Franco Moretti's "Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms" (Book Note)

 

Shakespearean tragedy, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Ulysses, along with Frankenstein and The Waste Land, stand as revered masterpieces in modern literature, whether in its refined or popular manifestations. However, the challenge lies in their centrality to our contemporary understanding of literature, which at times impedes our grasp of their deeper nuances. Franco Moretti addresses this challenge adeptly, employing structuralist, sociological, and psychoanalytic approaches to examine these texts as literary systems that reflect broader cultural and political realities.

 

In this endeavor, Moretti provides insightful analyses of various literary genres, unravels the intricate connections between high and mass culture in the 20th century, and delves into the significance of tragic, Romantic, and Darwinian worldviews. By approaching these works as tokens of larger cultural and political contexts, Moretti offers compelling insights into their complexities, enriching our understanding of their profound impact on literature and society.

 

In the initial chapter, Moretti proposes that a history of literature, framed as a "sociology of symbolic forms" and a chronicle of cultural conventions, could find significance within the broader context of a comprehensive societal history. While advocating for interpretation to be "coherent, univocal, and complete" and thus "falsifiable", he introduces complications that seemingly render such an approach challenging and places the realization of this venture "almost entirely in the future".

 

Chapter two contends that tragedy, specifically Elizabethan and Jacobean, played a crucial role in discrediting the values of absolute monarchy, facilitating the seventeenth-century English revolution. The argument is compelling but appears somewhat facile. The analyses of the literary works used as examples are hurried, and the societal parallels are built on scant foundations. The following chapter associates Frankenstein and Dracula with the "disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor," drawing a parallel to "worker and capital". While striking, this connection lacks a firm foundation. In "Homo palpitans," the fourth chapter, Moretti begins by challenging Todorov's assertion that structure and function are not necessarily correlated. He proceeds with contrived statements, such as characterizing Sherlock Holmes as "a decadent intellectual...who is no longer a person but a product". This leads him to a conclusion based on little more than verbal play: "Detective fiction...is literature that desires to exorcise literature".

 

In "Kindergarten," Moretti analyzes several novels featuring boys, exploring the question of why one cries. Choosing specific sentences that purportedly evoke tears, he concludes that crying serves as a means to make the real world disappear into "the reality of defeat”. The final two chapters revisit familiar tropes, discussing Joyce's "dismantling of cultural hierarchies” and Eliot's formless Waste Land reflecting its epoch. The conclusions align with prevailing views but lack surprises.