How To Study Literature Without Reading Books

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The New York Sun

The so-called death of the novel may not be a problem if, as Franco Moretti suggests, there are already too many novels – so many, that actually reading them doesn’t make sense. Mr. Moretti, a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford, would rather count novels than read them. While most professors teach close reading, Mr. Moretti advocates “distant reading.”


Mr. Moretti has said that his dream “is of a literary class that would look more like a lab than a Platonic academy.” Dispensing with the text itself, he hopes to examine thousands of novels at a time. “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History” (Verso, 120 pages, $26) is his manifesto, the culmination of a significant career, and, Mr. Moretti hopes, a foundational gesture.


At first glance intriguing, at second glance absurd, then seemingly pernicious, Mr. Moretti’s diagrams are finally very interesting. His central notion is simply put: Literary studies have traditionally encompassed only exceptionally good books, the tip of the iceberg. A canon of 200 19th-century British novels, he notes, would be generous by contemporary standards, but would be only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of novels actually published. But so many novels cannot be read. “And it’s not even a matter of time, but of method: a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole.”


This is not common sense: Most people would see no reason to read (or count) bad novels of no consequence. Mr. Moretti makes an analogy to history, which once studied only “rare and curious” events and people, but which now, rightly, takes a broader view, studying populations. But while populations bear a direct relation to leaders, serving in their armies, fueling their economies, great authors are likely oblivious of lesser works.


In short, Mr. Moretti would treat literature as sociology. But literature is closer to philosophy or painting: Though its disciplines produce a large body of work, only a small amount of it makes real progress, determining the future of the discipline. It is far easier to take the hero out of history than it is to take the genius out of literature.


Yet Mr. Moretti’s studies eventually address questions that have long been germane to English studies. His premise may be overstated, since it ultimately leads him back to the text. In his final section, on branching diagrams (“trees”), he takes advantage of his wide perspective to consider the evolution of free indirect discourse.


Here Mr. Moretti seems less a scientist than an artist. A tree diagram like his “Free indirect style in modern narrative, 1800-2000,” requires imagination and intuitive selection – the traditional work of a scholar. If anything, his diagram takes liberties that many close readers would avoid.


Why does Zola get his own short diagonal, while Mann and James are crammed together on a vertical leading to Woolf? Why are some lines longer than others? What Mr. Moretti calls these “morphological” aspects of diagrams are in fact key to his argument: He believes that some concepts are only visible when seen in a diagram.


His graph “British novelistic genres, 1740-1900,” a concatenation of other scholars’ studies of various genres, from “Romantic farrago” to “Imperial gothic,” shows that most genres last about 25 years, and that several genres will end, and others begin, simultaneously. Graphs like this one indicate that there have been several rises of the novel, and that trends in author gender oscillate over the decades.


“It’s fascinating to see how researchers are convinced that they are all describing something unique (the gender shift, the elevation of the novel, the gentrification, the invention of high and low),” Mr. Moretti writes. Only his abstract approach – counting, not reading – can cover enough ground to see these trends not as isolated events, but as cycles.


Non-academic writers are fond of such questions, because they invite bull: Why are Renaissance code mysteries popular? Because of fundamentalism? Because of the millennium? Mr. Moretti notes that these questions are formal – about forms – and can best be treated in the lines of a diagram. He argues that the rise and fall of the historical novel may be solved not with the text of “Waverley” but with a line graph in which “Historical” rises just as “Gothic” falls.


Such information is interesting to readers only insofar as we believe that the texts we care about are functions of collective systems. Mr. Moretti quotes D’Arcy Thompson, author of the classic science text “On Growth and Form,” to the effect that the growth of a creature depends not only on its intrinsic nature, but also on external forces. Thompson wrote about sea creatures whose bodies are shaped by water pressure; the impact of external forces on a novel, written by a human being, is less explicable. Mr. Moretti’s graphs are convincing as contributions to the history of the book, but readers will wonder how a single text shrinks into a dot and dissolves into a line, while its value, as an instrument of reflection, remains perfectly amorphous.


The New York Sun

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