Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History - 1

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 24, 2003, Pages 67-93

  Moretti, Franco ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0242626638     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (20)

1. The articles were first imagined at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and presented in an early version as the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, and then elsewhere. My thanks to the many people who have helped me to clarify my ideas.
2. Krzysztof Pomian, 'L'histoire des structures', in Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, eds, La nouvelle histoire, Paris 1978, pp. 115-6.
3. Fernand Braudel, 'L'Histoire, mesure du monde', in Les Ecrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. II, Paris 1997.
4. 'In Italy,' writes Giovanni Ragone, 'In the first twenty years of the nineteenth century virtually all the bestsellers of the previous century disappear', 'Italia 1815-1870', in Il romanzo, vol. III, pp. 343-54. A similar shift seems to occur in France, where, however, the caesura of the revolution offers a very strong alternative explanation. The 'Pastness of the past' is of course the key message of the two genres - gothic, and then historical novels - most responsible for the turn towards the present.
5. Albert Thibaudet, Il lettore di romanzi [1925], Napoli 2000, p. 49.
6. James Raven, 'Historical Introduction: the Novel Comes of Age', and Peter Garside, 'The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal', in Garside, Raven and Schöwerling, eds, The English Novel 1770-1849, 2 vols, Oxford 2000; vol. 1, p. 27, and vol. II, p. 44.
7. James Raven, 'Historical Introduction: the Novel Comes of Age', and Peter Garside, 'The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal', in Garside, Raven and Schöwerling, eds, The English Novel 1770-1849, 2 vols, Oxford 2000; vol. 1, p. 27, and vol. II, p. 44.
8. 7 Fernand Braudel, 'History and the Social Sciences. The longue durée', in On History, Chicago 1980, p. 27. The first extended treatment of economic cycles was of course Nikolai Kondratiev'S The Long Wave Cycle, written between 1922 and 1928.
9. A few more words on why a form loses its 'Artistic usefulness' and disappears. For Shklovsky, the reason is the purely inner dialectic of art, which begins in creative estrangement, and ends in stale automatism: 'Each art form travels down the inevitable road from birth to death; from seeing and sensory perception, when every detail in the object is savoured and relished, to mere recognition, when form becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically, a piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer.' (The passage is from an article collected in The Knight'S Move, and is quoted by Victor Erlich in Russian Formalism, New Haven 1955, p. 252.) The process is, however, open to a 'Kuhnian' reading, where a genre exhausts its potentialities - and the time comes to give a competitor a chance - when its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality: at which point, either the genre betrays its form in the name of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it betrays reality in the name of form, becoming a 'Dull epigone' indeed. (I develop this point in the appendix to the new edition of The Way of the World, '"A useless longing for myself": The crisis of the European Bildungsroman, 1898-1914', London 2000.) But we will soon see another, more draconian explanation for the disappearance of forms.
10. When specialists disagreed, I always opted for the periodization arising out of the more convincing morphological argument: in the case of industrial novels, for instance, I followed Gallagher rather than Cazamian, although the latter'S periodization of 1830-50 would have fitted my argument much better than Gallagher'S 1833-67. For details, see 'Note on the Taxonomy of the Forms', p. 91.
11. Karl Mannheim, 'The problem of generations', in Essays on the sociology of knowledge, London 1952, p. 279.
12. Essays on the sociology of knowledge, pp. 303, 310.
13. A possible solution: at some point, a particularly significant 'Destabilization' gives rise to a clearly defined generation, which occupies centre stage for 20-30 years, attracting within its orbit, and shaping after its mould, slightly younger or older individuals. Once biological age pushes this generation to the periphery of the cultural system, there is suddenly room for a new generation, which comes into being simply because it can, destabilization or not; and so on, and on. A regular series would thus emerge even without a 'Trigger action' for each new generation: once the generational clock has been set in motion, it will run its course - for some time at least. (This is in fact Mentré'S approach to the problem, especially in the long chapter in which he sketches an unbroken series of generations throughout French literature from 1515 to 1915.)
14. A first look at French literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century suggests that most of its narrative genres have a similar 30-year span: pastoral and heroic novels, the nouvelle historique, romans galants and contes philosophiques, sentimental novels, the Bildungsroman, the roman gai, the two main phases ('Heroic' and 'Sentimental') of the roman-feuilleton . . . On the other hand, Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos and other Brazilian literary historians have pointed out that when a country imports most of its novels, the regular turnover of the Anglo-French generations is replaced by a much more accelerated and possibly uneven tempo. If they are right - and I think they are - then the Western European case would once more be the exception rather than the rule of world literature.
15. See here how a quantitative history of literature is also a profondly formalist one - especially at the beginning and at the end of the research process. At the end, because it must account for the data; and at the beginning, because a formal concept is usually what makes quantification possible in the first place: since a series must be composed of homogeneous objects, a morphological category is needed - 'Novel', 'Anti-Jacobin novel', 'Comedy', etc - to establish such homogeneity.
16. William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment. The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1685-1750, Berkeley 1998, p. 44; April Alliston, 'Love in Excess', in Il romanzo, vol. I, La cultura del romanzo, Torino 2001, p. 650; Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Edging Women Out, New Haven 1989, pp. 7-8.
17. William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment. The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1685-1750, Berkeley 1998, p. 44; April Alliston, 'Love in Excess', in Il romanzo, vol. I, La cultura del romanzo, Torino 2001, p. 650; Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Edging Women Out, New Haven 1989, pp. 7-8.
18. William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment. The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1685-1750, Berkeley 1998, p. 44; April Alliston, 'Love in Excess', in Il romanzo, vol. I, La cultura del romanzo, Torino 2001, p. 650; Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Edging Women Out, New Haven 1989, pp. 7-8.
19. Pomian, 'L'histoire des structures', p. 117.
20. A comparable oscillation is probably at work between High and Low forms, whose simultaneous existence is a well-known, if often ignored, fact of novelistic history: from the Hellenistic beginnings (divided between 'Subliterary' and 'Idealized' genres) through the middle ages, the seventeenth century (the Bibliothèque Bleue, and aristocratic novels), eighteenth (Warner'S pair of 'Entertainment' and 'Elevation'), nineteenth (feuilletons, railway novels - and 'Serious realism'), and twentieth century (pulp fiction - modernist experiments). Here, too, the strength of the novel is not to be found in one of the two positions, but in its rhythmical oscillation between them: the novel is not hegemonic because it makes it into High Culture (it does, yes, but it'S so desperately professorial to be awed by this fact), but for the opposite reason: it is never only in High Culture, and it can keep playing on two tables, preserving its double nature, where vulgar and refined are almost inextricable.