A Struggle, a Search, a Hallucination
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
Verso, 254pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781781680841
reviewed by Jamie Mackay
It is a rare event that a 254-page book on narrative morphology hits high street bookshops as part of a ‘double-release’. But then, Franco Moretti has always worked hard to bypass the closed-circuit hubris of academic publishing. This is the same author, of course, who with the charismatic flair of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has periodically descended from his world-famous tenure at Stanford University’s ‘Literary Lab’ to proclaim certain millenarian truths: the advent of a digital humanities, the death of close reading and, in the unlikely figure of Milan Kundera, the ultimate collapse of European civilisation.
Distant Reading is the story of the resulting dust-storm, a collection of ten essays published between 1994 and 2009, all of which have stimulated gales of violent debate and sardonic dismissal in the usual periodicals. While its companion text, The Bourgeois, released on the same day, marks the continuation of Moretti’s historical criticism, this timely collection serves as a reflection on the various methodologies employed in his exploration of models from evolutionary biology and macroeconomics. From the Darwinian branch-diagrams and world-systems viewpoint that characterised his early writing, to his later work with statistics and network theory, Distant Reading invites the reader to establish their own ‘trajectory’ within a seeming chaos of innovative energy.
An initial point of unity is not difficult to establish: Moretti’s consistent and at times bitter dissatisfaction with comparative literature’s impotent sampling techniques of organic canons, timeless masterworks and transhistorical geniuses. Indeed, it is with this methodological laziness in sight that this collection provocatively squares up to a highbrow tradition that appears, like the political establishment it feeds, to be in the process of cracking:
[Literary criticism] is a theological exercise – very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously – whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, not let’s learn how not to read them.
In passages such as this, Moretti confirms his reputation as one of the most ambitious and sharp-tongued nimrods to ever describe himself an ‘archivist’. ‘The great iconoclast of literary criticism,’ announced The Guardian in 2006, a suggestive description that perhaps raises as many questions as it settles. Indeed, to label Moretti a literary critic at all is a controversial move. Signs Taken For Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 1983) is hardly a title compatible with the revered school of aesthetic autonomy reproduced by critics such as David Lodge and Simon Jenkins. Whatever in-fighting may go on between geographers and computer scientists to claim his work as their own, however, Moretti’s texts do indeed seem destined to make their most significant impact on the disciplinary procedures of literary criticism; to make the 0.5% of texts studied by scholars, deeper, wider and sufficiently compatible as to be translated into a system.
Distant Reading works, through a variety of unrelated strategies, on each of these vectors, and the results are frequently unexpected. The complex family politics of the Chinese novel and its role in the early development in the 15th century are found to be an anticipation of the European tradition; the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare is seen to rely on the European geopolitics of the British Isles; meanwhile, the heated question of ‘what a novel is’ is reduced, in the process, to a simple relationship between adventure and prose. The direction of these disparate fragments is, like all good scientific studies, most digestible in the very first moment of its hypothesis, such as the early essay ‘Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch’:
[T]hose independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)- well, they’re not the rule at all, they’re the exception. They come first, yes, but they’re not at all typical. The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran – not Defoe.
Moretti’s ambition is clearly not just to stretch previous methodologies but to embed the literary critical project within uneven processes of development, transmission and transformation. It as much a result of this formal innovation as necessary obscurantism that Distant Reading is full of authors of which the vast majority of his audience will have never encountered. One of the great successes of this collection is its convincing argument for the necessity of re-orientating literary studies, and in particular the European ‘bildungsroman’, from the perspective of such texts as Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber or Mário de Andrade’s Macunaima.
The importance of this task, however, as is underlined on many occasions in this volume, is not simply to expand the number of texts discussed within a World Literary Canon: ‘Reading “more” is always a good thing, but not the solution.’ Instead, it is the limited focus on devices, themes, tropes, genres and systems that constitutes the project’s epistemological distinctiveness; a historical approach to formalism in which ‘distance becomes a condition of knowledge.’ In the confines of a discipline which tends to restrict itself to the comfortably opposing camps of nostalgic biography and poststructuralist abstraction, Moretti manages in this succinct formula to establish genuinely new ground that has much to inform both approaches. Personal, esoteric, socially engaged and sensitive to the gradual and spoken evolution of numerous languages, these essays exhibit an interdisciplinary proficiency that has implications far beyond the confines of one subject area. It is a precarious and exhilarating balance, and his introductory notes, focused on the difficulty of juggling these various demands, are a welcome feature of this edition:
As the years went by, I would move increasingly away from [the] idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for what it meant. But the conceptual cogency that a small set of texts allows for – that, I do miss.
This intimate tone allows a direct confrontation with his critics and acolytes and is a crucial element in Moretti’s attempt to go beyond the ‘impersonality’ of ‘big data’. These latter phenomena, however, are among the highlights of Distant Reading: a global map of Hollywood exports that tracks the relative national exchangeability of action and comedy films; a graph of the power-dynamics of a Hamlet in which ‘no-one speaks’; and a study of 7,000 titles of British novels between 1740-1850 that demonstrates the changing grammar of this ‘half sign, half ad’. The simultaneous breadth and focus of these examples are testament to the strength of this collection and its consistent ability to confine and define its subject area as the specific test of a general rule.
Perhaps the most successful example of this approach is the extensive exploration of the 19th century ‘rivals’ to Conan Doyle shown in ‘The Slaugherhouse of Literature’. In a mass evaluation of data taken from a number of recently digitalised archives, Moretti identifies a strong correlation between the quantity of ‘clues’ and the market popularity of a given text. As the number of ‘unsolvable’ problems increases so too does the popularity of the novel and as the resulting tree diagram shows, Conan Doyle was a master at tapping into this nervous pre-modernist zeitgeist. What renders this particularly interesting, however, is not just the novel presentation of information (in fact, more often than not, the maps and graphs are ugly and difficult to read) but the quality of its analysis. What Moretti does with his experiments is significantly more interesting than the data itself, or perhaps more accurately, it is what the data becomes in Moretti’s hands that renders the project useful. In a paradigmatic example of how distant reading can develop other forms of close-reading, the data discovers a problem in the Detective novel as a genre, and as a result, one-possible structure of Doyle’s victory over the competition:
Clues begin as attributes of the omnipresent detective, I have said, and then turn the details open to the rational scrutiny of all. But if they are the former they cannot be latter: Holmes as Superman needs unintelligible clues to prove his superiority; decodable clues create a potential parity between him and reader. The two uses are incompatible: they may coexist for a while, but in the long run they exclude each other. If Conan Doyle keeps ‘losing’ clues, then, it’s because part of him wants to lose them: they threaten Holmes’s legend. He must choose, and he chooses Holmes.
Just like his tortured account of Conan Doyle’s creative process, Moretti fights with himself, re-assures himself and calls into question this complex method. While his media persona is arrogant and argumentative, for example, the voice here is frequently reflective, tempered and rational. This is even more visible in ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’, a cool meditation on the compatibility or incompatibility of his Darwinian and economic models: ‘there is one question that I find truly insoluble: evolution has no equivalent for the idea of social conflict.’ This constant reflexivity and self-criticism is a recurrent characteristic of the collection. ‘Distant reading’, while straightforward in its fundamental aims, can nonetheless only be understood as a struggle, a search, a hallucination. It is always case-specific.
Against this new perspective, poststructuralism, formalism, cultural materialism and new historicism are all given ample space to respond, and at times seem to dominate individual articles. It is perhaps for this reason, then, that the critic Emily Apter has voiced a profound dissatisfaction with the author’s evocation of ‘a city of bits, where micro and macro literary units are awash in a global system with no obvious sorting device.’ Moretti’s response is defiant: ‘I hope so … it would be a very interesting universe.’
Far from exhibiting a new form of structuralism to match his Marxist politics, the project is revealed here to rest on an acknowledgment that knowledge is never finished and that sometimes, as the case of the novel shows, its most powerful transformations of form are established through hybrid collisions; a resistance to Hegelian synthesis. In an up-front example of what this realisation might mean for academic labour more generally, Moretti concedes to the critics of his Conjectures, recognising that their attacks have taken the argument far beyond his initial remarks:
Once you have been really proved wrong, the argument is no longer about you; it’s about a world of facts that everybody agrees to share (and respect); about hypotheses that have an objectivity of their own, and can be tested, modified, or indeed rejected. A little narcissistic wound is a small price to pay for such progress.
While his refusal to treat literary texts as ‘privileged’ artefacts is no doubt a media-friendly affront, Distant Reading is in many ways most radical in its fervent commitment to this new form of intellectual work which Moretti sees as being made possible by his experimental approach: provocative and playful but above all collaborative and fallible. Critics who have challenged the ability of quantitative analysis to explain hermeneutic knowledge have quite rightly identified the wider limitations of the project, and as exciting as Moretti’s graphs are are they certainly cannot challenge power from the same vantage point as a deconstructive reading. At the end of the day, however, it might be this X-rated bonus-feature that is considered vital for all readers: the naked desire for an academic community which might one day abandon its fetishistic imperialism to take up the challenge of building something popular and democratic.
Distant Reading is the story of the resulting dust-storm, a collection of ten essays published between 1994 and 2009, all of which have stimulated gales of violent debate and sardonic dismissal in the usual periodicals. While its companion text, The Bourgeois, released on the same day, marks the continuation of Moretti’s historical criticism, this timely collection serves as a reflection on the various methodologies employed in his exploration of models from evolutionary biology and macroeconomics. From the Darwinian branch-diagrams and world-systems viewpoint that characterised his early writing, to his later work with statistics and network theory, Distant Reading invites the reader to establish their own ‘trajectory’ within a seeming chaos of innovative energy.
An initial point of unity is not difficult to establish: Moretti’s consistent and at times bitter dissatisfaction with comparative literature’s impotent sampling techniques of organic canons, timeless masterworks and transhistorical geniuses. Indeed, it is with this methodological laziness in sight that this collection provocatively squares up to a highbrow tradition that appears, like the political establishment it feeds, to be in the process of cracking:
[Literary criticism] is a theological exercise – very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously – whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, not let’s learn how not to read them.
In passages such as this, Moretti confirms his reputation as one of the most ambitious and sharp-tongued nimrods to ever describe himself an ‘archivist’. ‘The great iconoclast of literary criticism,’ announced The Guardian in 2006, a suggestive description that perhaps raises as many questions as it settles. Indeed, to label Moretti a literary critic at all is a controversial move. Signs Taken For Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 1983) is hardly a title compatible with the revered school of aesthetic autonomy reproduced by critics such as David Lodge and Simon Jenkins. Whatever in-fighting may go on between geographers and computer scientists to claim his work as their own, however, Moretti’s texts do indeed seem destined to make their most significant impact on the disciplinary procedures of literary criticism; to make the 0.5% of texts studied by scholars, deeper, wider and sufficiently compatible as to be translated into a system.
Distant Reading works, through a variety of unrelated strategies, on each of these vectors, and the results are frequently unexpected. The complex family politics of the Chinese novel and its role in the early development in the 15th century are found to be an anticipation of the European tradition; the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare is seen to rely on the European geopolitics of the British Isles; meanwhile, the heated question of ‘what a novel is’ is reduced, in the process, to a simple relationship between adventure and prose. The direction of these disparate fragments is, like all good scientific studies, most digestible in the very first moment of its hypothesis, such as the early essay ‘Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch’:
[T]hose independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)- well, they’re not the rule at all, they’re the exception. They come first, yes, but they’re not at all typical. The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran – not Defoe.
Moretti’s ambition is clearly not just to stretch previous methodologies but to embed the literary critical project within uneven processes of development, transmission and transformation. It as much a result of this formal innovation as necessary obscurantism that Distant Reading is full of authors of which the vast majority of his audience will have never encountered. One of the great successes of this collection is its convincing argument for the necessity of re-orientating literary studies, and in particular the European ‘bildungsroman’, from the perspective of such texts as Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber or Mário de Andrade’s Macunaima.
The importance of this task, however, as is underlined on many occasions in this volume, is not simply to expand the number of texts discussed within a World Literary Canon: ‘Reading “more” is always a good thing, but not the solution.’ Instead, it is the limited focus on devices, themes, tropes, genres and systems that constitutes the project’s epistemological distinctiveness; a historical approach to formalism in which ‘distance becomes a condition of knowledge.’ In the confines of a discipline which tends to restrict itself to the comfortably opposing camps of nostalgic biography and poststructuralist abstraction, Moretti manages in this succinct formula to establish genuinely new ground that has much to inform both approaches. Personal, esoteric, socially engaged and sensitive to the gradual and spoken evolution of numerous languages, these essays exhibit an interdisciplinary proficiency that has implications far beyond the confines of one subject area. It is a precarious and exhilarating balance, and his introductory notes, focused on the difficulty of juggling these various demands, are a welcome feature of this edition:
As the years went by, I would move increasingly away from [the] idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for what it meant. But the conceptual cogency that a small set of texts allows for – that, I do miss.
This intimate tone allows a direct confrontation with his critics and acolytes and is a crucial element in Moretti’s attempt to go beyond the ‘impersonality’ of ‘big data’. These latter phenomena, however, are among the highlights of Distant Reading: a global map of Hollywood exports that tracks the relative national exchangeability of action and comedy films; a graph of the power-dynamics of a Hamlet in which ‘no-one speaks’; and a study of 7,000 titles of British novels between 1740-1850 that demonstrates the changing grammar of this ‘half sign, half ad’. The simultaneous breadth and focus of these examples are testament to the strength of this collection and its consistent ability to confine and define its subject area as the specific test of a general rule.
Perhaps the most successful example of this approach is the extensive exploration of the 19th century ‘rivals’ to Conan Doyle shown in ‘The Slaugherhouse of Literature’. In a mass evaluation of data taken from a number of recently digitalised archives, Moretti identifies a strong correlation between the quantity of ‘clues’ and the market popularity of a given text. As the number of ‘unsolvable’ problems increases so too does the popularity of the novel and as the resulting tree diagram shows, Conan Doyle was a master at tapping into this nervous pre-modernist zeitgeist. What renders this particularly interesting, however, is not just the novel presentation of information (in fact, more often than not, the maps and graphs are ugly and difficult to read) but the quality of its analysis. What Moretti does with his experiments is significantly more interesting than the data itself, or perhaps more accurately, it is what the data becomes in Moretti’s hands that renders the project useful. In a paradigmatic example of how distant reading can develop other forms of close-reading, the data discovers a problem in the Detective novel as a genre, and as a result, one-possible structure of Doyle’s victory over the competition:
Clues begin as attributes of the omnipresent detective, I have said, and then turn the details open to the rational scrutiny of all. But if they are the former they cannot be latter: Holmes as Superman needs unintelligible clues to prove his superiority; decodable clues create a potential parity between him and reader. The two uses are incompatible: they may coexist for a while, but in the long run they exclude each other. If Conan Doyle keeps ‘losing’ clues, then, it’s because part of him wants to lose them: they threaten Holmes’s legend. He must choose, and he chooses Holmes.
Just like his tortured account of Conan Doyle’s creative process, Moretti fights with himself, re-assures himself and calls into question this complex method. While his media persona is arrogant and argumentative, for example, the voice here is frequently reflective, tempered and rational. This is even more visible in ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’, a cool meditation on the compatibility or incompatibility of his Darwinian and economic models: ‘there is one question that I find truly insoluble: evolution has no equivalent for the idea of social conflict.’ This constant reflexivity and self-criticism is a recurrent characteristic of the collection. ‘Distant reading’, while straightforward in its fundamental aims, can nonetheless only be understood as a struggle, a search, a hallucination. It is always case-specific.
Against this new perspective, poststructuralism, formalism, cultural materialism and new historicism are all given ample space to respond, and at times seem to dominate individual articles. It is perhaps for this reason, then, that the critic Emily Apter has voiced a profound dissatisfaction with the author’s evocation of ‘a city of bits, where micro and macro literary units are awash in a global system with no obvious sorting device.’ Moretti’s response is defiant: ‘I hope so … it would be a very interesting universe.’
Far from exhibiting a new form of structuralism to match his Marxist politics, the project is revealed here to rest on an acknowledgment that knowledge is never finished and that sometimes, as the case of the novel shows, its most powerful transformations of form are established through hybrid collisions; a resistance to Hegelian synthesis. In an up-front example of what this realisation might mean for academic labour more generally, Moretti concedes to the critics of his Conjectures, recognising that their attacks have taken the argument far beyond his initial remarks:
Once you have been really proved wrong, the argument is no longer about you; it’s about a world of facts that everybody agrees to share (and respect); about hypotheses that have an objectivity of their own, and can be tested, modified, or indeed rejected. A little narcissistic wound is a small price to pay for such progress.
While his refusal to treat literary texts as ‘privileged’ artefacts is no doubt a media-friendly affront, Distant Reading is in many ways most radical in its fervent commitment to this new form of intellectual work which Moretti sees as being made possible by his experimental approach: provocative and playful but above all collaborative and fallible. Critics who have challenged the ability of quantitative analysis to explain hermeneutic knowledge have quite rightly identified the wider limitations of the project, and as exciting as Moretti’s graphs are are they certainly cannot challenge power from the same vantage point as a deconstructive reading. At the end of the day, however, it might be this X-rated bonus-feature that is considered vital for all readers: the naked desire for an academic community which might one day abandon its fetishistic imperialism to take up the challenge of building something popular and democratic.