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Distant Reading. Franco Moretti.

Article  in  Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · March 2014

DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqu010

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 Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access published March 19, 2014

Book Review
............................................................................................................................................................

Distant Reading. modest way an analysis of power’ (p. 59). The

Franco Moretti. London: Verso, 2013. 254 pp. thought that literary exchange might involve some-
ISBN 978-1-7816-8084-1. $29.95 (paperback). thing like appropriation, where a peripheral lan-
guage area plays an active role in adopting certain
Since he coined the term in 2000, Franco Moretti’s core forms, arouses nothing but contempt: ‘Are
notion of ‘distant reading’ has become very popular. these concepts—or daydreams?’ (p. 117).
Comments such as these show Moretti’s Marxist

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It is no wonder that, looking for a title for a collec-
tion of essays, Moretti or his publisher chose that background. Moretti has also been profoundly
appealing, programmatic, and polemical term. influenced by the theory of evolution. ‘The
Distant Reading brings together ten essays, pub- Slaughterhouse of Literature’ applies the evolution-
lished between 1994 and 2011, and shows both con- ary perspective to the development of literary
tinuities and developments in Moretti’s thought. genres. Like nature, literature is a slaughterhouse.
One prominent example of development is the Why is it, then, that some books survive?
meaning of the term ‘distant reading’ itself. In its Moretti’s thesis is that readers like certain works
original formulation, in the essay ‘Conjectures on based on formal aspects, and by sharing their pref-
World Literature’, the term had nothing to do erences with other readers they decide about the
with the digital analysis of literature we associate it survival of these forms (p. 69–70). His example is
with today, and not even with the visualizations and the detective story, where Conan Doyle discovered
mappings of e.g. Graphs, Maps and Trees (Moretti the clue as an essential structuring element. Moretti
2005). Instead, ‘distant reading’ originally referred draws a tree structure in which each branching adds
to the study of world literature while relying on an essential requirement: there must be a clue, and it
studies done by other researchers. The size and must be necessary, visible, and decodable. He then
linguistic diversity of the world’s literatures make places stories by Doyle and his contemporaries on
this inevitable: ‘. . . literary history . . . will become their branches in the tree (p. 73), which he inter-
‘‘second hand’’: a patchwork of other people’s re- prets as a biological family tree:
search, without a single direct textual reading. Still . . . what ‘raises’ this tree, this branching
ambitious . . . but the ambition is now directly pro- pattern of literary history? Texts? Not
portional to the distance from the text . . .’. (p. 48) really: . . . the branches . . . are generated by
As an example, Moretti discusses the reception of clues—by their absence, presence, necessity,
the English and French form of the novel in non- visibility, etc. . . . a unit much smaller than
European literatures. In most cultures, the first the text. Conversely, the branches are also
novels are visibly the results of a problematic com- part of something much larger than any text,
promise between western form and local subject. which is the genre . . . . Devices and genres: two
For Moretti, this is an exercise of power. The foreign formal units. . . . Not texts. Texts are real ob-
form (the novel) is ‘dictated by an outside power’, jects—but not objects of knowledge. If we want
‘powerful literatures making life hard for the others’ to explain the laws of literary history, we must
(p. 58). And again, ‘Forms are the abstracts of social move to a formal plain that lies beyond
relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own them . . . . (p. 76–7)

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Review

This is a strong (and welcome) statement in de- In the years after this essay, Moretti’s theoretical
fiance of the almost universal consensus that the interests moved into the background to make room
humanities are about the individual and unique. for more quantitative work. The essay ‘Style, Inc.:
Laws explain regularly occurring features, not indi- Reflections on 7000 Titles’ is a good example. It
vidual cases. The emphasis on regularities and laws investigates trends in British novel titles in the
is a constant in these essays. Unfortunately, period 1740–1850. ‘In a few years, we will have a
Moretti’s laws are not always convincing. In detect- digital archive with the full texts . . . ; but for now,
ive fiction, for instance, the ‘wrong’ branches do not titles are still the best way to go beyond the 1 per
become extinct (p. 81), and this is a recurrent weak- cent of novels that make up the canon . . .’ (p. 181).
ness in the book: the tendency to generalize from a And why are titles of interest? ‘Half sign, half ad, the
single and not always very credible example. In the title is where the novel as language meets the novel
case of detective fiction, maybe the analogy between as commodity’ (p. 181). The major trend in the
the biological family tree and the tree that is sup- corpus of titles is that they were getting shorter.
Moretti offers an economic explanation: to stand

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posed to represent the genesis of the detective story
is just a superficial resemblance. The branches in the out among the increasing number of novels, books
tree of the detective story are not species that evolve needed eye-catching, memorable titles. The piece is
into descendant species. This tree is just a decision full of interesting observations supported by num-
tree that classifies stories based on theoretical cri- bers. The many titles that consist of just the first
teria; there is nothing in reality that corresponds to name of a female protagonist suggest a marriage
its branches. In a later essay, Moretti admits that on plot. In titles that name a single abstract concept
second thought much of the discussion about trees until 1800, the vices dominate (‘Disobedience’,
‘Retribution’), while after 1800, moral principles
should be seen as a methodological proposal rather
prevail (‘Moderation’, ‘Integrity’). Moretti: ‘. . . that
than as fully fleshed out empirical result.
moral precept fabricated for practical utility is really
Another insightful essay is ‘Evolution, World-
the dawn of Victorianism’ (p. 201).
Systems, Weltliteratur’. It discusses the importance
About this article, Moretti writes:
of evolution and Wallerstein’s world-systems theory
for literary history. One of the attractive aspects of This is a quantitative study: but its units are
Moretti’s work is that he tackles the really large linguistic and rhetorical. And the reason is
questions. In this essay, evolution explains literary simple: for me, formal analysis is the great
variation, while world-systems theory explains liter- accomplishment of literary study, and is
ary diffusion and uniformity. Until about the eight- therefore also what any new approach—
eenth century, divergence dominates; thereafter, quantitative, digital, evolutionary, what-
because of the rise of capitalism, diffusion becomes ever—must prove itself against: prove that it
the dominant tendency. In his introduction to this can do formal analysis, better than we already
piece, Moretti explains why evolution and world- do. Or at least: equally well, in a different key.
systems theory are so interesting for him: ‘they Otherwise, what is the point? (p. 204)
were both uncompromisingly materialistic; both This quotation offers a good example of
historical; both supported by plenty of empirical Moretti’s writing style. Note the explicitly personal,
evidence . . . What more could one ask for?’ (p. the implication that he is stating the obvious, the
121). The natural sciences provide a good model casual ‘whatever’, and the sentence fragments sug-
for literary history: ‘the opposition between laws gestive of speech.
and individuals, explanation and interpretation, The last article, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’,
random and intentional, distant and close, and so uses network diagrams to investigate literary works.
on, in all these cases I am squarely on the side of the The diagrams, for example of Hamlet, show charac-
natural sciences’ (p. 122). (Biology’s only shortcom- ters and their connections, and reveal clusterings of
ing is that it has no notion of class struggle). characters that otherwise would have remained

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 Review

invisible: ‘Here, nothing ever disappears. . . . The noncanonical literature, the methodological innov-
past becomes past, yes, but it never disappears ation, their rejection of the subjective, and his will-
from our perception of the plot’ (p. 215). The ingness to reconsider earlier views. This is without
diagrams and their manipulations (‘experiments’) doubt a rich book. However, the book also disap-
require interpretation, but Moretti is always good points, because of its many apodictic but unsub-
at finding meaning. The network diagrams for chap- stantiated pronouncements. Still, Moretti’s ideas
ters of Dickens’ novels show simple symmetric fig- have deeply influenced many literary historians
ures. Moretti: ‘it indicates that, below the surface of and practitioners of the Digital Humanities. The
social interactions, there is always a melodramatic pieces collected here provide a good picture of his
substratum of love or hatred ready to erupt’ thinking and if for that reason alone are well worth
(p. 233). Now, that may be a brilliant insight in reading.
Dickens (or human nature), but it is certainly not
suggested by the diagrams. Moretti describes the
essay as ‘a brief happiness, before the stern adult- Reference

Downloaded from http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/ by Peter Boot on March 24, 2014

hood of statistics’ (p. 215). Quite possibly, however,
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models
stern statistics would leave little room for flashes of for Literary History. London: Verso.
intuitive insight.
So the final verdict on this collection must be Peter Boot
mixed. Moretti’s essays are inspiring in their em- Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands
phasis on a scientific approach to literary history, doi:10.1093/llc/fqu010
their interest in large questions, the focus on

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