Monumental Novels in a Global and Digital Age

Abstract

During the last decade, the question of the end of the novel has been given new urgency. Authors and critics have expressed their concern about the future of the literary novel. Some worry that shorter textual forms, such as Tweets and the internet’s flashy, distracting overload of textual and visual fragments, are conditioning readers to a point where our shortened attention spans will soon make it impossible to read extended prose narratives. Others argue that novels cannot compete with the ‘screen’ technologies of computer and television. Of course, the ‘death of the novel’ should not be taken too seriously. On the contrary: these last decades have witnessed the publication of such exceedingly large novels as Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle-series (1009-‘11), William T. Vollmann’s The Atlas (1996) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006). How should we interpret these authors’ dedication to ‘big books’ and long narratives, and indeed the ambition to transform an ‘old’ medium to unprecedented scopes and volumes, just when the medium was expected to become obsolete? What social and technological factors contribute to this new emphasis on magnitude—in scope, length, weight, and bulk? This study argues that these authors reinvent the ‘monumental novel’ in a dialogue with changes in media and technology (digitalization, big data, quantification) and the ethical challenges of globalization. I work towards a definition for this under-theorized term ‘monumental novel’ that combines a notion of bigness and lasting greatness with an emphasis on commemorative value. I ask how the material dimensions of such novels and their expansive scope relate to their workings as vehicles of cultural memory, and how the monumental bigness of these works relates to their commemorative dimension of preserving the novel, literature, or the book for future generations. I place aforementioned works in a comparative framework of the nineteenth century, when monumentality was called upon to offer a sense of stability in (national) societies in technological and social flux. I propose that monumentality in the novel today can be read analogously, in the face of transformations in the media-landscape (e.g. the popularity of shorter forms of writing such as tweets, anxieties about attention spans, the shift from narrative to database) and the shift toward a globalized, ‘networked’ world. By foregrounding their own monumental potential, contemporary novels adapt to social, cultural and technological changes while stressing the novel’s unique affordances. Thus, I argue, monumentality as a strategy of writing confronts the challenges of an era in which the spheres of political, ethical, and aesthetic relationships between humans are expanding, by adapting to new aesthetic forms and scopes of reference.