DISTANT READING
FRANCO MORETTI
To D.A. Miller
l’amico americano
Contents
Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch
Conjectures on World Literature
The Slaughterhouse of Literature
Planet Hollywood
More Conjectures
Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur
The End of the Beginning: A Reply to Christopher Prendergast
The Novel: History and Theory
Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7,000 Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)
Network Theory, Plot Analysis
Index
Copyright
Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch
In the spring of 1991, Carlo Ginzburg asked me to write an essay on European literature for the first volume of Einaudi’s Storia d’Europa. I had been thinking for some time about European literature—in particular, about its capacity to generate new forms, which seemed so historically unique—and in a book I had just finished reading I found the theoretical framework for the essay: it was Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species, where the concept of ‘allopatric speciation’ (allopatry = a homeland elsewhere) explained the genesis of new species by their movement into new spaces. I took forms as the literary analogue of species, and charted the morphological transformations triggered by European geography: the differentiation of tragedy in the seventeenth century, the novel’s take-off in the eighteenth, the centralization and then fragmentation of the literary field in the nineteenth and twentieth. The notion of ‘European literature’, singular, was replaced by that of an archipelago of distinct yet close national cultures, where styles and stories moved quickly and frequently, undergoing all sorts of metamorphoses. Creativity had found an explanation that made it seem easy, and almost inevitable.
This was a happy essay. Aimed at a non-academic audience, and on such a large topic, it asked for a balance between the abstraction of model-building and the vividness of individual examples—a scene, a character, a line of verse—that would make it worth reading in the first place. Somehow, I found the right tone; possibly, because of my total reliance on the canon of European masterpieces (as a colleague pointed out, the word ‘great’ seemed ubiquitous in the essay; and it was, I used it fifty-one times!). The canon allowed for comparative analysis to take place: Shakespeare and Racine, the conte philosophique and the Bildungsroman, the Austrians and the avant-gardes . . . As the years went by, I would move increasingly away from this idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for what it meant. But the conceptual cogency that a small set of texts allows for—that, I do miss.
This was a happy essay. Evolution, geography, and formalism—the three approaches that would define my work for over a decade—first came into systematic contact while writing these pages. I felt curious, full of energy; I kept studying, adding, correcting. I learned a lot, and one day I even had the first, confused idea of an Atlas of literature. And then, I was writing in Italian; for the last time, as it turned out—though, at the time, I didn’t know it. In Italian, sentences run easier; details, and even nuances, seem to emerge all by themselves. In English, it would all be different.
Years ago, Denis de Rougement published a study entitled Twenty-eight Centuries of Europe; here, readers will only find five of them, the most recent. The idea is that the sixteenth century acts as a double watershed—against the past, and against other continents—after which European literature develops that formal inventiveness that makes it truly unique. (Not everybody agrees on this point, however, and so we will begin by comparing opposite explanatory models.) As for examples, the limited space at my disposal has been a great help; I have felt free to focus on a few forms, and make definite choices. If the description will not be complete (but is that ever the case?), at least it will not lack clarity.
1. A MODEL: UNIFIED EUROPE
Those were beautiful times, those were splendid times, the times of Christian Europe, when one Christianity inhabited this continent shaped in human form, and one vast, shared design united the farthest provinces of this spiritual kingdom. Free from extended worldly possessions, one supreme ruler held together the great political forces . . .
What you have just read are the first sentences of Christianity, or Europe, the celebrated essay written by Novalis in the very last months of the eighteenth century. As its underlying structure, a very simple, very effective equation: Europe is Christianity, and Christianity is unity. All threats to such unity—the Reformation, of course; but also the modern nation states, economic competition, or ‘untimely, hazardous discoveries in the realm of knowledge’—threaten Europe as well, and induce Novalis, who is all but a moderate thinker, to approve of Galilei’s humiliation, or to sing a hymn in praise of the Jesuits—‘with an admirable foresight and constance, with a wisdom such as the world had never seen before . . . a Society appeared, the equal of which had never been in universal history . . .’ Here, let me just point out how this intransigent conception of European unity—one Christianity, one design, one ruler—is also the backbone of the only scholarly masterpiece devoted to our subject: Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, published in 1948. ‘This work aims at grasping European literature as a unified whole, and to found such unity on the Latin tradition,’ reads Auerbach’s review.1 And thus Curtius himself: ‘We must conceive of the Middle Ages in their continuity both with Antiquity and with the modern world. This is the only way to construct what Toynbee would call ‘an intelligible field of study’—the field being precisely European literature.2
Onto Novalis’s spatial order (Rome as the centre of Europe), Curtius superimposes the temporal sequence of Latin topoi, with its fulcrum in the Middle Ages, which again leads to Rome. Europe is unique because it is one, and it is one because it has a centre: ‘Being European means having become cives romani, Roman citizens.’3 And here’s the rub, of course: because Curtius’s Europe is not really Europe, but rather—to use the term so dear to him—‘Romania’. It is a single space, unified by the Latin–Christian spirit that still pervades those universalistic works (The Divine Comedy, Faust) which seem to establish separate ‘national’ literatures, but in fact pre-empt them. In Europe, for Curtius, there is room for one literature only, and that is European literature.
If circumscribed to the Middle Ages—where most of the evidence comes from—this model may well be invulnerable. But Curtius has something else in mind: not the delimitation of the Middle Ages, but their permanence well into modernity. The line about European literature being ‘intelligible’ only because of medieval continuity leaves no doubts about it. And yet, ‘in today’s spiritual
