The emergence of narrative

Addison's "Adventures of a Shilling" is part of a sub-genre of stories that were extremely popular in the 18th century that we now call it- or thing-narratives: tales of a thing (here a coin), told from the perspective of that thing. A more modern example--though without a voice given to the thing itself is the soap in Blooms's pocket in Ulysses (except in Circe, if I remember right, when nearly everything gets a voice).

What is amazing to me about these stories is the emergence within them of narrative as plot: that is, the emergence of a linkage (which is metonymic or combinatory, to use formalism's terms) of discreet events that are never quite reducible to those events (and their narration) themselves. This is because plot is all about the flow of the events, so to speak, and the horizons of anticipation and retrospection that this flow engenders.

Austen brings about this flow of plot on the other end of the 18th century, in one of her most entertaining bits of juvenaila, "The Beautiful Cassandra:" a whole book of twelve chapters that fits on one page. I'll put it the first seven chapters here just so you can see what is going on:

Chapter the First
CASSANDRA was the Daughter & the only Daughter of a celebrated Millener in Bond Street. Her father was of noble Birth, being the near relation of the Dutchess of ——'s Butler.

Chapter the 2d
WHEN Cassandra had attained her 16th year, she was lovely & amiable, & chancing to fall in love with an elegant Bonnet her Mother had just compleated, bespoke by the Countess of ——, she placed it on her gentle Head & walked from her Mother's shop to make her Fortune.

Chapter the 3d
THE first person she met, was the Viscount of ——, a young Man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty. She curtseyed & walked on.

Chapter the 4th
SHE then proceeded to a Pastry-cook's, where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook & walked away.

Chapter the 5th
SHE next ascended a Hackney Coach & ordered it to Hampstead, where she was no sooner arrived than she ordered the Coachman to turn round & drive her back again.

Chapter the 6th
BEING returned to the same spot of the same Street she had set out from, the Coachman demanded his Pay.

Chapter the 7th
SHE searched her pockets over again & again; but every search was unsuccessfull. No money could she find. The man grew peremptory. She placed her bonnet on his head & ran away...

...you get the idea. This is a virtuoso performance (and a hilarious one at that) of what I'm getting at: Austen understands that the linkage of narrated events is so able to be carried by a larger structure that she is able to put whole chapter breaks between the telling of these events-- an act which, by the way, completely grasps the function of chapters as merely larger divisions or markers of those divisions already between narrated events in the novels.

But back to Addison. We can in fact put what we're getting at (and what Austen here understands) the other way around--and this is what these thing-narratives like Addison's do the best: what emerges in them is a way of manipulating the short sentences, the short narrated events, in terms of a larger arc. The trust Addison puts in these larger shifts makes him write small sentences that just document the exchanges of the shilling (much like how Austen is able to write little pointless circular events like that in chapter five of Austen's novel).

So at a certain point in the "Adventures," here is what we're getting:

I was sent to the apothecary's shop for a pint of sack. The apothecary gave me to an herb-woman, the herb-woman to a butcher, the butcher to a brewer, and the brewer to his wife, who made a present of me to a nonconformist preacher.

The speed with which the shilling is able to tell of what happened to her/him--through the use of small, quick sentences, is a function of the burden of the storytelling being shifted to the larger connective (i.e. plotty) structures. They're a blast to read for this reason. Why? To lay it all out would be more than I can really do right now, but it involves how this larger plot-structure allows a personal (singular) set of adventures to emerge, which in turn allows narrative capability to be lent to things that aren't normally allowed to enter into narrative. In short, it would involve explaining how this emergence of narrative into plot allows the whole story to be told from the perspective of the shilling, and perhaps on a larger level how--instead of seeing plot emerge as a function of narrative, as we've been outlining here--how the narrative is really a function of something like plot, how narrative emerges from plot. But since I don't know how to express this well, I'll just let the shilling speak:

I was born (says he) on the side of a mountain, near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake. I was, soon after my arrival, taken out of my Indian habit, refined, naturalized, and put into the British mode, with the face of Queen Elizabeth on one side, and the arms of the country on the other. Being thus equipped, I found in me a wonderful inclination to ramble, and visit all parts of the new world into which I was brought. The people very much favoured my natural disposition, and shifted me so fast from hand to hand, that before I was five years old, I had travelled into almost every corner of the nation. But in the beginning of my sixth year, to my unspeakable grief, I fell into the hands of a miserable old fellow, who clapped me into an iron I chest, where I found five hundred more of my own quality who lay under the same confinement. The only relief we had, was to be taken out and counted over in the fresh air every morning and evening. After an imprisonment of several years, we heard somebody knocking at our chest, and breaking it open with a hammer. This we found was the old man's heir, who, as his father lay a dying, was so good as to come to our release : he separated us that very day. What was the fate of my companions I know not: as for myself, I was sent to the apothecary's shop for a pint of sack. The apothecary gave me to an herb-woman, the herb-woman to a butcher, the butcher to a brewer, and the brewer to his wife, who made a present of me to a nonconformist preacher. After this manner I made my way merrily through the world; for, as I told you before, we shillings love nothing so much as travelling. I sometimes fetched in a shoulder of mutton, sometimes a play-book, and often had the satisfaction to treat a Templar at a twelvepenny ordinary, or carry him, with three friends, to Westminster Hall...

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.

"The critical and momentous shift:" theory, resistance

Diana Fuss in a recent article, "Teaching Theory" (in The Minnesota Review, 71-2). She talks of Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory:" how for de Man theory is resistance--both to other theories and to its own possibility (it is a practice raising questions about itself, resisting itself)--and how the resistance to theory (rejecting it) is itself theory. In short, as she affirms from experience teaching theory to students, "the best way to lessen students' immediate opposition to theory was to show how their concerns were themselves resolutely theoretical" (180). Thus, "ironically, de Man became useful as a strategy to mitigate student resistances rather than to cultivate them." ...a sentence, I'll note, that says more accurately what people I think are saying when they talk about the "failures of theory." She continues, "De Man's 'The Resistance to Theory' became the most effective weapon in my own theoretical arsenal for resisting the students' resistances" (181). And this leads her to what I think is an important passage, outlining a future for theory--one that overcomes, by acknowledging and learning from, the "failures" of theory:

There is no question that de Man was onto something. The best I have read, taught, and perhaps have written over the years is theory unafraid to resist itself, to challenge its own assumptions. Yet, my thoughts on how to theorize have changed dramatically since I became a professor, largely because of my experience teaching theory to undergraduate and graduate students. I no longer think that resistance exhausts all the many possibilities and practices of theory. If I have a new theory of theory, it is far less resistance and much more persistence. My new credo, forged in the crucible of the classroom, sees invention where I once saw only subversion. It embraces theorization over theory, an intellectual labor that goes beyond uncovering and resisting dangerous old ideas in favor of venturing and testing responsible new ones. (181)

"While resistance makes good politics, it does not always make effective pedagogy," she continues, and perhaps gets in the way of what, theoretically, needs to happen most: "Every theory classroom needs eventually to make the critical and momentous shift from talking about theory to finally doing it; only then, in my experience, does theory really begin to happen" (181).