Moretti: Missing the Forest for the Trees?

First of all, please excuse the horrendous pun in the title - it seemed inescapable, somehow. Second, I've been thinking a bit about Moretti's "Trees" in light of our conversation on Friday. My thoughts don't fit with the questions Prof. Reitz has raised, so I thought I'd throw them out in a separate post and see if anyone wanted to chime in.

Specifically, I've been thinking about the shortcomings of the trees Moretti tries to develop to track the evolution of genres/narrative techniques. During my first reading of "Trees," I found the image of "cultural selection" in the development of detective stories intriguing (72-73). I was especially interested in Moretti's assertion that this kind of representation was a way of allowing non-canonical writers to be present with the canonical: "instead of reiterating the verdict of the market, abandoning extinct literature to the oblivion decreed by its initial readers, these trees take the lost 99 per cent of the archive and reintegrate it into the fabric of literary history, allowing us to finally 'see' it" (77). Viewed in this light, there is a potentially subversive (or at least democratic) aspect of building literary "trees." However, the second (admittedly preliminary) tree Moretti constructs works entirely against it. He chooses to represent an extremely limited number of authors in the history of free indirect discourse, with limited rationale offered: where is George Eliot? Why is Joyce's branch longer than Woolf's? And why doesn't this tree allow for the representation of influence (i.e. Austen/Eliot -> Woolf, Flaubert -> Joyce)? The tree tracing the development of free indirect discourse creates a very limited canon, and gives no sense of how the genre actually develops from author to author - it categorizes rather than exposing relationships.

Since our class, I've been thinking about my initial responses in relation to Prof. Reitz's observation that Moretti, and indeed all of these critics, approach detective fiction with the assumption that the Holmes stories are the initial and also the archetypical detective stories, as if detective fiction as Holmes emerges Athena-like directly from the brain of Conan Doyle. Moretti does not substantively trouble this assumption even when his own tree shows that, far from offering perfect examples of "detective stories," The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes show a genre very much in flux. It strikes me that, while Moretti's trees seem effective at representing literature synchronically, they are not actually very effective at representing genealogically, especially when, as in the case of detective fiction, there is no clear starting point. When a genre or style is developing, or when a genre develops that has drawn on a wide variety of prior genres, lineages traced from a specific starting point are impossible.

A Crisis in the Subjectivity of the Aesthete?

It is one of the orthodoxies of the detective story that “the following homology must be observed: ‘author : reader = criminal : detective’” (Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction” 49).  One of our objections to the Moretti of “Clues” (and what you did not object to might also be a good topic to consider on the blog: what does he get right?) is that he seems to delineate all the possible subject positions so neatly and finally.  The detective individualizes (identifies/isolates) the criminal, returns us to the beginning, where everyone is the same as he/she began (detective, characters, readers; alas, not the victim, but Moretti does not pay him/her much attention, with sections only on “the criminal,” “the detective,” and “Watson”).  We have learned nothing and have no interest in re-reading, only in reading new versions of the old formula that observe all the same positions in relation to one another.  There is no social commentary (“detective fiction exists expressly to dispel the doubt that guilt might be impersonal, and therefore collective and social” 135), only a sense that the detective is the figure that keeps us from having to think about it (153). 

This seems a long way from the almost dizzying array of perspectives offered by De Quincey’s three iterations of “On Murder.” As we touched upon in class, the 1827 essay is framed by a faux letter to the editor which both enlists readers as a force for public morality (more effective than “an appeal to Bow-street”) and implicates readers in the violence about which they are to read: “the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who sits and looks on; neither can he be clear of blood who has countenanced its shedding; nor that man seem other than a participator in murder who gives his applause to the murderer” (9). The essay that follows, however, is fairly stable in its perspective: it is a lecture by a connoisseur of murder to other connoisseurs, some of whom, it is implied, have dabbled in the arts themselves.  Criminals and the author are thus linked, victims are individualized here (the German baker, famous philosophers) and the detective is nowhere.  While the 1839 paper has important differences (I would argue more reader-friendly, and more interested in offering up a spectrum of violence that is only barely under control as the party gets more raucous), the positions seem similar to those of the 1827 essay.  By 1854, however, it has become less clear.  The perspective of the postscript begins in a defensive position (“under the Telamonian shield of the Dean”95), more akin to the Editor's indemnifying note of 1827, the speaker (seems almost silly to call him anything other than De Quincey at this point -- are there vestiges of some sort of fictional persona?) seems to both see Williams as a garden variety English sailor (though they are always potentially criminal) and as a freakishly individualized villain (100).  The readers are invited to move with De Q through his narration, sometimes imagining the movements of the murderer, sometimes with a character in proximity (servant, lodger), sometimes with someone on the street (though never in the murderer’s head -- feel free to prove me wrong).  While there is still occasional fun and irreverance, there is no guilt contaminating our spectating, but rather a sense of shared outrage at this “useless butchery” (116).  Do the demands of detective work and/or narration of a mystery drive out the work of connoisseurship or is investigation just aesthetic appreciation by another name? How might you answer this for De Quincey?  For Holmes?

 

Punt?

Ah, Tuesday.  One-pager Eve.  It is most likely that we'll postpone a vigorous discussion on the blog this week and rededicate ourselves next week when we have an official post-er.   But if your checking in here with the blog suggests a deep desire to talk about detective fiction, rather than a dutiful compliance with the rules of the seminar, I will throw out one of the more provocative ideas we touched upon briefly in class.  Nancy Armstrong groups detective fiction with those fringe genres that had the potential to produce a different kind of individual/subject than the one produced by a kind of canonical, realist novel.  This both seems to work with D. A. Miller's argument that the Novel aids and abets the production of a disciplined individual and against it: different genres produce different, and arguably less disciplined subjects.  Do you find this argument compelling?  What literary critical paths might it lead us down?  What assumptions about genre is it making?

The state, the family, the individual - the "problem"

To recap slightly for those who weren't able to attend class last week, our discussion again vacillated between what, exactly, is 'kinda subversive' and what is 'kinda hegemonic.'  A particular thread that we followed is the relation of the family unit to the state - or rather the "family" to the "state," since we left class questioning our use of terms. I think it would be helpful to do a bit of crowd-sourced definition, and perhaps in the process explore further our reactions to the readings, particularly the Foucault and Goodlad.

Can we safely use the term "the state" as a stand-in for a growing bureaucratic (English, Victorian) police-state, or are our notions of government modern reflections cast upon the past?

Is the family unit subservient to the state, or is it a refuge from the state? Is the family unit generally the patriarchal nuclear family, or something more fluid? Does the patriarchy extend to the state, or is it condoned by the state?

On a slightly different track, Professor Reitz pointed out that the idea of the "problem of the individual" is something that both criticism and literature struggle with, from the realist novel to Darwin to Foucault.  As such, does the individual matter more than the family, when we talk about things like bureaucracy and state-control?  Or is it only so many nesting dolls?

I didn't intend to have so many explicit questions, but I think our classroom discussion hit upon so many different points that a definition of terms might not only help is clarify our ideas, but provoke new discussion with those who weren't there.

I'll leave you with this paraphrased quote from class: "Detective fiction is both conservative in that it reassures the reader of order and control, but also subversive in that it doesn't rely on the state for justice, order, or its conclusion."

One small thing

Reading "The Copper Beeches" this morning, there was a moment that resonated with the last part of our discussion yesterday, about patriarchy/the family as a capillary of discipline. Watson and Holmes are looking out over the picturesque houses in the countryside, and Watson comments on their beauty. Holmes says, "I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there." He goes on to mention "the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow." For me, these moments are "kinda subversive" -- Holmes certainly isn't raging against the patriarchy, but it made me think about the presence of some discomfort and skepticism, on Holmes's part, as concerns the family unit. He then postulates that the crowded city, not the law, is a better deterrent against such private "crimes."

Sherlock Holmes and "theories to suit facts"

For this blog post, I thought I'd take a moment to respond to the previous class discussion by looking at the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," and seeing if it answers (or complicates) any of the questions that were brought up in class.  It seems to me that the ideas of the reader's expectation, and also what might be called the reader's participation, were something many people were concerned with when we were trying to unpack out notions of genre, and the detective genre in particular.  I'd like to know whether, after reading the first Sherlock Holmes story (or stories), anyone has any new or changed ideas about what it means to be a reader of detective fiction. 

I found it interesting that in this story there was already the assumption of a Holmes readership - not only with the general feeling of the story starting without preamble or explicit introduction to the two main characters, but in the outright naming of a previous story, the Study in Scarlet.  Holmes references Watson as his "Boswell," which, according to wikipedia (sorry!) was an 18th century Scottish biographer whose name "passed into the English language as a term for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print."  Given our discussion about Watson as a possible stand-in for the reader, what do you think these mentions of Watson as author say about our notion that he is in some way 'safe' or 'reliable'? Watson is specifically characterized as a biographer-companion, someone who is both present at the moment of action but also relied upon to record, and thus reflect, upon that action.  The character as biographer notes that this case is different from "the two crimes which [he] has elsewhere recorded;" ie. the two previous novels.  Can Watson be both the writer and the reader?