![]() One of the signatures of the Moretti house style is syntactic elision (the sentence that is not a sentence). For, while his approach is attractively supple, there is a downside to this otherwise appealing modus operandi: a tendency to ellipsis at the very points where the larger claims stand or fall. It is this animating ambition that commands special attention and which I take as the focus of my own, more sceptical, comments. It enters a very strong claim on the recasting of an entire branch of inquiry. On the other hand, ‘Trees’ is not merely-or is so only deceptively-another variant of the modest proposal. For Moretti the former signifies-amongst other things, to which I turn shortly-the deployment of a set of hypotheses in a manner that is experimental, open-ended and inconclusive, less a signposting of the royal road to the Truth than the tracing of possible pathways, along which we are likely to encounter numerous blockages and dead ends. ![]() Moretti, rightly and refreshingly, insists on the distinction between thinking theoretically and ‘doing Theory’ (the latter for some considerable time now a largely routinized intellectual technology, with a certain market value in university literature departments). It is, however, expressly not proposed as yet another exercise in pure Theory. Secondly, the final piece operates at a higher level of theoretical synthesis than the others it is the meta-essay, addressed to the general principles and underlying assumptions of his project. First, they constitute, self-confessedly, both an ending and (a return to) a beginning (‘They come last, in this series of essays, but were really the beginning’) and are thus what binds all three pieces together, while also sending us back even further to several of Moretti’s earlier publications his ‘tree’ may therefore be said to bear fruit-perhaps not yet entirely ripe-stemming from a prolonged effort of reflection and research. footnote 3īut what particularly catches the eye-or at least my eye, for the purposes of this response-are the arguments underpinning the third, ‘Trees’, for essentially two reasons. Taken together (as indeed they must be), his three figures or representations-derived respectively from quantitative history, geography and evolutionary biology-weave an intricate and richly textured intellectual fabric. footnote 2 Franco Moretti’s response to both these questions has been robustly affirmative, while much of his career has been devoted to figuring out answers to the third question: if literary history is both desirable and possible, then how exactly to do it? His recent triptych of articles in New Left Review-‘Graphs’, ‘Maps’ and ‘Trees’, with the running subtitle ‘Abstract Models for Literary History’, published in book form by Verso this September-is his most considered reflection to date, proposing an intriguingly novel way of both construing and resolving a number of central issues in the field. footnote 1 The second question-is literary history possible?-was more the product of a developing scepticism as to the grounds of historical understanding itself. The first-is literary history desirable?-was particularly active in the Parisian polemics of the 1960s that generated the dramatic encounter between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes, an exchange-or rather a dialogue de sourds-which gave us Critique et vérité, Barthes’s crisply magisterial statement of the new anti-historicist critical temper. Over this time span, it has found itself confronted with three fundamental questions. ![]() D uring the past four decades or so, literary history has proven to be something of a problem child in the discipline of literary studies.
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