Contemporary Reconfigurations of the Encyclopedic Novel

Form, Gender, and Planetarity in ”Ducks, Newburyport”

Abstract

In this article, I explain how Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport accepts, rejects, and thereby reconfigures the structural and thematic conventions traditionally associated with the encyclopedic novel. In the first of the article’s three sections, I argue that the novel’s demanding structure and form do not allow its readers to be distracted even in today’s hyper-connected digital age. As most of this thousand-page-long maximalist novel comprises just one single sentence written in a relentless stream-of-consciousness style, readers cannot ignore its breathless and cant-like quality. Consequently, because of this singular narrative mode, the novel exemplifies as well as critiques the contemporary ethos of digital distraction and the systemic reduction of human attention spans. In the following section of the article, I suggest that the unrelenting, overwhelming aspect of the narrative of Ducks, Newburyport is inextricably linked to the way the novel provides a critical, feminist gloss on the question of gender. Not only is its narrator an unnamed, middle-class American woman but her monologic style adopts and adapts the famous monologue of Molly Bloom in the “Penelope” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Here, I also underline that in literary historiography, novels by female writers have historically been marginalised and hardly recognised as being encyclopedic. In the article’s conclusion, I emphasise that the linear and omniscient description of the lioness’s search for her cubs in Ellmann’s novel, which runs alongside the narrator’s monologue, implies that the contemporary encyclopedic novel actively interrogates the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the genre goes beyond anthropocentric and nation-oriented perspectives to imagine intricate connections among human beings and all other biotic and abiotic entities at the planetary scale.