Moretti, Franco. “The Soul and the Harpy: Reflections on the Aims and Methods of Literary Historiography.” Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. 1983. London: Verso, 2005 (Radical Thinkers 7). 1-41.

Introductions always get written last, perhaps years after some of the work they are supposed to ‘introduce’. Rereading one’s own work, one immediately notices mistakes and gaps, the ideas that seem so obvious now but which then—God knows why—seemed impossible to grasp. One would like to discard everything and start afresh—or at least look forward, not back, and pursue what has not yet been done, without worrying about making presentable what has long since been left behind. 1

On the other hand, in the rather frenetic world of literary criticism, theoretical speculation enjoys the same symbolic status as cocaine: one has to try it. Readers will judge for themselves whether in my case it has been worthwhile or whether they have simply had dust thrown in their eyes. 2

Rhetoric has a social, emotive, partisan character, in short, an evaluative character. To persuade is the opposite of to convince. The aim is not to ascertain an intersubjective truth but to enlist support for a particular system of values. 3

…but also recalling the theory of metaphor put forward by Max Black. Metaphor for Black appears as simply unthinkable outside a whole system of moral and cognitive commonplaces (rhetoric, as Aristotle had said, is the art of using commonplaces well) which are used and accepted without any longer being subjected to any control: “Consider the statement ‘man is a wolf’ . . . . The metaphorical sentence in question will not convey its intended meaning to a reader sufficiently ignorant about wolves. What is needed is not so much that the reader shall know the standard dictionary meaning of “wolf”—or be able to use that word in literal senses—as that he shall know what I will call the system of associated commonplaces. . . . From the expert’s standpoint, the system of commonplaces may include half-truths or downright mistakes (as when a whale is classified as a fish); but the important thing for the metaphor’s effectiveness is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely evoked. (Because this is so, a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another).” 5 [quote from Black, Models and Metaphors]

Rhetorical figures, and the larger combinations which organize long narratives, are thus of a piece with the deep, buried, invisible presuppositions of every world view. This why one duly turns to them every time one has to put into focus a particularly complex experience (one can practically speak about time only in metaphors) or to express a judgement that possesses particular importance (almost all emotional language—from ‘honey’ to ‘scum’ and beyond—is a long chain of metaphors). 6

Literary history, after all, abounds in rhetorical experiments that seem relegated for ever to the limbo of absurdity. But it also abounds—and this is the point—in experiments that seemed absurd and yet now appear not only entirely acceptable but actually indispensable—experiments that have become established as ‘commonplaces’. ‘Créer un poncif’: was not this Baudelaire’s—Baudelaire’s—ideal? When faced with a text that violates the conventions of its time, therefore, critical analysis cannot remain content with the half-truth that tells us how it did so. It cannot look, as it usually does, only at the past, at the dislodged convention or the deconstructed Weltanschauung. The future of a text—the conventions and the world views it will help to form and consolidate—is just as much a part of its history and its contribution to history. 7

This is the sense of a memorable passage by Erwin Panofsky: ‘art is not, as a point of view which excessively accentuates its opposition to the theory of imitation would like one to believe, a subjective expression of feeling or an existential occupation of certain individuals, but rather an objectifying and realizing conflict, aiming at meaningful results, between a forming power and a material to be overcome.’ Even the tone of this sentence makes it clear that, for Panofsky, there would be nothing wrong in seeing the history of art as an articulation of the history of social conflicts and violence: as a history of conflicts in the sphere of aesthetic forms. It is no longer a question, then, of contrasting rhetorical (or ideological) ‘consent’ with aesthetic ‘dissent’, but of recognizing that there are different moments in the development of every system of consent, and above all different ways of furthering it. 8

To a large extent, such a theoretical apparatus already exists. It is centred on the concept of ‘literary genre’. I do not think it is accidental that, in the twentieth century, the best results of historical-sociological criticism are to be found in works aimed at defining the internal laws and historical range of a specific genre; from the novel in Lukács to the baroque drama in Benjamin, from French classical tragedy in Goldman to (in a kindred field) the twelve-note system in Adorno. Yet there is no doubt that the concept of literary genre has not yet acquired the prominence it deserves, or that it could lead to a very different structuring of literary history from the one familiar to us. I would like here to outline some of the prospects that might open up if it were to be used systematically. But first I shall suggest why criticism has put up such widespread resistance to these developments. 9

In the period when he was working on his Modern Drama, Lukács, under the influence of Simmel’s sociology of forms, had come to formulate the problem we are concerned with in terms that still remain valid today. As he wrote in the 1911 foreword to that work: ‘The fundamental problem of this book is therefore: does a modern drama exist, and what style does it have? This question, however, like every stylistic question, is in the first place a sociological one . . . . The greatest errors of sociological analysis in relation to art are: in artistic creations it seeks and examines only contents, tracing a straight line between these and given economic relations. But in literature what is truly social is form . . . . Form is social reality, it participates vivaciously in the life of the spirit. It therefore does not operate only as a factor acting upon life and moulding experiences, but also as a factor which is in its turn moulded by life.’ Similar concepts are expressed in the first and longer draft of the foreword, the 1910 lecture ‘Observations on the Theory of Literary History’: ‘The synthesis of literary history is the unification into a new organic unity of sociology and aesthetics . . . . Form is sociological not only as a mediating element, as a principle which connects author and receiver, making literature a social fact, but also in its relationship with the material to be formed . . . . Form in a work is that which organizes into a closed whole the life given to it as subject matter, that which determines its times, rhythms and fluctuations, its densities and fluidities, its hardnesses and softnesses; that which accentuates those sensations perceived as important and distances the less important things; that which allocates things to the foreground or the background, and arranges them in order . . . Every form is an evaluation of life, a judgement on life, and it draws this strength and power from the fact that in its deepest foundations form is always an ideology . . . . The world view is the formal postulate of every form.’ 10

This line of research is very clear, and far richer than a couple of quotations can hope to suggest. One almost wonders what form sociological criticism might have taken had Lukács pursued his project. But, of course, things turned out differently. Already in 1910, in disconcerting synchrony with the arguments just quoted, Lukács elaborated a diametrically opposed concept of aesthetic form—a ‘tragic’ concept, based on the collapse of all connections between form and life, forms and history: ‘[Here] a fundamental question arises for aesthetics: is not what we have been accustomed to call form, and which we place a priori in front of the meanings of life and of what is being formed, the petrifaction of existence? . . . Every perfect work, precisely because of its perfection, places itself outside all communities and will not tolerate being inserted into some series of causes determining it from without. The essence of artistic creation, of formation, is just such an isolating principle: to cut every bond which tied it to living, concrete, moving life in order to give itself a new life, closed in on itself, not connected to anything and comparable to nothing. In every artistic creation there exists a kind of Inselhaftigkeit, as Simmel calls it, as a result of which it is reluctant to be a part of any continuous development. 11

But the same token, in Theory of the Novel the historicity which is consubstantial with the novel means that the formal accomplishment of a novel is always and only ‘problematic’: a ‘yearning’ for form rather than its attainment. Between Life and Form, history and forms, the young Lukács digs an ever-deepening trench. Life is ‘movement’, form ‘closure’. Life is ‘concreteness’ and ‘multiplicity’, form ‘abstraction’ and ‘simplification’. Form is, in a summarizing metaphor, petrified and petrifying: life is fluid, ductile, ‘alive’. 11

Form coagulates into a cruel a priori—extreme, tragic, opposed to life—because Lukács wants to conserve ‘life’ in a state of fluid and ‘open’ indeterminacy. 12

I believe that literary criticism has kept for too long to the terms of Lukács dilemma: to save the warmth of life and the purity of form. This is why history and rhetoric have become totally unrelated subjects. This is why the concept of literary genre has remained confined to a sort of theoretical limbo: recognized and accepted, but little and reluctantly used. To talk about literary genres means without any doubt to emphasize the contribution made by literature to the ‘petrifaction of existence’ and also to the ‘wearing out of form’. It means re-routing the tasks of literary historiography and the image of literature itself, enclosing them both in the idea of consent, stability, repetition, bad taste even. It means, in other words, turning the ultimate paradise—the paradise of ‘beauty’—into a social institution like the others. 12We can now return to the role of the concept of genre in slicing up and reordering the continuum of literary history. Something immediately strikes us. A history of literature built round this concept will be both ‘slower’ and more ‘discontinuous’ than the one we are familiar with. Slower, because the idea of literary genre itself requires emphasis on what a set of works have in common. It presupposes that literary production takes place in obedience to a prevailing system of laws and that the task of criticism is precisely to show the extent of their coercive, regulating power. The idea of genre introduces into literary history the dimension which the Annales school has called longue durée, and supports the hypothesis that ‘art is without doubt more suited to the expression of states of civilization than moments of violent rupture.’ 12 [final quote from Jean Starobinski, 1789. Les emblèmes de la raison]

Even the great historical controversies, when all is said, turn almost exclusively on the reinterpretation of an extremely small number of works and authors. This procedure condemns the concept of genre to a subaltern, marginal function, as is indicated most starkly in the formalist couple convention-defamiliarization, where genre appears as mere background, an opaque plane whose only use is to make the difference of the masterpiece more prominent. Just as the ‘event’ breaks and ridicules the laws of continuity, so the masterpiece is there to demonstrate the ‘triumph’ over the norm, the irreducibility of what is really great. 13

First, how far has empirical research borne out the antithesis between norm and masterpiece on which literary historiography continues to rest? In what sense does Shakespeare ‘violate’ the conventions of Elizabethan tragedy? Why not say the opposite: that he was the only writer able to realize them fully, establishing as it were the ‘ideal type’ of an entire genre? 13

The fact is that criticism has not entirely freed itself of its old task: that of being a sort of cultivated accompaniment to reading—to the reading we are doing here and now. Since certain works continue to be read, the desire spontaneously arises of showing that they are ‘contemporary’, and thus of emphasizing what allows them to be wrenched out of the hard earth of the past and laid in our lap. This betokens a relationship which texts whose distant roots lie in Greek, and above all in Christian allegorical exegesis. It is based on the belief, however banalized nowadays, that there are messages in the past that not only concern us but which in a sense were written for us and us alone, and whose meaning will be fully revealed only in the light of our exegesis. An agreeable superstition indeed and a highly useful one ‘for life’: but for precisely this reason it concerns the student of the contemporary mentality, not the historian. The latter—unless desirous of turning into that legendary figure whose only pleasure lay in contemplating his own reflection—must concentrate on the dissimilarities and ruptures: on what has been lost and become irretrievably unfamiliar, and which we can ‘re-familiarize’ only by doing such violence ot it that we distort the objective, material consistency of every work which it is the task of scientific knowledge to reconstruct and ‘salvage’. 14

But—it might be objected—the average production of a given genre is unreadable and boring now. I do not doubt it. But is precisely this unbearable ‘uncontemporaneity’ that the historian must seek out. (We might reflect in passing that if everyone behaved like literary critics who only study what they ‘like’, doctors might restrict themselves to studying only healthy bodies and economists the standard of living of the well-off.) And then, are we so sure that we know those ‘other’ ghost stories, the ‘conventional’ ones? Have these conventions really been studied, or do we not rather confine ourselves to evoking them hurriedly for the sole purpose of adding luster to their ‘destroyer’? If one wants to keep the couple convention-innovation and give the latter term the full historical and formal weight it deserves, it is all the more important to realize that the first term of the pair has not yet become an ‘object of knowledge’ in a true sense for literary criticism. The idea of ‘normal literature’—to paraphrase another Annales expression—has no place in criticism. The result is that, at present, our knowledge of literary history closely resembles the maps of Africa of a century and a half ago: the coastal strips are familiar but an entire continent is unknown. Dazzled by the great estuaries of mythical rivers, when it comes to pinpointing the source we still trust too often to bizarre hypotheses or even to legends. 14-15

Instead it should be noted that, if one wants to arrive at a historical reordering of any interest and validity, the concept of ‘genre’ will have to be elaborated in a much more pertinent way than it is now. At present, in fact, it mixes more or less at random references to content (detective story, picaresque novel), to effects (terror, humour), and to a number of formal features (stories ‘with happy endings’, ‘documentary’ novels). Such a loose classification cannot make much of a contribution towards simplifying and specifying a field of research. Perhaps the solution will be to concentrate on certain major rhetorical ‘dominants’ and reorganize the system of the different genres on the basis of these. 16-17

Now, if we rule out the possibility that historians hate literary critics for private and unmentionable reasons, as well as the possibility that the latter are so much more inept than other historians as to merit their utter contempt, this state of affairs can only be explained by suggesting that literary historians do not manage to be ‘real’ historians because they deal with an imaginary object. They call this object ‘literary history’, but it is traversed by such a jumble of internal contradictions, Ptolemaic epicycles, ad hoc explanations and downright eccentricities (Gibbon belongs to English literature but not Conan Doyle) that their discipline is rendered totally unusable by any historical research equipped with a modicum of scientific self-control. 18-19

If the majority of the population is illiterate, the written culture will oscillate between playing a wholly negligible part and having an overwhelming and traumatic function (as the printing of the Bible demonstrated). If, on the other hand, everyone is able to read, the written culture is unlikely to turn up such extreme effects, but in compensation it will become the regular and intimate accompaniment to every daily activity. 19

As historical periods change, then, the weight of the various institutions, their function, their position in the social structure change too. When, therefore, the historian of literary forms begins to look for those extra-literary phenomena which will help him (whether he knows it or not) orient and control his research, the only rule he can set himself is to asses each instance carefully. A few examples will help here too to clarify what I mean, and I hope they will show that the criterion of ‘each instance’ is not meant to encourage arbitrariness, but to subject it to the only kind of control possible in this context. 19

Let us take the knowledge of state structures and politico-juridical thought. This will be very helpful—and theoretically ‘pertinent’—for analysing tragic form in the age of absolutism, but it will be a lot less so for studying comic form in the same period. In the eighteenth century it will remain important for analysing the ‘satiric’ form of the novel, and yet be almost totally irrelevant for analysing the ‘realist’ novel. Or again, a study of sexual prohibitions and certain dream symbols deriving from them can provide many suggestions about the literature of terror and practically nothing about detective fiction of the same decade. Conversely, the emotional reactions to the second industrial revolution will be pertinent to the analysis of science fiction, rather less so to that of detective fiction, and quite insignificant for the literature of terror. 20

The different institutions of history have uneven rhythms of development, and in this respect the primary task of criticism is to outline the evolution of its own area of analysis, even if this leads it to move away from or contradict periodizations operating elsewhere. The reconstruction of a unified historiographical map is a subsequent, and typically interdisciplinary, problem. But it can be successfully tackled only if one possesses knowledge corroborated against the specific criteria of each particular area. 20

In principle, the criteria for testing literary interpretations should be the same as those already in use in every other scientific discipline. One should in other words demand of an interpretation that it is coherent, univocal and complete. And the test will consist in comparing it with data which—in the text or texts that constitute its object—appear contradictory or inexplicable in the light of the hypothesis itself. Nothing new here, one might say; and indeed this is nothing other than the elementary formulation of that principle of falsification used by all the empirical sciences, including, with a few additional problems, the historico-social sciences. All, that is, except twentieth-century literary criticism, whose methodological framework has for a long time rested on concepts like ‘polysemy’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘openness’, ‘difference’, all of which stress the non-univocal semantic character of the literary text. If a text is by definition non-univocal, even self-contradictory, then none of its elements can ever ‘falsify’ an interpretation. Because of the semantic peculiarities of the literary text, it is taken for granted from the outset that interpretive hypotheses will be negated and this state of affairs is accepted as unavoidable. But if the text has no falsificatory power, then any interpretation becomes legitimate, or, more exactly, none will ever be illegitimate. The rivalry between different hypotheses, the pathos of refutation, the passion for discussion—the ideals that animate every scientific undertaking—lose all foundation, appear superfluous and almost inconceivable. Interpretations tend to become mutually ‘incommensurable’, they do not appear to have any ‘problems’ in common. The claim that one of them is superior to another sinks almost to the level of a judgement of taste, whose empirical foundation is felt as an unseemly and prolix pedantry. 21-22

I have exaggerated, but not all that much. So long as it continues to revolve around concepts such as ‘ambiguity’ and the like, criticism will always, inexorably, be pushed into multiplying, rather than reducing, the obstacles every social science encounters when it tries to give itself a testable foundation. And all for nothing! For Hecuba!, one feels inclined to add. For the point is not whether the literary use of language is particularly polysemic or not. It is. But this in no way makes it impossible to conduct univocal and potentially complete—and thus refutable—analyses. It only means that these analyses must approach the text not as if it were a vector pointing neatly in one direction, but as if it were a light-source radiating in several directions or a field of forces in relatively stable equilibrium. These are more complex objects than a simple arrow, but an empirical and testable analysis of them is entirely possible, on condition that one aims to analyse and describe them as structures. By this token, adding, subtracting or transforming the meaning of each of their elements will not longer be treated (as is normally the case these days) as a noperation which is ‘always legitimate’ because of the weak logical connections instituted by the literary structure (which is therefore the promised land of all deconstructionist thinking). Rather, it will be treated as a legitimate act only if it contributes towards improving the total knowledge of the text, and towards strengthening these connections, those ‘prohibitions’ which, as an organized whole, it imposes on the interpreter. 22

The day criticism gives up the battle cry ‘it is possible to interpret this element in the following way’, to replace it with the much more prosaic ‘the following interpretation is impossible for such and such a reason’, it will have taken a huge step forward on the road of methodological solidity. This does not in the least mean giving up unpredictable or daring interpretations: as Popper observed, the value of a theory is in direct proportion to its improbability. It merely means subjecting this improbability to rigorous checks, since what is bizarre or outlandish is not always also true. Pecca fortiter, sed crede fortius is a good way of summing up the spirit of scientific research. 23

Two considerations arise here, which I will mention very briefly. It is of course entirely true to say that the language of demography is much more nearly univocal than that of literary criticism. But this is largely because criticism, for the reasons mentioned earlier, has always taken its own empirical foundations lightly, and, instead of struggling to set up a scientific community with common aims and clear rules, has tacitly preferred to legitimate a state of affairs where everyone is free to do as they like. The lexico-grammatical euphoria of the last few years is only the latest episode in a long and illustrious tradition of intellectual irresponsibility. Yet in principle this sort of thing can always be remedied. The second consideration opens up a slightly different area. If criticism can give itself a reasonably testable foundation, then rhetorical analysis will necessarily acquire a different status within the ‘stronger’ social sciences. If a literary critic were to attend an interdisciplinary conference on totalitarianism and speak for an hour about, say, the mechanisms of allegory, the performance would seem strange and entertaining. And yet it is the only valid contribution our imaginary participant could offer. I believe it is time to put an end to the embarrassing pantomime where the literary historian is in fact the person who expounds the commonplaces everybody knows in a string of well-turned and persuasive sentences. Historians know how to use computers; they will have no difficulty learning the difference between metaphor and metonymy—assuming, naturally, that one is able to demonstrate that the choice between these two figures entails cultural differences of some significance. 24

A satisfactory level of rhetorical analysis is reached. The configuration obtained seems to refer unambiguously to a particular hierarchy of values. So one performs the conclusive welding-together of rhetoric and social history. Let us suppose that up till now the argument has been flawless. It is precisely at this point that one makes a mistake. One succumbs to the allure of the sweeping generalization and falls into what we could call the ‘Zeitgeist fallacy’. Does the rhetoric of detective fiction imply a certain towards science? Right then: ‘the society of Conan Doyle’s time’, ‘England in the eighteen nineties’, ‘the imperialist phase of capitalism’—whatever else one cares to invoke—all ‘share that attitude’. In relation to this turn in the argument, the objections of the historian of mentalities obviously have falsificatory value. But only in relation to this. What becomes arbitrary when it is generalized may perfectly well not be so if it aims for a more restricted sphere of validity. 24-25

This universalizing immodesty, which follows literary historiography about like a shadow, has a secret cause which it is helpful to know because it points by contrast to a possible way out. The cause is named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Few things have been so exhilarating for aesthetic studies—and so fatal to their empirical solidity—as Hegel’s marriage of philosophy of history with idealist aesthetics. In the Aesthetics, every historical epoch has in essence one ideal content to ‘express’, and it gives ‘sensible manifestation’ to it through one artistic form. It was practically inevitable that—following the argument in reverse—once one had defined a rhetorical form one felt authorized to link it directly to the idea—single, solitary, resplendent—in which a whole epoch is supposedly summed up. Inevitable, and wrong—or at least, nearly always. Although from time to time moments of extraordinary intellectual and formal compactness occur, as a rule the opposite happens in history, and no system of values has ever been able to represent a Zeitgeist without being challenged by rival systems. 25

All rhetorical forms aspire to become the ‘Spirit of the Age’, but their very plurality shows us that this term indicates an aspiration rather than a reality, and should therefore be employed as a highly useful conceptual tool—but not as a fact. 25-26

Conversely, it is precisely a respect for the specificity of each individual form that seems to offer the best guarantee of restraint in the historico-social links that criticism seeks to establish. The more one manages to differentiate a given form from ‘rival’ forms, the more social and ideological connections one will find are prohibited. The advantages of this both for historical concreteness and empirical testability are obvious. This brings us back to the situation outlined in the previous section. If the history of literature ever transforms itself into a history of rhetorical forms, the latter will in turn have to start from the realization that a form becomes more comprehensible and more interesting the more one grasps the conflict, or at least the difference, connecting it to the forms around it. And this should not be understood—as has in fact already started to happened—as a diachronic criterion: or at least not only, and not primarily. As well as grasping the succession of different and mutually hostile forms, literary history must aim at a synchronic periodization which is no longer ‘summed up’ in individual exemplary forms, but is set up for each period, through a kind of parallelogram of rhetorical forces, with its dominant, its imbalances, its conflicts and its division of tasks. 26

This society is separated from the age of tragedy—the age of absolutism—by a historical rupture that radically altered two decisive aspects of literary, and more generally artistic, activity. First, tragedy belongs to a world that does not yet recognize the inevitability of permanent conflict between opposing and immitigable interests or values, and therefore does not feel any need to confront the problem of reconciling them. And second—there is, as we shall see, a link between the two—the age in which tragedy flourished did not recognize aesthetic activity as having any autonomy, but believed it should always cooperate directly, immediately, in moral or cognitive purposes. 27-28

It is a world that still thinks of itself as an organic whole, but is ceasing—clamorously—to be so. Tragedy springs from this unrepeatable historical conjuncture. Its elementary structure always consists in showing how two values that should be in a relationship of dominance and subordination suddenly, mysteriously (the mystery of Iago, of the witches in Macbeth, of passion in Phèdre) become autonomous and take on equal violence. As all Shakespeare’s and Racine’s tragic heroes discover to their consternation, the traditional ‘sovereignty’ of reason, or morality, over the other human faculties suddenly and irreversibly becomes impossible. 28

We can invert the formula used above, and say that tragedy presents a world which is ceasing to be organic, but which is still able to think of itself as organic. It is the paradoxical spirit of this literary form, which always leaves us, as Goethe observed, ‘with troubled minds’, ill at ease, uncertain. It was for this reason an unrivalled instrument of criticism and dissent. But an unrepeatable one: once the organicist ideology disappeared, so did the formal possibility of its tragic negation. 29