The Endless Novel
In A Potentially Terminal Age — The Problem And Promise of Nancy Drew
Ironic that this potentially terminal age — with nuclear war and climate collapse perhaps the two greatest threats — may also be the age ripe for the endless novel — the endless revolutionary novel in particular. An endless novel in my view would be ideally topical and revolutionary, or otherwise intensely liberatory. Such stories might help pull the world through its most vicious and perilous time.
Revolutionary stories, including those to-the-minute topical, may be as permanent as life itself, barring planetary collapse. Until a society achieves a predominate revolutionary literature, it's basically dead in many ways, or bedeviled at best. That’s why one finds so much life in the people’s media — the best of independent media and social media — full of “people in a given asocial society who react by rational aggression towards that society rather than by irrational aggression towards their fellow individuals” and where otherwise may be found “the spontaneous social literature of a free society” built voice by voice, view by view, fact by fact, experience by experience, far and wide.
I continue to serialize two liberatory novels with revolutionary features that I thought might wrap up around year’s end but not only has year’s end come and gone — and though it looks like both novels might technically or temporarily conclude a few months from now, one in particular — it has also become apparent, even likely, that either or both novels may never end, ultimately.
Though the concept had never occurred to me as of the new year, it seems possible and maybe even necessary to serialize online a type of endless novel, in particular with Most Revolutionary, or even Loop Day. Both cut topical to the minute while moving far more as novel and story than chronicle and news. These novels dramatically (or dramadematically in the case of Loop Day) create a sustained mentality, revolutionary mentalities, emotion by emotion, moment by moment, act/ion by act/ion — as well as voice by view by fact by experience that is more characteristic of topical journalism. Continuous impulse and movement in a potentially ever more powerful apparatus.
Most Revolutionary is readily divisible into “books,” two plotted for now, one drafted, with Book One slated to wrap up in the next few months, I suppose, at about 250,000 words. The subsequent “book,” Ultra Revolutionary, could be viewed as sequel to Most Revolutionary or as continuation — with continuation being far more accurate. In some ways an endless novel is similar to the personalized contemporary chronicle platforms and shows online and even the independent political and news operations in that I can't see any reason to necessarily end things — ultimately. I might or might not draw up a potential final end, but for now I view Most Revolutionary as an endless or infinite novel. Loop Day too — “book” by continuous serialized book.
This is not entirely a new feature of culture. The State may have a monopoly on mass violence but not on mass words. Loop Day is a Trump-motifed speculative anti-Empire crime thriller of revolt (in its current phase) that can easily far outlive Trump (and myself, for that matter), while Most Revolutionary is similarly a “heartland” epic anti-Empire crime thriller of revolution. Both novels allow for topical-to-the-minute drama, dramedy, and dissection (social and personal) and so may be endless because ever-refreshed by the new and the news (the literal novel). Both may constantly move through social and personal boundaries into the revolutionary — and be sustained somewhat in the manner, curiously, of TV series such as Guiding Light, The Simpsons, and Grey's Anatomy which ran or have run for 57, 35, and 20 years respectively (72 years for Guiding Light including its radio run beginning in 1937). What happens when culture and society flip over from the status quo into the revolutionary? You create a new aesthetic and world — especially as “form is the shape of content” — new experiences, new mentalities, new opportunities at progress.
Both Loop Day and Most Revolutionary were originally written in familiar 5 act TV series script form, aided by some Hollywood training. Now thoroughly adapted to more-or-less familiar novel form/s, Most Revolutionary has been DIY serialized for 8 months online so far, structured to reproduce itself scene by scene, act by act, chapter by chapter, book by book with now, I think, no ultimate end required or necessarily advisable. Nevertheless, the form remains more-or-less familiar with a caveat: if you lack the stomach for a bit of polemic, then neither novel may be for you.
The current 250,000 words and 8 months of Most Revolutionary is next to nothing given that the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series of novels, which might be thought of as a single long fictive chronicle, contain nearly 8 million words, through 73 years and 175 novels/books. And several Nancy Drew spin-off series account for perhaps another 12 million words over many more novels, continuing to the present. 20 million words. About 500 books. Or think of them as chapters of a long influential story: The Chronicles of Nancy Drew.
For comparison:
Jeyamohan’s contemporary novel Venmurasu — about 15 to 20 million words over 26 volumes. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Baroque period novel Artamène, or Cyrus the Great — about 2 million words over 10 volumes. Victor Hugo’s Victorian era novel Les Misérables — about 655,000 words over 5 volumes or “books.” Marcel Proust’s Modernist novel In Search of Lost Time — about 1.2 million words over 7 volumes. David Foster Wallace’s postmodern novel Infinite Jest — about 500,000 words over 6 “books.” (That’s a Tamil novel, 3 French novels, and an American novel, for what it’s worth. A number of classic Chinese novels over the centuries are longer than a million words when translated.)
Given these scopes and scales, an epic novel’s ultimate end seems more optional than inevitable. And if it’s a revolutionary novel in aspiration and reality, and ambitious enough, in a time desperately in need of revolution and capable of revolution — why end it? Many people never end their life’s focused efforts, having no reason to, so why necessarily end a novel expansive enough and adaptable enough to the ongoing moment? Let each sectional book mature and drop as sub-novel, or novel-as-part, then keep on. Imagine if an increasingly revolutionary Bernie Sanders were never to die, or even age, while the world changed around him, as he helps change it, always aspiring for more — The Saga of Bernie Sanders. This surreal but sensible and compelling mix of timelessness and topicality worked and works for Nancy Drew. What if Nancy Drew were revolutionary? What if she were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but even more revolutionary? Might we not have a far more revolutionized world by now? By way of many works like an infinite Epic of Alexandria?
As with Nancy Drew likewise with the Hardy Boys, including their spinoff series, nearly a century old, or, rather, eternal — ongoing at about 10 million words and 240 books — half of Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys that I recall were far more reactionary than revolutionary — which is antagonizing, a pity, and a real problem.
Some independent online news platforms and productions play out like kinds of endless novels — minus some classic types of story structure and various fictive elements. More basically they are personalized contemporary chronicles and/or a series of topical campaigns. The best of social media and independent media (the people's media — as can be found in a variety of places online especially) help writers and readers get away from the deceitful and destructive clutch of the establishment. Many have noted that such personalized or diverse and independent content in its various forms helps create more intimate and more fully human appeal and more truth and value between writers and readers — between people — which is potentially transformative, not to mention useful. This is what legacy (plutocratic) media largely has attempted to edit, filter, and ideologically banish from its traditional productions — largely for reasons of fraudulent ideology and violent control though claimed to be for reasons of objectivity and clarity.
Speaking of Bernie Sanders, as others have noted, the "Bernie Bro" smear in 2016 (and ongoing) was an identity politics smear by the Clinton campaign designed to undercut the Bernie campaign and its popular emphasis on class politics, and anti-war politics. As a consequence, this plutocratic Clintonite smear campaign helped drive many low income and class and peace conscious voters away from Democrats then and for years to come and into the arms of Trump and Republicans with their pseudo populism — or to simply sit out the elections — away from Bernie and the Squad's progressive populism, and away from establishment Democrats' gilded wage-slave Empire. Because these voters were hammered over to Republican fraudsters and to the sidelines, no surprise that in the most recent election, genocidal plutocrat Kamala Harris lost to a different kind of con artist, Con Don Trump, as a decisive chunk of the typical Democrat base flipped Republican or sat out the election — creating an American Brexit of sorts.
Beating people to shit is fucking around and finding out — to great profit, unfortunately. Crushing the Jeremy Corbyns and the Bernie Sanders — the voice of youth, ironically, and of the future, otherwise unrepresented — is like shooting your children. One look at the plutocratic, geriatric rulers of America gives a sense of the generationalcide ongoing, creating a terrain ripe for all the pseudo populist opportunists. And for revolution. The establishment plutocrats fronted by establishment Democrats and Republicans go to the shooting range and put up targets of youth and just kill and kill — to great profit. It’s painful not to be vivid about it — just as we see in Gaza, and in the American instigations that led to the Ukraine-Russia war, and as we see globally throughout the course of the Empire of Ghouls.
Fortunately, the real and the popular and the humane remain real and popular and humane. Consequently, the position of progressive populists (Bernie and the “Squad” and those closely related) in the 2028 Democrat primary and general election should be tough to beat — because of Ukraine, Gaza, inequality, climate collapse, health implosions, cash starvations, and other quality of life disasters perpetrated by the plutocracy.
Meanwhile people like Luigi Mangione are sharpening guillotines for the stratospheric elites like never before, for ever more obvious reasons, as the rapacious scandal of plutocracy profiteers to its increasingly terminal ends. The top-down defeat of progressive populism in the Democratic primaries helped drive media emblems like Joe Rogan away from Bernie's progressive populism to Trump's pseudo populism, and more likely than not helps fuel chaotic populists like Luigi Mangione.
The pestilence and violence of the plutocracy is boundless, literally, planetary and beyond. When a terminal malignancy like plutocracy is let to grow exponentially, points of no return are quickly reached, forcing an organism or species to cut out the malignancy or die. Not exactly the gist you get from Nancy Drew, let alone The Hardy Boys, let alone the ostensibly more enlightened and elevated literary firmament of tastemakers and publishers. The literary establishment adheres to and promulgates the class constraints of the ruling boards (owners) by way of attentive ideological subservience, which becomes sheer brainwashing. The state-capitalist plutocracy is nothing if not tyrannical and exterminist in myriad ways.
You don’t get such notions from Nancy Drew — though you should beginning in about the second grade, or earlier. If a people’s literature, a species’ literature, is not revolutionary in an unprecedented time of exterminations — including The Final Termination — then what is that literature but accessory to the ultimate crime(s). One could qualify the matter, but that’s the root nature — of the scene — of countless scenes — as noted by Kenneth Burke in “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism”: “...the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable.”
Are there many ambitious literary novels that are considered to be progressive populist and revolutionary at scale — in a multicultural world that suffers from extreme corporate-state violence and the top-down class warfare of Empire? If not, then the most "ambitious" writing with a claim to cultural saliency can make for a ripe target in a deeply angry and populist culture going back not only decades but throughout the entirety of American and in fact continental history, including back to the earliest colonial conquests.
Imaginative story that is not revolutionary can have some good if limited value too of course (or terrible value, depending on the nature of the creation), even on political topics. For example, given Greenland’s current topical moment, one could do worse than catch a glimpse into Greenland by way of Season One, Episode 4, “One-Hundred Days,” of the TV series "Borgen" — Denmark's "West Wing" (streams on Netflix) in which journalist Katrine Fønsmark “investigates illegal CIA prisoner transports through Greenland's Thule Air Base, highlighting Denmark's political challenges and its relationship with Greenland." Also see the arguably inferior 4th season of Borgen (Power & Glory) made recently, 10 years after the original 3 seasons, which revolves topically around Greenland through all 8 episodes: "This season centers on the discovery of oil in Greenland, delving into the geopolitical and environmental implications for Denmark and Greenland. The storyline examines the complex dynamics between the Danish government, Greenlandic officials, and international stakeholders, including the U.S. and China."
Nothing revolutionary, which is too bad. In fact, Borgen and West Wing are more than a bit like Nancy Drew, which has its clear merits and demerits — serious galling problems, typical of the status quo, to say the least, if not necessarily devoid of value. You run the risk of the nefarious, gutless, and vacuous in lit when you exclude revolutionary views, actions, moments. The toxic sum of the status quo can ruin even the better parts — definitely the kind of story you do not want to see go endless — in lethal triumph. Holocaust Harris and Genocide Joe, Tyrant Trump, Bomber Obama, the Kings Georges, Bigot Bill and Racist Ron — their times should all be long gone. And yet they persist — as genocidal froth on the tsunami of Empire.
Endings and the general sense of an ending can make for some of the most thrilling and inspiring, insightful and emotional, powerful and motivating moments of not only storytelling but of communication and experience in general. The closer the ultimate crisis may seem to be, the more it feels compelling to “end” long stories as novels like Loop Day and Most Revolutionary — whether they should or should not end at all. That these long stories are “ended” in private draft does not mean much when not “ended” in final public production, except that with a real sense of an ending in sight, there is the all-powerful urge to immediately resume — continue, start again, keep going — ever better this time, every time, more powerfully, more effectively, more decisively — because the fucking revolution — or whatever you want to call the battle for humanity — never ends. Something needs to end, a lot of things, but maybe not the engaged novels of the day and definitely not what’s most revolutionary — whatever form and content that might take itself to be.
For related critical views, see “Political Literary Criticism 1903-2003” — brief excerpts.