The Longest Work in the English Language?

The Longest Piece of English Literature: A Rabbit Hole

For at least 5,000 years, humans have created and written stories to share with and tell to those around them. The creativity of these early humans has brought now classic marvels into existence such as the oldest piece of literature, the mythic poem “Epic of Gilgamesh”, or the oldest known English poem, “Beowulf”. Luckily, the imagination of people has only grown since then, with poems turning into short stories, into novels, and eventually into entire franchises and universes apart from our own! Since both the concept of literature and the English language have existed for well over 1,000 years, it leaves some to wonder what the longest story in English is.

If you’ve been on the internet for a while, you may know the so called “answer” to this question, but if you don’t let me enlighten you. Searching up the aforementioned question rewards you with the answer of The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest. This supposed “longest piece of English literature” was first published onto the popular fanfiction site Fanfiction.net on March 4, 2008 as a way for the author, a user called “AuraChannelerChris”, or Christian, to learn English once he moved from Mexico to the United States. The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest is a Super Smash Bros. Brawl fan work that follows Chris and Lucario, a Pokémon, who embark on a journey to stop the Subspace Emissary from taking over all the worlds. At the time of writing this, the fanfiction was last updated on June 11, 2018, and sits at a whopping 4,102,328 words with 211 chapters to its name.

According to Christian, The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest is still a work in progress. In an interview with BuzzFeed from 2013, Christian told the interviewer, “I have livid nightmares that this story will end at ten million words. Who knows, really? Perhaps at 400 chapters, this huge tale will come at an end.” Since the update schedule for the fanfiction isn’t consistent, fans are left wondering whether the work will end up abandoned or Christian will go through with his statement and actually write enough words to reach this length.

Despite the humor of the seemingly longest story ever written in the English language being a video game fanfiction, it isn’t exactly the truth. While it is the first result that pops up using the internet, it barely scratches the surface of the rabbit hole known as “the world’s longest piece of English literature”. The deeper you dig, the more and more pieces of fiction you find that continuously surpass the previous. We find an example of this within The Loud House: Revamped.

In mid-2020, parts of the internet collectively experienced an enormous wave of confusion when it was revealed that The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest no longer held the title of the longest work in English. What story was now occupying the throne, you may ask? If you thought a Super Smash Bros. Brawl fanfiction being the lengthiest English work on record was absurd, then take a seat for this one.

The Loud House: Revamped is exactly how it sounds: it’s a fanfiction that aims to rewrite the 2016 Nickelodeon show The Loud House with the author’s original character inserted in. The story is also a crossover featuring too many shows to count. Yet, The Loud House: Revamped has amassed, at the time of writing, 9,516,814 words and 1389 chapters. The fanfiction updates daily and doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.

Once more, there is a catch to the situation. Pointed out by Twitter user @phendrifts, The Loud House Revamped has several instances throughout the work where the author has plagiarized. Some examples of this include chapter 1048 titled “Grownup Rugrats in Paris”, where Jamesdean5842, the author, copy-and-pastes an entire section from the Rugrats Wiki. The thread by @phendrifts outlines more instances, such as the author copy-and-pasting lyrics from OneRepublic’s song “Feel Again” without bothering to format them correctly.

Because of this work’s apparent plagiarism, people believe the title of “the longest piece of English literature” shouldn’t go to The Loud House: Revamped, their reasoning being, whether or not it was the author’s intention, pieces of the fanfiction aren’t in the author’s own words. Plus, the entire work isn’t necessarily in the traditional story-esque format and is instead written like a script.

These critiques of the story, although valid, raise another question: What does a piece of literature need to be a contender for the name “longest story in English”? Obviously it needs to have an extensive amount of words, but what about the content of said story?

After pondering the question for several weeks, I’ve realized that the title of “world’s longest piece of English literature” is subjective. No matter what content found inside the work, people will always have something to say about it. Case in point, The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest; Since some people take offense to the idea of fanfiction being considered “real” literature (even though the word simply refers to any written work or form of art), they may not accept The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest as an answer to that question.

However, the longest novel I could find and most controversial contender for this title is none other than Marienbad, My Love. As stated on the author’s, Mark Leach, website, the plot of Marienbad, My Love is: “Exiled on a deserted island, a Christ-haunted journalist-turned-filmmaker attempts to persuade a married woman from his past to help him produce a science fiction-themed pastiche to the 1960s French New Wave classic, Last Year at Marienbad. Through this act of artistic creation, he expects to carry out the will of God by prophesying the death of time and the birth of a new religion. If only he can make the woman remember him.”

Although I can’t make much sense of the condensed version of the novel, the content of the story becomes irrelevant once you find out its length of almost 18 million words, about fourteen-times longer than the longest novel Guinness World Records has recorded, A la recherche du temps perdu. The entire story comprises 10,710 pages and Leach states he still considers it to be a work in progress, though he has not added to it in recent years. The final length of the story isn’t certain, but will most likely beat out both The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest and The Loud House: Revamped in terms of length. So, if Marienbad, My Love is the longest story covered so far, what stops it from being the first result on Google?

To those who have attempted to read the entire novel, the main issue with Marienbad, My Love is that the book has too many records to its name: world’s longest word (“the holy Jah”; it has 4.4 million letters and means “god within”), longest sentence (3 million words), longest book title (6,700 words) and world’s longest novel. Because of the amount of records set by this book alone, skeptics believe this Mark Leach wrote the book with quantity over quality in mind, which could explain the mind-boggling narrative.

To add on, many portions of the story are actually just excerpts from other books Leach wrote prior to Marienbad, My Love. These quotes are pretty lengthy as well and were counted in the official word count, meaning the book itself may not be 18 million words if it weren’t for the citations used. For the 3rd time in a row, there isn’t a book that stacks up to these lengths that doesn’t have any controversy surrounding its contents.

In conclusion, rewarding one singular book with the title of longest written work in history is tricky. There will certainly always be someone who comes along and invalidates the entire book’s narrative, format, or reputation. Whatever book should earn such a prestigious name is solely based on one’s opinion on what literature truly is and what book fits the textbook definition the best. Maybe one day there will be an undisputed work deserving enough of such a title, but until then, all there is to do is go deeper down the literature rabbit hole to find that one special story that checks off all the boxes to become “the longest work in the English language”.