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book event
edited by Jonathan Goodwin
& John Holbo
Reading Graphs,
Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Liter-
ary History is one of the most provocative recent works of literary
history. The present volume collects generalist and specialist, aca-
demic and nonacademic responses by statisticians, philosophers,
historians, literary scholars and others. And Moretti's responses
to these responses. Originally written as contributions to an online
book event hosted at The Valve (www.thevalve.org), and edited
for this volume, these essays explore, extend and criticize many
aspects of Franco Moretti's work. They will be of interest to anyone
interested in Moretti's brand of "distant reading"; or in the pros-
pects for quantitative approaches to literary style and genre; or
recent interdisciplinary work in the humanities generally.
Contributors: Bill Benzon, Tim Burke, Jenny Davidson, Ray Davis,
Jonathan Goodwin, Eric Hayot, John Holbo, Steven Berlin
Johnson, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sean McCann, Franco
Moretti, Adam Roberts, Cosma Shalizi
Glassbead Books
Edited by John Holbo
3015 Brackenberry Drive
Anderson, South Carolina 29621
Glassbead Books
John Holbo, Editor
Reading Graphs,
Responses to Franco Moretti
Edited by Jonathan Goodwin & John Holbo
a Valve book event
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Reading Graphs, maps & trees : responses to Franco Moretti / edited by
Jonathan Goodwin & John Holbo.
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"A Valve Book event."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60235-205-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-206-3
(Adobe ebook)
1. Moretti, Franco, 1950- Graphs, maps, trees. 2. Fiction--History and
criticism. 3. Literature--Philosophy. 4. Criticism. I. Goodwin, Jonathan,
1973 Nov. 26- II. Holbo, John, 1967- III. Title: Reading Graphs, maps and
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Cover design Belle Waring.
Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models For
Literary History is published by Verso (2005).
This 'book event' consisted of a series of posts about Moretti's
book at The Valve. The event was organized by Jonathan
Goodwin. Readers met author, semi-seminar-style; still more
readers left comments, blog-style. For this book, the posts
have been edited for typos, clarity, style, second thoughts,
suitability for inclusion. The original event archive as a whole
has a permanent URL, should you wish to compare the origi-
nal versions of these pieces with the versions included here:
Paper has been a bit of a puzzle. We have opted to make it ty-
pographically clear where links appear in the electronic ver-
sion. Readers of the paper version who wish to follow links
can download the PDF version of the book from Parlor Press,
or check the original posts.
Introduction Jonathan Goodwin ix
1. Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits of The MLA
John Holbo 3
2. Graphs, Maps, Trees/Sets Hamper Grasp
Ray Davis 15
3. Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation
Matthew Kirschenbaum 31
4. Book Notes: Franco Moretti's Graphs,
Maps, Trees Tim Burke 41
5. A Brief Note on Moretti and Science
Fiction Adam Roberts 49
6. Maps, Iconic and Abstract
Bill Benzon 56
7. A Hundred Flowers
Eric Hayot 64
8. Moretti Responds (I)
Franco Moretti 71
9. Moretti Responds (II)
Franco Moretti 73
10. Totality and the Genes of Literature
Jonathan Goodwin 76
Contents viii l
11. Distant Reading Minds
Steven Berlin Johnson 81
12. The Next Cigarette and a Modest Garnish
Jenny Davidson 85
13. Judging Books By Their Covers – or –
Chance Favors the Prepared Meme
John Holbo 92
14. Moretti Responds (III)
Franco Moretti 105
15. Human, Not So Human: A Few Quibbles
About Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees
Sean McCann 108
16. Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing
Cosma Shalizi 115
Contributors 141
4 ix
Jonathan Goodwin
Tere was almost universal enthusiasm for the perceived nov-
elty and brilliance of Franco Moretti's project in our book
event, the third such event the Valve has hosted. Inter- and
multi-disciplinarity is both praised and reviled by many
academics; there is a sense that traditional disciplines are
outmoded administrative conveniences but also suspicion of
the possibility of mastering another feld in an era of hyper-
specialization. As a way of helping to assess this phenomenon
in literary history and criticism, I will briefy discuss the use
of interdisciplinary techniques in Moretti's previous work,
with special attention to the concepts borrowed from evo-
lutionary biology. Aferwards, I will give an overview of the
contributions in the present volume, many of which take as
their starting point Moretti's interest in evolution.
Purchasers of the most recent edition of Moretti's col-
lection of essays, Signs Taken for Wonders, may have noticed
that the essay "On Literary Evolution" was not included.
According to Moretti, this was an oversight. I mention this
because many of the ideas that would lead to GMT are frst
presented here, and I wondered briefy if it were deliberately
lef out of the collection due to obsolescence. Moretti uses
an evolutionary metaphor at the beginning of the essay. He
argues that a Lamarckian understanding of evolution, one
where variations are goal-oriented, characterizes the under-
standing of culture and of theories of history derived from
Hegel. He suggests that instead it might be useful to apply
a Darwinian understanding to this aspect of cultural evolu-
Jonathan Goodwin x l
tion: what if variations in literary history are not teleological,
and to explore the consequences of this postulate.
Moretti proposes frst that chance generates rhetorical
variations in literary history, with social necessity then select-
ing some of these variations (263). He borrows from Gould
and Eldredge's concept of punctuated equilibrium to describe
the "long periods of boredom, short periods of terror" (268)
in the development of literary forms. Hans Robert Jauss's ac-
count of the success of the literary work being proportional
to its distance from the age's horizon of expectations is, for
Moretti, essentially monistic.
Te Italian critic Francesco Orlando's concept of "fg-
urality rate," which Moretti closely identifes with literary
complexity, provides a means of evaluating the micro-histor-
ical literary evolution process. (Moretti also uses some ideas
about complexity theory from Prigogine and Stengers here
to suggest the non-predictability of rapid conceptual change
in the historical process.) Te startling claim that follows is
that the density of modernist poetry, with its never-before-
equaled fgurality rate, arises as an exaptation (in Gould and
Vrba's sense, the use of a trait or the combination of traits out
of contingency rather than as a selected-for adaptation) from
the development of ambiguity in the monologue in the tragic
Moretti's next work, Te Way of the World, Te Bildung-
sroman in European Culture, mentions the realization he had
about the Russian Formalists' critical novelty afer reading
Gould and Eldredge (247 n11) and also deploys the punctu-
ated equilibrium concept to describe rapid conceptual change
(232). Te essay, "A Useless Longing for Myself. Te Crisis of
the European Bildungsroman, 1898-1914" also specifcally in-
vokes the punctuated equilibrium metaphor. I mention this
because it leads to one of the key observations that underlies
GMT and was explicitly developed in work beginning with
"Conjectures on World Literature" and "Te Slaughterhouse
Introduction 4 xi
of Literature" in addition to Atlas of the European Novel,
1800-1900: that the canon is very small. Terefore, the new
forms that develop and drive literary evolution emerge out of
long periods of non-canonical stasis and lack of diferentiation.
Te change in Moretti's project that begins around Te
Atlas of the European Novel depends on the realization that,
while the canonical texts are the bottlenecks of literary evolu-
tion, that they cannot be studied in isolation. He humorously
describes close reading as a "secularized theology" emanating
from New Haven ("Slaughterhouse" 208), and suggests that,
to understood world literature in its context, that "distant
reading" has to replace it ("Conjectures" 56). Te great un-
read mass must be studied in order to see macroevolution-
ary patterns in literary history. Te canonical texts are those
which persist from generation-to-generation. Tey have the
ability, even if they are not immediately popular, to entice
readers to discover their virtues. (Moretti describes a similar
dynamic with the worldwide reaction to the Hollywood flm
in "Planet Hollywood.") In a footnote, Moretti mentions
that both Te Red and the Black and Moby Dick, two conven-
tional counterexamples, went through many editions in the
era when they are claimed to have been ignored or unappreci-
ated ("Slaughterhouse" 210 n4).
Contributor to this volume Cosma Shalizi wrote a useful
review of Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 in which
he took Moretti to task for some failure to use all of the statis-
tical tools at his disposal. He found Moretti's project interest-
ing enough to review however, and he is a statistical physicist
by trade. I will discuss Shalizi's ideas about Moretti in more
detail a bit later, but I bring this up to highlight the self-con-
scious novelty of Moretti's scientifc approach. Critics might,
and I believe have, called it "scientistic," an insult as deadly
as "positivist" in literary studies. Tough I do not agree with
this assessment, I feel that the abstract and scientifc basis ("a
Jonathan Goodwin xii l
more rational literary history") is so central to Moretti's proj-
ect that it should be discussed.
Shalizi tweaks some humanistic noses a bit in his review,
noting that Moretti is able to quote from the popular writ-
ings of Darwin and Kuhn's Structure intelligently, leaving
the reader to infer that this is rare. As we have seen, Moretti's
range of reference to evolutionary biology is heavily inclined
toward Gould, and the ideas of exaptation and punctuated
equilibrium do transfer well to literary studies. (In one of
his responses in this volume, Moretti notes that he is not
impressed with many of the current eforts in literary stud-
ies to use evolutionary approaches. Most of these have been
strongly infuenced by strains of evolutionary psychology,
and Gould's polemic against that, and, in the larger context,
the strong adaptationism of Dawkins and Dennett, seems
to have infuenced him as well.) As the foreword to GMT
notes, Moretti was trained in a Marxist tradition that em-
phasized the scientifc search for truth and objectivity and
reacted against the discipline's turn to French and German
metaphysics (2).
Alberto Piazza, one of the authors of Te Human
Geography of Genes, writes an aferword to GMT which dis-
cusses the potential usefulness of evolutionary concepts in lit-
erary studies from the perspective of a population geneticist.
Piazza identifes genetic drif as an important concept in cul-
tural transmission which would need further elaboration in
Moretti's model (104). Piazza notes the the phylogenetic tree
in molecular biology presupposes no natural selection efects,
since the convergences and divergences exhibited by selective
pressure would cancel each other out, but that the trees de-
vised by Moretti are primarily interested in the selected-for
efects. (Piazza also notes the presence of Mayr's allopatric
speciation in Moretti's work on the spread of free indirect
style, another major evolutionary theoretical concept used
to illustrate a pattern in literary history.) Te use of phylo-
Introduction 4 xiii
genetic trees in evolutionary biology, according to Piazza, is
best suited to the history of a gene. Te autonomous aspects
of the unit in question in Moretti's literary analysis and how
it can be compared to the biological concept of a gene is dis-
cussed briefy in my contribution to this volume.
Before turning to an overview of this volume's contents,
I will briefy review the illuminating exchange between
Moretti and Christopher Prendergast in the New Lef Review
on GMT. Prendergast argues that Moretti does not have a
causal mechanism to explain why readers of Arthur Conan
Doyle selected "clues" as the main determinant of his popu-
larity, and Moretti answers that, while he did propose a black
box type of mechanism here, he now believes that cognitive
science might provide an explanatory mechanism (75), it's
worth noting that Moretti cites Steven Johnson's entry in this
volume—and personal communication resulting from it, as
the source of this insight). Te major theoretical problem
that Prendergast identifes in GMT is that Moretti posits a
divergent model of cultural evolution whereas the presiding
explanations for models of cultural change emphasize con-
vergence. Te persistence of symbolic forms, for Moretti, is
why literary history branches rather than amalgamates.
A recurrent point in Moretti's response to Prendergast
is the distinction proposed by Noam Chomsky between
problems and mysteries. Problems have a feld of conceptual
understanding; not everything is known but the contours of
inquiry are well-established. Progress has been charted and
will continue. Mysteries, on the other hand, are not under-
stood. Progress has not been made on them, though their
formulation dates to antiquity. Moretti ends his response
by noting that the concepts he has addressed in GMT are
largely mysteries, whereas Prendergast's specifc criticisms
suggest that they are problems. Te abstractional techniques
are exploratory measures designed to reduce mysteries to
problems, as Chomsky has described his work in linguistics.
Jonathan Goodwin xiv l
Moretti concludes with a reconsideration of the liberatory or
demystifying potential of his project, an aspect of his work
important since his Marxist formation.
I will now review how the essays in this volume deal with
the challenges Moretti makes to literary history. John Holbo
begins his entry by observing that literary scholarship is not
entirely cumulative. For Holbo, literary scholars have a cul-
ture of ignoring each other's arguments and "results," such as
they are, and operate in a type of hermetic isolation. Te com-
ments to Holbo's post pressed him on this point, with "CR,"
an assistant professor, describing his experiences having his
articles rejected because they did not do enough of just what
Holbo had said literary scholars never do: cite other people's
work and place theirs in the larger context. Te miscommu-
nication here seemed based on a diferent methodological
understanding: from John Holbo's perspective in philosophy
and his concurrent interest in the philosophical basis of liter-
ary theory in the Continental tradition, the narrowing of a
problem-set based on successive attempts seems a defningly
absent trend in literary studies. From CR's perspective, the
almost ritualistic obeisance required to a "methodology" or
tradition of readings of a given text is itself stifing.
Ray Davis criticizes Moretti for what seem to be surpris-
ing conceptual omissions: philosophy and cognitive science.
As we have seen, Moretti does agree about the importance
of mental models for understanding the evolution of liter-
ary forms. And, though it is specifcally the French/German
metaphysical tradition that Moretti is reluctant to engage, it
is interesting to consider to what extent writers in that tradi-
tion could illuminate his project.
Matthew Kirschenbaum describes what was known as
the 'nora project', which is now known as the 'monk project'.
Kirschenbaum's entry deals mostly with the project's digital
humanities and data mining initatives and only tangentially
with Moretti's work. At the same time, however, it is argu-
Introduction 4 xv
ably the most relevant entry to the future of what Moretti
proposes here because of the role digitization and database
searches will play in the next generation of "distant readings."
(Moretti's "Te Novel: History and Teory" contains the fol-
lowing: "With digital databases, this is now easy to imagine:
a few years, and we'll be able to search just about all novels
that have ever been published, and look for patterns among
billions of sentences" (114), for example.) With the auto-
matic searching and identifying of generic features, the pro-
duction and analysis of the data similar to what Moretti does
in GMT will be able to happen with much larger sample sizes
and, therefore, much greater accuracy. Some generic features
are obviously more subject to automated recognition than
others. Free indirect style, for instance, is easier to recognize
than "clues."
Timothy Burke makes a number of wide-ranging ob-
servations in his essay. He draws on his experience as an
Africanist historian to note that even what makes its way in
the archive, vast as it is, is still only a small sample of the total
number of cultural objects in circulation. (Presumably it's a
large enough sample that statistical inferences from it can be
made, but the point about it being a sample is clearly impor-
tant here.) Curiously enough, Burke suggests that Moretti
has too gradualist an approach to evolutionary metaphors,
which suggests that even a writer as enamored of the punc-
tuated metaphors as Moretti can be criticized by a cultural
historian impressed with the power of the idea. Burke also
argues that Moretti should be more interested in complex-
ity theory and emergence, a topic which does show up in the
"On Literary Evolution" essay from Signs Taken for Wonders.
But more attention to what is clearly an important analytic
problem is needed for the long-term viability of Moretti's
project. (Piazza's aferword notes the severe problems intro-
duced into quantitative analysis by disturbingly common
non-linear processes.)
Jonathan Goodwin xvi l
Adam Roberts, inspired by the generational model of
genre development in GMT, outlines a generic history of sci-
ence fction in the next article. Based largely on his Te History
of Science Fiction, Roberts proposes a development of succes-
sive genres since Kepler's Somnium and suggests that they
would follow a pattern, if graphed, similar to that of Figure
9 of GMT, "British Novelistic Genres, 1740-1900" (19). Te
difculty in both of these graphs is disagreement about the
morphology of the genres, as both Moretti and Roberts note.
Bill Benzon then raises the issue of cognitive maps and where
they ft in with Moretti's geographical ones. I found this to
be a particularly interesting issue, especially given Moretti's
theoretical background. Benzon raises the quite interesting
point about what degree of geographical accuracy could
be expected from the authors of the various novels Moretti
lists. He cites a Donald Norman experiment where graduate
students could not accurately map the apartments they lived
in while they were in those apartments, yet they presumably
never had trouble navigating them. Te distance between
the cognitive map and the unconscious understanding of the
environment is another issue where research in cognitive sci-
ence could supplement Moretti's research aims.
Eric Hayot's piece is the frst to address the academic soci-
ology of Moretti's project. As he describes, there is both con-
siderable joy at the novelty and deep suspicion at not just the
perceived scientism but also the attitude that the "secular the-
ology" of close reading has been blasphemed against. Hayot
uses Lindsay Waters' argument against the elimination of joy
and the erotics of reading in modern hermeneutics as polar
opposite of Moretti's work. Hayot is not so willing to dismiss
either explicitly or tacitly the status quo as most of our con-
tributors seem to do, at least for the purposes of evaluating
Moretti's argument, and his contribution is salutary in that
regard, especially for reminding us just how radical and how
much of an outsider project this is. My brief essay attempts to
Introduction 4 xvii
examine what, if anything, the concept of the "ideologeme"
adds to Moretti's theoretical framework. Coming as it does
with a rich Marxian pedigree, I suggest that "ideologemes," if
adequately defned, would serves as a useful analogy to the
suspicious "memes" of sociobiology.
I noted earlier that Moretti quoted Steven Berlin
Johnson's contribution in his response to Prendergast in the
NLR. Johnson's point about needing a plausible psycho-
logical model to explain formal invention and reception was
identifed as an important area for future research. It is where
my own interests in Moretti's project mostly lie, and one of
the reasons that I was initially drawn to Moretti's work. In
the comments to Johnson's entry, both Bill Benzon and Ray
Davis elaborate on the need for a psychological theory of
aesthetics, one that takes into account scientifc research and
that does not, as Davis points out, rely too heavily on facile
generalization. It is a hard problem, and I fnd the appearance
of it in the discussion of a book that's resolutely sociological
in its focus to be interesting and refereshing.
Jenny Davidson criticizes Moretti for failing to recognize
the points of contact between his own project and the femi-
nist tradition of recovery, especially insofar as many of the
same texts and periods are covered by both. Much of Moretti's
work tries to establish the basis for canon formation, not cri-
tique it as such. Davidson usefully refers to other work whose
scope and aims are similar to Moretti's: Wai Chee Dimock's
two articles, "Planetary Time and Global Translation:
'Context' in Literary Studies" and "Genre as World System:
Epic and Novel on Four Continents," are both, especially in
their deployment of self-similarity in what Davidson calls a
response to historicism, especially illuminating in this regard.
In a challenge to Moretti's emphasis on divergence in cul-
tural evolution, Davidson claims that contingency has been
widely accepted as a facet of culture. In the Marxian tradition,
however, teleology is far more important than contingency
Jonathan Goodwin xviii l
and might even have been considered heretical at times. Te
importance of contingency as a role in cultural evolution and
historical understanding is a popular subject certainly; wit-
ness the long-standing tradition of alternative history writing.
But I agree with Moretti that the emphasis on contingency
and variation as a generative principle is in fact contrary to
the dominant models of cultural and literary history.
John Holbo's second post raises the exciting theoretical
question of marketing. Te infuence of advertising on the
spread of formal devices does seem to be, as Holbo claims,
an elided aspect of Moretti's analysis. Particularly now, when
the statistical sophistication and database extensiveness of
the modern marketing industry has exceeded even the most
utopian proto-fantasies of a Leopold Bloom, the question
of how markets are malleable through indirect interference
and manipulation seems crucial. Moretti's work on the
Hollywood flm does seem to suggest that it is the genre or
the formal aspects of flm itself which create its market. Te
words "advertising" and "marketing" do not appear in "Planet
Hollywood," for instance. Holbo reintroduces "dumb luck"
into the equation with the inexplicably huge success of J. K.
Rowling. Davidson notes in the comments that Rowling's
work seesa simply not as good (formally inventive, complex,
satisfying) as that of at least some of her peers, so some regres-
sion to the mean of popular taste would have to be a factor.
She also claims that this is not the case with Doyle; compared
to his peers, he is a better, more complex writer, a claim which
Moretti's analysis would seem to support. In his response to
this round of inquiries, Moretti invokes a principle from the
study of dynamic non-linear systems: that there must be a
small initial diference in morphology of form that accounts
for the large-scale change in magnitude seen in the market
Sean McCann begins by making the same observation
that Jenny Davidson did: that Moretti is a singular fgure in
Introduction 4 xix
literary studies who will inspire no school of research because
of several factors, the most important of which is that only he
is capable of doing these kinds of projects in a way that holds
others' interests. Tough I disagree with this claim, I recog-
nize its force. Prendergast makes a similar observation in his
long response to GMT. If it were not for Moretti's unique
theoretical trajectory, coming as he does from a background
in Marxist aesthetics, the project would immediately recall
a sterile positivist approach associated by Prendergast with
Gustave Lanson (43), in particular. McCann identifes two
environments of Moretti's analysis: the market and the men-
tal. According to McCann, Moretti's market environment
requires a diferent selection agent than the social environ-
ment, so the evolutionary analogy between them needs fur-
ther development Here again is another instance in which a
cognitive scientifc approach would advance the ideas found
in GMT. I also think that Moretti would not as easily accept
the distinction between these two types of environments.
Tis brings us at last to the fnal and longest essay in
the collection, Cosma Shalizi's "Graphs, Trees, Materialism,
Fishing." Shalizi begins his essay by noting that Moretti
invited him to participate in a seminar on the future of the
novel afer reading his review of Atlas of the European Novel.
Cosma Shalizi is, as he himself notes, perhaps the ideal reader
of a project like Moretti's, combining statistical expertise
with considerable polymathy. In the frst section of his es-
say, Shalizi applies statistical analysis to Moretti's claim that
clusters of genre appear and disappear within a generation.
He fnds that they do, but admonishes Moretti that the
point of quantitative data is to enable precise inference, so
there is no need to return to intuitive analysis. I do not know
the extent to which Moretti consulted a statistician in the
writing of GMT, but it is a complex discipline whose results
famously contradict intuition on occasion. (Moretti does
Jonathan Goodwin xx l
cite Hacking's Te Taming of Chance several times in earlier
Te distinctiveness of each textual unit that makes up
a genre and how that fact compares to population biology
is next point Shalizi emphasizes. If you classify texts purely
according to morphology, then phylogenetic similarity is
sacrifced. Does that level of the metaphor extend? Tis is
one of the questions that I asked in my contribution, which
started by raising the notion of "memes" or the ideologeme
as a constraining unit of cultural heredity (as I have to agree
with Prendergast and, presumably, everyone else, that litera-
ture does not have genes as such). Te next point of conten-
tion has also been raised by Prendergast in his essay, though
Shalizi approaches it from a broader (and more critical)
perspective. Te Hegelian notion of "expressive totality" (the
phrase seems to be Althusser's) and the interpretive problems
that result from trying to make complex inferences about
the social world from a sample size, ofen, of one cultural
object, disturbs Shalizi. He ofers the surprising and useful
observation that comparative methods taken from the bio-
logical sciences which use lattices capable of modeling such
phenomenon as lateral-gene transfer would not depend on
the determination of whether or not literature had "discrete-
valued, particulate factors, such as genes." As I have written
earlier, this question seems to me fundamental in assessing
the likely success of Moretti's approach, and I fnd this type
of modeling, as of yet unattempted, to the best of my knowl-
edge, to be an exciting opportunity.
Another issue where Shalizi difers from Moretti is in
his distinction between the social forces causing a change in
taste and those "which shape the content of the taste." Shalizi,
following Stanley Lieberson's A Matter of Taste, suggests that
these two forces have to be distinguished and do not always
have a determinative relation. Such an idea is deeply anti-
thetical to the main tenets of Marxian thought, however, not
Introduction 4 xxi
least of which to the expressive totality and teleology of form
that Moretti remains infuenced by. One new wrinkle Shalizi
provides in the repeated idea seen in many of the entries here
that a psychological understanding of formal reception and
change is needed is to appeal to the empirical studies done
of reading and response. Te literature that Shalizi refers to,
while certainly noteworthy and interesting in itself, will not
readily satisfy many comparatists covering the same liter-
ary ground as Moretti because of the vast gulf between the
highly aestheticized type of reading they are accustomed and
the presumably sterile and artifcial experiments that can be
studied with empirical methods. (Norm Holland's 5 Readers
Reading is an earlier and useful addition to the list of relevant
works that Shalizi mentions here.) Empirical studies of read-
er-response are also far removed from Moretti's description of
close-reading as a secular theology.
Shalizi concludes his essay with the comforting thought
that the randomness inherent in human history and cul-
tural products of that history, have, by that very random-
ness, "strict nonrandom regularity," which can be analyzed
using methods such as Moretti's or by the more traditional
technique of close reading. Tat seemingly paradoxical—yet
pleasing—idea seems as good as place as any to conclude this
introduction. I do want to mention that the comments made
throughout the book event were unusually substantive and
provocative. Please browse around in the archive, no matter
how you happen to be reading.
Works Cited
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Genre as World System: Epic and
Novel on Four Continents." Narrative 14.1 (2006):
—. "Planetary Time and Global Translation: 'Context' in
Literary Studies." Common Knowledge 9.3 (2003):
Jonathan Goodwin xxii l
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900.
Verso, 1998.
— "Conjectures on World Literature." NLR 1 ( Jan-Feb
2000): 54-68.
—. "Te End of the Beginning." NLR 41 (Sept-Oct 2006):
—. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History.
Verso, 2005.
—. "Te Novel: History and Teory." NLR 52 ( July-Aug
2008): 111-124.
—. "Planet Hollywood." New Lef Review 9 (May-Jun 2001):
—. "Te Slaughterhouse of Literature." Modern Language
Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 207-227.
—. Signs Taken for Wonders. 2
ed. London: Verso, 1987.
—. "A Useless Longing for Myself. Te Crisis of the
European Bildungsroman, 1898-1914." Ralph Cohen,
ed. Studies in Historical Change. Charlottesville, U of
Virginia Press, 1992. 43-59.
—. Te Way of Te World: Te Bildundgsroman in European
Culture. Verso, 2000.
Prendergast, Christopher. "Evolution and Literary History."
New Lef Review 34 ( July-Aug 2005): 40-62.
Roberts, Adam. Te History of Science Fiction. Palgrave, 2006.
Shalizi, Cosma. "One Efort More, Litterateurs, if You
Would Be Empiricists!" Review of Atlas of the European
Novel. 21 (Oct 1998. 28 Nov 2008). http://www.cscs.umich.
Reading Graphs,
Responses to Franco Moretti
4 3
¤ Graphs, Maps, Trees,
Fruits of The MLA
John Holbo
Moretti opens "Graphs" by remarking,
what a minimal fraction of the literary feld we all
work on: 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 per cent 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.
Tis reminds me of a point made in my inaugural
Valve post. How many members in the MLA? Te large
number is largely a function of the number of college courses
that need teaching, freshman essays that need marking, not
really at all a function of any independent conception of a hu-
manistic knowledge edifce that needs approximately twenty
or thirty thousand toiling professorial hands—obliged to
produce, yes even over-produce. Call this dynamic of su-
perfuity 'sorcerer's apprentice syndrome'. It's not the worst
problem, but it deserves address from every promising angle.
Moretti's project presents a fresh angle: an institutionally vast
discipline should try to fnd projects suitable for pursuit by
vast numbers of scholars. Actually existing academic liter-
ary studies makes considerably more sense if something like
John Holbo 4 l
Moretti's project makes sense. So, on behalf of the institution,
there should be a concerted efort to make sense of such proj-
ects. Which is no guarantee sense can be made. (Nor am I
proposing all English professors be conscripted as Moretti's
research assistants. No, not at all.)
Let me make the same point a diferent way (anticipat-
ing and answering an objection.) In his second paragraph
Moretti lists a number of scholars on whose work he builds.
"I mention these names right away because quantitative work
is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it
takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ide-
ally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus
be shared by others, and combined in more than one way."
Examples follow: graphs charting the take-of of the novel
in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria; data amounting
to knowledge that could not plausibly be approximated by
anything in an intuitive, appreciative head—however pro-
digiously well-read: an Easter Island-style monument. Like
Harold Bloom, say.
But now the inevitable objection: to suggest that lit-
erary studies take the quantitative turn is preposterous,
Gradgrindian positivism. I am sure Moretti gets this a lot, so
he surely has his answer down pat, but I'll make one on his
behalf (which is therefore not necessarily his.) Just as we are
accustomed to the existence of a standing army of academic
literary critics, so that we should be pinched from time to
time, to wake up to how strange this institution is—how
obscure in its actual, aggregate intellectual (as opposed to
pedagogic) function. I think we are overly accustomed to
the profound lack of cooperation that is the hallmark of
humanities research. We could use occasional reminders of
this very fact. Most literary scholars would no more simply
use the 'results' of a fellow scholar than they would use her
toothbrush (I heard that joke somewhere.) Not without frst
Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits 4 5
transforming, interrogating, refashioning so that this imple-
ment is made the new possessor's own. To look at a shelf of
journals and see, mostly, rows of used toothbrushes, is not an
energizing prospect, however.
I don't mean to be apocalyptic about it. It's a peculiar
situation, not the Downfall of Western Civilization. I also
don't mean to suggest the problem is unique to English
professors. (I think the original toothbrush joke was about
professors generally, or maybe it was even about scientists.)
But the problem is as acute in literary studies as anywhere,
so it may as well be addressed here. I am personally in a posi-
tion to say it is less severe in philosophy departments, where
there is more consensus about what counts as an argument,
hence more neutral portability of certain products. But, of
course, portability does not automatically equate to intellec-
tual value. Perhaps the philosophy department has purchased
communication at the cost of signifcance, declining into a
sort of puzzle-piece scholasticism, which likes to pretend it
is brick-on-brick scientism. But scholasticism is at least a pre-
sumptively seemly ethos for scholars. Tat is something. Given
the fact that there are so many scholars, they ought to be
seeking ways to make themselves more ... scholastic—while
fending of decline into empty scholasticism, yes of course we
need that, too.
Obviously this is going to be a pendulum thing. Too
many Morettis will call forth a new Edmund Wilson, mak-
ing fun of "Te Fruits of the MLA," which will not be funny
paper titles this time around, but mindlessly headlong factual
accretions—graphs, maps and trees of no conceivable interest
to anyone, save those so inclined to the ceremonial overpro-
duction of graphs, maps and trees that they miss the forest
of hermeneutic/aesthetic interest. (Do people recall that
Wilson wrote an MLA-mocking piece in 1968, complaining
about the excesses of the MLA? But these alleged excesses
John Holbo 6 l
were utterly unlike the alleged excesses we associate with the
journalistic genre of MLA mockery in the 1980's and 90's.
Tings change, while staying the same.)
But it seems to me the problem of too many Morettis
is yet to arise, and should be dealt with if it does, not pre-
emptively. Because, to repeat, this is one of those pendulum
swing things.
It seems to me, to repeat, that the oddity of the deep
incommunicability of results, within a large academic dis-
cipline—the lack of portability of the products across vast
felds and subfelds—should strike us more than it tends to. If
it did, we would welcome projects lke Moretti's more eagerly.
An institution should look to its nature, try to fnd things
that it is suited to do (as well as trying to change its nature so
as to be capable of things it presently isn't suited to do well,
yes of course.) So again: actually existing academic literary
studies makes more sense if something like Moretti's project
makes sense.
Te next objection strikes like clockwork: but you can't
just demand that literary studies professors start accepting
each other's results the way math professors accept each
other's proofs. Te toothbrush joke suggests an arbitrary fas-
tidiousness. It sounds as if I am saying scholars could just ac-
cept each other's results but they won't. But the hermeneutic
character of the humanistic enterprise (characterize it how
you like) means this is more a case of can't than won't. Well,
yes. But as an objection to what I am saying this has traction
only if the likes of Moretti are not just quantifers but mono-
maniac deniers of the possibility of anything valuable slip-
ping through their nets of number. Which he isn't. Te fnal
two sentences of section 1 of the frst essay. "A more rational
literary history. Tat's the idea." Not a totally Rational history,
goodness no.
Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits 4 7
Why rationalize history? Well, because we can, would be
argument one. And it is Moretti's. Because literary studies is
less well of if we can't would be argument 2, which I have
made. I feel odd even making it, because it seems so obvious.
Is it obvious to you?
Comments to this post were good and useful. Tere was also
sharp disagreement, and it became clear to me what I wrote
was doomed to be misunderstood in certain ways. Let me
append a few post-thoughts that amount to clarifcations of
what I meant to say. (I also encourage readers who fnd this
interesting to read all the old comments. But I'm not going
to rehash them.)
For about a year afer I wrote this post it seemed to me
literary scholars I bumped into, attended conferences with,
or corresponded with, were buzzing about Moretti, quite
independently of our little event. He seemed to be enjoying
a moment of academic celebrity. Fine by me. But it surprised
me how much of the buzz was negative. I was struck, in
particular, by one panel discussion I attended (yes, an MLA
panel) at which it was more or less agreed by various partici-
pants that scholarship and pedagogy of literary history are, at
present, mutually ill-suited. (I am providing my own gloss on
their agreement, if memory serves. But I'll withhold names,
in case memory does not serve. Maybe this is just me talking
to myself here.) On the one hand, you need a set of texts that
will provide you with sufcient evidence to pronounce intel-
ligently—justifably—on such subjects as 'the nineteenth
century American novel'. On the other hand, you need a set
of texts to fll out a 12-16 week syllabus for an undergraduate
course of that title. Tere isn't any one set of texts that can do
both jobs.
John Holbo 8 l
Of course it isn't so surprising that the most sophisti-
cated scholarship goes beyond what can be crammed into a
single undergraduate semester. But there is more to the point.
Tere seems to be a tendency for good undergraduate peda-
gogy to recapitulate bad (as opposed to merely incomplete
or preliminary) historiography. Te teacher fnds herself
proceeding as if 'the nineteenth century novel' (pick your
suitably broad subject) is the sort of thing that is at all likely
to show up through the lens of eight novels to be read. Te
truth is: reading a small number of novels and writing a few
interpretive essays can be a fne and enriching way to spend a
few months. But it's not the same kind of enriching activity
as studying the novel historically, with scholarly rigor. And
no one really thinks otherwise. So tension between pedagogy
and historiography is not just tension between for-students
simplifcation and for-scholars sophistication. It is tension
between value and validity. You are asking people to use
one method—close reading—to arrive at answers that re-
quire a diferent method—distant reading (to use Moretti's
term.)Te value of literature is substantially derived from
close reading activity (broadly conceived—you can be more
hermeneutic or erotic about these virtues of closeness, as you
like.) But many sorts of scholarly claims demand more 'dis-
tant reading' methods, on pain of invalidity. So how do you
proceed, if value and validity tug against each other, rather
than going together, as one would have wished?
Sitting in the audience at this panel, thinking my own
way through all this, I was innocently waiting for someone to
point out that Moretti might help. Yet three out of four of the
scholars on this panel were very negative about Moretti when
his name (inevitably) came up. Tey were almost (not quite)
dismissive. Te fourth seemed impressed mostly by the new-
ness of Moretti's project; seemed heartened that there was a
Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits 4 9
new thing some scholars were enthusiastic about. But surely
there is more to be enthusiastic here than enthusiasm itself.
Let me put the point yet another way. Rereading the
contributions to our event, I am struck by contrasts between
respondents who were otherwise in basic agreement. I say
Moretti is good because he is imitable. Sean McCann ap-
proves of Moretti, but predicts he will be largely un-imitable.
Tim Burke writes: "Of all the odd things I've heard in recent
years, one of the oddest would be that there are objections
in principle to the research paradigm that Franco Moretti
describes in Graphs, Maps, Trees." But Jenny Davidson quotes
Elif Batuman regarding Moretti's "irresistible magnetism of
the diabolical." She says she is "at once seduced and rendered
wary" by this distinctive quality, which she associates with
the 'heresy' of quantifcation. How is it possible that an au-
thor can seem, at once, moderate and agreeable to the point
of utter, ecumenical unobjectionablility, yet also 'diabolical',
If the answer is that literary scholars take the undesirabil-
ity of quantifcation for granted, whereas everyone else takes
its desirability for granted, the literary folks are fat out of
luck. Everyone else is right. But I'm quite sure that's not the
whole story. (I hope it's not even a signifcant part of it.)
I think these divergent responses are largely due to di-
vergent ways of taking rather characteristic "grand fourishes"
(Davidson's term) Moretti makes on his own behalf. Davidson
objects, rather mildly, that Moretti poses as a revolutionary,
but seems to be reinventing the wheel. "As a scholar working
in the feld of eighteenth-century British literature and cul-
ture, I fnd Moretti's work around these questions fruitful but
its distinctiveness or originality somewhat overstated. You
don't have to be a heroic scientifc pioneer and experimental-
ist to uncover the patterns in long-forgotten British novels of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
John Holbo 10 l
Let's consider: 'Distinctiveness or originality somewhat
overstated.' I would have said: surely highly distinctive even
if the conclusions are not so original. Moretti's methods will
mostly help by acting as an independent check on what we
think we already know. And yet: that's very exciting and new.
Davidson continues: "Ruth Perry's recent Novel Relations,
for instance, reaps the rewards of a lifetime of reading eigh-
teenth-century fction to discern patterns (the rise of the
novel of the second attachment, the trope of the cri de sang)
that are as illuminating as Moretti's graphs about literary and
social history." But the concern is obviously going to be that
a lifetime spent reading such-and-such a body of material
may, afer all, reap the reward of a distorted view. (It's not as
though we think we know that riding a hobby-horse for years
conveys immunity to eccentricity.) Should I trust what Perry
has to say or not? If some sort of independent, quantitative
confrmation or disconfrmation were possible, that would
be extremely welcome. (Confrmation is a more inductively
problematic relationship than disconfrmation. Still, if the
same result were arrived at by a sensitive critic, reading a
body of work, and by a number-cruncher, mining that body
of work, that would be confdence-bolstering, if not strictly
At the time of our event, I think I was more or less reading
Moretti's grand fourishes as just fourishes. I was enchanted
by the humbler possibilities, whereas Davidson was a bit more
inclined to take them seriously (the fourishes, that is), hence
to regard them as potential hubris. Looking at the text today,
I am inclined to split the diference. Partly this is the result of
me subsequently coming around to a more skeptical view of
many of Moretti's bolder claims. Tis is very important, but
too much to shoehorn in here. Let me conclude these afer-
thoughts the same way I began this piece: by accentuating the
positive, in a small way.
Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits 4 11
It so happens I have just fnished reading Jenny Davidson's
new book, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth
Century. It is a good book, I think. I feel I learned from it.
But I am quite sure it is exactly the sort of book that could
use Morettiesque methods to complement it. Tere is a ten-
sion in Davidson's methodology, and even more so in her
characterizations of that methodology. She makes her own
problematic gestures of distinctiveness and originality. When
we see this, Moretti's humble uses look even more useful.
Here is Davidson's characterization of what is going on in
her book: "I wanted, medium-like, to make these pages a sort
of parliament, an auditorium in which the voices of actors in
and commentators on the story of heredity in the eighteenth
century can be heard" (7-8). And: "Te great value of this
kind of swerve away from the straight-and-narrow of the
historical method—what makes it worth the risk—seems to
me to lie in the counterfactual or path-not-taken traction it
ofers on ideas" (8). She takes as models W.G. Sebald and
Roland Barthes and feels generally confrmed in her faith
in, "the writerly approach, an essayistic or discursive mode
that prefers not to participate in all of the disciplinary prac-
tices of history or criticism proper" (12). Yet, as she writes
near the end of the book, "I ofer these thoughts in a spirit
diametrically opposed to the deliberate amateurism of David
Denby's Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau,
Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
I want to keep all the intensity and the precision of academic
writing, and the virtues of specialization, but to make what I
write at least potentially open to readers in other disciplines,
or in other walks of life" (198).
I think the tension here is fairly obvious: if you are delib-
erately refusing to fulfll disciplinary expectations; if you are
giving up specialization for the serendipitous joys of a swerv-
ing, cross-disciplinary jaunt; if you are foregoing a sober, aca-
John Holbo 12 l
demic style for a more writerly, novelistic one; then whatever
makes you better than David Denby can hardly be the fact
that you are a properly disciplined, specialized, academic
writer, whereas Denby is not. (I have not read Denby and
have no opinion whatsoever about the specifc case. I really
am interested only in the general methodological question.)
And there is another problem here. Davidson's against-
the-disciplinary-grain posture is not fully credible because,
frankly, this posture is the disciplinary grain at the present
time. Tis sort of post-Greenblattian-Auerbachian-Sebal-
dian-Barthesian, New Historicist, or post-New Historicist
'touch of the real' essayistic-academic style is, if not predomi-
nant, then at least very familiar, very commonly met with. It's
normal. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense: people
are attracted to this style for all the reasons Davidson says she
is. So they write in this style. But, on the other hand, it can't
fully make sense for writing against the disciplinary grain to
be the disciplinary grain.
'Against the grain' feels like automatic, contrarian wis-
dom; innately in touch with all those confning, facilitating,
secure grooves of disciplinarity, specialization, so forth—yet
leaping above and beyond all that. Losing touch yet keeping
in touch. Inspired yet rigorous. Solidly argued yet boldly
leaping. Tese are the contraries we would like to combine. I
feel the impulse myself. It's no mystery why people want this.
But how do we seriously propose to get it? Even harder: how
do we suppose that squaring the circle, like that, could be the
new disciplinary normal. What's the disciplinary formula for
indulging in counter-disciplinary irregularities on a regular,
disciplinary basis?
Moretti is not the guaranteed solution to all such trou-
bles, perhaps not actually the solution to any of them. But it
seems to me that what should attract writers like Davidson
to Moretti, without detracting from their own projects in
Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits 4 13
the least, is the prospect of some serious assistance in pull-
ing of these contrary combinations with more conviction.
Te distinctiveness they achieve hereby may not be so much
Moretti's as their own.
Let me put it another way: just as the plural of anecdote
is not data, the plural of synecdoche is not historicism. Te
basic concern about the sort of historicism Davidson practic-
es is that it is argument-by-synecdoche; it persuades by virtue
of its essayistic charms. We are given a sample of 'voices'. Very
well. How do we know the sample is valid? (Read again the
passage from Moretti that I started out with.)
I know what Davidson will reply: it's not so easy to ap-
proach such a topic in any more systematic way. Tere's such
a hybrid mass of inherently cross-disciplinary, heterogeneous
material to come to grips with. (I haven't said anything about
Davidson's specifc historical claims. Sufce it to say that a
study of 18
Century attitudes towards 'breeding' inevitably
carries one to many diferent places.) Fair enough. But that
isn't a good reason not to want that other thing, let alone to
make strictly misleading gestures to the efect that, ordinarily,
we have that other thing. It is closer to being the exception
than the rule.
Were it possible to buttress Davidson's Breeding with
some bank of Moretti-esque maps, graphs and trees, the latter
might just repeat the former, thereby amounting to confrma-
tion (of a not-strictly dispositive sort). But they would still
allow Davidson herself to claim, with greater credibility, the
sort of distinctiveness she, indeed, wants to claim.
Her style of stroll across the felds is most credible if it
truly is a break from regular, systematic attempts to survey
and plow through those felds. We strengthen—and in no
way undermine—the value of 'essayistic' approaches to liter-
ary history by encouraging that other sort of approach.
John Holbo 14 l
Originally posted January 11, 2006
Works Cited
Davidson, Jenny. Breeding: A Partial History of the
Eighteenth Century. Columbia University Press, 2008.
4 15
C Graphs, Maps, Trees /
Sets Hamper Grasp
Ray Davis
I. "Graphs, Maps, Trees" by Franco Moretti
Moretti sounds like a happy guy. And it's infectious. Why
pledge allegiance to a groove and turn it into a rut? Get out
of that stufy cofee shop and into a cool refreshing stats
lab. Live a little! (With the aid of twenty grad students.) An
OuBelLetriPo is overdue. Let's pick a quantitative approach
and a subject out of the hat: "Pie charts" and "Coming-out
stories"—wait, um, I wasn't ready; can I try again? "Income
distribution" and "Aphra Behn"? Perfect!
Will you end up with a demolished bit of received wis-
dom? A sociological footnote? Or just graphic representation
of a critical triteness? You don't know! You think Perec knew
the plot of La Disparition before he started?
From this set of ongoing experiments, "Graphs" seem to
be going best. Tose cross-cultural Rise-of-the-Novel curves
hold immediate appeal.
And what they appeal for is correlation with something
else. Moretti plausibly and skeptically explains who might've
stepped on the brakes when the curve dips, but who revs the
engine? Do accelerators vary as inhibitors do?
Even more intriguing is Moretti's report that nineteenth-
century English fction genres tended to turn over in a clump
every twenty-fve or thirty years, rather than smoothly year
Ray Davis 16 l
by year. But his report relies exclusively on secondary sources,
and risks echo chamber artifacts. Are generational timespans
a convenience for the researchers he draws from? What if
dialogic genres ("Jacobin novel" and "Anti-Jacobin novel")
weren't shown separately? How closely do the novel's clumps
lock step with transitions in other forms? How far can we
reliably carry statistical analysis of a non-random sample of
Plenty of intrigue, then, and plenty of opportunity to re-
make the mistakes of others who've tried to turn history into
a "real science."
Since maps are ofen referred to by writers (and, when
otherwise unavailable, as in fantasy genres, ofen passed along
to the reader), their re-use by critics tends to be confrmatory
rather than revelatory—most dramatically when Clive Hart
walked each character's path through the "Wandering Rocks"
(Hart & Hayman, 181-216). In "Maps," Moretti's diagrams
make a good case for a not very startling thesis: a nostalgic
series of "village stories" will most likely feature a village
from which meanderings are launched but which fades into
insignifcance over time. As he admits, his scatter plot of
Parisian protagonists provides even less novelty: if you have
an ambitious young French hero, you start him in the Latin
Quarter and aim him elsewhere. (In "Te Invention of the
Artist's Life," Pierre Bourdieu diagrammed Te Sentimental
Education's character trajectories on a Parisian map and simi-
larly found graphic confrmation of what was never really in
Judging by early fruit, "Trees" hold the least promise. As
presented, the "free indirect discourse" evolutionary tree
doesn't meet Moretti's own standards of rigor, since he ofers
no material justifcation for either his selection of source ma-
terial or his linkages.
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 17
His other evolutionary trees may be most interesting for
failing to justify their initiating assumption: that visible de-
cipherable clues defne the classic mystery genre. Extending
the branches to verifable examples of "fair play" might draw
the tree-builder into unabstractable tangles. In the classic
blend of detection with gothic and horror elements, consider
how ofen the resolution seems arbitrary, delivered with a
wink. Given how poorly most human beings follow a logi-
cal argument, does anything more than lip service have to be
paid to rationality? To what extent was that expectation set
by reviewers rather than noticed by readers? How quickly
afer the rule's formulation was it challenged by re-assertion
of other aspects of crime melodrama in spy stories, thrillers,
procedurals, and hard-boiled stories, and then how quickly
was it undermined by "cross-breeding"? (My own experience
of genre change seems closer to Alfred Kroeber's self-grafing
Tree of Human Culture than to species divergence. You only
go so hardcore before background singers return to the mix.)
More exhaustive and more focused, Moretti's "everything
published in the Strand" tree carries more conviction (and
much less tidiness) than his initial "Conan Doyle and his ri-
vals" tree. Exhaustively constrained to such an extent, though,
the tree may describe something less than Moretti seems to
hope for. I can imagine a tree tracing certain ingredients of
virtual reality stories in 1980s science fction. But would that
graph evolution or just Gardner Dozois's editorial obligation
to avoid strict repetition?
Moretti closes his trilogy with two general remarks.
One is a call for materialism, eclecticism, and descrip-
tion. Tis I applaud, since the most interesting scholarship
I've read lately includes interdisciplinary studies of "acciden-
tals," histories of readership and publishing, text-crunching
of non-canonical sets, whether mechanically or passionately.
Tere's plenty of life even in purely literary anti-interpretive
Ray Davis 18 l
experiments such as those collected in Ben Friedlander's
Te other "constant" Moretti claims is "a total indifer-
ence to the philosophizing that goes by the name of 'Teory'
in literature departments." (He doesn't defne "Teory" more
precisely, but Novalis is apparently not on the prohibited
list.) And here, I think, I'll keep my hands quietly folded.
I agree that twentieth century philosophers and psychol-
ogists have made awful interpretation factories, and that liter-
ary studies sometimes reek of old shit under new labels. But
interpretations generated from political science, economics,
quantum physics, or fMRI averaging tend to be just as inane.
What makes such readings tedious isn't which foreign disci-
pline has been used to slap together a mold, but the inherent
moldiness of the afair.
For a critic and pleasure reader like myself, Moretti's text-
twice-removed fndings ft best in the foundations and frame-
work of aesthetics, clearing false assumptions and blocking
overly confdent assertions. Tat's also where neurobiology,
developmental and social psychology, and other cognitive
sciences seem most useful.
Along with philosophy. Having agreed to open up the
feld, why ban one of the original players? Tis isn't the sort
of game that's improved by team spirit.
II. "Sets Hamper Grasp" by A Contrite Form
My interest is really, why do our senses start being
fltered? And what does it do to our history and our
- bhikku 3
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 19
"Eidetic imagery—the ability to retain in detail a pic-
torial confguration—is found in approximately 8%
of the school population, but almost never in adults,
aside from artists."
In "Senses, Symbols, Operations" (in Perkins), H. Gardner
compared performances of a group of eleven-year-olds and
a group of fourteen-year-olds across a wide variety of per-
ceptual, motor, and cognitive tasks. For the most part, there
was no improvement with age, or there was a slight decline.
Improved: solving brain-teasers; recall of important narra-
tive details. Signifcantly worse: memory of irrelevant details;
"… we must ask whether a cultural emphasis on opera-
tive thinking has had, as an unintended consequence,
a deleterious efect upon fgurative capacities …. the
decline of incidental learning, the waning of interest
in the arts which is so characteristic of adolescence,
and contrasting strategies of adolescents and preado-
lescents in the style discrimination tasks [adolescents
tending to compare, preadolescents tending to de-
scribe] at least hint at the possibility …"
Even as a schoolboy I took tremendous delight in
Shakespeare, especially the historical plays. I have
also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable
and music very great delight. But now for many years
I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried
lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably
dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste
for pictures and music …. My mind seems to have
Ray Davis 20 l
become a kind of machine for grinding general laws
out of large collections of facts but why this should
have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain
alone, on which the higher states depend, I cannot
– Charles Darwin
I didn't much like Moretti's book or my review.
Disappointment makes a dull muse; I tried to lend interest
by borrowing Moretti's bluf tone. Te result was incoher-
ent: fashy threads on a sketchy character. As punishment,
I was condemned to explain my reaction all over again in
First I unpacked the reference to "echo chamber artifacts":
… there's a post-facto academically-inclined and then
selectively fltered defnition of "genre" being built
on: it has to be noticeable to late twentieth-century
Anglo-American literature majors; it can't be too
short; it can't be too long; then there are the outli-
ers, like McGann starting modernism with William
Morris or Aldiss starting science fction with Mary
Shelley …. When I've seen people try to delimit living
"genres," it's been a fasco, and I'm not sure distance
clarifes vision. We're not talking chromosome com-
parisons, or inability to reproduce. Tertiary English
department results might be like restricting a medical
research survey to studies fnanced by pharmaceuti-
cal companies.
Bill Benzon then pressed me on the perennial topic of cul-
tural evolution.
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 21
Some credos:
1. Te human species evolved.
2. As a species, humans are inseparably dependent on
other humans in ways that go beyond simple repro-
duction. We call this dependency "culture." (Note,
though, that I haven't personifed biological change
over time by saying something like "Evolution's goal
was culture.")
3. Human beings are attracted to novelty-within-lim-
its. Te attraction is evidenced both culturally and by
studies of individual behavior (insofar as "individual
behavior" can be said to exist in a cultural species).
4. Te defnition of "attractively limited novelty" dif-
fers over time, and from individual to individual, and
between cultural contexts.
So the desire of the editor to avoid strict repetition com-
bines biology (and thus, to some unknowable extent, an "evo-
lution" which might be fguratively treated as a motive force),
biography, and culture (including a corporate capitalist
economy). And, should the editor be successful, that desire
could be said to (temporarily) reinforce the cultural expecta-
tions that the editor caters to.
What's gained by calling that evolution? Where's the
oomph of the metaphor? It may be difcult for biologists to
clearly defne the limits of "species," but that doesn't begin to
compare with the difculty of defning "sub-genre" or "trend"
or "fashion" in a way that can support extended analysis. To
say that Dozois' individual choices were an evolutionary
force presumes what hasn't yet been proven: that there is "a
thing" that evolved from "a diferent thing" by divergence.
Ray Davis 22 l
Insofar as a fnal "thing" could be said to have come out
of the virtual reality fad I can only picture it as a set of now-
shared assumptions which no longer have to be justifed and
which are no longer capable of producing a frisson (except
among newbies; e.g., academics who'd read no sf and seen
no HK movies before Te Matrix came out.) But such a set
would be an example of convergence—a knob in Kroeber's
weirdly self-absorbing cultural tree rather than a leaf on
Darwin's biological tree.
Even if we jump exclusively to that level of abstraction—
sub-genre rather than story—I don't believe we fnd strict di-
vergence. One of the appeals of VR was its obvious afnity to
other meta-narrative techniques/sub-genres; it bolstered it-
self from the start with borrowings from mystic visions, fairy
tales, theater stories, highbrow fourth-wall breaking, and so
forth. It could be said to have diverged from some other sf
fads of the time, but only by its freedom to re-absorb what
had been (temporarily) excluded.
Rather than taking on (and glorying in) all the baggage
of "evolution," I'm more inclined to Timothy Burke's imag-
ery of emergence: "dumb luck." I think that's more accurate,
less misleading, and—sadly for professional scholars and crit-
ics—also much less likely to grab the journalistic imagination.
... Given a science fction scenario in which hybrid-
ization was by far the most visible method by which
genetic material passed, in which hybridization
could happen across almost any examples of any bio-
logical species, and in which there was near complete
turnover of species every twenty-fve to thirty years,
do you think that the category of biological species
would have developed in any way recognizable to
us? Would that world's D4rw1n have explained the
origin of species in the same way?
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 23
Again, when it comes to literary fashions, market-
ing, and infuence, what (besides confusion) is added
by the evolutionary metaphor?
Following Moretti's response, I became increasingly
All criticism is doomed to analyze only its own per-
ceptions. What the critic is fnally saying is, this is my
fantasy when faced with the work. What is essential
for the interpreter is an ethics of modesty: that he not
consider his own perception is the only one.
–"Edgar Allen Poe"
(Friedlander, quoting Rodefer, quoting Kristeva)
Less tentatively than John Emerson, I'm a plural-
ist. (As a consumer, anyway; as a producer, I'm merely
an amateur belletrist.) I enjoy much of the present-
day interdisciplinary work which might be classifed
as "materialist" or "quantitative." And I understand
that everyone who works in the humanities considers
themselves a member of a beleaguered minority, no
matter how successful they might seem to the out-
side world. But as a pluralist, like John, I feel some
need to push back against an either/or tone.
Te illusion of rising above one's own time is
thrilling, whether the buoyant gas be eternal verities,
the universal language of music, or scientifc analysis.
But history sinks us all eventually, and, despite the
earnest (and ofen well-rewarded) efort put into
social and psychiatric sciences, they have a short
shelf life. If not many people read Poe's or Twain's
or James's criticism nowadays, even fewer build on
studies of racial traits and phrenology and hysteria.
To paraphrase Prof. Arthur Lee, the social science of
today will be the symptom of tomorrow.
Ray Davis 24 l
"I may as well admit right away that every time I
have studied competition, success, and failure, I have
never found that luck played a major role ..."
Tat's hardly surprising, since we're not working
in controlled laboratory conditions. Explanations
can be invented for any event. Te problem is prov-
ing them. (Disproving proposed explanations, on
the hand, is ofen both doable and worthwhile.)
Histories which preclude dumb luck and the strictly
unpredictable infuence of individuals tend towards
the Whiggish or Spenglerian. Te excluded arbitrary
returns in the form of the historian's decisions.
"And then again, it may well be that the study of lit-
erature will always require, or be enriched by, both close
reading and abstraction, interpretations and explana-
tions; but this will amount to saying that literature
requires two conceptually opposite approaches. Which is
odd, and will make for some interesting speculation on
why it should be so."
As Laura Carroll indicates, "interpretation" is
hard to shake free of. For example, Adam Roberts's
pre-1900 "science fction" wouldn't have been analyz-
able as such until "mainstream realism" became well-
enough established to make those isolated works
seem like part of a rival tradition. Even choosing what
elements to trace through which representatives of a
"genre" is an interpretive act, which is why I called the
Strand spectrum analysis more convincing than the
"Conan Doyle's rivals" tree.
Insofar as literature can be said to exist at all, yes, I
believe it calls forth both "interpretation" and "expla-
nation"—that is, a desire to narrate the work's intend-
ed meaning and a desire to narrate the work's origins.
(Already that seems not so binary a opposition.) Or
it calls forth a desire to describe the work itself, or to
describe our reaction to the work, or, more generally,
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 25
to respond. Trying to pursue all of these approaches
at once would, I agree, result in an unholy mess and
a shattered career. But that doesn't mean that they're
unambiguously opposed.
Let's return to the celebrated clue of the drugged
cofee. I haven't read the source story, and so I don't
know what its efect in context would be for me,
much less for a reader of the time. But I've seen the
Continental Op and Philip Marlowe walk more or
less knowingly into traps to "shake things up." Te
detective mystery, broadly defned, shows someone
gathering knowledge about criminal circumstances
and bringing about an expository conclusion.
Presumably drawing from the nearly autistic Holmes,
the polite puzzle mystery depicts detached knowl-
edge (represented by the handling of clues, maps,
and timetables) and emotional disengagement from
the (emotionally arbitrary) conclusion. Hard-boiled
mysteries and psychological thrillers, on the other
hand, show knowledge as physical experience and
insist that observation is inseparable from infu-
ence. One might, Moretti-like, try tracing the split
by tracking the amount of physical and emotional
damage sustained by the detective—beatings in one
column, druggings in another—but there would
eventually be convergences: Hammett's "drawing
room" mystery (set among the detective's dysfunc-
tional friends, with the detective shielded by almost
pathological smugness and with a viciously undercut
solution); the "Ellery Queen" team's late decision to
make Queen a fallible bringer of injustice; Sayers's
turn from Wimsey toward Harriet Vane ...
Tere's not necessarily a confict between intel-
lectual-emotional engagement and the deployment
of evidence. Much of the quantitative, historical,
comparative, and materialist research that's been
Ray Davis 26 l
mentioned results in richer or refreshed readings.
In that list, I'd include what I've read of Moretti's
previous work; on early acquaintance, he sounds like
a Marxist Hugh Kenner: a congenial combination.
For whatever conscious or unconscious reasons, he
seems to have evolved in the direction of Philo Vance,
insisting on the need to keep the reading experience
(whether current-day or historical) at arm's length.
Me, I'm a Black Mask fan. Literature, like murder, is
no place for clean hands.
Te reception of Graphs, Maps, Trees seemed to repeat a
familiar irony: confdently self-proclaimed scientifc objec-
tivity met by hero-worship, declarations of allegiance, and in-
attention to the evidence. By the end of the Valve event, I felt
like the hapless (and dickless) EPA inspector of Ghostbusters,
pointing out the right things in the wrong movie.
As Bob O'Hara summarized in passing, con-
tingent history cannot be made isomorphic with
verifable lab science. Some of this recent rhetoric
seems intent on remaking the mistakes of such his-
torical system-builders as Brooks Adams and Oswald
Spengler. While scientised literary history will likely
contribute to fewer deaths than scientised general
history did, it seems even more confused: the aes-
thetic realm is defned by particularity, atemporality,
and variation of taste.
Regarding "rigor": If someone vigorously misap-
plies techniques to rigidly-held arbitrary premises,
are the results "rigorous"? Tey appear so; they even
feel so. Still, there's no reason to believe they're true.
An unconsciously developing preference for visi-
ble decodable clues "sounds reasonable." But Moretti's
clue tree doesn't prove it: the tree never reaches
the supposed end goal of evolution; chronological
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 27
ordering by height is implied but not documented;
no evidence is shown that Doyle's rivals at each "level
of development" were as popular as Doyle's stories
at the same level. Te parsimony principle suggests
instead that the popularity of the "Sherlock Holmes
stories" was due to Sherlock Holmes, with visible
clues a side-efect of building narratives around such
a character: the magician is more efective when
audience members inspect the box. What defnes a
MOR-generic detective novel isn't the quality of its
puzzle but the presence of a trademark detective.
But then we're back to personal names, which
aren't nearly as scientistic as abstractions.
Sullen bastard that I am, I'm not even cheered up
by Steven Berlin Johnson's call for equally "rigorous"
use of brain studies.
We've heard what professional philosophers think
of the English department's use of philosophy, what
mathematicians think of English department Gödel
and chaos, and what physicists think of English de-
partment entropy and quantum theory. And we've
heard some of what professional biologists and cog-
nitive scientists think of "Evolutionary Psychology."
Popularized metaphorically applied science is not sci-
ence. But it is what consumers want, and it's lucrative.
Since 1993, I've been fascinated by application
of the cognitive sciences to aesthetics. Since 1995 or
so, people who fnd this out have asked me what I
thought of some best-selling book or newspaper ar-
ticle. And I've always had to say that I prefer reading
in the primary disciplines. Outside them, we seem to
get Just So stories which justify a conservative canon,
New Age vapidity, or pop culture tautology. ("People
really do enjoy what they seem to enjoy. EEGs prove
it!") Working scientists who venture into criti-
cism fare little better. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's
Ray Davis 28 l
defense of this Chola bronze
sounds like a Jungian
art appreciation class. If he's describing biologically
determined reactions, why does his audience have
to be won over? I'd say it's because aesthetics is too
complex and socially-personally contingent to sup-
port the sort of argument he's making.
Unless we burn art, it outlives our theories about
art. I believe the cognitive sciences, cross-cultural his-
tory, and philosophy can all shed light on why that is.
But where's the percentage? What sells is a familiar
story with a twist. 100 newspapers and NPR can't be
Occasionally over the next few months I attempted to draw
attention to related research, most pointedly in this post
from March 4, 2006:
[...] Even in historic genres, it's possible to make
a conscious efort to switch imaginative contexts.
[...] Along those lines, I liked [Kinds of Literature by
Alastair Fowler] more than I expected. Genre mark-
ers are (sometimes unintended) signals to a commu-
nity. Spotting the markers isn't enough to tell us what
they're doing there. Fowler seemed to get that.
A more recent good example is Richard A.
McCabe's "Annotating Anonymity" in Ma®king the
Text [ed. Joe Bray, Anne Henry, and Miriam Fraser].
Rather than just describing the archaisms and ex-
planatory apparatus of Te Shepheardes Calendar as
pastoral conventions, McCabe shows how they took
advantage of (and sometimes had to work against)
the specifc model of Servius's Virgil commentaries.
I'm now fnishing Memory in Oral Traditions
by David C. Rubin. [...] Rubin explains certain ge-
neric conventions of epic, ballad, and counting-out
rhymes as directly molded by the mechanisms of
Graphs, Maps, Trees 4 29
multi-generational verbal transmission, and backs it
up with evidence.
On a more negative note, Franco Moretti's
"Graphs" and "Trees" are strictly parasitic on texts
which he keeps strictly at arm's length. Not what I'd
call a healthy relationship. More successful interdis-
ciplinary materialist approaches go beyond the con-
fnes of the English department. And although the
nora project [see Matt Kirschenbaum's contribution]
limits itself to textual analysis, it's with the reasonable
aim of noticing textual aspects missed by received
Books don't compete with each other in a closed
bibliosphere. Popularity and genre are social, not
strictly textual. Tey can only be understood by look-
ing outside a text itself. And when you do so, I think
you fnd something more like chaos theory than like
biological evolution.
Eventually, though, I think I got the message. Graphs, Maps,
Trees wasn't a collection of research papers. It was a celebra-
tion, a manifesto whose solipsism gave it the appeal of a hu-
man interest story. Any questioning of its results would inevi-
tably be taken as dissent from its cause. In more ways than one,
my lack of enthusiasm was genre-based.
originally posted, January 11, 2006
Ray Davis 30 l
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. "Te Invention of the Artist's Life." Yale
French Studies 73 (1987): 75-103.
Friedlander, Benjamin. Simulcast: Four Experiments in
Criticism. 1st ed. U of Alabama Press, 2004.
Hart, Clive, and David Hayman. James Joyce's Ulysses:
Critical Essays. U of California Press, 1977.
Perkins, David. Te Arts and Cognition. Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977.
1 "Some time in my teenage years I lost the ability
to perceive the outside world as I had been do-
ing, as if some kind of flter or screen had been
brought between my senses and reality ..." http://
2 "How does the artist convey the very epitome
of feminine sensuality? What he does is simply
take the average female form, subtract the aver-
age male form—you're going to get big breasts,
big hips and a narrow waist. And then amplify
it, amplify the diference. And you don't say:
'My God, it's anatomically incorrect'. You say:
'Wow! What a sexy goddess!'" From "Lecture
3: Te Artful Brain," Reith Lectures 2003. http://
4 31
C Poetry, Patterns, and
The nora Project
matthew kirschenbaum
[editor's note – Kirschenbaum's piece describes the nora project
which has, subsequently, become part of the MONK project.
Kirschenbaum's piece is especially interesting for its method-
ological refections. Links have been updated.]
What follows is a brief introduction to nora [now MONK],
an ongoing and experimental project in literature and com-
putation. My thanks to Te Valve for the opportunity to
make our work part of the conversation here. While not
directly inspired by Moretti's writing in Graphs, Maps, Trees,
nora exhibits many of the same priorities: an emphasis on
quantitative method, large-scale data analysis, visualization,
abstract modeling, cooperation and collaboration. Tese are
methods foreign to many in the humanities, as are our actual
technologies which run the gamut from XML and Java to
a toolkit developed by the Automated Learning Group at
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Yet
nora (which, depending on who you ask on the project team,
originated as either an acronym for no one remembers ac-
ronyms or a character in the William Gibson novel Pattern
Recognition—though we've since located other noras) is also
about provocation, ambiguity, and ultimately, interpreta-
tion—in short, still the stuf most of us would identify as
central to academic literary studies.
First, here's the ofcial version of what we're doing:
Matthew Kirschenbaum 32 l
Te goal of the nora project is to produce sofware for
discovering, visualizing, and exploring signifcant patterns
across large collections of full-text humanities resources in
existing digital libraries. In search-and-retrieval, we bring
specifc queries to collections of text and get back (more or
less useful) answers to those queries; by contrast, the goal
of data-mining (including text-mining) is to produce new
knowledge by exposing unanticipated similarities or difer-
ences, clustering or dispersal, co-occurrence and trends. Over
the last decade, many millions of dollars have been invested
in creating digital library collections: at this point, terabytes
of full-text humanities resources are publicly available on
the web. Tose collections, dispersed across many diferent
institutions, are large enough and rich enough to provide an
excellent opportunity for text-mining, and we believe that
web-based text-mining tools will make those collections sig-
nifcantly more useful, more informative, and more reward-
ing for research and teaching. nora is currently in the second
year of two years of funding from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. Te Principal Investigator is John Unsworth,
formerly director of the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, now Dean of
the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at
the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Participating
researchers are also based at the Universities of Georgia,
Maryland, Virginia, and Alberta.
Now for the unofcial version:
All of this is very, very hard. For starters, none of the
technical architecture for what we wanted to do was in place
when we started. We were able to leverage several existing
platforms and technologies but other pieces had to be built
from scratch. At present, nora is held together with chewing
gum and duct tape, a loose tissue of resources and standards
(datastores, text mining engine, visualization toolkit and
Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation 4 33
end-user interface) coupled with the more-than-occasional
late night email or IM session when something isn't working.
A signifcant part of our eforts to date have been devoted to
stabilizing this architecture, and we're most of the way there
at this point.
But we've also been spending our time trying to fgure
out what technologies like text mining are good for in hu-
manities research, particularly literary studies. Were we in a
social sciences discipline that routinely contends with large
amounts of data or even perhaps a humanities discipline like
history we would not have to work quite so hard. Literary
scholars, however—here the force of Moretti's arguments
make themselves felt—traditionally do not contend with
very large amounts of data in their research. A signifcant
component of our work is therefore basic research in the
most literal sense: what kinds of questions do we seek to
answer in literary studies and how can data mining help, or—
more interestingly—what new kinds of questions can data
mining provoke? (As a sidebar, we tried to answer that frst
one inductively. We compiled a list of verbs occurring in criti-
cal essays on 18th- and 19th-century British and American
literature from journals in Project Muse that never or rarely
occur in the American National Corpus, which is newspaper
writing for the most part. In short, a portrait of a profession.)
But the barriers to entry are non-trivial. To engage in data
mining on its own turf demands fuency in terms like naïve
Bayesian analysis, cosine similarity matrices, features, vec-
tors, dendograms, decision trees, and neural networks. On
the one hand we don't want to black box this stuf. We also
don't want to build a system so intimidating that one needs
an advanced degree in information science just to approach it.
Data mining and visualization are traditionally perceived
as problem solving technologies. Te canonical instance is
Don Swanson's early use of text mining in bio-medical lit-
Matthew Kirschenbaum 34 l
erature to identify a possible link between magnesium def-
ciency and migraine headaches. Swanson founds patterns of
association in widely disparate areas of the published litera-
ture to make the initial connection, subsequently confrmed
through a great deal of more traditional medical testing. He
called his fndings "undiscovered public knowledge"—it
was all there, already in the journals, but no one had put the
pieces together because no human reader would likely ever
have been in a position to synthesize all of the relevant ar-
ticles. But we don't typically set out to "solve" problems in the
humanities. We're not trying to fnd the causes of migraines.
We're not trying to "solve" the problem of Emily Dickinson
so that we can move on to the even more urgent problem of
Walt Whitman. So what does data mining have to ofer liter-
ary interpretation?
To start, we're interested in provocation, anomaly, and
outlier results as much or more than in what we think the
system actually gets right. In one early proof of concept
for nora, Steve Ramsay and Bei Yu attempted to classify
Shakespeare's plays according to the traditional categories.
Te data mining got most of them right. Tat's not what was
interesting though, at least not to Steve. What was interesting
was that the data mining thought Othello might be a comedy.
Interesting not because we're assigning any undue authority
to the machine's determinations, but because the question
became what was it about Othello that made it diferent from
the other tragedies? Why did this dumb brute force machine
"read" it as a comedy? As it happens, Steve subsequently
stumbled across a strain of scholarship on the play that makes
exactly that argument.
Tis initial experiment lead us down a path that produced
the following kinds of questions, as recently articulated by
John Unsworth: What patterns would be of interest to liter-
ary scholars? Can we distinguish between patterns that are,
Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation 4 35
for example, characteristic of the English language, and those
that are characteristic of a particular author, work, topic, or
time? Can we extract patterns that are based in things like
plot, or syntax? Or can we just fnd patterns of words? When
is a correlation meaningful, and when is it coincidental?
What does it mean to be "coincidental"? How do we train
sofware to focus on the features that are of interest to re-
searchers, and can that training interface be usable for people
who don't like numbers and do like to read? Can we structure
an interface that is sufciently generalized that it can accom-
modate interest in many diferent kinds of features, without
knowing in advance what they will be? What are meaningful
visualizations, and how do we allow them to instruct their us-
ers on their use, while provoking an appropriate suspicion of
what they appear to convey? How would we evaluate the ef-
fectiveness of our visualizations, or the sofware in general? Is
it succeeding if it surprises us with its results, or if it doesn't?
How can we make visualizations function as interfaces, in an
iterative process that allows the user to explore and tinker?
And how in the hell can we do all this in real time on the
web, when a modest subset of our collection, like the novels
of a single author, contain millions of datapoints, all of which
need to be sifed for these patterns?
Our team at Maryland includes my colleague Martha
Nell Smith in the English department, a long-time Emily
Dickinson scholar. In order to focus our eforts I urged
Martha and the rest of the team here to focus on the question
of erotic language in Dickinson, certainly a well-turned ques-
tion in the scholarship. We began with a corpus of about 200
XML-encoded letters comprising correspondence between
the poet Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington (Gilbert)
Dickinson, her sister-in-law (married to her brother William
Austin). Te demo we produced requires a user to frst rank
an initial set of documents with which to train the automatic
Matthew Kirschenbaum 36 l
classifer. Tis is done on a scale of 1 to 5, a process we call hot
or not for short. Te process is not unlike the NetFlix inter-
face that asks you to evaluate your favorite movies and then
fnds others that the recommender system thinks also might
be to your liking. Tis initial training set is then delivered to
the data mining engine, which proceeds to iterate over the rest
of the document set and return its initial predictions. Users
can see which individual words the data mining seized upon
as potential indicators of the erotic. Te method here, by the
way, is known as naïve bayes. Bayesian probability is the do-
main of probability that deals with non-quantifable events:
not whether a coin will land heads or tails for instance, but
rather the percentage of people who believe the coin might
land on its side; also known as subjective probability. Our
Bayesian classifcation is "naïve" because it deliberately does
not consider relationships and dependencies between words
we might instinctively think go together—"kiss" and "lips,"
for example. Te algorithm merely establishes the presence
or absence of one or more words, and takes their presence or
absence into account when assigning a probability value to
the overall text. ("Yeah, naïve, you, got that part right," I hear
some of you saying. But this is the kind of thing computers
are very good at, and naïve Bayes has been proven surprisingly
reliable in a number of diferent text classifcation domains.)
Right now the demo is hard-coded to the Dickinson corpus,
but it will be general before we are through with nora.
As I hope should be clear, by far the least interesting as-
pect of this (to us) would be the machine's defnitive conclu-
sion as to whether Emily is hot or not (we think the answer to
that is rather obvious). No, we're interested in the data min-
ing's capacity for provocation. Here, for example, is Smith on
some early results, when the word "mine" ranked high on the
list of words the data mining thought might be hot:
Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation 4 37
Te minute I saw it, I had one of those "I knew that"
moments. Besides possessiveness, "mine" connotes
delving deep, plumbing, penetrating—all things we
associate with the erotic at one point or another. And
Emily Dickinson was, by her own accounting and
metaphor, a diver who relished going for the pearls.
So "mine" should have been identifed as a "likely hot"
word, but has not been, oddly enough, in the exten-
sive literature on Dickinson's desires. Same goes for
"write"—oh to leave a piece of oneself with, for, the
beloved. To "write" is to present oneself, or a piece
of oneself, physically—and noting that the data min-
ing was picking up both "write" when recorded by
Dickinson and "write" in the [XML] header [where
it would indicate a letter] led the three of us to a "can
we teach a computer to recognize tone" discussion.
I wonder, remembering Dickinson's "A pen has so
many infections and a voice but one" what the hu-
man machine can do, what the human machine does
(recognizing, identifying tone) what we think we're
doing when we're so damned sure of ourselves. So the
data mining has made me plumb much more deeply
into little four- and fve-letter words, the function
of which I thought I was already sure, and has also
enabled me to expand and deepen some critical con-
nections I've been making for the last 20 years.
We're currently in the midst of a second, larger experi-
ment on reading sentimental novels from the Early American
Fiction Collection at the University of Virginia. Te steps
we're following run something like this: Stage 1. Evaluate
the use of text-mining on a small set of "core" sentimental
novels. We will label a subset of the chapters (the training set)
with a score indicating a level of sentimentalism, and then see
how text mining classifes the remaining chapters from those
novels. (Texts: Charlotte, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Incidents in the
Matthew Kirschenbaum 38 l
Life of a Slave Girl.) Stage 2. Two more novels will be added
to the set to evaluate how well the processes work when
more texts by the same authors are added to the set of works
studied. (Texts added: Charlotte's Daughter, Te Minister's
Wooing.) Stage 3. Te texts added will be those that scholars
recognize as exhibiting sentimentalism, though some may
not be as consistently sentimental chapter-by-chapter as the
"core" set used earlier. In this experiment there will be more
focus on gaining insights on sentimentalism and these novels
than in previous experiments. (Some likely texts: Clotelle, Te
Lamplighter, Te Coquette, Hobomok.) Stage 4. Using a text-
mining model that was developed to identify chapters with
strong sentimentalism, use text-mining on a set of works that
are considered by scholars not to be wholly sentimental or
just not sentimental at all. Tis may identify parts of texts that
contain aspects of sentimentalism, or common word-use that
is sentimental in one novel but not another. In this experi-
ment there will be a strong focus will be on gaining insights
on sentimentalism and these novels. Texts: Moby-Dick, Te
Scarlet Letter, Te Blithedale Romance, Irving's Sketchbook,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.)
Tere's more to say, including what students might
get out of a process like this. Maybe I can address some of
that in the comments. But just one more point here: Louis
Menand, in the current issue of Profession, decries what he
calls the "Captain Kangaroo" model of interdisciplinar-
ity that pervades the humanities: putting a psychologist
on the podium with a Freudian literary critic for a confer-
ence session, for example. When the full nora project team
meets, we have literary scholars, computer scientists, and
information specialists around the table. I have a Ph.D. in
English, but at Maryland, in addition to Martha Nell Smith
and Tanya Clement in the English department I work with
Catherine Plaisant and James Rose in the Human Computer
Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation 4 39
Interaction Lab and Greg Lord at the Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Steve Ramsay at the
University of Georgia is a gifed programmer as well as an
Assistant Professor of English and his graduate student Sara
Steger is both a serious scholar of the 19th century novel and
a serious hacker. Similar teams exist at Virginia and Alberta.
At Illinois, we're joined by personnel from the Graduate
School of Library and Information Science (usually ranked
as the fnest library school in the country) and the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Tis col-
laboration is not always easy or idyllic. As Stanley Fish is said
to have said somewhere, being interdisciplinary is hard. But
the collaboration and mutual respect are real, and they are
indispensable to getting things done. No one person has all of
the expertise and knowledge at hand that a project like nora
demands. I dare say that the graduate students working with
us on the project, both from English and computer/informa-
tion science, are exposed to a very diferent model of schol-
arly production, and diferent work habits, from what would
typically be the case in their disciplines.
Okay, this really is the last thing I want to say: none of us
see this as a messianic enterprise. We're not out to "save" the
humanities. Graphs, maps, and trees may not be for everyone,
nor is data mining I'm sure. But by the same token, none of
what I have been describing here is extracurricular research
for me or any of the other humanities scholars on the project
team. It counts toward the research portion of my annual
distribution of efort for one thing, and the publications and
results go onto my vita. Moreover, I'm a member of the MLA
(dues all paid up) and work from nora has already been pre-
sented there, to interested and receptive audiences. Let's all be
a little careful with the generalizations and assumptions that
have been fying around some of the previous entries. Cheers
again to Te Valve for getting this book event together.
Matthew Kirschenbaum 40 l
originally posted, January 12, 2006
Works Cited
Menand, Louis. "Dangers, Within and Without." Profession
4 41
¬ Book Notes:
Franco Moretti's Graphs,
and Trees
Timothy Burke
Of all the odd things I've heard in recent years, one of the
oddest would be that there are objections in principle to the
research paradigm that Franco Moretti describes in Graphs,
Maps, Trees. It really doesn't matter what your interest in
cultural or literary analysis is: what Moretti proposes is use-
ful grist for your mill. Tere is no requirement to purchase
the entire methodological inventory he makes available, or
to throw overboard close reading or aesthetic appreciation
or focus on a small and rarefed set of texts. Frankly, when
academics propose that we only do what they're doing and
stop doing everything else, I tend to ignore such propositions
in the same way that I ignore commercial hyperbole while
deciding what things I want to buy. I enjoy my iPod: I'm not
required to think that it has changed my life or should lead
me to chuck my stereo out the window. Whatever you think
literary analysis and cultural history are, quantifying the sub-
ject of their domains is a very good thing. Indeed, it is a kind
of knowledge long inferred and rarely acquired, and though
its acquisition unsettles some assumptions made in the in-
ferred known, it equally clarifes and strengthens many other
claims—or least puts new and productive burdens on them.
Tim Burke 42 l
Leave aside for the moment the particular kinds of mod-
elings and confgurations of his data that Moretti describes,
and just stick with the numbers alone. Even in a single nation-
al literature, it used to be hard to make any clear statements
about the total number of books published in a given year or
across a long series of years, and of those books, what propor-
tion were works commonly known, analyzed, or regarded as
defning a "literature." Now Moretti is not really so unusual
or isolated as he might appear in taking an interest in such
quantifcation, as Matt Greenfeld has noted. Tere are many
subfelds of cultural history and literary analysis that have
taken an interest in similar quantifcation and mapping, in
fact, the study of genres has long been shaped by an interest in
cycles of publication of the kind Moretti describes.
Te numbers alone, as Moretti observes, immediately fal-
sify or complicate a series of conventional ways of understand-
ing cultural or literary change over time. When we speak of a
particular novel's infuence, or about how literature changed
in response to a particular work, we're making claims that
ought to involve a total topography of published cultural
work. Until recently, that would not have been the case. If it
turns out that that the lineal descendants of a novel regarded
as infuential are no more than half a percent of all work pub-
lished over a ten-year period, this puts pressure on what we
mean by "infuential." It is not that we are now forbidden to
make the claim, but it constrains and specifes what we can
potentially mean by such a claim. It's just that Moretti does
helps us to realize that ofen, in making such claims, we've
put too much trust in the representations and attributions of
authors and readers, which are just as produced and fantasti-
cal as any publicly uttered memories, just as Gofmanesque
in their performance as any other presentation of self. It is
not that we are forbidden either to speak of that novel's qual-
ity or desirability, of what we (and past readers) might have
Book Notes 4 43
found enticing, inspiring, productive, mysterious in such a
work. Moretti doesn't quantify the production of meaning,
and even if he wanted to, he could not.
Enough on the simple virtues of Moretti's project. Of
course cultural historians and literary critics need numbers,
all of us, and godspeed to the counting and graphing. I'd love
to see someone do something similar with major historical
archives: count all the documents, all of them, and graph for
me their types and forms. Historians live in their archives,
but we don't really know them half as well as we ought to. We
accept the categories that the archive ofers us, and read along
the pathways laid down. In researching consumerism and ma-
terial culture in colonial Zimbabwe, I had to read horizon-
tally across an archive for a topic that the archive itself did
not recognize as lying within its confnes, and the sense I got
of what the archive contained was complicated considerably,
relative to what I'd been expecting. Quantifcation could only
help that understanding further.
What could enhance Moretti's work further? What do
I see as genuine problems and gaps in the models he ofers?
First, a warning: that counting publications only scratch-
es the surface of the totality of cultural production in any giv-
en post-Gutenberg moment. Tis is an issue that Raphael
Samuel wrote about for years with regard to historians
and their archives: that what lands in archives, is recorded as
documentary evidence, is just a small and sometimes highly
unrepresentative selection of the totality of potential grist for
the historian's mill in a given era. Moretti may be counting
formal publication and fnding that what is commonly taken
to represent "national literature" is not typical or representa-
tive, but beyond that lies an even larger domain composed of
the ephemeral, the unpreserved, the unrecorded. In the age of
electronic communication, we should be especially sensitive
to this problem. Even with the Web being archived, much of
Tim Burke 44 l
what has been written within it, and read avidly, is likely to be
lost in the longer-term: asynchronous discussions, epistolary
literatures passing through email, and so on.
Tere will come a point at which a project of quantifying
cultural production in any given historical moment will only
be able to gesture at a vast Oort cloud of unknown writings,
performances, and texts, seeing the gravitational efects of
some unseeable and lost Planet X tugging at the knowable
and quantifed. Tis especially strikes me as an Africanist: we
now have some lovely examples of "market literature"
in Nigeria available in published form, but beyond those
examples, I very much doubt we will ever be able to represent
the numbers or varieties of such texts published. If we con-
fne our understanding of what was typical or normal within
a cultural form to what we can fnd in archives, in libraries,
in catalogs, in records of publication, we'll ultimately have
a deformed conception of the totality. Beyond everything
counted there is always another mountain of the uncount-
able. Historians of slavery turned over every stone and record
to count the total numbers of Africans taken
across the Atlantic, and even then, had to make some educat-
ed guesses, which still fuels (sometimes quite intense) debate
among specialists in that feld. But once some numbers were
in hand, those historians realized that making any statements
about their meaning depended on another set of numbers,
namely, how many people there were in West and Equatorial
Africa at any given moment in any given society, what the
fertility rates were in those places, the numbers of men and
women, and so on. All numbers which, frankly, are never go-
ing to be tallied through anything besides serious guesswork.
Te second thing that occurs to me on reading Moretti
is that we know quantifying publication and quantifying
discrete elements (tropes, places, and so on) within publica-
tions doesn't tell us half so much as we might think about
Book Notes 4 45
the quantifcation of readership and circulation. Again,
maybe it's because I'm an Africanist that I'm especially wary
in this regard. You can count up the numbers of newspapers
published in a decade in southern Africa, including ones pre-
sumptively aimed at African audiences. You would be mak-
ing a big mistake to assume that such numbers tell you how
many people were reading or consuming those newspapers.
We know from historical and ethnographic work that the
literate ofen read or reinterpreted newspapers for the illiter-
ate, and that a single copy of a publication was ofen passed
around many readers. Texts travel through readerships in
ways that numbers do not describe very well. Here I'd look
to Elizabeth Hofmeyr's fantastic book on the transnational
history of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress for some insight,
for a tracing of how a single work can traverse readerships
in ways not precisely correlated with its appearance in librar-
ies, archives, or even within texts that invoke, allude or cite
Bunyan. Tere ought to be a sociology and social history of
audience and reading that might complement Moretti's work,
but my intuitive suspicion is that it would also very much
complicate the claims he would like to make. I also think that
the sociology of authorship and publication would be a use-
ful complement to Moretti: to know who knows whom, who
reads whom, and to which outlets and forms of publication
they relate strikes me as retaining its importance.
Te most important concern I have about Moretti is
that I think he has the same problem that the Annalistes and
world-systems analysts have had with modernity: a difculty
explaining rupture, breach, or novelty. Novelty here in mul-
tiple senses: as Elif Batuman observes, the novel-form is what
gets marked of in Moretti as something not explained. In
world-systems history, this problem has lately been exagger-
ated to extremes by some of the founding practitioners in the
feld, as in Andre Gunder Frank's argument late in his life that
Tim Burke 46 l
the contemporary world-system is part of a continuous fve-
thousand year old history, that modernity or the rise of the
West is a temporary or epiphenomenal speed bump in a well-
worn road, not anything genuinely new. Te problem with
a divergent tree of literary or cultural history is that it has a
hard time explaining the appearance of genuinely new forms
or genres: it is forced always to insist on a fundamental conti-
nuity. Te best that the world-systems historians could do, if
they didn't want to follow Frank's argument that modernity
or the rise of the West was an illusion, was either to insist on
materialist explanations of rupture (new technologies, new
means of production) or to ofer shopworn dialectics.
In evolutionary terms, Moretti is something of a gradu-
alist; my impulse is to throw up the cultural equivalent of
punctuated equilibria in reply, to insist that some genres and
forms do not descend gracefully from predicates but emerge
abruptly, catastrophically, like Aphrodite stepping from the
waves. Te evolutionary metaphor is a powerful one, but you
want to take in even more of it than Moretti does. For one, it's
fne to talk about the death of forms and genres, about how
divergence fuels convergence that fuels more divergence. You
can't have a metaphor that invokes evolution or speciation
without death, or at least the removal of specialized forms.
But it begs the question (and Moretti knows that it does) of
what the ftness landscape is for cultural forms.
'Emerge' in fact is the operative verb here: I think
Moretti's trees in particular could beneft enormously from
reference to the body of work subsumed under the heading
of "emergence" or "complexity theory." Because there is an
answer within that body of work to Moretti's question: what
explains the divergence of literary forms? It's not an espe-
cially comforting answer, perhaps, for either Moretti or some
of his critics, because it may eschew some deep underlying
explanatory principle for why some genres, tropes, modes
Book Notes 4 47
of literary representation produce an explosion of divergent
forms and why others die. In an emergent system, the place
within the topology of the system where complex structures
appear may be efectively random. If we take Moretti's exam-
ple of Sherlock Holmes, it might be that an evolutionary tree
of British fction in the last half of the 19th Century would
help us to understand why the environment was friendly
to "detective fction," what the conditions of the cultural
soil were like for the growing of a new tree. But as for how
Doyle's stories set the conventions of a genre and others die,
are forgotten or wither, some of that might be simply termed
"dumb luck". Te precise moment at which a genre crystallizes
may involve accidents of readership, circulation, publication
and imitation. We are not required to explain that moment
by arguing that Doyle somehow uniquely intuited the needs
and desires of a reading public, or was distinguished through
extraordinary ability. I'm echoing Gould's Wonderful Life
here very consciously. Tis is a rebuke of traditional liter-
ary theory, historicist literary theory and even Moretti all at
once: all of them assume that there is a rational way to explain
cultural reproduction which relates the successful, generative
or meaningful text to some underlying condition of its being:
an ideological or discursive ft to its environment, a skillful or
superior authorial creation of an aesthetic, or some undiscov-
ered underlying "law" of cycles and divergences. Here maybe
Moretti needs to go the next step rather than running back
for the materialist security blanket as he does in closing the
Te accidental and the emergent are also, however, where
we might reopen the door to agency, creativity and the will
of the author and reader again. Because another thing that
appears in literary and cultural history is the unpredictable
generativity of authors and readers who reach from a high
branch far back down the tree to create some new possibility
Tim Burke 48 l
of representation, who take what was a junk gene in DNA of
culture and from it express some meaning or representation
that was deemed impossible the day before. Sometimes such
authors are just Carlo Ginzberg's Menocchio, envisioning
private cultural worlds that die or are forgotten; sometimes
they are better situated, diferently located, or even, dare
we say it, more imaginative or skillful in how they excavate
the literary past in order to produce new possibility. Just as
I would in the end say that modernity is an emergent and
in some ways accidental social structure which in turn cre-
ates the possibility for individual agency that then generates
still other emergent forms through will, choice or deliberate
selection, I think you can reconcile the agency of authors and
readers with Moretti's graphs, maps and trees, but it does take
coloring outside his lines to do so.
originally posted, January 13, 2006
Works Cited
Hofmeyr, Isabel. Te Portable Bunyan: A Transnational
History of "Te Pilgrim's Progress." Princeton University
Press (2003).
4 49
C A Brief Note
on Moretti
and Science Fiction
Adam Roberts
Towards the end of "Graphs," Moretti touches briefy on SF:
neither Detective Fiction nor SF, he says, are included on
his chart, "although both genres achieve their modern form
about 1890 (Doyle, Wells) and undergo a major change in
the 1920s, in step with the overall pattern." Nevertheless, he
concedes, "their long duration seems to require a diferent
Well, I've just published the result of several years work
designed to argue the case that SF has enjoyed a longer du-
ration even than Moretti is inclined to allow. Not that he
takes an unusual position with regard to the genre. Tere
are, in a nutshell, three main views as to when SF "began":
it began with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818; it began
with H. G. Wells's Time Machine in 1895; it began with
Hugo Gernsback's magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, and
Gernsback's prosodically-hobbledehoy coinage "scientifc-
tion." Moretti is arguing, broadly, that novel genres have
about a quarter-century lifespan, which, even if we chose the
latest possible starting place as a launching point, does indeed
give SF a "long duration."
In my book, however, I try to make the case for the "long
history" of SF. I argue that science fction began at the be-
ginning of the seventeenth-century, with Kepler's Somnium
(written c.1600, published 1634). My argument is more
Adam Roberts 50 l
complicated than this. But for now I want to outline one way
in which my 400-year version of SF chimes with Moretti's
very persuasive claims for a "generational" structure to the
development of novelistic forms. I proceed without teams of
researchers, graphs, or indeed anything other than the brain-
cram of only recently having fnished writing my Palgrave
book—which is to say, I proceed tentatively. But if Moretti is
right then perhaps we need to be looking at SF not so much
as a "novelistic genre" and more as a cultural mode; for we
fnd within it certain approximately generational "vogues,"
which might be sketched as follows:
1. 1600s-1650s: Lunar adventure. Kepler's Somnium
1600-36; John Wilkins, Te Discovery of a World in
the Moone (1638); William Godwin Te Man in the
Moone (1638); Cyrano de Bergerac, L'Autre Monde
ou les Etats et Empires de la lune [Voyage dans la
Lune] (1657).
2. 1650s-1690s: Philosophical speculation and
"the plurality of worlds." Athanasius Kircher, Iter
exstaticum coeleste (1656); Bernard de Fontenelle,
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686); Gabriel
Daniel, Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690).
3. 1700s-1750s: Te alien as fantastical humanoid
(encountered on earth, within earth or near above
earth). Jonathan Swif, Gulliver's Travels (1726);
Voltaire's Micromégas (1750); Tomas Gray, "Luna
habitabilis" (1737); Ludvig Holberg, Nikolai Klimi
iter subterraneum (1741); Robert Paltock, Te Life
and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750).
4. 1750s-1790s: Te fantastic voyage as satiric-comic
bufoonery (ofen with pointed political allegory);
this is of course something already noticeable in Swif
A Brief Note 4 51
and Voltaire, but made much coarser, ruder and more
obvious in: "Sir Humphrey Lunatic," A Trip to the
Moon: Containing an Account of the Island of Noibla
(1764); Tobias Smollett, Te History and Adventures
of an Atom (1769), William Tomson's Te Man in
the Moon; or, Travels into the Lunar Regions by the
Man of the People (1783) and the two anonymous
works A Journey Lately Performed Trough the Air in
an Aerostatic Globe (1784) and A Voyage to the Moon,
Strongly Recommended to All Lovers of Real Freedom
5. 1760s-1800s: Utopian, and future fctions. Tese
two things, perhaps unsurprisingly, go together
with and reinforce the climate that produced the
French Revolution and its afermath: the anonymous
Te Reign of George VI: 1900-1925 (1763); Louis
Sebastien Mercier, L'An 2440 (1771); Nicolas-Edme
Restif de la Bretonne, La découverte australe par
un homme volant (1781); John Wessel Anno 7603
(1781); Restif, Les Posthumes (1805).
6. 1810s-1850s: Monsters, Mummies, Automata:
Gothic Heritage SF [Hofman, Der Sandmann
(1816); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Jane
Loudon, Te Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second
Century (1827)].
7. 1800s-1850s. Tales of the far future/last man
tales. Cousin de Grainville Le dernier homme (1805);
Mary Shelley, Te Last Man (1826); Felix Bodin, Le
Roman de l'avenir (1834); Prince Vladimir Odoevsky,
"4338 i-god" ("Te year 4338," 1840); R. F. Williams,
Eureka: a Prophesy of the Future (1837); Tennyson
"Locksley Hall" (1841); Anon, Te Air Battle. A
Vision of the Future (1859).
Adam Roberts 52 l
8. 1860s-1890s: Travel through the solar system by
Anti-Gravity devices. Te frst novel to use this de-
vice is Joseph Atterley, A Voyage to the Moon (1827),
but it doesn't really get going until later in the cen-
tury with: "Chrysostom Trueman," Te History of a
Voyage to the Moon (1864); Percy Greg, Across the
Zodiac: the Story of a Wrecked Record (1880); John
Jacob Astor, A Journey to Other Worlds (1894); Frank
Stockton, "A Tale of Negative Gravity" (1884); H. G.
Wells" Te First Men in the Moon (1901).
9. 1870-1900s: Near-future Invasion fctions.
Chesney, Te Battle of Dorking (1871); Horace
Lester's Te Taking of Dover (1888); Louis Tracy,
Te Final War (1896); Erskine Childers, Te Riddle
of the Sands (1903); William Le Quex, Te Invasion
of 1910: With a Full Account of the Siege of London
10. 1880s-1910s: Utopias. Edward Bellamy, Looking
Backward 2000-1887 (1888); William Morris, News
From Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest (1890); H. G.
Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905); Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Herland (1915).
11. 1890s-1920s: Interplanetary confict. Kurd
Lasswitz, Auf Zwei Planeten (1897); H. G. Wells,
Te War of the Worlds (1898); Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Under the Moons of Mars (published in book form as
A Princess of Mars, 1912).
12. 1910s-1930s: Gernsbackian SF: frst phase of
Pulp SF. Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-
12); E. E. Doc Smith, Te Skylark of Space (1928);
A Brief Note 4 53
Triplanetary (1934); Jack Williamson, Te Legion of
Space (1934).
13. 1920s-1930s: Spectacle and Monsters: frst phase
of SF cinema. Rene Clair, Paris qui dort (1923); Fritz
Lang, Metropolis (1926); James Whale, Frankenstein
(1931); Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,
King Kong (1933); William Cameron Menzies,
Tings to Come (1936).
14. 1920s-1940s. Machinic Dystopia. Yevgeny
Zamiatin, We (1920); Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927);
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932); Rene
Barjavel, Ravage (1943); Hermann Kasack, Die Stadt
hinter dem Strom (1946), George Orwell's Nineteen-
Eighty Four (1949).
15. 1930s-1950s: Campbellian or "Golden Age" SF.
John W. Campbell becomes editor of Astounding
(1938); Robert Heinlein, "Te Roads Must Roll"
(1940); Isaac Asimov "Nightfall" (1941); A. E. Van
Vogt, Slan (1946); Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers
16. Late 1930-1960s: Superhero Comics. Superman
(from 1938); "Captain Marvel," (Whiz Comics from
1940); Batman (from 1940); "Captain America"
(from 1941); John Broome and Gil Kane's reinven-
tion of "Te Green Lantern" (from 1959); Te
Fantastic Four (from 1961); Spider-Man (from
1962); X-Men (from 1963); Te Silver Surfer (from
17. 1950s-1960s: Classic SF Cinema Irving Pichel,
Destination Moon (1950); Inoshiro Honda, Gojira
(1954); Fred McLeod Wilcox, Forbidden Planet
Adam Roberts 54 l
(1956); Don Siegel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956); George Pal, Te Time Machine (1960).
18. 1950s-1960s: Cosy-catastrophes. John
Wyndham, Day of the Trifds (1950); Arthur C.
Clarke, Childhood's End (1953); John Wyndham,
Te Midwich Cuckoos (1957); John Christopher, Te
World in Winter (1962).
19. Late 1950s-1980s: Messianic and Religious SF.
James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958); Walter
Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959); Robert
Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); Frank
Herbert, Dune (1965); Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
(1967); Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (1969);
Sheri Tepper, Grass (1989); Dan Simmons, Hyperion
(1989), Gene Wolfe, Book of the Long Sun (1993-96).
20. 1960s. Psychedelic or Hallucinatory SF. Philip K
Dick, Te Tree Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965);
Michael Moorcock, Te Final Programme (1969);
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968);
Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969); David Bowie, "Space
Oddity" (1969).
21. 1960s-1980s. Gender SF. Ursula Le Guin,
Te Lef Hand of Darkness (1969); Joanna Russ,
Te Female Man (1975); Margaret Atwood, Te
Handmaid's Tale (1985); Sheri Tepper, Te Gate to
Women's Country (1988).
22. 1977-2000s. Blockbuster SF Cinema. George
Lucas, Star Wars (1977); Steven Spielberg, Close
Encounters of the Tird Kind (1977); Ridley Scott,
Alien (1979); Spielberg, E.T. (1982); James Cameron,
A Brief Note 4 55
Terminator (1984); Spielberg, War of the Worlds
23. 1980-2000s. Cyberpunk. Ridley Scott, Blade
Runner (1982); William Gibson, Neuromancer
(1984), Masamune Shirow, Kokaku Kidotai ("Ghost
in the Shell" 1991), Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
(1994), Wachowski brothers, Matrix trilogy
A couple of notes on this. Firstly, of course there's a lot of
wiggle-room in these little categories. Tey've been arrived
at subjectively and are meant to identify the core vogues for
their respective topics rather than the exhaustive categoriza-
tion of the feld. (So for instance, obviously, plenty of uto-
pias were written afer 1915; although I'd still argue that the
immediate wake of Bellamy's book saw the real heart of the
vogue). Secondly, I'm aware that were I to plot these out on a
graph they'd look a lot like the graph in "Graphs" … Figure 9,
to be specifc. Make of that what you will.
originally posted, January 13, 2006
Works Cited
Roberts, Adam. Te History of Science Fiction. Palgrave, 2006.
56 l
C Maps, Iconic
William Benzon
Tough I am rather interested in maps, I admit to being a bit
puzzled by the maps chapter of Moretti's book. Part of my
problem is that I am comfortable, not only with the iconic
maps of physical space that Moretti uses, but with the notion
of a cognitive map as used by psychologists and neuroscien-
tists, and with abstract maps of conceptual spaces used by
cognitive and computer scientists. I have given considerable
thought to the use of those abstract maps of conceptual
spaces in the study of (literary) textual semantics. Moretti is
not doing that sort of thing in this chapter, which is fne. My
problem is that I don't quite see how to relate what he has
done with iconic maps to thinking that I—and others—have
done in terms of abstract conceptual maps.
I say this, not as a criticism of his chapter, but as a state-
ment of my difculty in engaging with that chapter. Tis
document is a set of comments around and about that, but
arriving at no particular conclusion. It is an essay into pos-
sible sites of exploration.
Cognitive Maps
Let me start with the cognitive map, which is a neuro-cog-
nitive structure through which an animal "represents" the
external world. Te nature of this representation is of consid-
Maps, Iconic and Abstract 4 57
erable interest to psychologists and has attracted a good deal
of attention. Tis work is closely related to the mechanisms
by which animals navigate from one place to another. I have,
at one time or another, read some of this literature, but I am
not expert in it. Te following remarks are meant to be no
more than reasonable and indicative.
Animals are creatures of habit. Tey live in relatively fxed
territories where various places serve various needs. Tere is a
privileged place that serves as home base and there are various
other places where the animal fnds food and water, or danger.
Many animals migrate with the seasons, sometimes over con-
siderable distances. Finally, we should note that most animals
are considerably more sensitive to odors than we are. Tey
smell their way about the world. How is all this represented
in the animal's brain?
Tere is no reason to believe that cognitive maps are like
iconic maps except, rather than being inscribed in the dirt, or
on a rock, or imprinted on paper, they are somehow inscribed
in neural tissue. Tey seem to be more like lists of signifcant
places intertwined with bearings and headings between one
place and another. Te vital signifcance of these places is part
and parcel of the map; the "map" is not a neutral spatial sub-
strate to which vital signifcance is later attached. Te space
of cognitive maps is not merely about physical position; it is
about needs and satisfers, vantage points and opportunities
for action.
Given the importance of local and distant geography to
animals, it is clear that the neural systems that map that geog-
raphy must be sophisticated and complex (and have evolved
over hundreds of millions of years). Other than the system
for interpersonal relationships, these may be the most sophis-
ticated neural systems we have. Te myth narratives Levi-
Strauss has analyzed in, e.g. Te Raw and the Cooked, would
appear to intertwine these two neuro-cognitive systems, the
geographical and the social.
William Benzon 58 l
Vital signifcance seems central to Moretti's maps. It is
not just that things happen in diferent places, but that difer-
ent kinds of things happen at diferent kinds of places. And
where people tell stories about the world around them, those
stories will refect the vital structure of that world.
One wonders how conscious were the writers of the
geographic structure of their world. Some years ago Donald
Norman asked graduate students living in a certain building—
some of them for years—to sketch a map of their apartment
(Norman, 139). Many of them made a signifcant error in
their sketch, even thought they were sitting in the apartment
when they made the sketch. Yet, they had no trouble getting
around in the apartment building. Teir mental model was
adequate to that task, but not to the task of making a sketch.
Would the authors of Moretti's texts have been able to make
accurate sketches of the territory they wrote about? We do
not know. But being able to make such sketches is quite a dif-
ferent skill from being able to navigate through the territory.
In drawing his maps Moretti may thus show us something
about the geography of those worlds that the writers them-
selves did not (quite) know.
Tey need not have been conscious of the lay of the
land—as it appears to map makers—in order for it to be
implicit in their narratives. If activities are arrayed in the
world in a certain spatial pattern, and the narratives faithfully
represent those activities, then that pattern will be implicit
in the narrative without the author ever having given explicit
thought to the structure of that array. If the usage of geogra-
phy changes over time, then stories told over the same time
span will refect those changes. Again, without the author's
being explicitly aware of this.
Tis is at the center of Moretti's arguments in the maps
chapter. And perhaps that is what so interests him, that the
narratives accurately refect things of which the authors were
Maps, Iconic and Abstract 4 59
not, need not have been, explicitly aware. Tose patterns turn
up in the narrative because that is how the world works. Te
world creeps into the mind in ways that exceed our explicit
Ring Structures
Because our lives are lived in geography, many of our narra-
tives include journeys within them or take the form of a jour-
ney. Some of those narratives even include maps as part of
the text—I'm thinking of e.g. Treasure Island, King Solomon's
Mines, or, rather more recently, Perdido Street Station. And
then we have those squiggles in Tristram Shandy which map,
not the places of Tristram's or Toby's or Walter's life, but the
digressive mode of the telling.
Tose squiggles are more abstract in their import. Tis
leads me, in Shandian fashion, to ring structures, which are
about the mode of telling. In the small, we have a rhetorical
fgure called chiasmus. For example, "well knows … knows
well" in Shakespeare's Sonnet 129: "Tis the world well
knows, that none knows well . . . . " But such inversions ap-
pear in longer texts. (And they are an explicit part of the
arsenal of melodic variation and development in baroque
counterpoint.) A narrative will unfold through a series of
steps to a mid-point and then trace its way back through the
same series of steps, but in reverse, thus:
Mary Douglas has been investigating ring structure in
books of the Old Testament, while I have found it in Osamu
Tezuka's graphic novel, Metropolis. Te fact that rings are
symmetrical about a mid-point suggests to me that they may
ultimately depend on the cognitive structures we use for use
for spatial navigation. If you travel from location A to N and
William Benzon 60 l
then back you will pass the same landmarks on each half of
the journey, but in reverse order. If things of interest and con-
sequence happen to you along the way, both going and com-
ing, then you may have a narrative that is interesting as well.
But the ring structure of Tezuka's narrative cannot be
explained through fdelity to an external geography. For it is
not physical movement in space that takes the form of a ring,
nor the deployment of locations in space. Tezuka's narrative is
more like a picture within a frame3 within a frame2 within a
frame1, where you start at the outermost frame, move to the
next, the next, then the picture, and then you turn around
and go back out through the series of frames. We can think
of frame1 as the public world at large; frame2 is an under-
ground world of evil conspirators and robot slaves; while
frame3 is a children's world, of home, schoolhouse, and play-
ground. (Te picture itself has starting revelations.) Beyond
the fact that frame2 is underground, there is no explicit sense
the geographic relationships between these realms nor even
of diferent locations within each of the realms.
Tere is no particular reason to believe that Tezuka
achieved this efect through conscious deliberation. Te ring
structure I've outlined is not at all obvious; uncovering it
takes a bit of analytical work. Whatever forces are at work in
this ring seem to me more mysterious than the material forces
working on the English and German geography arrayed in
the narratives Moretti examines. In those narratives the mind
mirrors the external world. In Tezuka it is not clear that the
mind is mirroring anything at all.
Note that these ring-form narrative are diferent from the
rings Moretti talks about. In his discussion of village narratives
he illustrates physical rings in the geography that is the setting
for narratives. Certain things happen in the center, other things
happen closer to the periphery. But nowhere does he talk about
individual narratives having episodes arrayed in a cyclic fashion.
Maps, Iconic and Abstract 4 61
Tus the geographic ring and the narrative ring are dif-
ferent and independent phenomenon. Yet there is the pos-
sibility that the narrative ring ultimately depends on neural
structures that arose for the purpose of navigating the physi-
cal world. Te narrative ring is more abstract. Let us now
consider a diferent kind of navigational abstraction.
Te Method of Loci
[Here I simply quote from an old article of mine on Visual
Tinking (Benzon 1990)]:
Te locus classicus for any discussion of visual
thinking is the method of loci, a technique for aiding
memory invented by Greek rhetoricians and which,
over a course of centuries, served as the starting point
for a great deal of speculation and practical elabora-
tion—an intellectual tradition which has been admi-
rably examined by Frances Yates. Te idea is simple.
Choose some fairly elaborate building, a temple was
usually suggested, and walk through it several times
along a set path, memorizing what you see at various
fxed points on the path. Tese points are the loci
which are the key to the method. Once you have
this path frmly in mind so that you can call it up at
will, you are ready to use it as a memory aid. If, for
example, you want to deliver a speech from memory,
you conduct an imaginary walk through your temple.
At the frst locus you create a vivid image which is
related to the frst point in your speech and then
you "store" that image at the locus. You repeat the
process for each successive point in the speech until
all of the points have been stored away in the loci on
the path through the temple. Ten, when you give
your speech you simply start of on the imaginary
path, retrieving your ideas from each locus in turn.
William Benzon 62 l
Te technique could also be used for memorizing a
speech word-for-word. In this case, instead of storing
ideas at a loci, one stored individual words.
Te method of loci has become a central part of our "mem-
ory improvement" lore. Further, the efectiveness of this
technique has been verifed in psychological laboratories.
According to Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist, it even
works for people who deny that they have mental images.
What is interesting about this technique is that it in-
volves the deliberate creation of a cognitive model that is
afectively and motivationally neutral. One memorizes a par-
ticular physical space simply as a set of loci and paths between
them. Te loci have no intrinsic signifcance. Rather, they are
mental "pigeon holes" in which one can place things that do
have signifcance. What kind of "things"? Anything you can
Notice, in particular, how there is no necessary rela-
tionship between the topographic structure of the loci and
the logical structure of whatever is committed to memory
through those loci. If you were to listen to someone deliver
a speech which he or she had committed to memory using
the method of loci, there would be nothing in the speech that
would betray the building used to establish the loci and the
path used to traverse them. It would, in principle, be possible
for two people to deliver pretty much the same speech, while
using diferent buildings as their memory model.
Tat, in general, is the problem we face in trying to fgure
out how the mind deals with literary texts. However visible
the texts, the mind's mechanisms are hidden. Moretti's maps
tell us something of how the mind fnds the world. But just
how is it that the world makes its way into the mind there to
be transformed into texts? Tat process remains invisible.
originally posted, January 14, 2006
Maps, Iconic and Abstract 4 63
Works Cited
Benzon, William "Visual Tinking," A. Kent and J. G.
Williams, Eds. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and
Technology. Volume 23, supplement 8. Marcel Dekker,
1990, 411-427.
Norman, D. A. "Memory, Knowledge, and the Answering of
Questions.) Contemporary Issues in Cognitive Psychology:
Te Loyola Symposium. R. L. Solso, ed. Wiley, 1973,
64 l
C a Hundred
eric hayot
Part I: Let a hundred fowers bloom
Moretti's work only becomes a "problem" for literary stud-
ies when it claims that its method ought to replace the ones
currently in use. So far as I know it does not. Ergo: what's the
problem? Let a hundred fowers bloom. Te more ways we
have of studying what we're interested in, the better.
Tere may be problems with the metaphors or with the
statistics Moretti uses. Christopher Prendergast makes the
case against certain of Moretti's moves fairly clear in his
NLR response (the short version, focused on the argument
in "Trees": there's no reason to suppose culture functions like
nature). Tis is fne; the "rest" of literary studies is also a place
flled with people arguing about the validity of one method-
ology or another. No one says that we should all stop using
etymologies to close read because Heidegger knowingly used
false ones. Let a hundred fowers bloom.
If it can be improved or modifed—and of course it
can—then Moretti's method (call it distant reading, Annales-
style longue durée historicism, or sociology of literature) will
beneft from having more people engaged in it. Presumably
these people will disagree. Tis will increase the number of
epistemological possibilities, some of which will prove more
convincing than others. Perhaps even that movement could
A Hundred Flowers 4 65
be the subject of a Moretti-style evolutionary study. In any
case: let a hundred fowers bloom.
Why, then, is Moretti's work controversial? Partly be-
cause what he is doing is new and interesting, and partly be-
cause it comes at a moment when the last major wave of new
ideas seems to have foundered. Many people seem to want a
new Teory to replace the exhausted old Teory. Tese peo-
ple need to relax. Moretti is like a guy who shows up to the
party with liquor right afer the keg has been emptied. Part of
why he is welcome is because he is saving some people from
boredom or despair (he writes: "it is precisely in the name of
theoretical knowledge that 'Teory' should be forgotten, and
replaced with the extraordinary array of conceptual construc-
tions—theories, plural, and with a lower case 't'—developed
by the natural and the social sciences" ("Trees," 63).) People
who are desperate to cling to the old keg—either because
they have grown to love it, or because they think there's still
beer in there—sometimes feel threatened by the new guy at
the party, and want to say that he shouldn't be at the party
at all. But surely there's room for the beer drinkers and the
liquor drinkers in the room; let a hundred fowers bloom. In
this I am more catholic than Moretti himself, who in the lines
I cite above seems to want everyone to move away from the
keg and get to the good stuf they're drinking over at the sci-
ence fraternities.
From another perspective what Moretti is doing is not
that new at all. Louis Menand points out in a Profession
2005 essay that literary studies has always transformed itself
by borrowing wholesale from other disciplinary structures.
"Teory" as a branch (so thick it became a root) of literary
studies produced its momentum out of encounters with lin-
guistics (Saussure, Jakobson), anthropology (Lévi-Strauss),
sociology (the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu), psychology
(Freud, Lacan), history (Canguilhem, Foucault) and phi-
Eric Hayot 66 l
losophy (Derrida, Levinas, Nancy, Lyotard, not to mention
Marx, Hegel, and so on). Te "real" linguists, anthropologists,
sociologists and philosophers go on to decry literary studies'
adulteration of their ideas; rinse and repeat. In this sense the
newness of Moretti is just the kind of newness we in literary
studies have always wanted. I would not be surprised if this
newness operates on 25-year, generational cycles (though in
the academic humanities you might have to account for the
distortions produced by the nine years it takes, on average, to
get a Ph.D).
Will I go on to do Moretti-style studies of literature? No;
close reading mixed with deconstructive theory makes me
happiest. Would I welcome someone doing Moretti's kind of
work as a colleague? Of course I would. Will I suspect such
a colleague of falling too far into sociology and forgetting
about language? Will I wonder if s/he has turned the longue
durée into a fetish? Certainly. But that's what argument and
conversation are for; fowers don't just pollinate themselves.
Part two: what's so funny 'bout peace, love, and
Te most polemical thing Moretti writes appears in the last
paragraph of "Trees," where he says that his approaches "share
a clear preference for explanation over interpretation." Tis
reminds me of Lindsay Waters' recent piece in the Chronicle
(already blogged about on Te Valve by Miriam Burstein
and Daniel Green). Waters claims that a recent book by
Walter Benn Michaels exemplifes what's gone wrong with
English in the past forty years: "the complete and total ascen-
dancy of hermeneutics. Instead of the erotics of art, we've got
the neurotics of art: the meaning-mongering of interpreta-
tion for its own sake."
What's wrong with interpretation? It sucks the life out of
beauty, says Waters. It can't see "the larger structures within
A Hundred Flowers 4 67
which [novels] have meaning in the frst place," says Moretti.
Both these claims seem ridiculous to me, Waters' because he
has no idea what I think of as beautiful, and Moretti's because
of the word "frst."
But that's not really want I want to talk about: rather it
seems interesting to me that two people who couldn't, pre-
sumably, disagree more about what literary studies should
do and be (for Waters "beauty" is not in graphs or maps but
in the inefable experience of reading) both decide to frame
their remarks as an attack on the primacy ("frst" again) of
interpretation. As Prendergast points out in his NLR piece,
these claims are, of course, interpretations. Amateur decon-
struction aside, however (not that Prendergast himself is
either amateur or deconstructive), one might wonder—and
this is a historical question sustained by a close reading—why
right now, in January 2006, "interpretation" has become the
word for what's wrong with literary studies (as Waters points
out, Sontag's "Against Interpretation" is now 40 years old).
A serious historical answer to this question would require
recourse to the kind of resources marshaled by a Nora project
or the gang at Google, or an army of graduate students, or
perhaps just a few more hours of time than I'm willing to
spend on it.
Nonetheless let me gesture towards an answer by sug-
gesting that "interpretation" actually means something difer-
ent in each case. For Waters (as for Sontag) "interpretation"
valorizes the study of the text as a hermeneutic exercise blind
to aesthetic pleasure. Making the text speak as an instance
of pseudo-philosophy (this is what Keats is telling us about
the relation between truth and beauty), pseudo-architecture
(this is how Keats tells us about that relation), or pseudo-
history (this is what Keats tells us about the understanding
of truth and beauty in his era) instrumentalizes the beauty
that is the subject of the text in the "frst" place, and thus
Eric Hayot 68 l
constitutes a kind of technologization of the real that is part
of the life-destroying force of modernity (my rhetoric here
matching Waters', if you care to read his piece).
For Moretti, on the other hand, "interpretation" sug-
gests a kind of belletristic focus on the text at the expense of
the "larger structures" and "temporal cycles" within which
the form, as the subject of a materialist history, operates.
Interpretation does not arrive at the "frst" place of the text
because it fetishizes local meaning at the expense of historical
materialism. Tough Moretti believes that no "single explan-
atory framework may account for the many levels of literary
production and their multiple links with the larger social sys-
tem," what he's interested in are "production" and "social sys-
tems," not interpretations which are themselves presumably
only expressions of those systems or attempts to ignore them.
My theory of the historically negative force of "interpre-
tation" in January 2006 will, it seems, have to account for the
fact that "interpretation" means diferent things to diferent
people who could nonetheless, through a distant enough
reading, be seen to be arguing against the same thing. Does
this "close" (not that close, frankly) reading of "interpretation"
suggest that a more "distant" historical analysis of its appear-
ance has lost all claim to the truth? No, because it still matters,
I think, that the word "interpretation" is used in both cases.
But I am suggesting that such a distant reading without an ac-
companying close reading will be missing out on at least some
of the truth, just as a myopic focus on the diference between
these uses of interpretation will fail to grasp the broader his-
torical context within which they function. Tere is no room
for "frst" or "second" place in such a scheme. Rather there
is an accommodating sense that no one method has all the
answers, one that should produce a corresponding modesty
about interpretive claims.
A Hundred Flowers 4 69
I say it again: let a hundred fowers bloom. Tis is
not a simple metaphor (just ask the ones Mao beheaded).
Blooming is connected to reproduction, which is, as Moretti
knows, a competitive process. In a few generations some fow-
ers will be gone, and new ones will emerge; there's not enough
room in the feld for everyone. Some very good people will be
kept out by the dominant modes of criticism—try writing a
dissertation on "hubris in Byron" these days and see how far
it gets you—and some others will fower perhaps even more
than they deserve, thanks to shifs in the critical winds. But
the feld of literary studies is not the same as a feld in nature,
the diference being that in literature the blooms exert some
control (never as much as they'd like) over their environment.
Letting others bloom requires opening yourself to the pos-
sibility of being taken, or overtaken, by the other fowers in
the feld, allowing yourself to be seduced by the idea that in
the long run someone else is more important than you. Tat
admission can cripple you, or it can return as an afrmation.
Molly, blooming, knew this:
"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the
rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall
I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the
Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as an-
other and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again
yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my
mountain fower and frst I put my arms around him
yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes"
Eric Hayot 70 l
originally posted, January 14, 2006
Works Cited
Menand, Louis. "Dangers, Within and Without." Profession
Waters, Lindsay. "Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea." Te
Chronicle of Higher Education 16 Dec 2005. http://
4 71
² Moretti
franco moretti
Many thanks to everybody writing about the book—and four
brief rejoinders.
Does work like mine belong in a History department,
rather than in English? I take the idea as a compliment— try-
ing to make literary study a part of historical research has al-
ways been a fxation of mine. Does this abolish the pleasure of
reading literature? No—it just means that between the plea-
sure and the knowledge of literature [or at least a large part of
knowledge] there is no continuity. Knowing is not reading.
Are literary cycles limited to the 19th century? I doubt it.
Virtually all the evidence I know of [from studies in French,
British, and other Western European literatures] points to
the existence of genre cycles well before then, and the 20th
century largely confrms the pattern, in literature and outside
[think of war flms, or westerns]. Of course, it remains to be
seen how much of the literary [and cultural] feld is afected
by cycles. But even if it's only 50%, wouldn't that be a signif-
cant fnd?
Is it possible that relying on secondary sources may pro-
duce distortions? Of course. Point out a large enough num-
ber of distortions, and I will abandon the enterprise. But I'm
not going to do so simply because of the "possibility" of a
distortion. I frmly believe in falsifability, but falsifcation is
a matter of fact, not of possibility.
Franco Moretti 72 l
Do maps reveal very little about literature? Well, it de-
pends. Tose of village stories, for instance, bring to light
a type of spatial perception that would be hard to envisage
otherwise. Te map of Paris from the Atlas—especially in
connection with the London maps from the same book—ex-
plains why youth and social class play such diferent roles in
the two traditions. And so on. Still, a lot of people have that
reaction to maps—"Of course things are this way. What's
the big deal?" So, may I suggest a little wager-experiment?
Sometime in the future I'd like to make maps of regional
narratives [Hardy, Verga]. Why don't map-skeptics write in
advance what I will "obviously" fnd—and we compare the
results once the maps are done?
originally posted, January 12, 2006
4 73
¹ Moretti
Responds (II)
franco moretti
Some more thoughts:
First, a few details. I am less alone than I claim. Excellent.
I didn't even know of the existence of the nora project, which
seems very interesting, and I have now several new titles on
my reading list, which is great. As for evolutionary approach-
es, I would be more cautious; some of them—like memetics,
or the recent Literary Animal collection—strike me as naïve
in their disregard for formal analysis, and passion for fuzzy or
crude units of content.
Maps, no, there I am really alone, unfortunately (the idea
of a literary atlas began as a collective project, and I ended up
working on my own only when the frst project was denied
funding, and dissolved). Even Bill Benzon's very interesting post,
as he says right away, is on a diferent type of map (his fnal ques-
tion—how is it that the world makes its way into the mind there
to be transformed into texts?—is however one of the truly Great
Questions in front of us. I wish I knew what to answer).
One caveat for the more optimistic contributors. Te feld
of, loosely speaking, science and literature is full of false starts.
Te best example of quantitative analysis ever done—Burrows'
multivariate analysis of Austen's style—was published 20 years
ago, and has had, if I'm not mistaken, hardly any efects. (No
one has mentioned it in the course of this discussion either.)
We're all working uphill, and I'm not sure it's going to change
Franco Moretti 74 l
Close reading and abstract models, or, interpretation and
explanation. Bill Benzon is absolutely right in saying that
even in the sciences research is not evenly spread, but clus-
ters around specifc issues—the fruit fy is a particularly neat
example, because detective fction is a sort of literary fruit fy
(with few and clear variables, easy to manipulate). But this is
not close reading, it's actually much more similar to the "ex-
periments" (on village stories etc.) that I try to do in the book.
So, I still think that the strategies I outlined are antithetical
to the mainstream of literary criticism. It may be tactically
silly for me to say so now, given that the general consensus is
that what I do could be interesting, as long as it doesn't want
to get rid of current procedures, but what can I do, this is not
a matter of bragging, or of originality (originality, in a book
that borrows all its models?!), or of democracy (a hundred
fowers, yes, and more)— it's a matter of logic. Between inter-
pretation (that tends to make a close reading of a single text)
and explanation (that works with abstract models on a large
groups of texts) I see an antithesis. Not just diference, but an
either/or choice.
Tis said, I understand Eric Hayot's skepticism about
how I formulate the antithesis at the end of the book: I am
not happy with it either, and in the response to Prendergast's
article I will try a diferent take, stressing the causal aspects
of explanation, which are usually absent from interpretation.
In a formula, interpretation posits a relationship between a
meaning and another meaning, and explanation a (causal)
relationship between an external force (or constraint) and
one or more meanings. And then again, it may well be that
the study of literature will always require, or be enriched by,
both close reading and abstraction, interpretations and expla-
nations; but this will amount to saying that literature requires
two conceptually opposite approaches. Which is odd, and
Moretti Responds (II) 4 75
will make for some interesting speculation on why it should
be so.
Finally, Tim Burke's "dumb luck" argument. (My favorite
formulation comes from the extinction specialist David Raup:
"Bad genes or bad luck?") It is certainly possible that dumb
luck plays/played a much larger role than we imagine—prob-
ably larger and larger as we move back in history, and cultural
products can disappear more easily. I will enlarge on this in my
reply to Prendergast, but I may as well admit right away that
every time I have studied competition, success, and failure, I
have never found that luck played a major role (the only one
exception I know: Austen's novels, despite having soldiers, in-
clude no reference to war, unlike most of her contemporaries,
and the so-called "Hundred Years' Peace" that begun in 1815
rewarded her enormously for her choice: sheer external luck
changing the world, and hence the expectations of generations
of readers). (Needless to say, this is not the only ingredient in
Austen's long-term success). But I admire Gould too, and would
have liked to fnd instances of dumb luck. If anyone comes up
with convincing examples, I'd love to see them.
And I do need to add, I don't ignore book history (it's the
starting point of "Graphs," and about 50% of my last book),
nor punctuated equilibria (which I frst applied to literary
history 20 years ago, and have used in the three books I have
written since.)
Tanks again to all of you for the ideas and the challenges.
originally posted, January 15, 2006
76 l
¤© Totality
the Genes of Literature
Jonathan Goodwin
"Suppose at this juncture we were to state the blindingly
obvious: that, whatever their other properties, literary texts
do not possess genes" ("Graphs," 59). So begins the "Perils
of Analogy" section of Christopher Prendergast's response
to Moretti. Notwithstanding the Paris Review interviews, it
does seem difcult to maintain that literature has genes. Does
it have memes, however? Ideologemes? Maybe. And I will
discuss metaphors of cultural transmission and evolutionary
analogies in Moretti's argument.
Te coherence of the meme concept is by no means obvi-
ous, and memes are not by any defnition atomistic. Rukmini
Nair suggests in Narrative Gravity that narrative is adapted to
meme transmission
(205). And the description of the Genre
Evolution Project at the University of Michigan describes
three versions of generic change: Leavis's great man, Lukács'
great circumstance, and Barthes' great form. All are distinct
from the biological model of generic evolution as envisioned
by that project and also by Moretti. Biological evolution is
mostly divergent (gene transfer and other poorly understood
mechanisms being convergent) whereas cultural evolution is
largely convergent with divergence resulting from the contin-
gencies of imperfect transfer. Prendergast criticizes Moretti
for overemphasizing divergence and suggests that it lends
itself analogically to market-reifcation (61).
Jonathan Goodwin 4 77
Moretti ends "Maps" with a quote from D'Arcy
Wentworth Tompson's On Growth and Form: "We rise from
a conception of form to an understanding of the forces which
gave rise to it [. . .] and in the comparison of kindred forms [.
. .] we discern the magnitude and the direction of the forces
which we have sufced to convert the one form into the other"
(103). Te phrase "diagram of forces in equilibrium" is elided
in the quote and appears in the last sentence of the chapter, mi-
nus "equilibrium" (Tompson, 1027). Tompson, translator of
Aristotle's biological treatises, knew better than to use the word
"entelechy" lightly; but I think it relevant here. A morphological
divergence is where a potentiality has become an actuality; and
the Aristotelian connotation of completion or perfection does
not necessarily entail triumphalism, as I think Prendergast sug-
gests. So how to analyze the form of this governing force? Must
we suppose that literature is a machine?
I refer to the Galilean/Newtonian notion of the mechanism:
Te modern scientifc revolution, from Galileo, was
based on the thesis that the world is a great machine,
which could in principle be constructed by a master
artisan, a complex version of the clocks and other
intricate automata that fascinated the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, much as computers have
a provided a stimulus to thought and imagination
in recent years; the change of artifacts has limited
consequences for the basic issue as Alan Turing dem-
onstrated sixty years ago. (66)
Chomsky also observes that Newton refuted forever the
"mechanical philosophy"(67). All that is lef scientifcally is
the study of emergence in various forms.
Supposing that this is true of scientifc theories about
the natural world, is it true of the study of literature? Can
imaginative literature be coherently described as a machine
constructed by a master artisan? How about the novel, spe-
Jonathan Goodwin 78 l
cifcally? Is the novel a species of theory-construction, of
modeling? Does it explain the world by simplifying it, or
does it contain, through extrinsic immanence, an image (or
monad) of everything possible to be believed at the moment
of its production? If not, perhaps the various genres at any
given moment together form the well-rounded totality. "Te
individual work does not do justice to the genres by subsum-
ing itself to them but rather through the confict in which it
long legitimated them, then engendered them, and ultimately
canceled them" (Adorno, 208). You could apply this dialectic,
mutatis mutandis, to organisms and species. Here's Moretti
on the generic speciation-event (or extinction): "where a
genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give
the competitor a chance—when its inner form can no longer
represent the most signifcant aspect 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" ("Maps," 77
I am reminded here of Richard Goldschmidt's "hopeful
monsters" from Te Material Basis of Evolution, a concept
and work reintroduced and recuperated to some extent by
Stephen Jay Gould. Trough developmental mechanisms,
Goldschmidt argues, "a new type may emerge without accu-
mulation of small steps" (251).Tough not atomistic, com-
binable units, ideologemes may serve as an analyzable unit
of developmental constraint. Te word was probably frst
used by Bakhtin and/or Medvedev in Te Formal Method
of Literary Scholarship, and it appears most prominently
in Bakhtin's "Discourse and the Novel" (333-35).
Holquist notes there that Bakhtin intends the term neutrally
(429). Te most infuential discussion of ideologemes is in
Jameson's Te Political Unconscious:
Jonathan Goodwin 4 79
An amphibious formulation whose essential struc-
tural characteristic may be described as its possibility
to manifest itself either as a pseudoidea—a concep-
tual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or
prejudice—or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate
class fantasy about the "collective characters" which
are the classes in opposition. (87)
Jameson further suggests that ideological analysis re-
quires showing how the fnished cultural product is a "com-
plex work of transformation on the ultimate raw material
which is the ideologeme in question" (87).
As Turing wrote in his infuential paper about morpho-
genesis, "Most of an organism, most of the time, is developing
from one pattern into another, rather than from homogene-
ity into a pattern" (71-2). Ideologemes are similar to Turing's
morphogens in that they serve as developmental constraints
on the production of a given text. It's worth supposing that
narrative ecologies are optimally adapted to their historic en-
vironments and there is an inherently perfect transformation
of experience in the act of narrative creation. Te narrative
property constructs abstract models, shares species-invariant
characteristics, and integrates its individual variations into
the totality of the social imagination: Coleridge's distinction
of the primary and secondary imaginations ends by noting
that the latter is "essentially vital" (167). Tis vitality of the
secondary imagination allows the close reader to invent plau-
sible historical claims, and distant readings of the state of the
primary imagination discovers their context.
originally posted, January 24, 2006
Jonathan Goodwin 80 l
Works Cited
Adorno, Teodor W. Aesthetic Teory. ed. G. Adorno and
R.Tiedemann. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. U of Minnesota
Press, 1997.
Bakhtin, M. M. Te Dialogic Imagination. Ed. M. Holquist.
Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. U of Texas Press,
Chomsky, Noam. On Nature and Language. Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Dent, 1956.
Goldschmidt, Richard B. Te Material Basis of Evolution.
1940. Yale University Press, 1982.
Jameson, Fredric. Te Political Unconscious. Cornell
University Press, 1981.
Nair, Rukmini. Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition,
and Culture. Routledge, 2003.
Prendergast, Christopher. "Evolution and Literary History:
A Response to Franco Moretti." New Literary Review 34
( July-August 2005): 40-62.
Tompson, D'Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form.
Macmillan, 1943.
Turing, A. M. "Te Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis."
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Series B, Biological Sciences. 237.641, (Aug 14, 1952):
4 81
¤¤ Distant Reading
Steven Berlin Johnson
Full disclosures frst: Moretti is a friend, and was my advisor
for several years during my grad school days at Columbia in
the early nineties. I was there at the beginning of this project;
I can still remember the slightly bafed silence the followed
his announcement—over dinner with a half dozen grad stu-
dents—that the future of literary criticism was going to lie in
map-making. I spent an insane number of hours generating
some of the frst maps for him over the next year, using some
now-obsolete cartography sofware that was, to say the least,
not optimized for mapping narratives. So perhaps I'm biased
by my fondness for Moretti—or by the desire not to think of
all those hours generating maps as wasted ones—but I really
do think that the two books that eventually emerged out of
this research (Atlas Of Te European Novel and Graphs, Maps,
Trees) constitute a welcome and signifcant turning point in
recent literary criticism. Just the density of ideas in Graphs,
Maps, Trees alone is noteworthy; most scholars would have
spun the analysis of genre cycles into an entire book, but
Moretti gives you ten pages on it, and marches on to the next
case study. It's exhilarating stuf, and I wouldn't have it any
other way, but it does feel like we're going to be spending the
next ten years unpacking some of these examples.
When Jonathan asked me to contribute to this discus-
sion, he suggested one of the topics I might address would be
the connection between my work in Everything Bad Is Good
Steven Berlin Johnson 82 l
For You, and Moretti's model in Graphs, Maps, Trees. As it
happened, Moretti and I had just been exchanging a series
of email messages remarking on how our thinking had devel-
oped along parallel lines since we both lef Columbia. I talk
about this a little in the Appendix to Everything Bad: the shif
from a symbolic model to a systemic model. Most criticism
ultimately involves, in one fashion or another, decoding the
literary work to fnd the hidden meaning that lurks behind
it. What form that meaning takes depends on the kind of
critic you are: the genius of the author, the zeitgeist, the class
struggle, the unconscious, the subaltern, diférance. But the
systemic approach to culture isn't looking for hidden mean-
ing in the same way. Tis is how I described it in Everything
My argument for the existence of the sleeper efect
comes out of an assumption that the landscape of
popular culture involves the clash of competing
forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the
economics of the culture industry, changing techno-
logical platforms. Te specifc ways in which those
forces collide plays a determining role in the type of
popular culture we ultimately consume. Te work of
the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces,
not decode them. Sometimes, for the sake of argu-
ment, I fnd it helpful to imagine culture as a kind
of man-made weather system. Float a mass of warm,
humid air over cold ocean water, and you'll create an
environment in which fog will thrive. Te fog doesn't
appear because it somehow symbolically re-enacts
the clash of warm air and cool water. Fog arrives in-
stead as an emergent efect of that particular system
and its internal dynamics. Te same goes for culture.…
Distant Reading Minds 4 83
Diagramming not decoding: you can hear the Moretti
disciple loud and clear in that language. (You can also hear a
little Manuel DeLanda, for what it's worth.) But the passage
also points to an area that I hope Moretti will turn to next.
You can't analyze the literary system purely from the bird's-
eye-view of distant reading. You need to zoom in as much as
you need to zoom out: all the way to the human brain itself.
Consider this passage from Graphs, Maps, Trees:
Everybody, from the frst readers onwards, had no-
ticed the country walks of Our Village; but no one
had ever refected on the circular pattern they project
on the English countryside, because no one—in the
absence of a map of the book—had ever managed to
actually see it. (53)
Tose readers might not have seen that circular pattern,
but on some level, they must have perceived it; it must have
shaped their experience of Our Village in some meaningful
way. Otherwise, it's just a random pattern, formalist trivia, like
discovering there are the same exact number of words begin-
ning with "c" and "t" in the novel. Te same goes for Conan
Doyle and his rivals: the reading audience isn't consciously
analyzing the formal properties of a stack of detective stories,
and saying: "You know, I really like the ones with decodable
clues." But nonetheless they're somehow processing those
formal innovations, and building a sensibility around them, a
preference for one confguration over the others.
So my question for Moretti is: how does this happen?
How is the reader infuenced by formal properties without
being fully conscious of the infuence? Graphs, Maps, Trees is
silent on the question—understandably so, since he's got his
hands full persuading us of the birds-eye-perspective. But a
systemic theory has to work at all the relevant scales. All the
science and empiricism of distant reading disappears when
Steven Berlin Johnson 84 l
you get down to the level of the reader's mind: we're lef with
watered-down Freud: somehow the reader unconsciously
digests the form, emphasis on "somehow." (I tried my hand
at this approach for a few pages in Everything Bad—explain-
ing how the formal architecture of reward and exploration in
gaming connects to the brain's so-called "seeking circuitry.") In
flling in the gap, I suspect that the cognitive sciences will be
more relevant than evolutionary psychology, despite the fact
that the Darwinian approach to literature has been attracting
all the buzz lately. I'm less interested in where the brain's capac-
ity for apprehending formal variation came from, and more
interested in how it works. No doubt some these cognitive tools
for apprehending literary form will turn out to be spandrels, or
even exclusively the product of cultural training. Tat won't
make those tools any less interesting. But we need to be able
to talk with some rigor about how those semi-conscious assess-
ments take hold in the brain—the same rigor that Moretti has
applied to the system of literature itself. Right now all we have
is superstition …
originally posted, January 16, 2006
4 85
¤C The Next
and a
Modest Garnish
jenny davidson
Something makes me yearn for certain brand-new books like
a smoker plotting how to get her hands on the next cigarette,
so that I will order Kazuo Ishiguro's latest at great expense
from Amazon UK because of a release date three weeks earli-
er than in the US (worth every penny, by the way) or hit three
diferent Cambridge bookstores in search of a non-sold-out
copy of On Beauty in its frst week of publication (perhaps
not so satisfying an investment of time and money). I can't
put my fnger on exactly what produces that yearning in me,
but it is far less likely to be prompted by a work of literary
criticism than by a novel, and I was surprised to fnd myself
coveting Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract
Models for a Literary History to the point of being unwilling
to wait for it to turn up at the library.
Indeed, the book has proved just as enjoyable as I expect-
ed, a highly stimulating read, though not perhaps as shocking
as the fap copy suggests (in addition to the "heretical" count-
ing and mapping there is a great deal of reading and thinking
and arguing of a more familiar humanistic kind). What fol-
lows below: a few refections on the book's style and method-
ology from the perspective of a reader at once seduced and
Jenny Davidson 86 l
rendered wary by a distinctive quality of Moretti's writing
that Elif Batuman has labeled "the irresistible magnetism of the
For me, the puzzle of the book concerns how seriously
we're meant to take Moretti's grand fourishes in celebra-
tion of the quantitative. Moretti is of course aware of the
self-contradictory aspects of his exercise. Following his quite
wonderful bar graphs of the longevity of British novelistic
genres between 1740 and 1915 (all the way from the court-
ship novel through the industrial novel and the school story
to the New Woman novel and the Kailyard School), Moretti
ofers this admission in a footnote:
See here how a quantitative history of literature is
also a profoundly formalist one—especially at the
beginning and at the end of the research process. At
the end, for the reasons we have just seen; and at the
beginning, because a formal concept is usually what
makes quantifcation possible in the frst place: since
a series must be composed of homogeneous objects,
a morphological category is needed—'novel', 'anti-
Jacobin novel', 'comedy', etc.—to establish such ho-
mogeneity. (GMT 25 n. 14)
Is this a damaging admission, or a savvy one? Te lat-
ter, I'd say, but it also only hints at my reservations about the
claims of the chapter on "graphs."
As a scholar working in the feld of eighteenth-century
British literature and culture, I fnd Moretti's work around
these questions fruitful but its distinctiveness or originality
somewhat overstated. You don't have to be a heroic scientifc
pioneer and experimentalist to uncover the patterns in long-
forgotten British novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; Ruth Perry's recent Novel Relations, for instance,
The Next Cigarette 4 87
reaps the rewards of a lifetime of reading eighteenth-century
fction to discern patterns (the rise of the novel of the second
attachment, the trope of the cri de sang) that are as illumi-
nating as Moretti's graphs about literary and social history.
Moretti does not toil alone, in other words, and though his
professional peers may lack his fair, they possess their own
sorts of acumen; I'm thinking in particular of Gary Kelly's
excellent work on the fction of the 1790s and of Katie
Trumpener and Claudia Johnson on the novels of Austen's
generation and beyond. In a footnote to an earlier essay, "Te
Slaughterhouse of Literature," Moretti dismisses as socially
insignifcant the canon-bashing English professors who want
simply to replace Jane Austen with Amelia Opie, but read-
ing Opie's fction alongside Austen's ofers unusually clear
and convincing evidence for why it's worth reading "minor"
authors alongside their "major" contemporaries.
in an essay called "Recovering Ellen Pickering," Poovey—
prompted by the wording of an invitation from the British
Women Writers Association—"gave some thought to the
entire project of canon revision" and "decided to choose, vir-
tually at random, a woman writer I had never heard of, read
as much of her work as I could, then determine how, if at all,
I could 'recover' this writer for modern scholars and students."
And she includes some great diagrams! (Poovey's essay is fol-
lowed by thoughtful responses from Margaret Homans and
Jill Campbell, both well worth a look.)
Moretti isn't interested in chronicling these parallel de-
velopments in recent scholarship; nor does he acknowledge
what is at the very least a broad family resemblance between
his own work and that of another remarkable literary scholar,
Wai Chee Dimock, who has also recently invoked Braudel
in her call for the study of culture to become "planetary in
Jenny Davidson 88 l
Graphs, Maps, Trees is a short manifesto, of course, a call
for change rather than a survey of the feld, so such exclu-
sions are entirely understandable. More troubling for me is
the undisputable fact that the vast quantitative-collaborative
research project whose virtues Moretti propounds has some-
thing Pied-Piper-esque about it; without Moretti's own
imagination and critical intelligence and deep knowledge
of world literature driving it, doesn't the soul go out of the
whole enterprise? We're speaking here about a scholar whose
powerful intellect and imaginative scope have meant that he
himself can make wonderful use of the human-graduate-stu-
dent-equivalent of a commodity-cluster supercomputer; but
without Moretti directing the whole enterprise, the prospects
for communal enrichment come to look rather more bleak.
I don't dispute the striking insightfulness of Moretti's
treatment of the distinction between village stories and
provincial novels, in other words; he concludes in this case
that villages and regions are homelands, whereas provinces
are defned against a more desirable metropolitan center
and are thus "'negative' entities, defned by what is not there,"
unmappable forms since "you cannot map what is not there"
(53). And perhaps the most alluring instance of Moretti's dia-
bolical charm comes in the sentence immediately following,
which is both eminently reasonable and provocative to the
point of being dandyish: "It happens, there are un-mappable
forms (Christmas stories are another one, for diferent rea-
sons), and these setbacks, disappointing at frst, are actually
the sign of a method still in touch with reality: geography
is a useful tool, yes, but does not explain everything" (53).
Oh, go ahead, do tell me why Christmas stories are unmap-
pable! (I'm not being at all sarcastic; I really want to know . .
. .) Might you be thinking in particular of "Te Adventure of
the Blue Carbuncle," the most famous Holmesian Christmas
story, or does this sentence itself mimic the efect of the
The Next Cigarette 4 89
unreadable clues of Conan Doyle and his contemporaries,
providing something that looks awfully like a clue but resists
interpretation because of an absence of meaningful context?
Moretti is surely poking a bit of fun at himself here, writ-
ing in a style close to self-parody, as when he ofers a fippant
aside right afer that modest disclaimer about geography's
failure to explain everything ("For that, we have astrology
and 'Teory'"). But this is Moretti's own personal insightful-
ness, not a blueprint for cultural development; despite the
easy availability of quantitative techniques, in other words,
it's hard for me to think of a school of literary interpretation
less suited to reproduction on a mass scale.
I take the richest payof here in terms of literary history,
then, to be an insight that has also been arrived at elsewhere
and by other routes. Te "real content of the controversy",
Moretti says, "is our very idea of culture":
Because if the basic mechanism of change is that
of divergence, then cultural history is bound to be
random, full of false starts, and profoundly path-
dependent: a direction, once taken, can seldom be
reversed, and culture hardens into a true 'second
nature'—hardly a benign metaphor. If, on the other
hand, the basic mechanism is that of convergence,
change will be frequent, fast, deliberate, reversible:
culture becomes more plastic, more human, if you
wish. But as human history is so seldom human, this
is perhaps not the strongest of arguments. (81)
Te relationship between trees and contingency (and the
chapter on "Trees," with its treatment of the clue in the detec-
tive story of Conan Doyle's time, seems to me by far the most
interesting) is something about which Moretti is even more
explicit in an earlier essay, discussing the same idea. Tere he
calls the failure of Conan Doyle's rivals—and indeed of the
Jenny Davidson 90 l
creator of Sherlock Holmes himself—to explore the full liter-
ary potential of the clue "a good instance of the rigidity of
literary evolution":
you only learn once; then you are stuck. You learn, so
it's culture, not nature: but it's a culture which is as
unyielding as DNA. And the consequence of this is
that literary changes don't occur slowly, piling up one
small improvement upon another: they are abrupt,
structural, and leave very little room for transitional
forms. ("Slaughterhouse," 222)
Te tree's payof, in other words, mainly concerns con-
tingency: "What the tree says is that literary history could be
diferent from what it is" ("Slaughterhouse," 227). Interesting,
true; but didn't we know that already? And culture can be as
deterministic as nature, no surprise to Montesquieu and the
eighteenth-century climate theorists (or for that matter to
William James).
In the book's version of the "Trees" piece, Moretti's dis-
cussion of the clue segues into a really wonderful treatment of
"the still numerous 'ways of being alive' discovered between
1800 and 2000 by that great narrative device known as 'free
indirect style'" (81). Tis, for me, was the most thought-pro-
voking part of the discussion and yet also the one that bore
the least resemblance to the polemical version of "distant
reading" and looked most like good old-fashioned twentieth-
century literary criticism, with a kind of geographical expan-
siveness that owes more to earlier generations of scholars of
comparative literature than to recent work in the life sciences.
Moretti's fgure 33, "Free indirect style in modern narrative,
1800-2000," has this legend below: "Tis fgure refects work
in progress, and is therefore quite tentative, especially in
the case of non-European literatures, and of the diachronic
span of the various branches" (84). But isn't this just a way
The Next Cigarette 4 91
of fancying-up, so to speak, the insights of Moretti's critical
prose, itself a supple and powerful enough tool to operate di-
agramless? We don't need this "schematic visualization" (82);
Moretti's thoughts on Austen and Flaubert and Dostoevsky-
by-way-of-Bakhtin are the meat here, the fgure possibly just
a modish garnish to be set aside before tucking into the main
originally posted, January 17, 2006
Works Cited
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Genre as World System: Epic and Novel
on Four Continents." Narrative 14.1 (2006): 85-101.
—. "Planetary Time and Global Translation: 'Context' in
Literary Studies." Common Knowledge 9.3 (2003):
Moretti, Franco. "Te Slaughterhouse of Literature." Modern
Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 207-27.
Poovey, Mary. "Recovering Ellen Pickering." Yale Journal of
Criticism 13.2 (2000): 437-52.
1 Franco Moretti, "Te Slaughterhouse of Literature,"
Modern Language Quarterly 61:1 (2000): 207-27; 209 n.
2 Te piece is "Planetary Time and Global Translation:
'Context' in Literary Studies," p. 488. See also the full
elaboration of this argument in her wonderful recent
essay, "Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four
Continents" which includes a discussion of Moretti's
"distant reading," 90-91.
92 l
¤C Judging Books
by Their Covers
- or -
Chance Favors the
Prepared Meme
John Holbo
In "Trees," Moretti speculates about literary 'character' traits
that may confer 'evolutionary advantage'. A candidate case:
the clue as detective fction device [see fgure 3, p. 49]. Moretti
sketches a tree. I'll quote the expository accompaniment:
Two things were immediately clear: the 'formal' fact
that several of Doyle's rivals (those on the lef) did
not use clues—and the 'historical' fact that they were
all forgotten. It is a good illustration of what the liter-
ary market is like: ruthless competition—hinging on
form. 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). Tis
pressure of cultural selection probably explains the
second branching of the tree, where clues are present,
but serve no real function: as in 'Race with the Sun',
for instance, where a clue reveals to the hero that the
drug is in the third cup of cofee, and then, when he
is ofered the third cup, he actually drinks it. Which
is indeed 'perplexing & unintelligible', and the only
possible explanation is that these writers realized that
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 93
clues were popular, and tried to smuggle them into
their stories—but hadn't really understood how clues
worked, and so didn't use them very well.
Let me jump a paragraph to an objection Moretti tries to
answer. Te tree in question assumes morphology is key. "But
why should form be the decisive reason for survival? Why not
social privilege instead—the fact that Doyle was writing for a
well-established magazine and his rivals were not?" Moretti
tries to solve for this variable by establishing that Doyle's choice
perch in Strand Magazine was shared by others. Not only that,
there was more 'genetic diversity' just in Strand than even fg. 3
suggests (see fg. 4).
Very interesting, but let's step back up into the above para-
graph and run a variant objection. "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)." Te
problem is: Moretti's tree plots actual inclusions, not seeming
ones. And anyway: how does a story set about seeming to in-
clude something before you've actually read it?
You sell books to people who haven't read them yet, hence
who don't know what they contain. On the other hand, Doyle's
longue durée endurance run is plausibly due in large part to his
stories' winning forms: people like clues, especially those who
are fans of the genre of mystery stories. (Yes, there's certainly no
danger of it turning out that people don't like clues. So what are
we hoping to learn that we didn't know already?)
Let's be a bit artifcial and say the literary competition takes
place in two stages: frst, a book will be 'judged by its cover', and
must win; if it wins, it gets the chance to be widely judged for
what is between its covers. If it wins again, it 'avoids extinction',
i.e. becomes a classic (or at least doesn't fash in the pan.)
Just yesterday Jenny Davidson began her post by writing:
"Something makes me yearn for certain brand-new books like
a smoker plotting how to get her hands on the next cigarette
... I can't put my fnger on exactly what produces that yearning
John Holbo 94 l
in me ..." And just yesterday I linked to Art Spiegelman's tale
of frst love. "She was a paperback cover girl and I couldn't
keep my hands of her." I think we're all acquainted with some
such experience of seeming. It isn't pure black arts of market-
ing, I trust. On the other hand, there are such arts. A few
weeks ago [Wednesday 28 December 2005] the Guardian
ran a piece about statisticians trying to predict bestsellers not
from covers but titles:
Te team of three statisticians, helped by pro-
grammers, studied 54 years of fction number ones in
the New York Times and the 100 favourite novels in
the BBC's Big Read poll.
Comparing these with a control group of less suc-
cessful novels by the same authors, they found that
the winning books had three common features; they
had metaphorical, or fgurative titles instead of literal
ones; the frst word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjec-
tive or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took
the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or
of an adjective and noun or of the words Te ... of ...
By this formula the most perfect titles were
Agatha Christies' last thriller Sleeping Murder (1976)
and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, both with
83% marks. Te poorest was Patricia Cornwell's
thriller Cause of Death, with 9%.
British authors produced the highest-scoring
titles in both studies. John Le Carre was the most
consistent with Smiley's People, Te Spy Who Came
in From the Cold, Te Tailor of Panama and others.
Dr Winkler said: "When we tested our model
on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly
predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not for
nearly 70% of cases. Tis is 40% better than random
guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 95
of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is
surprisingly good."
Tey missed Te Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter. Still, what
does Moretti have to say about this sort of thing? (I don't
mean to be insulting, suggesting Moretti has never consid-
ered that people read afer they buy, that there is such a thing
as marketing, etc. I just wonder what he has to say about it.)
And yes, obviously my two-stage process is not tidy. Your
book needs to be consistently selected to get read. Tis isn't
just a matter of an eye-catchy cover, or snappy title. It's also
a matter of getting an editor to read you, then select you for
prominent placement to be read by many others. It's a matter
of opinion-formers—'coolhunters', frst adopters, review-
ers, literary cliques, what shelf it gets shelved on, what genre
tag gets attached to it, what authors become 'brand names'.
Oprah. Most of this activity indeed has to do with books
actually being read, and winning the 'ruthless competition'
to some degree as Moretti supposes: editors, reviewers, early
adopters, Oprah, have to like the form of your book (it's got
clues!) Still, in laying stress on the morphology of what's
between the covers, Moretti risks assuming efciency in the
difusion of information about morphology. We have an ef-
fcient literary market hypothesis. I don't see a strong reason
for believing in this efciency.
And be it noted: the evolutionary analogies may still pan
out, even if my skepticism is warranted (so we are not really
arguing about whether we should go on talking about evolu-
tion, or the market-place.) I might seem to be saying: you can
judge a book by its cover, and we do. But natural selection
is not such an idle browser: you can't judge, um, a beetle by
its carapace. Ergo, I am distinguishing the lazy reading styles/
purchasing practices of humans from Mother Nature's more
rigorous critical practices. But this is wrong. You can judge a
beetle by its cover: red means poison (keep away!) Covers are
John Holbo 96 l
as adaptive in nature, red in tooth and claw, as on the bookrack,
red in ripped bodices and teeth and claws and other popular
oferings. And for similar reasons. It is ofen advantageous to
convey a strong sense of what's inside.
At this point, let me turn to the luck argument. Moretti
responds to Tim Burke:
It is certainly possible that dumb luck plays/played a
much larger role than we imagine—probably larger
and larger as we move back in history, and cultural
products can disappear more easily. I will enlarge
on this in my reply to Prendergast, but I may as
well admit right away that every time I have studied
competition, success, and failure, I have never found
that luck played a major role (the only one exception
I know: Austen's novels, despite having soldiers, in-
clude no reference to war, unlike most of her contem-
poraries, and the so-called "Hundred Years' Peace"
that begun in 1815 rewarded her enormously for
her choice: sheer external luck changing the world,
and hence the expectations of generations of read-
ers.) (Needless to say, this is not the only ingredient
in Austen's long-term success). But I admire Gould
too, and would have liked to fnd instances of dumb
luck. If anyone comes up with convincing examples,
I'd love to see them.
Rather than pretend to some dataset at my fngertips
[see postscript for the dataset that turned up later] let me
dogmatically opine that J.K. Rowling is lucky. She's good, not
that good. At some point something tipped. Her books came
to occupy an oddly favorable position, which cascaded into
favor upon favor. Straining a bit, you might say that what you
have here is mild cultural 'lock-in', on the model of the 'lock-
in' Microsof has enjoyed—except that everyone likes Harry.
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 97
Harry Potter is a cultural operating system unto himself.
People read Harry because otherwise they wouldn't know
what's going on when everyone else is talking about Harry.
Tere are social benefts to reading Harry and social costs
of not doing so, for people who are not otherwise plugged
into any systems of literary reputation (snobbish or sensitive
or otherwise). And don't forget plain old-fashioned brand
name recognition. But it could have been a diferent author
whose works lucked into that role. Or, more likely, no author.
(Who thinks it was necessary that any literary success on this
scale was inevitably emergent at just this juncture in history?)
A large thesis, yes. But signifcant because, in deny-
ing 'luck' in the study of "competition, success, and failure"
Moretti seems committed to denying the possibility of things
we know happen in, say, business. (Don't we?)
It seems to me obvious that Rowling is not a unique case,
merely an extreme one. Many authors occupy cultural niches
that others might occupy but don't happen to. On the other
hand, is it right to call this 'luck'? Rowling is a lucky woman.
But 'dumb luck' may suggest there is no rational explanation,
which is something else. Tis gets us back to Burke:
But as for how Doyle's stories set the conventions of
a genre and others die, are forgotten, wither, some of
that might be simply termed "dumb luck," that the
precise location at which crystallization of a genre
occurs in a moment where many nascent forms of
the genre are present is about the accidents of reader-
ship, of circulation, of publication, of imitation, that
there is no deeper explanation that needs to cite how
Doyle's particular formulation of the genre more
precisely satisfed or represented the desires of a read-
ing public, or how his ability as a writer was more
precisely distinguished from any other. I'm echoing
Gould's Wonderful Life here very consciously.
John Holbo 98 l
Which is it? No explanation? Or we can't know it? (Be-
cause it's unreconstructable, or just wouldn't exhibit enough
interest?) I push the point because it seems plausible that the
explanation in Doyle's case might be that Holmes got famous
through a series of lucky breaks (such as Tim Burke is thinking
of ); yet these breaks can only be understood with reference to
certain 'morphological' features, in Moretti's sense. Chance
favors the prepared meme.
When I wrote the original version of this piece, in 2006, there
was indeed (to my knowledge) no dataset to test any form
of the 'lucky break' hypothesis in rigorous fashion. If you
pressed reset, then let it play out again, would Harry Potter
come out on top again? Alas, the actual world lacks a reset
button (or perhaps that's a good thing, at least for nonscien-
tifc purposes; but scientifcally inconvenient.) But in 2007,
just such a data set was ingeniously collected. Experimenters
at Columbia University—Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds,
and Duncan Watts—set up MusicLab, an online environ-
ment consisting of 'worlds' in which participants rate and
download songs by (unknown) bands. Te experimenters
constructed 'independent' and 'social infuence' worlds. In
the former, participants could see only song titles and band
names (randomly ordered); in social infuence worlds songs
were ranked according to participants' ratings (1 to 5 stars)
and download counts were visible as well. In two social infu-
ence worlds, this social information was falsifed—inverted,
to be exact. Te highest-rated song appeared to be the lowest-
rated, and vice versa.
As the title of a paper by the experimenters suggests—
"Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-
fulflling Prophecies in an Artifcial Cultural Market"—the
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 99
experiment was devised to test not Moretti's hypothesis but
its approximate opposite: namely, the notion that social infu-
ence is all. So, for example, a song falsely identifed as popular
will become popular—self-fulflling prophecy. Obviously,
Moretti's skepticism about the role of luck is likewise testable
in such an environment. (I acknowledge that Moretti is not
dogmatic in his claims about the role of luck, so it would not
be fair to say his view is falsifable by such an experiment. Still,
he clearly has strong personal opinions that may—and will—
be challenged by the likes of MusicLab.)
A quick note: it is misleading to continue using terms
like 'luck' and 'chance'. We are actually talking about forms of
social infuence. Let's review how we've gotten a bit of-track:
even if it is luck in the Harry Potter case, in the sense that
no one has any story to tell about an ingenious marketing
scheme that seeded the famous series' popularity, it certainly
is not the case that all advantageous social/cultural position-
ing/infuence is due to luck.
What I am thinking about, when I talk 'luck' in my piece,
is mostly the power of path dependence; of initial advantage
(due to chance or any other source, social or otherwise) cascad-
ing to dramatic efect. Tis is what Robert Merton calls (and
Malcolm Gladwell has popularized as) 'the Matthew efect':
"for unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away
even that which he hath" (25:29). It is also the Paris Hilton
efect: famous for being famous. Initial advantage—small
thing—can be sheer luck. Something snowballed for Harry
Potter, then a self-reinforcing social-infuence feedback loop
got established (plausibly). But the fact that what seeded
Harry's snowball, initially, may have been some snowfake of
dumb luck is not essential to the shape of the question, or to
the discovery of any answer. So what does the answer turn
out to be, insofar as the Music Lab experiment discovers any?
John Holbo 100 l
Unsurprisingly (I would say) the pure, self-fulflling
prophecy hypothesis is not borne out. Neither is any pure
quality-will-out hypothesis, however (without which the
proposition that luck is not a signifcant factor earns a seri-
ous question mark.) Moretti would be gratifed to learn that
the top quality song in the independent world also reached
the top in the basic social infuence world; and, even when
falsely accused of being low quality in inverted social infu-
ence worlds, was on-track to regain its top spot (although the
experiment ended before this result was attained, if ever it
would have been.) But the number two song's standing was
not similarly immune to social infuence and manipulation.
In general, there was a great deal of variation, across worlds,
pointing to the power of social infuence, also to the power
of path dependence. Small things, early on, make a big difer-
ence in the end. So luck does end up playing a big role. Tese
worlds, despite being identical at the level of the features of
the aesthetic objects they contain, diverge signifcantly. And,
frankly, it would be incredible if, in the real world, these ef-
fects were less, rather than more, than in this toy experimental
environment. (Te interested reader should review the ex-
perimenters' own conclusions, and their more quantitatively
precise statements of their results.)
What lesson should Moretti take from this?
He is not refuted, since (to repeat) he does not commit
himself categorically to any specifc, falsifable proposition
about the non-role of luck (or social infuence); but he should
be a bit chastened. "I may as well admit right away that every
time I have studied competition, success, and failure, I have
never found that luck played a major role." Tis may be true,
as a report of personal experience But it will not do. Moretti's
mindset seems to be this: he can see a potential variable he
cannot see how to control for. He is, in efect, hoping he can
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 101
do without controlling it. Unfortunately, it does not seem he
can really be right.
On the other hand, it hardly seems impossible to envision
(very empirically ambitious, to be sure) attempts to study the
sorts of things Moretti studies and the sorts of things the
MusicLab experimenters study; the two approaches really
ought to be complementary, even if they do challenge each
other's assumptions at points.
Consider this. Te Music Lab experimenters' inciden-
tal refections on the nature of aesthetic quality do not mar
their social psychological experimental designs, nor do they
invalidate their reasoning to various conclusions. Still, their
refections are so innocent I cannot help suspecting tongues
in cheeks (at least I hope they are, a little bit):
An obvious explanation for the failure of the inver-
sion to lock in [i.e. popular songs falsely identifed
as unpopular recover their rank somewhat, and un-
popular songs false identifed and popular sink down
in the ranks somewhat] is that the songs themselves
were of diferent quality, and that these diferences
were more salient than the perception of popularity.
Previous theoretical work by economists has indeed
emphasized the importance of intrinsic quality on
outcomes (Rosen 1981), and attempts have been
made to measure the quality of cultural products
(Hamlen Jr. 1991; Krueger 2005). Unfortunately, no
generally agreed upon measure of quality exists, in
large part because quality is largely, if not completely,
a social construction (Gans 1974; Becker 1982;
Bourdieu 1984; DiMaggio 1987; Cutting 2003;
Frith 2004). (Salganik, Watts, 349)
I do not think it was necessary for these authors, in this
particular paper, to survey the history of ideas about art, cul-
John Holbo 102 l
ture, aesthetic judgment, and critical consensus. But, having
decided to go down that line, it was incumbent on them to go
further; to take note that the literature stretches back before
1981, to say the least, and beyond the economics department.
History of aesthetics and art criticism, anyone? (David
Hume, at least? Adam Smith read him, afer all.)
Also, the proposition that 'quality is largely, if not com-
pletely, a social construction'—is simply not the sort of thing
one can assume, or even claim as weakly supported by any
existing body of data. Not because there is evidence it is false,
merely because the claim is ambiguous and vague. We don't
know what is being claimed. But the truth concerning the
area being blanketed by this claim is quite important, poten-
tially. At least it is interesting.
Before I take another step, let me say that I may be about
to protest too much: I don't think that anyone proposing
Moretti-esque studies, regarding music (or any other cultural
products), would in fact be unreasonably dismissed by the
MusicLab experimenters. If someone proposed investigating
features of the songs from the MusicLab experiment set; if
investigators found relations or connections, intriguing pat-
terns, I am sure the MusicLab experimenters would be quick
enough to see this line might be worthwhile. Nevertheless,
this 'socially constructed' line has a tendency to plow through
the interest of what Moretti does in conceptually incoherent
fashion. Let me try to clear that up. (Even if the confusion
would not cause trouble, in practice—which it might not—it
will be nice to have some theoretical sense of how projects
like Moretti's, and these MusicLab investigators, might inter-
lock, conceptually.)
Te MusicLab experimenters are tending to assume that
value can only be measured as a function of preference; pref-
erence is a feature of audiences, not art works. Tis might
make it seem that you can only study value (in this sense) by
Judging Books by Their Covers 4 103
studying audiences, as opposed to art works, which is pretty
much what MusicLab does. (For experimental purposes,
the songs in their set might as well be black boxes.) But, in
a sense, this is just false: many musicological features whose
relations to MusicLab results might be worth investigation
(length, beats-per-minute, instrumentation, even style) are
non-socially constructed, on any plausible account of what
'social-constructed' means. (Even style? You can't make some-
thing a sonata just by saying it is one. It has to have the right
features.) You can study all that, how various features song
features are correlated with other features, how all that is cor-
related with preferences and also perhaps how it is correlated
with susceptibility to or immunity to social infuence. (I'm
not saying I know there would be interesting results. But it
would be perfectly possible to check for them, empirically.)
Even if 'fast songs are good songs' is only true in the sense
that a solid democratic bloc reports that it likes fast songs
(which begs the question against certain competing accounts
of 'value', no doubt, but that is fne so long as you are clear
about it); still, studying aesthetic values, in this subjectivist
sense, does not entail the exclusive study of subjects, as op-
posed to works; because beats per minute is not a matter of
what anyone thinks, let alone what anyone prefers. So: you
look to preferences to see which properties of a song are inter-
esting, for aesthetic study purposes. (It turns out that tempo
is important. Surely this will be the case.) But then the prop-
erties that show up as valuable (or as correlated with values,
if you are absolutely insistent on keeping value in the eye of
the beholder) really are properties of the song. Tey can be
investigated to a considerable extent quite independently of
anything except the songs themselves. Again, I doubt anyone
would really make this mistake in practice. But these authors
may do so in theory, so it's worth pointing out where the fal-
lacy slips in.
John Holbo 104 l
Let's shif, hypothetically, to MysteryLab, where Moretti
has run fresh experiments. Tere isn't much point in me mak-
ing up results, although I feel confdent that they would not
be so diferent from the MusicLab results. Pace Moretti, so-
cial infuence and chance would play a signifcant role. (Until
someone does it, of course, Moretti—and you, too—are free
to keep whatever faith about the role of luck that you like.)
I would emphasize only that it is obviously not necessary
to treat art objects themselves as black boxes, as it were, for
purposes of experimental design. It is not even too late, in
the MusicLab case, to undertake a Morettiesque study of the
features of the works themselves. Te songs still exist, from
which you could generate data about song features. It would
be interesting to see what emerged, I think.
originally posted January 18, 2006
Works Cited
Salganik, Matthew and Duncan Watts, "Leading the
Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulflling
Prophecies in an Artifcial Cultural Market," Social
Psychology Quarterly 71, 4 (2008): 338-355.
4 105
¤¬ Moretti
Responds (III)
franco moretti
First, public thanks to Bob O'Hara—years ago I read his
"Homage to Clio," and it helped me think about evolution
and historiography. I have started reading some more of his
work this morning, and look forward to the rest.
Tim Burke's new version of the 'dumb luck' idea makes
much more sense to me, especially in John Holbo's version
that "luck favors the prepared meme." Here, a morphologi-
cal tree allows to recapture, not the luck exactly, but at least
the initial proximity between the winner and the rivals—a
proximity that market mechanisms quickly magnify into a
galactic gap. In this sense, there is a continuity between the
morphological argument (that establishes the—ofen tiny—
diference in initial conditions) and the social one (that ex-
plores the path dependency created by, in our case, literary
markets). Going back to the issue of luck, every lock-in is a
piece of luck [Doyle may have deserved to fare better, but
not that much better!] But if the mechanism behind "social"
luck is known (it a feedback loop, as Arthur and others have
shown), it remains to be seen what is the mechanism behind
"morphological" luck.
Steven Johnson's question—How is the reader infu-
enced by formal properties without being fully conscious of
the infuence?—is similar to Bill Benzon's "how is it that the
world makes its way into the mind there to be transformed
Franco Moretti 106 l
into texts?" Once more, I wish I knew an answer. What I did
in the book was to leave a black box in the explanatory chain:
given how the text is made, and given the success decreed by
its readers, there must be a passage in between where certain
formal properties are perceived by those who are reading,
even though we have no actual evidence that the latter are
aware of them. "Tere must be": that's the black box. One
should open it up, and explain how it works. When I will
start studying a solution, I think I'll follow Steven's advice,
and assume that the cognitive sciences will be more relevant
than evolutionary psychology.
Jenny Davidson fnds the project "Pied-Piper-esque," be-
cause too dependent on my own knowledge: without which,
she writes, "doesn't the soul go out of the whole enterprise?"
Tanks for the kind words, but if you remove the person who
has done most of the work, doesn't the soul go out of any
Sociological coda. As for my having at my disposal "the
human-graduate-student-equivalent of a commodity-cluster
supercomputer," not to mention the hints by John Emerson
about grad students voting en bloc at the MLA—I have
been teaching in the US for 15 years, and have never been a
member of the MLA, so that's unlikely. As for grad students
doing the primary work on which I later build castles in the
air, this has happened a few times—but much more ofen
in the opposite direction, with me gathering the primary
data, and placing them at the disposal of students or readers.
[Incidentally, it's amazing how few people are willing to work
on data that you have collected. Don't ask me why.] Grad stu-
dents are in general wary of projects like Graphs, Maps, Trees.
Tey realize they are very time-consuming, as one may work
for weeks gathering data that reveal nothing. In my situation,
I can aford the waste [although I hate it], but they can't. And
then, they are a lot less sure than some contributors to Te
Moretti Responds (III) 4 107
Valve that this will be a signifcant trend in literary studies.
Conclusion: of the many students who work with me only
one in fve, maybe one in ten, works along the lines of my
last book. Professionally, this is bad for me [my research
needs more data, gathered by diferent minds, etc]. leaves
my students and myself with our own paths and intellectual
originally posted, January 19, 2006
108 l
¤C A Few Quibbles
about Moretti's
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Sean McCann
I love Graphs, Maps, and Trees. Who couldn't? If you're not
dazzled by the erudition and the data set, how could you fail
to fnd instruction and delight in the nimbleness of Moretti's
mind and the brio of his prose? But, love it though I do, like
Matt, Ray, and Jenny Davidson, I'm not so sure that GMT
can really "delineate a transformation in the study of litera-
ture" as Moretti suggests (NLR 67). (On the "Maps" tech-
nique, let me recommend another superb precursor, Carlo
Rotella's October Cities.) I applaud Moretti's remarkable com-
mitment to research. I admire his interest in "explanation" as
against "interpretation" (even if I'm not sure the distinction
fnally holds up). I'm attracted to his emphasis on "devices
and genres; not texts." And I welcome his enthusiasm for
analogies and examples drawn from all sorts of disciplines ar-
guably related to literary scholarship. I'm still more taken by
his intellectual seriousness and his evident appreciation for
the artfulness of literary creativity. But looking at the essays
in combination and considering some of the many diferent
sources of insight I think they combine, I don't see a new
methodology for literary study so much as a sterling example
of comparative literary scholarship at its most inspired—à la
Auerbach, Spitzer, Bakhtin. Here's an unscientifc prediction.
Tere will be no school of Moretti, because only Moretti will
prove able to do what's on display here.
A few minor thoughts about why that might be so.
Human, Not So Human 4 109
First of all, I think it should be noted that, fruitful
though it clearly is, the "quantitative" angle could easily be-
come misleading. It's wonderful to see the graphs and to get
a sense of the vast range of material that still needs to be dis-
covered and understood. But as Moretti notes ("Graphs" 72),
all this is just data until hypotheses are generated. And it's in
the hypotheses (produced, by the way, via "interpretation")
that Moretti's most serious commitments and their potential
limits standout.
Te real interest, as Moretti indicates throughout, is
not so much in quantifcation as in the end it serves—
"comparative morphology" ("Trees" 62). Te central argu-
ment of the three essays, as I read them, is that literary form
is a record of (highly various) forces that can be discovered
by the scrupulous reader (102). Among the places, Moretti
puts this most clearly is a passage in "Maps." It deserves to be,
I think, a stunner of a line:
Deducing from the form of the object, the forces that
have been at work: this is the most elegant defnition
ever of what literary sociology should be. (97)
Perhaps I'm over-reading, but "deducing" brought me up
short. I would have said that one fundamental implication
of Moretti's research program is that it should hold out little
hope for deducing at all. If you're gathering information on
the publication history of the novel, then presumably there is
no object to investigate, only (to use the evolutionary termi-
nology Moretti introduces) population groups. And, if I un-
derstand correctly, short of molecular biology, the only way
to understand population groups is via induction. With the
history of publishing and reading, too, that induction should
arguably range over a pretty wide span of territory—includ-
ing (to take up some points mentioned by Timothy Burke
Sean McCann 110 l
and John Holbo) whatever can be gathered about readers,
industries, markets, mediators, and institutions.
Moretti leaves most of that material aside here, along
with some of the existing scholarship (genre theory, as Matt
notes, but also, e.g., publishing and literacy history) that em-
phasizes diferent factors than he places at the fore. In other
words, it's not only pedantry to pause at the deduction thing.
As he was in the exhilarating early essays collected in Signs
Taken for Wonders, Moretti remains form-centric. And, while
he makes that approach highly rewarding indeed, it rests on
some basic assumptions whose unargued status (and, perhaps,
inconsistencies) leave GMT less a portent of a new approach
to cultural history than a brilliant example of literary criti-
cism at its best.
1) Te most striking of those assumptions, indicated
in "Graphs," is the notion adopted from Russian for-
malism that literary genres function to "represent the
most signifcant aspects of contemporary reality" (77,
n.8). Combining Shklovsky with Kuhn, Moretti sug-
gests that genres resemble scientifc paradigms and
organize the perception of reality in productive but
inevitably limited ways. I fnd this an intuitively ap-
pealing notion, but I think you've got to acknowledge
that it remains unproven and probably unprovable.
It's not hard, for example, to consider other possible
functions served by genres—preserving the shared
values of a culture, say, or providing entertainment
value. Could such functions be consistent with the
representation of "reality"? Quite possibly, but it can
take some creative interpretation to make the case.
(Why did the movie musical fourish and decline?
Was it really the genre's ability to represent reality?)
Human, Not So Human 4 111
2) Tat frst assumption, which reads form as a way
to organize the perception of reality sits alongside a
second assumption, with which it may be, but I think
isn't necessarily consistent. Tis is the view expressed
in the Conan Doyle section of "Trees" that sees the
diversity, success, and failure of literary forms as the
product of market selection. Te selecting agent here,
of course, is not the pressure of changing historical
reality itself, but the preferences of a popular reader-
ship. (It's possible to argue, of course, that readers will
select for forms that represent reality well, but that
doesn't follow inevitably.)
3) Finally, the emphasis on reader selection runs up
against the claim in the latter part of "Trees," with its
fascinating discussion of free indirect discourse, that
history and social geography determine the use of
literary techniques—a suggestion that more closely
resembles the assumption noted in "Graphs."
Although I think it interferes with some of the elegance
of Moretti's argument, I also believe that it's a very good thing
that the latter part of "Trees" reintroduces the emphasis on
social geography emphasized by "Maps." Otherwise, the
discussion of Conan Doyle could be taken to imply that
Moretti's method depends on a unidimensional model of
the literary market. Discussing the rise of the detective story,
Moretti suggests that what survives is just what worked and
what readers liked—so that the sale of pop fction appears
to function as something like an efcient market. ("What
the literary market is like: literary competition—hinging on
form. 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)" (48).) But, striking though this
particular case study is, that impression will probably only
Sean McCann 112 l
work with a fairly narrow example—and one where low-cost
entertainment lit is at the fore. With cheap, mass circula-
tion entertainment, it makes sense to assume that consumer
preference probably shapes the production and popularity of
literary fashion most directly. Needless to say, however, not
all literature is only a consumer good. Just to choose some mi-
nor complications, some of it also serves pedagogical, ideo-
logical, and status purposes. And those complications on the
reception side are mirrored on the production side. Moretti
quickly considers and dismisses (with one striking, but still
quite limited piece of data) the role of status in infuencing
the chances of literary success. But surely the status battles of
artists are a major engine of modern creativity, and the suc-
cess they crave is not only secured by readership in numbers.
Of course, Moretti doesn't need to take the full range of
these complications into account in order to have fascinating
things to say. But I think they cast some doubt on the anal-
ogy of literary scholarship to scientifc research. One further
example. Toward the end of "Trees" Moretti emphasizes
the "the dependence of morphological novelty on spatial
discontinuity," drawing an implicit analogy to evolutionary
speciation (62). But, if I understand right, the essay combines
two, not necessarily fully overlapping senses of environment:
the market in which products compete for reader attention
(emphasized in the discussion of Doyle); and the social
world they claim to represent (emphasized in the discussion
of free indirect discourse). Especially when Moretti discusses
Gabriel Garcia Márquez—surely a world novelist with an in-
ternational market by the time he wrote Patriarch—it seems
clear that these two kinds of environment difer and don't
necessarily overlap. Only the frst really works with the evo-
lutionary analogy.
Personally, I won't be much disappointed if literary
scholarship never really resembles scientifc investigation. I
Human, Not So Human 4 113
wish we all were as good as Moretti and shared his seriousness
and creativity. But I'm not sure a more rational form of liter-
ary history is needed. At one point in "Trees" Moretti makes
a rather striking comment about one reason why he thinks
otherwise. Te comment comes in the course of Moretti's dis-
agreement with Alfred Kroeber about whether the evolution
of biological species difers from the evolution of cultural
forms. Kroeber thinks there is a fundamental diference and
that it's evident in the convergence, as well as divergence, of
cultural forms. Moretti disagrees and raises the stakes, saying
"the real content of the controversy, not technical at all, is our
very idea of culture." If we stress divergence:
then cultural history is bound to be random, full
of false starts, and profoundly path dependent…. If,
on the other hand, the basic mechanism is that of
convergence, change will be frequent, fast, deliber-
ate, reversible: culture becomes more plastic, more
human if you wish. But as human history is seldom
so human, this is perhaps not the strongest of argu-
ments. (55-56)
Perhaps not. But that last witticism isn't much of an
argument either and, if I understand correctly, doesn't really
address Kroeber's contention at all. (Pointing out the human
agency in unnatural selection doesn't necessarily imply a be-
lief that history is humane.) More seriously, aren't we posed
with a false choice here? I'm way out of my depth with this
stuf, but I would have thought that, if we take the analogy to
evolutionary biology seriously, then neither convergence nor
divergence would count as a "basic mechanism." Wouldn't
both merely be the efects of random variation and selection?
If that's so, Moretti presents us with a needless confict,
and one that suggests that a part of the motivation for his
transformation of literary study may be the long-standing de-
Sean McCann 114 l
sire to purge culture of its humanist legacies. I'm sympathetic
to that goal in part, but I don't think it's really required for a
meaningful cultural history.
originally posted, January 19, 2006
Works Cited
Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: Te Redevelopment of Urban
Literature. University of California Press, 1998.
4 115
¤C Graphs, Trees,
Materialism, Fishing
Cosma Shalizi
A few years ago, I wrote a review of Moretti's Atlas of the
European Novel, in which I presumed to tell him how to go
about his business. When he ran across it, his reaction was
not (as mine would've been, had our situation been reversed)
to tell me where to get of, but to invite me to a workshop
he was organizing at Stanford on new interdisciplinary work
on the novel—its motto, the quotation from Brecht about
"questions that appear to us completely unsolved," is recycled
for this book —where I had a great time. Reading these es-
says as they came out in New Lef Review, I enjoyed them
intensely, and recall thinking that Moretti could hardly have
done a better job of appealing to my prejudices if he'd tried.
(Said prejudices are those of someone almost equally fond of
Te Extended Phenotype and Main Currents of Marxism.)
With this kind of background, it comes as no surprise, I
trust, that I really like this book, and fnd objecting to what
he actually proposes here highly wrong-headed. In what fol-
lows, I want to say a bit about "graphs" and a bit about "trees,"
and explain why this sounds so promising to me. I am not
going to say anything about "maps," because I don't think I
have anything to add to that discussion, but I will, for the
sake of getting an M in there, end with some remarks on
"materialism." At no point can I pretend to be competent
to evaluate the originality of Moretti's work within literary
scholarship, to say how much of a departure, say, the trees re-
ally are. In a feeble attempt to pretend that my price is higher
Cosma Shalizi 116 l
than a weekend in California and a review copy, I will make
some criticisms, most about tedious extra stuf I wish Moretti
had also done. I'd like to think that what I say will also have
some value for those who don't share my rather haphazard
intellectual trajectory, but my experience with try-
ing to communicate across disciplines means I'll get a warm
glow if I'm even comprehensible, never mind persuasive. I
am accordingly very grateful to the Valve, and especially to
Jonathan Goodwin, for letting someone with my credentials
(viz., none) participate in this event.
Do Genres Come in Bunches?
Moretti makes a very striking claim in his frst chapter: that
genres of novels appear together, in clusters, separated by
about 25 years, and disappear together too. Looking at his
graph, my eye agrees, but my eye also tells me that there are
faces in clouds (the East African Plains Ape is an incorrigible
pattern-fnder), and probability theory tells me that purely
random processes can produce a lot of apparent clustering
and regularity. What reason is there to think that what looks
like genres coming in clusters isn't just coincidence?
Let's be a little more precise about what we'd mean by
"chance" and "coincidence" here. One natural possibility
is that new genres appear at a constant rate over time, ut-
terly independently of one another. Every year, then, there
would be a constant probability of a new genre forming, but
whether it did or not would have no bearing on whether the
next year saw a new genre. Tis is our null model—the one
that says what things should look like if we're just fooling
ourselves, and there are no clusters. To get slightly technical,
the intervals between genre-arrivals should have what's called
a geometric distribution. Assuming, for the sake of argument,
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 117
that that's true, we can use the average time between genre-
appearances (3.44 years) to estimate the most likely value for
the probability of a new genre appearing in any given year
(about 29%).
Once we assume that the inter-arrival distribution is geo-
metric and fnd the parameter, we can simulate from it, and
get examples of what Moretti's graph would look like, if only
chance were at play.
Te top line shows the appearance dates of Moretti's 44
genres; the next two lines give the results of simulating from
a model of uniform random appearance, with the same mean
time between genres as the actual history.
Is there more clustering in reality than in the results of
the null model? I couldn't say, by eye, but I don't have to. I
can calculate the probability of generating Moretti's history
from the null model: it's somewhat less than 1 in 10
. Tis
in itself isn't decisive; any particular history becomes less and
less probable as one considers longer and longer intervals of
time (cue Stoppard), so we need to know what fraction of all
Cosma Shalizi 118 l
histories of that length are at least that unlikely. I could work
this out exactly, if I were willing to do some actual math, but
I'm lazy, so I just had the computer simulate a million histo-
ries and evaluated all of their likelihoods. If the null model
were actually true, we'd see histories like Moretti's only about
0.4% percent of the time.
So this is actually pretty good evi-
dence that the null model is not true, and Moretti's history
does show the kind of clustering he thinks it does.
Of course, this only underlines the question of why
Moretti's data is clustered. I can think of a couple of defat-
ing explanations (maybe the clusters match the periods
more intensely scrutinized by historians; maybe they tend
to adjust when they report genres appearing towards certain
focal dates). Or it could be due to some sort of exogenous
infuence, from war, politics, economic shifs, etc. (I did not
try removing the obviously topical genres, like Chartist nov-
els, and repeating the analysis.) Or it could be due to some
sort of endogenous mechanism within the system of liter-
ary production and consumption—generational turn-over
of authors, of readers, of editors and publishers (suggested
by my friend Bill Tozier). Or: maybe there's some space of
things-people-like-in-novels, which the popular genres at any
one time partition up in various ways; if one genre dies out or
another appears, this might destabilize all the others as well. I
don't think Moretti's time series, by itself, is enough to begin
to let us decide among these mechanisms (some of which are
compatible), but I do think it lets us see that some mechanism
is called for.
Here is my frst reproach: Moretti should have been the
one to do this analysis, not me. If testing hypotheses is too
banausic and mechanical for the pages of New Lef Review,
then it should either be in another article, or in the book.
Moretti is a shrewd man, and in this case his intuitive analysis
of the data was right, but there is no reason to rely on intu-
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 119
ition alone for something like this. And, if one is going to go
to the trouble to collect quantitative data, one ought to use
it quantitatively. Mathematical abstraction (quantitative or
otherwise) is not valuable for its own sake, but for the infer-
ences it lets us make, when the proper tools are applied. In
this case, those tools are pretty easy to bring to bear. Tey
should be.
Dissolving Genre History
Here is Moretti at the end of "Graphs":
For most literary historians ... there is a categori-
cal diference between 'the novel' and the various
'novelistic (sub)genres': the novel is, so to speak, the
substance of the form, and deserves a full general
theory; subgenres are more like accidents, and their
study, however interesting, remains local in character,
without real theoretical consequences. Te forty-
four genres of fgure 9, however, suggest a diferent
historical picture, where the novel does not develop
as a single entity—where is 'the' novel, there?—but
by periodically generating a whole set of genres, and
then another, and another… Both synchronically and
diachronically, in other words, the novel is the system
of its genres: the whole diagram, not one privileged
part of it. Some genres are morphologically more
signifcant, of course, or more popular, or both—and
we must account for this: but not by pretending that
they are the only ones that exist. And instead, all
great theories of the novel have precisely reduced
the novel to one basic form only (realism, the dia-
logic, romance, meta-novels...); and if the reduction
has given them their elegance and power, it has also
erased nine tenths of literary history. Too much. (90)
Cosma Shalizi 120 l
On the one hand, this seems to me to be obviously correct.
On the other hand, I wonder very much why Moretti stops
here. If we look within any one of those forty-four genres, I
think we have every reason to suppose that we'd fnd it com-
posed, in its turn, of sub-genres, and so on, and ultimately of
a shifing succession of individual texts. 'Te' Bildungsroman
(to pick one of the forty-four, not entirely at random) is a
short-hand way of referring to the most common and endur-
ing features of a historically-changing and always-various
population of books, just as "the" bottle-nosed dolphin is an
abbreviation for the leading tendencies of a certain popula-
tion of organisms. What Moretti hints at, in the paragraph
I quoted, is that "the" novel is itself a population, either of
genres, or of texts structured into genres. But he doesn't say
outright what seems very plain to me, and so I'd like to know
why, and specifcally whether he thinks it's actually wrong, or
Te assumptions of population thinking are dia-
metrically opposed to those of the typologist. Te
populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in
the organic world. What is true for the human spe-
cies—that no two individuals are alike—is equally
true for all other species of animals and plants.
Indeed, even the same individual changes continu-
ously throughout its lifetime and when placed into
diferent environments. All organisms and organic
phenomena are composed of unique features and
can be described collectively only in statistical terms.
Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form
populations of which we can determine the arithme-
tic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are
merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals
of which the populations are composed have reality.
Te ultimate conclusions of the population thinker
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 121
and of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For
the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the varia-
tion an illusion, while for the populationist the type
(average) is an abstraction and only the variation is
real. (Mayr, 84, quoting himself from a 1959 paper)
Tis makes salient the question of how we mark of dif-
ferent populations as distinct. Te usual biological criterion
is through common descent, and the possibility of inter-
breeding—-Mayr's "biological species concept." (Tere is
a vast controversial literature on the details.) Ruth Garrett
Millikan has a closely related notion of "reproductively-estab-
lished families," which doesn't lean so heavily on the details
of biology, and which would seem to ft the case of genres
of novels (Millikan, 1984). One could also defne classes of
texts purely morphologically, which might include many un-
related lineages (just as one might consider all streamlined
marine predators which live in the water all the time, a class
including dolphins, killer whales, sharks, tuna, ichthyosaurs,
etc.). Just as such organic forms have appeared in several
lineages, morphologically-defned categories could appear in
multiple places and periods, the way novels arose, apparently
quite independently, in both the Hellenistic world and in
China (and elsewhere, for all I know). Historical populations,
however, are unique.
One could ... take evolutionary bibliography as the
prototypical evolutionary science and think of biol-
ogy in terms of bibliographic analogies…
Te Cabinet of Horrors
People have generally sought to explain cultural change and
cultural variation by supposing that culture is causally driven
Cosma Shalizi 122 l
by something else (the climate, the social structure), or, more
strongly, that it is adapted to something else, or, more strongly
yet, that it functions adaptively for the beneft of something
else (here social structure, or ruling classes, are favored as
suspects over the climate). Tis has led to an awful lot of (if I
may use the phrase) adaptationist just-so stories, and uncriti-
cal analogy-mongering on a level with the sort of thinking
which leads rhinoceros horn to be prescribed for impotence.
Jon Elster is worth quoting at some length:
In his comments on the links among capitalism,
Protestantism, and Catholicism Marx set a disastrous
precedent for many later writers who have attempted
to fnd "structural homologies" or "isomorphisms"
(two fancy terms for "similarities") between econom-
ic structures and mental products. Because virtually
any two entities can be said to resemble each other in
some respect, this practice has no constraints other
than the inventiveness of and ingenuity of the writer:
Tere are no reality constraints and no reality control.
Marx suggests two inconsistent lines of argument.
One is that there is a strong connection between
mercantilism and Protestantism, the other that
there is an elective afnity between mercantilism
and Catholicism. He was confused, apparently, by
the fact that money has two distinct features that
point to diferent religious modes. On the one hand,
money (gold and silver), unlike credit, can be hoard-
ed. Hoarding easily turns into an obsession, which
is related to the fanatical self-denying practices of
extreme Protestantism. On the other hand, money
can be seen as the "incarnation" or "transubstantia-
tion" of real wealth. In that sense the money fetishism
associated with mercantilism is related to the specif-
cally Catholic practice of investing relics and the like
with supernatural signifcance. Both arguments are
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 123
asserted several times by Marx, each serving to show
up the essential arbitrariness of the other. Later at-
tempts to explain the theology of Port Royal, the
philosophy of Descartes, or the physics of Newton
in terms of similarities with the underlying economic
structure are equally arbitrary. Like the analogies
between societies and organisms that fourished
around the turn of the century, they belong to the
cabinet of horrors of scientifc thought. Teir com-
mon ancestor is the theory of "signs" that fourished
in the century prior to the scientifc revolution inau-
gurated by Galileo—the idea that there are natural,
noncausal correspondences between diferent parts
of the universe. What Keith Tomas refers to as the
"short-lived union of science and magic" maintained
a subterranean existence of which the doctrine of
ideology, in one of its versions, has been one manifes-
tation. (Elster, 183-184)
Even if we shutter and lock the Cabinet of Horrors, and
go to look for explanations of trends in such cultural products
as novels (which is, afer all, what Moretti wants), I'm afraid
we will fnd most of them in the capacious Closet of Mildly
Appalling Objects. Tere is no shortage of attempts to give
such changes meaning as signs of something else, some aspect
of the social or economic structure, of the way we live now (or
the way they lived then), but very, very few of them are con-
vincing. In his great book on changing fashions, A Matter of
Taste, the sociologist Stanley Lieberson looks at some of the
reasons why these attempts at ad hoc explanation are so ofen
bad. (He puts things more politely; I paraphrase.) First, the
facts are ofen just screwy, both about the developments to be
explained: non-existent trends, non-existent causes, weirdly
mis-characterized trends, trends being explained by events
which happened long afer the former began, etc. (In fairness,
Cosma Shalizi 124 l
such scholarly "misconstruction of reality"—à la Hamilton
(1996)—is a lot more common than we academics like to
think.) Second, the mechanism connecting the explanations
to the explananda is lef totally obscure. Tird, no attempt is
made to test the explanation, by checking that it can account
for the magnitude of the observed change, by ruling out alter-
native explanations, or by much of anything else. Te result is
a steady stream of claims about how culture works which are
advanced with what is, under the circumstances, an astonish-
ing degree of assurance. Lieberson's book provides many fne
examples of such cavalier just-so story-telling for names, the
decline of hats, etc.
Checking hypotheses about causation, and still more
about adaptation, is really hard; with just one case, arguably
hopeless. What you need is the ability to reliably detect de-
partures from the hypothesis, if they are actually present—
"power," in the statisticians' jargon. It is hard to get much
power when n=1. If you want to claim that certain aspects of
19th century British novels were the way they were because
those features ftted with ideologies of British imperialism—
a fairly strong hypothesis about adaptation—I don't see
how you can do it just by interpreting Mansfeld Park, no
matter how subtle and sophisticated your reading. On the
other hand, if you look at lots of contemporary novels, and
the ones which (say) depict Great Britain's relations with its
colonies in the same way as Mansfeld Park does are system-
atically more successful, on average, than those which depict
it diferently, well then I don't see how that couldn't be good
news for your idea, though even that would really only be the
beginning of backing it up.
Biologists have given a lot of thought to checking hy-
potheses about adaptation, and developed many means of do-
ing so. Mutatis mutandis, many of these means could also be
applied to literature, or other aspects of culture. Eric Rabkin,
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 125
Carl Simon and their collaborators have started doing just
this with their Genre Evolution Project, looking at short
stories from 20th century American science fction, and no
doubt there are others doing this kind of thing too.
One way of checking adaptive hypotheses, especially
relevant here, is the "comparative method," or rather meth-
ods, which work much, much better when combined with
good phylogenies. I think a literary historian who wants
to study the evolution of genres and devices would be very
well advised to look at the comparative methods biologists
employ to study the evolution of qualitative characteristics
of organisms. (Te major issue would be that literary phy-
logenies will not be trees but more complicated lattices. But
this is analogous to the efects of lateral gene transfer, com-
mon among bacteria, and so I'd suspect not only solvable but
solved, someplace in the literature. Whether inheritance is by
means of discrete-valued, particulate factors, i.e., genes, is not
a crucial issue for such methods.) What I really want to see
from Moretti (or someone) is a study along these lines of clues
in the detective story; I'd be even more interested in one of
free indirect discourse.
A crucial aspect of testing hypothesis about adaptation is
a contrast with the outcome of a well-crafed neutral model—
a way of saying what to expect if no adaptation were present,
or not that adaptation anyway. Tese ofen have surprising
consequences; for instance, neutral genetic drif will tend to
fx some version of a gene in a given population, even if it con-
fers no ftness advantage. (Tis is described in any book on
population genetics.) So I wonder about things like whether
we should expect, under a reasonable neutral model, that
some formal device should become universal within a genre?
If so, did clues take over detective stories any faster than neu-
trality would predict? (It's hard to imagine a successful genre
where every story relies on confessions found by accident, but
Cosma Shalizi 126 l
whether that's intrinsically weirder than actually existing de-
tective stories, I can't say.)
Te foregoing shouldn't be taken to mean that compara-
tive literature should slavishly imitate comparative biology.
Tere are people who have thought about the application
of evolutionary ideas to social and cultural change in ways
which are much more sophisticated about psychology, social
organization and human interaction than (most) advocates
of memetics; I am thinking particularly of David Hull,
W. G. Runciman, Dan Sperber, Stephen Toulmin's great
Te Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts, and even the
fragmentary MS. of Adam Westoby. As the economist
Richard Nelson writes, we should expect our ideas of
general evolution to change as we learn more about cultural
evolution. We should also expect to have to develop diferent
methods of data analysis. But, as always, we start with what
we already know how to do.
I share Moretti's hope for a "materialist sociology of literary
form." I'd like a materialist sociology of culture generally. But
I suspect it won't be able to do everything he wants it to.
When Moretti quotes D'Arcy Thompson on how the
form of an object is a diagram of the forces which produced it,
I'm happy to go along, and even happy to agree that this gives
us some ability to work backwards, from form to force. But
this sort of inverse problem generally doesn't have a unique
solution, especially if some of the forces were transient
and highly contingent … Less metaphorically, something
Lieberson argues very convincingly is that we ofen have to
distinguish between the social forces causing there to be a
change in some taste, and those which shape the content of
the new taste. Ofen the latter mechanisms are more or less
internal to the bit of culture in question, like ratcheting. Or:
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 127
culture doesn't have to express or refect the social order. I
suspect Moretti would be disappointed if this were the case
for, say, genres of novels. Well, so would I. But this needs to
be checked. One way would be to try to develop good neutral
models, and see whether, and where, they break down.
Dan Sperber has a great essay, in Explaining Culture,
on "How to be a genuine materialist in anthropology." He
complains about treating Capital, the World-System, cultural
symbol-systems, mentalities, etc. as reifed causal forces, if not
self-interested foresightful agents, forgetting that human his-
tory, society and culture are actually (if I may quote Marx and
Engels): "real individuals, their activity and the conditions
under which they live." It seems, at least to this interested out-
sider, that the study of literature in society also sufers from
the ills Sperber diagnoses in anthropology. And I think what
he advocates there should go here, too: give actual causal ac-
counts of how macroscopic patterns emerge from the interac-
tion of many material bodies (notably, people and books), of
the sort we know to exist, endowed with the kinds of abilities
we know them to have.
Tis commitment may sound harmless, because content-
less, but it does actually have implications. It means that you
have to do a lot of work to justify functionalist explanations
(though it's not impossible. See Elster.) It should make you
very dubious about ideal types (Mayer again. It should make
you more interested in exploring variation, and not dismiss-
ing it. It should make you very dubious about "practices" and
other shared mental objects, at least as ordinarily conceived
(see Turner). And it suggests a lot of productive directions,
investigating communication, cognition, and the collective
patterns they produce.
In Graphs, Maps, Trees, as in his Atlas, Moretti is basically
looking at the communication end of things. He doesn't say
much about cognition, or individual thought more generally.
Cosma Shalizi 128 l
Elsewhere (see e.g. Signs Taken for Wonders) he has dabbled
in psychoanalysis, but I hope that's past. A materialist theory
of literary form will ultimately have to concern itself with the
organic processes of reading and composition, but the way
to do this is through empirical study of readers and writers,
not more interpretation of texts, or armchair ruminations
(whether those are on the primal scene, the environment of
evolutionary adaptation, or conceptual blending). Of course
literary scholars have been making stabs in this direction at
least since I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism, but with the
advent of cognitive psychology this can be done in a much
more systematic way, combining modeling of cognition with
experimental tests of the models.
Again, many people (e.g.,
Jerry Hobbs, Herbert Simon) have been proposing
this for some little while, but it's only recently, with works
like Bortolussi and Dixon's Psychonarratology, that people
have begun to actually do it, taking the predictions of various
theories of narrative, which say that changing stories in cer-
tain ways should afect readers' responses, and seeing whether
that's actually right. Tis, and not desk-bound specu-
lation about analogies, seems to me the proper way to start on
a cognitive psychology of literature. It is obviously comple-
mentary to what Moretti wants to do, and (this is the sweet
part) the two enquiries can be pursued in parallel; neither has
to wait for the other.
One thing Moretti does not do, anywhere, is construct
models linking individual behavior to aggregate patterns.
Economists and sociologists already make such models, and
anthropologists are starting to do so. It may be premature
here, but ultimately it will be vital. If diferent social groups
have diferent beliefs, is that because those beliefs express
their relations to the mode of production, or is it because
they tend to talk more with in the group than across group
boundaries? Adaptationist theories of culture tend to go for
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 129
the frst choice, but we don't really know whether the
latter could account for the specifc patterns of cultural dif-
ference and change that we see.
How Not to Learn from the Natural Sciences
What I said above about not mindlessly imitating biology
deserves some amplifcation.
Evolution ought to have a bad name in the study of
literary history. Reading René Wellek's "Te Concept of
Evolution in Literary History" (or his article for the
Dictionary of the History of Ideas) is actually quite depress-
ing. (Te fgures he discusses—not Wellek himself—bring to
mind Kurt Vonnegut's line: "they deserved to fail, because
they were all so stupid.") Te many post-Darwinian ventures
in this direction went, essentially, nowhere, at least as far as
understanding literature better goes. It surely didn't help that
their understandings of biological evolution were ofen very
bad, generally some kind of Spencerian or even Lamarckian
belief in tendencies of progressive development—perhaps
inspiring, but hopelessly un-explanatory. (Tis has vitiated
far too much evolutionary theorizing about social processes;
cf. Toulmin's chapter 5.) As for the more recent wave, since
the 1980s, the people who seem to think that literature exists
because humanity craves dramatizations of Daly & Wilson's
Sex, Evolution and Behavior drive me up the wall. (Teir idea
makes no sense even if you are very sympathetic to evolution-
ary psychology, which I am.)
Tat said, this is not at all what Moretti is proposing, and
I don't see the harm in trying to make this all ft together as
another instance of a general explanatory pattern, alongside
biological evolution, because they have similar causally-rele-
vant features, and so similar mechanisms are at work. Many
people have pointed out, in some detail, that explaining
biological processes through the joint action of variation and
Cosma Shalizi 130 l
selective transmission in populations is one instance of a gen-
eral pattern of historical explanation; Toulmin is particularly
clear on this.
Tere is a demography of businesses (Carroll &
Hannan), of interest groups (Gray & Lowery) even of medi-
eval manuscripts of classical works (Cisne), and
so why not one of literary texts? Inheriting discrete, particu-
late hereditary factors from a small, fxed number of immedi-
ate ancestors is not the sine qua non of this form of historical
explanation, though the details of the process of inheritance
will very strongly afect the character of the resulting dynam-
ics. It might be that theories of literary change cast in this
form are too complicated to be useful, or that we just don't
know enough yet to fnd the useful ways to formulate them.
But it wouldn't hurt to seriously try, and we'd learn a lot, no
matter the eventual outcome.
Varieties of Rational History
One way to take the bit from Braudel about "a more rational
history" that Moretti adopts as a motto is simply to hope that
literary history will be a rational enterprise. Tere are various
aspects to this—the accumulation of knowledge, a desire to
give explanations, a realization that more than one explana-
tion might be possible and a desire to check which one is right,
and so on. To do all this, it's important to develop, use and
refne reliable methods of inquiry—ones which are unlikely
to lead you into error, and which tend to correct the errors
they do make. You want to be able to persuade others, and
you want to know that you're not just persuading yourself. As
a statistician, my job is to help with the reliable-methods-of-
inquiry bit, so it looms large for me. I think this is more or less
what Moretti has in mind when he talks (elsewhere) about
wanting "falsifable" literary history—for ideas which have
enough content that they can not only be communicated
from one person to another (without tripping Liberman's
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 131
detector), but checked. Which said, I wish that here, as in
his Atlas, Moretti had done a more systematic job of checking
his conclusions. Would it be unfair to suggest that, while he
sees the need for data analysis, it will be lef to a successor
generation to put it into routine practice?
If you want to say that asking literary history to be com-
municable, testable and reliable is asking it to be scientifc and
that's icky, well, it's a free country (at least for now). Te more
I think about what makes something a science, the less that
seems like an important question. But whether something is
a rational enterprise of inquiry matters. I'm sure it's possible
to object to wanting history to be more rational in this sense,
but I fnd that thought so alien and pointless I won't even try
to engage it.
Another take on "rational history" is that the vast mass of
details in small-scale history are essentially random, or, more
exactly, the connections among them are as convoluted and
involved as the details themselves. (Tis is one way to defne
randomness, mathematically.) But looking at larger scales,
the randomness averages out, leaving regularities which are
simpler and more nearly comprehensible by fnite minds,
and more reliable. As a statistical physicist and a statistican,
I am the last to disagree: "In fact, all epistemological value
of the theory of probability is based on this: that large-scale
random phenomena in their collective action create strict,
nonrandom regularity" (Gnedenko & Kolmogorov, 1). Te
small-scale details of literature and of human life have an in-
trinsic interest and value that is missing from the small-scale
detail of molecular chaos, so there is certainly all the room
in the world for what Moretti would like to do and close
reading, and even essayistic appreciation. (But there is not,
I am afraid, room enough in the world for Harold Bloom.)
Whether there is room in an academy organized around the
production of peer-reviewed research fndings for all of them,
is fortunately not a question I need to have an opinion on.
Cosma Shalizi 132 l
Finally, you might be tempted to go from the last sense
of "rational" to supposing that large-scale history must be
the working-out of some scheme which is "rational" in that
it's really deterministic, or even teleological. Tis would be a
mistake. It is not at all hard to give examples of stochastic pro-
cesses that combine random evolution and feedback, which
converge on very nice large-scale regularities, but which regu-
larity they converge on is completely random and indetermi-
Brian Arthur, among others, argues that processes like
this are important in the evolution of technology. Is literature
like that? I have no idea. But I don't see any reason it can't be,
and this needs to be borne in mind.
Let me close by quoting the same paragraph twice, once from
the version in NLR, and then again from the closing pages
of the book. In both cases, Moretti is enumerating themes
which stretch across his chapters.
First, a total indiference to the philosophizing
that goes by the name of 'Teory' in literature de-
partments. It is precisely in the name of theoretical
knowledge that 'Teory' should be forgotten, and
replaced with the extraordinary array of conceptual
constructions, —theories, plural, and with a lower
case 't'—developed by the natural and by the social
sciences. 'Teories are nets', wrote Novalis, 'and only
he who casts will catch'. Teories are nets, and we
should learn to evaluate them for the empirical data
they allow us to process and understand: for how
they concretely change the way we work, rather than as
ends in themselves. Teories are nets; and there are so
many interesting creatures that await to be caught, if
only we try. ("Trees," 63)
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 133
First of all, a somewhat pragmatic view of theoretical
knowledge. 'Teories are nets', wrote Novalis, 'and
only he who casts will catch'. Yes, theories are nets, and
we should evaluate them, not as ends in themselves,
but for how they concretely change the way we work:
for how they allow us to enlarge the literary feld, and
re-design it in a better way, replacing the old, useless
distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or
that national literature...) with new temporal, spatial
and morphological distinctions. (91)
Whether this pragmatic message is what Novalis meant, I
have no idea; I only know the line because Popper used it as
the epigraph for Te Logic of Scientifc Discovery. But that's
what Popper meant by it, and I think it's right, and I look
forward to seeing the coelocanths and tube worms and
giant squid which will be brought up from the deeps in years
to come.
originally posted, January 24, 2006
Works Cited
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Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response.
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of Corporations and Industries. Princeton University
Press, 2004.
Cisne, John L. "How Science Survived: Medieval
Manuscripts, Demography, and Classic Texts'
Extinction", Science, vol. 307 (2005): 1305-1307.
Cosma Shalizi 134 l
Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. Sex, Evolution and
Behavior. 2nd ed. Brooks Cole, 1983.
Deane, P. M. Te First Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed.
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Elster, Jon. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Frawley, William. Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language
and the Unifcation of the Social and Computational
Mind. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Gnedenko, B. V., and A. N. Kolmogorov. Limit
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revised edition. Addison-Wesley, 1968.
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Hamilton, Richard F. Te Social Misconstruction of Reality:
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David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An EvolutionaryAccount
of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. U of
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Lieberson, Stanley. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions,
and Culture Change. Yale University Press, 2000.
Lupia, Arthur, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Samuel L.
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Runciman, W.G. "Te 'Triumph' of Capitalism as a Topic
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Sperber, Dan. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
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Tompson, E. P. Te Making of the English Working Class.
Peter Smith, 1999.
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1 More on testing the null model of genre appear-
ance, for those into that kind of thing: Really, of
course, the most suitable null model for random
appearance would be a continuous-time Poisson
process. Since the data are discretized by years,
however, I'm faking it by using a geometric
distribution of inter-arrival intervals. (I also
tried simulating from a Poisson process and
then discretizing the result; the results weren't
much diferent.) Te only parameter of such a
process is the mean inter-arrival time, or equiva-
lently the "intensity," the probability per year
of producing a new genre. Simple maximum
likelihood estimation gives this as 0.2905405,
which implies a log-likelihood for the original
Cosma Shalizi 136 l
data of -103.9498. To evaluate the signifcance,
I generated 1,000,000 sample paths, of the same
length as Moretti's, and then for each one re-
estimated the intensity and used that to evaluate
the log-likelihood. (Tis sort of "bootstrapping"
should account for the fact that I ft that pa-
rameter to the data in the frst place. It wouldn't
be appropriate if, say, Moretti had advanced
the conjecture that the mean inter-arrival time
should be 10 years on independent grounds.) Of
the 1,000,000 sample paths, only 3,802 had log-
likelihoods as small or smaller than the original
data. Tat is to say, if the null model were cor-
rect, we'd see results like this only about 0.38
percent of the time. So we can certainly reject
the null model at the conventional 5 percent
signifcance level, or even the 1 percent level,
and in fact this is a considerably more severe test
than that.
2 From Sydney Winter, who works out the anal-
ogy in some detail.
3 "Adventures of a Man of Science," Elif Batu-
man's wonderfully-titled review of Graphs, Maps,
Trees in n+1 magazine ( January 6
, 2006), is a
quite nice essay, but it also provides what looks
like a typical example of the kind of mere plausi-
bility I have in mind:
"Perhaps the Holmes stories are not half-baked
versions of the "correct" mystery story, but a
diferent kind of mystery story, wherein the
nondecodability of clues is not a bug, but a
feature. Conan Doyle was writing during the
conquest of England by industry and rational-
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 137
ism; perhaps his readers wanted stories about
the kinds of magic that are possible within the
constraints of science. Holmes categorically
rejects the supernatural, not in order to show
that the new, rational rules preclude magic,
but in order to show that you can still have
magic even if you play by the rules. Decodable
clues came a "generation" later, with Agatha
Christie and the frst World War, and became
more rigorous afer the second—by which
time readers wanted to be reminded that the
world was still rational." (146-147)
First of all, it seems bizarre to say that
Britain was being conquered by "industry and
rationalism" in the 1890s, long afer the scien-
tifc revolution, the Enlightenment (cf. Porter)
the Industrial Revolution (cf. Deane)and all its
social consequences (cf. Tompson), utilitarian-
ism, etc. (Indeed, Mr. Lecky might want to have
a few words ...) Second, Batuman gives us no
reason to think that contemporary readers saw
what Holmes did as (pardon the phrase) magic
within the bounds of reason alone. Tird, even if
she were right about the social situation and the
cultural product, the hypothesized causal con-
nection is really just another arbitrary analogy,
of the sort Elster complained about. Suppose
Conan Doyle had been better about using de-
codable clues than Christie. Would it not then
sound just as plausible to say this expresses the
triumph of rationalism, followed by a post-war
weakening? As it is, Batuman's account seems
to appeal, implicitly, to a desire to hang on to
older ways of thinking. Either the whole reading
public of Britain in the 1890s is being treated, in
Cosma Shalizi 138 l
a grossly anthropomorphic fashion, as a single
person, with such a desire, or she is making a
quite specifc prediction about which readers
Conan Doyle appealed to, one which does not
seem especially plausible, though it might be
tested. (It is utterly unclear whose purposes or
needs are invokes by the in-order-to's—Conan
Doyle's? his original readers'? society's?—but I
fear the worst.)
Finally, no attempt is made to check that this
is the source of the appeal, nor that the later
strict decodability of clues really was caused by
the World Wars, for the reasons given. I don't
know enough to say that this suggestion is false,
or that checking it would be impossible. I don't
even want to suggest that a book review in a
little magazine would be a good place to do such
tests. But it doesn't seem to worry Batuman that
there is no support for this idea (yet).—Let me
repeat that I like the essay.
4 Incidentally, thinking that cognition is compu-
tational, and even that its computational archi-
tecture is strongly constrained by organically-
evolved developmental processes, in no way
commits one to denying that thought is also
profoundly cultural and historical. Sperber is
very good on this, but also see Frawley; or the
papers collected in the Lupia, McCubbins, and
Popkin volume.
5 Of course it isn't the only pattern of successful
historical explanation. Even within the natural
sciences, geology and astronomy provide very
diferent ones.
Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing 4 139
6 More exactly, there are stochastic processes
("urn schemes") where the relative frequencies
of diferent outcomes are guaranteed to con-
verge, with 100% probability, but the ratio at
which they converge is itself a random variable,
not determined by the initial set-up in any way.
Te models of lock-in developed by Brian Ar-
thur and his collaborators in the 1980s are urn
models, but actually less indeterministic than
the classical ones.
4 141
William Benzon is an independent scholar and trumpet-
er. He is the author of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and
Culture (Basic 2001). He blogs at the Valve, www.thevalve.org.
Tim Burke is a Professor of History at Swarthmore College.
He is the author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Consumption,
Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Duke
UP 1996) and co-author of Saturday Morning Fever: Growing
Up With Cartoon Culture (St. Martin's Press, 1998), as well as a
variety of articles in African history, cultural studies and game
studies. He blogs at Easily Distracted, weblogs.swarthmore.edu/
Jenny Davidson teaches in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University; her latest
academic book is Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth
Century (Columbia UP 2008); and she blogs at Light Reading,
Ray Davis is a student in good standing and has completed all
requirements except for dissertation. Advisors are welcome at
Jonathan Goodwin is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Louisiana, at Lafayette. He is working on a book
about time in interwar British fiction.
Eric Hayot is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Comparative Literature at Penn State University. His most re-
cent book is The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity,
and Chinese Pain (Oxford UP 2009)
Contributors 142 l
John Holbo is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
National University of Singapore and author of Reason and
Persuasion: Three Dialogues By Plato (Pearson 2009). He blogs
at the the Valve, at Crooked Timber, crookedtimber.org, and at
John & Belle Have A Blog, examinedlife.typepad.com.
Steven Berlin Johnson is the bestselling author of seven books
on science, culture, and technology, mostly recently The Ghost
Map, The Invention of Air, and Where Good Ideas Come From..
He is the co-founder of the web sites FEED, plastic.com, and out-
Matthew Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the
Department of English at the University of Maryland and
Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology
in the Humanities (MITH). His is the author of Mechanisms:
New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT 2008).
Sean McCann is Professor of English and American Studies at
Wesleyan University.
Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature
at Stanford. In addition to Graphs, Maps, Trees, he has writ-
ten four other books and edited, most recently, The Novel
(Princeton 2006).
Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature
at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of
a number of critical studied, including The History of Science
Fiction (Palgrave 2006) as well as a dozen novels, all science fic-
tional or thereabouts.
Cosma Shalizi is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Carnegie
Mellon University, and an external faculty member of the Santa
Fe Institute. He blogs at http://bactra.org/weblog/.
book event
edited by Jonathan Goodwin
& John Holbo
Reading Graphs,
Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary
History is one of the most provocative recent works of literary his-
tory. The present volume collects generalist and specialist, aca-
demic and nonacademic responses by statisticians, philosophers,
historians, literary scholars and others. And Moretti's responses
to these responses. Originally written as contributions to an online
book event hosted at The Valve (www.thevalve.org), and edited
for this volume, these essays explore, extend and criticize many
aspects of Franco Moretti's work. They will be of interest to anyone
interested in Moretti's brand of "distant reading"; or in the pros-
pects for quantitative approaches to literary style and genre; or
recent interdisciplinary work in the humanities generally.
Contributors: Bill Benzon, Tim Burke, Jenny Davidson, Ray Davis,
Jonathan Goodwin, Eric Hayot, John Holbo, Steven Berlin
Johnson, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sean McCann, Franco
Moretti, Adam Roberts, Cosma Shalizi
Glassbead Books
Edited by John Holbo
3015 Brackenberry Drive
Anderson, South Carolina 29621