Franco Moretti at the Valve
 

The Franco Moretti event at The Valve is going along swimmingly, and I again seem to have been self-selected as the bad fairy at the feast.

Primarily I will be responding to the piece by  Cosma Shalizi, an author whom I generally like and admire. I only read enough of Moretti's stuff (most of Graphs) to be annoyed by his attitude. It does not bother me that Moretti is doing the things that he's doing, or that others should follow him, but the consensus of the symposium, at least at the beginning, seemed to be that Moretti's project  might be the new paradigm, and should replace other ways of studying literature rather than just providing  an additional approach:  e.g., Benzon's "Beyond that, I too believe that we need to bracket the search for meaning and put it on the shelf".  (Given the realities of disciplinary politics, it may be inevitable that proposals be competitively stated  -- with limited resources, someone has to lose -- but it's my bias to think that disciplinary politics is usually a negative force.)

I organize my criticisms around two main themes: explanation and la longe durée. My position on the first of these is the standard old-fogy position, whereas the second criticism is more peculiar to me.

Shalizi says, "The small-scale details of literature and of human life have an intrinsic interest and value that is missing from the small-scale detail of molecular chaos, so there is certainly all the room in the world for what Moretti would like to do and close reading, and even essayistic appreciation." This is about half-way to where I want to be, but it sounds a bit concessive. Let me say it this way: Moretti's sort of analysis could just as easily be applied the shoe styles as to fictional genres, and would come up with interesting results either way. Most people involved in literature, however, would feel that such an analysis, even though it might come up with interesting insights, ignores and obscures what literature is all about. Literature just seems more interesting, complex,  and important than shoes. For this reason, I think that study of the small-scale detail of literature should not merely be allowed, but should have priority over the kind of thing that Moretti wants to do.

Take physics, for example. Imagine a Morettian social history of physics. It might come up with interesting stuff, but it would generally be regarded as misleading if there wasn't some attention to the fact that some physicists were right and others wrong, some physicists made discoveries and others didn't, and that some of the trends were dead ends and some of them fruitful. In other words, an objective  description of physics as a series of events is misleading if it doesn't take into account the "subjective" aspect of physics as an attempt to understand the world -- an attempt which can be either successful or not.

Humanists are touchy about this objectified kind of approach because we always suspect that people who work this way do not actually believe that literature really does anything or ever is really successful. This is not a straw man; we often run into people who think that way, and every once in awhile someone will make a detailed argument to that effect. And that's OK -- it's a free country, as Cosma says -- but we humanists tend to believe that the one place where people of this sort should never be found is in departments of literature.

This will seem paranoid to many, but let me reiterate the analogy. Can you imagine a physics department in which social historians of physics had an equal status with actual working physicists? This is more or less impossible -- a high proportion of physicists have no respect whatsoever for sociology, and very little for history, and the median number of historians of physics in physics departments is probably zero. (When it was decided to finally include some social scientists at the Institute for Advanced Studies, there were protests). But the way Moretti works seems very similar to what I just described.

Thus, in the same way that physics should be thought of normatively -- with priority given to the major successful attempts to explain and understand physical reality, less attention given to the minor attempts, and essentially no attention given to the unsuccessful attempts -- the primary way to think about literature should be in terms of its success in doing whatever it is that literature does. Criticism, in this sense, would be comparable to science education and to general science writing, which try to help people who want to know about the important and interesting conclusions of physics.

This might be called appreciationism, but I don't see the problem with that. If literature is intentional and of value, the way physics is of value, the primary role of the critic should be to point the way to that value. And of course this is elitist, but I don't see any escape from that. Even people who read bad books think that they're reading good books, and even among the bad books they read, they always will prefer some to the others._[i]

My second point has to do with the Braudelian model behind Moretti’s work.  The direction of attention to la longe durée,  the ordinary, and history-from-below has come up with results which couldn’t be attained otherwise, but  l'histoire événementielle and elite history have their claims too, and by and large I think that the pendulum has swung too far in the Braudelian direction. On the one hand, it’s one of the defining traits of the elite that they are able to control resources,  take initiatives, and make things happen, whereas commoners normally are forced to get by as best they can or not at all. On the other hand, it just isn’t true that every seemingly sudden change is really just the sudden manifestation of a long gradual development. (And as for cycles, the ones I’ve seen -- one by Andre Gunder Frank explaining Eurasian history, and others relating Eurasian history to climate change --  haven’t seemed to be grounded on data at all, and Frank’s seems to have neither mechanisms nor data. Sometimes scientists find cycles because finding cycles is what scientists do.) In many fields we've recently seen a move from gradualism and uniformitarianism to discontinuous change, and I think that in human affairs, including novel-writing,  sometimes these changes are the result of the actions of individuals ("great men", if you will).

I see a tension between two strains in Shalizi’s piece. He expresses the first  “This commitment….should make you more interested in exploring variation, and not dismissing it’, and the second, "But looking at larger scales, the randomness averages out, leaving regularities which are simpler and more nearly comprehensible by finite minds, and more reliable."  To me it seems that Moretti’s method, by discussing genres and bracketing out the individual differences, errs in the side of the second strain. From an evolutionary point of view, the difference (as Shalizi says elsewhere) is an individual. Most individual differences “average out”, but evolution happens because certain individual differences (favorable mutations), do not average out, so that the unique exception eventually becomes the rule.

From this point of view, the canonical works have much greater importance than the non-canonical ones; they are the equivalent of the first carriers of favorable mutations. (The  biological analogy breaks down here, since books don’t die but sit on the shelves indefinitely, and immortal books establish descent-lines which are independent of any kind of adjacency. Both Melville and Twain explicitly acknowledge their debts to Rabelais and Cervantes, for example, but  their debts are ahistorical and independent of affiliations of language or genre.)

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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