Six Degrees of Danish Bacon

When it comes to phenomena of language and style, we can do things that previous generations could only dream of.

Thank god we are past the pencil-and-ruler famines of yesteryear.

I daresay, that Lord connexion looks shaky. Has has been any independent verification? He doesn’t seem to very connected; not a chap that mixes well, I see.

Thanks Jonathan!

I think we can safely say that he is a key figure in the network.

No, I think we can safely say that the guy who does Garfield Minus Garfield has some new work cut out for him.

Rosencranz-and-Guildenstern don’t have a tie because they function as a single character. They don’t need to talk to one another because there is no thought in the head of Rosencranz which is not also in the head of Guildenstern.

Whenever I encounter Moretti writing about literature, I’m reminded of an example Douglas Hofstadter uses in Gödel, Escher, Bach in his discussion of levels of organization and the reductionism/holism debate: A man who buys an LP of a Bach recording and hangs it on the wall, and invites his friends over to admire it.

What Moretti sees when he charts this stuff may be interesting and all, but does it really contribute to my critical understanding of a novel or a play? Was literature running so low on complexity and interest that we had to find new ways to talk about character and genre (for examples) that don’t require us to just read the damn book already?

Maurice wrote:
What Moretti sees when he charts this stuff may be interesting and all, but does it really contribute to my critical understanding of a novel or a play?
Well, as someone outside the tent I could be naughty and say pretty much the same thing about literary criticism as a whole in regard to actual appreciation of literature.

As someone who uses Directed Graphs reasonably often, I would suggested that the benefit would be in comparing all of the works of one author to another.

The whole point of this kind of tool is to reduce the detail to the barest and most essential relationships – you could overlay a graphs using different coloured edges (the lines) for the dialogue between characters and their appearances in a scene together and gain some higher level understanding of the construction of the play(s).

For example – you could examine character relationships in Shakespeare in comparison to Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett plays. Using the different coloured edges idea above you could stand back and squint at all the graphs (honest) and get a general overview of the technique of the authors.

It may say absolutely zero about the quality of the work, but may still provide useful insight… or at least that’s how it works in my field.

Of course, you should insert appropriate allegory regarding a man with hammer here.

@11 wins the thread

It confuses me when people question Moretti’s methods because the conclusions he produces could be arrived out with more traditional methods. Maybe they could, but why not use all of the tools at one’s disposal? Sometimes, when you’re trying to figure something out, it helps to draw a diagram. I would imagine that this is a claim most people would accept, so why object to Moretti’s pragmatic use of diagrams because we could, in principle, do the same things some other way?

If there’s a valid complaint to be made about Moretti’s methods, it is not that they are unnecessary innovations, but that they are not innovative enough. “Drawing diagrams” is not a revolutionary new methodology; it’s just a common-sensical thinking aid, as should be clear to anyone who’s ever felt the need to whip out a pen and scribble on a pad of paper while thinking about something. If Moretti used statistics or some other sort of quantitative technique to analyze his data, rather than just diagramming it and then coming up with stories about the diagrams, that might be a revolution worth disagreeing with. (I guess his discussion of power-law distributions in the new pamphlet takes him closer to “statistics or some other sort of quantitative technique” than he went in Graphs, Maps, Trees, but I haven’t looked closely enough at the paper to judge that bit.)

It’s a play. There are some considerations that have been left out.

Some characters may need to be offstage at a certain point because they are changing costumes or other business.

Effectiveness of the performance is paramount. Maybe having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern not talk to each other enhances the overall atmosphere.

It’s sort of an interesting concept in the abstract, for comparative use, but I think it’s a rather blunt instrument.

I actually like Moretti’s quantitative/mapping stuff. The part in Atlas of the European Novel about the meaning of location in various early 19th century English novels is pretty neat – it talks about social class and the parts of novel plots that tend to take place in Scotland versus those in the south of England, the way region relates to how morality is depicted and, er, some other stuff I don’t remember because I don’t have the book handy.

Maybe this diagramming of Hamlet isn’t the best example of his recent work, but in the article he talks about the possibility of mapping networks in the huge, complex Qing Dynasty novel The Story of the Stone. (This is one of my favorite novels, so I know it – albeit in translation – fairly well.) Mapping the networks in Story of the Stone would actually be really useful – I’ve read some essays which do this partially in words, and it doesn’t work well because there are about twenty million characters, the novel seems to have been written in multiple versions by several people and it’s partially autobiographical. Mapping would draw out a lot about the structure of the novel that is difficult to see; it would also, I imagine, help sort out some of the social commentary in the novel by making the family and other social connections more visible. If you were to do some different maps that showed relationships over the course of the novel, you could easily get at many of the nuances of the Jia family’s changing fortunes.

The thing is, I’ve read Moretti’s earlier work and found it absolutely incredible. The Way of the World, for me, opened up a new way to understand the political dilemmas of modern radical leftism, for example. There’s quite a lot of “how to live” in Moretti, if you’re into that sort of thing. So I have a bit more faith in Moretti’s smarts than I do in my own, as deferential-to-authority as that may seem. I don’t always get the point of his mapping work, but I tend to assume that further reading and thinking will help me to understand and use it. I know there’s a lot of hostility in reactions to his recent work, but sometimes it sounds like people looking at early modernist art and saying “What’s so important about that? My kid could do that.”

What, no Yorick?

Um, excuse me?

Rosencrantz: Ho, Guildenstern! Bring in my lord!
(Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3)

I know it’s the postmodern age and all, but I think that counts as Rosencrantz speaking to Guildenstern. I hope Moretti didn’t highlight that interesting fact.

You really want to have your “Hamlet” down stone cold before you publish results like this…I probably wouldn’t recall if Tamora, say, ever speaks a line to Marcus Andronicus. But Hamlet?

I know it’s the postmodern age and all, but I think that counts as Rosencrantz speaking to Guildenstern. I hope Moretti didn’t highlight that interesting fact.

Maybe “the characters speak to one another” means “each character speaks to the other”, thus doesn’t include purely one-way “exchanges”.

Both characters are identified by name in the stage directions to the Second Quarto edition and the First Folio; in the actual spoken dialogue, Claudius calls the queen “Gertrude,” or some recognizable variant thereof, in every printed edition. No one ever calls the king “Claudius.” So there is no textual basis for calling these characters “Claudius” and “Queen.” “Gertrude” and “King” would make much more sense.

That doesn’t matter.

Again, you really gotta have your Hamlet down if you want to publish…

If you were the editor, that is.

SPOILERS ALERT

But what if Hamlet were the figment instead?

Then you get Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

HH @14: I could be naughty and say pretty much the same thing about literary criticism as a whole in regard to actual appreciation of literature.

Sorry you feel that way. I’ve found a lot of Empson, Trilling, Leavis, Williams, Pritchett, Bayley, Rahv, Howe, Tate, Jarrell, Davenport, Kenner, Birkerts, Wood, and dozens of other people very useful for helping me appreciate literature.

I’ve posted a methodological remark about visualization and objectification at my blog:

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/moretti-update-visualization-and.html

Interesting is, good, no?

Literary criticism can be a kind of art. (And I second Mr Scialabba’s list of names.) I couldn’t say that Geoffrey Hill’s criticism wasn’t an addition to his poetic oeuvre, as much as to any tradition of commentary or scholarship.

I sometimes want to ask Ricks, ‘Well which opinions do you believe that you have improved into knowledge?’ Because Ricks, really, is an artist with an idiosyncratically powerful command of English style. And he knows it.

Frowner @22: The Way of the World, for me, opened up a new way to understand the political dilemmas of modern radical leftism, for example. There’s quite a lot of “how to live” in Moretti, if you’re into that sort of thing

This is intriguing. Would you say a bit more?

Probably the most wide-spread application of such diagramming is the Bechdel Test.