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  • The Tragedy of Forms
  • Daniel Stout (bio)
Review of Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. New York: Verso, 2013.

"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...

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