Moretti and the Ptolemaic Monstrous

The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that whcih can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared.. is heralded by a species of monsters.

Franco Moretti’s latest work proposes a shift in literary studies from the individual canonical text in all its cross-grained opacity to a "construction of abstract models" based on larger quantitative movements. Part of his chapter on graphs deals with a familiar question: does a form like the novel take off, develop and decline due to some internal logic, or is there (for example) a dialectical relation between it and the reality it claims to represent or respond to. Or both. Moretti’s analogy is the Ptolemaic system:

It’s only when Ptolemaic astronomy begins to generate one ‘monstrosity’ after another, writes Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that ‘the time comes to give a competitor a chance’ chance’—and the same is true here: a historical novel written in 1800, such as Castle Rackrent (or in 1805, like Waverley’s abandoned first draft) simply didn’t have the incredible opportunity to reshape the literary field that the collapse of the gothic offered Waverley in 1814.

The successor or competitor form enters the field not through its sheer originality or brilliance, but due to impasses that have developed within the hitherto dominant, creating a space for intervention. What I find interesting here are two things. Firstly, a suggestive model – or sketch thereof – of how the emergence and disappearance of forms is provoked by, is the result of meeting or failing to meet (in however indirect and deferred a way), a historical world outside them. As Moretti puts it:

The process is, however, open to a ‘Kuhnian’ reading, where a genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give a competitor a chance—when its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality: at which point, either the genre betrays its form in the name of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it betrays reality in the name ofform, becoming a ‘dull epigone’ indeed.

Secondly, though, a certain notion of the ‘monstrous’. Here’s another account of its appearance in the Ptolemaic system:

"The concept of the epicycle was one of the characteristic features of the Ptolemaic system. In the centuries following its formulation, the gradual accumulation of astronomical data by medieval Christian and Moslem astronomers revealed further irregularities in the movements of the planets which required further adjustments to the traditional geocentric system. To account for these irregularities, more and more epicycles were proposed and as time went on the theory underwent successive modifications and amendments. By the early sixteenth century the whole Ptolemaic system had become, in the words of a contemporary astronomer, "a Monstrosity", a fantastically involved system entailing a vast and evergrowing complexity of epicycles."

Now perhaps Moretti touches on this (I haven’t read him in enough detail to say), but where and what is the literary equivalent of this ‘monstrous’? Joyce's Ulysses was referred to as a 'monster', but this was because it escaped the nets of existing classification, it was a herald of the new which could not be named according to the old and available forms. It appeared monstrous only according to those forms. But the Ptolemaic monstrous is a kind of hypertrophy or mutation within those old forms. The old system over-proliferates, bulges and becomes baroque in an attempt to accommodate growing ‘irregularities’ in reality. We thus have a kind of creative flourishing, a production of the unfamiliar (the 'grotesque' multiple epicycles etc), but as a defense against new material and a determination to stick to the old. A defense against the new rather than an attempt to run with it is the source of monstrous innovation. I wonder then, what the literary equivalents of such a ‘defensive monstrous’ would be??

(On Moretti, see also here & comments)