Distant Reading. Franco Moretti
to two Roman empires, and must endure our destiny, whether we want it or not . . .’ The passage is quoted by Curtius in his 1934 essay Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Calderon. Curtius is predictably in great syntony with this Roman–imperial image of Austria, and Hofmannsthal is indeed for him the most representative European author of the twentieth century.
32 Guizot, Histoire, pp. 40, 38.
33 ‘Philosophical history, the science of origin, is the form which, in the remotest extremes and the apparent excesses of the process of development, reveals the configuration of the idea—the sum total of all possible meaningful juxtapositions of such opposites. The representation of an idea can[not] be considered successful unless the whole range of possible extremes it contains has been virtually explored.’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Baroque Drama, p. 47. As Adorno wrote in The Philosophy of Modern Music (London 1973), ‘only in such extremes can the essence of this music be defined; they alone permit the perception of its context of truth. “The middle road”, according to Schoenberg . . . “is the only one which does not lead to Rome”’ (p. 3).
34 Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, New York 1985, pp. 219–20. ‘Many variations don’t work’; today, we all know of Joyce’s stream of consciousness; yet Les lauriers sont coupées, The Making of the Americas, Berlin Alexanderplatz are already novels for specialists; and some French texts of the 1920s, written under the spell of Ulysses (Yeux de dix-huit ans, 5,000, Amants, heureux amants), are totally forgotten. If we are ever going to have a literary palaeontology, these library fossils will help us to understand why a certain technical solution was selected over others, and to have a better grasp of our cultural evolution. Like the history of life, the history of literature is a gigantic slaughterhouse of discarded possibilities; what it has excluded reveals its laws as clearly as what it has accepted.
35 The metaphor used earlier—‘division of labour’—is not completely satisfactory. In the ‘epic’ projects of the early twentieth century (Mahler, Joyce), where all sorts of ‘low’ conventions are conscripted for the edification of the aesthetic totality, mass culture and avant-garde techniques lie side by side—as Adorno put it—‘like two halves that no longer form a whole’. The proximity multiplies dissonances and irony; it radicalizes the complexity of the formal system. Their blending at all costs—quite a triumph of entropy—will be the great achievement of postmodernism.
36 It goes without saying that the aesthetic sphere had begun to move towards autonomy three or four centuries earlier. A relative security against arbitrary acts of power has thus been almost a constant of modern European literature, and must have encouraged its formal inventiveness.
37 Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy, London 1963, p. 9.
38 These many Europes arise successively, one after the other, but they later coexist for long stretches of time, and the cohabitation of diverse formal spaces within a fixed geography has induced a growing complexity in the European literary system. The form of the present essay—which does not begin with a fully given concept of European literature, but constructs it in the course of time, adding new determinations along the way—tries to reproduce the historical evolution of its object.
39 Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, New York 1899, p. 442. The textual history of Hamlet offers a lovely instance of the role of the metropolis in literary invention. The first printed versions of Hamlet are, as is well known, three; the first in-quarto (Q1), of 1603; the second in-quarto (Q2), of 1604; and the in-folio (F) of 1623. The Hamlet we read is based on Q2 and F; it’s from them that it draws its ‘strangeness’, its tragi-comic web, the enigmatic structure which has turned it into a key text of modernity. Q1, on the other hand (the bad Quarto, as philologists affectionately call it), apart from other major defects, ruthlessly simplifies everything; it gives us a one-dimensional tragedy, lacking in the heterogeneity and complexity of Hamlet. And where does Q1 come from? In all likelihood, from the sudden need to prepare a text for a tour in the provinces. Formal inventiveness, tolerated in London, and in fact rewarded with a great success, is deemed implausible as soon as the play has to leave the metropolis.
40 Nietzsche’s phrase, on Wagner and French late Romanticism, is from Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Enzensberger’s essay is collected in Einzelheiten.
41 According to a classic study by Carlo Dionisotti, the Italian literary canon (the first to be established in Europe) was entirely the product of exile: ‘the work of an exile’ Dante’s Comedy, ‘a voluntary exile’ Petrarch at the time of the Canzoniere, ‘exile in the midst of his own fatherland’ the situation out of which arises the Decameron. See Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin 1967 (1951), p. 32. Dionisotti wrote the essay in London, after Fascism had forced him too into exile. At the other end of the European development, Perry Anderson has redefined the great ‘English’ culture of the twentieth century as almost entirely the work of emigrés; see his ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review I: 50 (July–August 1968). The most ambitious overall description of the European canon—Mimesis—was in its turn written by Auerbach during his exile in Istanbul.
42 Museum der Weltliteratur is the expression used by Heinz Schlaffer in his study of Goethe’s poem (Faust Zweiter Teil, Die Allegorie des 19, Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1981, p. 107). On the analogies between the architecture of museums and that of jails, see the first part of The Lost Centre, by Hans Sedlmayr.
43 This is certainly the case for the Spanish and Portuguese literatures of Latin America, and for literatures in English from Asia and Africa (not to speak of America and Australia); francophone African literatures may soon play the same role.
Conjectures on World Literature
‘Conjectures’, too, was an occasional piece, like ‘Modern European Literature’ before it. At Columbia, the department of English and Comparative Literature was re-thinking its structure, and I had proposed to detach Comparative Literature from English; as a series of gloomy departmental confrontations got under way, the Italian Academy asked me to organize a small conference: four papers, of which mine would be one. It seemed like a good opportunity to bring disagreements into the open.
The discussion was on comparative literature; writing on world literature instead was, at the time, a somewhat polemical choice—and problematic, too: I remember considering the title ‘World Literature?’, with a question mark at the end, to signal my perplexity about a concept no one seemed to use any more. Pascale Casanova’s Republique mondiale des lettres, which was about to be published while I was writing ‘Conjectures’, helped change this state of affairs; but back then, people were, at a minimum, sceptical (my colleagues at Columbia, for instance, refused to use the words ‘World Literature’ for the name of the new department). But I had found a strong conceptual model in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and went ahead just the same.
Wallerstein’s tripartition of core, periphery, and semi-periphery appealed to me because it explained a number of empirical findings I had slowly gathered in the course of the 1990s: France’s continental centrality, so often mentioned in the essay on European literature; the peculiar productivity of the semi-periphery, analyzed in Modern Epic; the unevenness of narrative markets of the Atlas of the European Novel—all these, and more, strongly corroborated Wallerstein’s model. Besides resting solidly on facts, the theory also highlighted the systemic constraints under which national literatures had to develop: in a starkly realistic reversal of the creative ecosystem of ‘Modern European Literature’, world-systems theory showed the power of core literatures to overdetermine, and in fact distort, the development of most national cultures.
Although based entirely on the work of Marxist thinkers—Jameson, Schwarz, Miyoshi, Mukherjee, and of course Wallerstein himself—and backed by quite a lot of historical evidence (or at least: a lot, given the parameters of literary history), ‘Conjectures’ provoked heated