“Spaghetti Novel”

By Dick Swart on 23 January 2012

In the early 19th century Honoré de Balzac wrote around a hundred novels and essays that together he called ‘La comédie humaine’. He undertook this enormous endeavor in order to give an accurate image of French society in the early 19th century. It was meant to be a critique of the social circumstances in that period. La comedie humaine had three divisions called ‘Etudes de moeurs’  ‘Etudes filosophiques’ and ‘etudes analytiques’. These etudes were divided in scenes varying from ‘Scènes de la vie Parisienne’ to ‘Scènes de la vie de la politique. Among these novels there are a few that have become global classics like ‘La père Goriot’ and ‘Eugénie Grandet’. Honoré Balzac, (he added ‘de’ to suggest nobility) did something new in these novels. Main characters in one book appeared in other books also. You can even read little hints to other books through these cameos as you could call them. By doing so, he intertwined the plots in the books together in to one big narration. The novels are readable separately but together they open up a beautiful ‘network-view’ of French society with its hopes, fears, loves and envy’s in the early 19th century. 
Emile Zola, inspired by Balzac, did more or less the same in his ‘Les Rougon-Macqart, histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire’. But these twenty novels had a more hierarchical approach as it told the story of a succession of family members and their social environment.

These early examples of ‘network-stories’ were written by one individual and not by a team of writers working in collaboration. There are many examples of writers working together on one single story, with maybe a few subplots written by a single author in that team. This collaboration can be very simple as happened with the book ‘Will Greyson, will grayson’ written by John Green and David Levithan. The only thing they decided was that the two main characters (Will Grayson with capitals and will grayson without capitals) would meet at one point and that this encounter would have a tremendous effect on both their lives. And although the plotlines were more or les written separately and the chapters alternate between the two characters it is still fair to say that in the end it resulted in a single story about two characters with the same name.

In my view the first true teams of collaborating writers working on a network of stories emerged in television. Writing 26 episodes in one year is undoable for one person. Although Balzac might have pulled it off for his productivity was incredible and only paralleled by his constant pursuit of women and money (usually in combination). These teams were not erected in order to undertake some new kind of literature experiment but only because the demand for scripts was so high that the work had to be divided. A fine example of an elaborate network of intertwining stories is of course Star Trek. My favorite tv-series ever. I especially like Star Trek because of the intertwining stories, the references made and appearances of characters (Q). Through these aspects the Star Trek ‘Uberstory’ has become bigger than the sum of all its scripts.

As part of my master I imagined and crudely developed several new types of novels. One of them is the ”spaghetti-novel”. It is a novel consisting of numerous stories (the spaghetti) all playing in the same setting (the sauce). Stories ‘touch’ each regularly and readers should be able to read from one storyline into another storyline as intuitively as possible. The metaphor maybe colorful an imaginative but is also an incorrect one for in a plate of spaghetti, two strings don’t merge or split and that is what makes it interesting and creates a real network. And no, I don’t need this silly ‘rhizome theory’ for it (see my previous blog).

If I’m able to fund it I would like to make a writing environment (web) and a reading environment (iPad) where an infinite amount of ‘would be’ writers can write stories in a given setting and were they are encouraged to make as much meaningful connections as possible with other stories. It should be a never ending ‘multi novel’ that has no key-writer, or any form of hierarchy or rules other than the limitations of the software and the rules of conduct that writers among themselves will develop very fast as I can imagine. In order to maintain quality there must be some sort of governing body for publishing parts of the networked story.

For funding reasons it might be better if I’d call it ‘Massively Multiwriter Online Networked Stories’ or MMONS fro short. Anyone any better suggestions before I write my proposal?

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