The fourth chapter traces Philip K. Dick’s adaptations of ancient East Asian cosmology to structure America’s ethnically heterogeneous future in the emergent North Atlantic world order. Dick finds inspiration in I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that arose to combat chaos in an era of warring states. Dick’s references to China in The Man in the High Castle belongs to a career-long hunt for devices that might delay the decay of traditional forms of belonging. The I-Ching must be distinguished, however, from the magic aerosols and hand-cast ceramics that appear elsewhere in the Dick canon, for it offers a means with which to imagine a culturally coherent America. Thanks to the I-Ching, three archetypal forms of totality—American suburbia, European totalitarianism, and Third World primitivism—that remain irreconcilable in Now Wait for Last Year constitute a functioning amalgamation in High Castle. Along the way, I place Dick’s interest in the I-Ching in an intellectual tradition at least as old as Hegel, which posited that the Chinese, putatively never afflicted by Cartesian dualism, retained access to a sense of totality foreclosed to Europeans and North Americans.

The first chapter claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic, and by extension, questions the English novel’s complicity in propagating that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire, surfaces to the diegetic level in a classic instance of a thematization of the device and becomes available for critical contemplation. Drawing from Max Weber, Mary Poovey, and Georg Lukács, I attend in particular to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve’s recasting of Sutpen’s life as a debtor’s farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a transnational fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the discovery of original forms with which to express the modern transnational world order.

The third chapter shows that Vladimir Nabokov, seeking to replace the superannuated form of national allegory, constructs a figure of supranational metonymy through chess. Critics have explained that the Bildungsroman is a novel of socialization that displays how an individual finds his place in a social world and projects a trajectory of collective progress. Like Beckett, though, Nabokov was a post-revolutionary expatriate who made his career in another language. One of Nabokov’s targets was the notion that novels offer national allegories. Reading Nabokov’s early novels, which feature Russian exiles who rove across the continent as if across a chessboard, I reveal the writer’s interest in crafting a “personal world” that travels well across borders. The figure of metonymy presents advantages over metaphor. First, elastic in scale, metonymy represents spaces smaller or larger than the nation. Second, where national allegories had to install generic template protagonists at their narrative centers, supranational metonymies stress individual idiosyncrasy, accommodating abnormalities; they reject the premise that there can be such a thing as a generic national character.

The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisingly recuperative. The high modernists used the stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the evanescence and meaninglessness of present action. Transferring that technique to the past tense, Beckett records dissipating practices of everyday life. What’s more, Beckett’s garbled lists provoke readers to impose sense by drawing upon a shared cultural grammar. Beckett’s verbal hoarding makes conceivable a collective bound by shared axioms that reduce abstract multiplicities into knowable situations. Beckett thus posits infranational communities that are consolidated not by institutionally underwritten concepts such as nationality or ethnicity but by remembered practices of everyday life.

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.

The introduction sets down the blueprint and specifies how the argument builds upon existing understandings of the novel. Taking as my starting point the critical reluctance to acknowledge Defoe as the first English novelist, I trace the interdependence of Enlightenment thought, accounting practices, and literary realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also offer an overview of how theories of the novel have depended on the conceptual scaffolding of the antinomy. Long deployed by philosophers to structure unwieldy abstractions, the antinomy functioned also as tool to grasp the most diffuse of literary forms. Hence theorists as various as Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Michael McKeon, and Frederic Jameson all posit that the novel is built in the tense field opened between opposing forces. By contrast, Adorno’s model of the Leibnizian monad asserts that art is always already tainted by the outside world, partly constituted by empirical logic. Over the more popular antinomic construction, I follow Adorno’s conception of art as absorptive monad . I further explain the book’s focus on select Anglophone writers and the three prerequisites for aspiring to speak for the world.