English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Deeper Structures of Literary History

M. ElizFranco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. 119pp. $26.00.

By Stephen Burn, Northern Michigan University

            Franco Moretti’s 1996 study, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, attempted to outline a taxonomy that would allow literary history to accommodate uniquely complex texts that elude ordinary classification, such as Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Nine years later Moretti has written a book that tries to reverse his earlier feat. If Modern Epic tried to find a place for the distinctive achievement, in Graphs, Maps, Trees Moretti searches for an approach that will flatten the idiosyncrasies of the individual novel as he charts the broader sweep of literary history.

            Underlying Moretti’s attempt to reconfigure literary history is his contention that our current appraisals of the literary field are based upon “old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature . . . )” that are applied to a canon that is much too small:

a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one percent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows – and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so . . . 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.

Advocating a mode of comprehending vast expanses of literary history that dispenses with the need to actually read books may sound like a lazy student’s dream, but in place of close reading Moretti draws upon a theoretical toolkit composed of three different abstract approaches – graphs, maps, and trees – and assigns a chapter to the results each approach yields. 

            The study opens with an exploration of how the history of the novel can be represented in temporal terms via graphs.  Plotting time against the numbers of books published per year, Moretti examines the rise of the novel in five countries, and the lifespan of novelistic genres in Britain, before examining the percentage of new novels published by male and female authors to demonstrate how market-dominance alternated between genders in early nineteenth-century Britain. This may all sound tame enough, but if the reigning orthodoxy of critical studies can be summarized by Harold Bloom’s view that literary genius is a unique “ mode of originality that . . . cannot be assimilated,” then Moretti’s study is controversial even in these early foundations. On these graphs the singular landmark texts virtually disappear, as Moretti transforms classic works into tiny dots on a graph.  The price to pay for this more comprehensive picture of literary activity is an unsettling leveling of the literary field, as Moretti concedes: “Pride and Prejudice and The Life of Pill Garlick: Rather a Whimsical Sort of Fellow, appear as exactly alike: two dots in the 1813 column.”  Instead of the action of the individual, Moretti points us to deeper triggers: politics, biology, market forces. 

            Chapter two shifts the focus from time to space, examining how maps might be used to approach texts, and this shift in perspective sharpens Moretti’s focus on the individual work.  Rather than vast swathes of literary history, Moretti selects what would have been three small dots on a graph – Mary Mitford’s Our Village, John Galt’s Annals of the Parish, and Berthold Auerbach’s Black Forest Village Stories – and subjects them to a kind of literary cartography.  Moretti explains that he likes maps because:

they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – find its occurrences, place them in space . . . or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object . . . with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess “emerging” qualities, which were not visible at the lower level.

Attempting to map the three nineteenth-century idylls he has selected, Moretti’s cartography yields insights into the tendency of village stories to organize themselves into circular geographical patterns (emphasizing their self-sufficiency, at the center of their own little world), and the developing conflict between the local and the national. From this, Moretti deduces the impact of larger historical forces – rural class struggles, state formation – upon the literary form of the idyll.

The goal of the last chapter – Trees – is, at least partly synthetic. Taking the evolutionary tree Darwin included in the fourth chapter of The Origin of Species as his template, Moretti combines the temporal and spatial approaches of his preceding chapters by attempting to represent literary history in morphological terms, where “history is systematically correlated with form.” In placing literary works on an evolutionary tree, the analogy with evolution is a matter of quite simple market forces for Moretti: either “readers discover that they like a certain device, and if a story doesn’t seem to include it, they simply don’t read it (and the story becomes extinct).”

One example Moretti offers is an attempt to probe Arthur Conan Doyle’s status by analyzing the early development of British detective fiction. Moretti examines detective stories in terms of their treatment of clues, favoring works that include visible clues that are essential to the work, and decodable by the reader.  Judging works that include the elements he favors to “live” and those that do not to “die” Moretti uncovers the kind of coincidence between form and history that he has been hoping for: “the ‘formal’ fact that several of Doyle’s rivals . . . did not use clues – and the ‘historical’ fact that they were all forgotten.”  Trees, then, for Moretti share with graphs the benefit of showing us a wider slice of history: “instead of reiterating the verdict of the market, abandoning extinct literature to the oblivion decreed by its initial readers, these trees take the lost 99 percent of the archive and reintegrate it into the fabric of literary history.”  But while graphs obscure “all qualitative difference among their data, trees try to articulate that difference.”

            Moretti’s three abstract approaches make this volume an adventurous and provocative study, and he is not unaware of how ambitious his project is, announcing that “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.”  But while devotees of close reading may shudder at Moretti’s model of “distant reading,” there is much to be taken from the book.  In particular, the graphs in the first chapter provide an authentically provocative way of thinking about genres, and about the novel not as a singular form but as the sum of its peculiar offshoots – or, as Moretti terms it: “the system of its genres.”  The account of maps, with its narrower focus, is less ambitious, but the evolutionary trees provide some fascinating (if variable) insights. The tree tracing the genesis of the British detective story is very persuasive, but a tree devoted to free indirect style in modern narrative is – at this stage (Moretti notes that it is still a work in progress) – less convincing.  Ultimately Moretti is wrong to suggest that we can simply stop reading books and begin counting, graphing, and mapping them – ultimately, all of his models rely on some interpretation of the content of a book (either classifying its generic affinities, or accounting its devices). But it is, nevertheless, easy to envisage how his graphic representations of literary history could be applied in the classroom, and how they will stimulate further scholarly activity.