Franco on form

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. (London: Verson, 2005.)

Graphs, Maps, Trees seems significantly more interesting and worthwhile to me now than it did a year and a half ago when I first looked at it. I guess that means the education is working. I came across it in the process of writing on a Barthes essay on literature and literary history from which, incidentally, Moretti pulls a sentence or two to comment on one of the graphs in the first chapter. At the time I thought it was sort of hare-brained. What has happened since then? I’ve spent a further one and a half years in graduate school, read up on my Marxist literary criticism and (this is the sort of thing to which I’d like to pay attention) heard Moretti’s work briefly discussed at the AHA round-table in honor of Roger Chartier. So now he has the approval of the professional organization to which, one day, I will probably be obliged to belong. More important, I have a pretty good idea of what tradition he means to evoke when he says, at the end of his little, pumice-polished book,

“Were I to name a common denominator for all these attempts, I would probably choose: a materialist conception of form.” Is this reminiscent of the Marxist ‘60s and ‘70s? “Yes and no. Yes because the great idea of that critical season—form as the most profoundly social aspect of literature: form as force, as I put it in the close to my previous chapter—remains for me as valid as ever. And no, because I no longer believe that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system...” (92)

Certainly, Moretti is Marxist-inflected. Happily, I’m hearing about Marx on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from Fred Jameson this semester, so when I read Moretti: “As long as a hegemonic form [of genre] has not lost its ‘artistic usefulness’, there is not much a rival form can do” (17), I hear an echo: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed...” (426, Early Writings). This points to a major theoretical issue that I have with Moretti, which I suppose he, Marxist-inflected as he is, does not think is a problem. I mean that he takes for established fact that the role of literature (or, prose fiction, anyway) is to help its readers somehow ‘think’ society. From a footnote on the same page as the above quote: “a genre exhausts its potentialities...when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality” (17). The representative quality of the novel is crucial because he invokes the troubled idea of the ‘generation’ in order to explain his data about the life-cycle (usually 20-25 years) of the genre: “if what attracts readers is the drama of the day, then, once the day is over, so is the novel” (30). No doubt this question is worked out elsewhere. But it rankles for Moretti to be so cavalier about this when scholars like Lyon-Caen (see previous post) take such trouble to demonstrate the particular historical conditions under which it is indeed the case the people use the novel to read their social world. Moretti needs a more sociological explanation.

Which is odd, because his project is largely to bring sociology to literary history. He describes, on the very first page, his project this, “Within that old area territory [literary history], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs [graphs, maps, and trees]...in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading’...where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection”(1).

Then again at the end:

“Three chapters; three models; three distinct ‘sections’ of the literary field. First, the system of novelistic genres as a whole; then, ‘the road from birth to death’ of a specific chronotype; and now, the microlevel of stylistic mutations. But despite the differences of scale, some aspects of the argument remain constant. Fist of all, a somewhat pragmatic view of theoretical knowledge...In the second place, the models I have presented share a clear preference for explanation over interpretation...” (91)

This is all very sociological. Indeed, I found myself turning back to Randall Collins in the later part of the book, during Moretti’s discussion of Sherlock Holmes. Moretti is attempting to arrive at an evolutionary chart for a particular genre—in this case, the detective story, through treatment of the clue, as presumably, today, a determining feature of the genre.

(I might as well say here—I also find it odd that Moretti discusses collections of stories and novels proper as though they were indistinguishable. A central problem of any quantitative history is the definition of terms—where does Moretti draw the line? What about history-as-literature, which it was most of the way through the 19^th century—indeed, ‘non-fiction’ titles still sometimes outsell fiction, right? Where would I get numbers about this?).

This is fine, and tries to take in to account readership and market forces (pgs 72-77). It seems to me, though, that Collins’s idea of ‘attention space’ would be quite useful here. Perhaps Moretti feels that ‘market’ implies ‘attention space.’ Survival in the market means commanding a certain share of it, certainly—but I would think that especially where literary sub-genres are the subject, a sufficiently full attention-space could, in a manner of speaking, split, and spawn new niche markets. That is, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were good enough that other writers, who treated the material differently to a sufficient degree, were pushed out of this market, and into another? That doesn’t sound so good, but I’d like more of a treatment of this sort of question from Moretti.

‘Graphs’ is polemic about the 99% of novels written that critics ignore (must, by simple numbers), but it’s downhill after that. ‘Maps’ manages to squeeze a bit more ideology out of what you might call the virtual geography of certain village stories, but forgets his own sensible advice from the previous chapter to find questions to which he hasn’t already got the answer. The last chapter, ‘Trees,’ is unconvincing with Sherlock Holmes, and then, when we get to free indirect discourse, it sounds to me simply like old-fashioned (good, mind you, but still old-fashioned) literary history. A few books, here and there, which typify a way of writing, through time.

The interesting thing about Moretti’s three ‘models’ is that they are all tied to physiological life processes. He himself refuses to believe “that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system,” and he does not use any such framework. Yet the analysis of his graphs turn on generations of readership, that is, human life-times. His maps are also of vectors of human movement, and take, for the most part, a comfortable walk as a basic measure. ‘Trees’ assumes genealogy for novels as clear as that for living beings. The very model is deeply biological, even if he tries to hide it behind technology. So is it all about the body? Is not the individual human body the only possible locus for a genuine cultural materialism? Or do I only think this because I read the first part of Fiction of a Thinkable World?

Harpham on Zizek

Harpham, Galt. "Doing The Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge." Critical Inquiry Volume 29, Number 3, Spring 2003.

All in all, much less exciting than the title might lead you to believe, but not a terrible polemic-by-way-of-introduction.

“If we took Zizek as a guide to the real character of conventional academic methods and practices, we would be forced to revise--actually, to discard--all our assumptions about academic work and indeed about rational thought as such. For if Zizek's practice were to be universalized, the result would be the destruction of the very idea of a field, a specialized professional discourse that arrives at a true account of a limited domain by progressive and rational means. It would mean the end of life as we know it.”

Harpham also says, “Much of Lacan's mystique derives from the fact that he grounds his hypotheses about the mind in a science of language, giving them authority, scope, and profundity. But, as we have seen, Lacan relied on Saussure for that science...” and it may be true that the mystique comes from this ‘structuralist veneer,’ but it is also the case (as Harpham says) that Lacan botched or radically altered Saussurean lingusitics. Isn’t a more sensible reading of the relationship between the two that in 1957 Lacan knew Saussure was huge, knew that everyone was saying these things, and proceeded with his own, rather un-Saussurean understanding of language? He is often nasty, often ironic—why not here? Certainly, Zizek is very clear in Sublime Object of Ideology that he does not consider Lacan to be any kind of structuralist.

dunno what's going on with the formatting. it's what i get for cutting-and-pasting from html.

guillory - cultural capital (1993)

Cultural Capital is very much a product of its times; I’m not sure how much of what Guillory says remains relevant (never mind true) in 2007. The book appeared in 1993, and is essentially a Bourdieusian intervention in the debate on the canon. The starting point is the reasonable observation that it is extremely problematic, in terms both of theory and practice, to talk about representation in the ‘canon’ in the same way one discusses political representation. Indeed, Guillory thinks that to do so is both nonsensical and politically pernicious. He seems to regard this move as a symptom of the total political defeat of the left in Reagan-era America. (As an aside, I think it might be very interesting, very productive, to think about what really has changed in the past 15 years. Everything or nothing? Were the Clinton years just a hiatus? What would have happened if the Twin Towers had fallen the first time they were bombed?)

There’s much business in the middle of this big fat book. He makes and then takes back a number of interesting comparisons. For instance, the idea that the syllabus is the constitutive element of the canon, that really the canon is an imagined totality, never realized, impossible to realize—I want to elaborate, to say that no doubt a canon cannot be some mythical aggregate of all syllabi, that there must always be a remainder, an missing something...

The strong point seems to me to be that it is indeed theoretically incoherent and (therefore) politically destructive to insist on ‘representative’ canon formation. Think instead about syllabi. Rather than being concerned about inclusion or exclusion from a mythical canon, think rather about the distribution of ‘objectively’ measurable cultural capital.

The conclusion of the book was, for me, quite unsatisfying. Having established, I think convincingly, that Bourdieu’s general perspective is best, Guillory seems to have no larger point to make—no solutions to offer, or even directions in which to move. After a lightly critical account of Bourdieu’s ideas on the relative autonomy of cultural production, Guillory, all innocence and wide-eyes, introduces a thought experiment. What if there was only cultural capital? Happily, this exact thought-experiment was performed by Marx in The German Ideology. The world after the revolution will not have designated intellectuals of any kind, because ‘intellectual’ and its variants are positions in the social field determined by a special intersection of cultural and material capital. That is, to be an intellectual today is (generally) also to be of a privileged social class. The thrust of the argument is that since it is theoretically impossible either to disconnect cultural from material capital, or to do away with differences in the distribution of cultural capital, the least we can do is the relatively simple job of eliminating the uneven distribution of material capital. Oh, if that’s what literary critics are supposed to be doing.

I’m no doubt not doing justice to Guillory. He makes a number of good points. But the conclusion of the book, if it can even be called a conclusion, is a shot off into the wild blue, and doesn’t match the hard-headedness of the earlier sections. Also, as is I suppose inevitable, he has constructed quite a straw man in the simplistic ‘representationalist’ view of canon formation. Surely there’s more to it? Surely more of an effort could have been made to tie the actual social world in to the debate, since he is perfectly willing to throw the ‘politically ineffective’ stone at his opponents. He quotes Henry Louis Gates Jr. on previously excluded minorities who hear no voice they recognize in ‘canonical’ literature—and no doubt it is better to say that these people have been excluded from the means of cultural production, no doubt worthwhile to point out that in practice, class only rarely enters the picture (race and gender are easier to essentialize)—but it isn’t a response. Guillory may be right, probably is right, that ultimately the solution to certain ailments of the academy are really much larger than the academy. Still, don’t blame us isn’t a great message.

Also, and for a number of reasons, I’d like to commit myself right now to being very, very careful in my use of the word ‘precisely.’ One should be especially wary of the ever-alluring ‘it is precisely not...’ construction, because it rarely is.

clive bell on france

This is most of the last paragraph from an essay reproduced in William Bywater's 1975 'rehabilitation' of Bell. I especially like: "Her literature is to English what her painting is to Italian, only more so."

From “Order and Authority, I” Athenaeum. 1919.

“France, the greatest country on earth, is singularly poor in the greatest characters—great ones she has galore. Her standard of civilization, of intellectual and spiritual activity, is higher than that of any other nation; yet an absence of vast, outstanding figures is one of the most obvious facts in her history. Her literature is to English what her painting is to Italian, only more so. Her genius is enterprising without being particularly bold or original, and though it has brought so much to perfection it has discovered comparatively little. Assuredly France is the intellectual capital of the world, since, compared with hers, all other post-Renaissance civilizations have an air distinctly provincial. Yet, face to face with the rest of the world, France is provincial herself.” (pg 172)

The Political Unconscious

Here is a somewhat extended quote to explain what I like about Fred Jameson:

“Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day...My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism...Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus—and not through the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists—can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alteration of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot...” (18-20)

And cut to a quote from the Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing societies...” In Jameson’s class on Sartre, at least in its most recent incarnation, the first reading assignment is selections from Pascal’s Pensées. At several points in The Political Unconscious Jameson mentions the frequent comparisons between various religions and Marxism, saying that the comparison may be just, but should certainly not be to the denigration of the latter. Indeed, he courts such comparisons by, entirely unnecessarily, positioning his Marxist (Freudian) hermeneutic as the successor, the next, indeed, the only real change since, medieval theological hermeneutics. He begins with the four levels of medieval Biblical hermeneutics not just in relation to Northrop Frye, but essentially because his critical practice, if not a religion proper, is certainly a faith. So perhaps assigning Pascal is a nod in the direction of his own faith.

Sartrean philosophy does not, in my opinion, leave much room for the past (even the ‘cultural past’), except as individuals ‘know’ it. Any kind of collective history is impressionistic at best. The Critique (in 1960) did indeed try to rectify this, and to treat totality rigorously from both an existentialist and a Marxist perspective. Although it is perhaps unfair, it is exactly at this juncture that I am inclined to locate the Jamesonian leap of faith. Sartre’s attempt to bring his phenomenology in line with a Marxist philosophy of the collectivity failed. I am inclined to say the Critique is a failure not so much because the book is unreadable as because as far as I can tell, Jameson, who is very persuasive, has failed to get anyone to pretend to have read it.

So from my perspective, Jameson’s insistence that not just the text, but History (emphatically, for this reason, capitalized)—which is not itself text, but can only ever be approached textually—makes a meaningful whole represents his primal leap of faith, without which the rest of his critical practice would not be possible. Conceiving of history as the Lacanian Real (or, what I know even less about, the Althusserian/Leibnizian ‘absent cause’) does not solve the problem. Lacan does not take one into a realm of genuine collectivity, never mind totality, any more than Sartre. It is possible that Jameson would describe this ‘leap of faith’ as one of the Utopian goals of his project, or a Utopia inscribed into its process. This is acceptable to me, I suppose, though I don’t share it.

Moreover, I don’t see the reason for it. Neuroscientists claim that the brain is greater than the sum of its parts. There is, I understand, a whole field of research built around ideas of irreducible complexity, critical mass of connectivity, or whatever. I should know more about them, probably. This sort of claim is far from what Jameson is doing. Really, his claims to totality—as he makes clear—are a necessary gesture of critical foreclosure. One must somehow delimit the field of study, the lines are arbitrary, and will line up only with some sort of radical original choice. Jameson’s is Marxism. After this, with great critical dexterity he divides the task of totalizing criticism into three overlapping phases, or levels. All the different critical idioms are contained, on one of the three levels, within the Marxist one (this is the point of the smaller, more soberly formulated 1976 essay, “Criticism in History”).

There are a few further issues that I would like to signal, but about which I haven’t made up my mind. The first is Jameson’s explicitly interpretive, that is, hermeneutic, stance. He mentions Gadamer once, in a footnote, to say that the contextual horizons for interpretation he, Jameson, is setting out here are not like Gadamer’s horizons of interpretation. I suppose that this is Jameson’s way of being anti-Barthesian. There is a hard kernel of the Real in every text, and the critic ought not try to ignore it in the name of jouissance. Politics, all the moral imperatives of Marxism, get in the way.

This interpretation must happen within, as suggested above, certain contexts. Different contexts for different sorts of interpretation; though I think a more detailed comparison of Jameson’s three levels of interpretive context with LaCapra’s (also from the early 1980s) long list of contexts for each text. No doubt the difference may be explained disciplinarily—that is, LaCapra is, in the end, an historian, Jameson a literary critic. So LaCapra goes very willingly outside the text, while Jameson goes so far as to say, “the symbolic act [that is, the text] therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it” (81). I’m not sure what the distinction between generation and producing is supposed to be, but the model is an interesting one. Too flat, though. Any given text certainly might be a symbolic act, and most can be read in that way, but this depends on the context of production. The author-function, I should think, still allows this. Perhaps the issue is that for Jameson one always goes into the past through the text one is investigating, and in this sense, it does indeed create its own context. In the end, though, I can’t agree. To say that the text produces its own context is to allow the critic to find whatever she is looking for in it. Jameson solves this dilemma by turning to totalizing interpretation—that is, the text means only in relation to other structures, other texts—but the totality is, as I said above, really just an act of faith, its content prescribed in some sense from before the book is opened.

Finally, there is the question of allegory. Jameson’s use of historical allegory is sensitive and multi-layered, but my fur is up about this. Michael Sprinker’s 1994 book on Proust purported to be historical materialist in orientation but didn’t seem ever, or hardly ever, to rise above the level of class allegory. As though Sprinker had read a few books about the class structure of the time, and then found homologous structures within the Recherche; he declares an allegory and goes home. For instance, he seems to have decided that the proletariat was a negligible political force in the fin-de-siècle and up until the popular front, even. The real struggle continues to be, according to him, between aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. This is foolishness. It comes from taking the Action Française at its word, and hunting for French fascists in every literary corner. The Recherche certainly is incisive social critique, among other things. But it is not a model of French society as a whole, it is a very peculiar view of a peculiar part of this society. Even this view might be said to be underpinned by the lower-classes, excluded, certainly, but not ignored. This is the content of the scene in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs at Balbec, where the wealthy eat in the gas-lit glass box of the restaurant, while the poor stand in the dark outside, invisible from within, their faces pressed against the glass. Sprinker’s ham-handedness and vulgar allegory has made me suspicious of Jameson in this regard. I’ll have to read more.

Perhaps next I’ll try Vico out. All this talk of philosophy of history has me itching for it. Also, it will be useful when I go back to Sorel.