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Systems novel
Systems novel is a literary genre named by Tom LeClair in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, and explored further in LeClair's 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. LeClair used systems theory to critique novels by authors including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Ursula K. Le Guin. Citing Fritjof Capra's description of systems theory as a "new vision of reality", LeClair invoked ideas from thinkers such as James Lovelock, Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hofstadter 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 and maximalism. 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, complexity and emergence. Some systems novels fit both categories, though not all.
Having introduced the term in relation to Don DeLillo, Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess. They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller), J R (by William Gaddis), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy), LETTERS (by John Barth) and Always Coming Home (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, William Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels 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."
In 2000 Kirkus Reviews called David Mitchell's Ghostwritten "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, 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 and Bronte and Dostoyevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading."
John Freeman has suggested that the September 11 attacks 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, 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."
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Systems novel
Systems novel is a literary genre named by Tom LeClair in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, and explored further in LeClair's 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. LeClair used systems theory to critique novels by authors including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Ursula K. Le Guin. Citing Fritjof Capra's description of systems theory as a "new vision of reality", LeClair invoked ideas from thinkers such as James Lovelock, Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hofstadter 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 and maximalism. 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, complexity and emergence. Some systems novels fit both categories, though not all.
Having introduced the term in relation to Don DeLillo, Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess. They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller), J R (by William Gaddis), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy), LETTERS (by John Barth) and Always Coming Home (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, William Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels 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."
In 2000 Kirkus Reviews called David Mitchell's Ghostwritten "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, 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 and Bronte and Dostoyevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading."
John Freeman has suggested that the September 11 attacks 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, 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."