Early in 2006 The Valve sponsored a book event on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. A dozen thinkers prepared comments on the book, Moretti responded, The Valve’s commentariat joined in the fun. This event has subsequently be edited into a book, Jonathan Goodwin and John Holbo, eds., Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees (2011). A few years later The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece on Moretti’s Literature Lab at Stanford; and this kicked off a lively Valve discussion.
Moretti’s latest work has kicked off a discussion at Crooked Timber. In this work Moretti has graphed networks of relationships between characters in texts. The basic idea is simple: write the names of characters on a sheet of paper. If two characters talk to one another, connect them with a line, thus:
Moretti has reported his results in The New Left Review and in a somewhat longer pamphlet available for download from his lab.
In this post I’m not concerned with the Moretti’s results, I’m interested in a comment he made along the way. This is from page four of the pamphlet:
Third consequence of this approach: once you make a network of a play, you stop working on the play proper, and work on a model instead: you reduce the text to characters and interactions, abstract them from everything else, and this process of reduction and abstraction makes the model obviously much less than the original object – just think of this: I am discussing Hamlet, and saying nothing about Shakespeare’s words – but also, in another sense, much more than it, because a model allows you to see the underlying structures of a complex object.
This is an important methodological point. By drawing a network of character relationships one has created a model that is clearly distinguishable from the text itself. One has objectified an underlying mechanism.
Moretti’s observation bears comparison with a similar observation by Sydney Lamb, a linguist of Chomsky’s generation but of a very different intellectual temperament. Lamb cut his intellectual teeth on computer models of language processes and was concerned about the neural plausibility of such models. He is one of the first thinkers to use networks as representations of language structures and processes. In his major systematic statement, Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language (John Benjamins 1999) remarked on importance of visual notation (p. 274): “. . . it is precisely because we are talking about ordinary language that we need to adopt a notation as different from ordinary language as possible, to keep us from getting lost in confusion between the object of description and the means of description.” That is, we need the visual notation in order to objectify language mechanisms.
Moretti’s point is much the same as Lamb’s. The model is an object of thought that is clearly separate from the phenomenon it is helping to explain, language in one case, a literary text in the other. Now, in talking of objectification, I do not mean to imply that such models constitute objective knowledge about either language or texts. Objective knowledge requires more than objectification; it requires some kind of evidence that a given objectification is the right objectification. Where the models are of mental structures and processes, such evidence is hard to come by. The objectifications are, at best, a starting point.
In Moretti’s case, these objectifications have turned out to be of limited value (p. 12):
It is never easy, realizing that one has reached a dead end, pure and simple. But this is what it was. Using networks to gain intuitive knowledge of plot structures had played an important role – but we had now reached the limits of its usefulness. Better turn away from images for a while, and let intuition give way to concepts (network size, density, clustering, betweenness ...), and to statistical analysis.
I observe that such things as “network size, density, clustering, betweenness ...” are objectifications too, objectifications defined over the basic notion of a network and useful in examining networks too large to yield insights upon visual inspection.
Objectification has to start somewhere. The general idea of a network is an objectification technique that is proving extraordinarily useful in many disciplines. I fully expect that networks will prove useful in the objectification of literary phenomena.
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