Encyclopedic Narrative, Epistemology, and Post-Truth

Abstract

This article reevaluates the relevance of encyclopedic narrative in the light of the popularity and pervasiveness of post-truth politics. While early critics of post-truth sought to combat the latter’s rise by appealing to expertise, objectivity, and scientific authority – and distancing themselves from the sort of theoretical ideas and fictional forms that might question such authority – this article argues that such responses misunderstand the roots of post-truth as well as the resources available for confronting it. Focusing upon one such resource, the encyclopedic narrative, I argue that encyclopedic fictions are valuable because they challenge readers to understand and experience – as opposed to ignore or dismiss – the epistemological pressures that make post-truth so attractive in the first place.

To defend this argument, this essay proceeds in two steps. First, I locate the previously unexplored homology between the history of encyclopedism and the rise of post-truth. Viewed over the longue durée, today’s post-truth politicians appear to have weaponized something that encyclopedic authors have feared since Diderot imagined the original Encyclopédie: that information’s increasingly limitless availability will paralyze, rather than catalyze, the pursuit of truth. Second, I analyze how this fear has animated the form and content of encyclopedic novels over the past three centuries. Considering a trio of texts that confront the epistemological, social, and psychological effects of informational abundance – Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) – I argue that encyclopedic fictions are edifying precisely because their form is epistemologically perplexing.

Since this form challenges readers to experience the epistemological problems (e.g., information overload, conflicting perspectives, confirmation bias) driving post-truth without embracing its nihilistic conclusions, encyclopedic fiction may cultivate habits of judgment, attention, and self-scrutiny that appeals to expertise and authority alone cannot provide.