Reading at a Distance: Another Way of Shaping Things
Abstract. But is it abstract enough?
Today, I finally had the opportunity to actually sit down and read all of Franco Moretti’s wonderful, wonderful Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. The first thing I quickly realized has nothing to do with Moretti’s argument, or his graphs, maps, and trees. Rather, it has to do with me. [But of course!]
Moretti almost immediately reminds you that scholarly monographs can, in fact, be a real joy to read. His writing style is playful and engaging, especially his use of the fragment; and—yes, I’m going to nerd out here—he really knows how to rock the em dash. He interrupts at all the right moments.
So what about me? Well, having recently recovered from a swell of writing deadlines in this month of November, I’m noticing how boring and dry and matter-of-fact my academic prose is getting. Honestly, I don’t even want to read it, and that is a problem, one which, as Moretti demonstrates, needn’t be an inevitability. There, he’s inspiring.
But back to the book: As I mentioned, Graphs, Maps, Trees is most certainly a one-sitter. As for its argument (which seems like such a pedantic word for Moretti’s approach), here’s what I gather about his notion of “distant reading.”
- Quantitative approaches to literature (e.g., graphs of new novels released by year) can pose, through data gathering, problems for which we literary types have no solution. At all. Imagine that. Embracing the absence of explaining away, an absence of an interpretive “solution.” Not exactly business as usual for literary or cultural studies. (See pages 25-26 for more.)
- Literary maps (e.g., a map of where an author’s stories are located or set) mobilize a productive reduction of a text to specific elements, the abstraction of those elements from a narrative, and the ultimate animation of those elements through a new object. (See pages 52-54 for more.) Put this way, “maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level” (53). Pattern analysis.
- People who make trees read like knights. They think in “L” shapes. To borrow from Missy Elliot, they don’t brag. They boast. Or, as Moretti puts it, “literature moves forwards and sideways at once” (91). Tree diagrams (e.g., a tree of the “clue” in the genesis of detective fiction) enable readings of literary history that are both diachronic and synchronic. Through them, we can read time and space simultaneously. (See pages 89-92 for more.)
Ultimately, for Moretti, the use of graphs, maps, and trees to study literature and literary history leads to, in my opinion, two brilliant and clear observations. First, form can be understood as a force, and the diagrams he provides are diagrams of such forces (57). Second, and related to the first, reading at a distance is a materialist approach to form (92). These are abstractions, yes, and they are abstractions grounded in the material substrata of literature as a social form.
What’s more, at least from my reading, Moretti does not render the abstract model a representation of literature. After all, if they are, then traditional literary criticism would be, too. Instead, they are correspondences with literature. They can be read as critical practices (especially the map- and tree-making), with new affordances for the analysis of literature as a variable and dynamic set of relationships. These models aren’t harmonious environments; they’re aren’t merely the visualization of existing data; they’re divergent and convergent ecologies. (For more here, see pages 80-81.)
They’re trajectories.
Think such models—such reductions of literature to specific elements—are conspicuously neat? Fair enough. Moretti already has a response: “Granted, things are not always so neat. But when they are, it’s interesting” (42).
It’s true, true, true. Theory has indeed provided the literary types with some generative abstractions. But maybe, just maybe, they’re not abstract enough. Moretti, then, might provide us with a suggestive and, dare I say, exciting model for that “enough.”
I now want to read this book. Two things:
1) I’m not sure I understand “abstract enough.” Maps and materials recall, for me, Wittgenstein’s “back to the rough ground” as the cure for walking on philosophical ice: without adequate friction an abstraction doesn’t get very far. What makes FM’s book sound so enticing is that his abstractions seem to be pulled from a very palpable and rough interaction with the world, which is what is necessary if literary form is ever to turn into a force.
BUT
2) I recently read an old 20th-c text, Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, where he makes the claim that novels differ from history by revealing that which is “hidden”; I think he calls it the “secret life.” This quality makes the novel speculative, to be sure, capable of all kinds of ideological obfuscations. But no other medium, according to Forster, can offer us access to that hiddenness. Might mapping court the risk of turning the novel to history? And then cause us to miss the forest for the trees? Does Moretti address this?
Keep fighting for fine prose.
hi jentery, & paul,
saw this new blogpost on my facebook feed & was excited that you enjoyed moretti’s book so much–i read in at the end of summer, and also found his methodology and his easy passion rejuvenating.
as for paul’s question, it makes me think about the third part of manuel de landa’s _a thousand years of non linear history_. i feel confident enough in both your po-mo geekiness to assume your rough familiarity at least: in seeking an “abstract enough” machine to model the material flows of linguistics, de landa rejects a chomsky model & embraces instead (surprise surprise) Deleuze & Guittari’s model. but despite the predictability, its a careful discussion of how to suit different kinds of abstraction to different materials, and when you’ve reached the elusive “abstract enough.”
though i have to ask, what crises come upon us if we start to think of history & the novel as the two surfaces of a single sheet of paper, etc…
jentery, if you haven’t read it, i think you’d really enjoy fredrick kittler’s gramophone, film, typewriter–something about a triptych structure means the academic prose is lively? at any rate, my other truly engrossing academic read in recent memory. hope you’re well.
Thanks, Paul and Emily. As Emily points out, Paul, the “abstract enough” is, surprisingly enough, a gesture toward Deleuze and Guattari. From A Thousand Plateaus:
“Chomsky’s grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy…). Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”
That context provided, here’s my take on your question, Paul:
Yes, Moretti’s work is a literary history. So, as a historical formalism, the investment is quite different from literary formalism (and its close reading practices), even if the approach rings with the same language. That said, I see no reason why something like Moretti’s approach couldn’t be coupled with close reading (tho that coupling doesn’t occur in Graphs, Maps, Tree). Then reading becomes a matter of scale, not an either-or rendering of close or distant.
For example, I’ve found that asking students to “animate” literature through another medium (generally digital) demands that they close read first, to then map out, graph out, or the like. On the other hand, one of the benefits, I’d say, of Moretti’s distant reading is that you don’t have to read all of the books in a given period to make productive reductions about literary production, genre, and culture.
I’m betting you won’t be too hip on this “surface” aspect of the text.
And good to hear from you, Emily! De Landa, indeed! Thanks for the Kittler rec; I read it for my exams, but I think I need to go back and revisit it. I tend to refer to Discourse Networks more often than his triptych.
But, your question. If I read it correctly, then I would simply avoid that coin. Although Paul might disagree, I have no problem treating lit as history and history through lit. Put another way, I’m not inclined to make arguments for the autonomy of art. What I think Moretti does impressively (and in a short monograph, no less) is demonstrate how history and literature are in correspondence. They cannot be isolated from each other; and at the same time one does not determine the other. And so, while I’ve been fond of Jameson’s call to always historicize, I’m equally reluctant to historicize too much.
Am I off the mark here? Did I follow the question?
Take care, you two.
Indeed you did follow the question!–though i notice in reading it again that pinot noir leads to awkward phrasing.
The teaching strategy you talk about makes me try to envision what a heterogeneous close-and-distant reading might look like; again no surprises–to me, it either looks digital or poetical. And in both cases the setting is premised on spatial orientation. Susan Howe, or an academic paper that works like an iphone?
Jentrey, i think i’ve probably located the tip of your academic iceberg and better at least peruse your blog further before i bumble blindly ahead.
I’m thinking about form, here, though, too. So, as Paul marks, on the one hand, we have to be careful not to elide ‘form’ and ‘formalism’, and, when you go with bare form exclusively, then the elision is very easily made. How do we trust ourselves to sufficiently treat form itself as a material construction so that we remember to critique it simultaneous with using it as a modeling tool?
I’m reading about Caxton right now, and I find it comforting how when he used the word “forme” it meant simultaneously structure of writing and the thing on the big metal pressbed!
I’ll have to look out for the earlier Kittler, now, too, even if it isn’t a triptych!
Revel in weekendness–
e
I’m all about writing an academic paper that works like an iPhone. And I haven’t lost hope in a digital poetics.
An example?.
And where’s Justin Cabrillos when you need him?
As for Caxton, modeling, and materials, I’m going to sit on those points for a bit, Emily. I’m pre-coffee and can’t find my press.
Hope all’s well on a Saturday that feels like Sunday.
I like bullets, as they allow me to read at a distance. So here are a few more, not fully thought out but trying to respond to both of your very provocative comments:
1) In the context of the paragraph you quote, J, D&G seem to use “abstract enough” as a means to create a theoretical account which does not succumb to a grammar of power, no? An endlessly adaptable theory, one adequate to the multiple particularities and differences, as opposed to one which reduces all utterances to a single sentence form (structuralism being another target here: early Barthes wanting a novel to look like a sentence).
But isn’t “abstract” here a substitute for “adequately complex”? That is to say, doesn’t any given historical/cultural utterance, act, practice, form EXCEED even the most complicated of theories?
(Which is to say, D&G may trying to turn theory into poetry here, something which cannot fully account for its own boundaries on its own terms and is OK with that.)
My version of “close reading” is always trying to pay attention to that excessive quality of the work, in all of its overdetermination. Which becomes very, very complex, too complex, even for a single theoretical model. Which may be why close and distant reading are both necessary.
2) Raising the question of the novel and history isn’t at all saying “don’t historicize” but to ask “what’s historically and presently significant and particular about this way of writing?” Or, more concretely, “what does this formal practice make possible? How can it be used? What does it DO?” That demands close and distant at once. For myself, that is how I try to deal with the absolutely crucial question Emily articulates so well above: “How do we trust ourselves to sufficiently treat form itself as a material construction so that we remember to critique it simultaneous with using it as a modeling tool?”
Incidentally, at the bookstore today, I saw the two-volume work that made me first interested in FM (I had forgotten about it), his edited anthology on the novel, which, in the introduction, he seemed to lay out exactly that kind of approach.
Implicit in that approach, to briefly address the “autonomy of art” dragon, is that particularity is not the same thing as autonomy. A novel is a particular interaction with a cityscape, for instance, while an iphone is another and a newspaper a third. My earlier question was asking how to take that particularity into account without diminishing the absolutely true fact that all these particulars interact to create tremendously excessive networks, which we call “culture” or the “social.”
Incidentally, D&G would gnash their teeth at Jameson.
One last remark: If history/novel are two sides to the same sheet of paper, what happens when that paper is worked through a typewriter? You get words and their tactile mirror. Adorno?
I’ve wandered here a bit. But the pleasure of hearing from two fine minds makes me want to talk about everything.