Distant reading: some musings between world literature and digital humanities

di Giorgio Guzzetta 
University of Cork,
111223634@umail.ucc.ie

Abstract: 

The publication in 2013 of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading marked the definitive canonization (a word that the author might not like) of «a growing field of unor thodox literary studies» and was particularly praised by digital humanists as some sort of vindication of their work by an established literary scholar [1]. Ross argues that it provides a constructive alternative to the «conflict rhetoric characterizing DH meta-discourse» and self-justification («the divisive conceptual apparatuses that structure DH meta-discourse at present») at the «rhetorical and institutional crossroads» of the discipline we are currently experiencing. The book, moving away from the usual opposition between traditional and digital humanists, models Moretti’s career as «a kind of alternate academic history in which the digital humanities developed organically from within traditional methods of scholarship» providing a «compelling […] anti-conflict narrative that emphasizes the shared goals of the ‘traditional’ academy and DH» [2]. For sure, distant reading contributed to the hype of Digital Humanities in recent years, especially in literary studies departments [3].
This would be an important achievement, of course, but the space opened up at this crossroad is not as peaceful as it seems, in my view. To what extent Moretti’s work can vouch for a sound and suitable, uninterrupted and organic evolution is a statement that still needs to be validated. A comparison between the endorsement of distant reading by Digital Humanities scholars and its more controversial reception in literary studies casts some reasonable doubts about this mediating role. In the initial chapter of Reading by Numbers [4], Bode distinguished three main areas of criticism: reductionism («such approaches reduce he inherent complexity and multiplicity of literature and language to uniform data»), absolutism («the quantitative methods make false claim to authoritative and objective knowledge») and acquiescence to neoliberalism («such studies resonates, in problematic and complicit ways, with contemporary institutional discourses, especially neoliberal or economic rationalist managerial practice») [5]. In her view, «some aspects of Moretti’s research justify some of the criticisms», but the three «are not intrinsic to quantitative methods». In fact, in spite of those criticisms, she maintains that Moretti’s «work is well worth the engagement» [6].
While sketching a new history of the Australian novel, Bode was able to recalibrate not only the literary field (a claim she made in the subtitle of the book), but also the field of quantitative research methodologies. Her analysis of different methodologies that Moretti mixed together in its own personal blend, such as book history, literary darwinism, and, more recently, digital humanities, is very detailed:

His [Moretti’s] application of quantitative methods extends well beyond any other work in book history, especially in his use of what might be called textual as well as material or historical data. While the first chapter of Graphs is (as Moretti acknowledges) es sentially an exercise in quantitative book history – drawing on historical data to explore trends in book publication, authorship and genre across a range of national fields – the other two chapters are based on datasets created from elements within particular literary texts, such as character, setting, plot and device. […] In more recent work, Moretti employs quantitative methods to analyse language patterns in much larger groups of texts. These other studies have their own antecedents: Literary Darwinists used textual data, and Moretti’s analyses of language patterns draw on methods developed in linguistics and digital humanities (or humanities computing). But no one else incorporates these range of approaches, or combine them in ways as original and provocative as Moretti [7].

The scope of her survey is limited, for obvious rea sons, to Anglo-American culture. The main area of ex pertise of both Moretti and Bode is English literature, the latter from a peripheral position (Australian novel), the former with forays in European and World literature (the significance of which I will discuss later on). So, in a sense her bias is understandable. Still, the lack of reference to Italian culture is, in my view, problematic, and in my paper I will try to fill the gap, especially in the first section where I analyze the origin of the idea of distant reading.
My main interest is not to discuss the history of Moret ti’s ideas and methods as such, but how they are con nected with digital humanities, how they fit in it. Moretti’s writing is «wide-ranging and, above all, sparky», and I have no doubts that he is «a writer who has interesting and important things to say about the practice of liter ary history in general and the development of the novel in particular» [8]. Therefore, my discussion is focused only on a very specific aspect of his scholar work, that goes under the umbrella-term of distant reading, which, as I have said before, represents the main common ground with digital humanities. My paper could be considered, I guess, a close reading of Distant Reading focused on three main topics: the origin of the methodology; the problem of world literature; the issue of data.

The origin of Distant Reading

Given the hype that surrounded the label he created, it is not surprising that Moretti decided to write a book to reconstruct «the intellectual trajectory of his philosophy  of ‘distant reading’ [… following] two decades of critical explorations» (I quote from the publisher is website). It is not a monograph, but a collection of essays, originally published from 1991 to 2011, without even an introduction to connect them together. This choice is a bit odd, but not entirely new in Italian culture. In 1957, Elio Vittorini, at that time a leading figure in Italian literature and culture, especially left-wing, collected his writings from 1929 to 1957 for Diario in pubblico, a controversial book in which each piece was accompanied by comments written in a different font that contextualised and updated the content of the original texts. The way in which he reworked the material stirred some criticism, rekindled by the posthumous enlarged edition of 1970 (Vittorini died in 1966), where a new section was added covering the period between 1957 to 1966. He was attacked mainly on the grounds that he distorted the originals to conceal his alleged sympathies with Fascism, an issue on which tons of ink have been spent in the past, but that does not concern us here. What is interesting, on the other hand, is the possibility that Moretti used a similar structure when collecting his own writings.
Moretti’s academic career started in the 1970s (his f irst edited book was published in 1975, his first monograph a year later), when he was trying to «create a happy union between materialist and formalist approaches to literature» [9]. At that time the ghost of Vittorini was still present in Italian culture, and would have for sure haunted a young, left-wing literary scholar like Moretti. This can explain the similarities between Diario in pubblico and Distant Reading. Like Vittorini, Moretti used italics to introduce each essay, commenting and giving information on the origin and significance of it, on the writing circumstances and the issues addressed, and sometimes even on the difference between the Italian and the English versions. A possible connection with Diario in Pubblico is interesting because of the way in which Vittorini dis-assembled and re-assembled the original texts, abstracting and virtualizing them with a ‘distant reading’ method similar to the one proposed by Moretti later on. In doing this, Vittorini was actually saying something about the way in which cultural and linguistic memory works (something that one could apply also to his work as a translator, but that is an other story). In short, what he is implying is that texts and books are not (forever) cast in stone, but are ne gotiated, textured linguistic systems that combine to gether subatomic particles that keep operating, passing through them, and connecting cultural and linguistic life before and after the event of a book publication. In other words, we could say that he is sidelining the text as a cultural object, privileging or at least bringing into view elements from a different scale. Similarly, as we know, Moretti will look at components and features above and below the level of text.
Apart from this innovative approach to cultural and textual memory, that was not very well received at that time, the one thing that the 1970s generation for sure inherited from Vittorini was his attention for the problem of the two cultures and his attempts to bridge the gap between science and humanities. Inspired by C.P. Snow’s 1959 pamphlet, in the early 1960s Calvino and Vittorini debated the question in the last issue of Il Menabò, the literary journal they co-directed (that stopped when Vittorini died in 1966, except for this 1967 issue that was a tribute to him). Furthermore, in a collection of notes written by Vittorini, posthumously published as Le due tensioni, «one of the dominant themes […] was the need for contemporary literature to catch up with modern scientific knowledge» [10]. The notes covered a wide range of ideas (sociology, linguistic, anthropology, even cybernetics), but the common element was «la passione dominante della letteratura», omnipresent, «anche dove se ne pronostica o se ne sconta già prossima la fine» [11].
The centrality of literature as the main symbolic system that allows a society’s expression of itself, ultimately a humanistic concept, was a basic assumption for both Vittorini and Moretti. The latter, in the first essay of the collection, Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch (1991), abandoned Curtius’ idea of a homogeneous European literature, but still takes for granted a strong, organic connection between lit erature and cultural identity, at the national level:

The notion of European literature, singular, was re placed by that of an archipelago of distinct yet close national cultures, where styles and stories moved quickly and frequently, undergoing all sorts of metamorphoses [12].

It is this organic nature of literature that allowed him to follow Vittorini’s invitation to bridge the gap between science and humanities. Specifically, he is able to sketch the historical evolution of European literature and re-interpret the notion of canon using concept from evolutionary biology, such as variation and selection. The literary canon is the result of a process of selection amongst the variants (i.e., the many different texts) produced by individual agents (i.e., the writers). Caesar summarizes Moretti’s position quite clearly, highlighting the question of writer’s agency as a particular problematic issue:

In the dialectic between biological variation and selection, the variation, or innovation, for Lamarck is always functional to selection […] Lamarck’s organisms are rational agents and, according to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘it is this combination of conscious adaptation and rational evolution […] that makes theorists account for cultural evolution in Lamarckian rather than Darwinian terms’. Because in Darwin, the link between variation and selection is not necessary: selection itself obeys the laws of necessity, but not all variations are selected. While biological evolution in Darwinian terms proceeds by divergence, cultural evolution proceeds, it seems, by convergence. This creates a problem for cultural historians because it appears to deny agency. But Moretti succeeds in breaking this problem down quite cleverly. On the one hand, the discontinuity between variation and selection would mean that more literature is always produced than will ever be ‘selected’, and also that no effort on the part of an individual author can ensure that his or her work will be preserved for posterity; by the same token, however, it allows Moretti to preserve an individual agency that gives birth to texts, and then to declare it irrelevant when it comes to analyzing the text’s social function [13].

The agency of the writer is problematic also in Vittorini, as his idea of natural engagement shows. It might be too daring to say that «Vittorini barely ever, I hazard, expresses the relationship between himself and society as a relationship between a writer-individual and a reader-individual» and that «the author-reader relationship is […] a subset of a much greater, even universal, set of relationships» [14], but clearly there is in Vittorini a strong identification of the writer with a society, or a community, similar to the national literary identification envisaged by Moretti. The ambiguities of Vittorini’s notion of literature and culture are best ex pressed by Burns when she said that he 

refers frequently to a central concept: ‘lo spirito di ricerca’. This ‘spirit’ is the essence and energy source of culture, and the reason why it is so important to human development. The very phrase encapsulates two directions which persist in Vittorini’s critical thinking: the ‘spirito’ expresses a metaphysical quality, whilst the ‘ricerca’ indicates a more practical and earthly activity [15].

In Moretti too there is a dualism that he never man aged to reconcile, between plot and language (or story and style: «narrative theory has always known that a story is composed of the distinct layers of story and style», a statement far too trenchant, in my view) or between variation and selection, that will lead to two different lines of research [16].
This dualism is epitomized in Vittorini’s «due tensioni», described as «tensione di affettività/espressività come chioma d’albero di un tronco di tensione razionale» [17]. To visualize this abstract model of literature, he sketched an actual tree on the left side of the page, a practice that Moretti will inherit and further develop.
Moretti’s visualizations indeed open up «exciting vistas» [18], anticipating more recent interdisciplinary collaborations between science and humanities that revised the idea of the canon: 

Ciascuno degli studiosi che ha risposto al mio invito ha contribuito a definire i contorni e sviluppare le varie sfumature del concetto e della pratica di “canone”. […] La perdità di centralità del testo da tempo non è più un tabù nelle discipline umanistiche […] La sempre più inattuale (e nociva) separazione tra scienze della cultura e scienze della natura riporta alla luce un senso non-canonico degli artefatti cognitivi: la varianza svela il ruolo del margine, del subalterno, dell’escluso[19].

Should we call this distant reading? I would say no. The text has lost centrality in both cases, but for differ entreasons. In the case of Fiormonte, we can say that text and literature have both lost centrality, becoming part of the (new) media system:

Mettendo al centro della storia i mezzi di comunicazione, l’asse culturale del novecento subisce uno spostamento – per esempio riportando le forze che guidano la creazione dei concetti di autore e opera (la letteratura stessa) dentro il sistema dei media [… e rappresenta] il primo attacco dall’interno all’assetto di quelle discipline umanistiche tradizionali – storia, filosofia e letteratura – che avevano dominato la cultura occidentale degli ultimi cinque secoli [20].  

Moretti, on the other hand, is not interested in the transformations and the mutations of the text triggered by digital encoding and digital convergence. In the Introduzione to La letteratura vista da lontano, the Italian version of Graphs, Maps, Trees, he clearly states that «qui si parla di letteratura: l’oggetto rimane più o meno quello di sempre, a differenza della recente virata del new historicism, e poi dei cultural studies, verso altri ambiti di discorso» [21]. He takes a clear stand here against new media and, even more so, hybrid forms such as digital games [22].
The shift is not from text to media, but from text to literary system. The difference is more clear in the second essay of his collection, Conjectures on World Literature, where he spoke for the first time of «distant reading». Even Moretti had some doubts about the label, as he stated in introducing the piece:

Conjectures provoked heated reactions […] aimed at the idea of ‘distant reading’. That fatal formula had been a late addition to the paper, where it was initially specified, in an allusion to the basic proce dure of quantitative history, by the words, ‘serial reading’. Then, somehow, ‘serial’ disappeared, and ‘distant’ remained. Partly, it was meant as a joke; a moment of relief in a rather relentless argument. But no one seems to have taken it as a joke, and they were probably right [23].

Serial reading foregrounds purely methodological aspects of a quantitative approach, whereas distant positions the reader above and against the text, and establishes a cognitive, if not moral, distance. Distant reading is indeed a change of scale, but also a «condition of knowledge [that] allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes- or genre and systems» [24]. The scale is that of World Literature, which requires the use of “different categories” and “a new critical method” in order to make sense of the “great unread” (a concept originating from Cohen 1999). How Moretti interpret it is what I will discuss in the next section. 

World Literature

 The idea of World Literature, an offspring of the Respublica Literaria of the Renaissance, gained currency after Goethe used it in several occasions, particularly in 1836 Eckermann’s Conversations. His interpretation was similar to Moretti’s idea of European literature described above, that is to say an inter-na tional network of writers from France, England and Germany that mutually exchanged creative texts and opinions in journals and in letters. Not surprisingly, in Goethe the shift between European and Universal (Weltliteratur) was frequent, the former being a step in the progression that will lead to the latter: