Benjamin Bergholtz is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana Tech University. His new book Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (Nebraska, 2024) was published in October.

Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right.

Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know), and globalization’s gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift).

Introduction

Mapping the Maximalist Novel

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. . . . Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.

—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Nearly four hundred pages into Salman Rushdie’s massive and meandering novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), the narrator, Saleem Sinai, puts forth a remark that typifies the genre of fiction that his author helped inaugurate: “to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” The idea is both reasonable and ridiculous, ambitious and alarming. As Saleem suggests, “each ‘I’, every one” of the nearly eight billion humans who populate this planet engage in interdependent relationships with people and places they do not know, animals and organisms they do not see, corporations and conglomerates they cannot control. In such an interconnected and intertwined ecosystem, swallowing a world—that is, studying the whole, the “multitude,” the “sum total of everything”—may be a prerequisite to understanding a single life.

With Saleem’s life shaped by the partition of India, the Bangladeshi War of Liberation, and the legacy of British colonialism more broadly, the content of Midnight’s Children appears to validate its sweeping scope. The novel’s formal presentation, however, indicates that swallowing a world comes with significant risks. To read Midnight’s Children is to be inundated with information, bombarded with bit characters, overwhelmed by history. It is also to be reminded, by the narrator’s actions as well as his words, that this information is inaccurate, these characters are caricatures, this history is incomplete. As Saleem alternates between celebrating and questioning his attempt to “to encapsulate the whole of reality,” Midnight’s Children pulls readers in two directions at once: while its narrator posits that the complexity of contemporary life necessitates that one consider the “sum total of everything,” its diegesis proves that addressing everything in a single work of fiction is not only dangerous, but impossible—Saleem himself is reduced to “specks of voiceless dust” by the multitudes that he tries to swallow.

The dialectic between Midnight’s Children’s encyclopedic narrator and its exhausted reader tells us something about the encyclopedic, exhaustive, and, to adopt the terminology of critics such as Stefano Ercolino, Mark McGurl, and Nick Levey, “maximalist” genre of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century fiction that Rushdie helped inspire. Just as Saleem is eventually “sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes” that he means to swallow in Midnight’s Children, the characters, authors, and even readers of novels such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014), and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) are ultimately sucked into the historical conflicts permeating their pages. Beyond simply representing, for example, the allure of contemporary fundamentalism (White Teeth), or the transnational commodification of violence (Brief History), or the proliferation of misinformation and alternative narratives (In the Light), maximalist novels self-consciously recreate the problems that they analyze. Engaging with a maximalist novel, consequently, means experiencing the most demanding version of Rushdie’s dictum: to understand a work such as White Teeth, Brief History, or In the Light, you’ll have to swallow a world that, through its scope, structure, and narrative style, formally reproduces the problems it represents.

This invites questions, about the genre’s purpose as well as its political implications, which this book sets out to address. If one accepts Ercolino’s description of the maximalist novel as an “aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel” characterized by features such as length, encyclopedism, and diegetic exuberance, then why do so many maximalist novelists use the exuberance of maximalist form to reproduce the imaginative, ethical, and political problems they represent? What is the purpose behind this perplexing aesthetic strategy, and why has it become so popular over the last few decades? Perhaps most crucially, how might experiencing the contradictions of maximalist form help readers better understand and engage with the historical conflicts illustrated in maximalist novels? Put differently, if maximalist novelists really do suck readers into the problems that they swallow, how might engaging with these problems on multiple fronts (via form as well as content) prepare readers to potentially do something about them in the world outside of the text? To answer these questions, this book explores maximalism’s relationship with a historical process that has become increasingly germane to maximalist fiction, but that remains undertheorized in analysis of the genre: globalization. At its core, globalization is an uneven and ongoing process that increases the interconnectivity and interdependence between people, products, ideas, and the planet itself. Inextricably connected to the history of colonialism and the spread of capitalism, globalization makes any attempt to diagnose a social problem within a single community or nation—say, the effects of a corporate merger, or the creation of a transnational pipeline, or the spread of a global pandemic—increasingly obsolete, and it arguably justifies the sweeping scope of maximalist fiction. If everything and everyone is connected by globalization, to return to Midnight’s Children, then “swallowing a world” may be an extreme but understandable way to comprehend the interconnected and precarious complexity of contemporary life.

But this is only half of the story. The premise of Swallowing a World is not that maximalist novels merely represent the effects of globalization, but that, through their perplexing and paradoxical presentation, they formally recreate these effects on the page. The reason maximalist novelists have adopted this unsettling and unwieldy aesthetic strategy over the last half-century, I believe, is that they recognize the following aporia: as an all-encompassing phenomenon that affects everyone in incongruous but essential ways, globalization does more than validate the size and scope of maximalist novels—it implicates them in the problems that they analyze. Globalization is characterized, among other things, by a market that “incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers,” technological innovations that alternatively unite and divide, and a lingua franca that creates transnational connections at the same time that it marginalizes those who do not submit to its hegemony. Generally written in this hegemonic language, maximalist novels are characterized by a similar set of attributes: their “rebellious expansion of signification across larger and larger stretches” of space and time often extends across the globe and into the deep past; their size and technical complexity “inspire fanatical devotion and revulsion in equal parts”; and their very existence as objects of art necessarily entangles them in the global market whose effects they so frequently catalogue and critique.