The Tragedy of Forms

 
“There are,” the biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, “many different ways of being alive,” but there are “vastly more ways of being dead” (qtd. in “Graphs” 52).¹ Franco Moretti refers to that remark in the third installment of his now seminal “Graphs, Maps, Trees,” but in a way the quip could serve as a motto for much of the critical work Moretti has undertaken over the past decade. In a series of essays now collected in two volumes—Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005) and Distant Reading (Verso, 2013)—Moretti has been practicing as well as preaching a form of literary history that relies less on the reading of individual texts than it does the mapping of literary production along the lines of a biological population. Just as understanding the evolutionary history of a living specimen means knowing something about the versions that have fallen by the wayside, so too, Moretti argues, should our literary-historical accounts be able to situate the survivors (the Austens, the Dickenses, the Doyles) within the larger context of the forms that failed to prosper, or to prosper for long. The history of Pride and Prejudice (1813), in this view, involves seeing not only its relationship to, say, Waverly (1814) but also its connection to (and difference from) far lesser known texts like The life of Pill Garlick; rather a whimsical sort of fellow (also 1813—who knew?). The story of culture’s happening, Moretti has been arguing, can’t really be separated from a history of cultural mishap. No creation, as it were, without some correlative destruction.
 
It is fitting, then, that Moretti’s most recent book, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, should present itself as the account of an extinction. “Not so long ago,” the book begins, “this notion [of the bourgeois] seemed indispensable” (1). But these days “its human embodiment seems to have vanished” along with the term itself, even among historians of economic culture. Only a few decades ago, Moretti explains, Immanuel Wallerstein called the bourgeois the “main protagonist” in the “story” of “this modern world of ours” (1). Now, suddenly, he is nowhere to be found. How is it that we’ve ended up, as if inserted into Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in a story without a hero?
 
The question that starts the volume—Where did the bourgeois go?—asks for a historical answer. But the bourgeois has always been hard to pin down. Thus Moretti cites a number of thinkers (including Wallerstein, Perry Anderson, Jürgen Kocka, Peter Gay, Aby Warburg, Simon Schama, and Dror Wahrman) who see the bourgeoisie’s defining trait as its lack of any. At one point, for instance, Wallerstein defines the bourgeois as a kind of gap or blank space in the class structure: the bourgeois is the thing that is “not a peasant or serf” but that’s also “not a noble” (qtd. in The Bourgeois 8). Add to this the bourgeois reformulation of rights as negative freedoms and its emphasis on economic and social mobility (a formulation only intensified with the coinage of middle class) and the titular object of Moretti’s study begins to look all the more elusive. It’s a big question whether there is anything we can call the sine qua non of the bourgeois. Sometimes it’s a particular relation to capital (e.g. ownership of the means of production). Other times it’s a temperament or a style (e.g. industrious, serious, self-restrained)—but styles, like keywords, change. It’s not surprising, then, that it is via a variety of indeterminacies that historians have defined the bourgeois. Permeability, dissonance, contradiction, multiplicity, porosity, weak cohesion, and inherent vagueness—for the thinkers Moretti cites, these are the characteristics (if that’s the right word) of our “protagonist.”
 
Moretti cites these views, but one can still sense—even in the absence of any direct attempt at refutation and lots of signs of his admiration for the people who hold them—that he’s not all the way on board. Yes, of course, he seems to be saying—there’s no transhistorical essence to the bourgeois—but, on the other hand, the bourgeois isn’t exactly nothing. “Incognito” (12) isn’t unknowable. But how to talk about a discontinuous and, worse, strategically self-effacing entity over time? Well, by producing a map of those extinctions and effacements, the “consequences (and reversals)” (12) that comprise the course of a thing whose life seems like nothing but a series of adaptations. This is the real aim of The Bourgeois: a morphology (though it’s interesting and a little surprising that the term does not appear in the book) of the social class that, as Marx and Engels saw long ago, made “constant revolutionizing” into “the first condition of existence” (Marx 67). The goal is a kind of negative image of a moving object: to “reverse-engineer” our way from “resolution” back to “a living and problematic present” (14).
 
The inherent changefulness of its object and the necessary flexibility of its method make for a book that reads like a collection of brilliant vignettes. The book is divided into five chapters plus a chapter-length introduction, but each of the chapters is divided into subsections (sometimes only three, sometimes as many as nine), and some of these subsections contribute not only to the chapter of which they are immediately a part but also to a couple of threads of trans-chapter meditations (there are six subsections on prose scattered across the first three chapters, and there are seven subsections on various keywords across the first four). The effect, and maybe the strategy, is to produce an argument that doesn’t accrue mass so much as, in good morphological fashion, swivel against and then obliquely mirror its earlier segments. “Closely connected,” Moretti says early on, “though not quite the same; this is the idea behind The Bourgeois.” And you can see that idea epitomized in a sentence like this one: “In the years immediately following [Dostoevsky], Ibsen’s realistic cycle performed exactly the opposite experiment—and reached the same conclusions” (168), in which the most recent development (Ibsen) manages to entirely contradict and entirely repeat its predecessor (Dostoevsky) in one fell swoop.
 
This way of proceeding plays to Moretti’s critical strengths. As a critic, Moretti has long been committed to the immanent development of the idea (to just seeing where things go if you follow them for a while), totally happy to rely on the formulations of others (who tend to appear almost in the form of soundbite), and utterly willing, when the interest of any configuration starts to fade, to let things trail off into an ellipsis. With distant reading, he’s been giving the most attention to the part about relying on others, since there’s no truly big data from tiny first-persons.
 
But whatever Moretti says publically about close reading, many moments in The Bourgeois make clear that Moretti remains one of the best noticers working in contemporary literary criticism (right up there with D.A. Miller, who has been very clear about his commitment to proximity, and to whom Distant Reading is dedicated). The readings of the Vermeer paintings that lead off chapter two (“Serious Century”), for instance, could hardly be more compelling rivers of thinking and rethinking. Noticing how a single idea (leisure) drops out of a list when Robinson Crusoe repeats it or how a character’s commitment to abstraction is signaled by his odd propensity for words like “ponderation,” “stupefaction,” “distinction” (163): it’s hard to imagine doing this sort of thing from a distance.
 
The interest of these individual insights cannot, though, quite mute the lingering question about how—if at all—they should be understood as part of a larger structure. Even morphology—in fact, especially morphology—needs some notion of connective tissue, and in the fourth section of the introduction Moretti offers a “synopsis” (13) of what’s holding it all together. The line Moretti sketches runs from bourgeois origin (in the first chapter, on Robinson Crusoe), to the bourgeois expansion in the first half of the 19^th-century (“the island has become half a continent” [13]), to its bewildered dominance in the second (“he has gained power, but lost his clarity of vision” [13]), and, finally, to its eventual subsumption under capital itself (“capitalism triumphant, and bourgeois culture dead” [22]). A shapely narrative, then, of origin, ascent, and a doggedly-resisted but finally inevitable extinction in the face of the very “spirit of capitalism” that had brought the bourgeois into being and with which, for a while anyway, he had seemed entirely identified. The Bourgeois reads like a Communist Manifesto—in which the bourgeois is discovered to have been digging his own grave—but done this time via the history of aesthetic form.
 
One can see why, especially if he wanted to call it The Bourgeois, Moretti would have been eager to discern in the aesthetic data the same satisfyingly clean arc that lends the Manifesto its prophetic clarity. Translated into literary form, the story is no less compelling: the rise of double-entry book-keeping hooks up nicely with a realist prose that wanted everything in its place, which in turn hooks up nicely with the Victorian emphasis on a sober, clear-eyed precision that—and this is the crucial break—turns out to be unsustainable in the abstracted landscapes of modern capital. Still, it is possible to wonder about the pressure which the curve of capital’s bildung exerts on our interpretation of aesthetic developments. Look, for instance, at Moretti’s reading of the massive increase in what he calls “fillers” in 19^th-century narrative. The interesting formal observation here is that, as opposed to the heroic eventfulness of an earlier literature, bourgeois narrative becomes obsessed with the in-betweens, with fillers. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, is a long story with only a handful of events. And the rest is filler: stretches of story in which people “talk, play cards, visit, take walks, read a letter, listen to music, drink a cup of tea…” (71). Unlike events (proposals, marriages, affairs, wars) which one can count, fillers are, by definition, a little shapeless and hard to measure. “It is not easy,” Moretti writes, “to quantify this sort of thing.” But then what are they doing in bourgeois narrative? Well, Moretti answers, fillers succeed “[b]ecause they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life” (81). And from “regularity” we can make our conceptual way to a host of familiar, bad-bourgeois principles and affects. First, “Hegel’s prose of the word: where the individual ‘must make himself a means to others'” (75); then “that analytical style…where the world is observed as if by an ‘impartial judge'” (76); then “an oppressive everyday” (77), plus “sadness” (78) and sobriety (80); then we get the “laborious” and the tamed (81); then the desire to “escap[e] from vagueness” that is the “reality principle” (86); and then last, but not at all least, we get “the most beautiful invention” of double-entry book keeping that “forces people to face facts” (86). The trajectory is convincing from one morphological step to the next. But we can also see that a lot hinges on that initial decision to read “fillers” in terms of regularity, since it’s that move that carries us from what is, at bottom, a pretty weird thing for a fiction to do (get rid of events) to the bourgeois world of laborious restriction we feel like we already know. Once that first decision is taken, we can move pretty quickly (15 or so pages) from narrative “filler” as that which resists quantification (the “hard to quantify”) to the filler as the foremost sign of a will toward regularity so indomitable that everything must be counted not once but twice.
 
Does it have to go that way? Maybe. But filler-as-regularity is, after all, not the only (or even the most obvious) answer to what it is that fillers mean. Why not see them, instead, as a giant reduction in regularity (serfs, after all, know their place, but how the folks in Mansfield Park wander: Where is Fanny?), or as signs of decline in the shaped-ness of time? Obviously, emphasizing this aspect of the filler would set it not just outside of but against the usual bourgeois suspects of domination, accountability, and industry. The filler, that is, would be not just a stage, but (or but also) a glitch in the curve of bourgeois development. And the shapeless filler would thus find a home next to the curious formlessness Moretti notes as the condition of Robinson Crusoe‘s resolutely plodding prose. Compile a bunch of details and you get, Moretti says, “Defoe’s shapeless story…the great classic of bourgeois literature” (35). Look, Moretti enjoins, at the strange sublimations of the novel’s grammar. The novel is full of sentences that say “having accomplished X, I did Y, to do Z.” On the one hand, Moretti says, such sentences—”past gerund; past tense; infinitive” (53)—encapsulate the purely purposive action and instrumental reason of the bourgeois. On the other hand, though, Moretti also notices that the infinitive—the “stroke of genius” (53)—that concludes the series offers a strangely unconditioned opening: “Finally, to the right of the main clause, and in an unspecified (though never too distant) future, lies the final clause, whose infinitive—often doubled, as if to increase its openness—embodies the narrative potentiality of what is to come.” “Never too distant” because Moretti won’t let the bourgeois (and maybe the bourgeois doesn’t want to) abandon its commitment to the “short-term teleology” of instrumental reason (51). But still “unspecified,” and, when something is unspecified, who knows how distant it is? Neither the bourgeois nor the morphological imagination is in a position to know in advance what will turn out to have been the decisive adaptation, what will turn out to have been instrumental. Maybe this thing—this piece of string, my opposable thumb, whatever—will turn out to be useful. Or maybe not: “My paddles,” says Robinson in a passage Moretti quotes at length, “signified nothing: and now I began to give myself over for lost…” (qtd. in The Bourgeouis 62).
 
It’s a little hard to fit these moments of shapelessness, openness, and unquantifiability into our standard account of the bourgeois as a positive ideology of clear-eyed focus and rigid attention to detailed account—and it’s not clear exactly what Moretti himself wants to make of them. We might, to be sure, see them as yet more of the contradictions that riddle capitalist existence, or choose instead to see them merely as the remnants of that first negative move (neither serf nor noble) that launched the bourgeois but couldn’t, in the end, stay unconditioned for very long. However we make sense of them, though, their presence testifies to a second story percolating throughout Moretti’s account. This is not the more prominent one, in which bourgeois realism is overtaken by capitalist abstraction and sober individualism replaced by the structural megalomania of personified markets. It is, rather, an earlier (and maybe longer-running) extinction of an openness or absence of condition that seems, however briefly, to have belonged to the bourgeois. The world of Wilhelm Meister is the world of means and ends, but the novel’s prose is, at least for a while, “curiously mixed with a strong sense of possibility” (75). Crusoe, similarly, is comprised of almost nothing but work, but “there is a subdued, elusive sense of enjoyment that pervades the novel….But enjoyment of what?“(44).
 
Maybe it’s naïve to think that the question—”enjoyment of what?“—could really stay unanswered, or to imagine that the surplus of “possibility” could escape realization. Time itself would probably be enough to ruin it. Sooner or later, even Proust’s “éternel imparfait” (77) will appear as a span that can be measured and Robinson will return home to learn that his plantations have been pouring money into his accounts all along. Then, “signified nothing” will be just another way to say useless. Still, thinking about these looser moments suggests a slightly different history, one in which we can see that what was pernicious about capitalist instrumentality was not only its insistence that, as Hardy put it, “inches of land had value,” but (way worse) its ability to transpose those things that used to feel like alternatives to its operations—things like elusive, objectless enjoyment; the hard to quantify fillers; a sense of possibility; life’s shapelessness—into the heart of its operations (Hardy 18). The hard to quantify, the too shapeless to measure are now (cf. the fine print on your credit card agreement; cf. the tax loophole; cf. the too-big-to-jail) primarily useful as “camouflage” for keeping one’s surpluses locked down (144). Exactly the same experiment, then, with exactly the opposite conclusions. That, too, is the (maybe even sadder) idea behind The Bourgeois.