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A review by nickfourtimes
Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History by Franco Moretti
5.0
1) "The title of this short book deserves a few words of explanation. To begin with, this is an essay on literary history: literature, the old territory (more or less), unlike the drift towards other discourses so typical of recent years. But within that old territory, a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs---graphs, maps, and trees---in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. 'Distant reading', I have once called this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models."
2) "History was... Pomian speaks in the past tense here, as is probably accurate in the case of social history, but certainly not for its literary counterpart, where the collector of rare and curious works, that do not repeat themselves, exceptional---and which close reading makes even more exceptional, by emphasizing the uniqueness of exactly this word and this sentence here---is still by far the dominant figure. But what would happen if literary historians, too, decided to 'shift their gaze' (Pomian again) 'from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional to the large mass of facts'? What literature would we find, in 'the large mass of facts'?"
3) "Variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle---and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive, neither men nor women writers 'occupy' the British novel once and for all, and the form keeps oscillating back and forth between the two groups. And if this sounds like nothing is happening, no, what is happening is the oscillation, which allows the novel to use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors. But this process can only be glimpsed at the level of the cycle: individual episodes tend, if anything, to conceal it, and only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process."
4) "[The] key to this perceptual shift lies in Mitford's most typical episode: the country walk. In story after story, the young narrator leaves the village, each time in a different direction, reaches the destinations charted in figure 14, then turns around and goes home. 'When a system is free to spread its energy in space', writes Rudolf Arnheim, 'it sends out its vectors evenly all around, like the rays emanating from a source of light. The resulting... pattern is the prototype of centric composition.' Exactly: out of the free movements of Our Village's narrator, spread evenly all around like the petals of a daisy, a circular pattern crystalizes---as it does, we shall see, in all village stories, of which it represents the fundamental chronotype. But in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and the only way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained. One step at a time.
[...]
In Mitford's walks, Barrells' 'rough circle... in which the villagers work and move' is rewritten as a space of leisure rather than work. Slow easy strolls, thoughtless, happy, in the company of a greyhound called May; all around, a countryside full of picturesque natural views, but where very few people are actually doing anything. Decorative: for each page devoted to agricultural labour, there must be twenty on flowers and trees, described with meticulous precision. If urban readers are made to share the village's perception of space, then, it's also true that this space has been thoroughly gentrified; as if Mitford had travelled forward in time, and discovered what city-dwellers will want to find in the countryside during a brief weekend visit. Not surprisingly, country walks were by far the most popular part of Our Village, and remained long in print by themselves while the rest was forgotten."
5) "The very small, and the very large; these are the forces that shape literary history. Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real objects of literature (in the Strand Magazine you don't find 'clues' or 'detective fiction', you find Sherlock Holmes, or Hilda Wade, or The Adventures of a Man of Science); but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history. Take the concept of genre: usually, literary criticism approaches it in terms of what Ernst Mayr calls 'typological thinking': we choose a 'representative individual', and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman; you analyse Goethe's novel, and it counts as an analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking there is really no gap between the real object and the object of knowledge. But once a genre is visualised as a tree, the continuity between the two inevitably disappears: the genre becomes an abstract 'diversity spectrum' (Mayr again), whose internal multiplicity no individual text will ever be able to represent. And so, even 'A Scandal in Bohemia' becomes just one leaf among many: delightful, of course---but no longer entitled to stand for the genre as a whole."
6) "From the abode of noise and impropriety, where nobody was in their right place, to the asshole gringos handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. This is what comparative literature could be, if it took itself seriously as world literature, on the one hand, and as comparative morphology, on the other. Take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the 'opportunistic, hence unpredictable' reasons of evolution, in Ernst Mayr's words. And of course the multiplicity of spaces is the great challenge, and the curse, almost, of comparative literature: but it is also its peculiar strength, because it is only in such a wide, non-homogeneous geography that some fundamental principles of cultural history become manifest. As, here, the dependence of morphological novelty on spacial discontinuity: 'allopatric speciation', to quote Ernst Mayr one more time: a new species (or at any rate a new formal arrangement), arising when a population migrates into a new homeland, and must quickly change in order to survive. Just like free indirect style when it moves into Petersberg, Aci Trezza, Dublin, Ciudad Trujillo..."
2) "History was... Pomian speaks in the past tense here, as is probably accurate in the case of social history, but certainly not for its literary counterpart, where the collector of rare and curious works, that do not repeat themselves, exceptional---and which close reading makes even more exceptional, by emphasizing the uniqueness of exactly this word and this sentence here---is still by far the dominant figure. But what would happen if literary historians, too, decided to 'shift their gaze' (Pomian again) 'from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional to the large mass of facts'? What literature would we find, in 'the large mass of facts'?"
3) "Variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle---and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive, neither men nor women writers 'occupy' the British novel once and for all, and the form keeps oscillating back and forth between the two groups. And if this sounds like nothing is happening, no, what is happening is the oscillation, which allows the novel to use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors. But this process can only be glimpsed at the level of the cycle: individual episodes tend, if anything, to conceal it, and only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process."
4) "[The] key to this perceptual shift lies in Mitford's most typical episode: the country walk. In story after story, the young narrator leaves the village, each time in a different direction, reaches the destinations charted in figure 14, then turns around and goes home. 'When a system is free to spread its energy in space', writes Rudolf Arnheim, 'it sends out its vectors evenly all around, like the rays emanating from a source of light. The resulting... pattern is the prototype of centric composition.' Exactly: out of the free movements of Our Village's narrator, spread evenly all around like the petals of a daisy, a circular pattern crystalizes---as it does, we shall see, in all village stories, of which it represents the fundamental chronotype. But in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and the only way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained. One step at a time.
[...]
In Mitford's walks, Barrells' 'rough circle... in which the villagers work and move' is rewritten as a space of leisure rather than work. Slow easy strolls, thoughtless, happy, in the company of a greyhound called May; all around, a countryside full of picturesque natural views, but where very few people are actually doing anything. Decorative: for each page devoted to agricultural labour, there must be twenty on flowers and trees, described with meticulous precision. If urban readers are made to share the village's perception of space, then, it's also true that this space has been thoroughly gentrified; as if Mitford had travelled forward in time, and discovered what city-dwellers will want to find in the countryside during a brief weekend visit. Not surprisingly, country walks were by far the most popular part of Our Village, and remained long in print by themselves while the rest was forgotten."
5) "The very small, and the very large; these are the forces that shape literary history. Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real objects of literature (in the Strand Magazine you don't find 'clues' or 'detective fiction', you find Sherlock Holmes, or Hilda Wade, or The Adventures of a Man of Science); but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history. Take the concept of genre: usually, literary criticism approaches it in terms of what Ernst Mayr calls 'typological thinking': we choose a 'representative individual', and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman; you analyse Goethe's novel, and it counts as an analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking there is really no gap between the real object and the object of knowledge. But once a genre is visualised as a tree, the continuity between the two inevitably disappears: the genre becomes an abstract 'diversity spectrum' (Mayr again), whose internal multiplicity no individual text will ever be able to represent. And so, even 'A Scandal in Bohemia' becomes just one leaf among many: delightful, of course---but no longer entitled to stand for the genre as a whole."
6) "From the abode of noise and impropriety, where nobody was in their right place, to the asshole gringos handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. This is what comparative literature could be, if it took itself seriously as world literature, on the one hand, and as comparative morphology, on the other. Take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the 'opportunistic, hence unpredictable' reasons of evolution, in Ernst Mayr's words. And of course the multiplicity of spaces is the great challenge, and the curse, almost, of comparative literature: but it is also its peculiar strength, because it is only in such a wide, non-homogeneous geography that some fundamental principles of cultural history become manifest. As, here, the dependence of morphological novelty on spacial discontinuity: 'allopatric speciation', to quote Ernst Mayr one more time: a new species (or at any rate a new formal arrangement), arising when a population migrates into a new homeland, and must quickly change in order to survive. Just like free indirect style when it moves into Petersberg, Aci Trezza, Dublin, Ciudad Trujillo..."