Encyclopedic Novel Form

Abstract

This article fills a significant gap in maximalist and encyclopedic novel studies by offering a narratological definition of the encyclopedic novel. While existing scholarship has identified historical contexts as well as core thematic and epistemological qualities shared by encyclopedic novels, such criticism overall neglects an account of the genre’s techniques for plotting and structure. Yet a structural, formal analysis is crucial for understanding the genre, clarifying the structures that result in the genre’s distinct cognitive challenges and delights. This article proposes a formal definition centered on three narrative elements: character, plot, and world. Encyclopedic form requires (1) at least three distinct, major focalizing characters, (2) separate, non-merging plotlines for those characters, and (3) a spatially expansive world that that prevents these plotlines from coalescing into a centered, predictable design. Drawing on examples including Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and limit cases such as Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, the article distinguishes encyclopedic form from encyclopedic content, arguing that thematic epistemophilia alone is insufficient to produce the genre’s characteristic decentered structure. Having established this formal model, the article turns to its cognitive consequences for readers, identifying four distinct effects that define the reading experience of encyclopedic novels. First, the genre increases the difficulty of narrative configuration and reconfiguration: readers take longer to form an initial working model of the novel’s design, and that model is repeatedly and substantially revised as new information – such as Infinite Jest’s late revelation about JOI’s childhood epiphany – retroactively reorganizes earlier models. The genre’s characteristic mixing of subgenres compounds this difficulty by denying readers the usual generic cues for anticipating structure. Second, predictive processing and judgments of relevance are destabilized: readers must look back more frequently than usual to track information that bears on plot, character, theme, or world. Encyclopedic novels often reward this labor with improbable, high-coincidence intersections that operate according to their own “probability design.” Third, as the reader’s prediction of individual plot outcomes becomes difficult, readers shift attention toward the discourse’s underlying rhythms – the patterned recurrence and absence of particular characters or plotlines – as an alternative way of forming expectations about the narrative progression. Fourth, encyclopedic novels heighten reader attention to simultaneity, positioning multiple narrative lines and forms of consciousness as occurring at once, whether or not this simultaneity is explicitly signaled. Together, these four effects create the genre’s distinctive reading experience: sustained, effortful sense-making amid apparent chaos. The article closes by connecting this narratological account to systems theory, proposing that the encyclopedic novel’s multiplicity, perspectivism, uncertainty, and simultaneity model it as a literary analogue of a complex system. The framework of the “systems novel” offers a way to understand how these notoriously difficult novels maintain a sense of organization and balance despite their characteristic excess.