digital novel

Beyond Maximalism: Resolving the Novelistic Incompatibilities of Realism, Paranoia, Omniscience, and Encyclopedism through Electronic Literature. 

In The Maximalist Novel, Ercolino defines a type of novel that displays multiform maximizing and hypertrophic tension. He lists Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997), Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), and Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) as examples of the term, and classifies the maximalist novel using ten elements: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. While Ercolino’s ten elements accurately identify and classify a significant novel form that has emerged, I argue that these elements are incompatible with one another, which has resulted in criticisms of maximalist novels, as well as a number of maximalist novelists to abandon the form. While Ercolino argues that these incompatibilities represent an ‘internal dialectic’ of the genre, I argue that this is too conflicting to be stable as a novelistic form. These incompatibilities include the incompatibility of multiple (hybrid) realisms, the incompatibility of paranoid imagination with ethical commitment, and the incompatibilities of narratorial omniscience and an encyclopedic mode with a persuasive realism. By examining contemporary fictional works written by previously maximalist novelists, I reassess Ercolino’s ten elements in order to identify the reasons why certain authors have moved beyond the limits of his definition. In so doing, I compare and contrast Ercolino’s ‘maximalist novel’ with Woods’s ‘hysterical realism,’ and Johnston’s ‘novel of information multiplicity.’ Using the Franzen and Smith corpuses as examples, this paper speculates on the future form of the novel as it progresses into the 21st Century. From this literary interrogation, I apply these conclusions to my digital creative practice by developing the digital novel The Perfect Democracy (funded by the Australia Council for the Arts). This work takes as its subject the entire population of contemporary Australia. Such a vast subject is impossible to represent in a work of fiction. The whole work is presented as a 3D frame-like artefact, that can be navigated as a whole, allowing readers to be presented with a multivalent, broad-canvas novel, while resolving the paradoxical issues identified in my interrogation of Ercolino. I propose that this will be achieved by utilising Calvino’s Six Memos. Images of Australian currency will be used as a structural device to remove weight by representing the whole society from the richest to the poorest in the quickest way possible, and a multitude of simultaneous digital writing formats and voices will be used to precisely depict characterisation. 

Works CitedCalvino, I. (1988) Six Memos For The Next Millennium, trans. P. Creagh, London: Vintage, 1988.Johnston, J. (1998) Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Smith, Z. (2001) ‘This is how it feels to me’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan (accessed 18 November, 2018).Wood, J. (2001) ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, The New Republic Online. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman (accessed 18 November, 2018).

Before the ubiquity of iPad, Kindle, and other tablets ushered in a new appreciation of the literary, there was the cell phone novel. Initiated in Japan around 2000, one of the most popular examples of the cell phone novel ( keitai sh ō setsu ), Koizara , was successfully adapted into a multimilliondollar fi film. The success of keitai sh ō setsu can be attributed to a variety of factors: Japan’s cell phone ( keitai ) market, where screens are big; long commutes on public transport; the specific fi characteristics of the Japanese language; and the long tradition of the “personal, pedestrian and portable” (Ito 2005) as part of everyday life. As a medium, it has been embraced by young women, as both readers and writers, for its ability to provide new avenues and contexts for expression around previously tacit practices (e.g., domesticity; Hjorth 2009b).
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Emerson, Lori, and Robertson, Benjamin J., eds. Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.

The keitai sh ō setsu u phenomenon began with the founding of one of Japan’s most pivotal usercreated content (UCC) sites for mobile Internet, Maho No Airando ( maho meaning “magic”), in 1999. Although keitai sh ō setsu u were initially written by professionals, by the mid-2000s everyday users had begun to be inspired to write and disseminate their own keitai sh ō setsu . Predominantly written by y women for r women, this mode of new media highlights the signifi ficance of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999); many of the successful keitai sh ō setsu u (millions produced yearly) are adapted into older media such as film, fi manga , and anime (see remediation). This practice can be seen as an extension of earlier gendered tropes of Japanese new media that were dubbed in the 1980s the “Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting” phenomenon (Kinsella 1995). Characterized by “ kawaii” ” (cute) transformations of the Japanese alphabet, hiragana , an emerging genre of new media writing (which has a history as “women’s language”), soon dominated mobile communication from the pager onward; it became known as the “highschool girl pager revolution” whereby female UCCs hijacked (through personalization techniques) the technologies industry conventionally aimed at businessmen (“salarymen”) (Fujimoto 2005; Matsuda 2005; Hjorth 2003).

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