UC Berkeley

In The Wikipedic Novel, I taxonomize a new novelistic subgenre that is distinguished by the self- conscious way it bears within its form information from the Open-Source Internet. I argue that these novels, laden with semi-reliable narrators, embed “clickable” material that creates in readers a compulsion to draw away from these texts to the Internet to verify ideas. This compulsion, which I call “clickability,” is incited by specific narrative features, some of which include seemingly polymathic first-person narrators who use the Internet, the visual rhetoric of proper nouns and the embellishment of summary, and accounts of art and historical events mediated through televisionand the Internet. In using these elements, the novelists under study—Tom McCarthy, Teju Cole, and Ishmael Reed—rework the genres of the Novel of Ideas and the Encyclopedic Novel. Across interviews, these three authors unashamedly admit to using Wikipedia in drafting their novels, and this study investigates how the resonances of this cribbing (encouraged by the Open-Source Internet’s inventors) affect plot, character, and ethics in these works. My theorization of the Wikipedic Novel thus aims to contribute to the understanding of how the novel as a “cannibal art” thrives through its innovative incorporation of heterogeneous social discourses. And more generally, my dissertation explores the ways novels call attention to their status as printed books, autonomous objects and artistic totalities whose unified expression is, in these novels, symbolized by their material wholeness—an attribute that is deployed as the sign of “the literary.”

My introductory chapter describes the history of Open-Source logic, drawn primarily from Wikipedia’s architects’ belief that the collective knowledge of an Internet plurality should be openly available and reusable without repercussion. I account for how this ideology opens a terrain for novelistic craft to shift to accommodate the Open-Source’s knowledge, even despite its own freight of potential unreliability. In chapter 2, I read Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) to expand the term called “visual rhetoric”: the way book pages and textual marking from quotations to proper nouns create presuppositions of knowledge. These help readers affiliate with the protagonist, a British anthropologist named “U.,” who has a confidence-crisis as the Internet opens the terrain for the greater plurality, “you,” to cannibalize his skills. Chapter 3 analyzes Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and mobilizes the terms of clickability through a novel whose thematics are explicitly not technological. The narrative representation of ideas in this chapter dramatizes Walter Benjamin’s critique of “information” as a turn away from the social bonds and ethical responsibilities of lived community. Cole’s novel deliberately diverts readers from the unreliable narrator’s action in the story world to the extratextual corroboration of his ideas as he himself “later looks up” facts in the novel or admits to having “once read” esoteric, masterful ideas that break from the novel’s general style and imply a subtle digital banality guiding information’s inclusion in the novel. This extradiegetic invitation helps to characterize the protagonist primarily through his obsessive connoisseurship, which on the level of plot performs his attempt to escape responsibility for the harm he has done to others. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the “digital griot” in Ishmael Reed’s JUICE! (2011). The novel is narrated by a political cartoonist retrospectively describing his obsession with the O.J. Simpson “trial of thecentury.” I argue that the novelistic representation of a live media event opens a range of clickable, viewable ephemera to supplement the narrator’s accounting. This turn on historical fiction reanimates the role of the narrator due to the irrecoverable lacunae of minor moments in the Open- Source—radio callers, local periodicals, and particular descriptions of court scenes otherwise unavailable in digital archives. The blur between fact, fiction, and verifiability affiliates the narrator and, by extension, author, with the figure of the “digital griot,” or wizened storyteller of live events made “dead” and irrecoverable for a newer generation.