The Form of Information and Informational Form in The Woman in White

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between narrative and information in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859−60), which unfurls its lurid mystery story through a collection of documents—diaries, letters, medical reports, tombstone inscriptions, and more. It argues that the novel, which emerged from the nineteenth-century culture of superabundant information, links together the act of narration with the act of information management in its formal poiesis. The result is informatic narrative, a mode of narrative that both manages information and narrates its happening; that tells and tells-about at the same time. Simultaneously, however, the novel's formal tensions undermine its very project, problematizing the possibility of producing any totalizing truth through information. And yet, by enfolding information and narrative in the dynamism of form, the novel theorizes a way of understanding corpuscular facts and making them experienceable—namely, through the synthesis, experiential density, and interpretability of story.