January 25, 2004
Interpreting Abstraction: Interview with Franco Moretti
by Nader Vossoughian
In his recent essay “Graphing the Novel,” the first of three forthcoming texts published by the New Left Review, Franco Moretti argues that a shift has taken place within literary studies, “a shift from the close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models.” Against New Critical or formalist approaches to literature, he calls for a theory of reading governed by the recognition of patterns rather than the deciphering of signs: “all great theories of the novel,” he writes, “have precisely reduced the novel to one basic form only (realism, the dialogic, romance, meta-novels…); and if the reduction has given them elegance and power, it has also erased nine-tenths of literary history. Too much.”In what follows I ask Professor Moretti to clarify some of the goals and premises of his research, particularly in the light of criticisms leveled against his quantitative methods by existential phenomenology and Critical Theory.
Q. My first question centers on the project of trying to forge a “more rational literary history.” In what way do you see your own quantitative methods as being more rational than the approaches utilized by historians past?
A. Braudel’s quote [i.e., that "history is... much more rational in its procedures and results, when it examines groups and repetitions"] explains it; the individual case is unpredictable, whereas a series often shows a regularity. Needless to say, my repetition of “rational” was also self-mockery.
Q. How would you respond to Georges Canguilhem’s criticism of physiologist Adolphe Quetelet, namely that quantitative statistics merely lends scientific legitimacy to existing social and cultural norms, that it tells us more about the “normal” and the “abnormal” than it does about the “true” and the “untrue”?
A. I don’t understand the question/objection. To begin with, normal/abnormal and true/untrue are completely independent conceptual pairs: the former describes a distribution of (in our case, literary) phenomena; the latter describes the relationship between an assertion and its object. One can say things about what is “normal” that are true – or untrue. For instance, it seems to be true that the “normal” cycle for British novelistic genres is around 25 years. And it seems to be untrue that, say, Brazilian novelistic genres function in the same way.
As for quantitative study “lending scientific legitimacy to social and cultural norms”, this is anti-scientific superstition. Aside from the fact that I have spent all my adult life trying to show how aesthetic forms are vehicles of social consent, the article in New Left Review investigates the extent and nature of (some of) those norms: why should the knowledge of how they work lend them “scientific legitimacy”? If anything, it offers arguments to criticism. Are you suggesting that ignorance serves critique better than knowledge?
Q. Couldn’t one argue, however, that your macro-social approach to literature seeks to install a new (equally subjective) literary canon? Aren’t you ultimately arguing that students of literature ought to study “normal” or “average” novels as opposed to “good” ones?
A. I am certainly arguing for the latter. But that does not entail “installing an (equally subjective) canon,” for the simple reason that a canon is a minuscule fraction of the field (one per cent, half per cent, less) – whereas I argue for the study of the entire field: the 99%, plus the 1% that we already know.
Q. So just to clarify: are you saying that inductive empirical research doesn’t necessarily make claims about what one ought to read? Are you saying that judgments about literary canons should still be based on qualitative (rather than quantitative) criteria?
A. [Yes.] Actually, I think that the disagreement here is merely terminological. The kind of criticism I am after would have an hypotethico-deductive nature, but would indeed have no normative component. In other words, it should be able to make predictions [in the sense one speaks of predictions in the historical disciplines], but will make no prescriptions about what one should or should not read.
Q. My next question has to do with semiotics and statistics. In your article, you observe how quantitative forms of analysis could help historians study thousands of texts over a period of decades or even centuries. Do you think that statistics can also be used for studying individual texts? Can words be quantified? If so, what would a quantitative model of “word reading” look like?
A. Yes, statistics has been used for the study of individual texts, or small corpora, anyway. John Burrows’ quantitative stylistics of Jane Austen’s novels is a little gem of this kind of research.
Q. Last, I was intrigued by your account of “imaginary maps” in the nineteenth century novel and was wondering whether one couldn’t trace your account through to the present. Do you think that the small town is still regarded as a “negative space” in village narratives? More specifically, how do twenty-first century models of globalism differ from nineteenth-century models?
A. Sorry, I am a nineteenth-century specialist, and have no idea how village narratives function today, because I don’t know them. The work I have done rules out idyllic self-sufficiency for developed capitalist countries, but this negative prediction is all I have to say. One thing I have learned is that hunches and hypotheses are necessary, at times wonderful mental tools – but that constructing hypotheses which you will never test, about fields you don’t know, is vacuous.
If you are interested in reading Professor Moretti’s “Graphing the Novel” article in full, you can do so at the New Left Review website. Parts II and III of his three-part study on graphs, maps, and trees will be published later this year.
Franco Moretti is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His publications include Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), and Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998).