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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to write about the recent Valve seminar on Graphs Maps and Trees, which has been described as offering a qunatitative approach to literary history, based on documenting the history of differing genres (analysing all tests from a given period rather than solely the canonical ones) through 'distance reading' rather than close reading. This piece seemed particularly striking to me:"In this piece, Moretti addresses the problem that the clues in the Sherlock Holmes stories are not decodable by the reader—whereas today the decodability of clues is “the First Commandment of detective fiction.” “Conan Doyle gets so many things right,” writes Moretti, so how is it that he can “lose his touch” at the last minute? Moretti eventually concludes that the unintelligibility of the clues is a deliberate means of emphasizing Holmes’s omniscience: if the reader could decode the clues, Holmes would no longer be a superman. Conan Doyle, in short, misuses clues “because part of him wants to.”
In “Trees,” Moretti passes over the “wants to” element—presumably to underscore the element of randomness. But I think he had it right the first time. Science is necessary but not sufficient for Holmes’s genius. After all, Dr. Watson is a good scientist, and conscientiously uses the “deductive method,” only to arrive, time and again, at the wrong conclusion—as the reader is guaranteed to do. Holmes’s use of clues strikes an incredibly delicate balance: the mystery is always solved using rational rules, but this doesn’t mean the solution is available to just anyone. Holmes is essentially aristocratic: things come to him effortlessly that never come to others at all.
Perhaps the Holmes stories are not half-baked versions of the “correct” mystery story, but a different kind of mystery story, wherein the nondecodability of clues is not a bug, but a feature. Conan Doyle was writing during the conquest of England by industry and rationalism; perhaps his readers wanted stories about the kinds of magic that are possible within the constraints of science. Holmes categorically rejects the supernatural, not in order to show that the new, rational rules preclude magic, but in order to show that you can still have magic even if you play by the rules. Decodable clues came a “generation” later, with Agatha Christie and the first World War, and became more rigorous after the second—by which time readers wanted to be reminded that the world was still rational."
This isn't really especially radical and is indeed particularly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of heteroglossia and its consequences in the polyphonic aspects of the novel. If criticism and comparison are two tools that can be used to interpret the text, then surely the above comparisons throw light into questions like Christie's social conservatism or the role of the gothic and supernatural in Doyle. Such examples of how genres are interpreted and redefined are surely not all that unusual; the case of how Langland rewrote sections of Piers Plowman in response to radical authors appropriating elements of the text seems to offer a particular concrete example.
With all that said, what does tend to concern me about Graphs, Maps and Trees somewhat is the attempt to quantify elements of literary history across large periods of time and distance; firstly because genres are rarely especially stable (and individual texts are rarely confined to single examples of any genre) and their classification somewhat arbitrary. Even with a defined morphology, it seems difficult to define why certain genres succeed and other do not. After all, literary history is riddled with examples of authors that failed to catch the popular imagination and were only to be acclaimed later; such models might work well with Doyle and Christie but what about authors like Bernhard, Pessoa and Kafka who remain even now largely acclaimed through critical endorsement than popular success (and who were very far from being even remotely representative of the bulk of work published in their lifetime)? Moretti's model seems to work well for popular genres but I'm not quite so sure it works so well otherwise.Labels: Interpretation, Literature, Theory
posted by Richard 6:28 pm
