The Maximalist Novel

From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666

Stefano Ercolino

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623561901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The Maximalist Novel sets out to define a new genre of contemporary fiction that developed in the United States from the early 1970s, and then gained popularity in Europe in the early twenty-first century. The maximalist novel has a very strong symbolic and morphological identity. Ercolino sets out ten particular elements which define and structure it as a complex literary form: length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten characteristics are common to all of the seven works that centre his discussion: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by the Babette Factory. Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre.

Part One

1

Length

Gravity’s Rainbow: 912 pages¹; Infinite Jest: 1,079 pages²; Underworld: 827 pages³; White Teeth: 448 pages⁴; The Corrections: 672 pages⁵; 2666: 1,105 pages⁶; 2005 dopo Cristo: 401 pages.⁷ From a minimum of 401 pages to a maximum of 1,105 pages. Long novels. In five cases, beyond long, very long. Why?

The length of maximalist novels is not a neutral material fact but something more. It is both a possibility and a potent attraction; a possibility, tied to the strongly innovative and experimental nature of maximalist novels as well as to their epic, totalizing ambition; an attraction, whose reasons instead lie in the advertising dynamics of the publishing market and in these novels’ peculiar status as commodities.

As Viktor Shklovsky suggested, formal innovation is nothing other than the fruit of a slippage, of an accidental change. In literary texts, the old accumulates quantitatively on the new, and when the accumulated changes pass from being purely quantitative to being qualitative, a new form is born.⁸ In Modern Epic, Moretti rereads this idea through the concept of bricolage, understood as the motor of literary evolution, and affirms that in moments of transition, the production of a new process cannot be planned, or rather, not always: “because change is not planned: it is the fruit of the most irresponsible and free—the blindest—rhetorical experimentation.”⁹ He later concludes that

if Shklovsky is right, and formal innovation proceeds “in a quantitative way”—then it will happen more easily in those texts that have a larger quantity of space at their disposal. I do not believe it accidental that Shklovsky should formulate his hypothesis while discussing War and Peace (or that it should find full confirmation in Ulysses). Large dimensions are probably favourable to formal innovation. They allow more time, more chances, greater freedom.

And the epic form allows greater freedom for another reason, too—a structural one, this time. The epic, as we saw with Faust, is a form prone to digressions: full of episodes flanking the basic Action. Marginal episodes—and, for that very reason, favourable to experimentation. Because a truly innovative attempt usually begins in an uncertain, and perhaps even quite unpromising, fashion: if located in the foreground, it would be frozen by the immediate requirements of the plot. But if the experiment is at the margins of the text, the author is freer to play with the form. Even if things go as badly as can be (as in “Scylla and Charybdis”, or “Sirens”), the catastrophe will have a limited effect, leaving the overall structure of the work intact. The textual periphery functions as a kind of protected space, where an innovation has time to develop, and consolidate its own peculiarities. Then, once it is ready, the new technique crystallizes: it rids itself of the old motivation, and it moves to the foreground.¹⁰

It could not be said better. A procedure, or a new genre, is born from a quantitative accumulation of details at the periphery of the text. They then move to its center when the innovation has become firmly consolidated. Length would represent the ideal condition for the unfolding of this process, insofar as it is possible that the more space that is available, the greater the accumulation of details, and hence, the greater the likelihood that a new form will be brought to light. Of course, both Shklovsky and Moretti point to single innovative processes which find, initially, a protected space at the periphery of the text where they can flourish, to then move to the textual foreground at the moment in which they have reached a certain expressive maturity. Moretti offers a brilliant example of this for stream of consciousness which, even though it had been used originally and notoriously by Édouard Dujardin, achieves the full extent of its formal potential only in Ulysses.¹¹ The case of the maximalist novel, instead, is a bit different. Its length is the necessary precondition for the radicalization of not just one aspect, but a multiplicity of procedures. As we shall see in the first part of this essay, the “morphosphere”¹² of the maximalist novel is defined by the constant and often extreme use—albeit within a certain spectrum of variability—of a series of rhetorical strategies. Except perhaps as regards the peculiar form of narratorial omniscience characteristic of some of the maximalist novels we will examine, these strategies do not contain in themselves features of strong innovation. It is rather their copresence and interaction which determine their unique formal contours. It is in this sense that length should be understood to be the indispensable material foundation of the maximalist narrative project: the container that has made and makes possible its existence as a highly experimental literary genre. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a maximalist novel that is not long, and this is not only because of formal innovation. A text that aspires to rival the entire world cannot do so except by assuming the latter’s amplitude. And some of the most important tools the maximalist novel employs to obtain that goal—encyclopedism, chorality, digressions, the polycentric multiplication of narrative threads—would not, in a restricted space, be able to fully express their potential as “world effects.”¹³ They require extensive dimensions to insure their full efficacy. But there is also more.

In a review of Infinite Jest for the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni quotes Amy Rhodes—head of marketing for the publishing house Little, Brown & Company, which released Infinite Jest in 1996—who stated that the publicity campaign for the promotion of the novel was orchestrated precisely around its imposing dimensions, promoted as a clear sign of its importance.¹⁴ Length became then a guarantee of worth and, in Rhodes’s words, of “a certain undeniability” about it.¹⁵ A careful marketing strategy was constructed around the novel’s length in preparation for the release of Infinite Jest, a book which—the publishing house assured the 4,000 store owners, critics, and journalists to whom it had announced its imminent arrival in bookstores with an avalanche of elusive postcards—would give readers “infinite pleasure” with “infinite style.”¹⁶ An interesting or, at the very least, curious thing: a promotional campaign for a novel that revolves around a mere material fact, its length.

In the section “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” of the opening “Exposé” of his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin coined the suggestive expression of “the sex appeal of the inorganic” to describe the powerful and novel attraction exercised by commodities in the Paris of Baudelaire beset by modernity¹⁷:

Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshipped. . . . Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service.¹⁸

The inorganic appeal and cult of the corpse: Benjamin establishes on Marxist grounds an extraordinary negative aesthetics of the commodity-object. Understood as the typical mode of the bourgeois gaze turned on consumer goods, a necrophilic gaze,¹⁹ and a sort of dark side of the “theological niceties” of commodities,²⁰ fetishism is released from its traditional connotations of perversion and primitivism²¹ and placed at the heart of a rich aesthetic category such as “the sex appeal of the inorganic.” Mario Perniola has explored the category most efficaciously: analyzing heterogeneous phenomena such as cyberpunk, drugs, and metafiction, he has identified a new form of the contemporary cultural imaginary, as well as a way of living sexuality beyond traditional notions of desire and pleasure, as a death libido directed at the sphere of the inorganic.²²

But let us return to the maximalist novel, and let us attempt to read the promotional campaign for Infinite Jest based on its notable length within the framework of the “sex appeal of the inorganic.” Infinitization of quantity, and fetishistic fixation with the object of desire, length, in accordance with a substitution mechanism typical of fetishism,²³ becomes the tangible sign of something extremely precious and desirable. The maximalist novel would seem to be, from this point of view, one of the most refined literary products of late capitalism. Hundreds and hundreds of pages and some hefty weight, its status as a commodity is unequivocally confirmed at a sensorial level. It makes perfect sense. We find ourselves face to face with the quintessence of that progressive commodification of culture theorized by Fredric Jameson and fully revealed with the advancement of postmodernity and late capitalism.²⁴ Only in this kind of historico-economic context can the promotion of a book based on its dimensions make sense. That is to say, a publicity campaign that tries to make a novel desirable by treating it as an object endowed with its own sex appeal: a commodity item that takes up a good bit of shelf space in bookstores, which is impressive because of its physical size, and certainly not because it is a highly sophisticated literary product. It should not come as a surprise then that most maximalist novels in circulation have enjoyed considerable editorial success. Suffice it to recall that Infinite Jest, White Teeth, and The Corrections were all bestsellers. The meager success of world texts with the reading public, lamented by Moretti, counterbalanced, however, by their academic cult status,²⁵ seems to be literally reversed in the case of maximalist novels. In order to understand the reasons why the maximalist novel has been so warmly embraced by the reading public while world texts were relatively unsuccessful in their brief time, we must probably look at that “sex appeal of the inorganic,” under whose shadow modernity took root, and which was strongly accentuated beginning around the second half of the 1950s, on the heels of the epochal epistemological rupture of the postmodern. It is a phenomenon that was surely already present at an embryonic stage in Baudelaire’s Paris or in Joyce’s Dublin, but which fully unleashed its enormous power of enchantment only with the establishment and the boom of mass consumption society, drawing into its orbit ever new and diverse commodities. Today, more than ever, market globalization and the development of seductive and broadly accessible technologies seem to have considerably enlarged the domain of the fetishistic desire for the inorganic.²⁶ The high-tech and telecommunications industries, for instance, have demonstrated their ability to create new status symbols. Apple products, for example, are the reification of a certain way of thinking, of acting in the world, of doing politics; they are true and affordable identity fetishes, pure ideology. And in these times of dramatic existential uncertainties and ideological murkiness, who would not be willing to pay a price, and not ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• The Maximalist Novel
• Introduction: Maximalist Paradigms
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright