Wikipedia and the Novel

One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all, are we supposed to make of all these wikinovels? I mean novels that leap from subject to subject, anecdote to anecdote, so that the reader feels as though they are toppling like Alice down a particularly erudite Wikipedia rabbit hole. The trouble with writing such a book, in an age of ready internet access, and particularly Wikipedia, is that, however effortless your erudition, no one is any longer going to be particularly impressed by it . . . The problem here—if problem it is—is that no connection, in this book of artfully arranged connections, is more than a keypress away from the internet-savvy reader. Wikipedia, 20 years old next year, really has changed our approach to knowledge. There’s nothing aristocratic about erudition now. It is neither a sign of privilege, nor (and this is more disconcerting) is it necessarily a sign of industry. Erudition has become a register, like irony, like sarcasm, like melancholy. It’s become not the fruit of reading, but a way of perceiving the world.footnote^＊

This passage is taken from the novelist and science writer Simon Ings’s review of Rotterdam-born Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand the World, which was shortlisted for the International Booker when it appeared in English in 2020, and was subsequently voted one of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century by the New York Times.footnote¹ I place it at the outset in homage to Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis, each of whose chapters likewise starts with an ‘episode’ or a ‘scene’ from what Rancière calls ‘the aesthetic regime of art’. A ‘counter-history’ of artistic modernity, Aisthesis begins in Dresden in 1764 with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso in The History of Ancient Art and concludes in New York in 1941 with James Agee’s inventory of the possessions of an Alabama sharecropper family in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It traces the development of a ‘regime of perception, sensation and interpretation’ that allows previously excluded objects, forms, media and subject matter—for example, broken statues, non-metrical verse, photography and the lives of people of plebian origins—to overcome cultural resistance and to be experienced and classified as ‘belonging to the arts’. In his ‘Prelude’ to the book, Rancière writes that Aisthesis has ‘no encyclopaedic goals’. Not only has he elected not to discuss some of the hallmarks of modernity, such as Mallarmé’s ‘Igitur’ and Duchamp’s Fountain, he admits that his analysis of the aesthetic regime of art is ‘incomplete’ and ‘could surely have come closer to our present’.footnote²

Coming closer to the present is what I intend to do here by considering why ‘Wikipedia’—as both a source of and a metonym for information—has become a pejorative term among book reviewers in recent years. I will look at four recent examples, starting with Ings’s review of Labatut’s collection of short fictionalized biographies of twentieth-century scientists and mathematicians. According to Ings, the ‘wikinovel’ has two distinguishing generic features. The first is that it mimics the experience of the ‘Wikipedia rabbit hole’, by leaping from subject to subject the way a reader leaps from one Wikipedia article to another by clicking on one of the hyperlinks embedded in them (it is not irrelevant that the rabbit hole metaphor for this activity is derived from a novel). The second generic feature is the deployment of what Ings calls ‘erudition’, meaning the heavy reliance on presenting information in a discursive, as opposed to narratival, manner. Erudition, Ings suggests, has become devalued, because of the ease with which the free online encyclopedia’s 125 million users can access its 66 million collaboratively edited entries. In a way, the difference in prestige between Wikipedia and other, more recondite sources of information is reminiscent of the one between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘liberal’ arts that obtained in the first half of the eighteenth century. The democratization of knowledge through the ready supply of information has turned erudition from a mark of social distinction into a common affective ‘register’ and a ‘way of perceiving the world’; in other words, what Rancière calls a ‘regime of perception’.

The implications of this notion—that we have entered a new, Wikipedian regime of perception—for fiction and creative nonfiction set, unlike Labatut’s, in the twenty-first century, do not seem to have been fully appreciated by critics. Reviewing Sally Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021), the British critic Susannah Goldsbrough wrote:

Climate is one of a cluster of hot-button political issues dealt with largely through email exchanges between Alice and Eileen. Theoretically, it is a plausible and interesting stylistic development for someone who writes in the classic English novel tradition—a contemporary twist on epistolary. But in reality, the emails are like a spine: structurally integral but knobbly and rigid. Their content slips between politics and dense reams of fact, so that they end up reading more like Wikipedia entries than fiction.footnote³

In fact, the emails between Alice, a famous writer, and Eileen, the editor of a literary magazine, are less a contemporary twist on the English epistolary novel—on Clarissa, say, or Frankenstein—than they are an update of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller’s thoughts on the relationship of art to such hot-button political issues as revolution, to which we are tipped off by the novel’s title, a quotation from the German poet’s ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’. Nor do they read like Wikipedia entries, if for one text to ‘read like’ another text means that they are structurally or stylistically similar. Wikipedia is acknowledged by Alice and Eileen as the initial source of information for their exchange about, for example, the Late Bronze Age collapse. On page 40, Eileen writes: ‘I read about this on Wikipedia’ and on page 160: ‘Scholarly interpretations are more various than the Wikipedia page led me to believe’. In the interim, Alice—she of the rabbit holes—consults Wikipedia to learn about a related event, the disappearance and translation of the ancient script Linear B. She comments on the difference between the sources of her information and her own presentation of it in her email to Eileen. Because ‘the Wikipedia entries . . . are somewhat disorganized, and some even offer variant versions of the same event’, she writes, ‘I’ve condensed the story here into a suitably dramatic form’.footnote⁴

What makes the emails in Beautiful World seem, in Goldsbrough’s words, ‘knobbly and rigid’, is that the medium of the online encyclopedia is infelicitously transposed into the medium of the paper book. In a real-life email, one could simply link to the Wikipedia page for the Late Bronze Age collapse; but the novel form—which must deliver the information to an absent third party, the reader—requires Alice and Eileen to paraphrase Wikipedia’s contents (even though Ings’s ‘internet-savvy reader’ enjoys the same access to the online encyclopedia as Alice and Eileen do). But Goldsbrough’s complaint is more fundamental. ‘Wikipedia’ functions as a metonym or generic trademark for information as such, for the ‘dense reams of fact’, which—perhaps like ‘political issues’—she implies do not belong in fiction.