Distant Reading by Franco Moretti

Author:Franco Moretti
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

IV

The central morphological point of ‘Conjectures’ was the contrast between the rise of the novel in the core as an ‘autonomous development’, and the rise in the periphery as a ‘compromise’ between a Western influence and local materials. As Parla and Arac point out, however, early English novels were written, in Fielding’s words, ‘after the manner of Cervantes’ (or of someone else), thus making clear that a compromise between local and foreign forms occurred there as well.13 And if this was the case, then there was no ‘autonomous development’ in western Europe, and the idea that forms have, so to speak, a different history at the core and at the periphery crumbles. The world-systems model may be useful at other levels, but has no explanatory power at the level of form.

Here things are easy: Parla and Arac are right—and I should have known better. After all, the thesis that literary form is always a compromise between opposite forces has been a leitmotiv of my intellectual formation, from Francesco Orlando’s Freudian aesthetics to Gould’s ‘Panda principle’, or Lukács’s conception of realism. How on earth could I ‘forget’ all this? In all likelihood, because the core/periphery opposition made me look (or wish . . . ) for a parallel morphological pattern, which I then couched in the wrong conceptual terms.14

So let me try again. ‘Probably all systems known to us have emerged and developed with interference playing a prominent role’, writes Even-Zohar: ‘there is not one single literature which did not emerge through interference with a more established literature: and no literature could manage without interference at one time or another during its history’.15 No literature without interference . . . hence, also, no literature without compromises between the local and the foreign. But does this mean that all types of interference and compromise are the same? Of course not: the picaresque, captivity narratives, even the Bildungsroman could not exert the same pressure over French or British novelists that the historical novel or the mystères exerted over European and Latin American writers: and we should find a way to express this difference. To recognize when a compromise occurs as it were under duress, and is thus likely to produce more unstable and dissonant results—what Zhao calls the ‘uneasiness’ of the late Qing narrator.

The key point, here, is this: if there is a strong, systematic constraint exerted by some literatures over the others (and we all seem to agree that there is),16 then we should be able to recognize its effects within literary form itself: because forms are indeed, in Schwarz’s words, ‘the abstract of specific social relationships’. In ‘Conjectures’, the diagram of forces was embodied in the sharp qualitative opposition of ‘autonomous developments’ and ‘compromises’; but as that solution has been falsified, we must try something else. And, yes, ‘measuring’ the extent of foreign pressure on a text, or its structural instability, or a narrator’s uneasiness, will be complicated, at times even unfeasible. But a diagram of symbolic power is an ambitious goal, and it makes sense that it would be hard to achieve.

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