I came across a funny thing, embedded above, perusing Instagram today. One could argue, in a semi-serious way at least, that the meme is its own acute form of criticism, and to have Moretti’s meandering mode of inquiry summed up so concisely in sign-oriented rhetoric of the meme brings me some kind of childish delight.

All in all, I respect Moretti’s mission. I’m sympathetic to it, I fear, because I find the mode of inquiry to be such a novel one– I kneel, move my mouth in prayer, and the graph that outputs on Google Analytics looks like it make sense. Maybe I adjust the smoothing. And then when I see something that looks good, I work out the mechanics of the theoretical skeleton. Perhaps Moretti is a little misguided, resolving a complex about the study of literature’s soft gaze (whoops, hope I’m not offending anyone), and an equally potent inferiority complex that students of the humanities often have about those who embark upon the hard sciences.

So when Moretti rationalizes his methodological shift towards a quantitative mode of literary theory, I applaud. The appeal to the rigid truth of numbers, in contrast to woozy and highly subjective qualitative narratives and the human folly from which they arise, strikes me as a purifying act by Moretti, who has something to fear, and demons to exorcise. It’s a cool turn. But simultaneously, I have my own discomfort, stemming from the fact that while I recognize the incredibly permeating way mathematics can be used to explain and model the world, I want to believe in some kind of romantic verve that will elide mathematical analysis. Thus, I say that perhaps Moretti has some kind of epistemological bias (clearly a reaction to generations of a certain mode of inquiry, a history I have no interest in denying lol).

Graphs are fun, though, so there is something pleasing to the eye about recognizing similar curves such as the ones visible in Figure 1. My friend looked over my shoulder and told me that “all this shit is garbage”, calling attention to the fact that the narrow sample of countries omits a large amount of other nations. Of course, if one has hedges in their front yard, they ought to be expected to trim them. Moretti stays in the clear, though, purified by his constant chastity and a willingness to engage in what (at least has been repeated to me for years now) is the central basis of good academic work: transparent use of sources. Moretti’s unwavering faith in the research of his fellows is commendable; he writes that “quantitative work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared by others, and combined in more than one way.” There is something empowering about constructing knowledge in such a positivistic way that is very much unlike more Negative Nancys like, let’s say, Nietzsche.

But heck, Moretti has some really great things to say, too. His note on the increased important of novels into India around the time of the 58 rebellion in colonial India is a fascinating one. His construction of the novel as a deeply indeterminate commodity bears a great bit to unpack. In the way that one can step a level up, and see three parallel axis– from bottom to top, Time, then Genre, and above Form– I imagine these three corresponding timeliness similar to Ferdinand de Sassuere’s diagram of the functioning sign, in that at any given point in time, corresponding moments in Form, Genre, and History condense inextricably into one another and are indexed within the Novel. Because for however much Moretti understands that he is asking tricky questions, he is on the money to assert that “the aesthetic sphere is the most appropriate to reflect overall changes of mental climate”, and a broad-bracketed concern with how mental climates/aesthetic attitudes cycle over time is a pretttttty good one, if you ask me.