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style="color: inherit; text-decoration: none; font-family:
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Wark</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>on<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span
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line-height: inherit;">The Bourgeois : Between History and
Literature</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span
class="book_title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
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<abbr class="published" style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding:
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<div class="article_body article_text" style="margin: 0px; padding:
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Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Hoefler Text', 'Times New Roman',
serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal;
font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; color: rgb(68, 68, 68);
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">IT USED TO BE a terrific insult, to call
someone or something “bourgeois,” but it doesn’t work so well
these days, since nobody seems to know what it means. While
pretty much everyone, from left to right, agrees that our world
is a capitalist one, the notion that the culture of those who
rule it is “bourgeois” seems no longer to hold. The bourgeois
was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature,
idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the
boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of
bourgeois identity was the realist novel. In<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Bourgeois:
Between History and Literature</em>, Moretti shows how the
novel as form served as the capacious and adaptable home within
which the bourgeois could both assert and camouflage itself.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The word “bourgeois” came late to English,
where the more discreet term “middle class” has long prevailed.
But the bourgeois could only pose as a representative of the
“middle” so long as an aristocracy held the formal reigns of
power. With the passing of the last remnants of feudal society,
bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its
specificity while finding a language through which to speak for
the whole social order. Moretti tracks the evolution of this
attempt through the form of the novel. Like the great Marxist
literary theorist György Lukács before him, Moretti thinks, as
he puts it, that “forms are the abstract of social
relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an
analysis of power.” Moretti has curiously little to say about
narratives or characters. His method is to track the
significance of particular keywords, and the texture of
particular kinds of grammatical form — methods that are
controversial, at least in the small world of literary studies,
but that, as I will attempt to show shortly, may be emblematic
in their own way of our times.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">But first, the 19th-century novel. It has
to be said: the realist novel can be frightfully dull. Bourgeois
form is above all<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">prosaic</em>. It lacks the transcendent leap toward
the heavens of its ancestors, the epic and the romance, the
tragic glamour of regicide or the passion of the savior passing
between worlds. The bourgeois realist novel is as horizontal as
a pipeline. Its momentum is usually heavy, a slow accumulation
in the face of obstacles. It is about making something of this
world, not transcending it in favor of another. As Moretti
shows, bourgeois prose changed the whole meaning of adventure.
The adventurer was once a merchant who set out not knowing to
whom he would sell or from whom he would buy. Fortune was once
the Goddess of uncanny weather. But the bourgeois makes her over
into a figure whose odds can be calculated. The bourgeois turns
adventure into the calculus of arbitrage, of the canny knack of
buying cheap and selling dear.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Daniel Defoe’s<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Robinson Crusoe</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(1719) is a precursor
here. Crusoe’s adventures are on the cusp between the older,
wilder sense of adventure and a new sensibility. The shipwrecked
Robinson does not depend on God or Fortune for help; he helps
himself. He sets himself to work, as if he were both boss and
laborer. Here we strike one of Moretti’s keywords for the
bourgeois sensibility:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">industry</em>. It is hard work, being shipwrecked —
but it’s a steady job. There’s no spontaneous bravery, no tests
of honor, no looking upwards to the heavens. The feudal sense of
adventure melts away in the island sun.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Long before the pioneering sociologist Max
Weber identified “instrumental reason” as a key characteristic
of bourgeois culture, Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s
labors are nothing if not<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">efficient</em>. What is useful is beautiful on the
island of bourgeois thought, and what is both beautiful and
useful is without waste. The world is nothing but a set of
potential tools and resources. “The creation of a culture of
work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the greatest
symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Crusoe’s industry and efficiency produces,
surprisingly, a modicum of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">comfort</em>, or ethically permitted expenditure of
rest and relaxation, treating the body well — all of this is
quite justifiable if it means an increasing or sustaining of
industry. What he enjoys on his island isn’t luxury, because it
isn’t useless. It is play, repose, indulgence — made useful and
ordinary. It is neither aristocratic dissolution nor puritan
self-stricture. A little reward for the self is legitimate at
the end of a day’s labors if it makes body and mind fit for more
labor the next.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Moretti’s formal analysis tracks how Defoe
organizes the bourgeois worldview with a forward-slanting
grammar in which time is segmented and arranged serially.
Robinson confronts this, does that, attains this benefit. Here’s
a characteristic sentence from Defoe’s novel: “Having mastered
this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I
bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants.”
As Moretti comments: “Past gerund; past tense; infinitive:
wonderful three part sequence.” It’s the “the grammar of
growth.” Bourgeois prose is a rule-based, but open-ended, style.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">This grammar creates a whole new
visibility for<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">things</em>. In John Bunyan’s<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Pilgrim’s
Progress</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(1678),
objects are still impediments to the pilgrim’s upward reach
towards the sacred. In Defoe, things can be useful in
themselves. They are connectable only sideways, to other things.
With this you get that, with that you make this, and so on.
Things are described in detail. Everything appears as a
potential resource or obstacle to accumulation. What is lost, as
Moretti notes (following Lukács) is the totality. The world
dissolves into particulars. The bourgeois self sees a world of
particular things as if they were put there to be the raw
materials of the work of accumulation.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">It is remarkable how much of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Robinson Crusoe</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is already composed of
what Moretti calls “filler.” In between the big narrative
turning points, the bourgeois novel stuffs in more and more
filler, where the background creeps into the foreground and our
characters and their actions seem to get lost in a welter of
things. “[F]illers rationalize the novelistic universe,” Moretti
writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer
adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx
describes, in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Capital</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Volume
1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” The
creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will reach its
apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great
narrative invention.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In the novel, subjectivity decreases and
objectivity increases. Description becomes analytic rather than
romantic, induction rather than ornament. Or so it appears.
Moretti: “description as a form was not neutral at all: its
effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that
alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the novel’s
conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is
a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and
cultural sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and
persistence of all things.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The bourgeois novel as form combines two
apparently contradictory impulses: the capitalist drive toward
rationalization (in its forward-slanting plot), and a kind of
cautious conservatism (in the intractably thick descriptions of
the fillers). Marx thought that economic rationalization would
strip the halo from old cultural forms, but if anything the
reverse was the case: while the bourgeoisie were dynamos of the
economic sphere, in the cultural sphere they collected
museums-worth of bric-a-brac.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Bourgeois cultural stolidity was the very
condition of accumulation. As Moretti puts it, the bourgeoisie
was “the first<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">realistic</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>class
of human history,” but only in economic matters. Victorian
Britain was the most advanced and dynamic capitalist economy of
the 19th century, but in cultural matters, it preferred
sentiment and medieval ginger-breading. The last thing the
Victorians wanted was for all that was solid to melt into air
when it came to the political and cultural institutions that
protected the very possibility of accumulation. Far from
becoming more transparent in its moment of victory, as Marx
predicted, capitalism became more and more opaque. The “real”
bourgeois spirit of aggressive iconoclasm vanished the moment
the bourgeoisie triumphed. Theirs was not an ideology for the
whole of society. The bourgeois loved creative destruction in
the economic sphere, but in culture, it came to see the merit of
restorations of all kinds. The Victorian legacy was “a
modernizing world, enveloped in historical screens.” Western
Marxist critics, from whom Moretti descends, have long been
alert to this screening out of raw accumulation and have sought
analytic tools for poking at least a small hole or two in the
scrim.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Like any other culture in its moment of
ascendance, the Victorians mobilized existing things, borrowing
and refashioning them for their own purposes<em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">.</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Over the course of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, the specifically bourgeois
note in culture becomes fainter, but bourgeois social control
grows stronger. A displaced aristocracy can now be absorbed and
its relics treasured, after a fashion. What matters more is
securing working class consent to bourgeois rule. The bourgeois
has to learn<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">influence</em>; raw power on its own won’t do. One
of the great themes of the bourgeois novel in full bloom is what
Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony,” or rule through the consent
of the ruled.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">How does this bourgeois hegemony show up
in the novel at the level of style? Moretti traces it through<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">adjectives</em>.
It is sometimes thought that, as the novel becomes a
specifically bourgeois form, its descriptive detail increases.
Moretti takes that intuition as a testable hypothesis. Using
databases of thousands of novels, Moretti is able to disprove
it. Its more a question of the work adjectives are doing. They
start to have a strangely metaphorical character. Adjectives
like “hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment
without a judge, the author having retreated behind the screen
of her or his putatively neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is
the real significance of the bourgeois novel’s free indirect
discourse, that strange point of view characteristic of the
novel, which hovers close to a character but is not identical to
it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning all by
itself.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In the novel, the world is re-enchanted at
the granular level of the adjective describing the thing. Every
tiny thing is imbued with hegemonic bourgeois morality. The
morality itself is not all that interesting: a mixture of
sentimental Christian dross and bare calculation. What’s more
interesting is how it comes to saturate fictional language, and
thence the world that language both names and modifies.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Once again breaking out his quantitative
toolkit, Moretti demonstrates this via the rise of the adjective
“earnest.” Its utility lies in the way it goes both ways: on the
one hand, it connotes a serious and business-like demeanor; on
the other, it points to a certain spiritual self-discipline. It
is perhaps the perfect Victorian word. Moretti does not mention
Oscar Wilde’s famous play, but surely Wilde, writing in the
death throes of the Victorian era, was on to something.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Importance of
Being Earnest</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>sums
up in a phrase the Victorian form of bourgeois sensibility. (Of
course, for Wilde, “earnest” was also a code word for
“homosexual” — a dimension that Moretti does not touch.)</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">When not drilling down into the formal
details of fictional form, Moretti manages a broad and clear
synoptic sweep. The bourgeois realist novel went through three
phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, where it falls apart.
The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath of the French
Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and the
emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like
Conrad’s<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Heart of Darkness</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>— it was not able to
encompass. The novel then split into two parallel streams. On
the one hand, the genre novel, which presses on into uncharted
territory, addressing a mass audience on themes the realist
novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death of God, the
industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the
modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of
variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as
form, while at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the
historical event which now outstrips the speed and scope of the
trauma of the French Revolution. “That such an extreme tension
would not last long,” says Moretti, “is hardly surprising. Yet
that this phase would also be the last creative drive of
European literature — this was a surprise for everybody.”
Initially unacceptable to bourgeois audiences, modernism clears
a space where the novel can utter the unutterable, but this
iconoclastic literature matters less and less to the wider
culture. For Moretti, modernism is less forward-looking than was
thought at the time. “The museum and the avant garde” he calls
“unsusceptible accomplices in a violent reorganization of the
past.” Modernism recuperates the past in order to let it go.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">And after that? While Moretti gestures to
a decentering of thinking about the novel in a postcolonial
context, his bailiwick is Europe, and he leaves the periphery to
those who, like the great Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, have
spent lifetimes putting European cultures in their proper
(provincial) place. Meanwhile, back in the old world, the
European novel runs out of steam — or rather, the reading
culture that sustains it does. Moretti: “A continent that falls
in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Explicitly evaluative remarks like this
are rare in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">The Bourgeois</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(and not often that
sharp or funny). Moretti’s work is Marxist in filiation, and
there’s a strong emphasis on historical analysis. While he draws
on all of the Marxist critical tradition’s great exponents, from
Lukács and Gramsci to Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes,
Moretti’s main progenitors are little known Italian Marxist
thinkers such as Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti, whose
work was vigorously anti-dialectical. Della Volpe had no time
for supposedly ineffable depths of meaning, even in poetry, and
sought to put the analysis of literary discourse on a soundly
materialist basis. His intellectual descendant Colletti also
eschewed elaborate but evidence-free cultural critique.
“Methodology is the science of those who have fuck all,” is how
one might freely render one of his famous remarks.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">From Della Volpe and Colletti, Moretti
takes a preference for “falsifiable criticism,” constructed so
as to be sensitive to knowable, empirical facts. To their legacy
he adds what he calls a “formalism without close reading.”
Moretti pulls novels apart like steam engines. He is interested
in answering questions as to how texts work, not in perpetuating
their mystery. In that sense, his own work partially, and in the
best sense, partakes of the spirit of of bourgeois culture
itself. His method is summed up by the titles of two of his
books:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary
History</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(2005)
and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Distant Reading</em>, the newly released companion
volume to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">The Bourgeois</em>. For Moretti, there’s too much of
the whiff of the sacred about close reading; as he puts it in
his 2000 article “Conjectures on World Literature” (reprinted in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Distant Reading</em>):
“At bottom it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of
very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need
is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now
let’s learn how not to read them.” In most modern academic
criticism, the novel stands in for the holy book and the
literary reader becomes the guardian of some special essence
known only through patient exegesis. Moretti’s disregard for
such pretensions is a breath of fresh air amid the incense.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Surely, Moretti is right that the idea of
the literary critic as catechist of the bourgeois theology of
the secular canon is surely in terminal decline — and the
passing of that model of the literary is of a piece with the
decline of “the bourgeois” as a cultural archetype. Capitalism
no longer has much need of such Sunday servicing. The Victorian
aggregate of aggressive economic expansion and pious
conservatism is a thing of the past. In the 21st century,
aggressive accumulation has no need of a cultural alibi.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The Situationists had a useful term for
the time and place that others have messianically dubbed “late
capitalism”: they called this “the overdeveloped world.” It is
as if capitalism in the West overshot the point where its
internal conflicts might have transformed it into something
else. Now it can only feed on itself. One of capital’s few
remaining growth strategies is to colonize from within those
cultural bulwarks which, in Victorian times (or even in postwar
America), seemed to be the noncapitalist stabilizers of
capitalist accumulation. And so we get the whole of culture —
education, communication, even religious faith — recapitalized,
via charter schools, MOOCs, private contractors, social media,
the megachurch.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Such a world has no place for either the
bourgeois novel or the keeper of its hermeneutic flame, the
literary critic, for the simple reason that it is no longer a
bourgeois world. Our ruling class still lives by exploiting
labor, but in cultural terms it is not bourgeois. The literary
form in which it reveals itself best is probably the self-help
book or the business biography. Such forms would probably yield
interesting insights if amassed together and studied as one vast
database, except that such texts, unlike the largely forgotten
and out-of-print novels Moretti analyzes, are zealously guarded
“intellectual property.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In this post-bourgeois cultural context,
Moretti’s work is a terrible provocation to literary critics. He
is not only indifferent to the residual theological function of
close reading: he is a practitioner of the characteristic arts
of post-bourgeois life. What, after all, does the post-bourgeois
reverence above graphs, maps, trees, algorithms, infographics,
and other examples of so-called “big data”? The delight we once
took in the skill of the novelist, or the literary critic, is
today elicited by the extraction of patterns from vast swaths of
texts and other sources, via the kind of perceptive operations
that machines perform much better than people.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The difference, of course, is that
Moretti’s project is a critical one, and though this work is
historical through and through, it does have consequences for
our present political moment. Take European identity, for
instance. As a comparative literature scholar, Moretti is
interested in the novel outside its role in national cultures.
The map of the novel (and, thus, of 19th-century bourgeois
culture) is not identical with the map of the nations. The
European space — and Moretti is most at home here — is a field
of only relatively autonomous national terrains of unequal
sizes, within which the novel has spread and evolves in quite
different ways. Moretti’s Europe has no essence or unity. It is
polycentric, and defined by its conflicts and changes. European
space allowed forms to speciate and find different niches.
Bigger cultural spaces will likely have more diversity not only
of particular titles but also of forms. The cultural ecology of
the provinces is always more restricted.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In Moretti’s evolutionary model for
thinking about the novel, forms bifurcate. The tree of
literature is constantly sprouting new branches, but some die
off, taking their place in the fossil record of “the great
unread.” The readers have spoken. This postulate makes many of
Moretti’s colleagues particularly squeamish, since it suggests
that the market is the determinant of culture. Literary critics
(even Marxist ones) like to think we have in the literary work
some relatively autonomous object not completely subsumed within
the system of capitalism. We even like to think there could be
resources of resistance in the old classics, or at least a
counter-canon of neglected radical works. But, for Moretti,
“[t]heories will never abolish inequality: they can only hope to
explain it.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">One thing his theory explains very well is
how the market feedback loop exaggerates differences in success
between the more and less fit kinds of literary form. But his
indebtedness to evolutionary models perhaps combines with the
economism that afflicts to many of his fellow Marxist thinkers
to create a blind spot in his work. In biology it is practically
impossible, once one animal or plant species branches off from
another, for these lines to reconnect. But in culture there is
no structural reason why branches cannot rejoin and form a
network rather than a tree. Moretti is rather resistant to
turning his tree-like history of the novel into a network-like
one. Moretti is no postmodernist: forms, individuate; they don’t
come back together. There isn’t so much recombination going on,
in other words, although he does note that successful new forms
often borrow not from previous canonic works but from low or
neglected ones. He is a little leery of this détournement as a
general, and generative, principle, however — perhaps because it
would take his own moderate dissolving of the boundaries of book
and author too far. One wonders how much Moretti’s findings have
to do with certain methodological assumptions rather than with
evidence. If you begin with “realist novel” or “detective story”
as a unit of analysis, you are naturally going to see how one
version of this generic form differs from another more than how
it draws into it materials from other kinds of writing entirely.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Still, it is undeniable that Moretti’s
body of work is one of genius. He has retrieved the depth and
shape of the invisible literary field, that trace of the
infrastructure of literacy itself. His distant reading brings
into focus both bigger and smaller textual units, some visible
to the “naked eye” as it were, some only revealed via
machine-assisted “distant reading.” His data-mining work is of a
kind more common and accepted in media studies — such as in the
work of Henry Jenkins and Lev Manovich — than in literary
scholarship, but with the added virtue of retaining some link,
however attenuated, to the critical project of his Italian
Marxist ancestors. He adds a sturdy branch to that old elm tree.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">It has to be said that all of literary
criticism participates, whether wittingly or not, in the matrix
of bourgeois culture. What is interesting about Moretti is that
his work has more to do with the workings of texts, with their
description and evaluation, than on hiding that labor behind
decorative screens of elaborate exegesis. His work is the
dialectical counterpart to what the New Critics and Derrideans
hath wrought. It is not that it would ever in any sense replace
close reading, as some critical deacons fret. But by furnishing
us with information about how bourgeois literary culture
functions as a whole, he reveals the critics’ complicity in it.
Up above, it may be all high-minded talk of resistant readings
and counter-canons, but down in the engine room the business of
literature is all about making variants on products for a
panoply of markets.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">There is a strand of Moretti’s work that
is symptomatic of our post-bourgeois epoch, one more interested
in patterns than passages, for which culture is no more
mysterious a continent than any other. Moretti acknowledges that
critique is not his long suit, and it is therefore tempting to
read him as a bearer the bad news of contemporary capitalism
rather than an analyst of its history.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">And yet Moretti’s influence is enormously
enabling for the critical side of critical theory. This is
because he clears away some of the illusions of the power of
critical reading to effect any change all on its own. It must
surely pass through the minds of many professional readers of
Moretti that our works, too, are just variations of forms,
thrown on the market, where a fickle readership — mostly of grad
students — decides for itself whether the form addresses the
actual tensions they experience in everyday life. Moretti will
not be thanked for disabusing us of the illusions of the modest
power of critique. But his books might be profitably used to
advance the critical project onto the post-bourgeois terrain. At
the very least, I predict, there will be reprints.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">McKenzie Wark is the author of T</a></em><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">he Beach Beneath the Street</a><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">,</a><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></a><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">Telesthesia,</a><em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></a></em><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">A Hacker Manifesto</a><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;"><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?id=1428"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">, among other things. He is working
on a book about Andrey Platonov and Alexander Bogdanov. He
teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York
City.</a></em></p>
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