Distant reading, again

Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more.

Quite simply, distant reading makes sense of texts through the process of gathering immense amounts of empirical data about literary works—the presence or absence of various traits, noted by collaborative efforts considering texts in dozens of languages—and organizing it all into various systems or wholes that seek to make sense of their distribution—projecting representations of the evolution of a genre, say, and its spread across Europe as it becomes more or less viable in various markets. Such effort is continually motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on,” given that the empirical amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still less then one percent of what was then produced ), and because these works continually overflow the national and linguistic borders within which literary research often moves.

Against this, then, attempts to expand the canon over the years to include alternative literatures meet something like their limit case, but so too does close reading. For it is the organization of canons—or attempts to expand them—around the latter that makes the study of the actual, empirically existing literary field impossible: as Moretti says, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases.” This study is only possible if we begin to plot what we have not looked at closely in order to extrapolate tendencies that we cannot actually observe at all. The entire project of literary studies suddenly becomes not one of avoiding paraphrase in the sense of avoiding reduction--which, I’d suggest, is the most fundamental motivation of close reading--but what literary structuralists like Propp, Greimas, Genette and Todorov long ago discovered could constitute a powerful poetics: negotiating reduction, simplifying, and then working off of these reduced systems.

Lest Moretti's study of these particular systems of distribution sound too much like work on the economics of literature, however, which has sometimes been treated very extensively in literary study, Moretti assures us that the effort is ultimately directed to the study of where and when formal innovations in literature--the province once proper to close reading—occur, since the traits that will be noted and plotted on graphs, maps and trees will indeed be formal ones: the presence or absence of clues in the evolving genre of the mystery, for example, which is then able to be represented in tree form. This has significantly led Jonathan Arac to call Moretti’s work “formalism without close reading,” an appellation Moretti himself says defines his work perfectly.

But if Moretti can actually affirm his work’s formalism, he still cannot give us much sense of what the close reading to which it is opposed actually involves. “At bottom,” he says, “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.” Such vagueness is typical of many recent critics who seek to turn away from close reading or, indeed, find new ways for critique in general to proceed. For specificity is not, ultimately, necessary: “close reading” can remain a label for the most tenacious of our basic critical dependencies—in Moretti’s case, at most it is the sort of scrutiny or attention that denies us access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental. “It’s a theological exercise,” in other words, only hints at what we need to make explicit in order for any widespread resistance to close reading to take place, and not collapse, as it sometimes does in Moretti, into the mere belief that anything different is better than what we have. In this respect, what is also necessary is a sense that distant reading is not only a name for Moretti’s work with models, but something like one pole at the end of a wide continuum whose opposite, while indeed being close reading, is only so if we cross many intervening levels of reading, from the more to the less distant over to the less and the more close. Looking for other distant readers than Moretti (I'd suggest Raymond Williams is such a reader), is then one step in both refining what we mean by close reading and showing how we can be lead out of it and brought towards something more distant, precisely by refusing to set up distant reading as some homogenous space outside of which, immediately, we fall into the close. Such a maneuver in fact capitalizes on what Moretti’s and other such attacks, in their vagueness, actually restore to close reading: its functional aspect, which ties it to methodological decisions that have alternatives.

Richards himself used the term “close” primarily in this functional sense, in order to denote the level at which one’s approach to the text in reading could, not make meanings appear, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning. Only subsequently in America would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which the practical Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with except by becoming Utopian: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent meanings with care. If the term and the practice have been able to remain less questioned, it is perhaps because its functions have become so intertwined with notions of virtue that, in the days of deconstruction, the cry “you have not read me closely,” could become not just a description but an accusation of irresponsibility in the widest sense--something like literary critical immorality, whatever that would be. And since it had become an empty term for, at bottom, interpretive work in general and what it does well, it is no surprise that “closeness” can veer round in Moretti to become an empty term for all that is bad.

Franco Moretti and close reading

An attempt at a paper. Here is the introduction, which discusses Franco Moretti and the merits of what he's up to. I'm concerned not with distant reading itself (which I think has amazing potential), but how we get to distant reading from close reading:

Franco Moretti’s recent work is motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on” (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 3) He considers the field minimal because the actual amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still “less then one percent” of what was then produced ("Slaughterhouse of Literature")). Even more importantly, the literary field is minimal in that the distribution of these works as well as the forms that they use and modify continually overflows the national and linguistic borders within which our research moves. He therefore argues—most forcefully in Graphs, Maps, Trees—that literary critics should practice the study of these distributions of (world) literature as systems, as wholes, since “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases” (GMT, 3) This means working off of models (like graphs or maps), produced by collaborative efforts at gathering and processing data, in dozens of languages, about when and where formal innovation occurs. In short, literary criticism should be brought closer to something like a sociology of literary forms.

Now, even if we do not agree with these conclusions, Moretti’s work perhaps has an effect over which we should linger. Flipping through journals, we begin to notice that we see only large blocks of text—no tables or charts, let alone graphs, maps, or trees. Opening up newly published studies, we find four or five chapters considering one or two literary figures, each investigated one by one—cases indeed stitched together. Walking through the literary criticism section in the library, we notice that few books have their spines lettered with more than one name—direct collaboration is relegated to the “acknowledgements.” In short, Moretti’s work starts to reveal that some of the least methodologically informed aspects of our criticism might indeed be methodologically determined. The infrequency with which we use quantitative data, the case by case basis of argument, and the lack of collaborative research are exposed as three very prevalent assumptions about how we should work—namely, that we should talk about the qualities internal to literature, do so by investigating singular cases of literary activity, and express our findings as a solitary critical consciousness—that we thought were just the form our critical work usually takes.

This is to say Moretti perhaps calls into question our way of working more than he gives us any new, feasible program for a sociologically based literary criticism (though he and other literary sociologists are making more and more visible the benefits and perhaps even the feasibility of adopting such a program). After reading him, certain practices or methods which give our critical work its distinctive form and character are seen afresh as merely one set chosen out of the many it is possible to adopt. This is not only because Moretti has such a different way of working, but because what his way of working seeks to challenge is indeed our method, and not any existing program for or theory of literature. In fact, it seems as if one of the most important arguments underlying Moretti’s work is that the proliferation of such programs or theories in order to challenge other existing theories of literature might have preserved the unreflective use of these methods. If Paul de Man can point out the similarities of deconstruction to practical criticism in “The Return to Philology,” does this not precisely announce that theoretical revolutions, despite what they claim to change and indeed do change, may change very little in the realm of methodology? Recent efforts to account for literary theory’s “failures” over the last few decades—even recent efforts to “historicize” it—might then be seen as expressing more or less confusedly, more or less belligerently, this frustrating point that Moretti makes clear: theory as it has been practiced might not be focused on altering some basic aspects of how we work.

But if what Moretti challenges is first and foremost our way of working, making visible our reliance on a distinct methodology, how are we to characterize that methodology? We hinted at some of its features above (it perhaps involves interrogating, individually and on a case by case basis, the qualities internal to literature, as opposed to working cooperatively on large fields of data with models). But can we say more definitively what that methodology is that we just assume to be the typical form statements about literature take? Moretti’s use of the term “distant reading” to characterize his own way of working with models and systems makes it clear: in his view our methodology is just the opposite, whatever theoretical approach we may adopt. In other words, close reading, for Moretti, is that way of working which most governs our practice of criticism.

Now, we are immediately tempted to challenge this. Surely there are other ways of working with literature: literary history, for example, might deploy different methods. But I would like to entertain Moretti’s notion that most forms of literary study in America (at least) do rely upon close reading as the way to work, for perhaps—despite the inaccuracies of his generalization—he is getting at something we critics are only beginning grapple with: namely, the tenaciousness of close reading, our dependence upon it and fondness for it despite significant changes in our notions of what literary study should be since it began to be practiced. To get a sense of this tenaciousness, we might merely observe how for so many years and even now, in our everyday speech and even in our critical discussions calling someone’s critical endeavor “a close reading” remains, without exception, a way to compliment or ratify that person’s work. Conversely, we might note that (especially for those still following Derrida) saying “you have not read this closely” remains a way for us to delegitimize what another is claiming about some literary activity. Reading Moretti, we might be surprised that these two little words could ever be used in a disparaging manner—to indicate a lack of rigor. This, however, is only one minor sign of the unremitting, unquestioning faith in close reading’s methodological efficacy which may pervasively govern widely differing critical practices—to which Moretti, I think, seems acutely attuned.

It remains all the more unfortunate, then, that he is not more specific about what, exactly, close reading itself involves. “At bottom,” he says in “Conjectures On World Literature,” “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.” This is about as specific as he gets: a potshot on the way to a call for something, indeed in some cases anything, different. But Moretti is not specific because he does not need to be specific: as far as he is concerned, close reading can remain a label for the effects of our current methodological dependencies, whatever they involve: the effects being the numerous ways we are denied access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental—that 99.5% of nineteenth century novels mentioned earlier, and the 99.5% of other fields. But insofar as the use of the term “close reading” carries for us the sense that it does accurately describe something more involved, and remains tenacious precisely because of what it involves—as I, and many of the people who have responded to Moretti’s work, think it does—Moretti fails to make available any more precise knowledge of how specific aspects of how we work lead to these effects or consequences. In doing so, he also fails to capitalize upon one of the most promising aspects of his project, which I have in the preceding tried to outline: for if Moretti can defamiliarize our ways of working, or can show us that our ways of working entail certain methodological decisions, he does not show us any way to alter these decisions. We may not work as collaboratively as we need to be working, for instance, but what in close reading specifically brings about the exclusion of cooperation? “It’s a theological exercise,” only hints at what we need to make explicit in order to responsibly bring about some real change...

Here is the point at which I would say that this is not entirely his fault: indeed, we all think we know generally what close reading entails. But it isn't clear that certain aspects might even be "distant" in the precise sense that Moretti uses that term. I found that many of I.A. Richards' practices in close reading function this way, at the same time as they consolidate a vision of what close reading is and should be that gets taken up by subsequent critics. However, even this vision is not merely homogeneous: significantly, it is internally torn between an analysis of communication and an analysis of the literary, which other critics will emphasize remains irreducible to the communicative.