Conclusion

Summary

In the past eight chapters, I have outlined the manifold preoccupations of big novels with scale, as part of a larger cultural obsession—from geographical scale to the scale of human history, and from scales of reading to the human body. I considered bigness in a material sense of book materiality, bulk, and page numbers; stylistically, as excess or gigantism; bigness as play or provocation, as well as actual mimetic movements of big data structures. I asked where this obsession with scale comes from, why it is taken up today, and why in the book-bound novel. As I mentioned at the beginning, V.S. Naipaul questioned the novel's relevance as an artistic form capable of answering to our larger global political situation. He phrased his loss of belief in a revealing way: “the world cannot be contained in the novel” (2003, 180). The question of containment is one that has resurfaced throughout this book, and it captures some of the productive tensions with which literary writing and/in the book, and even representation in general, is faced in an information age. The bound book is charged with new meaning in the face of these developments, as the “other” to big data. At the same time, we have seen, novels expand under the influence of the digital.

With big data and its applications like Global Information Systems, self-tracking apps, and totalizing data visualizations rises the illusion of bypassing representation and signification: if the dataset is large enough, a one-on-one relation between the map and the territory threatens to ensue. Social media and technologies for selfrepresentation allow us to store, track, and broadcast our own lives in real time, to capture every single moment. Databases operate according to a logic of infinite expandability and connectivity. With convergence, transmedia storytelling, and participatory culture, we can turn to any medium or platform to “binge” our favorite contents on demand: wherever, whenever. Naipaul is not completely off the mark in suggesting that, as an efficient form of representation or communication (as if it ever was that), the novel is now hopelessly obsolete and outdated. Repeatedly, we have seen that literary language and book materiality are neither immediate nor transparent, lag behind life, and take up space. They are embarrassingly small-scale and operate according to the logic of compression and sampling.