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.
I wish only to plead a little on Moretti's behalf...
ReplyDeleteMoretti happens to like citing himself so you can dig up his information and that means it can be difficult to figure out which claim he's actually making sometime.
First, Moretti argues at the outset of the book from which Trees chapter comes, that all maps/tree/graphs are representations and therefore reveal/obscure different details. So I think he'd agree that a tree w/Doyle at the bottom inaccurately makes it seem that Doyle is the first detective novel, but would then argue that the tree reveals other aspects of Doyle that are difficult to "see" w/o this representation.
Second, I think Moretti is actually very interested in flux. Moretti makes one of his references in the Trees chapter to "The Slaughterhouse of Literature" ( http://english.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Moretti%20-%20Slaughterhouse%20of%20Lit.pdf )in which he uses detective fiction as a test case for using quantitative analytical tools(i.e. trees) for understanding why certain literature survives. Moretti is trying to understand why Doyle is the quintessential detective novel amidst such a wide field (of now forgotten lit.) and he decides its the presence of necessary, visible, decodable clues. In "Slaugherhouse" he writes ". . .two things stand out from the very first branching, at the bottom of the figure: first, that quite a few of Conan Doyle’s rivals use no clues at all; second, that these writers are all completely forgotten" (214).
Alyssa: such an interesting comment in light of Darwin on the horizon. You remind us that at the heart of the story detective fiction tells is the need to raise as many interpretive possibilities as possible and then to follow one possibility to its realization as the solution. I guess one of the questions here is, to signify on your awesome title, do we miss the branches for the trunk (or whatever we'd want to call the winning branch).
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad Paul brings up "Slaughterhouse," which is essential reading if you are interested in Moretti's methodology.
On my first read of "Trees," I was bothered by what I perceived as an inconsistency on Moretti's part: while he acknowledges the limitations inherent in what he calls a "tentative" mapping of the vast and unwieldy evolution of free indirect discourse, he seems to take for granted that the evolution of detective fiction can be fairly comprehensively mapped through its use of clues--a single formal device. What would a tree that mapped the presence of sidekicks look like? Or of first versus third person narration?
ReplyDeleteLooking over "Slaughterhouse" (thanks for the link, Paul!) did help to clarify Moretti's position somewhat. He maps the presence of clues as a first inquiry into what he suggests will be a long term and expansive systematic study. And yet again, he states that he began his project by considering both rivals of Austen and rivals of Doyle, choosing to chart the latter because "detective stories have the advantage of being a very simple genre" (212).
This brings to mind a subject we've touched on in class, which is whether the consideration of detective fiction as a clearly delineated genre clarifies or obscures our readings of specific works. Given Moretti's interest in the role of the market in literary history, generic considerations do make sense. And yet this method seems to suggest a hermetically sealed readership and sphere of influence within a genre that Moretti claims was in its infancy as such during the period under consideration.
While reflecting on the differences between technological evolution and biological evolution, Moretti suggests that a single point of convergence and divergence represents the genesis of a genre: "It is easy (in theory, at least) to envision how this cyclical matrix could be applied to the history of genres: convergence among separate lineages would be decisive in the genesis of genres of particular significance; then, once a genre's form stabilizes, 'interbreeding' would stop, and divergence would become the dominant force." (80)
ReplyDeleteThis observation, put forth in a tantalizing footnote, is a compelling definition of genre and deserves more attention. In this light, Doyle's invention of Sherlock Holmes, like Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, incorporates a diverse array of smaller innovations into a new creation. The product of this process of synthesis is so effective that it cannot be ignored, and thus spawns a branching series of variations. This gives credence to those who tend to associate genres with a single seminal work, as in the case of Doyle and detective fiction.
However, if we were to fully embrace this perspective on genre, we would have to leave trees behind. The form of a tree tends to suggest a beginning and an end, rather than a crux or point of confluence. (Although a case could be made for using both branches and roots, with the trunk as the bottleneck.) Perhaps a helix would better represent these cycles of confluence while maintaining a biological motif?
I've been rewriting this comment all day because I'm trying very hard not to let my critique of Moretti's argument devolve into mere criticism - we shall see how well I do!
ReplyDeleteWhile I find Moretti's eventual conclusion to "Trees" - that in this "new conception of literary history, [...] literature moves forwards and sideways at once" (91) an appealing way of describing the use (and usefulness) of graphically arboreal literary data, I cannot overlook the mostly teleological way that Moretti describes literature in the specific. While this is, perhaps, a descriptive hole that is difficult to avoid, Moretti continually posits genre fiction as not only closed, but as only significant in that it evolves into a kind of Ur text (in this case, Doyle and Holmes) that is simultaneously used to represent the genre as a whole and as also the beginning and the end, the reason the genre came into being and the reason it has no need to continue; a sort of evolutionary apex. On page 74, Moretti describes his 'clue' graph (figure 30); not only does the graph represent only partly "exactly what, sooner or later, we had expected to see" but the part that is unexpected is described as a "last-minute stumble on Doyle's part". Similarly, in Moretti's "Clues," "Holmes exists because Peter Pan does not: it is not yet possible to fly through keyholes" (136). Moretti insists, in "Trees," that the graph is a way to avoid using a 'representative individual' to "define the genre as a whole" (76) but I cannot help but think he does just that. Holmes is the only detective fiction that 'counts' - it is the end point in that it 'works' - it prefigures Peter Pan - it is the base and the top of the tree. When close-reading diverges from this point of view, it is a 'stumble' on Doyle's part; Holmes exists only insofar as he falls neatly within the graph, even the graph that purports to show variety (width, rather than length) is mostly described in terms of length - time and history.
I hesitated to put this comment out into the stratosphere, because it feels awfully like linguistic nit-picking, but perhaps Moretti's language choice can make us more aware of how we, too, describe (the) genre. (Although several people in class have pointed out that detective fiction is a still-evolving / revolving / occurring narrative form). While the historical environment of a text is important, I think it is dangerous to always read 'backwards' - to see form, or even a particular author, as working towards something, to view things that do not fit an expected pattern as anachronistic unimportant.
Additionally, on a personal level this 'literary science' makes me wildly uncomfortable, if only in part because it admits that the Scientific Method is non-essential to the argument at hand - the conclusion is drawn before the data is in.