Andrew's Wiki
Atlas European Novel

General Theses

• Purpose: “half methodological manifesto, half pragmatic example” using 19th c European novel (wants it to be useful! people can use his maps as starting place!)
  • Critiques other “literary atlases” from 1910 to 1996 as making maps themselves peripheral, not a part of the discourse: map first, then think, he says
• ”...geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens’, but an active force, that pervades the litearary field and shapes it in depth” 3
  • in other words: “geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel” 8
  • Allows you to see the book in a new light
  • Makes him look at previously forgotten books, ie data
• How to find out the connections between geo and lit? Mapping! “systematic use of maps” 3 to “dissect the text”
  • Not that you look at maps that already exist (people have already done that to look at Shax, at Hardy, at H Rider Haggard); but that you make your own maps of texts
  • Quotes Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounce “purse”), from “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism”
    • “operations upon diagrams…take the place of the experiments upon real things that one performs in chemical and physical research” qtd 4
  • I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it: too mathy; too foreign to lit
• Method
  • Select data, map it, analyze the “shape” of the data, find out something new (something “more” than the data you input)
• Result: lit is the product “of two conflicting, and equally significant forces:” the inside and outside, the social and the rhetorical (which for Moretti is the ONLY reason to study lit):
  • ”ortgebunden, place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes”
    • “bound to its space” 71
  • “the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and self-organizes” 5

Type One: Space in Literature (fictional space in lit)

• Jane Austen’s “complications” he finds occur either in London (5x), Bath (4x), OR seaside towns (Ramsgate, Twickenham – riverside, Brighton, Weymouth, Dawlish, lime, Plymouth) 19
  • Her complications are by the sea and rivers, Britain opened up, while the beginnings and ends are in “home counties” in the heart of Britain
  • And he says notice that the complication places are REAL cities, while the homes of beginning and end are all fictional
  • Austen has two diff Englands: the safety of landed class v the unsafe class of mobile seducers: her stories turn these 2 Englands “into a story” 20
• Overseas Colonies
  • 27: why? b/c that way, wealth is produced elsewhere, off-stage, letting the author forget about it: ideological b/c you want to forget the poor in England
• Maps show how English novels love to make French or France the villain
• Maps show how historical novels pull AWAY from national center, towards borders (external, ie out of the state, border crossing = adventure; internal, it within the state, border crossing = treason)
  • Generalizes this idea: Every genre has its own type of space 35 and its own “spatial map”
  • Scott: crossing borders crosses time (ex: Scotland moving around you see devt of production: hunting, herding, agriculture, trade), which is itself a model of the historical novel, which lets you pass into the past as well 38
    • Shows that each nation’s internal borders reveal a heterogeneity of chronological positions: a nation has spaces that belong to diff times 40 “many temporal layers”
      • Of course, then these differences will be “erased” to make national identity, at least in historical novel
• “Space acts upon style,” ie Scott’s comic characters live on borders 43, so that along the borders you go above or below the “serious” register of the realist novel, into comedy or tragedy; ie Scott’s descriptive style which becomes poetic along borders 44
• “Space is correlated to plot” 46
  • 55: the Lady’s Magazine has its novels set in Europe, but its short stories and “anecdotes” in the Far East and New World: longer narratives are familiar, the shorter are the unfamiliar
  • 58: the “colonial romance” European novel into Africa has a straight shot from a “rim settlement” (garrison or trading post on coast) straight in to some “uncharted” part of Africa w/out any backwards or forwards or lateral hesitations: “linear…no alternatives…only obstacles – and therefore, antagonists”
    • what antagonists? “lions, heat, vegetation, elephants, flies, rain illness – and natives…all interchangeable…all equally unknowable and threatening” 59
    • lack of complicated geography reflects the “uncomplicated” business of the world market which only wants simple acquisition/exchange 61, so that 62 “the spatial logic of the one-dimensional plot” recapitulates one-dimensional exploitation of Africa
    • for example, the fact that these romances tend to lead to “rescuing” some lost European = deliberate reversal of truth. We’re liberating…yeah right
  • 46 as changes occur near border and “tropes increase near the border” Why? B/c once you’re in an new space, you no longer know how to express that space and must have recourse to metaphors
    • Takes Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor – that you use metaphor when the “referential field” for something doesn’t yet exist, so you take one from a familiar object
    • What’s neat, Marinetti points out, is the operation of reference to something diff ENACTS and points out the very unfamiliarity (“What a weird comparison” = speaker’s fear of not being able to communicate or understand new thing) even as it tells you what to think about the foreign and thus contains its unfamiliarity
• Spanish picaresque novels, 16-17th centuries (which reminds me of my leisure spaces)
  • The open road but in a narrow, not-overreaching fashion: the mule, not the ship 48—just like the limited reach of all realist novels, he says: “modest…yet, never without some kind of value”
  • Trips w/stops at inns, which all have same flavor b/c same opportunities and characters: “work, sex, gambling, food, religion, petty crime, entertainment” with “mule-drivers, innkeepers, guards, priests, whores, young squires, gamblers, thieves” 48… but they are “reshuffled” and so “combinations change” so to make it still interesting, interspersed with stories told by people every once in a while
  • Picaresque’s picture of “modern nation as that space where strangers are never entirely strangers—or at any rate don’t remain so for long” 51
• Bildung
  • Young, active city with lots of strangers/characters, a sense of the unknown, and sophisticated jobs: the arts, journalism, finance, law, politics. Fashion and seduction.
    • Your peers
  • Middle area of provinces with a few more characters than the village; jobs are “school, trade, civil service” 64
    • The generations
  • Family, old area of village with few characters
• “Each space determines, or at least encourages, its own kind of story… Space is not the ‘outside’ of narrative, then, but an internal force.” 70
• Says that the modern novel does try to hearken back to simplicity of fairy tale as seen in Propp’s analysis of it: a “symbolic compromise between the indifferent world of modern knowledge and the enchanted topography of magic story-telling” 72
  • Vladmir Propp: initial world presents problem, then hero departs; space of the donor involves test and given aid, then you have “another kingdom” w/real crisis, the borderland of pursuit, and then the results space: back in the initial world
  • Marinetti: it’s still there in the novel, but deformed, changed a little or a lot; things start to get ambiguous, not so much reliant on a binary
• 19th c novels made London legible esp accdg to class
  • Two Halves: some novels show either one half or the other; as indeed most urban novels reduce the city to some sort of opposition (a la narratology and Propp, seeing the oppositional dyad as the core of narr)
    • Silver-fork novels: 1830s-40s – West End (ex: Catherine Gore’s works; Disraeli’s Vivan Grey; Bulwer-Lyttons Pelham)
      • The fashionable squares (Grosvenor, Berkeley), parks (mostly St James), Bond Street shops, St James’ clubs; the border, Regent St
      • They purge and oversimplify: there is the West End, then everything else
    • in the City: Newgate novels (crime)
  • Paris: “a mosaic of little worlds”
    • the phrase is from Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigations of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment”
      • Each part has its own purpose and labor: trade, theatre, publishing, education; alone w/little piece of middle class, poor, new wealth, old wealth
      • for Balzac, this complexity is great, not to be avoided, but to be integrated w/narr
    • Zola’s Paris: “claustrophobic” 90 people don’t wander and if they do it’s special occasion or their lives are threatened
  • French Bildungsroman requires the youthful, inspired space of the Latin Quarter to exist (cf Sentimental Education)
• Balzac showed him, and now he makes it a rule, that the “secret shape of the city” is the two oppositional elements plus a mediator (whether it’s one crafty person or some entity like “journalism” or money).
  • Instead of binary, you have triangle b/c you always have the Third element, social overdetermination, thus: social relationships are a triangle 108
    • which he compares to Simmel’s “transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrast”
  • Ultimate source? “indirect…nature of social relations:” “city-as-market” with Marx’s “three dramatis personae:” “A sells to B to buy from C” 109
  • It’s what makes urban existence what it is.
  • Ultimate effect? Weakens the aim, which vanishes 110
• Dicken’s Third: the middle class
  • Doesn’t show up until his later works (compare Oliver Twist to David Copperfield)
  • Must be in middle of two diff hostile forces: David between Uriah (low) and Steerforth (high); Pip between Magwitch (low) and Estella (high)
    • Middle: the “hinge” and “source of value” for Dickens 132
  • Only in this middle space can you have private/public divide 120 (the very low and very high don’t have an escape from work); best example, Wemmick (his City v Walworth distinction)
  • The ones who STAY in London are generally the very high and the very low, whereas his middle characters end up leaving it
  • Critiques Dickens for trying to reduce complexity of London (cf Bleak House, narrator occasionally commenting, how could these things be possibly connected, you ask?) through family romance: by connex people by forgotten or suppressed bloodlines. Too easy, simple.
    • Actually, Dickens’ London is just a bunch of autonomous pods, not a true city, he claims 130
      • I ask, why are you so sure the city is all about connex?
• Sherlock Holmes
  • Only one story about East End; the rest about City and West End
    • Whereas contemporary accounts of actual crime, quite the opposite: not in West End, but in East End
    • Why? East End crime so real, too real. West End crime is “an enigma” hence interesting to write and read about 137
  • His rural spaces: “code words for a weekend in the country,” Surrey, Kent, Sussex 137; very Jane Austen, he notes
  • Almost half of the villains are foreigners 140

Type Two: Literature in Space (lit in historical space)

Reactions/Commentary

• His graphs often have a quote from someone else’s book that’s not about space per se but about the texts he uses to make the map, thus showing that certain critics are already trying to find the knowledge that maps give, and that if they’d had maps they their ideas would be clearer.
  • Says that people are already trying to go where he wants em to
• Quite logically proceeds from Geography effects on X to its effects on Y to Z ….

Random

• Braudel: Moretti like Jameson likes Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World (1949) (written by memory in a concentration camp; a captured French soldier) while Arrighi likes Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century 3 vols (1967-79)
• Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (on Rimbaud)
• Jameson’s emphasis on space as part of culture
• Perry Anderson, Considerations of Western Marxism
  • more info: Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left by Paul Blackledge (2004)
• On the role of slavery and the colonies in the rise of capitalism
  • Moretti: “colonies played certainly a significant, but not an indispensable role in British economic life” 24-5
  • Moretti follows Patrick O’Brien, V. G. Kiernan, and Paul Bairoch to say that imperialism didn’t CAUSE or create or even make possible the rise of capitalism. Think, for example, of the small start-up costs of manufacturing initially that didn’t require big money of plantations. Some also say that industrialism itself caused colonialism. The world conquered by the Europeans was hurt much more than Europe was helped.
  • However, Robin Blackburn says that capitalism was “advanced” by the regime of “primitive accumulation” of plantations. Doesn’t say that slavery MADE capitalism OR that colonialism was the best way for Britain to make money. However, it did let Britain beat its capitalist rivals.
  • My own reflections:
    • Roderick Floud said that in terms of actual contribution to production and expansion of capital into a modern financial bureaucracy, imperialism only let them advance about 5 yrs more, total, than the economy would have grown anyway. Plus the costs of empire = they’d have been richer w/out it.
    • Ian Baucom, speaking in terms of the structural supports of capitalism devpd for the financial phase of 18th and 19th c British capitalism, said that slavery produced finance capitalism as we know it b/c of its encouragement of bills of sale and insurance company and its model of property
    • Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Marx himself, as well as the contemporary ideology about empire: colonialism is one of the ways to deal with the surplus (overproduction).
    • So, my own conclusion, putting it all together: empire did not create capitalism or advance it very much, but it did contribute to the SHAPE of British capitalism of this period (for example, by giving it the outlet surplus needed, which would have had to have been accomplished, accdg to David Harvey, in more unsavory ways: the devaluation of goods or of the workforce)
• Russian Formalism
  • “function” versus “motivation” of action/event
  • “function:” what it does to the plot, the narrative
  • “motivation:” the superficial reason WHY for that person’s own reasons; rationalized
• Perry Anderson: Napoleon period was one of perhaps greatest nationalistic fervor, “a counter-revolutionary nationalism” qtd 29
  • Moretti generalizes: war, defining self against the other, is primary way to create collective identity
• Bakhtin
  • dialogism: each issue “opens up to” its opposite
  • chronotope: the chronotope is what defines a genre
  • Marinetti doesn’t like his polyphony, which he says is only appropriate for Russian novels 45; says that realist novel is reductive, finding a single common language like Ernest Gellner’s “single intellectual currency”
• Weber: “monopoly of legitimate violence”
• Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London 1889
  • There are many general patterns (wealth of the west side; the middle classes hugging major arteries) but then again there’s a huge mix of classes in most areas: “confusion” 78 not easily legible
  • 19th c novels had to MAKE London legible
• Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise @ department store
• Recommends Balzac’s Lost Illusions