Reviewed by:

• Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature by Andrew Franta
• Sean Silver (bio)

It is impossible to read Andrew Franta’s Systems Failure without reflecting on our time as a moment of profound system collapse. Banking systems, ecosystems, systems of checks and balances, now the public health system and systems of law: all have proven prone to fail. But why they fail is harder to pin down. There is no particularly good way to arrive at the logic of failure from within the systems themselves, or the logics those systems project. Systems like Smithian economics or Linnaean botany were meant to be engines of limitless progress; each offers the sort of logic that informs the upward-trending graphs appearing with repetitive, systematic regularity in book after Steven Pinker book. Yet they all, differently, fail. So, maybe it is time to start thinking that failure is built into the premise of system, not by design, but by some other necessary, internal contradiction. It is time to register that systems can fail by succeeding too well.

Franta’s careful, probing study takes aim at “system” in its earliest years, when system-thinking was put to work in eighteenth-century letters. It joins a group of studies, including Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman’s Invisible Hands (2015) and Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture (2012), which identify veins of thought about the generative potential of mixture and confusion. Systems Failure takes aim at the mismatch between complex situations and the generic and literary techniques that attempt to explain or to regularize them; it is interested in an Enlightenment delight in disorder, which turns out to be just as mainstream as its impulse to regularity. It is interested in moments when literary systems themselves collapse, especially in contradictions brought to light through their own successes.

Franta’s key insight is that literature offered eighteenth-century authors a loose range of approaches for representing complex situations. Some of the genres we most associate with eighteenth-century arts—like biography and the novel—would therefore be engaged in modelling enterprises, each instance irreducibly different. Systems Failure comes closest to offering a system itself when Franta displays this principle of difference in six various chapters, which together address six strategies for modelling complexity: Samuel Johnson’s lifelong attempts to master life-writing; Laurence Sterne’s semi-satirical gestural systems; Tobias Smollett’s experiments in the picaresque, bringing topography into tension with epistolary networks; the collapse of discursive systems in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams; Jane Austen’s novels of connection; [End Page 458] and the gothic architecture of Thomas De Quincey’s dream narratives. These are six several chapters on six several authors, which examine six singularly unlike experiments in modelling.

This is a book about systems failure, wary, all the while, of the traps laid for the system builder. However, a number of abiding concerns emerge. The first is this very tension between the author’s rage to order and an aesthetic of realism, between the force of genre to supply form and the webby mangle of fact. Aristotle provides a template, sketching out the difference between poetry and history; Franta recasts this generic distinction as the place where literary systems differently fail. The first chapter treats this tension explicitly, pivoting on Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744). Franta identifies a profound strain between Johnson’s fidelity to the details of the life of the friend whose biography he set out to write, and the over-powerful rhetorical style which strives to give that life shape. Savage’s case was a particularly difficult one, something akin to a mystery hinging on the parentage that Savage claimed for himself. For Johnson, writing his life meant a difficult double negotiation, un-loosening the details of a riddle only to reweave them in narrative; the Life of Savage, Franta suggests, “unties the knot of Savage’s life only to tie it up again” (39).

Not all complex systems are scalable; not all networks are self-similar, in the way that the veins...

审核人：

• 系统故障：安德鲁·弗兰塔（Andrew Franta）在英国文学中对混乱的使用
• 肖恩·银（生物）

无法阅读安德鲁·弗兰塔的系统故障却没有考虑到我们的时间是系统崩溃的时刻。银行体系，生态系统，制衡体系，现在的公共卫生体系和法律体系：都被证明容易失败。但是，为什么失败的原因很难确定。没有特别好的方法可以从系统自身内部或那些系统所预测的逻辑中得出故障的逻辑。史密斯经济学或林奈植物学等系统注定是无限进步的引擎。每种逻辑都提供了一种逻辑，这些逻辑以史蒂文·平克（Steven Pinker）的书为基础，以反复，系统的规律性通知出现的上升趋势图。然而，它们全都以失败告终。因此，也许是时候开始考虑将故障内置到系统的前提中了，而不是通过设计，而是由于其他一些必要的内部矛盾。

弗兰塔（Franta）的细心，探索性研究最早是针对“系统”的，当时系统思维以18世纪的字母来付诸实践。它加入了一组研究，包括乔纳森·希恩（Jonathan Sheehan）和德罗·沃曼（Dor Wahrman）的《看不见的手》（2015）和沃尔夫拉姆·施密根（Wolfram Schmidgen）的《精妙的混合物》（2012），这些研究确定了混合和混乱产生的潜力。系统故障着眼于复杂情况与试图解释或规范它们的通用和文学技巧之间的不匹配；它对启蒙运动对混乱的兴趣很感兴趣，事实证明它与对规律性的冲动一样是主流。它对文学系统本身崩溃的时刻很感兴趣，特别是在通过自身成功而暴露出来的矛盾中。

弗兰塔（Franta）的主要见解是，文学为18世纪的作家提供了各种各样代表复杂情况的方法。因此，我们最常与18世纪艺术联系在一起的某些类型（如传记和小说）将从事企业建模，每种情况都不可避免地有所不同。当Franta在六章不同的章节中展示了这种差异化原理时，系统故障最接近于提供系统本身，它们共同解决了用于建模复杂性的六种策略：塞缪尔·约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）毕生尝试掌握写作经验；劳伦斯·斯特恩（Laurence Sterne）的半讽刺性手势系统；托比亚斯·斯莫列特（Tobias Smollett）在野外画风中进行的实验使地势因书信网络而紧张；威廉·戈德温的话语系统崩溃迦勒威廉姆斯; 简·奥斯丁的联系小说；[末页458]和托马斯·德·昆西（Thomas De Quincey）的梦幻叙事的哥特式建筑。这些是关于六位作者的六个章节，这些作者检查了六个不同的建模实验。

这是一本关于系统故障的书，始终会引起系统构建者的注意。但是，出现了许多持久的问题。首先是作者在追求秩序的狂热与现实主义美学之间，在体裁提供形式的力量与事实之间的张力。亚里斯多德（Aristotle）提供了一个模板，勾勒出诗歌与历史之间的差异。弗兰塔（Franta）将这种普遍的区别重塑为文学体系因不同而失败的地方。第一章以约翰逊的《野蛮人的生活》为中心，明确地处理了这种紧张关系。（1744）。弗兰塔（Franta）指出，约翰逊（Johnson）对他打算写传记的朋友的生活细节的忠诚与努力塑造这种生活形态的过分夸张的修辞风格之间存在着巨大的张力。野蛮人的案子特别困难，类似于野蛮人为自己辩称的关于父母的神秘感。对于约翰逊来说，写出自己的生活意味着艰难的双重谈判，松开谜语的细节，只是将其重新编入叙述中。在野人的生活，福兰特建议，“解开野人的生活的唯一结再次拴起来”（39）。

并非所有复杂的系统都具有可伸缩性。并非所有网络都是自相似的，就像静脉...