Saturday, November 23, 2013

Graphs, Maps, Trees and... Language



". . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied an entire City, and the map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, these Excessive Maps did not satisfy and the Schools of Cartographers built a Map of the Empire, that was of the Size of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, the Following Generations understood that that dilated Map was Useless and not without Pitilessness they delivered it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and the Winters. In the Deserts of the West endure broken Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole country there is no other relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda: Viajes de varones prudentes, libro cuarto, cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658."
J. L. Borges, "Del Rigor En La Ciencia", El Hacedor, 1960 (translation by Diego Doval)


"Texts are certainly the real objects of literature [...] but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history" (76), writes Moretti in Graphs Maps Trees. Moretti is calling for a renewed formalism without close reading, and for a "materialist conception of form" that could save comparative literature from its decay: "take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reason for its transformations" (90). A renewed literary history capable of taking into account not only the canonical list of works of Western literature, but to study and compare the literatures of many a country and many a class, and to go "from the extraordinary to the everyday" (3), from "the form of an object to the forces that have been at work" (57). Wonderful. But let's go back to the first quote: texts. Moretti invites us to try and go beyond them, to develop strategies and techniques that allow us to take a comprehensive overlook at them and to look for cycles, patterns, clusters, within them and, most of all, among them. Thus, we can abstractly "explain general structures" (91) instead of continuing with the classic "interpretation of individual texts" (91) which, for Moretti, usually corresponds to that scholarly practice for which we tend to ask "only questions for which we already have an answer"(26). Texts.

Texts, and literary markets, and politics, and economics, and questions of readership and reception, and questions of influence and divergence. Moretti's perspective is provocative and inspirational, because it calls for new (more scientific, if we want to call them so, but certainly more complex, in terms of the socio-contextual interconnections they are interested in) approaches to a historicized and neomarxist study of literature. Moretti acknowledges at the beginning of the book how, while "the quantitative approach to literature can take several different forms - from computational stylistics to thematic debates, book history, and more"(4) he is only dealing, at least in this book, with book history. And perhaps this latter is a 'safer' and potentially more successful area for experimenting with the study of genres, of chronotopes and of stylistic mutations, because it depends less directly on the primary material that constitutes texts, i.e. language. But in the case of stylometrics or thematic debates, there come some problems, I think, because texts are made by language and by a 'literary' use of it, with all the rhetorical strategies of allusion, symbolism, lyricism,  etc., and with all the secret codes that this use of language implies, and I am not sure that a distant reading can grasp that. I feel that language, and texts, have an ultimate capacity to escape any categorization, and to prove them wrong. Or perhaps it's us, readers, it's what is born from that reading, that escapes the singularity of patterns and of explanations and remains open to the plurality of our interpretations. Because texts belong to a historical context, participate in the making or unmaking of a political agenda, embody a marketing strategy, and imitate one another or diverge from one another, but texts are made of language, and language is constantly being made and remade by us, who are constantly being made and remade by it. There is always something that escapes the logic of explanation and the logic of communicative linearity which some quantitative approaches are necessarily based upon: the logic of the "from me to you, with no misunderstanding". But in that path "from me to you", there, I find impossible to give up on the value of reading, closely, and of re-reading, even (because the questions do stay open, no matter how we try to close them down, even through our impeccable scholarly writing).

Still, I agree with Moretti. Comparative literature does need to go beyond the boundaries of national canons, and western canons, and finally study the Weltliteratur prefigured by Goethe and by Marx and Engels. We do need to be more aware of the socio-economic embeddedness of literary genres and trends, and of the stylistic mutations related to them. (This is something that not only Moretti, but also other literary historians and comparatists, such as Gayatri C. Spivak or Claudio Guillen, have been arguing for years, although from quite different perspectives.) In this sense, I am really excited to see what can be done for literary history through the use of computational approaches. But I hope that, precisely because we claim the importance of having a "materialist conception of form", we do not forget that the first material of literature is language, and that we consider not only its socio-politico-economical referentiality, but also that intrinsic, rhetorical capacity of what we call its 'literary' usage, i.e. escaping from mere communication and open up new domains of creative redefinition of the world. Now, on this last note, one could argue that, in fact, quantitative approaches to literature do not usually regard poetry. But who says that prose never uses (and redefines) language in the way poetry uses (and redefines) it? How can we draw those limits?

3 comments:

  1. Yes, it's very true that poetry is so often no included in these distant reading experiments. And now that we've both seen at least some of the complexities that go into coding for such analyses, I think we can understand why...poetry is much more complex and variable in its markup structure, and many many many more things need to be taken into account when coding. And what's more, I think there has just been much poetry systematically digitized and prepared for this sort of analyses. Which points to one of the key concerns (at least for me) with large-scale computational analyses: that so many of the choices about what to analyze are determined by fairly arbitrary factors (i.e. what happens to have been digitized, what happens to have passed out of copyright, etc.). Just as it is important to not generalize and make sweeping historical conclusions based on readings of individual texts, so too is it important to acknowledge the limits and selectivity of more inclusive (although never fully inclusive) groups of texts.

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  2. *** I meant to say "much less poetry systematically digitized," just for the record...

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  3. Hi Caterina,

    I like your post and your final passage in particular. I always think humanists should embrace and introduce new approaches into their field. Things change and so does audience and expectations. These devices will not only reinforce the author’s claims to documentary truth but help establish or reinforce generic expectations in their readers.

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