Figurally Epic: Novels and the Digiscape

In an essay published in the New York Times last year, Jonathan Franzen rhetorically asked, “Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?” The statement radiates the tone of hyperbolic anxiety we’ve grown accustomed to in premature proclamations of the “death of the book” in the age of new media. Novels are still being read – and written – at historically high rates, after all. But Franzen’s rhetorical question still raises a legitimate issue. It would be nonsense to dispute that literary culture is undergoing a phase change as it adjusts to the proliferation of new forms of creative expression and aesthetic experience. As D. N. Rodowick observes in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the new media, “the culture of the book” will not “simply disappear, though its forms may change,” and “its dominance has been displaced” (69). It is worthwhile to wonder what the place of literature is, or should be, in what Rodowick calls “the age of the figural,” the post-historical, “increasingly dynamic and nonlinear discursive universe” (46). Although Rodowick worries that the emerging figural discourse of new media might engender either a “utopia” or a “nightmare,” he nonetheless appears to appreciate the displacement of the book, and with it, the tyranny of logocentric signs, in favor of a Deleuzian culture of “becoming.” It is in this philosophical frame that we ought to consider Franzen’s question: digital forms of expression not only compete with more traditional forms of literature to the latter’s desperate economic disadvantage, but – more significantly – they compel us to rethink the supposed value of the models of thought, knowledge, and production around which the “culture of the book” has been based. New media challenges the assumed value of literary forms like the novel in philosophical as well as financial terms, but, conversely, a careful consideration of the novel provides a critical frame for understanding the cultural values at stake in the transition into the age of the figural.

As theorized in 20^th century literary criticism, the novel is the literary form that structurally and linguistically refuses the sort of logocentrism that is also rebuffed, according to certain accounts, by new media. Mikhail Bakhtin described the novel as an intrinsically “polyphonic” and dialogic literary form, a textual space that integrates disparate voices and sets them into a relation of what he called “interanimation,” rather than a contest for dominance that would eventually organize the voices hierarchically. A work is “novelistic” if no single voice – such as the author’s – subsumes the others, and if the work’s “languages” circulate in an endlessly shifting dialogue. Bakhtin’s definition of the novel is clearly exacting, and it excludes many of the books a publisher would call a novel; he even took issue with some of the elite stars of literature, such as Tolstoy, whom he considered overly didactic. A true “novel” for Bakhtin is indeterminate, open, “a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality” (Bakhtin 7). It encourages, or perhaps even demands, the practices of reading advocated by post-structuralists: writerly readings, in which the reader dances and plays with the weave of signifiers. And in this way, Bakhtin’s conception of what makes a work “novelistic” suggests that the novel is a distinct materialization of Rodowick’s “figural” concept; a Bakhtinian novel, too, is “ever permutable – a fractured, fracturing, or fractal space, ruled by time and difference,” and a novel might be said to “[know] nothing of the concept of identity” (Rodowick 46).

According to this description, it would seem that new media is the apotheosis of this rather idealistic characterization of the  “novelistic.” But the particularity of the novel form gains clarity in György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel, which argues that novels are epics for a skeptical age, literary attempts to give expansive and intensive representation to the condition of being human, but undertaken under the quintessentially “modern” shadow of the expectation of failure For Lukács, the novel hopelessly takes up the project once undertaken in confidence by epics, when the world still appeared to meet “the soul’s inner demand for greatness, for unfolding, for wholeness,” and “beauty [was] the meaning of the world made visible” (30; 34). But, as Lukács and many others tell the story, modernity wrenched us from that innocence, and artistic enterprise transformed from a revelation of beauty and order, into a compensatory effort to produce a sort of beauty and order otherwise lacking in the world. The novel is not unique for undertaking this ultimately insufficient aesthetic effort to combat what Lukács calls the “disintegration and inadequacy of the world;” what distinguishes the novel is the fact that the disjuncture between aesthetic desire and material reality is itself the formal principle defining the genre: “in the novel [metaphysical dissonance] is the form itself” (38, 72). Novels are born of a constant, unresolved tension between the literary artifice that strives for totality, and the abundance of particulars that enliven its characters and narrative. Novels emerge in the opposition between form and content, architecture and detail. They provide “epic” contours for the worlds they represent, and yet they cannot contain these worlds, spurting surpluses of sensuous, untidy detail and the polyphonous voices that can never be resolved into one tone. This dissonance between form and content reflects the metaphysical dissonance between human ideals and worldly actuals, and according to Lukács, only the novel enacts this dissonance in its very form.

Perhaps the novelist’s ambitions to create an incompletely total, closed world are incompatible with an allegedly posthistorical, postideological worldview. If the novel was the epic for modernity, it is appropriate to wonder if the “posthistorical” or “figural” age demands a new form of epic. The figural age might demand a narrative aesthetic whose formal principle lies beyond knowing and affirming that the totalizing epic project is doomed to fail. Novels, in other words, may have lost what Lukács would call their “historico-philosophical” currency. Creative products emerging from the figural do better than express a “novelistic” indeterminacy, because the scene of their appearance is too heterogeneous to accommodate even briefly the outmoded idea of totality. Taken together, the myriad voices of the networked masses perhaps amount to a sort of trans-media, authorless, digital epic, continuously written and rewritten, without any possibility or ambition of unity or conclusion. We are all sculpting the contemporary digiscape (to invent a term in the spirit of Appadurai’s “Disjunctures”), writing our human story in uncombinable different languages and registers, a heteroglossia better suited to the real variety of experience than the novel ever was. And yet, Lukács’ “metaphysical dissonance” has not disappeared in the age of the figural, so we must still ask if there is a narrative art form superseding the novel as the dominant aesthetic offering a compensatory “totality complete in itself” (Lukács 71).

An immediately obvious candidate for the role of the figural epic is television, particularly given the sophistication of cable and network dramas over the past decade. Well-made serial dramas are “novelistic” in many ways: they develop richly sketched characters, they unfold a “text” composed of disparate subjective voices in dialogue, and they attempt to produce an aesthetic totality. There is less space, however, in a scripted, vetted, studio-produced television show for the sort of messy “surplus” that both Bakhtin and Lukács posit as integral to the novel, and the medium is not inherently dissonant. Certain self-reflexive genres of television shows may enact a more “novelistic” performance of the limitations of the aesthetic, but such “dissonance” is not a defining formal principle of the medium as such (or, thinking with McLuhan, its formal “message”). We may not desire “dissonance” as the message of our media, but we ought to be critical of media that elide the fractures and permutations of the figural.

Another, more interesting, candidate for the designation of posthistorical, figural “epic” is gaming. Videogames, RPGs, MPGs and computer games with either abundant or practically nonexistent narrative respond to the epic impulse as Lukács broadly describes it. They offer a vision of totality, a closed and completed system, structured according to rules inscribed in code. And like novels, games hint formally at their own incompletion: they require a player, and the “totality” achieved through the player’s activity is unstable, temporally charged, constantly changing, and subject to whimsical subversion through uses not intended by designers. In games, totality is “systematized” according to what Ian Bogost has called the game’s “procedural rhetoric.” This coded organizing logic of videogames is not apprehended abstractly, as it must be in a novel, but rather is directly experienced, or we might even say performed, by the player.

Such enactment is clearly different from abstract apprehension, and the perceptive mode enlisted and developed by games (as well as television) is a major deviation from the mode engaged by novels. Marshall McLuhan’s discussion of “hot and cold” media might here clarify the stakes of this displacement of literary “epics.” McLuhan calls information-intensive media “hot,” and he argues that, “any intense experience must be ‘forgotten,’ ‘censored,’ and reduced to a very cool state before it can be ‘learned’ or assimilated” (24). There is much to be excited about in new media’s hotness, but there is still a value to the sort of understanding that requires coolness, reflection, and even interpretation. Interpretation is not the necessary enemy of the rhizome, either; it does not require hegemonic or patriarchal constriction of “knowledge,” and the novel seems to me to be an aesthetic form that uniquely unites the possibility of interpretation with the proliferation of interpretations – in other words, a novel still elicits interpretation as an act, but not with any singular telos.

I do not write this essay as a mournful apologia for a disappearing, or shrinking, creative form. Novels are not going to disappear, although as Rodowick and others have suggested, book-bound literary forms have been ceding their privileged position in culture for decades, and may yet drift even further from popular cultural practice, forming what author Benjamin Kunkel has called “islands and archipelagoes off the digital mainland.” The point that I have tried to raise in this essay is that we ought to pause a moment in these early days of our figural age, and consider, or reconsider, the sort of functions that creative works can fulfill. We ought to ask to what extent we still want or need the creative work performed by literary works, and to what extent that work can be accomplished in the newer media of the figural age. If we believe, with Lukács, that literary forms respond to the needs of their “historico-political” moment, we ought to ask what our needs are in this contemporary “fractured, fracturing, or fractal space,” and we ought to imagine and create productive works accordingly.

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