Networks

Author: Rachel Tay

Rhythm and Whole

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines “rhythm in fiction” as “repetition plus variation.” It is not the melody itself, he proposes, but that which is suspended within and goes on to be sustained beyond. Forster also designates rhythm as the “whole” of the “symphony,” since it is the centre of gravity around which notes compose themselves and melodies are harmonized in synchrony (114). More extensible than meter, but nonetheless regulated, rhythm can hence be said to demarcate the durational frame in which “non-sonorous forces” are housed and “render[ed] … sonorous” in time (Deleuze 48). Such a capaciousness is what Forster suggests permits the possibility for music’s “freedom” and “expansion” — a potential for autonomy realised, for example in the musicians’ performance — as it makes room for the contingent, incidental, and “local impulse[s]” that eschew prior schematization (114). Accordingly, he laments that he cannot point to But rhythm’s novelistic counterpart is elusive and Forster laments the fact.  Because a novel’s plot often tethers it to a planned and stultifying pattern and because in order for a coherent sense of causality to transpire, narrative elements have to be carefully mapped out in service of a teleological end (115), the novel’s framework  pares down the “immense richness of material which life provides” to an austere unity. Forster’s conventional novelist, lacking rhythm, appears doomed to leave no life or feeling in their texts (111).

Must a novel’s generic obligation to achieve coherence necessarily leave it lifeless? And must an intricately plotted conceit be so stultifying? More interestingly, does Forster want to avoid this implication when he identifies rhythm as both variance and  “whole”? In so doing, he can be said to have proleptically adumbrated or anticipated the concept of open architecture — a technological infrastructure predicated on the principles of accessibility and modifiability that would come to organize much of society and inform its cultural production in the ensuing decades. Perhaps Forster’s charge of the novel’s infidelity to life’s caprices should be considered in light of the technological developments at the turn of the century, as the mechanization of transnational warfare was rapidly dissolving geographical boundaries, and as the shift from technical to networked media in the Edisonian age likewise reconfigured the relations between cause and effect . As Virginia Woolf, Forster’s own contemporary, would remark of the modern subject in her essay, ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, he is “a different human being who has put locks on his doors … to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof” (222).

Concurrent with the incipience of global interconnectedness there arose, for the writers who came after Forster and Woolf, the complex task of patterning the myriad and opaque entanglements of the “wire[d]” modern subject — or, in other short, forming literary experimentation around a world of an unprecedented scale and indeterminacy. To this end, Woolf herself would propose in the very same essay her invention of an “exacting book” (228). As incongruous as it is ordered, and as particular as it is scopic, such a book, she contends, requires

the writer … to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalizing and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination. … And then, though this is scarcely visible, so far distant it lies on the rim of the horizon … [to dramatize] the power of music, the stimulus of sight … the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people … Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed. (229, emphasis added)

Although Woolf would later reconstitute this “unnamed variety of the novel” as the “play-poem” — the curious form to which she had assigned her novel, The Waves — here, I would prefer to construe it alternatively as a network.^[1] More specifically, I refer to Patrick Jagoda’s interpretation of the network as both “a structure for links and nodes,” as well as a dynamic “figure for a proliferating multiplicity that at once enables and challenges our very capacity to think” (3).

Because it accounts simultaneously for the structural and the processual in its modelling of a system that generates heterogeneous connections — while at the same time offering us a fathomable structure that circumvents the straightforward attribution of causality to metaphysics — such a definition of the network affords us, in this case, the necessary coordinates by which to retroactively anchor Woolf’s and Forster’s visions. Moreover, as Bruno Latour suggests, the language of networks has garnered such traction that its vocabulary has become nearly inconsequential today (129). Where Latour discerns the ineffectuality of network discourse in its current state of ambiguity, however, I derive from the pervasiveness of its usage a valuable transversality: the network’s ontologically unstable figuration as both an “objective thing in the world” as well as a “metaphor … [for] interconnection” facilitates points of contact between the tangible and the intangible, whereas its apparent ease of circulation across time and disciplines evinces its own communicative effects (Jagoda 4).

In Woolf’s delineation of her “exacting book,” therefore, we find both a rough sketch of a technique — an appeal for a “logical” structuration that invokes the mechanisms of a networked infrastructure — as well as an intimate atuning to a vast array of networks in her attempt at eliciting one’s sense of “an extraordinary number of perceptions.” Such is what I would identify, following Jagoda, as a nascent “network aesthetics”: a form that does not “merely represent or thematise network,” but “find [its] fundamental aesthetic raison d’être in the paradigm shift of the network society that they interrogate and intensify through metaphor and technological imaginaries” (44-45). In particular, due to its stark awareness of its own inextricability from the very systems within which it circulates — the fact that it understands that it cannot stand apart from the networks that comprise itself to depict them accurately — the networked novel can neither conceive of, nor allude to the network as a stable object. Instead, it can only “perform and encode its own sense of connectivity,” as an indication of the prevalence and ongoing operations of such networks (45). Thus conceding its own position as a circuit among circuits, the network novel formalizes an “immanent interconnectedness without any hope of transcendence” (46). It functions to suggest the irrepresentability of a network that is nonetheless omnipresent, while simultaneously — and paradoxically — impressing on readers the precise affective experience of being in a “network sublime” (49).

Should Forster’s initial concept of a sufficiently distensible literary form be a primarily rhythmic one, then networked fiction renders this imperceptible fluidity nevertheless detectable in space. Its broader emergence would coincide with the rising ubiquity of networked technologies, right as the mechanisms of the latter became increasingly intelligible with its preponderance in everyday life. At the same time, while the various discourses of structuralism unfolded throughout the century and the systematic logics delineated by such ideas took hold in public consciousness, an attentiveness to one’s own interpellation within a series of linguistic and ideological structures — a notion to which the writers of what we know today as “high modernism” had only vaguely gestured — would, too, be codified and re-absorbed into cultural production.

The result is a literary form scrupulously patterned after machinic procedures. Or, in the words of Italo Calvino, a “literature machine” that enjoins — and thereby allows for all— the subsequent encounters and interplays between the reader and the disparate semiotic systems from which it draws.[2] Although such a “system of logical operations,” he details, conceives of itself in discrete terms — as a finite, structural code with which a reader navigates the text — the very space that it demarcates is what also allows room for its reader, “an empirical and historical man,” to enter into the text in order to produce “unlimited combinations, permutations, and transformations” (‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ 5, 22, 6). Engendering and multiplying its own significance to no end, not only does this literary “combinatorial game” manifest the “strict and logical imagination” that Woolf demands of her “exacting book,” but it also mimics the “enormously complex representational dialectic” of a Jamesonian postmodernity in order to propagate comparably labyrinthine worlds (54).

Such a sprawling yet ordered scope betrays intimations of a more insidious  apparatus lurking within. Networked texts such as Calvino’s and Jorge Luis Borges’ hence become suffused in a disorienting atmosphere of apprehension and uncertainty. Consequently,  restaged in such fictions of interconnectivity is, in this sense, a sliver of the discontinuous realities and alienation experienced by the postmodern subject, a faithful “facsimile of the world and of society” not unreminiscent of Forster’s idealized text (Enzensberger, qtd. in ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ 26).

Network Operations

Take, for example, Borges’ hypertextual short story, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’. It is one of the foremost instantiations of what Borges calls a “growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times,” and, more intriguingly, a piece of fiction notably patterned according to the Boolean conditional (28). Beginning two hundred and fifty-two pages into a historical study, in the midst of a deposition record, and at the conclusion of an undisclosed telephone call, the text plunges its readers into a noticeably tense conflict, in media res. Brief descriptions of the aforementioned study (a historical chronicle in “Liddell Hart’s History of World War I”), deposition (a statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun”), and call (“the voice that had answered [Yu Tsun] in German … was that of Captain Richard Madden”) gesture towards the urgency of the situation that the text presents. However, little else is disclosed about the ways in which the story’s protagonist, Dr. Yu Tsun, had arrived at his distressing circumstances. Instead, readers are left to guess at the precise contours of the narrative that they have unwittingly interrupted, with nothing but fragmentary pieces of information to confirm their conjectures.

Nonetheless, it is also through such minutiae that dramatic tension is roused and Yu Tsun’s telephone conversation is made to seem immediately significant, seeing as the various ways by which the event is communicated to us imply not only a recipient, but also an incident — a movement, a process, or a cause — to produce the former. Because, as Émile Benveniste reminds us, the presence of a speaking I always “posits another person, the one who … becomes my echo to whom I say you and who says you to me,” any mode of communication necessarily establishes causal relations between a minimum of two nodes, notions, or phenomena (729). Therefore, Yu Tsun’s telephone call presumes the shadowy existence of an interlocutor, just as the text’s address of a nameless “you” anticipates — and thereby calls into being — the figure of the reader (19). By leveraging on the connective capacities of communicative media, the text hence situates its central characters and incidences within the wider information economies in which they circulate: it locates them as elements already enmeshed in extant — though yet uncovered — relationships, while at once placing them in the midst of consequential action produced by these connections themselves.

Of course, this is not to say that the ways in which Borges’s short story maps connections is at all unprecedented, given that the ability to refer to — and to inaugurate relations — between disparate objects has always been inherent to language’s indexical quality. But what distinguishes ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’ as a networked text is the exceptional prominence of the connections drawn within it — a discernible sense of its characters’ imbrication in greater systems rendered salient by the uneasiness resulting from the reader’s unwelcome intrusion into the text. Seeing as neither the deposition that opens the text nor Liddell’s History of World War I — nor even Borges’ short story, which one will eventually know is dedicated to Victoria Ocampo — had been explicitly intended for us, one can only infringe upon the text as an extrinsic interloper. Thus, not only does the reader’s unanticipated entrance into the text detach existing chains of communication from their presumptive recipients or nodes, but it also makes manifest to readers this very detachability and appropriability of communicative links by others.

As a result, it is such an inscrutability of the pseudonymous other that surfaces the presence of the network so conspicuously in the text — as the sense of possibility percolating beneath it — given that future in which this potential would cumulate could always bring about danger and harm. As Yu Tsun would go on to remark, following his fateful phone call, “the voice that had answered in German” had also  “meant … the end of [his life]”. Because the presence of Captain Richard Madden, an adversarial MI5 agent’s voice “in Viktor Runeberg’s apartment” would suggest to Yu Tsun that Runeberg, his own handler, “had been arrested or murdered,” the call would also have allowed Madden to locate and eliminate him next. Thus, as readers would come to discover, Yu Tsun’s life hinges inherently on the identity of his caller — a detail that had, and could only have been, known by the character should he pick up the receiver. If it had been Runeberg with whom he was communicating, then he would likely have been safe. Or else, were it anyone but Runeberg who had spoken to him, then he could imperil his life.

In this manner of miming the Boolean conditional of “If—Then(—Else),” then, Borges’ short story confronts readers with the stakes of a contingent future both intimated by the obscured network connections unfolding within the text and encoded in the algorithmic expression, as the capricious, dangling “else”. More than that, however, it also stirs in readers the affective weight of unknown yet looming implications: it hints at all the possible ramifications of Yu Tsun’s complicated entanglements, without ever reaching to a definitive disambiguation of the plot in which he has been entwined. Not unlike “the contradictory chapters of Ts’ui Pên” that Yu Tsun encounters — fragments of his ancestor’s project to create the eponymous story’s eponymous labyrinth, “which would be strictly infinite” — hence, the combinatoric logics of the Boolean conditional portend an invisible totality. It defines a schema wherein all “alternatives” can be encompassed, because it implies, by merely endeavouring to be able to engender and encompass all imaginable outcomes, that every possible “undertaking” has “already [been] accomplished” (22). The framework of the text thus “imposes upon [itself] a future as irrevocable as the past,” because the matter of totality’s scope is always tautological: it contains all because it implies — and therefore entails — all.

Still, the fact remains that human time, like human language itself, is always linear and sequential, and we can only inhabit one of the many “diverse futures, diverse times” at one time. So, even when presented with the “infinite series of times,” “network of times,” and “all possibilities of times” insinuated by the text, readers can only follow Yu Tsun from the single, discrete moment in which they are first introduced to him into a solitary timeline in the latter’s life. Accordingly, the “other dimensions of time” that “saturate” the novel can merely persist as such, as “invisible persons” populating the same textual space, but only in a virtual elsewhere unrealized by the words of Borges’ text. Time and potential hence run up against each other in the short story to foment a sense of exigency — a need to proceed in the right direction — in a garden of forking paths.

After all, the alternative could always lead to one’s demise, and the wartime backdrop of both Borges’ contemporaneity and the short story had meant that death was seldom out of one’s mind’s eye.[3] The “swarming sensation” (28) that Yu Tsun describes thus attests to an anxiety that is endemic “to a realization of total linkage,” “a manifestation of maximal network aesthetics” (Jagoda 54). More specifically, it can be named as a perpetual worry that stems from one’s discovery of the ubiquitous web of causality to which one is bound, given that one can never encircle the network’s colossal limits or command it, save to resign to its incomprehensible schematics. Through Yu Tsun’s unmistakeable sense of helplessness, therefore, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’ affectively conveys what Jagoda calls the “problem of … mapping a network”: that despite the network form’s “stability of structure, its overwhelming quantity of connections … resists cognitive comprehension or the experiential capacity to maintain all of its segments cohesively in consciousness” (55). Subsequently, all that consists in the text is then a palpable sense of powerlessness against one’s own knowledge of one’s inextricability from the networked structures that one cannot grasp — a “tenuous nightmare” that will come to define the age of hyper-connectivity and  paranoia that had, in Borges’ time, already been burgeoning (Borges 28).

Obfuscating the Network

If Borges’ short story patterns itself according to the Boolean conditional in order to mime and evoke the discombobulating effects of networked structures, then Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler (thereafter Traveler), written almost three decades later, both adopts and disrupts this conditional expression to render the network form more pervasive and diffuse. From the moment that readers first encounter the novel, any and all expectation that one might have of the novel form is thoroughly unsettled. Beginning in the subjunctive mood and with a conditional clause, for instance, the “if” of the novel’s title sets out to posit a hypothetical scenario. Yet, with no verb to complete the clause — but only a preposition and a noun to compose it — the expression is ostensibly an imperfect one. While a reader’s curiosity may be piqued by the novel’s evocative title, then, little is offered by way of satiating such interest. Instead, only the outline of a combinatoric algorithm is introduced with the suggestive “if”.

Certainly, one could always look further to the titles of the novel’s named chapters — which can, quite extraordinarily, be assembled into a somewhat recognizable, albeit ungrammatical, sentence — for a verb to eventually be proffered. However, one cannot neglect to note that the sentence’s conditional clause is closed not by a statement, as one would expect, but only a question. Hence, the initial proposition, “If on a winter’s night, a traveller … looks down in the gathering shadow,” is neither supplied with the consequences to which its occurrence will lead, nor is it circumscribed by the situations in which it will not result (1, 258). Rather, the tone of contingency that accompanies the title’s subjunctive mood is merely protracted by the inquiry, “What story down there awaits its end?” (2). With such an unstable start and an equally nebulous end, the sentence that now comes to frame the novel for its readers promises nothing but doubt. What “story”, then, could such an imprecise algorithm produce? What kind of narrative could even “[await] its end” in the text?

Crucially, one must observe here that the query appended to the novel’s titular proposition does not simply point to the ambiguity of the “end” that is due to arrive — it also refuses to delimit the purview of the “story” itself. Taking the question to be one of whether a story without ends or origins is even conceivable — and not just one of what shape its plot might take — hence, the problem with which Traveler greets its readers at its opening appears to suggest that the concrete demarcation of a narrative’s margins is integral to its formation. As Frank Kermode would assert in his study of eschatological fictions, “Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in media res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems” (7). Conversely, the utter paucity of these fictive linchpins in any given narrative — however fallacious such “origins and ends” may be — would loosen its plot from any reasonable “sense” or causality.

By this vein of argument, what follows in Calvino’s open text can only be the feeling of strandedness — or that of being “in the middest” — because one’s condition necessarily “stand[s] under the accusation of being horrible, rootless fantasies” when one lacks the requisite epistemological horizon with which to fathom one’s position (38). More than the sense of trepidation that permeates ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, therefore, the new order of incomprehensibility that Calvino’s novel introduces infuses the text with an even more frustrating atmosphere of bewilderment and destitution. It affectively conveys the “immanent processes of disconnection, disorientation, and drift,” in order to manifest in readers the sense of discomposure that arose with the invisibilization of networked structures — and which has only intensified as hypermediation and hyperconnectivity accelerated towards the late twentieth-century (Jagoda 53).

Indeed, while the Boolean operation that structures Borges’ short story invests into ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ an abstract notion of a nonetheless imaginable whole — a totality figured allegorically by Ts’ui Pên labyrinth itself — Calvino’s Traveler muddies the legibility of the algorithmic function so much so that even its inner workings become questionable to us. This may be evinced, for example, by how the hazy borders of the text at once renders the novel’s beginning uncertain, thus calling into question the ontological statuses of both the reader and the text. Consider the first line of Traveler: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel” (3). Here, the novel instructs its reader to picture a scene in which they are “about to begin reading” the very book that they are already reading, even though they must — more paradoxically — first be reading the text in order to happen upon the statement, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel”. In this way, the reader is instantly jolted from their intuitive engagement with the text, whereas their habitual assumption of the novel’s second-person pronoun, “You,” is disturbed: the reader is called to connect with the text — that is, to “begin reading” it as its “Reader” — at the same time that they are estranged from this very act.

Where does one’s experience of reading “Calvino’s new novel” then begin? And where does it really end? It appears that one cannot know for certain, for the text proceeds to make it plain to its readers that its boundaries stretch well beyond the covers of the book: it encompasses one’s “notic[ing] in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveller had appeared,” one’s acquisition of the book from a bookstore, and even, as Calvino tells us, one’s “circling of the book … before reading inside it” (4-8). Alluding to the broader determinations that work covertly to bring an individual to a book, therefore, the introduction of Traveler unveils the process of reading in order to call into question the constructs of the “reader” and the “text”. Should the second-person “you” enter into Borges’ short story in order to stabilize its readers as a supplementary node in its network, then the same occurs in Traveler in order loosen this node from its reader. As a result, just as the once assured perimeters of the novel’s diegetic world disintegrates, one can no longer take for granted one’s own position both within and in relation to the text.

Such is the discomfiting feeling of disaffection that is extended throughout the rest of the novel, as Calvino’s “Male Reader” — in a stark opposition to the standard, passive implied reader — becomes plainly enfolded into the novel as an active, agentic character. Drawn into a book-fraud conspiracy plot in which the matter of authorship and literary production is strikingly problematized, the character of the reader is inducted into, and begins to rearticulate critical debates on the provenance of literary texts. Meanwhile, punctuating this seemingly outlandish situation are also the incipits of ten novels that the “Reader” happens upon and begins to read. Yet, faced with missing pages, misprints, and unforeseen interjections to hamper the conventional flow of information, his — and the reader’s — experience of these novels are, uncannily enough, always disrupted in the middle. Subverting  the seemingly straightforward processes of literary production and reception, therefore, Calvino’s novel eschews the easy reading of a familiar, readerly text: in place of coherent interpretations, it seems to engineer frustration instead.

To be sure, Calvino’s readers are, at intermittent junctures, also made aware of the choice that they have to simply put down the book in their hands: he writes, for example, of the “[Male] Reader’s” temptation to “fling the book on the floor,” “hurl it out of the window,” “out of the block, beyond the neighbourhood, beyond city limits, beyond the state confines … the solar system, the galaxy” (26). Yet, because we are so accustomed to seeking in the fictions we read the very “fictive concords” that cleave us from the boundless systems that Calvino lists, we are likewise given to believe that language’s linearity would lead us to a prospective end. Thus, buoyed by our anticipation of the novel’s inevitable conclusion, we let ourselves be reeled back by the line of the text anyway.

Still, Calvino’s novel continually disappoints us in this regard, for the denouement that closes the text cleverly sidesteps any sense of definitive closure to open up towards a multiplicity of potential: it ends with a conventional marriage plot that has earlier been foretold, satirized, and precluded as a satisfactory resolution to the novel. Thus, with all possible ways of reading Calvino’s novel parodied and discounted by the text itself, any attempt by readers to interpret Traveler is stymied by the novel’s pre-emptive disclosure of its potential significance. Led not out of the text by Ariadne’s thread — the linearity of language — but entrapped in a “network of lines that enlace” and “intersect” (1, 132, 161), readers hence find themselves caught in the novel’s labyrinthine schema without a “plan … [to] dissolve its power” (Enzensberger, qtd. in ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ 25). Just as all of Kermode’s “fictive concords” are thus unmade, so, too, is the vicissitude of time — that vital narrative element which holds the promise of meaning. Consequently, with hardly a glimmer of the network’s modus operandi, readers are lost amid the “flow[s] of information” in the textual network, in a circuitous chase for an ever elusive narrative significance that feels increasingly unattainable (Calvino 26).

The Network Imaginary

Where Borges and Calvino turn to formal experimentation to shroud their readers in both their diegesis as well as the experience of being a networked subject — seeing as this affective sense of connectivity, one must note, cannot be otherwise articulated — a more general cohort of postmodern novelists would, later on, absorb into their work the algorithmic logics of their hypermediated and hyperconnected contemporaneity instead. This may be observed in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (thereafter Lot 49), where readers come to find a vision of postwar American capitalism so saturated with data and networked connections that it is, rather, the “absence of even the marginal try at communication” that begins to feel “threaten[ing]” (53).

Set in Southern California, notably described as “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts — census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei” — the landscape of the novel is ostensibly overrun with a plethora of puzzling symbols and signs, from name brands to enigmatic hieroglyphs and other uncanny distortions of common proper names (13). At the heart of it all is Oedipa Maas, who arrives at the fictional San Narciso after receiving a “long-distance call, from where she would never know,” informing her that she was going to be the executor of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity‘s estate (2). The character, however, becomes quickly embroiled in a conspiracy plot to uncover a seemingly related organization of mail-carriers named Trystero, when unusual coincidences between the shadowy group as well as Inverarity’s more dubious dealings as a real-estate mogul mount and attract her attention. Evidently, then, tropes from Borges’ and Calvino’s fictions resurface here, as insinuations of telecommunications and underground networks once again recur to adumbrate the possibility of their deeper designs.

But what differs in Pynchon’s novel is that the ontological statuses of such networks are no longer certain, for the connective apparatus of the network itself has now been introjected by Oedipa: assailed by an astounding arsenal of signs and information, and without a reliable system by which to organize them, she takes it upon herself to map these connections instead. In her everyday encounters, Inverarity’s affairs, and an underground postal system — amongst other phenomena — the character sees a common invocation of “Trystero” that binds these otherwise dissimilar objects. And in this supposed ubiquity of the enigmatic Trystero, she discerns the work of an omnipresent metanarrative beyond her grasp. Unable to ignore any of these likenesses or the sheer prospect of fortuity bestrewn throughout her life, Oedipa is thus made into a paranoid figure par excellence. As Pynchon asserts, “Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasised by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenertrated with the dead man’s estate” (88). Hence, despite the patent peculiarities sown throughout its narrative, the central intrigue of Lot 49 — the truth of Trystero’s existence — appears to be undercut by the novel’s pathologizing of Oedipa’s state of mind.

Nonetheless, one has to wonder if Oedipa’s suspicions are entirely unwarranted, when the gears of the postmodern capitalist machine complex — the state of the world in which the character resides — do indeed grind, not unlike the scientist, Nefastis’s machine, to render all things alike and organizable in order to maximize efficiency. Is it any wonder, then, that the character could look down upon a “vast sprawl of houses” and perceive the pattern of a “transistor radio … circuit,” when the two could, in fact, be so closely linked? For the transistor radio has undeniably permeated most residential homes by the 1960s, and such communicative technologies are undoubtedly wielded to facilitate “an intent to communicate,” what the image surfaces is not merely a flimsy comparison between two inconsonant occurrences, but the decentralized and incalculably vast reach of capitalism’s mechanisms (14). In this sense, the paranoia that comes to consume Oedipa’s mind can be said to be derived not from a psychopathology, as she suspects, but an all-encompassing yet incomprehensible system that has inadvertently implanted such similitudes by its very flattening of differences.

The “chance of [Trystero] being real” hence “continues menace her so,” even as Oedipa herself would prefer “it all to be a fantasy,” seeing as its reality would confront her indubitably with the greater horrors of both Inverarity’s and capitalism’s machinations — that is, her imbrication within and her complicity with a corruption that she cannot discern nor deny (107). Because global capitalism fundamentally integrates the world “into one economic space via increased international trade,” promoting such an “internationalization of production and financial markets … by an increasingly networked global telecommunications system,” the immeasurable proliferation of such a network throughout one’s life would, accordingly, implicate one in an incomprehensible circuitry of events from which one can never divest oneself (Gibson-Graham 120). Wandering into a rooming house and past its abject scenes of “drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts [and] hookers,” then, Oedipa finds herself drawn by an inexplicable sense of affinity to such suffering: “She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him,” writes Pynchon of Oedipa’s chance meeting with an old, dying sailor, even though she appears to share nothing in common with him but their respective connections to Trystero (105, 102). Yet, neither of them are privy to the other’s exact entwinements with Trystero, and any association between them — should they even exist at all — cannot be expressly mapped. So, despite her compelling desire to ameliorate the sailor’s situation, Oedipa “can’t help” as “nothing she knew of would preserve … him” (102, 105). In this manner, the senses of exigency and futility of being a networked subject take on an ethical dimension here in Pynchon’s hyperconnected world, as one is dismayingly reminded at every turn of one’s inability to act against a totalizing and imponderable network of connections. Left disoriented and incapacitated, it appears that one can only “inherit” — as Oedipa does — “[an] America coded in Inverarity’s testament,” a system encoded irrevocably in violence and exploitation (149).

Yet, perhaps our view of the network need not remain so pessimistic, for we must remember that our positionality as readers affords us an unique yet privileged distance to reflect upon the very experience of being “networked” itself. After all, should the networked text, as Jagoda asserts and the fictions of Borges, Calvino, and Pynchon have in turn elucidated, function to intensify the giddying and attenuating affects characterizing our hyperconnected postmodernity, then what it also reveals to us — even if only obliquely — is also the existence and effects of the networked structures configuring our lives. It articulates hypotheses that can only emerge in Oedipa as mere inklings, confirming the presence of “revelation[s]” that “trembl[e] just past the threshold of her understanding” (104). Likewise, it allows us to detect the unfortunate irony in Oedipa’s plan to fulfil the sailor’s dying wish — by finding “the landlord of [the rooming house], and bring him to court, and buy the sailor a new suit … and give him the bus fare to Fresno” — when we discern that Inverarity and “the landlord” are possibly not incomparable (103). In other words, the literary aestheticization of networks at once sharpens our attunement to our own condition as a networked subject, at the same time that it orients us more clearly to the implications of the networks in which we are, at the moment, bound — metastructures that often thrive instead on their presumed anonymity.

The closing note, therefore, is one of ambivalence. For just as Borges, Calvino, and Pynchon’s texts have been shown to stun and enervate their readers, they can also hint at the possibility of dialectically opposite outcomes — we cannot forget Calvino’s initial concept of the networked novel as a “literature machine” divested from any ethical obligation in and of itself. If anything, the effects that these networked fictions work upon their readers are often only amplifications of the attitudes that readers take to these texts. So, to project into such networked texts feelings of incapacity and paralysis is also to divulge the extent to which our current networked structures have enfeebled our agency, and to be thus consumed by only fear and paranoia is also to exhibit the Manichaean logics of capitalism to which we have become so accustomed, but this certainly does not preclude all other potentialities enfolded into the ever extensible form. One need only to look to the brimming and ever extensible horizon of the immanent network to envisage multiplicities — literary, ethical, political, and both promising or otherwise  — beyond what we can at present imagine.

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^[1] The notion that the networked form is already attendant within The Waves has been previously advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, in their reading of the novel as an “abstract machine” which functions to intermingle and assemble the multiplicities of “vibrations, shifting borderlines” that constitute each of the novel’s seven characters (252).

^[2] To be clear, such a gamification of literature entails not the total relinquishment of the human for the machinic, as Forster himself might describe the strictly patterned novel. Instead, as Calvino will go on to elaborate, while acknowledging the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, A. J. Greimas, and Roland Barthes, the algorithmic function of literature serves only as a scaffold for the expansion of its numerous poetic permutations (‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ 22). The Oulipian writer, Jacques Duchateau, would return to this notion later in the 1960s, in his defense of cybernetics in the arts, when he observes that “not all machines are like the ones that automatically dispense platform tickets or peppermints. The essential characteristic of the machines that interest us is not that they are determined but that they are organized” (qtd. in Duncan 35).

^[3] I derive this from Paul Saint-Amour’s Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, in which he argues in part that the newly emerged doctrine of total war had, since 1916, engendered a constant anticipation of war, “making the future seem a predetermined site of catastrophic violence and therefore capable of inflicting damage in the present” (9).

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Works cited

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Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Translated by William Weaver, Vintage Books, 1992 [1981].

Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts” in The Uses of Literature. Translated by Patrick Creagh, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 [1982], pp. 3-27.

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Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Perennial Classics, 1990 [1965].

Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art” Collected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 218-29.