Fictions of the Wikipedian Fact: Facticity, Authority, and 21st-century Fiction

This article considers the effect that Wikipedia has had on fiction of the 21st-century, and proposes that one distinctive feature of Wikipedia’s influence on this period has been the tension it has put on how novelists conceive of the relationship between facticity and authority. The first half of the article looks at how facticity and authority work on Wikipedia, drawing illustratively from Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture (2019) and Ben Lerner’s short story ‘The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory’ (2023). The second half consists of a comparative reading of engagements with Wikipedia in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and Tokarczuk’s Bieguni (2007; trans. Flights 2017), in which I consider the two novels' contradictory responses to Wikipedia: Ducks as a turn towards the authority of the self, Flights as a valorisation of the self’s engagement with the other.