The Alternative to Gottschall

This article about Jonathan Gottschall–whose attempts to fuse the scientific method and literary criticism I’ve found wanting–doesn’t change my opinion on the erstwhile “scientific” literary critic.

However, this paragraph does pose a pretty good question:

On some level, I understand Goodheart’s position. Gottschall’s literary lab is a joyless place. The students are slaves to a single question. Science’s methods, when applied in this way, are cheating us out of the unique pleasures of human creativity. But Crews and Goodheart don’t offer alternatives. “Crews is particularly good at tearing things down,” said Gottschall. Postmodern Pooh is a masterful jaunt through the current wreckage in theory departments across the country. But although he can lampoon like no one else, “he proposes nothing that the rest of us can build on. He’s a famous naysayer, yes, but where do we go from there?”

It just so happens I have the answer: Franco Moretti. For a number of years now, Moretti has been doing a kind of statistics-based literary criticism that honors the art of literature while also bringing in the science of statistical data that people like Gottschall want to exploit.

In Atlas of the European Novel 1800 – 1900, Moretti develops a sort of framework for the evolution of the novel in conjunction with the development of states and cities. He uses a model that he compares to punctuated equilibrium to help compensate for the fact that certain novels that work as high art will always be diminished by reading them as statistical points on a chart, even though we can also learn something from reading the lesser books as data.

Moretti writes:

A history of literature as history of norms, then: a less innovative, much “flatter” configuration than the one we are used to; repetitive, slow–boring even. But this is exactly what most of life is like, and instead of redeeming literature form its prosaic features we should learn to recognize them and understand what they mean. Just as most science is “normal” science–which “does not aim at novelties [. . .] and, when successful, finds none.”

Thus, you can learn some sorts of things from the great mass of “normal” novels, and you can learn other sorts of things from the standouts (for instance, Old Goriot, which Moretti singles out as decisive in the development of the European capital city novel).

Moretti’s other great accomplishment is that he doesn’t treat his data like mere scientific data. When explaining the meanings he finds in the data he presents in Atlas, his readings are true readings in the literary critical sense. Far from Gottschild’s simple binaries (“Is the author alive or dead? Let’s poll people and find out.”) his readings of the data are nuanced and provocative, and they open up more conversation instead of attempting to close it.

Many thanks to Andrew Seal for helping me find this author.

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