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.”
On Friday, I returned from the 2009 Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which, from day one forward, was great times. The Institute was held at the University of Victoria—indeed, not a bad spot to study in June. For one, there’s the rabbits. But there’s also the near-perfect weather (especially at nite).
