traces. Alternately,

some of the Group 3 cases might’ve been wrongly closed to protect the criminal acquaintances

of corrupt officials.

However, even if this process only takes us so far, its insights do a better job plotting the

otherwise impenetrable morass than most methods, including those pursued by the book’s

characters. The murders themselves, after all, are not the only source of cruft in the novel: at

least as much is generated by characters’ failed investigations, which is entirely understandable

given how disparate are the killing and, consequently, the extent to which they resist easy pattern

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recognition in working memory. Even as good an officer as Martínez gets caught up in nonsense

theories not worth either his or our attention sometimes, as when he wonders at length about a

victim’s discarded clothes: “[It was a]s if the killers had removed the victim’s pants before

tossing her in the bushes. Or as if they had brought her up there naked, with her pants in a bag,

and later discarded the pants a few yards from the body. The truth is, none of it made sense”

(595). The TV seer Florita Almada, meanwhile, attracts the attention of Santa Teresa’s citizens

with claims that she has had visions of the murders, but her rambling television addresses

(always quoted at great length) provide even less insight, as they mostly comprise oddball

dietary advice and mystic treacle like this:

[…] The consumption of vegetable fiber, even though it doesn’t provide us with

usable energy-producing elements, is beneficial. When it isn’t absorbed, the fiber

causes the bolus, in its passage through the digestive tract, to retain its volume.

And that causes pressure to be generated inside the intestine, which stimulates

intestinal activity, assuring the easy passage of waste through the whole digestive

tract. Diarrhea is hardly ever a good thing, but going to the bathroom once or

twice a day brings serenity and balance, a kind of inner peace. Not great inner

peace, why exaggerate, but a small and shining inner peace. What a different

between vegetable fiber and iron and what they represent! Vegetable fiber is the

food of herbivores and it’s small and provides us not with nourishment but with

peace the size of a jumping bean. Iron, in contrast, represents harshness in our

treatment of others and ourselves, harshness in its most extreme form. […] (457)

Even the lengthy retracings made late in this section by the renowned American criminologist

Albert Kessler, though set up to produce expectations of some resolution, end up going nowhere

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(see 605-606). That also appears, at first, to be the fate of Harry Magaña, arrived from

Huntsville, Arizona to investigate the death of American Lucy Anne Sander, who follows his

few leads in circles around Mexico for several pages without getting results, though this apparent

pointlessness comes to an end when he stumbles onto the last person to see Sander attempting to

dispose of a body, at which point he is surrounded by other men and likely killed (438-449). His

narrative suddenly appears to be more meaningful than Kessler’s or Almada’s, but it is promptly

cut off before it can help us connect the plot together.

These attempts fail because the characters try to close-read cruft that, like the words of

Cinoc’s dictionary, only suggests the barest traces of plot. Without skimming over them and

undertaking the kind of plotting I have described, it is almost impossible to define and address

the problems faced in Santa Teresa, which are so dire not because there is an all-powerful

criminal conspiracy controlling life and death but because there does not seem to be one—or,

rather, because there is a complex network of agents behind the crimes, which may include

several moderately-powerful (but not all-encompassing) criminal groups but are probably not

exhausted by them. Some number of the killings may be deliberate serial murder-rapes

perpetrated by one or more of Santa Teresa’s several criminal organizations; others are likely just

byproducts of the city’s abundance of organized crime, whose success in the city is likely abetted

by the socioeconomic changes globalization has brought to the border area; a number are

probably localizable incidents, though encouraged by recent cultural changes in the city and the

overall sense of police incompetence; and some are simply the violence that our species

perpetrates upon itself everywhere it settles.

This cannot really be a solution to the crimes, of course, but still, I believe this plot better

accounts for the stories behind the narrative than any otherwise produced by the police, the

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protestors, or the book’s critics. What the cruft in “The Part About the Crimes” ought to remind

us, then, is that large-scale social phenomena are always composed of small-scale individual

events, and that while we must consider large-scale causes when addressing large-scale

problems, many of the constituent events defy obvious plotting in terms of those large-scale

causes.

In fact, sometimes they defy explanation entirely, but their frequent mysteriousness

cannot stop us from attempting to explain them, because sometimes they are less opaque than

they may at first appear. To adequately respond to any socio-political trends of this magnitude,

then, requires a mode of cognition capable of addressing them at a resolution less zoomed-in

than that which their individual narratives’ affective nature will tend to invite.

As may be implied by the convergence of characters from around the world on Santa

Teresa in the novel’s other parts—the European literary critics, the American journalist Oscar

Fate, and Archimboldi—Santa Teresa condition’s is increasingly characteristic of the

contemporary world, less because it is especially violent (global violence, after all, continues to

trend historically downward) than because it presents us with an enormous amount of narrative

that resists straightforward processing. All of these characters, after all, encounter a tangled

mess in Santa Teresa out of which they need to extricate themselves, despite the general

impenetrability of their situations: Fate, for instance, must navigate himself and his

acquaintances Guadalupe Roncal and Rosa Amalfitano (daughter of the literary critics’

professorial liaison Professor Amalfitano) away from the seemingly omnipresent gangsters with

which his work covering a boxing match has brought him into contact, while Archimboldi,

existentially unmoored since his participation in the German army during World War II, has

come hoping to break through his nephew Haas’s inextricably labyrinthine legal limbo. The

totality of these messy conditions is well beyond their conscious understanding, which, like all of

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ours, is structured to comprehend simple, linear narrative, but they must compress and rearrange

what they find as best they can to survive. Perhaps this is best expressed by two of the literary

critics, Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza, whose long quest to find a writer toward

whose work they are inexplicably and profoundly drawn is no different in nature from the

novels’ other knotty mysteries. Upon realizing they will never quite find Archimboldi, the pair

conclude, “The important thing is something else entirely. […] That he’s here […] and we’re

here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him” (158-159). Truly, “close enough” is usually

about as well as we can do.

Perhaps the struggle to plot the crimes might best be understood through the narrator of

“The Part About the Crimes” himself. He is not nearly so detached as critics describe him: as

some of the quotes above show, he is by turns critical of the police efforts and bemused with

them, yet he is aware he can do little beyond work from what they have discovered. His efforts

do make a little progress beyond theirs, noting some clues they don’t investigate and observing at

which points they lose track of evidence, but he does not get very far. In fact, Echevarría tells us

that Bolaño planned the narrator to be none other than his alter ego Arturo Belano (898): what

better voice to make the attempt of synthesizing so many recalcitrant materials into a plotted

sequence of events, yet to fail in doing so? As Roncal ambiguously tells Fate during a half-

dreamed sequence in which they interview Haas in prison, “No one pays attention to these

killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them” (348). In one sense, the “secret” could

have something to do with violence or with economic conditions and misogyny during

globalization, but it probably has as much to do with the first half of the sentence as the

second—that is, with paying attention. That so many victims have died for such variegated

causes renders those attending the crimes nearly incapable of focusing on any one without doing

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them injustice as a whole, and vice versa. When we ask who’s killing the women of Santa

Teresa, we also must ask how we are to plot at all when there are “too many possible stories” to

which to attend.

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Chapter 5—The Epic and the Allegory

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

It is not the effort nor the failure tires.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills

Down small to the consequence a life requires;

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills

Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills

Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.

The complete fire is death. From partial fires

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills

From missing dates, at which the heart expires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

—William Empson, “Missing Dates”

The Problem of Contemporary Figural Narratives

We discussed in the last chapter James Wood’s claim that mega-novel storytelling

sometimes becomes gratuitously overrun with arbitrary stories. Wood, however, does not stop

there, but proceeds to make a more serious attack upon the very process through which mega-

novels aspire to meaning. Wood illustrates his complaint with this parody of mega-novels’

attempts to accrete significance:

If, say, a character is introduced in London, call him Toby Awknotuby (that is,

“To be or not to be” — ha!) then we will be swiftly told that he has a twin in

Delhi (called Boyt, which is an anagram of Toby, of course), who, like Toby, has

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the same very curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a

religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father

(who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has

been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels

group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth), and that

Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was

elected prime minister in 1979 and has not spoken a word since. And all this, over

many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!

(Irresponsible 178-179)

This pastiche (which, as Wood argues, isn’t far from some of what many mega-novelists have

produced) is characterized by relentless mythologizing, with the cataclysmic bombing of

Hiroshima converted for literary purposes into the origin of a fictional family, the silencing of

the Left during the 1980s made supernaturally literal, and several other cultural touchstones and

coincidental parallels from the postwar period littered throughout. Wood implies, though, that

such narratives merely play at myth: myths, after all, require an overarching integrated system in

which to function, and the individual mythic connections here are so random as to be incapable

even of satirizing mythos. They gesture toward the idea of a larger worldview, but do not create

one. Wood exemplifies this criticism in his dismissal of Thomas Pynchon by contrasting

Pynchon’s books to those of an older literary genre, claiming “his novels behave like allegories

that refuse to allegorize […] they move meaning around, they displace meanings, but they do not

inhabit meaning,” leading to a situation in which “there are scenes that mean too much and there

are scenes that mean too little” (Broken 200-202).

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This criticism threatens to undermine the biggest ideas addressed by mega-novels. In an

era during which writers cannot take for granted what T. S. Eliot called a “framework of

accepted and traditional ideas” (“William Blake” 278), in fact, it implies that contemporary

fiction may not be capable of embedding large-scale concepts into narrative at all, and that any

obvious figural narratives—ones in which, for instance, political occurrences can have mystical

correlative effects upon individuals and coincidental likenesses communicate trenchant symbolic

connections—become inherently ridiculous. After all, if we agree that Toby Awknotuby’s

father’s birth at the exact moment of the Hiroshima explosion is a pseudo-mythic overreach, how

can we say any differently about the birth of Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children at the exact moment of Indian independence, prompting his epic claim to embody the

Indian nation? Similarly, if having Toby’s aunt being struck mute upon Thatcher’s election is a

transparently silly metaphor, why should Toru Okada’s receipt of a blue mark upon his cheek

when afflicted with the psychic malady plaguing postwar Japan in Haruki Murakami’s The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle be any less so? And if twinning the fates of the British and Indian

nations through Toby and Boyt’s shared genital deformation is strained and unconvincing, isn’t

Don DeLillo’s attempt to intertwine white and black America in Underworld via Nick Shay and

Cotter Martin’s mutual attachment to the Bobby Thomson home run ball similarly empty?

To address these questions, we will need to look at mega-novels’ relationship to the two

oldest and most venerated genres of figural narrative, the allegory and the epic, to examine how

these forms create semic structures to which more recent fiction seems less suited. Due their

shared figural nature, in fact, allegory and epic’s definitions have long overlapped, which may

also be because the epic, going back to Plato, has been traditionally considered a formal mode or

genre (Genette, Architext 12), while allegory often instead suggests a mode of interpretation, the

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“meanings ascribed to or discovered in a text, without (it has been supposed until quite recently)

regard to considerations of literary form” (Treip 4).

As such, the terms may often be used with

respect to the same works: in fact, epics have been read allegorically for millennia (Treip 55),

even predating the writing of any full-scale narratives intended to be allegories (Quilligan 19).

Hopefully this overlap will help justify, in the absence of a fully systematic treatment of many

centuries’ worth of writing on these genres, the somewhat ambitious approach this chapter will

take. In light of the profound challenges to cognition posed by seismic shifts in world culture

since World War II, I argue that allegory and epic essentially merge in the contemporary mega-

novel, producing a volatile hybrid whose resulting abundance of both signification and cruft

pressures to its greatest extent our ability to imagine ourselves with respect to the contemporary

nation and world. To see why, however, will require us to examine the nature of these genres

and how the postwar mega-novel diverges from them.

Allegory, Epic, Metanarrative, and Paranoia

As I mentioned, the allegory and the epic are united by their shared use of figural

narrative systems. As Gary Johnson has noted, allegory is primarily distinguished from other

major figures like metaphor and simile by its emphasis on narrative (6), while epic may be

distinguished from other narrative forms through the figurativeness of its central characters and

events, as suggested by Georg Lukács’s argument that “The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never

an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the

fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community” (66). These figural

narratives tend to be explicitly mythic in their engagement with culture: according to Edwin

Honig, in fact, allegory is based in “an earlier mythic fusion of belief with worship embracing

fundamental ideals and customs upon which the structure of society depends” (21), while

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Frederick Turner claims that epics “gather the scattered myths, legends, and fairy tales into a

coherent architechtonics” (212). This systematicity, consequently, allows them to gesture toward

the universal: Deborah Madsen argues that in allegory “Narrative truth and absolute truth are

conflated in the same quasi-transcendental source of legitimation that is invoked for both culture

and society” (3), while Lukács adds that “the epic answers the question: how can life be

essential?” (35) by asserting a “transcendental structure” that provides its readers with a

metaphysical “home” (40-41).

Similarly, both epic and allegorical texts access this figural-narrative fusion via rifts in

temporality that the contemporary novel, grounded in homogenous time (see B. Anderson 24-

26), generally does not allow. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, though the epic is narrated as if

historical, it is really set in an “absolute past” (Dialogic 15), and allegories tend to begin with a

dreamy excursus from their specific historical moments toward a timeless environment (Honig

68-81). Upon entering this suspended temporal space, both focus on generative moments of

traumatic conflict, with Angus Fletcher claiming allegory’s action is a dramatized “battle” that

“turns out always to be a conflict of ideas and ideals” (Allegory 157), while Turner notes that

“[every] epic quest involves a great battle, which is either the climactic episode of the work or its

entire substance,” containing in its result implications for “world consciousness” (117). The

mixing of temporal modes to depict figural conflict, of course, recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss’s

definition of myth as “both a sequence belonging to the past […] and a timeless pattern which

can be detected in the contemporary” (430). We should also note that these narratives have the

potential to be drawn out to substantial scale, observed in epic as early as Aristotle (59b)

and as

true, though less obviously, in allegory: as Fletcher notes, even though many individual

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allegories are short, because an allegorical system might be expanded to cover anything, “the

typical allegory threatens never to end […] it has no inherent limit” (Allegory 367).

If the two are to be distinguished, it is by the type of schemata by which readers are

supposed to process their personal relationships to the work’s large-scale concepts. Readers are

supposed to understand epics as expressing a tangible national narrative—the “absolute past” to

which Bakhtin refers is a “national epic past” (Dialogic 13; emphasis mine)—while readers are

supposed to conceive allegory as expressing a supranational and supernatural theo-philosophic

system like Christianity. As a result, the epic leans toward the exemplary rather than

hermeneutic: when Philip Sidney, for instance, praises Virgil’s Aeneas, he claims not that the

Trojan signifies Virtue but asks, “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that

wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?” (145). Allegory, on the other

hand, in Fletcher’s straightforward definition, is text that “says one thing and means another”

(Allegory 2), requiring the reader to interpret a deeper meaning that is not literally stated. The

overall difference in the way the two are supposed to be read might be well expressed by

contrasting Theodore Steinberg’s claim that the epic is “a narrative that focuses simultaneously

on the lives of its characters and on a pivotal moment in the history of a community” (29), with

Maureen Quilligan’s argument that reading an allegory is always about accessing the “pretext

[…] the source that always stands outside the narrative […] the text that the narrative comments

on by reenacting” (97-98).

Such figural narrative systems are powerful cognitive aids for conceiving one’s place

within an otherwise unimaginably vast and varied world. As Mark Turner points out, the “The

projection of one story onto another […is] a fundamental instrument of the mind” (5), noting

how allegorical narratives aid us in understanding complicated social and psychological events

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like “homecoming” or “journey of the soul” by blending simpler events and spatializing them

(35, 44). Essentially, they provide us with scripts that ground the overwhelming and

unassimilable particularities of individual experience into a larger framework. Furthermore, as

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities shows, among the most powerful of such

projectable stories has always been the national narrative, of which the epic is the most

prominent example, as it encourages cooperation and moral behavior by spatializing a shared

humanity onto physical space. As Anderson put it, “In an age when it is so common for

progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insists on the near-

pathological character of nationalism […] it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire

love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love” (141). Without national narratives, everyone

outside an individual’s local kinship network might seem an irreducibly alien being; with them,

empathy and communication become more possible.

However, poststructuralist theory has often argued against the use of such large-scale

conceptual systems. Since Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernity as “incredulity toward

metanarratives”—the latter term defined as any all-encompassing “discourse of legitimation”

(xxiii-xxiv), among which he explicitly includes epic and allegory as examples (27-29)—many

have joined his critique of the potential “totalitarian effect” of such “unitary and totalizing truth”

(12-13). Frederick Turner, in fact, attributes the “relative absence of serious literary critical

attention to epic as a world literary genre for at least the last sixty years” to this very attitude that

epic is “the grand narrative of oppression, essentialism, and the marginalization of the subaltern”

(3-4). Similar criticisms regarding allegory’s alleged dogmatism go back even further, at least to

Samuel Coleridge calling it “a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is

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itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principle being more worthless

even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot” (437).

Consequently, epic or allegoric elements in narrative are often only accepted by

contemporary criticism when they are construed as subverting the transcendent concepts

traditionally associated with those genres. For instance, when allegory was revived by

deconstructionists like Paul de Man, it was construed as dramatizing the gap between textual

figure and meaning, rather than allowing access from one to the other (see 187-208).

A similar

argument regarding epic was suggested by Linda Hutcheon’s elucidation of “historiographic

metafiction,” a literary genre within which “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as

human constructs […] is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and

contents of the past” (5), undermining the authority of historical metanarratives like epic until

“the narratives or systems that once allowed us to think we could unproblematically and

universally define public agreement” are challenged (6; see also Morley 2-3).

This total rejection of metanarratives in literature, however, is theoretically problematic.

As many critics have pointed out (I cite here Fredric Jameson), “the disappearance of master

narratives has itself to be couched in narrative form” (Postmodernism xi): that is, one cannot not

have a metanarrative, because any overarching opposition to metanarratives creates a new

metanarrative. Furthermore, it is ethically questionable: as Eric L. Berlatsky argues, refusing all

metanarrative erases the grounds on which, say, groups against whom historical injustices have

been committed can articulate that the injustice committed against them should be universally

regarded as unjust, that its occurrence is historically true, or their collective identity as a group at

all, and considering that this approach was supposed to enable critiques of authority, these flaws

rather undermine its value (Real 26-34). Contemporary criticism’s difficulty in dealing with this

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tension might be observed in Jed Rasula’s comment regarding the encyclopedic novel (which he

defines so as to overlap with my treatment of the allegory-epic mega-novel)

that “The adjective

‘encyclopedic’ is equivocal: as an enticement to comprehensiveness and mastery, it is

awkwardly shadowed by its Enlightenment provenance and tainted by its association with master

narratives. Yet the sort of narratives associated with encyclopedism are the very ones most

insistently cited for their burlesque heterogeneity” (“Textual”). Despite Rasula’s formulation,

this is not really a paradox: if one does not seek to encompass as much as possible, one is by

definition suppressing and excluding something.

We are left, instead, with dialectic: how does one construct a metanarrative adequately

large to allow the subject a coherent relationship with the world without doing prohibitive

violence to particularity? This simultaneous tendency toward and repulsion from figural

narrative systems, in fact, is perhaps the chief subject engaged by allegory-epic mega-novels,

primarily via their tropes of paranoia and conspiracy theory. On the one hand, the conspiracy

theorist is an allegorist on an epic scale, explaining how events that appear to speak only to a

local situation really refer to some historical metanarrative. As Richard Hofstadter wrote in “The

Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see

conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or

“gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a

conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and

what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usually methods of political give-

and-take, but an all-out crusade. (29)

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One would think, then, that literary critics opposed to totalizing metanarratives would be

opposed to paranoid interpretations. However, they often end up embracing them. Consider, for

instance, critical response to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose main characters attribute

much of what happens in Europe’s immediate postwar moment to a conspiracy perpetuated by a

military-industrial cabal dubbed “Them.” Pynchon critics frequently see in Them’s malevolent

power a vicious “total system” and consequently, they tout paranoia as the best way to identify

and oppose it (see Maltby 150). This apparent contradiction derives from the fact that paranoia

is, as Eve Sedgwick noted, “reflexive and mimetic” as well as “a strong theory”: if one wants to

oppose all-encompassing systems, then one must adopt a paranoid interpretation capable of

seeing such systems anywhere and everywhere they might instantiate themselves, which can

quickly lead to the kind of totalized dogmatism one is trying to critique (130-136).

Granted, paranoia does lend those who adopt it at least two important cognitive benefits.

The first is that it compresses innumerable particulars into one or two major forces, making it

much easier to conceive the world. As Samuel Chase Coale puts it, paranoia:

underscores a particular narrative pattern and process that writers have employed

to grapple with their own doubts and intimations about how the world is run, or

not run, and how the individual, acutely aware of his or her personal impotence in

the face of labyrinthine bureaucracies and global forces, feels that he or she has

become a function or instrument of some invisible, anonymous, but omnipotent

and coercive power. (6)

One is always aware that too much is going on for one to fully perceive, even though much of

what one cannot understand might be tremendously important, and paranoia gives one a way to

articulate the forces behind such events, if not understand the events themselves. As Salman

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Rushdie once remarked in an editorial praising paranoia, “If the crimes of the past are only now

being uncovered […], how long will it take before we know about the crimes of the present?”

(Step Across 319). This process of condensing such an enormous number of sensory perceptions

to a coherent set of relations has been termed “cognitive mapping” by Jameson, though he

consequently claims that “Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is a poor person’s cognitive

mapping” (“Cognitive” 356). As with all mapping, of course, cognitive mapping must be

drastically reductive, as we may recall by remembering Jorge Luis Borges’s short piece about the

imperial map designed to record all the particularities of the land, “whose size was that of the

Empire,” and consequently rather useless (325).

The second benefit to paranoia is how it strengthens the self’s sense of importance. Since

attempts to realize the world in its totality will inevitably impress upon the individual mind its

own crippling insignificance, paranoia can rejuvenate subjectivity by ascribing to it privileged

access to a reality invisible to others. As Paul Ricoeur pointed out in articulating the

“hermeneutic of suspicion” popular in critical theory since the late nineteenth century (which

Sedgwick identifies with critical paranoia), even writers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who

“look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness” (33), suspend their

suspicion for one act of credulity, because “liberation is inseparable from a ‘conscious insight’

which victoriously counterattacks the mystification of false consciousness” (34-35): in other

words, they believe nothing in culture is free from the corrupting force of ideology except their

own minds in theorizing that ideology.

This specialness is especially pronounced for those

paranoids who believe themselves specifically at the center of the conspiracies they articulate.

Reflecting on The Truman Show, whose protagonist is the hero of a 24/7 reality show of whose

existence he only gradually becomes aware, Patrick O’Donnell notes that paranoia may be “the

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last refuge of identity,” because it “allows us to perceive what might be called a self-referential

depth in the fantasy of the totalized world of available objects, folding back into it a kind of

personal history, destiny and temporality” (Latent 9). Conceiving oneself as a combatant against

an all-powerful Them in this manner, even if such a crusade is inherently unwinnable (perhaps

especially because it is unwinnable), makes one’s actions more narratively and cognitively

legible.

However, paranoia also has serious drawbacks. For one, it narrows one’s focus so

severely as to make it inadequate for handling that which lies beyond its predetermined purview.

As empirical research has demonstrated, conspiracy theorists are especially vulnerable to

confirmation bias, since they fill in informational gaps with whatever invented facts best suit

their ideology (Swami and Coles 562). As Sedgwick notes, however, this resistance to empirical

reality renders paranoia quite bad at making predictions, even though it is designed to insulate its

adherents against surprise (141-142). The implausible “conspiracy” to which the pejorative

“conspiracy theory” refers, after all, isn’t the one necessary to execute a plot, but the much vaster

conspiracy required to plant all the evidence suggesting there isn’t one. Holocaust deniers, for

instance, are unbelievable not because the Allied forces couldn’t have conspired to propagandize

against their enemies, but that faking the Holocaust would have required an enormously

complicated bureaucracy seamlessly generating millions of physical records and survivors’

testimonies, all the while remaining totally invisible to all but those initiated into Holocaust

denial.

In less severe cases, competing conspiracy theories often prompt their partisans into

games of paranoid one-upmanship,

each new theory proposing ever more encompassing

paranoid schemes to articulate why other paranoids have come to mistaken conclusions, as with

how Jameson’s critique of postmodern paranoia has itself been critiqued as paranoid for insisting

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that all legitimate cognitive mapping can only be understood through the all-encompassing terms

of Marxist dialectic (see Simons).

Perhaps most importantly, paranoids’ self-aggrandizement isolates them and prevents

either empathy or collective action with others. Conspiracy theorists’ paranoia has been found

both to reduce their political activity and to cause them to otherwise make poor social decisions:

for instance, those who believe that AIDS is a government plot to exterminate African-

Americans are less likely to practice safe sex (Swami and Coles 561, 563). For this reason, as

Scott Sanders noted in an early essay on Pynchon, “a nation of paranoiacs would be a

totalitarian’s dream” (158). This is particularly so for a totally reflexive paranoia, articulating

not a particular conspiracy but that all events are probably to be part of some conspiracy or other:

as Thomas Schnell writes, “The world of undiscriminating cynicism, where no one is trusted and

nothing is believed, is in many ways a comfortable one. Every citizen enjoys the automatic right

to a sly, knowing, and superior attitude toward all authorities but has no obligation to do

anything about them.” (qted. in Coale 1). Such a position would render the most ridiculous

theories equally plausible to those deserving real attention, eliminating anyone’s ability to do

anything about them.

This problem of establishing what constitutes an adequately-sized cognitive mapping is

why, I believe, allegory and epic must converge in the mega-novel. Since allegory has

traditionally relied upon abstract ideologies like Christianity, then in an era when even nominal

Christians often do not subscribe to many major tenets of the faith, allegory must find a different

system on which to base its figuration, and as Anderson observed, the nation is the strongest

available system (1-4). Similarly, while a classical epic might conceivably have spoken to all of

an ancient city-state through one exemplary event from the absolute past, for larger modern

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nations, epics require more elaborate figuration to encompass its citizenry. In other words,

contemporary epics require allegory to achieve epic scale, while contemporary allegories require

nationalism to provide a sufficiently solid conceptual structure. The resulting narratives,

however, are unstable, because their tendency toward universal meaning is tempered by a

suspicious recoiling toward particular event, though that desire for particularity is itself drawn

back almost immediately to seek context for itself in the larger world. As a result, this process

produces lengthy narratives in which any given element might, at any moment, be imbued with

great significance, but also might be reduced into meaningless cruft.

How Is Everything Connected in Underworld?

The exemplary cases of how this process works involve the mantra Timothy Melley

called “the official slogan of postwar paranoia”: “everything is connected.” As Brian McHale

had earlier noted, the sentiment appears in many mega-novels, including Gravity’s Rainbow and

Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (Constructing 87-88), and continues to be disseminated in

popular and literary culture. Its appeal likely derives from its simultaneously affirmative and

terrifying connotations, suggesting both that the most particular and humdrum elements of our

lives might be tremendously significant and that even these mundane things might be complicit

in some pernicious scheme to which we are oblivious.

It is also, however, a basically meaningless statement. To claim that “everything is

connected” is trivially true: semiotically, Eco showed long ago that one can hop from any

linguistic sign to any other given enough connections (Aesthetics 67), and materially, physics has

long since demonstrated that every particle in the universe was once compacted into the same

infinitely dense ball and thus might be “connected” by calculating its historical trajectory from

that point. What “everything is connected” fails to address is the more important question of

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how closely everything is connected. As the paranoia of, say, the contemporary American right

ought to remind us, things are often connected despite a general lack of relevance to each other:

for instance, that President Obama once had a professional “connection” with the middle-aged

academic Bill Ayers should not cause us to interpret Obama’s politics as akin to the younger

Ayers’ violent anti-government Marxism. “Everything is connected” can be a dangerous maxim,

then, suggesting that those who speak it bear some special wisdom when, in fact, it does not

convey any meaningful knowledge at all.

The phrase’s contradictions might be explicated well via its two appearances in Don

DeLillo’s Underworld. The first occurs in a conversation between waste management specialist

Nick Shay and his colleagues Simeon Biggs (Big Sims) and Jesse Detwiler regarding a

mysterious container ship nicknamed The Flying Liberian that has supposedly been traveling for

years unable to dock. The men somberly theorize the ship could be the key to conspiracies

involving anything from the mob’s incinerator waste (279) to a heroin shipment overseen by the

CIA (289). Aware, though, that they have no particular evidence for these speculations, Detwiler

decides to justify their paranoia by saying, “You know why [we believe this]? Because it’s easy

to believe. We’d be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know” (289). The irony, of

course, is that they construct these theories precisely because they don’t know what, if anything,

is going on, which Detwiler implicitly admits when he elaborates that “what we know” is merely

that “everything’s connected” (289). There is something ridiculous about the men’s sharing of

such junk theories, resembling as they do the waste products the Flying Liberian is supposedly

trying to dump. As Wood remarks, “If what you start out from is what you do not know, this is

an infinitely extendable mystical spectrum. One can always not know more” (Broken 219).

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That conclusion, though, is complicated by the men’s parallel discussion of their

profession’s central concern, garbage, the great recurring motif of allegory-epic mega-novels.

Superficially, garbage is “connected” to “everything” but in only the weakest way, as is made

clear by Nick and Sims’s discussion of the enormous amount of food waste produced by the

restaurant industry (283). However, Detwiler argues that this attitude has “everything

backwards”: instead of garbage being a byproduct of civilization, he thinks, “garbage rose first,

inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense” (287). Waste is so

voluminous, he points out, that it requires one to devise a holistic response to keep oneself from

being overwhelmed by it, and such a response would necessarily generate an exemplary system

of connectivity, the kind out of which societies are made. Detwiler suggests, then, that there

might be something both socially valuable and aesthetically creative in finding new ways to

connect trash to our lives, which is likely why he suggests we “Make an architecture of waste.

Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and

bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage” (286), a goal

shared by characters like Klara Sax, who attempts to make an art installation out of junked

WWII bombers (68-71). Similarly, perhaps composing paranoid theories of culture out of

disparate, unverifiable rumors might be a valuable way to manage an atmosphere otherwise

overloaded with cruft.

However, just because junk can be connected doesn’t mean it should be. As Wood

points out, most garbage comprises “objects of indifference, convenience, and hatred” (Broken

215)—and, we might add, toxicity. Eco himself implicitly acknowledged this in Foucault’s

Pendulum, whose scholar-protagonist insists on gathering as much trivial data as possible for his

index-card system, as we discussed in Chapter 2. Later the novel, however, to avoid boredom at

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his menial publishing house job, he and his friend Jacopo Belbo use a computer program to

randomly combine fragments from the conspiracy-theory manuscripts about the philosopher’s

stone, the Freemasons, and the Holy Grail that they have been assigned to vet into their own

elaborate master allegory explaining all European history. This proves not to be difficult,

because as the book’s narrator, Dr. Casaubon, notes, “Concepts are connected by analogy. There

is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree

everything is connected to everything else. […I]f tout se tient in the end, the connecting works”

(602). One variation of their allegory, for instance, interprets Marx and Engels’s “specter

haunting Europe” as the Illuminati’s hunt for a secret Plan, which, betraying the Kabbalistic

elite, Marx and Engels attempt to recover for the proletariat. Though this allegoresis is amusing,

it is entirely gratuitous: as Casaubon’s lover Lia points out, the most obvious interpretation of the

puzzling medieval document that starts off their quest is that it is a shopping list (521). Such

gratuitousness, no matter how entertaining, however, does not come without cost. The Plan ends

up not being redemptive, nor even benign, but destructive, because the circle of conspiracy

theorists from whom the scholars had taken these materials (“the Diabolicals”) becomes

convinced of its truth and convene an ad hoc ritual at the Paris Conservatory of Arts and Crafts

that ends up murdering Casaubon’s colleague Jacopo Belbo (565-581). As Lia had earlier

insisted, “Your plan isn’t poetic; it’s grotesque” (525).

Are the efforts by Underworld’s characters to suggest that “everything is connected,”

then, similarly ill-conceived? The answer is not clear, because their consequences are much less

straightforward than those of the Plan. The ambiguity is most pronounced in the memorabilia

collector Marvin Lundy, who believes in the “dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is

available if you analyze the dots” (175), which leads him to paranoid theories about how Bobby

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Thomson’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World connects to the first Soviet nuclear test and about the

prophetic significance of Gorbachev’s birthmark (171-174). Even though these theories are as

ridiculous as anything in Foucault’s Pendulum, Nick’s friend Brian Glassic feels “shamed” upon

visiting Lundy because these theories “exposed his own middling drift” (177). Glassic, like

many of the characters, feels lost in the haze of conflicting paranoias characterizing the Cold

War era, and had indeed earlier also tried to use the Thomson home run to articulate his location

in national history, claiming, “When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark

rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But

when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it

was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something” (94). However,

he is not able to develop it much further, and from the unmoored perspective in which it leaves

him, even Lundy’s near-absurd belief in the national significance of his accumulation of detritus,

that is “is history, back-page. From back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate” (174), looks

appealing.

Where is the boundary, then, between a poetic allegory of trash and a grotesque one?

DeLillo’s essay on the novel’s creation, “The Power of History,” seems to suggest that at least

some of these theories might be on the poetic side, as he valorizes the Thomson home run as

“beautifully isolated in time—not subject to the debasing process of frantic repetition that

exhausts a contemporary event before it has rounded into coherence,” which allows it to “draw

people together in ways that only the most disastrous contemporary events can match.” When he

proceeds to claim fictional re-creations of such moments are “all about reliving things,” he

implies that, if we were only able to connect up all the junk of the past again, we might finally

understand our place in “the sweeping range of American landscape and experience.” His

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protagonist, however, is not so confident. Nick purchases from Lundy the home run ball, hoping

it will lead him back to “the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin,

heedless and real” (810), but as time passes, he notes, “I tend to forget why I bought it,” and it

sits on his bookshelves in a tenuous gray area between allegorical emblem and trash, “wedged

between a slanted book and a straight-up book […] a beautiful thing smudged green near the

Spalding trademark and bronzed with nearly half a century of earth and sweat and chemical

change” (809). Though Catherine Morley is not entirely right, I think, to call the male

characters’ apotheosis of the ball a “political construction” that “works to aestheticise and erase

national politics” (145)—so many readers have responded so strongly to the opening chapter

depicting the home run that DeLillo’s claim has some credibility—both the historical

significance Nick and Glassic attribute to it and the way they distinguish it from more recent

history seem overstated, created at least as much for their own narrative needs as anything else.

It is unclear to what extent we can take it, or any of Nick’s many unfulfilling adventures in the

novel, as especially meaningful, yet at the same time it is unclear whether we can totally dismiss

it.

This interpretive conundrum is brought to its climax by the book’s other use of

“everything is connected,” toward the conclusion, in which the batty Bronx nun Sister Edgar

perceives the mystic apparition of a martyred Hispanic girl named Esmeralda on an overpass

billboard, then dies and is absorbed into the nascent World Wide Web, where she becomes

“open—exposed to every connection you can make in the world,” having in the process a variety

of visions: a nuclear explosion, her double J. Edgar Hoover, and the eyes of God (824-826).

They culminate in her realization that “Everything is connected in the end” and this final page:

Fasten, fit closely, bind together.

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And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound

of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball

maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and

it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the Glimmerglass sky, and you look at

the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood

alive in light, the thick live tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and

eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of

experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the

phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl

of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow

pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed

butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow pencils, and you

try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its

meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow,

its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of hail

and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching

noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a

dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a

longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and

orchards of the solitary hills.

Peace. (827)

There is a certain breathless magic to this passage, especially in its bravura one-sentence middle

paragraph, propelling us to the book’s end with the feeling that we might finally have been given

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the key, finally, to understanding the novel’s missing connections. Yet that sense of ecstasy is

manufactured almost out of sheer syntax, because when we actually read it closely, it is obvious

that nothing it lists is connected at all. Much of it, in fact, is literally trash, like the apple core,

the melting wax and butter, and the weeds. It is difficult to imagine that these words were meant

to be read at any depth at all, but rather giddily raced past in hopes of communicating the idea of

connectivity, rather than any specific connections. How Nick and the other characters relate to

America, then, or how we might imagine such a relationship for ourselves, is left unresolved

amid this final pile of rubbish.

Regarding Foucault’s Pendulum, McHale once argued that the paranoid interpretation he

associates with modernism ought to be scrapped in favor of “counter-paranoiac” reading, which

he associated with Lia’s approach (Constructing 186-187). However, Lia is not really counter-

paranoid: she connects everything, too, just more plausibly than Casaubon does. This final page

of Underworld is what counter-paranoia would really look like, juxtaposing a bunch of objects

without any apparent figural relationship between them, and certainly not any with national

implications. There has been some debate as to what degree Underworld is properly paranoid,

“an extended demonstration of the hypothesis—at times even the faith—that everything is

connected” (P. Knight 239), or “post-paranoid,” depicting a world in which people “don’t have

to believe […] that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages

ignorance may just be ignorance” (M. Wood 3). The answer to that question is probably that it is

not so much either paranoid or post-paranoid as it experiments across the spectrum of paranoia,

examining the relationship between what James Wood refers to as the “centrifugal” tendency of

theories like Lundy’s and scattered “centripetal” text like the final page (Broken 213). While

none emerges are absolutely correct, some aremore cognitively tenable than others.

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What, then is the role of cruft in the paranoia-laced allegory-epic mega-novel? It

emerges on the extremes of both tendencies. As Wood notes, the paranoia of Underworld’s

characters does not resemble the “private paranoia” of, say, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man,

which grows organically out of a fully-realized psychological state and not only motivates all his

actions but can be contrasted against what we are told of a real external world surrounding him.

Instead, it is a “political paranoia,” targeted less at one subject’s imagined conspiracy than vague

musings shared more or less by several characters on the world at large, with minimal

implications for the plot (Broken 215). The fact of the characters’ paranoia might be important,

but the specific form their paranoia takes is insignificant in a way unthinkable for the classic

psychological novel: you don’t need to attend the particulars of DeLillo’s paranoias in the way

you do Dostoevsky’s. Both produce bad cognitive mappings, in other words, but while private

paranoias inextricable from the narrative they spawn, most paranoid theories in Underworld

(e.g., Lundy on Gorbachev’s birthmark, Sims on the Flying Liberian’s cargo) might be excised,

moved, or altered with no impact on the larger narrative. Such theories, moreover, are often

accompanied by contrasting passages that lack much connectedness, rendering them

unassimilated and illegible within the novel’s larger texture. In between these two poles of cruft,

the novel presents a large gray area of possible modes of connectedness of greater or lesser

plausibility. Though Wood is right to note the incongruity in how mega-novelists’ admirers can

never decide whether they are “great occultist[s]” or “visited hoaxer[s]” (Broken 200), even if

many individual moments “mean too much” or “mean too little,” there is value in the cruft they

produce. By pressuring us from opposed directions, they call into question what would

constitute an adequately large, but not overdetermined, figurative understanding of the world.

Repelling us from a paranoid position, the narrative might push us toward a relatively counter-

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paranoid attitude, but that perspective will likely render us incapable of managing other narrative

elements and encourage us to develop a different form of paranoia. This sequence of feedback

and calibration is the distinctive cognitive process provoked by the allegory-epic mega-novel,

and with which the rest of the chapter will be concerned.

World War II as the Contemporary Allegorical-Epic Event

This dual narrative motion probably derives from how traditional figurative ideological

systems have unraveled over the past few centuries of economic and cultural globalization, a

process whose impact on epic literature is sketched out in Franco Moretti’s analysis of “world

texts” in Modern Epic (see 50). If we were to select a specific moment as the diachronic, mythic

event grounding the contemporary allegory-epic mega-novel’s approach to figural narrative,

though, especially with respect to global mega-novels, it would probably be World War II. As

Edward Mendelson claims, the “technologies of instant communication and the economy of

world markets” emerging after the war display “the existence of a new international culture,”

causing works with epic pretensions to reformulate the way they figure global communities

(164-165). Though neither the authors nor principal characters of Foucault’s Pendulum and

Underworld were directly involved in the war, it appears no less formative for that: in fact, their

sense of belatedness with respect to it often makes it even more influential, as with how Glassic

claims the Thomson home run was “Like a footnote to the end of war” (94), the Edenic moment

that closed off the forties and began the Cold War, while Belbo’s ambitious but insular literary

sensibility seems to have originated in his pubescent inability to have been involved with either

the Italian Fascist or Resistance movements (106-107).

Given how the war generated or upended so many national narratives, as well as

significantly advancing internationalist sensibilities, it should not be surprising that it has

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substantively shaped ensuing epic narrative and conspiracy theory. Interestingly, in contrast to

how World War I is often considered the defining event for modernism,

World War II has never

been associated as strongly with postmodernism,

even though many of the great postmodern

novels from around the world, especially mega-novels, are responses to World War II in the

same way Mrs. Dalloway or The Magic Mountain is to World War I. If one were, for example,

to describe a long, challenging novel in which a male protagonist—sympathetic in his way, but

naïve and unreliable in matters both perceptual and ethical—wanders across a weird landscape

created by the war’s wake, driven at any given moment by specific goals but unsure about what

he ought to be doing in any larger sense, one might easily be discussing Günter Grass’s The Tin

Drum if that nation were Germany; but if it were Japan it could be Haruki Murakami’s The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; India, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the United States, not

only Underworld but Gravity’s Rainbow, William Gass’s The Tunnel, and any of a number of

other novels.

World War II and its legacy, however, have long defied straightforward artistic treatment.

For World War I, as Samuel Hynes notes, there had been a unified “Myth of the War” (x),

equally accessible to a British poet like Wilfrid Owen and a German novelist like Erich Maria

Remarque, about communal terror at modern military technology and the betrayal of innocent

young men by doddering generals (449). No such myth exists for World War II. There is, after

all, a plausible interpretation of the conflict as “clean, straightforward, and unambiguous” (Jarvis

96), the Allies good and the Axis bad, and while good novelists, especially those who had served

in or witnessed the fighting, resisted this narrative (Homberger 174-179), simply appropriating

World War I’s myth in the new postwar era would create an unpalatable equivalence between,

say, the Nazis and their victims (see Barnouw). In attempting to write about the conflict, authors

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from different countries are faced with distinct difficulties: for writers in Axis countries,

acknowledging their nations’ role in the war at all has proved difficult (see Guest 216);

for

those in Allied nations, admitting the human tragedy of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo,

and other areas immolated by Allied campaigns within the war’s larger narrative has been

problematic (see Rau 207-208); and for writers in nations decolonized after the war, finding a

balance between the lineages of Allied universalist humanism, with its attendant imperialist

heritage, and self-determined local values, with their sectarian and regressive tendencies, has

provided serious challenges (see Brennan 85-100, Ten Kortenaar 12-13).

However, each group is confronted with the postwar period’s characteristic obstacles to

articulating personal identity with respect to the contemporary environment. As Jameson

famously remarked, our environment “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the

individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and

cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world,” which he believes “can itself stand

as the symbol of the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global

multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as

individual subjects” (Postmodernism 44). This concern is probably why Jameson hopefully

mused around the same time that “third-world” literature might show a path out of this cognitive

conundrum, because, he believed, it was always written “in the form of national allegory: the

story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the

public third-world culture and society” (“Third-World” 69; emphasis his). This position was

immediately critiqued as a dramatically inadequate simplification of the actual experience of

writers in the countries in question, of course (see Ahmad), leaving the question of how to figure

one’s place in the contemporary world lacking any clear answer.

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This might be what makes paranoia-drenched mega-novels so attractive in the postwar

world.

They tend to present their characters (and readers) with several potential mappings of a

complicated national situation involving many bizarre phenomena, usually rooted in World War

II, ranging from rigid allegory to near-total disconnection. In some cases, the national allegories

turn out to be valuable to the characters’ construction of a coherent sense of place, but in many

cases they merely generate cruft.

The characters’ quest becomes how to distinguish which

modes of interpretation are too paranoid to be cognitively tenable from those which are not

paranoid enough, an exceedingly difficult task given that often apparently ridiculous theories end

up being empirically justified while apparently stable conceptions regarding communal identity

easily disintegrate. The rest of the chapter will examine the different ways in which these books

deploy and dismantle figuration, forcing us to develop more cogent ways of responding to the

situations to which they are applied.

Varieties of Catachresis: LETTERS and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The first kind of allegorical cruft we will examine is the empty or inapposite figure.

Conventional rhetoric does not have a term for an apparent figure that does not actually figure

anything, but the closest is probably catachresis. In contemporary use, it refers to any figurative

connection between two concepts “marked by the feature of illogicality, often close to absurdity,

and generates far-fetched, strained associations” (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 41), so it should not

be too much of a stretch to have it cover empty figures as well.

More has been written on

catachresis’s implications for language than can be discussed here, but most prominently, as

Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska notes, their “lack of definite reference and interpretation” has

led them to be associated with “certain experiments in twentieth century modernist, but

especially postmodernist, prose,” which she links to “the demise of master narrations” (49).

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Though there is a credible deconstructionist defense of catachresis claiming that the disjointed

transition between tenor and vehicle provides “the chance for insight” (Goldblatt 80), clearly

there is a point beyond which these become more wasteful than illuminating. Mark Turner calls

this the “invariance principle,” the rule that, for the sake of our cognitive stability, “Conceptual

projection […] shall not result in an image-schematic clash in the target” (108-109).

What

makes catachreses especially difficult to manage, though, is that they usually cannot be identified

immediately as catachrestic: in fact, they often seem potentially intriguing until one has had time

to play out their implications and determine otherwise. That is frequently the case with their use

in conspiracy theories, wherein signs are often attributed meanings that seem plausible at first

but eventually break down into partial or total incoherence upon analysis.

For instance, consider the longest section of John Barth’s epistolary fiction LETTERS,

which comprises over two hundred pages (out of a total 772) of letters by the descendants of The

Sot-Weed Factor’s Burlingame and Cook families (see Ch. 3), beginning with Andrew

Burlingame Cook IV’s 1812 missives to his unborn son Henry Cook Burlingame V about family

history and extended by Andrew Burlingame Cook VI in 1969. Broadly, the letters reinterpret

the complex web of conflicts constituting early American history as revealing both a secret

conspiracy to instigate a Second Revolution and the Burlingame-Cook family’s tragic Pattern of

being unable to successfully influence that history. Their failures largely derive from each

generation’s misinterpretation of the previous one’s place in the Pattern: as protagonist Lady

Amherst summarizes in 1969, “Andrew [IV] declares, in effect, that the whole line have been

losers because they mistook their fathers for winners on the wrong side; he announces his

intention to break this pattern by devoting the second half of his life to the counteraction of its

first, thus becoming, if not a winner, at least not another loser in the family tradition” (253).

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However, interpreting national history in a way that is simultaneously rebellious (i.e., indicating

personal agency), allegorical (i.e., indicating the omnipotence of the Pattern), and duplicitous

(i.e., indicating interpretive fallibility) renders the whole thing even more illegible than the self-

negating Patterns Barth experimented with in Giles Goat-Boy and Chimera. For instance,

observing Andrew IV’s stated reorganization of his goals around the belief that his Revolution-

era father was not a Loyalist but a double agent for General Washington, Amherst notes, “Had

Andrew IV really changed his mind about his father’s ultimate allegiances, or was he merely

pretending to have done, for ulterior reasons? Was his avowed subversiveness a cover for

subverting the real subversives? And might his exhortation to his unborn child have been a

provocation in disguise?” (254).

This self-canceling paranoia comes to a head in the book’s final pages, when Andrew

VI’s final letter contains a postscript by his purported son, Henry Cook Burlingame VII,

declaring that most of what the former has written (including his presentations of Andrew IV’s

letters) is false. Laying out the possibilities for Andrew VI’s true motives with respect to the

Pattern, the younger man speculates that—

1. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall support it, since

he believes me a “winner”; therefore

a. he works for it himself, because he considers himself also a “winner”

and does not believe that I shall rebel against him; or

b. he works against it, because he regards himself (as he regarded his

namesakes) as a “loser,” and/or because he believes that I shall work

against him.

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2. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall oppose it, since

he believes me a loser; therefore

a. he works for it himself, considering himself a winner and trusting me to

rebel against him; or

b. he works against it, believing himself a loser and trusting me not to

rebel against him. […] (753)

—and similarly through bullets 3 and 4, playing out these combinations in the cases in which

Andrew VI opposes the Second Revolution. While Henry VII asserts that “Such displays

confuse only the naïve. To Cook, as to me, the actual state of affairs is as easily sorted out as the

ABCs, no more finally equivocal than the authorship of this letter, or its postscript” (754), it

ought to be clear that there is no way for us to determine that Henry VII (if he’s even the true

author of this postscript) presents the “true” interpretation of the Pattern. If the allegories in

either Andrew IV or VI’s letters might be total nonsense, then so might be Henry VII’s.

with Zhang’s riddle in Mason & Dixon, this merely presents an infinite and incomprehensible

array of shadow stories, rendering the Pattern’s value as a master figure basically nil.

Were this real history, we might conceivably research further and generate an ad hoc

method of evaluating plausibility, but as it is, everything in the Cooke-Burlingame letters is

catachresis, incapable of meaningfully signifying one thing as opposed to another. Unlike with a

classic unreliable narrator, there are no outside cues suggesting a sounder interpretive guide.

As Max Schulz puts it, LETTERS is a “quirky, wasteful, fascinating thing” (Muses 46), and

though O’Donnell attempts to redeem it by claiming “the ‘wastes’ of narrative coincide with its

circulatory purifications; its significances are engendered as a process that amasses its own

quantities to the point where a significant, qualitative change occurs” (Passionate 57), it’s not

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clear that any changes occur as a result of these repetitions and negations: the novel ends, after

all, with its characters mostly either getting remarried or killed off. The modern-day characters’

relationships, granted, gain some of their sympathy as a result of the bewildering environment

they must live in, but for readers the possibilities of the Pattern’s meaning are exhausted by

Amherst’s comments.

Even Tom LeClair, who otherwise exalts mega-novel excess, realizes

that there’s something wrong with LETTERS’ “bewildering intricacies of counter-plotting,”

finally deciding that the book relies too much on “its top-down codes and plans, its tightly drawn

correspondences and determinisms” (202), and though I think exactly the reverse is the case—

the “codes and plans” fall apart all too obviously—this accurately points out that it does not take

long to realize that the Cooke letters cannot create a meaningful allegory.

The cruft generated by Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle poses more

difficult problems, perhaps because rather than the fanciful scenario of Barth’s novel, Murakami

directly engages the legacy of World War II and Japan’s occupation of Manchuria.

In some

ways, of course, the book does seem neatly allegorical. For example, the narrator, Toru Okada—

who has recently lost his paralegal job and finds himself with no interest in new employment—

has become gradually estranged (emotionally, then literally) from his wife Kumiko, who has

herself long felt an inner psychic split associated an abortion several years prior, which

contributes to the fact (observed by Toru upon receiving a serious of anonymous dirty phone

calls) that the pair have not had sex in some time. Several supporting characters face similar

psychological troubles, like the quasi-telepathic Creta Kano, a “mental prostitute” with a history

of psychosexual dysfunction, as well as the psychic healer Nutmeg Akasaka and her son

Cinnamon, the latter of whom has been mute ever since an enigmatic childhood dream involving

a bird that sounds like a wind-up toy and two men burying something in his backyard. As the

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novel proceeds, though, these psychological holes are linked to the war figuratively, often via

literal ones. Toru, for instance, receives a bequest from his late friend Mr. Honda by way of a

Lieutenant Mamiya, who recounts how he has suffered from existential emptiness ever since

being thrown down a dry well by the Mongolian army while stationed in Manchuria, prompting

Toru to venture into the dry well across the alley in the vacant Miyawaki lot to meditate. The

personal and political are further linked when we discover the involvement of Kumiko’s

economist brother Noboru Wataya—who has just inherited the Diet seat held by his uncle

Yoshitaka, the logistician in charge of Japanese imperial strategy during the war—in both Creta

and his sister’s sexual trauma, suggesting the abusive tendencies in Japan’s rapid adoption of

Western-style politics and economics. The narrative’s epic and allegorical strands, then, might

be interpreted as suggesting World War II created a national psychic rift, with the cultural

diseases expressed by pre-war imperialism and postwar capitalism combining with the nation’s

brutal defeat in the war to impede the political and psychosexual functioning of its citizens. This

sense of malfunction coalesces in the image of the wind-up bird itself, which shows up not only

in Cinnamon’s dream but in his grandfather’s account of an episode from the war and in Toru’s

walks through his neighborhood and tends to vanish when characters are stricken by the psychic

rift, providing a paradoxical sense both of the world’s orderly functioning and the tenuous,

artificial nature of that order. That the book climaxes with Noboru suffering a stroke in

Nagasaki and Mamiya forging a new life with Creta in Hiroshima seems to resolve this allegory

quite neatly, the two cities destroyed by atomic bombs figuring the nation’s rebirth.

Yet things are not quite so pat as this account suggests. Between the initial publication of

the original edition’s second and third books, in fact, Murakami’s Japanese critics pointed out

that many of the novel’s apparent figures, rather than tying themselves up cleanly, were going

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entirely unexplained, “hang[ing] aimlessly like threads in an unfinished tapestry” (Amitrano 32).

Though by the end of the novel many figures that had seemed illegible earlier have been

incorporated into the allegory—for instance, Toru’s anonymous caller is finally identified as a

splintered element of Kumiko’s psyche, and the odd blue mark on Toru’s cheek becomes

associated with the Akasaka family’s healing mission—others are catachrestic, presented as if

they will eventually acquire clear figurative meaning, but never do. One example is the overture

to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, from which the novel’s first book takes its name. The

overture plays on the radio during the novel’s first page (5), causing Toru to unconsciously

whistle it several chapters later (60), and its emblematic nature is apparently confirmed when it is

constantly hummed in the dream realm Toru visits while meditating in the well by the waiter

walking toward a mysterious hotel room (243). However, the opera’s narrative does not seem to

apply to the novel’s allegory: even the two works’ title birds, in fact, have almost nothing in

common, as one is an emblem of vulnerability and the other a mischievous trickster.

Furthermore, Toru neither has nor wants any deeper associations with the piece: as he ponders

late in the novel, “If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and look it up in

an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was

available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these questions by then”

(554). As Jay Rubin notes, in fact, Murakami’s own sense of the opera was much the same, as

he spent many years idly wishing to find out what kind of opera was attached to the overture

without ever doing so. Rubin elaborates that “The opera features prominently in the book not

because its plot provides a key to the novel but precisely because it is just out of reach [ …] for

Toru The Thieving Magpie will always be something he hasn’t quite understood. It is familiar,

and yet its meaning eludes him” (218). Like Toru’s missing-then-retrieved polka-dot necktie and

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the bequest from Honda that turns out to be an empty box,

it is only connected to the allegory

very weakly.

This is intriguing, because as Giorgio Amitrano notes, associative “connection,” rather

than novelistic causality, appears to be the main principle holding together Murakami’s

narratives (29). Wind-Up Bird’s characters, in fact, frequently adhere to the paranoid principle

articulated by the Sheep Man in Murakami’s earlier Dance Dance Dance that “It’s all

connected” (124). Late in the novel, for example, Toru ponders:

[Nutmeg and Cinnamon’s] “clients” and I were joined by the mark on my cheek.

Cinnamon’s grandfather (Nutmeg’s father) and I were also joined by the mark on

my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather and Lieutenant Mamiya were joined by the

city of Hsin-ching [e.g., where they had been stationed during the Manchurian

occupation]. Lieutenant Mamiya and the clairvoyant Mr. Honda were joined by

their special duties on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, and Kumiko and I had

been introduced to Mr. Honda by Noboru Wataya’s family. Lieutenant Mamiya

and I were joined by our experiences in our respective wells—his in Mongolia,

mine on the property where I was sitting now. Also on this property had once

lived an army officer who had commanded troops in China. All of these were

linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental

East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan. (497-498)

Yet many elements in the novel don’t quite fit into this pattern. Finishing the above passage,

Toru asks, “But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause

and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I

were born” (498). He is not the only one to feel that way, either, as his teenaged neighbor May

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Kasahara writes, upon dropping out of school to work in a wig factory, that her life seems as if

“one disconnected thing led to another disconnected thing, and that’s how all kinds of stuff

happened. […] I don’t have any idea what’s happening to me” (461-462).

Perhaps the book is prompting us not to be satisfied with establishing that “Everything is

connected,” but to ask “How closely is everything connected?” When we have put together what

would otherwise seem like a plausible network of figurative connections, yet have left many

apparent figures unincorporated, we should ask, as does Matthew Strecher, “whether these

connections are real, imagined, or coincidental? What are we to make, then, of the ‘histories’

they seem to contain[?]” (167). The elaborate connections Toru constructs may merely exist to

cover up his own sense of emptiness and expendability. Early in the book, after all, when

discussing with Kumiko the mysticism of Malta Kano and Mr. Honda, he suggests that all that

all such explanations are essentially arbitrary: “I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t

explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than

somebody who is. Right?” (48). His allegorical narrative, intertwining his own malaise with

that of millions of other Japanese, could well be elaborate nonsense—which easily could get

rather boring.

Amitrano, I think, articulates the best way to approach this problem when he notes in

Murakami, as Wood does in DeLillo, a “tension between a centrifugal tendency towards the

values of exactness and clarity […] and the centripetal force that leads characters, events, themes

so far from the center of narration as to become virtually invisible or disappear altogether,”

which he hypothesizes “may be read as a contrast in which the divided sensibility of readers in

this last portion of the millennium can be reflected with symbolic effectiveness” (34). I would

only add that “reflected,” invoking as it does the mimetic fallacy, is not quite the right word. A

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better way of putting it is that as we read, we come across any number of potential emblems,

some of which might be meaningful and some of which are simply cruft, but we don’t know

which is which until we have finished the book. As a result, we need to be prepared to read any

figure as possibly having deep resonance but also as possibly being a waste of our attentional

resources. As Rebecca Suter notes, Murakami intended in Wind-Up Bird to create an “open”

version of Ellery Queen’s habitual “challenge to the reader,” one prompting his audience to solve

the mystery prior to the climax, except without explicitly providing the solution as Queen did

(105). As in Underworld, the opposing centrifugal and centripetal tendencies create a spectrum

of meaningfulness amongst the novel’s potential figures, requiring that we be primed to invest

substantial attention in any image at any point, but also that we distribute it in such a way that we

do not become too invested in something that ends up being meaningless.

For instance, at first we might interpret Toru and Kumiko’s cat, who is named after

Kumiko’s brother Noboru, as figuring the same malignant forces the economist represents,

especially when the cat vanishes at the novel’s start and helps precipitate their psychic maladies.

As the book proceeds, though, the connections between the human and feline Noborus grow

weaker: the Okadas, after all, see their pet representing not their repulsion at her brother but

“something good that grew up between us” (603). Furthermore, though the human Noboru’s

actions continue through the novel’s middle sections to figure larger societal ills and prolong

Toru’s anguish, the cat not only does not add further malevolence, but suddenly reappears at the

book’s midpoint without resolving anything. This crashes the metaphor into the invariance

principle. As if to admit the cat’s limited figurative function from this point forward, Toru

renames him “Mackerel” (378). To insist either that the cat reveals the novel’s deeper figurative

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structure or that he subverts all such structures would be to miss the point: instead, we should

note that he has an important figurative function for some time, which suddenly ceases.

This method of interpreting individual figures, of course, will have an impact on how we

interpret the larger figural narrative system of which it is part, such as national identity. Many of

the book’s characters, for instance, are mystified about their relationship to Japan, none more so

than Mamiya. Being Japanese, for him, is not exactly determined by geography, because prior to

the war, the land officially part of the Japanese empire waxed and waned with the state’s

imperial fortunes: while posted in Manchuria, for instance, he had felt that “To protect my

homeland, I too would fight and die. But it made no sense to me at all to sacrifice my one and

only life for the sake of this desolate patch of soil” (146). Nor, however, is his national identity

exactly determined by shared ethnicity or culture, as the postwar shift in global power relations

causes many of the nation’s institutions and allegiances to be Westernized, partly exemplified by

how after being captured on the Soviet front, Mamiya attempts a realpolitik alliance with a

Russian power-broker that alienates him from his fellow Japanese prisoners-of-war (538-547).

When his last tie to Japan, kinship, dissolves upon his family’s deaths in the nuclear strike on

Hiroshima, Mamiya becomes incapable of relocating himself within Japan. His lack of

nationality does not liberate but cripples him, and his inability to feel resonance with anything

upon his return makes him think that “real life may have ended for me deep in that well in the

desert of Outer Mongolia […] There was nothing left for me. I felt truly empty, and knew that I

should not have come back there” (170). The catachrestic nature of his Japaneseness, then,

should make us think through what would constitute a meaningful attitude toward the nation.

Similarly, the novel’s catachreses should make us wary about how we interpret the

resolution of the novel’s allegorical national crisis. At the novel’s climax, Toru enters the dream

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world, locates the lost Kumiko in the hotel room, sees a TV news report about how a baseball-

bat-wielding man resembling him has bludgeoned Noboru Wataya into critical condition, then

takes a blood-stained bat from Kumiko and kills an invisible monster who challenges him,

prompting Noboru’s real-world collapse (574-587). As a subconscious figure, Toru seems to

have received the bat—a complex symbol of both Japanese nationality and Westernization—

from Cinnamon’s account of his grandfather’s role in the war’s late stages, which depicts a

Japanese officer ordered to execute an escaped Chinese prisoner using the baseball bat that the

escapee himself had used to kill his jailers (517-520). When Kumiko gives the bat to him, then,

it appears to complete a circle of connections to World War II. Yet the bat also has a literal

existence that is almost total cruft. Near the novel’s midpoint, Toru is followed by a guitarist

who proceeds to attack him with a bat until Toru wrests it away and knocks him unconscious

(335-336), subsequently keeping the bat and bringing it with him to the well. Just before he

enters the well for his climactic battle, though, the bat inexplicably disappears (549). Any

attempt we might have made to tie the literal bat into the figurative web is destroyed, as its

existence is revealed to be entirely gratuitous. However, the opaque link between the actual and

imagined bats might prime us to consider more exactly the link between the two murders

committed with the figurative bats. After all, the World War II execution is pointlessly brutal,

the act of an imperial power too inflexible to acknowledge its impending defeat—not to mention

totally ineffective, as the prisoner revives and has to be shot anyway. Is Toru’s own ritual

violence, then, merely an extension of the same cultural disease he attempts to eradicate? Or can

it still serve its purgative function despite this association?

The uncertainty these questions imply may be why the novel’s conclusion only partly

resolves the myriad problems it raises. On the one hand, a malevolent politician dies, Toru

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locates Kumiko and begins to resume written communication with her, and several minor

characters experience happy endings. On the other, the fates of the disappeared Malta Kano and

May Kasahara are left unresolved, and perhaps more importantly, we do not know whether Toru

and Kumiko’s relationship will ever be fully restored: Kumiko is imprisoned after she removes

her brother’s life support and is not yet ready to speak to Toru in person (601-605). Similarly, it

is not clear to what extent Noboru’s death will actually cleanse Japan of its postwar malaise, or

whether the psychic rift will persist. It is tempting to be clunkily Lacanian about such gaps, but

the book’s final words suggest that the problem is, fundamentally, a cognitive one. Pondering

his situation as he takes the train home from visiting May, Toru tells us, “I closed my eyes and

tried to sleep. But it was not much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away

from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment” (607). The novel’s events have given

Toru a stronger sense of local and national connections, but his continued inability to maintain a

cognitive schemata establishing his relationship to the rest of the world leaves him unable to

sustain consistent focus. He remains “far away from anyone or anywhere” because his mind is

still adrift, not quite able to process the world.

The Elephantiasis of Midnight’s Children

The narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, has no such lack of

conviction about his place within the nation. His introduction to the autobiographical chronicle

about the first decades of Indian independence following World War II claims, after all, that

“there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles

places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a

swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well”

(4). Being born at midnight on August 5

, 1947—the exact moment of independence—means,

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he believes, that his “destinies [are] indissolubly chained to those of my country” (3). This is an

ambitious claim, but it is not totally unfounded. For one, his heritage is a near microcosm of

India’s history: though he is raised by the well-off Sinai family, who comprise both Western-

educated professionals and Muslim traditionalists, he was born of a poor Hindu woman and a

departing British officer, himself descended from the founder of Bombay. Furthermore,

Saleem’s face is reminiscent of the Hindu god Ganesh, to whose scribal role he aspires (170,

176). Lastly, his moment of birth has given him telepathic abilities, allowing him to

communicate with the thousand other supernaturally-endowed children born during the first hour

of independence, whom he dubs Midnight’s Children. When Prime Minister Nehru addresses

Saleem as “the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young” (139), it

seems quite plausible to suggest that his life might allegorically represent the entire history of

India and all its hope for the future.

Early on, though, Saleem begins to worry about how to manage the scope of such a

narrative. While recounting how his mother Amina’s lover Nadir Khan fled the assassination of

Mian Abdullah, Saleem tells us a brief story about Nadir’s roommate, a painter whose works

“had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art,” causing him to wail

“I wanted to be a miniaturist and I’ve got elephantiasis instead!” Subsequently, and with no

other explanation, the painter commits suicide (49). As this vignette has only modest relevance

to the story of which it is an excursus, Saleem likely means to communicate by it anxieties

regarding his own elephantiastic endeavor. Those worries become clearer a few chapters later,

when he ruminates upon whether the spectacular, but apparently coincidental, events that shape

his life are motivated by chance or fate:

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if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared

the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course,

we might—as pessimists—give up right here and now, understanding the futility

of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway;

things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? (86)

Believing everything is strongly connected, that is, may provide a sense of collectivity, but does

so at the price of emphasizing one’s own insignificance to the enormous, predetermined pattern

of fate. Yet Saleem cannot refuse fate, either, because its absence would render his actions

insignificant for the opposite reasons, the lack of larger context to (and privileged place in)

which to relate them. As Neil Ten Kortenaar writes, “what frightens Saleem is not excess or

incongruity but rather the probable lack that excess can imply” (93). It is no coincidence, then,

that Jameson’s “national allegory” framework has both been enthusiastically applied (see

Kane)

and emphatically rejected (see Mossman) by Midnight’s Children’s critics: the book

both prompts such a large-scale approach as necessary for conceptualizing an immense nation

like India, while also resisting it as fatalist and potentially dogmatic.

Consequently, Midnight’s Children is concerned not merely with the premise that

“everything is connected” but how to best pursue the question “how far should everything be

connected?” As the narrative proceeds, Saleem has increasing difficulty determining the lengths

to which he should extend his allegory. For instance, when explaining why his ten-year-old self

had sent a letter to Commander Sabarmati revealing the commander’s his wife Lila had been

sleeping with the film producer Homi Catrack—leading in sequence to Lila and Homi’s murder,

the commander’s imprisonment, and Saleem’s filmmaker uncle Hanif committing suicide—

Saleem assigns blame to fated narrative archetypes:

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Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we

are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and

Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense

the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drover her Hindustan to an address

off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-

scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her […], he was Leander swimming

the Hellespont toward Hero’s burning candle. (297)

None of these love stories, however, is a remotely adequate figure for the relationship of Lila and

Homi, as none involves love triangles. The overextension of Saleem’s figuration suggests his

struggles with conceptualizing personal agency in a larger context, as at first he tells us, “As for

my part in the business, I will not give it a name” (297), using the power of fate to erase his

culpability, but only a few pages later he uses it for precisely the opposite reason, declaring

himself the commander’s “puppet-master” (300). Neither is true—he has some, not total,

responsibility—yet for someone who both feels the importance of understanding his life as

imbricated in the national future, but also acutely realizes his own insignificance as only one

citizens among hundreds of millions, that idea is difficult to articulate.

An even greater overextension occurs when Saleem notes after his grandfather Aadam

Aziz collapses on the road to Pakistan to mourn Hanif that Nehru has fallen sick at around the

same time. Recapping the past hundred pages, Saleem thinks:

If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair.

If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted

me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from

my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into

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exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of

Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled

off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to

Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill.

And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my

birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru’s

death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault? (319)

Despite its position at the end of several somewhat more plausible connections, the answer to the

last question is obviously “no,” especially since Nehru dies some months after Aadam anyway.

The passage, in fact, demonstrates in miniature Saleem’s difficulties with circumscribing the

endless web of relations in the manner that Henry James wrote was necessary for any narrative

(see Introduction), as a plausible set of local connections gradually extends into a paranoid

effusion of cruft too overdetermined to be coherently sustained.

The problem, however, is not simply an excess of figuration. Though Timothy Brennan

argues that “Saleem is a culprit not because he fails to resist, or because he conspires for personal

gain, but rather because he proliferates metaphor” (98), the narrative’s problems cannot be

solved by simply rejecting Saleem’s expansive figurative impulses. Granted, an overuse of

figuration does cause real problems for Saleem, most visibly through his allegories’ competition

with (and similarity to) Indira Gandhi’s totalitarian view that “India is Indira and Indira is

India” (483), which justifies her climactic confinement and sterilization of the Midnight’s

Children. However, a Saleem who refused to understand his actions’ figural place within the

state would likely end up like The Tin Drum’s Oskar Matzerath,

the lifelong Danzig resident

who similarly narrates the twentieth-century history of his city in autobiographical terms.

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Notably, Oskar notably refuses to adopt any conscious Polish nationalism: he insists there is no

connection between his anti-authority agitation, such as his literal refusal to grow up and his

disruption of government gatherings with his drumming, and any political motivation, but that he

is motivated purely by “private and what is more esthetic reasons” (93). Even when he does link

himself to public events, he reveals a total lack of national engagement in doing so, as when he

mentions the Nazi “secret weapons” program only to adopt the phrase as a nickname for his

glass-shattering voice (290).

His deliberate innocence does keep him from helping the Nazis,

but it also makes his resistance to them narcissistic and destructive, prompting him toward theft,

vandalism, and a near-sociopathic lack of empathy. Such negative consequences might illustrate

why Roger Clark writes that Midnight’s Children’s national mythos is not “a mere postmodern

game. Rather, it derives from the great hope of a nation finding its way toward harmony and

tolerance, and from the great fear of collapsing into chaos” (62). In fact, such moments often do

provide real insight for Saleem: as Berlatsky points out, in many cases, “Saleem’s explicit

references to metaphor imply that they have the potential to reveal reality, not obscure it” (Real

121), as with the novel’s “literalized metaphors,” like when Saleem observes that the skin of

India’s businessmen grows whiter as the nation’s economy integrates with Western capitalism

(204).

The debate over whether Saleem’s figuration is good or bad, of course, misses the point.

As an abstract concept, metaphor has neutral value: it can be extremely beneficial or quite

dangerous, depending upon how it is used. An extremely expansive figuration, like that between

Midnight’s Children and India itself, might be valuable through the way it imagines how native

Indian abilities might guide the country toward an otherwise unimaginable independent identity

and prosperous future. However, other similarly-scaled allegories, like Saleem’s account of

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Nehru’s death, lead only into nonsense. Saleem addresses this problem near the novel’s

midpoint:

“Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,” the Prime

Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense?

How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on

the fate of the nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to

history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our

(admirably modern) scientists might term “modes of connection” […]: actively-

literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-

literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world. (272-273)

Saleem acknowledges shortly afterward, though, that “the Midnight’s Children Conference […]

never became what I most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the

‘modes of connection.’ The ‘active-literal’ passed us by” (273). That the active-literal mode is

the most difficult to achieve, in fact, suggests why Saleem’s figuration is both necessary and

dangerous. Since very few individuals in a nation of India’s size can ever have a direct active-

literal impact on the whole, effecting change only becomes feasible if one reduces the nation into

figurative concepts embodied in specific persons and events.

However, this leads to the basic paradox of modern democracy: giving voice to millions

of individuals creates a disorienting cacophony that no one can adequately attend, but restricting

those voices to a small number of representatives inevitably concentrates power in an anti-

democratic hierarchy and thus deprives the populace of speech. It is not for nothing that several

of the novel’s characters are desperate for the country to contain its exploding population, as

with Dr. Narlikar and his anti-fertility proselytizing and tetrapod venture (200-202), Indira and

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Sanjaya Gandhi and their sterilization program (492-497), and Saleem’s own vision of being

“trample[d…], the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six,

reducing me to specks of voiceless dust […] sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the

multitudes” (533). Not only does population pose logistical and humanitarian problems, it

makes the nation impossible to coherently conceive. Even the allegorical representation of

India’s hundreds of millions via the hundreds of surviving Midnight’s Children cannot evade this

problem: in blurring their voices, Saleem admits that “my narrative could not cope with five

hundred and eight-one fully-rounded personalities” (262), which is probably why the telepathic

meetings Saleem orchestrates for the group quickly dissolve into a “hundred squalling rows”

over objectives, leadership, and personal agendas (292).

Saleem’s failure to be either a representative leader or cognize a vast multiplicity of

voices causes him to vacillate between unstable figural systems through the novel’s latter stages.

As Ten Kortenaar notes, Saleem sometimes gets turned around to the point where he “insists that

national history is as often an allegory of his life as his life is an allegory of national history”

(31). For instance, consider his figurative charting of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war. There is

nothing inherently wrong with relating the war figurally to his family, as the trauma of their own

displacement from India to Pakistan puts them in good position to experience the divisive and

destructive nature of this conflict between the two formerly united states. However, bombarded

with both the official Indian and Pakistani media’s allegories of national invincibility, each so

overextended as to totally revise reality—“Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more

aircraft than India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistan

Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man” (388)—Saleem is left no coherent space

into which to project his own self, causing him to create another unsustainable allegory in

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response: “Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that the hidden purpose

of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my

benighted family from the face of the earth” (386). He is so unmoored that he believes this claim

is a fully objective one, arguing that anyone who would “examine the bombing-pattern of that

war with an analytical, unprejudiced eye” (386). This is transparently not true, of course: if

anyone were to do so, they would likely come up with a Poisson distribution similar to Roger

Mexico’s in Gravity’s Rainbow, a probabilistic distribution expecting bombs to cluster in

apparent patterns, but only as a matter of chance (54-58). Devising a sounder theory under

Saleem’s cognitive conditions, however, is not easy: since not only has his own national

allegiance been forced to waver between India and Pakistan over the course of the book, but the

countries’ national narratives themselves have grown alien and unacceptable to him, it is no

wonder that his personal figuration becomes horribly distorted.

A brain injury caused by an explosion-propelled spittoon, however, causes Saleem to be

“cleansed” of his “yearning for importance” (403) at the war’s end, turning him into a meditative

Buddha figure with a supernatural sense of smell but no other acknowledgment of worldly or

political matters. Yet instead of leading him to enlightenment, this anti-figural attitude prevents

him from understanding the larger implications of his actions. When he is inducted into the

Pakistani army prior to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, he blithely follows his unit’s orders

to covertly kidnap Sheikh Mujib, leader of the independence movement, without any

consciousness of what he is doing (409). His inability to conceive himself as a Muslim Pakistani

mindlessly hunting down a fellow Muslim Pakistani—or, for that matter, as a patriotic Indian

further fragmenting an already fragmented subcontinent—allow him to be used for pernicious

nationalist purposes. Saleem understands this when narrating his tale years later, but by that

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point it is too late. Reflecting at that point upon a passing vagrant who brags that he can generate

a fifteen-inch turd, the narrating Saleem tells us:

Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the

hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I

needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that

I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to

understand my life and benighted times; but now I’m disconnected, unplugged,

with only epitaphs left to write. (527)

Though any figuration can be taken so far as to become nonsense, the flexibility to extend and

contract figures, to consider different blends of concepts before deciding upon one, is extremely

valuable. By the novel’s end, though, Saleem has exhausted this ability, his cognitive powers so

decimated by three decades of attempting to manage the problem of his country’s size that he

lacks the focus to continue his efforts.

Given the wildly divergent evaluations of Saleem’s narrative, the book’s critics don’t

seem to have figured out how to manage that problem either. There is an odd contrast between

the near unanimity in critical evaluation of Midnight’s Children as an aesthetic success,

culminating in its victories in the 1993 and 2008 “Booker of Bookers” competitions, and the

substantial disagreement over what it actually succeeds in doing. In particular, there is

widespread disagreement over whether Saleem, in composing his epic, satisfies what he calls the

subcontinent’s “national longing for form” (344). John Su, for instance, believes that Midnight’s

Children succeeds only inasmuch as Saleem fails, claiming that the novel “rejects the heroic

myth as the basis for an epic of India” (548) and “locates in the unrepresentability of the future

the possibility of unraveling deterministic national narratives and discovering political

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formations that are presently unimaginable” (562). However, despite this, Ten Kortenaar points

out that the book “is most often read, inside and outside of India, as a triumphant celebration of

the nation and as the first novel commensurate with India” (12). Søren Frank, arguing this point,

claims Saleem’s unstable figurations amply demonstrate how “the world itself is in constant

motion, open-ended and subject to continuous revision” (197). Perhaps Michael Gorra lays out

this problem best, as he on the one hand celebrates how Rushdie presents a new “way to deal

with politics on a large scale, rather than in terms of individual ethical dilemmas” (147) but on

the other worries that “the whole narrative of Midnight’s Children remains so firmly under the

thumb of [Rushdie’s] self-regarding style that at times I find it hard to distinguish because the

writer’s fantasies on the one hand and the Widow’s on the other, between the book and the

totalitarian world it purports to attack” (145). Just as Saleem is so overwhelmed by his nation’s

size that he cannot find his place within it, his readers are so overwhelmed by the range of

possible figurations he presents that they cannot decide which are or are not adequate to the

problems of mapping the contemporary world.

What the book does do is present acutely that predicament, in which the expanding

networks comprising our society continue to outpace our ability to conceptualize them. Its cruft

is emblematic of all the possible national figurations possible in the contemporary world, and

how many of them quickly descend into absurdity. Midnight’s Children requires us to consider

how far we must allegorize any given event to make it comprehensible, but also where we must

cease to allegorize so as not to make nonsense of its individual meaning. As the “two three, four

hundred million five hundred six” souls that crush Saleem in its final pages increase to billions,

that task only grows more difficult.

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Us and Them in Gravity’s Rainbow

If it were inevitable that this book’s last chapter would be about allegory and epic, it may

have been similarly inevitable that it would end with Gravity’s Rainbow. Though any of the

preceding four chapters could’ve addressed Pynchon’s masterpiece, since it possesses extremes

of high and low textual entropy, presents large amounts of junk information, satirizes so broadly

as to be often indistinguishable from that which it mocks, and weaves together plot threads that

often lead nowhere, this is a book that demands to be addressed terminally, and with a breadth of

scale to which only the allegory and epic are truly appropriate. This is not merely due to its

eschatological nature or its sizable cottage industry of commentaries, but because it has that rare

property shared by only the greatest books: it turns us all, despite our best efforts, into

hypocrites. It does so by vacillating so rapidly between dazzlingly profound allegory and absurd

conspiracy theory that it reveals, perhaps more strikingly than any other book, how frighteningly

inadequate are our interpretive apparatuses for distinguishing the two.

As with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Midnight’s Children, Gravity’s Rainbow’s

backdrop is the aftermath of World War II, out of whose demolished global ideologies it

attempts to reassemble a new understanding of human civilization. It involves an epic quest,

namely American Lt. Tyrone Slothrop’s journey through lawless post-surrender Germany (“the

Zone”) in search of a mysterious, apocalyptic rocket called the 00000, which is made up of a

synthetic material (“Imipolex-G”) to which he may have been sexually conditioned during

infancy by a representative of an evil military-industrial cabal that he dubs “Them.” While

fleeing Their pursuit, Slothrop becomes imbricated in the Zone’s numerous cultures and

subcultures, as well as their attendant mythological systems, ranging from the Puritan

eschatology of Elect and Preterite to Nordic tales of Tannhäuser to invented legends like that of

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“Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in the 10

century, routed a Viking invasion”

(577). In this way, the novel figures the shifting borders and uncertain trajectory of the postwar

global moment through Slothrop’s own struggle to establish his identity, as might be observed by

considering side by side the American’s musing that “maybe for a little while all the fences are

down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and

somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect,

without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up” (566) and the narrator’s quip that

“Slothrop […] is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days” (295).

This allegorical sensibility, however, as well as Slothrop’s conviction he is at the center

of a conspiracy, lead him toward extreme paranoia. Anticipating the narrator’s famous claim

that paranoia is “the leading edge of the discovery that everything is connected” (717), Slothrop

feels even before he enters the Zone that Their “plot against him has grown” to include almost

everyone he encounters, a conspiracy that at times seems to him “monolithic, all-potent” (240).

The gradual expansion of Slothrop’s plotting of this conspiracy against him onto ever higher

levels of organization is exemplified well by the passage in which he and Blodgett Waxwing

infiltrate Shell’s British headquarters to investigate the multinational’s role in the creation of

Imipolex-G, finding there “not [Churchill son-in-law and Minister of Supply] Mr. Duncan

Sandys cowering before their righteousness […]—but only a rather dull room, business

machines arrayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as sugar faces.”

Subsequently, he thinks:

Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, “How high does sit go?”

is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because the organization charts

have all been set up by Them, the titles and names filled in by Them, because

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Proverbs for Paranoids 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions,

they don’t have to worry about answers.

Slothrop finds he has paused in front of the blue parts list that started all

this. How high does it go…ahhhh. The treacherous question is not meant to

apply to people at all, but to the hardware! (255)

Even hardware, Slothrop believes, might be conspiring against him. By entering the Zone, he

seeks to investigate the very nature of connectedness itself, hoping to better understand the

nature of a world that seems to be conspiring against him more and more each moment.

However, how to go about interpreting this vast network of connections, which Leo

Bersani claims makes Ulysses look like “play for a child-detective” (187), has caused the novel’s

critics four decades’ worth of headaches. One established tradition of Pynchonists read this

omniconnectedness in a traditionally epic and allegorical manner, respectively exemplified by

Thomas Moore and Kathryn Hume’s claims that Gravity’s Rainbow, especially in the sections

set in the Zone, generates a “style of connectedness” based in Jungian archetypes or a syncretic

“mythography” of all Western culture. The other major tradition, however, suggests that if there

is value in how the Zone has been “cleared, depolarized,” then book must instead constitute a

“denial of any encompassing patterns” (A. Friedman 69) such as those that allegory and epic

presuppose. Calling critics like Hume and Moore “good paranoid readers,” for instance, McHale

claimed that while Gravity’s Rainbow “engages our paranoid tendencies as readers,” it “also

solicits our participation at a higher, reflexive level of reading [...b]y confronting us with

irreducibly ambiguous, or, better, multiguous features” (Constructing 113). Either the novel

generates the postwar era’s most rigorously structured figural narrative system, that is, or it is a

quintessentially uninterpretable postmodern text. Even criticism attempting to reconcile these

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two positions often does so unsatisfyingly, as with Deborah Madsen’s analysis of allegory in

Pynchon, which insists that the book’s “allegory works subversively from within, to expose the

operations of a dominant signified” (25) but also acknowledges that “the possibility remains that

a signified invisible order may reside in reality and that absolute meanings may be revealed amid

the free play of allegoric signs” (12-13). For all her nuance, she cannot finally say whether the

book’s allegories are “a construction or a cryptomorph” (111), falling back on the late twentieth-

century critic’s standard thesis that Pynchon simply “problematize[s] the whole issue” (25).

Yet this division reflects less two distinct interpretations than two starting points tending

toward the same contradiction. On the one hand, those in the poststructuralist camp, like Peter

Cooper, claim that within the book there is “no stable perspective from which we can know and

describe the world” (219) because it “defies a 1 or 0 method of reading” (212), yet they often end

up inscribing a rigid allegorical binary anyway, by insisting there is “clear internal evidence of

an evil and manipulative cabal,” thus reifying a total Us vs. Them structure (161).

Conversely,

though those in the first camp often claim that “creative paranoia” is most valuable for how it

allows us to identify and oppose Their system of “synthesis, control, and rationalization”

(Khapertian 139) with a “We-system” that “does not proceed rationally […] but […] appears to

function, at least on one level, simply by violating the behavior They would predict” (Siegel 19),

this is no more logically consistent, because as Hofstadter wrote, “the paranoid mentality is far

more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.

It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic” (36). Indeed, generating schemes

heroically pitting oneself in a cosmic battle against a demonized Other is characteristic not of

those seeking to sympathize with a downtrodden preterite, Hofstadter points out, but “the

megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted” (38).

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Regardless of the position with which we begin, that is, Gravity’s Rainbow tends to twist

it back against itself. I have written elsewhere about how this emerges in critical treatments of

the novel’s preterite vs. elect binary, especially with regards to the head of British paranormal

research at the White Visitation, Dr. Edward Pointsman (“Character”). To address these issues

in the novel as a whole, though, will require a bolder claim about how to approach the novel’s

paranoia, one that, though it has been gestured toward by a number of critics, has not been fully

embraced: “They” do not actually exist.

This might seem a ridiculous assertion, as They are

referred to by many characters throughout the narrative, but nevertheless, They are mere

“pasteboard,” and being able to acknowledge that while still navigating the book is probably the

most serious challenge for Gravity’s Rainbow’s readers.

Few critics have actually been able to explain exactly what is meant by “Them.” Most are

forced to describe Them in the way one of Pynchon’s best early readers, Tony Tanner, does here:

What emerges from the book is a sense of a force or system—something,

someone, referred to simply as “the Firm” or “They”—which is actively trying to

bring everything to zero and beyond, trying to institute a world of nonbeing, an

operative kingdom of death, covering the organic world with a world of paper and

plastic and transforming all natural resources into destructive power and waste:

the rocket and the debris around it. “They” are precisely nonspecific, unlocatable.

There is always the possibility of a They behind the They, a plot behind the plot;

the quest to identify “Them” sucks the would-be identifier into the possibility of

an endless regression. But, whatever Their source and origin, They are dedicated

to annihilation. This is a vision of entropy as an extremely powerful worldwide,

if not cosmos-wide, enterprise. (“Games” 134-135)

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I am reminded of Foucauldians discussing “power,” wherein a critic’s acknowledged inability to

define a term does not limit the confidence with which it is wielded. This characteristic

fuzziness, though, leads Tanner and many other Pynchonists into error. Most importantly,

Tanner wrongly identifies Them with the Firm, even though the latter is only ever used to refer

specifically to the British intelligence bureaucracy (T. Moore 92),

while Them is used to refer

not only to the Firm but several other real or hypothesized power structures, such as the German

military bureaucracy (see 406-428). The distinction is important, because while the Firm is up to

all sorts of objectionable activities, their objectives are often directly opposed to those of their

German counterparts and other forces construed by various characters as part of Them. No

wonder Joseph Tabbi grouses that “the paranoid plot-makings attributed to the catchall terms

‘Them’ and ‘The Firm’ are less successful, and generally less important, than are the more

particular forms and methods of control that modern technology instills in us” (Postmodern 89):

it’s not clear that the term “Them” means anything specific at all.

In other words, while there are clearly “conspiracies here or there,” in Hofstadter’s

words—for example, Slothrop’s uncle Lyle Bland definitely conspires with German scientist

Laszlo Jamf to perform experiments upon the infant Slothrop (85-86, 288-291), and Pointsman

conspires to trace Slothrop into the Zone (see 230-231)—and furthermore while those individual

conspiracies are often “connected” through corporations like IG Farben—who, for instance, buy

some of Bland’s companies and incorporate the work done on Slothrop into the German war

effort (290)—whether these connections can be mapped as a conspiracy of Them constituting

“the motive force in historical events” is not nearly so clear. Even in passages where it seems

like “the existence of the opposing They-system and We-system is asserted” by the narrator

himself (Kolbuszewska 125), the evidence is not as straightforward as it might seem. Consider

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the assault on Shell quoted above. As with most of the novel, the narrator does not speak

directly here but uses a loose indirect discourse, melding his voice with the characters’ thoughts

(see Hägg, Narratologies 93-121; Hardack 94). (This often goes unrecognized, causing the

misconception that the novel has flat characters, when it actually constitutes one of the most

profound depictions of consciousness in all literature.) The final paragraph confirms that the

passage’s characterization of Them comes primarily not from the narrator but Slothrop’s

imagination, which is often barely reliable for perceiving what’s directly in front of him. In fact,

Slothrop explicitly refers to Them here not to exhibit any epiphany about Their true nature but

simply to admit he has no idea who or what They are.

The slipperiness with which Slothrop refers to “Them” increases when he enters the

Zone. For instance, when he takes up with a bohemian Berlin collective led by Säure Bummer,

he begins making wildly off-base political readings of the objects he encounters, such as that a

poster of Stalin is really of his ex-girlfriend and that the Reichstag is a defecating King Kong

(374). Looking at photos from recent Allied conferences, he thinks:

Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders,

conveyed beautifully the sense of Death’s wings, rich, soft and black as the winter

cape, prepared a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They

assembled, a being They would dismantle.

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going

the right way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can’t be real, no more

than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some

two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of

this burned tenement so amazingly detailed—They sure must have the budget, all

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right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging

body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-

remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the

set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant

atomizer…. (380)

Even the most paranoid critic ought to admit this is interpretation is dangerously narcissistic, its

allegorical reading of the ruins Berlin as signifying Their manipulation of Slothrop deriving not

from real knowledge about how “everything is connected” but from Slothrop’s scrambled mental

state. And in fact, if we look through the novel, nearly every mention of Them similarly derives

more from psychological needs of specific characters rather than any reliable narrative statement,

as with the mentally-broken German physicist Franz Pökler’s suspicion that his superiors are

replacing his daughter Ilse with lookalikes on her annual visit, which he admits he has no way of

determining (424-425); Herero Oberst Enzian’s methamphetamine-driven speculation that “this

War was never political at all […] secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of

technology,” usually quoted without his subsequent rejection of this belief, as it “puts you in

with the neutered, brother” (529-530); and even Mexico’s rationalization of his ineffective

resistance to his superiors that “The Man has a branch office in each of our brains” (727).

Given their outspoken distaste for “binary thinking,” why do so many of the novel’s

critics go along with this Us vs. Them framework? A telling hint might come through Slothrop’s

worry that the manipulative, well-connected Bummer might be one of Them, a thought he rejects

a moment later because he feels Bummer “can’t possibly be on the Bad Guys’ side. Whoever

They are, Their game has been to extinguish, not remind” (445). That logic is quite flimsy—

Hilary Bounce’s “reminders” about Shell’s political connections helped Slothrop theorize

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“Them” in the first place (243-247)—so it ought to draw our attention to the phrase “the Bad

Guys,” a term that, like so much of Slothrop’s consciousness, derives from genre novels and

Hollywood movies, where all persons, instead of possessing the complex mix of motivations

common in life and literary fiction, may be neatly divided into Good Guys working for society’s

best interests and Bad Guys working against it. This worldview, of course, is almost always

condemned by literary critics as oversimplified, liable to encourage violent jingoism and erode

readers’ capacity for empathy, yet as this passage should make clear, it maps directly onto the

Them-Us division assented to by most critics. They exist because, like Slothrop, Pynchonists

want to be able to identify the Bad Guys.

Given his situation, Slothrop may be forgiven for that desire. After all, he has just

discovered his father and uncle have “sold [him] to IG Farben like a side of beef” (291), learned

from Stephen Dodson-Truck that he’s being used by a British intelligence community with

which he had thought himself allied (214-223), and gotten chased from Nordhausen by his own

country’s military under the command of Major Marvy (313-319): his only real ally in the Zone

has been the German Geli Tripping, lover of the Soviet officer Tcitcherine (334-336). Since his

sense of national and kinship allegiances have totally collapsed, it’s understandable that, for the

sake of his mental stability, he would merge multiple agents exploiting him into one group and

subsequently imagine himself at the center of a conspiracy. It is not until late in the novel, when

Seaman Bodine tells him “Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” and Solange adds “And yes

but, the arrows are pointing in all different ways” (613) that he is capable of realizing that “the

Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself” (614).

Elaborating upon Solange’s point, we might imagine the forces against Slothrop as

several converging vectors, each characterized by opposing x-y components and a small but

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uniformly downward z component; the vectors themselves are quite distinct, but as experienced

at the point where they converge, the x-y components cancel each other out and resolve into one

strong downward force that acts as if it were a vector on its own, which is doubtless how

Slothrop sees Them. Critics, though, should not mistake this abstract resolution for the real

vectors. Granted, in a novel as elaborate as Gravity’s Rainbow, we will often need to simplify

that which is complex: as H. Porter Abbott notes, “all events, real or imagined, are infinitely

decompressible […] any event contains a number of events, each one of which contains an even

finer number of events, and so on” (“Narrating” 10), so it is often necessary to compress toward

“narratable linearity, which is the domain in which our minds were designed to abide”

(“Narrating” 13). However, as Abbott notes, if we go too far in compressing events whose

“interconnectedness” is “detailed and complex,” we will end up with a model that is “either false

or seriously misleading” (“Narrating” 12). That is exactly what Slothrop does at his most

paranoid moments. Even though the novel’s complexities will often drive us to a similarly

baffled state, we need to avoid that tendency.

However, refusing to allegorize entirely and indulging instead Fran Mason’s view that

“there may be no moral and that the events were ‘just a bunch of stuff that happened’” (169)

leads to equally serious cognitive problems. For instance, after leaving Bummer to head for

Cuxhaven seeking a discharge, Slothrop witnesses this “great frontierless streaming”:

Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the

camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going back home, the

eyes of both parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much

older than what’s forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians

trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs

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too hard to sing, talk pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between

Berlin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks, Croats and Serbs,

Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars

stirred and streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing

alongside for miles, sliding away, numb, indifferent to all momenta but the

deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to give a shape to, white

wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prison-camp

pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland dust, caravans of Gypsies,

axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving the vehicles beside the

roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns,

trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside

for army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the

way west, Kazakh ex-P/Ws marching east, Wehrmacht veterans form other parts

of old Germany, foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs

[…] (558-559)

I imagine most readers skim this passage. (You probably did just now.) With the exception of a

few vivid images, it is little more than a list of twenty-three Central and Eastern European

ethnicities in stock images of displacement. That it is described so flatly and in one sentence

(which, incidentally, continues a few more lines) seems to characterize it as pure perception,

filtered by minimal narrative compression or figuration. That approach prevents Slothrop from

committing his earlier paranoid absurdities, but also keeps him from creating meaningful

patterns or illuminating synecdoches. When Slothrop uses this list format elsewhere, in fact, it is

primarily to describe waste products—e.g., “rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed,

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Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass,

pieces of automobile” (638)—about which the narrator laments our inability to “make sense out

of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste…” (601).

This anti-paranoid way of perceiving the landscape appears to be a backlash to the

cognitive unsustainability of Slothrop’s earlier paranoia. After several weeks in which his desire

to discover the truth about the 00000 is overtaken by moment-to-moment survival on his assorted

journeys with Bummer, he realizes that he’s forgotten what he’s doing in the Zone at all:

Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—

religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where

nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his

cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered

as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between

him and the west Sky.

Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure

that he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that reason.… (441)

Anti-paranoia, in other words, is as mentally destructive as paranoia. Its lack of selective

differentiations renders the subject into something like Borges’s Ireneo Funes, who lives in “the

teeming world of […] nothing but particulars” and, as we saw in the Introduction, is

consequently “not very good at thinking” (137). Slothrop’s perception that he is losing his mind

is, in that sense, quite accurate.

Considered as an abstract dilemma, of course, paranoia and anti-paranoia present

something of a false choice. As Molly Hite has argued, “the contradictory of ‘everything is

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connected’ is ‘not everything is connected,’ a proposition that leaves ample room for the

possibility that some things are connected, and in innumerably different ways” (Ideas 17). There

are indeed options available for us on the continuum between paranoia and anti-paranoia: it is

quite possible to be moderately paranoid and become more or less so as the situation warrants.

However, Slothrop faces not just an epistemological problem regarding his paranoia but a

cognitive one: he must decide not only where to place himself on the paranoid continuum but

also how to determine where he is on that continuum at any given moment. To discover only in

adulthood that one had been used in infancy as a test subject for a notorious psychological

experiment might suggest that one has gone through life insufficiently paranoid, but to assume

similar paranoid links regarding everything one sees will quickly lead to madness.

Consequently, Slothrop’s level of paranoia vacillates wildly in respond to feedback from his

environment, unable to find an approach that consistently works.

These fluctuations, after all, are what cause Slothrop’s eventual disintegration, not any

aggression by Them. When we are told midway through Slothrop’s journey in the Zone that he

“has begun to thin, to scatter,” the proximate cause is explained in terms of Mondaugen’s Law,

that “Personal density […] is directly proportional to temporal bandwith” or that “The more you

dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But

the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are” (517). Fundamentally, this principle

is about attention: the longer one maintains focus, the more stable one is, but as attention span

diminishes, “It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five

minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here” (517). Paranoia, conversely,

extends temporal bandwidth by locating one within a longstanding geopolitical framework.

Many Pynchon critics valorize Slothrop’s scattering as a victorious evasion of the System (see

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Bersani 195, Madsen 102, Pöhlmann 355-358), but to my knowledge, none have sought to, like

Slothrop, “spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his

shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers

and marmots” (635), incapable of communication even with one’s closest friends (755-757).

Logistically, there is nothing difficult about deciding to live this way: it is simply cognitively

intolerable, a state of dissolution so total that one might as well have been hit by the 00000.

The sense of national and spiritual identity provided by epic and allegory, of course, has

long been a method of avoiding these problems. That is probably why “the one ghost-feather” of

Slothrop’s self that is last to dissolve is “America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s

whispered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with

come-hitherings, incredible promises” (635). While there are any number of potentially

pathological things about nationalism, it is also the most powerful concept through which, as

Anderson notes, “pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed” (154).

Though Sascha Pöhlmann is not totally incorrect to claim that “the Zone as a textual device can

be used as an exemplary space for postnationalism” (286), he is also right to add that this is not

necessarily a positive thing, because “The Zone is born out of war, the migrants that traverse it

are far from migrating by choice, and its openness is only the result of continent-wide

destruction” (292). The only thing separating the “great frontierless streaming” from pure

paratactic gibberish, after all, is its residual national divisions, which may also be all that makes

it bearable for those traversing it.

Can one conceive an allegorical system adequate to these challenges that does not turn

into an overdetermined paranoia? The “We-System” created by Slothrop’s fellow functionaries

in British intelligence, the Counter-Force,

seeks to do so. As Pynchon’s source R. D. Laing

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once remarked, “The invention of Them creates Us, and We may require to invent Them to re-

invent Ourselves” (60-61).

In other words, the Counter-Force does not rebel against a

preexisting Them but allegorically creates Them as its raison d’être. This self-definition,

though, dooms the Counter-Force to be “schizoid” and “double-minded,” as Mexico reflects

(727), though not for the reasons he thinks: since the Counter-Force constructs Their rationality

as the enemy, its paranoid rebellion forces it into performing a stilted and hypocritically rational

irrationality, as when Osbie Feel tells a fellow member of We, “They’re the rational ones. We

piss on Their rational arrangements,” while belly-dancing for no particular reason (651). This

tension is likely why the Counter-Force tries to stabilize its figural cosmos via the disintegrated

Slothrop, whose recovery is one of its formative acts. However, as a spokesperson for the

Counter-Force says decades later, “Opinion even at the start was divided. It was one of our fatal

weaknesses. […] Some called [Slothrop] a ‘pretext.’ Other felt he was a genuine, point-for-point

microcosm” (753). They agree that he is to be considered figuratively, but cannot decide what

use to make of him, as epic hero or allegorical figura. The Counter-Force’s inability to resolve

its contradictions dooms it to incoherence.

A more successful approach may not exist, but if it does, it must be based in a method of

figuration adequate to the book’s complexities, able to consistently follow the meaningful

connections while ignoring those that descend into cruft. I am not sure there are general

principles to be articulated regarding how to do that, so close in appearance are meaningful and

meaningless figural narratives. Inasmuch as our minds slowly form and revise them while

reading the book, though, such principles become more possible. The role of criticism on

Gravity’s Rainbow, then, ought to be how to slowly and collectively explain how to determine

which of the book’s figurations are valuable for understanding our place in the contemporary

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world and which are not, as well as which of those moments that refuse figuration productively

disassociate us from totalitarian allegory and which simply render themselves unreadable.

For instance, how should we interpret the book’s use of Tarot? As with all fortune-

telling, Tarot is based in a highly figurative system that promises its subject access, via

apparently unrelated signs, to a larger Pattern. Also as with all fortune-telling, it is nonsense: as

professional psychic Ian Rowland writes, Tarot and other forms of “cold reading” are “the

biggest, most enduring, and most popular scam of all time” (9). Consider, for example, the Tarot

drawn up for Major Weissmann, the mastermind behind the 00000: his cards include the Tower,

which we are told resonates phallicly with the Rocket’s destructive portents; the Queen of

Swords, which alludes to his queerness; and the King of Cups, which previews his future as a

von-Braun-like sage in America (760-764). This reading feels insightful, but as Rowland notes,

“the actual significance each card is deemed to have [in a Tarot reading] is irrelevant. A serious

book on interpreting tarot cards may tell you that ‘The Tower’ signifies change in existing

relationships. However, the cold reader can attribute whatever significance she wants to any

card […]. All that matters is that it sounds convincing” (75).

That Weissmann’s spread is

actually meaningless might be best seen in the card representing his future, The World: though

according to A. E. Waite’s standard guide this card represents “the state of the soul in the

consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self-knowing spirit” (156), Pynchonists

generally interpret the World to mean precisely the opposite of that—“there is no escape, no

transcendence” (Tatham 587; see also Weisenburger, Companion 374-375)—because to

associate The World’s positive transcendence with Weissmann would be contrary to their view

of him as the concatenation of Western evil. If the cards may simply be interpreted to reinforce

whatever preconceived notions either narrator or reader holds, they tell us nothing: it would be

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simple enough, after all, to create a convincing reading about Weissmann from almost any

possible Tarot spread, or to re-read these cards as describing literary characters with nothing in

common with Weissmann.

As the passage acknowledges, Tarot’s allegories, like Slothrop’s

hallucinated Them, are “pasteboard” (763).

Yet we cannot entirely dismiss the Tarot session as mere mumbo-jumbo, even though it

comes from a narrator who, during this passage, reveals himself zoned out smoking in front of

the TV after failing twice to get his preferred spread (752),

because some cards do present

intriguing lines of thought. For instance, we are told that the card representing Weissmann

himself—the industrious Page of Pentacles—is likely identical to that of his enslaved lover from

his days as a colonial administrator, Enzian (763). This is counter-intuitive, at odds with a rigid

Them-Us division, but there are real links between the two, dramatized in their parallel quests to

understand the meaning of the Rocket. Neither the card nor its reader has authority to identify

the pair, of course, but our imagination of a blended space that they jointly occupy might not

dissipate so quickly even upon realizing that. Furthermore, if we dismissed Tarot, should we do

the same for references to the mythic-religious system from which much of it derives, Kabbalah?

As with many esoteric systems, much of Kabbalah appears ridiculous to the uninitiated: when we

read “Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman,” tell us, while high on Thorazine, that “although the

Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be

apprehend all at once, together, in parallel” (768), we probably ought to roll our eyes and skim

ahead to the actual launch. Yet having earlier heard Ensign Morituri’s story about how prior to

the war German actress Margherita Erdmann, one of Slothrop’s contacts in the Zone and among

those connected to the 00000, had nearly sacrificed a small Jewish boy under the guise of

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“Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God” (486), we might take more seriously the

relationship of mythic archetypes and human behavior.

The problems with evaluating such figurative systems come to a head in the final scene,

in which the Imipolex-G-coated 00000 (loaded with Weissmann’s sex slave Gottfried) is fired

from Germany on Easter 1945 and reappears in 1970s California. The scene describes how the

00000’s fuel is ignited, launching the rocket parabolically upward until the fuel runs out, at

which point its trajectory quickly decays, freezing the rocket at its highest point momentarily

before it begins to fall. This arc is determined by real and unavoidable physical laws, which,

inasmuch as they unite all action into a universal pattern, might justly be called allegorical.

However, the narrator builds further allegories on top of these. He states “This ascent will be

betrayed to Gravity,” echoing earlier, apocalyptic allegorizations of scattering and heat death as

portending the species’s collapse, and his subsequent “The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on

a promise, a prophecy, of Escape” characterizes the rocket’s propulsive force as a figure for

humanity’s attempts to surmount it, with the moment of suspension in between (“The first star

hangs between his feet”) serving as something like enlightenment (774-775). These additional

figurations, though, are not so ineluctable as the physical equations.

The latter feeling of

transcendence is rooted at least as much in purely biological unease at the imagination of

complex natural and synthetic forces working in concert upon one’s body, and on a larger scale,

the destruction of one theater by one rocket does not necessarily portend any more cosmic

destruction. On the other hand, asked to imagine the planet from a heretofore unseen

perspective, it is hard not to think about what new or terrible knowledge might be gained from it,

nor how the 00000’s real analogues contributed to postwar America’s two most sublime

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creations, the space shuttle and the ICBM, which bear within them many of our postwar era’s

largest-scale hopes and fears about who we are and how we relate to the universe.

In considering this final image, we should keep in mind that, despite the long line of

Pynchon criticism that blames the destruction that the 00000’s landing heralds on synthetic

military-industrial control, the novel’s two most common tropes for apocalypse, gravity and

entropy, are entirely natural. It is not rationalist analysis but nature that is the true source of

death, in which none are elect and all are preterite, everything destined to be reduced eventually

to undifferentiated particles. What exists otherwise are competing allegories that attempt to

circumvent this principle. They are not all equally valid: some are so necessary to conceiving

the world that we might as well call them true, while others are so contradictory, constricting, or

destructive that we must call them false. Managing the spectrum between the two is the great

challenge of human civilization, and as society becomes increasingly complicated, we need to

become increasingly adept at filtering which of these to allow to orient our attention and which

to dispatch.

Famously, McHale claimed that the greatest difficulty in reading fictions like Gravity’s

Rainbow is their irresolvable ontological conflicts between different diegetic planes

(Postmodernist 10), but if Gravity’s Rainbow’s reality were simply indeterminate, the book

could be dismissed as one incoherent novel among many.

Instead, the book presents us with a

more difficult set of contradictions, those within our own modes of cognizing the world.

Whether we perceive reality through the frames of religious or scientific epistemology, through

universalist or relativist morality, through the Left or the Right, no matter how sound it appears

when we are not reading the book, it will appear all too visibly inadequate when we do, its

inconsistencies and holes dragged into the open and exposed. Though McHale has at times

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implied that postmodern fiction “post-cognitive” (Postmodernist 10), this problem is very much

a cognitive one, and no book raises it more profoundly than Gravity’s Rainbow, the exemplary

experimental work of figural narrative systems, the subtlest distributor of cruft in our fiction, and

the greatest of mega-novels.

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Conclusion—The Fate of the Mega-Novel

The past five chapters have analyzed how we process text in the mega-novel, ranging

from its sentence-level lacunae up to its macro-scale figurations of nation and world. Given how

utterly mega-novel text overwhelms our limited working memory and how often it dissolves its

most important text into a large amount of cruft, I have argued that this requires us to hone our

ability to modulate attention to an extremely fine degree, filtering the latter so as to better

perceive the former. Furthermore, through my analyses of specific mega-novels, I hope to have

demonstrated that there is no single attentional mode optimal for all literary texts, and that one

must frequently switch modes, sometimes drastically, so as to best apprehend what one reads:

some passages should be processed closely and slowly, while others should be read more

quickly; some are best read distantly, while others are best passed over entirely. Refining this

procedure can be cognitively beneficial, I believe, because learning how to modulate attention in

the mega-novel’s controlled environment will allow us to apply this ability to the more

unrestrained cascades of information we regularly encounter in our everyday lives.

Having made this argument in its particulars over the past several hundred pages, I would

like now to articulate a few general conclusions. First, I would like to extrapolate some practical

pedagogical implications. As N. Katherine Hayles suggests in her essay on hyper and deep

attention, many university professors, afraid of boring their students, are reporting an increased

reluctance to assign novels of any length (Hayles, “Hyper” 188), and since mega-novels have

always clashed with what one of my graduate professors termed the Economy of Course

Syllabi—approximated by Mark O’Connell’s quip, “Why commit yourself to one gigantic

classic when you can read a whole lot of small classics in the same period of time?”—there is

reason to worry that mega-novels may start to fall out of literature courses entirely, save a small

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handful that can justify an entire semester’s focus. While this trend is understandable, I think

there is reason to push against it. As I pointed out in the Introduction, literary education has long

been principally concerned with the training of attention—a point we might remember,

incidentally, when taking up our periodic defenses of the humanities—and while other literary

genres have their own unusual relationships to that crucial element of cognition, the mega-novel,

as I have shown throughout this book, pressures its nuances more than any other.

How to teach mega-novels so as to maximize this impact is a more complicated matter.

Doubtless, the problem admits a variety of solutions, whose success will vary based on the

particular teacher, students, and mega-novel. However, I hope that this book has at least

demonstrated that in the classroom setting, mega-novel difficulty should not simply be papered

over. Instead, it needs to be foregrounded and discussed, with the frustration and boredom it

produces in students both acknowledged and validated. Those responses are not mere obstacles

in the paths’ of students’ understanding, but the most vital effect mega-novels produce. The

strategy I alluded to in Chapter 2 of allowing students to skip Moby-Dick’s whaling chapters,

then, is half astute and half misguided: it understands how these chapters will bore students and

are often a bit pointless, but misses how important they are to shaping attention. When one’s

students complain of being bored with a mega-novel, one should not simply try to work around

those passages, or for that matter grouse about students’ unwillingness to commit sufficient

effort to the book or their deficient knowledge of, say, the prerequisite economics and world

history to fully appreciate it. One should take it, instead, as the starting point from which to

examine students’ cognitive processes and gradually alter them so that they can better attend the

passages that warrant attention.

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Second, I’d like to address in a broader context some points I have already articulated in

piecemeal fashion regarding critical misconceptions about mega-novels. One is the problem

caused by the Reader’s Guide approach, the view that everything in a mega-novel can be

understood as deeply meaningful once one has corrected one’s ignorance of its allusions and paid

close attention to its text, which will allow a labyrinthine but lucid structure to be deciphered.

For one—as I painfully learned during a summer spent at a publishing house vetting lengthy,

unsolicited fantasy manuscripts, many of which came supplemented with obsessively-detailed

maps and appendices—simply because a book contains an extremely complicated fictional world

does not mean, necessarily, that puzzling out that world is worth anyone’s time: there needs to be

more to a mega-novel than gratuitous elaboration. Of course, I do not dispute the tremendous

service done by the major mega-novel Reader’s Guides—those, for instance, by Steven Moore,

Steven Weisenburger, Greg Carlisle, the entire Joyce industry, etc.—in systematically

articulating ways in which parts of their text that many of us might otherwise have failed to give

much notice can be more closely attended. However, we must realize that many readers’

difficulties in understanding mega-novels are at least as much caused by paying too much

attention in the wrong places, to passages whose apparent connections never end up coming to

fruition, and over whose surface mega-novel veterans have learned to skim. This view needs to

acknowledge that mega-novel excess is often simply insignificant.

Another misconception is the critique that mega-novels’ outsized scope exhibits an

overweening and “totalizing” ambition, which readers in an enlightened, pluralist society should

reject. This view has always been inherently self-contradictory: if one is going to imagine what

it means to live in a heterogeneous, diffuse environment, rather than a provincial, blinkered one,

one’s fictional world needs the breadth and scope to match it. As Italo Calvino wrote of the

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literature of “multiplicity,” “Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not

in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all

hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares

imagine will literature continue to have a function” (112). I will add that literature is exempt

from these dangers of ambition because, by its very fictionality, it can never assert the truth of

any interpretive system, ethics, or epistemology. Its value comes through the range of thought it

helps make possible, and mega-novels, by exploring the possibilities of imagination as widely as

they can, do this better than any other genre.

However, we can only appreciate this multiplicity in a manner apposite to our minds’

limited channel capacity. The poststructuralist perspective that we should celebrate mega-novels

for their anti-hierarchical subversion of order and flux—inspired, in many cases, by Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, an approach to “multiplicity” in which

“There are no points or positions […] There are only lines” (8), making it “open and

connectable in all of its dimensions” (12), because it “has neither subject nor object, only

determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions” (8) and consequently rejects any “hierarchical

systems”(16)—is also misconceived. Given the unimaginably numerous stimuli we encounter in

every waking moment of our lives, we have no choice but to simplify them into points, and once

we have done so, we must hierarchize them by paying them different levels of attention based on

their perceived importance. If you did not do this, you could not prioritize the words being

spoken to you by a friend over those of a passerby, or the book in your hands over the patch of

air beside it; indeed, you could not even distinguish your friend’s words from the constant hum

of noise generated by the world, nor the book from surrounding atmospheric particles. Lines

without points, after all, are not a multiplicity, but simply a mass of sameness.

In the best

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scenario, you would end up like Funes the Memorious and merely incapable of thought; in the

worst, you would lose all capacity for conscious thought. If Jesse Prinz is correct to claim that

we are only conscious of that to which we have modulated our attention (89), in fact, in a very

basic way, consciousness is hierarchy: it is our knowledge of the stimuli that we have decided

are worth paying attention to as opposed to our ignorance of stimuli we have decided are not.

Our choice is not between constructing hierarchical versus non-hierarchical structures: it is

between hierarchizing well and hierarchizing poorly, and as with all things, those who refuse to

admit the nature of the choice are likely to end up in the second group.

Yet if the poststructuralist conception of mind is not adequate to cognizing the

information age, what model is? Hayles, examining this problem with respect to Infinite Jest,

writes that “nothing less than a reconceptualization of subjectivity can offer a solution” (693),

because the novel’s events show that “the idea of an autonomous liberal subject can be a recipe

for disaster in a world densely interconnected with interlocking complex systems” (696),

suggesting we must shape our minds more along the lines established by communal institutions

like AA or the Enfield Tennis Academy (693-695). As demonstrated in Chapter 2, however,

these models evacuate subjectivity of its critical faculties, rendering it extremely vulnerable to

exploitation. What is more interesting about Hayles’s argument, though, is its relationship to her

more recent concerns about students’ limited attention spans and tendency toward ADHD. As I

mentioned in the Introduction, ADHD is not primarily defined as an inherent incapacity for

attention, but an inability to “self-regulate” attention—and “self-regulation,” of course, has long

been a term frequently associated by critics of Hayles’s persuasion with the “autonomous liberal

subject” whom she critiques.

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One always must be careful of transferring terminology across disciplines, but is it

entirely off-base to say that the poststructuralist subject has ADHD? There is some research,

after all, linking ADHD symptoms with the types of creativity poststructuralists prize, theorizing

that an “inability to filter out information […] makes these individuals constantly open to much

more information, increasing the chances of them coming up with an original recombination of

information” (Healey and Rucklidge 422). Despite the obvious possible benefits of such a

cognitive framework, however, I trust that anyone who has long dealt with ADHD-diagnosed

persons understands the serious cognitive drawbacks that accompany this perpetual openness,

primarily its susceptibility to distraction and incapacity for inhibition.

Is there any other hypothetical construct for subjectivity better able to critically manage,

filter, and modulate through information overload? And if not, can it be that after decades of

theoretical assault within the academy, it turns out we actually need the autonomous liberal

subject after all? It seems to me that this may be the case, because so far as I can tell, no other

model of subjectivity is capable of the attentional modulations required to make of the mind

something more than a mere repository and replicator of memes, powerless over their transit and

absolutely at their mercy. If it will mollify objections, let us say that this status is not a given,

that it must be built gradually over time, and furthermore that it can never really be fully

achieved, only approached. It cannot, however, be curtly dismissed, least of all in the context of

the mega-novel: while Borges might have once thought that only someone with Funes’s

capacities for memory could read a book like Ulysses (qted. in Quian Quiroga 12-14),

for the

reasons I have articulated, the task is probably best undertaken by a mind not totally open to

stimuli but one with maximum capacity for controlled shifts in modes of processing.

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To rigorously argue this point would obviously require far more analysis than could be

contained in my remaining space. I will end instead by illustrating this speculation with two

quick stories that happened to bookend the composition of this work. In 2011, around the time I

began, the IBM computer program Watson appeared on an episode of the quiz show Jeopardy!,

handily defeating two of the series’s most successful champions. I imagine this came as no

shock to those conversant with recent developments in A.I., but I (like, I suspect, many

humanists) was somewhat surprised, as I had not realized that computers could now not only

process encyclopedic text with incredible speed but also, for many practical intents and purposes,

demonstrate comprehension of it equal to that of any human. While subsequently wondering

whether there would long be any function for the human mind in a world where computers

seemed progressively capable of superseding its abilities, I consoled myself with one thought,

perhaps prompted by a glance at Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2: Watson, for all his prodigious

memory and even more astonishingly precise ability to search and filter it, would probably be

totally baffled by Finnegans Wake. That said, if this observation is to help us conceptualize the

continuing importance of human mind, we need to make sure it does not apply equally to most

humans, too.

Two and a half years later, during in the summer of 2013, when I began writing this

conclusion, former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden leaked documents to several news

outlets detailing some of the agency’s elaborate surveillance programs, prominently including

large-scale collections of metadata from some of the country’s largest information companies,

whose scale potentially extended into the yottabytes. Though I do not have the technical

expertise to speak with any confidence about what exactly this portends, the resulting hubbub in

the mainstream press about potential threats to privacy seems to me misplaced—at least, if

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“privacy” is conceived traditionally, as individuals’ control over specific information they

believe to be only accessible to them. So far as I can tell, there is no individual piece of

information that such programs make available that had not been accessible through one method

or another previously. Besides, more importantly, when one has the run of a database of such

enormous size, one does not generally use it to look up for specific bits of data: the very quantity

of information within it, after all, makes any individual datum nearly meaningless. Rather, what

one does is find novel ways to manipulate the data, representing it at three or four levels of

compression, then reordering it so that it provides answers to questions that otherwise could not

even be asked. One uses it, in other words, to eliminate or subordinate the vast majority of its

raw data while simultaneously synthesizing new information that even the individuals with

whom it is associated are not likely to know.

What kinds of filtering, recoding, and sorting, then, will be done with the unthinkable

amount of data our society will produce in the near future? What beneficial and pernicious

effects might result? And what kinds of minds will we have to produce to adequately handle it?

Briarwood, Queens, 2011-2013

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Notes

Introduction

1. Karl calls them “Mega-Novels” rather than “mega-novels.” I decapitalize the term so

as to broaden it beyond his specific emphasis on postwar American fiction.

2. Of course, we might as easily ask it of some of James’s later work, especially The

Golden Bowl.

3. The list of humanists expressing these sorts of concerns is far too extensive to survey

here. For a recent discussion of these issues, see Baron.

4. The most famous attempt to give all elements of a text this kind of attention is, of

course, Barthes’s S/Z, which attempts to closely analyze every phrase of Balzac’s “Sarrasine.”

David Richter’s summary of S/Z’s reception should demonstrate Rabinowitz’s point: “S/Z was

simultaneously the masterpiece and the reductio ad absurdum of Barthes’s holistic approach to

fiction, because it made clear that any genuinely complete analysis of a fictional text would be so

long and complex as to be nearly unreadable. It was widely admired but never imitated, even by

Barthes himself” (832).

5. This is also why it has been suggested both within philosophy (see Svendsen) and

psychology (Fahlman et al.) that boredom is abetted by the desire for but absence of meaning in

one’s life.

6. It does not help that most texts Ngai mentions, other than Gertrude Stein’s The Making

of Americans, are conceptual poetry, such as Judith Goldman’s poem listing every word in

Moby-Dick that begins un-. Many of these are arguably stupid, as Chapters 1 and 3 will suggest.

7. We should not over-emphasize this point, given the specific parameters of the study

cited within consumer research, but Yoon, Sarial-Abi, & Gürhan-Canli actually suggest that low

information loads tend to push people more effectively toward alternate perspectives.

8. This argument is suggested, for example, by Jeppsen’s claim that“when the novel

begins to ignore the noise of culture—and, to be precise, the badness of the prose that fills our

daily communicative life […]—then the novel will drown in the depths of irrelevancy” (143).

Similarly, though not approvingly, James Wood claims that DeLillo, Pynchon, and Wallace

share with Flaubert the notion that “the novelist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he

describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring” (Fiction 33).

9. In fact, there may be no better fictional treatment of the asymmetrical relation between

the world’s vast information and our limited minds than Borges’s early short fictions, which is

why I will refer to them throughout the book.

10. How to place one’s attention, of course, is a major subject of Wallace’s famous 2005

Kenyon College commencement address, as well as several of his later stories, most notably

“The Soul is Not a Smithy.”

11. This is probably why genre has been such an important critical tool for writers as

diverse as Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson.

12. Incidentally, Robert Scholes’s The Fabulators, one of the first monographs to attempt

to conceptualize (what eventually came to be called) postmodern narrative, uses a chapter

organization remarkably similar to my own, even though I developed it independently well

before I was aware of Scholes’s book. This corroborates, I think, Sinding’s general point.

13. The next time you criticize a mediocre commercial film or novel, for example,

observe the extent to which your criticism relies upon your perception of its failure to fulfill

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certain expectations. Steven Moore, for instance, after spending much of his introduction to The

Novel excoriating the aesthetic limitations of conventional realist fiction and its tendency to

pander to readerly pleasure, proceeds to establish the quality of Joyce’s dialogue over John

Grisham’s on the grounds that the latter is “unrealistic” and “unsatisfying” (15).

14. For instance, when I presented on a panel about contemporary encyclopedic

narratives during the writing of this book, our esteemed moderator’s introductory comments

treated as a given that the greatest value of mega-novels was their ability to subvert totalizing

metanarratives. See Chapter 5 for more on this point.

15. So far as I can tell, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of attention span nor

any universal value for its typical length. However, an experiment conducted at Catholic

University regarding an activity similarly challenging to reading a mega-novel—listening to a

chemistry lecture—demonstrated cycles of attention lapses every four minutes or so among

student subjects (Bunce, Flens, and Neiles).

16. That the narrator of long novels no longer performs this function was famously

observed by an eminent scholar in a classic work of narrative theory, but for the life of me I

cannot recall who or where.

17. As Horace wrote, even Homer nods.

18. Even Charles Dickens, who does write with the oral narrative rather than reference

work in mind, often addressed and satirized the encyclopedic impulse (see Buzard 119).

19. Catherine Emmott has examined the manipulation of attention in the whodunit at

some length (Sanford and Emmott 92-93).

20. Contra Kenner’s claim that Joyce cross-references everything “at least twice, in order

to demonstrated that nothing is a flyspeck on the design, but an intended part” (63), Mesias is not

mentioned again.

21. The tendency of this tactic to lead to self-reinforcing feedback loops was famously

critiqued by Alec McHoul and David Wills in their study of Pynchon (108).

Chapter 1

1. There have been some partial exceptions, such as Milorad Pavić’s wonderful

Dictionary of the Khazars or Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, but those tend to fit more

in the category of encyclopedia, at least as I am defining the terms, which is discussed in Chapter

In fact, the Wake has recently inspired Bill Cliett to compose a “lextionary” comprising

definitions of 800 of Joyce’s coinages, designed, like the first English dictionaries, to “jazz up

your voca(l)bulary.”

3. Certainly, there are currently no elucidations of these words on Raphael Slepdon’s

Finnegas Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, the most comprehensive database of Wake

glosses.

4. These distinctions are often made somewhat differently by followers of Barthes, often

to assert that “experimental” novels are writerly, while “realist” novels are readerly. However,

Barthes in S/Z does not associate “writerly” text with difficult or experimental work, but in fact

states that “the writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore”;

we may only find it in “ourselves writing” (5). In other words, the readerly and writerly appear

more distinguished by the reader’s cognitive modes than the text itself. Similarly, The Pleasure

of the Text claims that his terms “pleasure” and “bliss” should not be made “the source of

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absolute classifications” since “there is always a vacillation” between them (4). Of course, this

studied vagueness, characteristic of Barthes’ later period, has not stopped anyone from co-opting

the terms for more rigid polemical purposes.

5. Some interpretations of information, following Wiener, prefer to consider information

the negative of entropy. The difference, so far as I understand it, mostly derives from whether

one considers information a property of the message or the receiver’s knowledge, but for our

purposes, the distinction is unimportant, because in both cases their absolute value increases in

exact proportion, even though one has a negative sign in front of it.

6. The otherwise astute Steven Weisenburger provides a case study. Discussing Gaddis’s

first novel, he claims that “Even in The Recognitions, though, Gaddis is well aware that

cybernetic theorists had recently discovered a telling homology between the mathematical

equation for computing entropy and the equation for calculating the information per message,

that is, the message’s susceptibility to semiotic entropy or ‘noise’” (Fables 212). This is entirely

wrong. As may be seen from my description, Shannon’s definition says nothing about a

tendency toward noise: in fact, because it evaluates text separate from its channel, it is exempt

from Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, which Weisenburger seems to have conflated

with entropy proper. (Only when the message is transmitted in a channel does the Second Law

apply.) Furthermore, Shannon’s definition is explicitly non-semiotic, because it separates

information (i.e., the actual characters) from meaning (i.e., what they semiotically represent)

(“Mathematical” 1).

7. How a focus on meaning can confuse literary treatments of information may be seen in

Thomas Pynchon’s early story “Entropy.” In his introduction to the retrospective collection of

his early short stories, Slow Learner, Pynchon warns that, though his early work had given

readers the impression that he possessed a deep knowledge of entropy, they should “not

underestimate the shallowness of [his] understanding” (12-13). In “Entropy,” in fact, Pynchon

has his character Saul refer to five dramatically distinct information theory terms—noise,

redundancy, ambiguity, irrelevance, and leakage—as essentially synonymous (90-91). All five

impede meaning, of course, but how their effect on information causes them to do so is

dramatically different. As a result, Saul’s application of information theory to relationships

becomes incoherent—which might be an appropriate, if unintended, result for the story.

8. This paradox may not apply in quite the same way to literature as biology: after all,

biological mutation is unguided and genetic, while literary mutations are shaped by critical

intelligence and may be taken from anywhere. Yet this is likely why, despite The Gold-Bug

Variations’ interest in genetic mutation, there are so few errors (and so much conventionality,

not only in language but plot and character) over its 600 pages, excepting the one

“diseasterously” in the passage from which I quote (and, of course, in the book’s title).

9. We should take a moment, incidentally, to reject the commonplace view that modern

art is characterized by an original defiance of convention, while postmodern art is based upon

repeating conventions and undoing totalized orders. After all, contrary to Eco, it is the arch

postmodern novel J R that Steiner criticized as too unconventional to be read, while it is the

modernist masterpiece The Making of Americans that Wilson found too repetitive to finish. This

distinction looks particularly inadequate given the equally common, and diametrically opposed,

identification of modernist literature as affirming totalized order and postmodern literature as

subverting metanarratives. Not only does that distinction work no better on its own—for

instance, Leo Bersani, in The Culture of Redemption, complains about supposed totalized

aesthetic order in modernist work such as Joyce’s Ulysses but ignores how the contemporary

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critics characterized the book as a nihilistic cacophony, while oddly discounting the almost

identically broad reliance of postmodern work like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on the

grand textual structures of Weber, Rilke, Kabbalah, physical equations, and so on (155-199)—it

directly contradicts Eco’s formulation by associating order with the modern and disorder with

the postmodern. Surely, there are some general distinctions that might be made between

modernism and postmodernism, but this rhetoric about order and originality is not among them.

10. Gibbs himself uses the word “entropy” twice in reference to the clutter of messages

that overwhelm the Upper East Side apartment (i.e., those on its radio, telephone, incoming mail,

and ambient disorganized papers) serving as a retreat for several failed artists who have become

entangled in J R’s schemes (287, 403) and once more while substitute teaching (21).

Consequently, entropy was one of the first subjects addressed in criticism on the novel (see

Thielemans, “Gaddis”; Malmgren) and continues to be invoked by more recent Gaddis criticism

(see Leise).

11. See Chénetier, though, for an analysis of how the narrator’s absence in J R is

generally overstated by such critics.

12. As established in Chapter 1, note 5, there is a school of thought that sees entropy as

information’s opposite. If entropy can be thought of as the opposite of information, however, it

can only be as its additive inverse or negative (e.g., as 1 is to -1). While Wiener articulated this

position in some of his work, it is not consistent with this formulation: he wants them to be polar

opposites (e.g., as 1 is to 0), with entropy creating an absence of information. For the reasons

articulated, that will simply not work.

13 Critics’ inability to articulate this dilemma leads to frequent contradiction. For

instance, Comnes’ thesis is that Gaddis’ work is based in indeterminacy, but he ends up speaking

of the novel in determinate structures like musical tonics and overtones (110); similarly,

Johnston is unable to distinguish Gaddis’s own “deterritorialized” aesthetic (156) from the

pernicious way that “capitalism produces an information multiplicity whose terms always excess

the telos of the system’s functioning” (Information 161).

14. Critics sometimes recognize this without satisfactorily expressing how it is achieved.

For instance, O’Donnell’s essay on the dissolution of the independent narrative voice ends by

mystically invoking “the presence of ‘Gaddis,’ who has orchestrated the novel’s many voices,

languages, and discourses” to hold things together (O’Donnell, “Master’s”), while Tabbi

similarly has recourse to an ineffable process whereby “the reader, author and text converge in

the collaborative give-and-take that for Gaddis constitutes the acts of reading and writing”

(Tabbi, “Technology”).

15. In fact, Gaddis may include a quick jab at Orwell’s insistence on shorter, Anglo-

Saxon words in The Recognitions, as in one party scene his narrator recounts how, “Beyond,

someone was engaged in writing a criticism of a work which contained forty-nine one-syllable

words to seven of two syllables, thirty-one words of Anglo-Saxon origin to five of Latin and

one-eighteenth of Greek. It was honest, this person said” (619).

16. See James Miller for an account of the debate over Orwell in academic writing at the

end of the twentieth century.

17. Stein explicitly rejected the tactic of altering or inventing words, in fact (Lectures

237-238).

18. Actually, as Stephen Ramsay observes, the variety of vocabulary used in the novels

of “hard” writers like William Faulkner and Henry James is often dramatically less than that of

“easy” storytellers like Rudyard Kipling and Jack London (71-72).

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19. She writes of Stein’s 1934 abridgement, which cut out hundreds of thousands of

words, “I do not think it sacrifices much” (163).

20. Interestingly, Goldsmith also invokes Pierre Menard, and characteristically (contra

Barth), he seems a bit disappointed that Borges didn’t just retype Don Quixote instead of writing

his own story. I suspect Barth, for his part, might mind that Goldsmith seems to have applied his

non-reading practices to the Borges story Barth so admires, given that Goldsmith appears

confused on some pretty basic plot points (109-110). Incidentally, Goldsmith does partly resist

the notion that his work need not be actually written, claiming of a book like Day that the

“conception of what it would feel like to read it, to hold it, to examine it” is an important

aesthetic experience. Furthermore, even for a book as mechanical as Day, Goldsmith points out

that he had to make some original decisions regarding font, formatting, etc. However, these

“literary properties that we’re not able to see during our daily reading” of the newspaper (118-

119) do not seem to produce particularly profound results.

21. This process might be seen at the macro level in the convoluted structure to the whole

book’s periodic repetitions of longer passages revealed by Clement’s corpus study.

22. Furthermore, as Marjorie Perloff notes, we should not assume that Stein’s

terminology itself is particularly consistent or rigorous (64-66). Stein’s essays are a poet’s, not a

critic’s.

23. Here is that second paragraph:

Some love themselves enough to not want to lose themselves, immortality

can to them mean nothing but this thing. Some love themselves negatively, then

impersonal future life is for them alright, a good enough thing. Some love

themselves and others so hard that they are sure that they will exist even when

they won’t, they do to themselves exist even when they don’t, these have a future

life feeling, an individual thing, some love themselves and they are it and that is

all there is of it in them and they do not have future life in them to be an important

thing. Men and women have being in them all of them when they are living.

Many men and women have in them a feeling of future life in them, very many of

them, some for this life, some for another life, some for both lives, this and

another one, some have a stronger, some have a weaker feeling of themselves

inside them, some have more, some have less loving in them for themselves than

other ones have in them, some have more some have less loving in them for other

ones than others have in them, some have more some have less feeling for some

thing than other ones have in them and all these things in each one are part in

them of the virtuous feeling, of the religious feeling they have in them each one,

each man and woman, each one having man or woman being in them, each man

or woman has some being in her or in him. (444, 480)

24. Despite everything, the Wake’s text is still primarily classical, rather than quantum,

information. Quantum information does exist: to create it, one entangles photons to form qubits

that may achieve values anywhere on the continuum from 0 to 1, and thus would not be limited

to the alphabet’s discrete set of characters. However, since quantum information decays into

classical information as soon as it is measured, it is not clear that any literary work could be

expressed in this form (Loepp and Wootters 56-102). All of the Wake, however, is easily

expressible in classical, linear text, with only the minor exceptions of the musical staffs in “The

Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (which still relies on a finite musical vocabulary) and the footnotes in

the “Night Lessons” chapter (which still could be expressed classically, so long as one

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manipulates the spacing to separate out the marginalia). Put another way, not only is Finnegans

Wake in the Library of Babel, it would be one of most coherent of the library’s books.

Finnegans Wake may break language down to the individual character (Attridge 207; Rasula,

“Finnegans” 524), but rarely does it go further.

25. To my knowledge, only critic has explicitly attempted to bridge these camps using

information theory, James Connor. However, he gets mixed up in his analysis of order and

disorder. Connor claims that the Wake “belongs at the top of Shannon’s bell curve, halfway

between pure order and pure chaos, constructed, yet constructed in such a way that it packs a

certain measure of improbability into every line” (826), but that is a misreading of Shannon’s

graph. The midpoint of which he speaks is not between order and disorder, but between total

probability that a binary digit reads “1” and total probability that it reads “0”—that is, the point

at which either choice is equally likely, and thus where the text is maximally entropic.

26. Interestingly, Shannon named Joyce’s work as an example of text that got closer to

the minimum redundancy, but this may be somewhat misleading. Shannon and his colleagues

refer to the frequency studies of G. K. Zipf, who famously tested his theory regarding the

relation of a corpus’s words’ frequencies to their ranks on Ulysses. Zipf chose Joyce’s novel

because its size, vast vocabulary, and abnormal prose style pushed his theory to its limit, yet it

still held. Accordingly, the Macy conferees cite Joyce because they believed, following Zipf,

that the size of his vocabulary would make any given character less predictable/redundant, much

as a newspaper article’s use of many disparate proper nouns and minimum filler make it less

redundant (“Redundancy” 254-255). However, from my (very limited) understanding of Zipf’s

work, though, it appears he did not consider syntax, which at least adds some unpredictability in

the late Joyce. Quantitative linguistic analysis beyond this, sadly, is outside my ken.

27. Coincidentally, Bennett also invokes Borges’ Pierre Menard, in his case to

demonstrate the tremendous difference in time between how long it would take to independently

generate such a structured work as Quixote (Menard, remember, only finishes a few chapters)

and how long it would take to simply copy it.

28. Despite arguments that the Wake destroys the Babelian borders between the world’s

languages (see Derrida, “Joyce”; Milesi 148), the Wake is much more a work of English than any

other language, in particular by maintaining its syntactic structure (Epstein 15-16). Many

foreign loan words are incorporated, of course, which expands the dictionary we need to use for

correction.

29. While the typeset of the Wake is standardized, its aural form is obviously not: the

Wake’s words can be pronounced with any number of accents, which would inevitably vary the

value of d

, though the general critical tendency is to hear it in the West Irish dialect Joyce used

in his “Anna Livia Plurabelle” recording. I use my best judgment in treating the phonetics of the

Wake’s words, but these values will obviously only be approximate.

30. That the sounds are similar seems important, too. Not all Hamming distances seem to

be the same in this respect: while I don’t think anyone would favor “lacy” over “easy” as a

correction for “eacy” on the grounds that l is only seven letters from e while s is sixteen away

from c, something about phonetic structure makes the close relation of the voiced and unvoiced

alveolar fricatives represented by c and s seem to present a smaller Hamming distance than if

they were not so closely related. It even seems to trump motifs—no one has suggested “eacy”

should be read as “eary,” despite ears being one of the book’s major motifs.

31. As Sebastian Knowles further pointed out to me, the rhythms of more complex

phrases are also detectable beneath the Wake’s sentences, though their Hamming distances on a

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word-by-word basis are quite large. Why some phrases with high Hamming distances seem

appropriate corrections and others with lower ones don’t is part of the mystery of the language.

For instance, Epstein hears “The Star-Spangled Banner” in “Saw fore shalt thou sea. Betoun ye

and be” (36); I don’t, but I cannot think of any way to adjudicate this dispute.

32. d

=4 here, but d

is much lower; it cannot be calculated exactly, but every sound in

each word is closely related to its correlate (see Chapter 1, note 30).

Chapter 2

1. I focus on the use of specialized information as the essential feature of the subgenre so

as to keep the “encyclopedic novel” from too much overlap or conflation with “epic novel,”

which I treat in Chapter 5. Critical treatments frequently merge the two. For instance, Frye

identifies the epic as the subset of the encyclopedic that is associated with the “romantic” and

“high mimetic” range of his modal theory (315-326), since a culture’s epic constitutes a

“mythical or scriptural revelation” that combines knowledge and cultural meaning (54-56).

Though Mendelson makes a greater effort to separate the encyclopedia and epic chronologically

and by breadth of knowledge expressed, he still claims “Encyclopedic narrative evolves out of

epic, and often uses epic structure as its organizing skeleton” (162). That Mendelson blurs the

two is perhaps seen in how Franco Moretti in Modern Epic, though acknowledging that he and

Mendelson are discussing a similar canon, thinks these books are better referred to by his title

phrase (4). The convergence of encyclopedic and epic for these three is rooted in a purportedly

inextricable connection between knowledge and cultural ideology, especially via education (Frye

54-55; Mendelson 162, Moretti, Modern 37). The two are related, of course, but there is

something to be gained by examining them separately.

2. Burn only explicitly refers here to the work of William Gaddis, but implicitly extends

his view toward the encyclopedic novel generally.

3. Not only must it be accurate, it must accurately transmit discoveries made elsewhere,

making it doubly referential—Wikipedia’s “no original research” policy represents the typical

encyclopedic attitude well (Reagle 11-13). One exception, incidentally, is the Enlightenment

Encyclopédie.

4. That even sophisticated readers tended to overrate their capacity for making such

distinctions was demonstrated when Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code managed not only to

convince a large number of readers of the historical accuracy of its long-debunked theories about

the Holy Grail based solely on a meager introductory page of “Facts” (see Burstein), but even

got academics more caught up in debating its factual accuracy than its novelistic merits (see

Ehrman).

5. In fact, the very unexpectedness of the most interesting truths encyclopedic novels

relate renders them poor transmitters of those truths. This might be best exemplified by

Gravity’s Rainbow. As Terry Reilly has noted, much in Pynchon’s World War II narrative that

has been viewed as fantastic invention is based on actual secret information he picked up from

his days at Boeing (“Hans Kammler” and “Hard Science”). However, such information, instead

of making the book a revealing secret history of the war, renders its encyclopedism ineffective.

To add an example, one scene sees British intelligence send invisible, coded messages whose

recipients can only decode using their own semen (72-74). I can only imagine this scene is

usually taken by readers as pure fabrication, yet it was recently revealed that MI6 did once use

semen as an active agent in invisible ink (“MI6…”). However, the precise mechanism Pynchon

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describes does not really resemble that which MI6 actually used, so since the novel describes a

process that sounds totally fictional, yet has a factual basis, yet is not actually described

correctly, it would be best not to try to learn about World War II from its text.

6. Nor is this attitude purely a relic of the mid-century academy; see Sisk for a more

recent academic attempt to verify Melville’s cetology.

7. Given how confusing Ishmael’s assertion is for first-time readers (Wolff 123-124), for

whom the whale’s status as a mammal is one of the few cetological facts they are likely to know,

it is interesting that there have not been many good critical analyses of this claim. Vincent

throws off a response, claiming Melville, though knowing that the whale was not considered a

fish by biologists, “let his definition be shaped by the common characteristics and by familiar

experience, not by laboratory information” (140)—an odd conclusion, given that Ishmael seems

so determined to correct popular misconception elsewhere. While Donald Wolff grants a level

of “irony” to this claim, he still believes the text supports the value of “common sense” against

“academic learning” (124). Otherwise, critics addressing this passage are few and far between:

the only one I have found presenting a plausible explanation is Jamey Hecht, who claims that

Ishmael does so to deny his relative kinship to the species his profession hunts (113-117).

8. Charles Olson attempts to extricate Ishmael on that point by noting the distinction

between baleen whales and toothed whales before asserting “Melville was satisfied with the

biggest of the toothed whales, the sperm” (22-23). This exemplifies, I think, the slipperiness

with which critics arguing the classical encyclopedic position make their case.

9. Though the cetological chapters were once argued as necessary to inform readers about

key-terms central to the plot later (Vincent 122-125), these plotless expository chapters are

clearly written by choice rather than dramatic necessity. For instance, in Chapter 72, “The

Monkey-Rope,” Ishmael has no difficulty introducing and defining his central whaling term

during the action without pontificating abstractly upon it at great length (319-322).

10. Granted, this view still surfaced occasionally: as late as the nineteenth century, a

German encyclopedia sought to encyclopedize all known information. It was abandoned as

unfinishable only after 167 volumes had been written and no end was yet in sight (Yeo 4).

11. As several studies have shown, accuracy per se is not that much of problem for

Wikipedia: despite the lack of central editorial verification, because it can be updated

instantaneously, it tends not to fare that poorly when compared to centrally-edited encyclopedias

(Reagle 138-168). Even so, the fact that Wikipedia is editable by almost anyone leads to the

site’s own admission that readers should confirm its material elsewhere, an astonishing

admission for an encyclopedia (Reagle 163-164). Regardless, though, accuracy alone is merely

necessary, not sufficient, for a good encyclopedia. Two representative examples should make

this point well. Regarding adequate organization of data, Wikipedia’s article on the 2008

conflicts on the Georgia-Russia border quickly devolves from a disciplined overview of a key

world event into an accurate but sprawling and nearly paratactic day-by-day account of assorted

occurrences, hindering comprehension of the subject for a casual reader. Somewhat more

whimsically, the popular Internet game of “wikigroaning” highlights how a given subject’s

importance is rarely reflected by the depth of information Wikipedia carries on it, as with how

the article on humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer has a lower word count than the article listing

unproduced episodes of the British TV series Dr. Who.

12. The shared surname is acknowledged in the text, as is the fact that both Eliot and

Eco’s characters take it from Isaac Casaubon (62).

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13. The actual value of Casaubon’s hypothetical project to his time is a separate question,

which depends upon how much we credit Casaubon’s intelligence.

14. Casaubon’s serendipitous comments about how “secret services” use this strategy

resonate well with the CIA archivist Nicholas Branch in Don DeLillo’s Libra, published the

same year as Foucault’s Pendulum, who is charged with filing and sorting every record of

related to the Kennedy assassination, no matter how trivial, for his eventual secret history of that

event (14-16). Like Eco’s Casaubon, his project is hypothetically finishable, inasmuch as its end

product is not totality but a critical condensation, yet the rate at which he accumulates data seems

to outstrip his ability to process and order it (440-445, and see Codebó 137-157).

15. Perhaps this is why, in Richard Powers’ The Goldbug Variations, fictional biologist

Stuart Ressler’s pioneering genetic research is so much less compelling than the mundane scenes

in which research librarian Jan O’Deigh pores through her homemade filing system to find an

interesting Daily Fact for her library’s community board.

16. See also H. Clark (“Encyclopedic” 107). Donato (895) and Burn (“Collapse” 48) also

tackle this point, but identify the impossible totalizing encyclopedic dream of being able to write

(in Burn’s terms) a “book about everything” as descriptive of Flaubert’s efforts more than

Bouvard and Pécuchet’s.

17. Burn is specifically talking about David Foster Wallace’s Infinte Jest here, but he

makes similar remarks about Flaubert’s characters elsewhere in “The Collapse of Everything.”

The phrase “take data pretty much as it comes,” incidentally, is Wallace’s, not Burn’s.

18. I freely admit to not realizing that Bouvard and Pécuchet were mishandling their

gardening until their crops failed, which says nothing about gardening as a body of knowledge

and everything about a city-dwelling literary scholar’s ignorance of it.

19. Some critics have suggested that Flaubert’s inability to finish the book before his

death speaks to the indefinite and consequently nonsensical nature of all knowledge (Donato,

Gothat-Mersch), but this misses the point—the first volume is essentially finished, and the

second is designed to be so that Flaubert could’ve completed it swiftly, though we will never

know what this catalog would’ve looked like beyond what exists of the Dictionary of Accepted

Ideas.

20. Of course, many encyclopedias and encyclopedia-like volumes like textbooks do not

have scholarly notes. However, given that such omissions have provoked criticism about their

failure to effectively address the way in which knowledge is discovered/ordered/retrieved (see

Loewen 302), it should be clear how vital they really are to this process. (Certainly, whenever

we consult Wikipedia, we ought first to look at how rigorously endnoted is the article in

question.)

21. Vollmann does admit that Europe Central is less “rigorously grounded in historical

fact” than his Seven Dreams series of historical novels about the North American continent

(753). I do think that the points I make, however, hold for those books too, especially for the

notes, as Vollmann even writes in his prefatory statement to each volume that “The reader is

encourage to use the Chronology and Glossary only as needed […] As for the Source Notes, they

may be ignored or skimmed […]” (Argall, n. pag). See Caserio for an approach to these books

that, though different than the one I’ve laid out here, demonstrates the limitations of the

historicity of even such rigorously historical fiction.

22. In another endnote, Orin Incandenza describes these as practical jokes of hyper-

naturalism in which Incandenza and his crew would simply throw a dart at a phone book page

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and declare whatever happened to the name it hit in the next hour and a half the “found drama,”

unmediated by audience, director, or cameras (1026-1028).

23. To be fair, Aubry acknowledges the limits of the 12-Step philosophy and does not

quite idealize it. However, in his view, the ideal blend of sincerity and irony is exemplified by

an AA guest speaker (217-218). Interestingly, such criticism seems to entirely oppose the early

critical response to The Pale King, which claims Wallace encourages total mental fixation on a

chaotic, disparate mass of trivial minutiae as a path to personal salvation, as I noted in the

Introduction.

24. See Woulters for a discussion of this issue as it appears in Wallace’s final novel, The

Pale King.

25. See Chapter 2, note 12.

Chapter 3

1. Too many mega-novels have been associated with the Menippean tradition to list them

all. For a capacious application of the term to mega-novels generally, see Weisenburger (Fables

199-256). Regarding the specific works discussed in this chapter, Elaine Safer does not quite use

the term “Menippean satire” in her subchapter on The Sot-Weed Factor, but her description of

the work as a “comic epic” and invocation of Plato’s dialogues and Rabelais’ Gargantua and

Pantagruel bring her treatment so close to Bakhtin’s that we may attribute her failure to mention

him to Bakhtin’s slow assimilation into the Western literary establishment as she was writing

(50-68). For The Public Burning, see Jackson Cope’s extended description of the novel’s

relation to Bakhtin and the carnivalesque (71-85), and for The Recognitions, see Johnston’s

Carnival of Repetition, which discusses the term without quite resolving it into his challenging

discussion of the book’s treatment of authenticity (Carnival 42, 66, 152). Incidentally, Barth’s

second mega-novel, Giles Goat-Boy, has more frequently been dubbed a Menippean satire than

The Sot-Weed Factor (see Walkiewicz 73, Walter, Gresham). I don’t treat it here, however,

because it seems not to involve the use of cruft in humor that I am emphasizing, though it would

fit quite nicely in Chapter 5’s discussion of self-negating allegory. See also Khapertian for a

discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s books in this context.

2. Esther is an important supporting character, and the chapter does devote a few pages to

her activities; Ellery, her lover, is more minor, but his arc is developed a little as well; and the

second speaker above (“the tall woman”) and her husband appear briefly in a few other scenes.

However, this still leaves as many as half a dozen nameless, unimportant voices in this excerpt

alone.

3. Bergson’s worldview, of course, profoundly influenced Gertrude Stein’s: my

subchapter on The Making of Americans in Chapter 1 might be read with Bergson in mind.

4. There have been several criticisms that this formulation is too limiting (see Griffin 29-

30), but I see no way for the genre to be articulated at all without it. As Rosenheim notes, both

the fiction and historic particulars are vital: if one attacks historical particulars without writing a

manifest fiction, one has composed not satire but polemic (17-18), and if one writes a manifest

fiction without attacking historical particulars, one has merely written fantasy (29-30).

5. For how this can be done, see Wayne Booth on how “stable irony” can separate satirist

and satirized (see 1-31 and 105-120).

6. Actually, very little in the novel can be said to argue for the Rosenbergs’ innocence.

As many have noted, the Rosenbergs’ voices are surprisingly muted in the book, and while

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toward the book’s end Nixon reaches the conclusion that the Rosenbergs weren’t guilty (370)—

which is Coover’s own position (LeClair and McCaffery 78)—his logic is so confused by a

series of weird fantasies about the pair as to have little rhetorical force. Just about the only point

introduced in the book that might even serve in the Rosenbergs’ favor is the (historically

accurate) citation of Albert Einstein and Harold Urey’s claim that there was no “secret” of the

atomic bomb for the Rosenbergs to steal.

7. Gaddis, too, seems to have believed he was engaged in some sort of muckraking

endeavor, claiming of The Recognitions, “I thought that I was the first one to discover that the

world was filled with false values and I was going to tell them. […] It was a sense of mission”

(qted. Safer 111). However, even the largely grotesque stories culled from the New York Daily

News that Gaddis did incorporate “verbatim” into the text (Johnston, Carnival 157) cannot

“expose” anything much, since cherry-picked several years’ worth of news demonstrates little.

In using such material to fend off anticipated attacks against the book’s realism, Gaddis most

resembles the creative writing workshop student who angrily defends an unconvincing story by

insisting “it all really happened that way!”

8. As Christopher Knight notes, “Weisenburger’s critique does not escape its own fall

into binarism, hierarchization, and totalization, thereby undercutting the vaunted ‘radicalness’

[…] of the project” (253). Alastair Fowler further points out, with some justice, this approach to

postmodern satire actually “proves the rule: it is addressed to true believers who already share

the satirist’s views” (66-67).

9. It should not be hard to see why many critics have believed a limited length preferable

for maintaining clarity in satiric balance—recall Hippolyte Taine’s complaint that reading

Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet was like watching two snails try to climb Mont Blanc, since “the

first time they fall is amusing; the tenth is unbearable” (qted. in Flaubert xiii).

10. Weisenburger, in fact, cites Bakhtin directly (Fables 27-29).

11. For instance, though Pantagruel’s lineage is forty names long, Rabelais creates

frequent incongruity in the list by invoking both Biblical and classical giants, wildly

contradicting the standard lineages from both those traditions and inventing ridiculous new

giants besides (e.g., “Offot, who developed an awesomely fine nose from drinking straight from

the wine-cask” (18-20). Similarly, the list of surfaces with which Gargantua experiments wiping

his ass has dozens of entries but is frequently broken by commentary (e.g., a cat’s fur does well,

but the cat will claw you) and is divided into several briefer sublists (herbs, fowl, etc.), each of

whose use as an ass-wipe is ridiculous in its own way (245-250). Perhaps the most appropriate

scene to juxtapose against the one from Barth we will examine in a moment is the insult contest

between Panurge and Thaumaste, which in Rabelais eschews what might’ve been a tiresome

catalog of dirty words for a convoluted exchange of obscene hand gestures (103-108).

12. Much less does he undermine history entirely, as many critics have suggested the

book aims to do (see McCaffery 87-89). These arguments are fond of invoking Uncle Sam’s

insistence that “Hell, all courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a

baldface lie” (86) and Time’s claim that “objectivity is an impossible illusion […] only through

the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention

Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible” (320), but while these views appear similar to

Coover’s, simply saying them in fiction does not make them true, and furthermore, both of these

pronouncements are uttered by characters seeking to pervert truth to destructive ends. As Frank

Cioffi notes, “Many critics have noted that the novel is about how the factual is essentially a

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fictional construct. […] But I wonder to what extent this novel is also about how some fictions

are better orderings of an AW [actual world] than others” (“(Im)Possible” 37).

13. The novel’s treatment of myth is well-covered ground; in addition to Ramage, see

LeClair (106-130) and Dainotto.

14. I take these definitions from Tzevetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (41-57). In short, the

uncanny is that which may appear supernatural but is simply an improbable or coincidental

natural happening, while the marvelous is the legitimately supernatural. The fantastic is that

which one cannot yet tell is uncanny or marvelous.

15. For all the commentary on the grotesqueness of Sam raping Nixon, the scene is little

worse than Boabdil’s rape of Joan Toast: Nixon may tell us, “it felt like he was trying to shove

the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass!” (532), but Ebenezer describes Joan

Toast as having been “split like an oyster” (334).

16. To name a few examples, these would include the mistakenly-lobotomized Mr.

Pivner; the nameless man stuck on the outside of an airplane throughout a Caribbean flight; and

the Reverend Gwyon, whose ashes are accidentally baked into a bread eaten by his son Wyatt.

As my numbers suggest, incidentally, the exact totals are a bit arbitrary, as so many extremely

minor characters’ horrific outcomes are mentioned only in passing, while some more important

characters’ activities are merely implied (e.g., Otto’s likely death of his mysterious disease under

Dr. Fell’s treatment, the likely statutory rape of Giono by Big Anna, etc.). Several I double- or

triple-count, for that matter (e.g. Esme attempts suicide, is institutionalized, then dies of an

arcane illness).

17. Given that Christopher Knight’s book on Gaddis avoids postmodernism’s slippery

vocabulary by conceiving The Recognitions as a more traditional satire on a specific historical

milieu, it is worth commenting upon to an extent here. As I argue in this chapter, I think The

Recognitions frequently fails on this front. To take one example, Knight focuses heavily on

Gaddis’s satiric depiction of abstract painters, but the scene in which Gaddis most directly does

so—the party celebrating Max’s L’Âme d’un Chantier, a work shirt framed as a painting—is

totally ambiguous as to whether the painting has any aesthetic value as a found object, which

renders its nature as satire close to nil. On the one hand, the commentary about it is a self-

contradictory and stupid collection of faux-aestheticist commonplaces: for instance, Hannah tells

Otto that “I think it’s the saddest thing Max has ever done. It’s an epitaph. […] The emptiness it

shows, it hurts to look at it. It’s so real, so real” (182), then later turns around and tells Stanley

“The composition’s good. Max is good with compositions, he’s successful with it, but he still

works like painting was having an orgasm, he has to learn that it isn’t just having the experience

that counts, it’s knowing how to handle the experience” (184). On the other hand, when the

narrator makes a rare intrusion into the noisy party, he says “Above them all the Worker’s Soul

hung silent, refusing comment; though the red lead recalled bridges built by horny hands,

sexually unlike any that fluttered glasses beneath it now, the spots of rust a heavy male back

straining between girders, generally different from any weaving here. For all its spatters of

brightness, that canvas looked very tired, hanging foreign and forlorn over the sad garden” (185).

If this is a serious attempt to satirize aesthetes by feminizing them in comparison to the honest

masculinity of common workers, it is horribly failed, as not only is the binarism lazy and heavy-

handed but the narrator has himself such an overeducated Brahmin sensibility that any claim that

to empathizing with a worker’s spirit is laughable.

18. Just about the only critic who rejects that The Recognitions is satire is Birger

Vanweesenbeeck. However, he seems primarily to mean that the novel does not satirize the

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value of art, instead championing the artist’s small but devoted community in the postmodern

era. This view does not address sections like the party scene that treat at length characters that

Vanweesenbeeck would surely not characterize as part of that genuine artistic community.

19. Weisenburger, for instance, while attacking authenticity and cultural tradition as mere

romantic-modernist rhetorical tricks, due to their imposition of hierarchized values onto an

unstable world (Fables 216), still lambastes how the “myriad of counterfeiters, plagiarists, and

usurers are not eccentrics at all but central figures of their society, itself the debased coinage of a

modernist cultural orthodoxy,” apparently relying upon such stable, universal values like

authenticity (Fables 210).

20. Of course, one can write perfectly good satires without the free indirect discourse, but

it is particularly useful in the novelistic mode, which is why a list of the device’s great

innovators, such as Austen and Flaubert, will overlap substantially with a list of great prose

satirists. Incidentally, Gaddis’s tendency away from this tradition, especially toward greater use

of direct dialogue, is taken even further in J R (see Ch. 1).

21. This is most apparent in the passages dealing with Mr. Pivner’s devotion to his

evening radio and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (285-292, 498-

501). Compared to his sympathetic treatment of Wyatt and the Rev. Gwyon’s attachments to

religious doctrines, Gaddis invokes no recognizable attraction that Pivner might find to either the

radio or to Carnegie’s book, because he depicts them as being transparently stupid. The narrator

invites readers to join him in feeling confident in their intellectual superiority to Pivner rather

than challenging them, which—despite claims by those like Weisenburger of the book’s

radicalness—is the most conservative form of satire. This highbrow complacency, as Peter

Wolfe has noted, sometimes expresses an uncomfortably high disdain for anyone without

Gaddis’s prep-school-through-Harvard classical education and encyclopedic knowledge about

and taste for art (55-57), which substantially weakens many parts of the book. For instance,

when Otto, hearing Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus on the radio, off-handedly and

mistakenly suggests that the work’s text has been translated into English from the original

German—an understandable mistake, given that Judas Maccabeus is far from Handel’s best-

known piece and that the composer was raised in Germany before spending his most prolific

working days in London—Wyatt angrily yells to himself “–The original! Good God, how can

anyone clinging to such foolishness keep any hope in his head?” (136). I can’t help but think

that, while Gaddis’s sympathies are likely with Wyatt on this point, the latter is much more

worthy of being mocked here than Otto.

22. We will give Steven Moore credit here, as his book on Gaddis sensibly reasons that

since Wyatt only appears in twelve of the twenty-two chapters, one of this two chapters on the

book ought to be focused on Wyatt’s narrative arc and the other on the book’s other threads.

That said, this half-and-half division still overstates Wyatt’s involvement in the book, as Wyatt is

only involved as a main character in the majority of scenes in five chapters (Part I, Chs. 2,3, and

7, Part II, Ch. 3, and Part III, Ch. 3). In another four he is a focal character in about half the

scenes (Part I, Ch. 1, Part II, Ch. 2, 6, and Part III, Ch. 5), and in three more he only appears

quite briefly as part of a much broader canvas of characters, wherein he is rarely the focal point

(Part II, Ch.1, 7, 8). It is true that the ten chapters without him at all tend to be among the book’s

shorter ones, but even so, I estimate that Wyatt is only involved in about 40% of the book’s total

scenes.

23. Gaddis may begin the chapter by quoting Darwin on “the struggle for existence”

(568), but the characters do not really compete with or even engage with each other much at all:

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everyone rambles on about themselves without listening to or caring about what anyone else

says.

Chapter 4

1. Of course, these four possibilities are reminiscent of those facing Oedipa Maas in The

Crying of Lot 49 (i.e., that there is a secret Tristero conspiracy of postal carriers; that there is no

Tristero conspiracy and she is merely hallucinating; that there is no Tristero conspiracy, but there

is a conspiracy set up by her late lover Pierce Inverarity to make her believe there is one; or that

she is hallucinating an Inverarity conspiracy to make her think there is a Tristero conspiracy)

(140-141). In my view—one shared by Pynchon, if the introduction to Slow Learner is any

guide (22)—the way those choices suggest the equal validity of all shadow stories and thus

mutually self-negate is a failing of that shorter book. How Mason & Dixon avoids this problem

by making Zhang’s plots a local instance of cruft, rather than the crux of the book, should be

clear later in the chapter.

2. Of such plots, Peter Brooks writes, “The reader never is vouchsafed anything we

would want to call a plot, in the traditional sense, but he is himself forced to engage in plotting, if

not toward the creation of meaning, at least in exploration of the conditions of narrative

meaning” (316).

3. Abbott’s work has recently addressed narrative compression, the notion that any event

can be theoretically broken down into a sequence of smaller events almost indefinitely, all the

way down to the molecular level. Obviously, we are only cognitively capable of understanding

such events at all at a relatively high level of compression, at which point they become more

narratable and can establish a narrative point. Abbott represents these principles with the

following diagram:

Shadow stories, as he notes, function as a third dimension to this chart, allowing another field of

potentially indefinite decompression (“Shadow” 3).

4. This possibility is raised explicitly when the pair are impersonated by their underlings

Darby and Cope (470-473).

5. While the genre’s appeal to its contemporary Spanish audience came from the way it

realistically depicted rural poverty, when exported, the picaresque read primarily as an exotic

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sequence of comic adventures. Consequently, while the picaresque’s influence on England

includes a few works that might pass for picaresques with Spanish critics (e.g., Moll Flanders), it

is more characterized by novels from the likes of Henry Fielding, which emphasize comic

adventuring more than social marginality (see Monteser 41-71; Winton; Beasley). This

perspective took hold so thoroughly that today even Anglophone academics—to the great horror

of most Hispanists—often refer to Don Quixote, a work featuring a wandering journey but most

decidedly not about rural poverty or a pícaro’s “criminal biography,” as a picaresque (Wicks 14).

While some do continue to maintain a restrictive definition based in the classic works (see

Ardila), the word has been used so variously over the past several centuries that most now follow

Claudio Guillén and Alexander Blackburn in acknowledging a broad picaresque “myth”

comprising numerous family resemblances rather than a firm genre. For instance, Robert

Scholes’ The Fabulators, for instance, in tracing the generic roots of early postmodern fiction,

cited the influence of the “loose and episodic picaresque form, with its simple, chronological

string of events in the life of a roguish individual” (67). More recently, other critics have linked

not only the postwar American “road novel,” to the picaresque (see Sherrill), but has stretched it

to cover works as diverse as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe

novels, Michael Moore’s documentaries, and the BBC comedy series Blackadder (Ehland and

Fajen).

6. The OED currently defines the word as “a rogue, a scoundrel,” but there is no

universally agreed-upon derivation allowing us to chart its accrued connotations. Frederick

Monteser notes five possibilities, which invoke roots as varied as the (then-ill-regarded) French

province of Picardy, smallpox sores, and a sharp or pinching sensation (13-14).

7. For this chapter’s purposes, I use this restricted definition of the genre. There is, after

all, even less consensus on the frame-tale’s definition than the picaresque’s, partly due to its

limited theorization within the Western academy (see Barth, Friday 224-225), which is likely

caused by how the frame-tale’s origins lie in Eastern languages not widely spoken in this half of

the world (e.g., medieval Arabic and classical Sanskrit) (Gittes 2). This has caused it to merge

with the much more general, not to mention critically popular, concept of “framing,” which may

be applied to a wide variety of works outside the cornice-novella structure. For instance, the

common trope of mise-en-abyme been invoked to suggest that framed storytelling is the

characteristic element of both modernist and postmodernist fiction (see Caws; Pearce, “Enter”)

and the trope of transmission of narratives among characters has been argued to be central to the

development of the novel (see Duyfhuizen, Transmission). Furthermore, as Eric L. Berlatsky

points out, “framing” may also be used to refer to the relationship between a main text and extra-

or para-textual elements that “frame” our readings of a work (“Lost” 166), while William Nelles

observes that even ordinary dialogue cannot be rigorously distinguished structurally from framed

narrative (123-125). The category, as will be obvious, has a tendency to expand beyond one’s

ability to say anything meaningful about it. Incidentally, as Richard Walsh suggests in The

Rhetoric of Fictionality, we should be careful of overusing the frame image to describe the

relation between readers and a work of fiction, because it implies a certain kind of barrier and

separation between the two rather than any direct engagement.

8. The Thousand and One Nights is a useful example because of its high degrees of both

vertical and horizontal framing. If we grant, as John Barth notes, that the opening of the

collection itself claims to narrate the story of another mythic volume called the Thousand and

One Nights (Friday 223), then the book reaches seven vertically-embedded speakers with

extensive horizontal framing: for instance, the book’s general narrator tells us about a legendary

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book of tales, whose narrator tells us about the storyteller Shahrazad, who tells us (in “The

Hunchback’s Tale”) about a tailor, who tells us about his encounter with a barber, who tells him

about how as a younger barber he extracted himself from execution by narrating the fraught

situations of his six brothers, each of whom speaks briefly in his own story (Richard Burton 355-

406). Even this complexity is nothing compared to the Sanskrit tale collection The Ocean of

Story, whose combination of horizontal and vertical framing, as Barth notes, is even more mind-

boggling (Friday 84-90).

9. This holds true for those frame-tales both based in horizontal framing, where one or

more storytellers on the same diegetic plane tell unconnected stories, and vertical framing, where

a storyteller narrates a story in which one of her characters further narrates another story to

someone else, and so on (see Nelles 132).

10. Partly, this is because both genres rely upon the conventions of pre-Gutenberg

narrative traditions: as Walter Ong notes, their structures were devised at least as much to help

storytellers steeped in oral traditions to project the artificial audience written narrative requires

than to innovate literature for its own sake (69-70).

11. Charles Clerc and Brian McHale have both implied that the novel draws on both the

frame-tale and picaresque traditions (Clerc 89-91; McHale, “Zone” 49-50). Neither quite realizes

that he is doing so, however. Clerc places Mason & Dixon explicitly in the picaresque tradition,

but subsequently brings up the Learnèd English Dog’s reference to himself as a “tail-wagging

Scheherazade”; McHale, conversely, explicitly places it in the frame-tale tradition, but only after

invoking the American “road novel” tradition, which, as Rowland Sherrill notes, is rooted in the

picaresque.

12. Kolbuszewska discusses this primarily in terms of the Gothic, which she identifies at

the center of the novel’s chronotope. My discussion of chronotope is not meant to contest her

argument, merely to supplement it.

13. More famously, this happens to Gravity’s Rainbow’s Tyrone Slothrop, who is

scattered by his inability to manage the many plots surrounding him. Regine Rosenthal has

suggested that Slothrop is really a Spanish-style pícaro, but while she is correct to note the

spatial wildness that unites Gravity’s Rainbow’s Zone and the picaresque landscape, I believe the

frequent temporal incongruities that mark the book move the narrative closer to a

circumfabulation. (We will examine Gravity’s Rainbow in more depth as a mega-novel epic in

Ch. 5).

14. Sascha Pöhlmann probably has discussed the tension between these tendencies best,

though without quite resolving it. Though he criticizes the Mason-Dixon Line regarding “The

obvious violence of such acts of demarcation” (231), he also notes, “The nation of Americans

which Mason sees in the process of being created is actually built, not because those who share

an essential group identity finally get to rule themselves, but because an imagined community is

produced through discourse as a weapon to fight oppression and injustice” (232). The latter,

however, is not possible without the former: one cannot either achieve or sustain its multiplicity

without establishing linearity.

15. See the episode of Tom Hynes and Catherine Wheat to observe first the potential

abuses caused by establishing clear legal borders, but then how establishing legal jurisdiction

helps build community (575-584).

16. In other words, plotting here relates to Todorov’s notion of the fantastic, where

characters do not know whether to plot an event as uncanny or marvelous. See Chapter 3, note

14 for more discussion; see also de Bourcier for a discussion of the compatibility of pre- and

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post-Enlightenment concepts (185-186), and Kolbuszewska for how these terms may be

addressed via the Gothic (183-204).

17. Even a self-consciously overplotted modern circumfabulation, John Barth’s The

Tidewater Tales—which throws into its narrative about the fortnight sailboat trip of literary

couple, one of whom is a Barth-like fiction writer who has been stricken with a constricting

minimalism (see Further 64-88), everything from a conventional domestic drama to an

embedded play set in the Fallopian tubes called Sex Education to several encounters with frame-

jumping circumfabulation heroes like Odysseus and Don Quixote—generally manages to avoid

pure cruft due to the power of the central narrative voice. The closest thing to a pointless story

its elaborate subplot involving a possible world-jeopardizing scheme by rogue CIA agents

(“Doomsday Factors”), which has so little impact on the rest of the book that it is tied up only as

an afterthought in the denouement (644-646) (contra Fogel and Sleuthag 190-212). Still,

however, it gives the novels’ narrators so much amusement in the recounting that it maintains

something of a point.

18. Life A User’s Manual is, obviously, a horizontally-based frame-tale. I do not know

whether there exist any great vertically-framed mega-novels. Such a book would doubtless be

categorized among postmodern metafiction, but the best examples of in this subgenre tend to be

shorter works like “Menelaiad” from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, a retelling of part of the

Odyssey in which Menelaus’s eight vertically-embedded layers of narration respond to and

resonate with each other in cascading ways, or his even briefer “Frame-Tale,” a Moebius Strip

that loops the phrase “Once upon a time there was a story that began.” The closest example of

which I can think is Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, which shares some of the properties I

describe here but does not do much with them. Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

is of mega-novel length, and it does reach five vertical layers, but the outer two are never

invoked outside the book’s opening and closing, and the remaining three’s interaction match

neither the nutty heights of Barth’s shorter metafiction nor the fascinating cruft of the other

mega-novels in this chapter (see Brown and Barth, Further 311-348). This lack, incidentally, is

perhaps emblematic of how metafiction exhausted itself rather more quickly than many critics

expected. Despite common claims in the 1980s and 1990s that metafiction “highlights […] the

extent to which we have become aware that neither historical experiences nor literary fictions are

unmediated or unprocessed” (Waugh 30) because “the profusion of narrators […] makes any

assumption of textual authority yet another fiction” (Duyfhuizen, Transmission 44), or that, in

the clash of ontological boundaries, “postmodernist fiction achieves its aesthetic effects and

sustains interest, in the process modeling the complex ontological landscape of our experience”

(McHale, Postmodernist 39), adding vertical layers to a text as often undercuts its meaning as

increases it. The problem is not that such self-conscious approaches are inherently “fake” or

“empty,” as John Gardner claimed (94-96), but that any fictional world’s separation from the real

allows vertical levels to be added so arbitrarily as to make their use inconsequential

philosophically. For instance, if it is revealed several chapters into a novel that its story has been

written by a prison inmate, then further revealed later on that the inmate’s narrative is

constructed by his creative writing teacher (as occurs in Jennifer Egan’s The Keep), the novel has

shown less about the mediation of reality than about an overuse of one localizable trick.

Consequently, metafiction is usually better deployed with a sense of fun rather than metaphysical

seriousness, as with, for instance, Don Quixote’s comments in the second half of his narrative

about the popular reception greeting the first.

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19. If one counts the preamble and epilogue, there are one hundred and one, a number as

symmetrical as Shahrazad’s (Burgelin 174). For a more extensive look at the connections

between the Thousand and One Nights and Life A User’s Manual, see Joly (304-313, 1102-

1111).

20. As Barthes notes, even the most straightforward narrative inevitably “still seems to be

keeping in reserve some ultimate meaning, one it does not express” (S/Z 216).

21. Bartlebooth’s name has three sources, and while the first two are intrepid questers—

the grail-seeking knight Parsifal and modernist Valery Larbaud’s gentleman traveler A. O.

Barnabooth—the third is one of the exemplary useless men of literature, Herman Melville’s

Bartleby the Scrivener (Burgelin 188).

22. Acknowledging this, Josipovici uses the standard critical fallback as his defense:

anything that contradicts his theory is intended ironically (191). For reasons that should be clear,

I reject this argument.

23. Bolaño himself claimed the book was largely a response to Huckleberry Finn

(Between 353), one of the few American books Hispanists will admit possesses some

authentically picaresque features. Similarly, the book has been linked to the “road movie” (see

Kaegi) whose heritage prominently includes the picaresque (see, again, Sherrill).

24. Madero and Lupe, for their parts, vanish entirely; no one, not even the self-

proclaimed “definitive authority” on the visceral realists, hears of Madero afterward (584-585).

25. Three of the thirteen, furthermore, include features that put the official conclusion

into question. For two cases (the cases of Mónica Posadas (460-462) and Aurora Ibánez Medel

(573-574)), there are inconsistencies in the confessions provided by the arrested killers. For the

third, the case of Esther Perea Peña (625-626), questions are raised within the police department

about the plausibility of the official reconstruction.

26. While an critic especially devoted to laying guilt at the feet of globalization could

doubtless argue why his individual psychological disease should be ignored in favor of macro-

level economic forces beyond his control, I am unaware of any culture in human history that has

managed to eradicate this kind of domestic killing.

27. See Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees for this distinction between “close”

and “distant” reading (1-2).

28. See Abbott’s diagram, reproduced in Chapter 4, note 3, for an illustration of this

principle, and Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of it.

Chapter 5

1. Critics as divergent in attitudes as Northrop Frye (89) and Fredric Jameson (Political

34) have asserted that all literary interpretation is allegorical, in fact, suggesting how thoroughly

the genre may be detached from any specific literary form.

2. Indeed, size may be the primary connotation that “epic” holds today, as Alison Johns-

Putra observes when noting how the term is popularly deployed in describing gargantuan

productions like “Hollywood blockbusters and rock songs, as well as ‘real-life’ events: sporting

contests, corporate takeovers, political elections, court cases” (1).

3. Along similar lines, Fletcher recently articulated the postmodern phenomenon of an

“allegory without ideas,” a nominalism-inspired subgenre that uses traditional “symbols of

power” without locating them in a total allegorical concept and which thus “gains strength by

abjuring eternal ideas” (“Ideas” 32)

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4. See Ch. 2, note 1, for more discussion of this overlap.

5. Patrick O’Donnell claims that paranoia does not actually form grand narratives, but is

“a form of accommodation for the loss of those grand narratives” (Latent 16), probably

believing, as Peter Knight does, that paranoia does not assert truth but is “an ironic stance toward

knowledge and the possibility of truth” (2). This is perhaps true of paranoia conceived as

prophylactic, reflexive cynicism deployed as necessary to insulate the subject from the public

sphere, but there are certainly many paranoid theories intended quite seriously as forms of

knowledge.

6. Ricoeur himself, in fact, claims to be an adherent not of the hermeneutic of suspicion

but of “recollection of meaning,” in which one places faith in consciousness’s ability to both

intend and receive meaning truly (28-30).

7. As Petra Rau notes, postmodern writers on the political Left are happy to debunk most

official historical narratives regarding World War II as a matter of subversive political

principle—except the Holocaust, which cannot be questioned (215).

8. As Peter Knight notes, few call their own ideas “paranoid” or “conspiracy theories,” no

matter how elaborate the hypothesized schemes they contain, but reserve those terms as

pejoratives for others’ misguided theories (10-11).

9. For instance, Samuel Hynes, summing up critical attitudes on the relationship of World

War I to its era writes, “No one after the war—no thinker or planner, no politician or labour

leader, no writer or painter—could ignore its historical importance or frame his thought as

though the war had not occurred, or had been simply another war” claiming that the conflict

generated a “gap in history” (ix-x). In response to this gap, Hynes continues, there emerges a

“fragmented, elliptical, difficult form” of perception and expression in the arts that comes to be

known as modernism: “Modernism means many things, but it is most fundamentally the forms

that the post-war artists found for their sense of modern history: history seen as discontinuous,

the past remote and unavailable, or available only as the ruins of itself, and the present a formless

space emptied of values” (433).

10. I have heard it suggested numerous times recently that the literary academy’s

definition of the period covering the second half of the twentieth century has changed from

“postmodern” to “post-WWII.” There is much that might be said about this shift, but that the

fact that these two definitions are viewed as alternatives shows the relative weakness of their

association: no one quibbles about making a period distinction between “high modernist” and

“inter-war” literature.

11. Writing with the willingness to make broad generalizations resisted by future

generations of scholars, Harry Guest observed in 1984 that the lions of Japanese literature’s

minimal reference to the war was because, “The Japanese have an amazing—and possibly

enviable—capacity for forgetting, ignoring or bypassing what is unpleasant or inconvenient.

Furthermore, Japanese art is traditionally oblique” (216).

12. Several critics have suggested that these books’ paranoia, especially those written

some years after the war, have more to do with the anxieties of Vietnam than World War II (see

Dickstein 40, Jarvis). While I don’t think it is wrong to link these novels to Vietnam, for the

reasons I have argued, their modes of figuration seems to me at least as appropriate to World

War II.

13. See Irr for another treatment of this issue with respect to Jameson’s theory, though I

believe this essay takes too much for granted the stability of national identity, even in its attempt

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to address internationalism in the work of twenty-first-century fiction about immigration and

return.

14. Doing so would actually be an example of the classical catachresis, which Quintilian

defined as a term that “adapts, to whatever has no proper term, the term which is nearest” (8.34).

15. This might be demonstrated best via the infamous Ern Malley hoax, in which two

Australian poets, frustrated by the obscurity of modernist poetry, submitted to wunderkind editor

Max Harris (and subsequently published) a batch of poems that haphazardly strung together

gnomic imagery and arcane vocabulary under a fake persona (Lehman). A typical one is “Night

Piece”:

The swung torch scatters seeds

In the umbelliferous dark

And a frog makes guttural comment

On the naked and trespassing

Nymph of the lake.

The symbols were evident,

Though on park-gates

The iron birds looked disapproval

With rusty invidious beaks.

Among the water-lilies

A splash — white foam in the dark!

And you lay sobbing then

Upon my trembling intuitive arm.

“The symbols were evident” is an obvious joke, because they are of course not evident at all: the

relationships between the various images and whatever they might conceivably figure are so

arbitrarily catachrestic that no real insight is derivable from them. Granted, as Lehman notes,

that a number of contemporary avant-garde poets (e.g., John Ashbery) think the poems rather

good in spite of their intent to satirize, but while there is admittedly a very fine line between the

better of the Malley poems and, say, the minor poems of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, I tend

to think the similarity tends less to speak well of Malley than poorly of avant-garde poems.

16. Charles Harris seems to trust Henry VII (180-181), and though I generally would not

dispute his Barth expertise, I don’t believe there is any reason to think so.

17. This is a contrast to the moments in The Sot-Weed Factor where the true geopolitical

schemes and even existence of characters like Charles Calvert or John Coode are seriously

questioned before they are eventually resolved (see Ch. 3).

18. In other words, they cannot create Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction”: as

Schulz notes, the “historical contradiction […] structurally neutralizes the novel’s negative

metahistorical intentions” (Muses 120, 129).

19. This was, incidentally, a major movement in the arc of Murakami’s career, as he had

been criticized in Japan throughout the 1980s for being apparently apolitical (see Suter 52).

20. To be precise, the box is a Cutty Sark box, and Toru does find a bottle of Cutty Sark

in the hotel room he revisits in the dream world. However, like the Thieving Magpie overture, it

appears to be a meaningless connection.

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21. Kane does not explicitly cite Jameson, but she does claim that “Midnight's Children

belongs to a group of postcolonial novels […] that allegorize national history through the

metaphor of the body politic” (95).

22. Rushdie has cited The Tin Drum as a model for Midnight’s Children (Imaginary 277);