Graphs, maps, trees

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 26, 2004, Pages 79-103

  Moretti, Franco ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 1642369500     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (15)

1. There is nothing further to see in Yonville. The street, the only one, about a gunshot in length, with a few shops on each side ...' (Madame Bovary, II.I)
2. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840, Cambridge 1972, p. 95. For the sources of the two Helpston maps (figures 3-4), see pp. 225-7.
3. Rudolf Arnheim, The power of the center. A study of composition in the visual arts, new version, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1988, p. 4.
4. Walter Christaller, Central places in Southern Germany [1933], Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1966, p. 20. Christaller's model presupposes an 'isotropic' space, where movement can occur with equal ease in every direction; this is of course a theoretical abstraction, whose validity is limited to homogeneous agricultural flatlands (like indeed much of Southern Germany). The assumption of an isotropic space is the common denominator between Christaller's theory and the structure of village narratives; I briefly discuss the problematic nature of this idea in footnote 12 below.
5. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', 1937-38, in The dialogic imagination, Austin 1981, p. 225.
6. Then, more threateningly: '"You want to take everything from, us: now, there happens to be one thing our minds are made up to hold on to." Raising his axe and gnashing his teeth he continued: "And if I must split every door between me and the king with this very axe, I will not give it out of my hand. From time immemorial it is our right to carry axes".'
7. Of twenty-eight European anthems I have been able to check, twenty-two establish a significant semantic field around the first person plural, beginning of course with the very first word - Allons - of the greatest of them all. Nothing seems as essential to national anthems as this grammatical sign of collective identity; even the name of the country receives fewer mentions (20), while the semantic field of 'glory' has 19, 'past' and 'war' 15, 'enemy' and 'nature' 13, and 'God' a mere 12. Interestingly enough, the three European anthems older than the Marseillaise - the Dutch, English, and Danish anthems: 'William of Nassau', 'God Save the Queen', and 'King Christian' - all foreground the figure of the sovereign, and show no interest in the first person plural (except for 'God Save the Queen', which however places it in the object position: 'long to reign over us', 'God save us all', 'may she defend our laws'). The difference between a dynastic and a collective basis for national identity is beautifully captured by this grammatical detail.
8. Ian Duncan, 'The Provincial or Regional Novel', in Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing, eds., A companion to the Victorian novel, Oxford 2002.
9. If London does not enjoy the same mythical status as other European capitals, the reason is probably that the English provinces were more self-confident than their continental counterparts, especially after 'their' industrial revolutions (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield ...). The hollow sense of unreality of Emma Bovary, or Ana de Ozores, or the three Prozorov sisters is thus hard to imagine in places like Milton or Middlemarch: full of problems, to be sure, but where life is absolutely real.
10. Claudio Cerreti, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italians, 1998, pp. 141-8.
11. Or better, again, as a succession of diagrams (figures 46abcd in the Atlas): first, where the young men settle; second, what they desire; third, where they indulge in their fantasies; fourth, where they end up. Each map photographed a particular stage in the plot. Atlas of the European Novel, London 1998, pp. 96-99.
12. Geometry signifies more than geography: but it seldom signifies by itself. Here, the choice of village stories as the basis of this theoretical sketch may have been unfortunate, as the isotropic space which is so typical of this genre tends to over-emphasize the role of geometry at the expense of geography: a fact I became aware of only after long, detailed exchanges with Claudio Cerreti and Jacques Levy (who have all my gratitude, and shouldn't be held in the least responsible for the views I am expressing). In fact, the most common type of literary map (in the Atlas of the European Novel, at any rate) looks less like those of Our Village than like that of Parisian novels, where the geometrical pattern is distorted by the specificity of Paris's social geography - as is particularly clear in the case of those three characters who start on the 'wrong' side of the Seine. (For two of them, Du Tillet and Popinot, the explanation is simple: they belong to the space of trade rather than to that of intellectual life in the Latin Quarter; for the third character, Wenceslas, I cannot find a satisfying reason.) On a related note, I have encountered Hervé Le Bras's splendid Essai de géométrie sociale (Paris 2000) too late to discuss its extremely suggestive ideas in this article.
13. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form [1942], Mineola, NY 1992, p. 16.
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 'Toward a general comparative theory', 1790-94, in Scientific studies, Princeton 1995, p. 55.
15. D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, p. 1027.