Tom LeClair Thomas LeClair (born 1944) is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the ''New York Times Book Review'', the ''Washington Post ...
James Lovelock
James Ephraim Lovelock (26 July 1919 – 26 July 2022) was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating sys ...
,
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include '' Steps to an ...
and
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...
to analyse how the novels in question depicted processes and relationships within social, cultural, economic and political systems. LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to '' Moby-Dick'' and '' Absalom, Absalom!'' in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect."
Subsequent critics widened the geographical range but mostly adhered to the notion that systems novels were typically large and dense, making the concept overlap with other critical terms such as
encyclopedic novel
The encyclopedic novel is a literary concept popularised by Edward Mendelson in two 1976 essays ("Encyclopedic Narrative" and "Gravity's Encyclopedia"). In Mendelson's formulation, encyclopedic novels "attempt to render the full range of knowledge ...
and
maximalism
In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an aesthetic of excess. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more".
Literature
The term ''maximalism'' is sometimes associat ...
. This weakened its usefulness as a genre definition, but with the rise of the internet, the systems novel has come to be seen as reflecting the conditions of network culture. The term is now used in at least two different ways, stemming from LeClair's thesis though with different emphases. One highlights bulk, broadness of scope, range of content and greatness of ambition. The other highlights engagement with scientific and technological concepts such as
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
,
complexity
Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interaction, interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.
The term is generall ...
and
emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
Emergence ...
. Some systems novels fit both categories, though not all.
J R
''J R'' is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. In the story, a schoolboy secretly amasses a fortune in penny stocks. ''J R'' won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976.William Gaddis), ''
The Public Burning
''The Public Burning'', Robert Coover's third novel, was published in 1977. It is an account of the events leading to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. An uncharacteristically human caricature of Richard Nixon serves as protagonist a ...
Women and Men
''Women and Men'' is Joseph McElroy's sixth novel. Published in 1987 (with a 1986 copyright), it is 1192 pages long. Somewhat notably, because of its size, the uncorrected proof was issued in two volumes.A fact some reviewers thought worth me ...
'' (by
Joseph McElroy
Joseph Prince McElroy (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as '' Women and Men''.
Personal background
McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brookl ...
), ''
LETTERS
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
Always Coming Home
''Always Coming Home'' is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It is in parts narrative, pseudo-textbook and pseudo-anthropologist's record. It describes the life and society of the Kesh people, a cultural group ...
'' (by Ursula Le Guin). LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery, about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large: the self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality, how massiveness is related to mastery."
LeClair saw the systems novel as a reaction to the "postmodern collapse of high and modern culture", while at the same time being postmodern itself. "Authoritative in their mastery of contemporary information and postmodern techniques, systems novels admit from within themselves their own limitations – the relativity of categories, the arbitrariness of all models and fictions, the constraints of languages, the limitation of a single metadiscourse, and authorial perspectivism. Widely selected, imaginatively structured, oddly proportioned, and strangely scaled, the plenitude of information in systems novels demands from the reader a systemic understanding, a recognition of the homologies between the systems novels and the ecosystem in which they are published, the world they master."
In 1996 LeClair applied the term to Richard Powers' ''
The Gold Bug Variations
''The Gold Bug Variations'' is a novel by American writer Richard Powers, first released in 1991.
Plot introduction
The novel intertwines the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA with the musicality of Johann Sebastian Bach's harpsichord ...
You Bright and Risen Angels
''You Bright and Risen Angels'' is a 1987 novel by William T. Vollmann, detailing a fictional war between insects and the forces of modern civilization. Vollmann described the book, his first, as "an allegory in part", inspired by his experience ...
'' and David Foster Wallace's '' Infinite Jest''. LeClair highlighted all three authors' experience or interest in computing and mathematics. He wrote, "I am not suggesting only that Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace write more explicitly about information than the earlier systems novelists or that their fluency with technical or mathematical languages distinguishes their work. Rather I believe these younger writers more thoroughly conceive their fictions as information systems, as long-running programs of data with a collaborative genesis."
Ghostwritten
''Ghostwritten'' is the first novel published by English author David Mitchell. Published in 1999, it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was widely acclaimed. The story takes place mainly around East Asia, but also moves through Russia, B ...
'' "An inordinately ambitious first novel... a fairly extreme example of the contemporary 'systems novel' (as practiced by Pynchon, DeLillo, McElroy, et al.) obsessed with the interrelationship - not to mention intricacy and opacity - of postindustrial culture's supersophisticated technologies... A richly layered, difficult text that may well be worth the several readings it probably requires.
The Kirkus review expressed an ambivalence amplified in Jonathan Franzen's 2002 essay Mr. Difficult, recalling his first steps as a fiction writer. "At the excellent public library in Somerville, Massachusetts, I identified a canon of intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers. The same names - Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Barth, Barthelme,
Hannah
Hannah or Hanna may refer to:
People, biblical figures, and fictional characters
* Hannah (name), a female given name of Hebrew origin
* Hanna (Arabic name), a family and a male given name of Christian Arab origin
* Hanna (Irish surname), a famil ...
, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin - kept showing up together in anthologies and in the respectful appraisals of contemporary critics... My problem was that, with a few exceptions, notably Don DeLillo, I didn't particularly like the writers in my modern canon. I checked out their books (including '' The Recognitions''), read a few pages, and returned them. I liked the idea of socially engaged fiction, I was at work on my own Systems novel of conspiracy and apocalypse, and I craved academic and hipster respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn't. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and
Conrad
Conrad may refer to:
People
* Conrad (name)
Places
United States
* Conrad, Illinois, an unincorporated community
* Conrad, Indiana, an unincorporated community
* Conrad, Iowa, a city
* Conrad, Montana, a city
* Conrad Glacier, Washington ...
Christina Stead
Christina Stead (17 July 190231 March 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a mem ...
, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading."
John Freeman has suggested that the
September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...
marked the end of the systems novel. Writing ten years after the event, he observed that although many American fiction works had reflected on the attacks, "not a single one of these novels - not even DeLillo's
Falling Man
''The Falling Man'' is a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York City. The Unidentified Man in the image was trapped on the uppe ...
, which is the best of all 9/11 novels and unfolds on the day - offers a kind of unified field theory of the how and the why, the global heave of what happened... This end of the systems novel is, however, not such a bad thing; it marks a necessary end to a fiction about a kind of fiction... After all, they all presume a world in which the US is the centre; all of them narrate a tale in which whiteness is the neutral value."
Against this view was Tom McCarthy's reaction in 2011 to the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace's unfinished and fragmentary The Pale King. McCarthy found the "networked, systems-novel structure of the book... exhilarating and brilliantly realized" and wrote that Foster's book could be seen in two ways: "as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale" or "a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself... in an age of data saturation."
Further development
In 2014 Stefano Ercolino replaced "systems novel" with a new term. In ''The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666'', Ercolino described "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at the threshold the twenty-first.". Like LeClair, Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: ''Gravity's Rainbow'', ''Infinite Jest'', ''
Underworld
The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld.
...
'', ''
White Teeth
''White Teeth'' is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel centres on Britain' ...
2666
''2666'' is the last novel by Roberto Bolaño. It was released in 2004, a year after Bolaño's death. It is over 1100 pages long in Spanish, and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided into five parts. An English-language translat ...
'', and ''2005 dopo Cristo'' by Babette Factory. Unlike LeClair, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ''ambiguous'' relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power."
LeClair's original notion was nevertheless embraced and extended by Damien Walter, who linked it to
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
in a 2016
Guardian
Guardian usually refers to:
* Legal guardian, a person with the authority and duty to care for the interests of another
* ''The Guardian'', a British daily newspaper
(The) Guardian(s) may also refer to:
Places
* Guardian, West Virginia, Unite ...
article. "At their best, when systems novels veer right into science fiction, they can hold infinity itself in their purview - and none come closer to that than
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American writer of science fiction. He has published twenty-two novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his ''Mars'' trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many ...
... There are more contemporary science fiction authors using this model, too:
Madeline Ashby
Madeline Ashby (born April 24, 1983 in Panorama City, California) is an American-Canadian science fiction writer.
,
Ramez Naam
Ramez Naam is an American technologist and science fiction writer. He is best known as the author of the ''Nexus'' Trilogy. His other books include ''The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet'' and ''More than Human: Embraci ...
and
Monica Byrne
Monica Byrne (born July 13, 1981) is an American playwright and science fiction author. She is best known for her drama ''What Every Girl Should Know'' and her debut novel '' The Girl in the Road'', which won the 2015 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and ...
all use science fiction as an arena for speculative, intellectual debate."
Tracy O'Neill
Tracy O'Neill is an American writer. She has written two books, ''The Hopeful'' and ''Quotients''.
O'Neill has a BA from Connecticut College, an MFA from City College of New York, and a MA and MPhil from Columbia University. She has received th ...
responded to her 2020 novel ''Quotients'' being described as a systems novel, saying:
"If the systems novel has traditionally been associated with stories told by white men, perhaps it’s because too often it’s been assumed that books by women of color centering on racialized pain, especially in the private sphere, are the sum of what women of color are capable of—when of course we have more stories to tell—rather than an inherent incompatibility between the systems novel and the requirements of representing life at the margins. I see the problem as less about this story form than a view in which our primary recommendation is construed as 'authenticity.'"
Gods Without Men
''Gods Without Men'' is Hari Kunzru's fourth novel, first published in 2011. The title is taken from a quote by Honoré de Balzac. The novel is set in the American southwest, and contains elements of magical realism.
Plot
Although there are many ...
''. Dario Diofebi's ''Paradise Nevada'' was favourably described by the Washington Post in 2021 as "a throwback to the sprawling 1990s systems novel on both a conceptual level and a sentence-for-sentence basis". In
Esquire
Esquire (, ; abbreviated Esq.) is usually a courtesy title.
In the United Kingdom, ''esquire'' historically was a title of respect accorded to men of higher social rank, particularly members of the landed gentry above the rank of gentlema ...
, a positive review of Adam Levin's ''Mount Chicago'' conflated LeClair's and Ercolino's categories, focusing on bulk: "The maximalist novel — also referred to as the 'systems novel' or the 'Mega-Novel' — towers, it looms, it stands upright on the bookshelf and intimidates readers, daring them to endeavor, to understand, to finish... Once, the publication of a maximalist novel drew much publicity and attention, but now the market teems with them."
There has also been continuing suspicion of the genre. In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the ‘systems novel’ the future of fiction?",
Sam Leith
Sam Leith (born 1 January 1974) is an English author, journalist and literary editor of ''The Spectator''.
After an education at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, Leith worked at the revived satirical magazine ''Punch'', before moving to the ' ...
compared Tom McCarthy's ''
The Making of Incarnation
''The Making of Incarnation'' is a 2021 novel by English writer Tom McCarthy.
Conception and writing
The novel involves a search for a fictional missing item—Box 808—from the archive of Lillian Gilbreth. Gilbreth was a real-world figure know ...
The Every
''The Every'' is a 2021 dystopian novel written by American author Dave Eggers. The novel is a sequel to Eggers's 2013 novel ''The Circle''. It tells the story of a woman named Delaney Wells who joins The Every, a company formed by a merger betw ...
''. Leith wrote, "Where Eggers, though, is writing a more or less traditional novel (inner lives; rich characterisation; decipherable motivation), McCarthy is doing something stranger and more ambitious. His characters are short on inner life: their place in the systems that surround them are what McCarthy is about. And as a book it is hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written – but you struggle as a reader, a little, to engage with something that seems more interested in rendering speeds and the physics of scattering light than in the people so rendered and on whom that light falls. The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn’t changed as fast as the world around it."Leith, Sam. "Is the ‘systems novel’ the future of fiction?" GQ 4 January 2022 /ref>
While the term persists in literary journalism, it has "lost traction" in academic criticism, according to a 2021 journal article by Toon Staes. Like Ercolino, Staes criticised LeClair's "loose conceptualisation", saying that in ''The Art of Excess'' LeClair had "mainly used the systems paradigm as a source of plot and metaphor in his discussion." But instead of replacing the term, as Ercolino did, with a new conceptual framework applicable to a similar collection of novels, Staes suggested an "update" for the systems novel that would restore its original connection to systems theory and the related field of complexity theory. This would still embrace LeClair's examples, but could also include novels that were quite different in scale, tone or content. In Staes' new definition, "systems novels feature multiple nonlinear and fragmented narrative strands that gradually fix the reader’s attention on a network of relationships; they braid together different perspectives and narrative voices, none of which is more important than the others; they often feature a large cast of characters; and they display what I would call 'distributed causality', moving from lower-level narrative events to higher-level patterns. As systems novels progress, alternating between parallel plots and disparate storylines, they prompt readers to shift their focus from the particular and the local to the general and the global, in order to perceive the emerging patterns that unfold." As an example of this redefined systems novel, Staes suggested ''
Pfitz
''Pfitz'' is a Novel in Scotland, novel by Scottish physicist and author Andrew Crumey. It concerns an 18th-century Germans, German prince who dedicates his life to the construction of imaginary City, cities. The name Pfitz is taken from an inh ...
'' – a comic novel set in the 18th century, imbued with self-reflexivity and allusions to emergence. Staes wrote, "''Pfitz'' makes for an interesting test case, not least because its author, Andrew Crumey, studied nonlinear dynamics... It also makes for an idiosyncratic systems novel, since, at a mere 164 pages, its length falls well short of the baggy monsters in LeClair’s corpus."