Chapter Three - Narratives of the Database: Between Counting and Recounting

Summary

In the last chapter, I started out with the problem of information overload; the present chapter deals with possible ways of restoring order and countering this overload. Currently, the database is the dominant means at our disposal to achieve this. From the second half of the twentieth century, the digital database became the primary medium for the organization of information. Databases strip information of their context, so we can access any given record in multiple contexts at the same time. Consequently, they increase the number of possible combinations of data. Today, digital technology erodes established categories by enabling us to store objects that were traditionally separated by media or form as bits or a continuous stream of data. In this respect, Friedrich Kittler has written of a leveling effect among different, yet utterly interconnected media. Digitization, from this perspective, erases the differences between media, so that “[i]n computers everything becomes number: imageless, soundless, and wordless quantity” (1997, 32). The organization of data increasingly becomes a mutable, multi-linear process. As a result of such changes in accessing, processing, and communicating information, Ernst Van Alphen argues in Staging the Archive (2014),

the symbolic form of (syntagmatic) narrativity has a more modest role to play. It is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kinds of information is embedded, but the other way around. It is in the encompassing framework of archival organizations that (small) narratives are embedded. (12)

Van Alphen analyzes “archival artworks,” a trend in the visual arts since the 1960s, which consists of incorporating principles of archival organization such as lists, inventories, and storages. In big books today we can discern an analogous phenomenon of combining the quantitative strategies of the database with the more symbolic or synecdochal logic associated with novelistic narratives. This chapter builds on his idea and shows that where narrative tries to accommodate the database, the precarious balance between the two modes of representation is prone to tipple over into the opposite situation: the database engulfing many fragmented narratives. What new and old ways of ordering narrative material are at the novel's disposal when “telling” is increasingly configured as “counting,” and when its overarching frame is no longer the hierarchical beginning, middle, end structure of the story? As a case study I go on to consider Bolano's 2666, this time zooming in on Book IV: “The Part about the Crimes.”