Chapter Eight - Slow Reading, Materiality, and Mediacy: How Books Withstand Real-Time and Binging

Summary

By foregrounding the inescapability of a limited, subjective perspective on the world, we saw, Danielewski's and Vollmann's acts of world-forming go against the idea of the globe as an already totalized entity available to the panoptic gaze of a viewer. Such images are pervasive in data visualizations, and they are part of a larger tendency in thought and writings about media, to conflate representation and reality. The current and final chapter of my book addresses and critiques this tendency within monumental novels, and entertains the potential ways in which these novels can resist them.

In Dave Eggers's dystopian The Circle (2013), about a powerful social media corporation (reminiscent of Facebook or Google) that wants to make the world a better place by recording “everything,” one of the company's leaders makes a speech that echoes the rhetoric of big data enthusiasts:

There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness. And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known.

The words dropped onto the screen: All that happens should be known. (67)

Eggers is not far off the mark in emulating the rhetoric of theorists like Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier (2013) who, as noted in chapter four, predict that as big data techniques are systematically integrated into daily life, society will strive to understand the world from a larger, more comprehensive perspective than ever before—an “N=all of the mind” (49). An important thread throughout my book has been the influence of these developments on the book-bound novel: how the novel survives its predicted death, by becoming “monumental” as a way of adapting to these new scales of information and the fragmentation of data in real time that surrounds us.

It took me seven chapters to map out strategies of recording the (gendered) self, memory, the everyday, and global networks in the monumental novel, as transformations of literature under the influence of digitalization, datafication, and social media. There are, however, important media-specific differences to consider. Some of these have come up already, for instance in chapter six on series like The Familiar and Game of Thrones that reinvent the novel by emulating the TV series, and in the last chapter, where I contrasted The Atlas and Only Revolutions with Geographical Information Systems like Google Earth.