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Modern Epic: the World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (review)

Article  in  Modernism/modernity · January 1997

DOI: 10.1353/mod.1997.0045

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Andreas Gailus
University of Michigan
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• Modernism/modernity
• Volume 4, Number 3, September 1997
• Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by:
• Andreas Gailus
Franco Moretti. Modern Epic: the World System from Goethe to García Marquez. London, New
York: Verso, 1995. Pp. xii + 324. $64.95 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

In the present critical climate, Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic: the World System from
Goethe to García Marquez is a most unusual book. To begin with, a materialist and
formalist history of a literary form, Modern Epic harks back in many ways to work
being done between the wars (Bakhtin, Russian formalism, Lukács, Panofsky),
bypassing virtually all critical methods that have dominated American literature
departments over the past decades. Furthermore, Modern Epic takes as its
geographical point of reference not the nation-state, the darling of recent politically
inspired criticism, but the world system, a conceptual entity Moretti imports from
history and the social sciences (Braudel, Wallerstein). And finally, Moretti writes not
just literary history, in itself a rather unfashionable activity, but derives his
historiographical model from, of all things, evolutionary theory. Having read
carefully Modern Epic, I am still uncertain whether it is because of, or despite, this
distance from today’s literary criticism that Moretti’s book is one of the most arresting
and stimulating studies I have come across in the past five or so years.

Moretti’s point of departure is a classification problem surrounding the most

celebrated texts of the West.

Take Faust, what is it? a ‘tragedy,’ as its author states? A great philosophical tale?
A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby Dick? Encyclopedia,
novel, or romance? . . . Ezra Pound described Bouvard et Pécuchet in 1922 as ‘no
longer a novel’; ‘it is no longer a novel,’ T. S. Eliot repeated of Ulysses a few
months later. But if not novels, then what are they?
[1]

Modern epics, suggests Moretti, proposing a taxonomy that accommodates, along

with the above mentioned texts, The Nibelung’s Ring, The Cantos, The Waste Land,
The Man Without Qualities, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. A super-canonical
genre, the epic performs a social function sharply distinguished from the novel:
whereas the latter is primarily concerned with the construction of national identity,
the former is the symbolic form that expresses the West’s domination of the world.
Modern epics, in other words, are world texts that represent and legitimate the new
capitalist world system. Represent and legitimate. The “and” joins Moretti the Marxist
to his formalist alter ego. For on Moretti’s view, literature’s ideological function must
be sought in its form—or better, in form’s ability to reduce symbolic tensions created
by social transformations. “[Literature] has a problem-solving vocation: to make
existence more comprehensible, and more acceptable. And, as we shall see, to
make power relations more acceptable too—even their violence” (6). Form as
containment, then. What makes Modern Epics so fascinating and difficult, however,
is less this Lukácsian framework than [End Page 175] Moretti’s ability to conceive of
“containment” in system-theoretical, rather than organic terms: that is, in terms of
complexity reduction. The new world system, Moretti suggests, poses
representational problems that both require and exceed traditional epic form.
“Require,” because the economically unified world system calls for the totalizing and
encyclopedic ambitions of the epic; and “exceed,” because the symbolic
heterogeneity of this system—populated by different temporalities and fragmentary
world views, but also quintessentially open, capable of permanent extension—puts a
centrifugal spin on all formal attempts at totalization. The modern epic “resolves” this
problem, the tension between globalization and fragmentation, totality and
openness, through the development of devices capable of representing non-organic
complexity: polyphony, leitmotiv, collage, free verse, allegory, stream of
consciousness, dissonance. But also, and in reaction to these centrifugal forms,
centripetal devices that counterbalance, and at times suppress, the increase of
complexity: the commonplaces, lists, myth, even stupidity.

Moretti distinguishes two major phases in this history, each related to a phase in
the development of Western capitalism, and centered around a main text that effects
a kind of morphological explosion: the colonialist take-off of the world-system around
1800, which finds its first formal recognition in Goethe’s Faust, and dominates most
of the nineteenth-century epic imagination; and the second phase, captured most
forcefully in Joyce’s Ulysses, where the epic’s geographical reference shifts to the
European metropolis, which has put the world on display and sale, bombarding the
subject with a cacophony of languages, stimuli, and seductions.

It should be clear by now that Modern Epic is a study of huge, not to say epic,
scope and ambition, and I will thus limit my comments to a few of its theses that
strike me as particularly interesting, provocative, or problematic. The first bears on
Moretti’s methodology. The protagonists in Moretti’s literary history are not so much
individual texts as genres and devices. On this view, a genre consists of an
assembly of devices, and an individual text belongs to a genre when it employs a fair
amount of these devices. This Wittgensteinian model has the advantage, it seems to
me, of being flexible enough to account for variations and experimentation (most
but not all traits), while being sufficiently contoured to make visible resemblances
and affiliations (most traits). Above all, it makes for a rather discontinuous and
bumpy literary history. Two examples. Polyphony, Moretti argues, emerges in
Goethe as an attempt to represent historical non-synchronicity, recedes in the
nineteenth century under the pressure of various monologic devices (myth as used
 by Wagner, free indirect speech as used by Flaubert, the list as used by Whitman,
allegory as used by Melville), then explodes in the second half of Ulysses, where it is
refunctionalized to capture the autonomization of institutional languages. As for the
first part of Joyce’s novel, it is dominated by another device, the stream of
consciousness, to which Moretti devotes an entire excursus, and which he argues
becomes in Joyce a technique of the meaningless, a symbolic horizon within which
the modern city can be experienced, not as overstimulation or loss of experience,
but as occasion for a banal and lukewarm hedonism: precisely the kind of attitude,
Moretti suggests, that twentieth-century consumerism requires. Increase, decrease,
refunctionalization: this system-theoretical approach to texts and literature
demystifies both, stripping the text of all organic properties and literary history of all
teleological and continuative necessities. But it also carries with it a certain element
of fuzziness. For example, can the stream of consciousness really be understood as
a device characteristic of the epic if, as Moretti himself shows, it is employed in
many novels before and after Joyce, and if, more importantly, Ulysses is really the
only epic that ever employed this device? Which leads to my second query. One
of Modern Epic’s most important implications is that it forces us to rethink
modernism, suggesting that a good part of it—let us call it, the polyphonous
modernism—builds on an intensifies formal experiments initiated around 1800. On
the other hand, it seems to me that it is precisely in modernism that this [End Page
176] polyphonous tendency spreads to the point of exploding the generic framework
Moretti uses to account for it. Free verse, collage, atonal music: these forms are at
least as “open, heterogeneous, incomplete” (59) as those employed by modern
epics, suggesting that the latter loses in modernism its monopoly on producing
“world effects” (228).

A final comment. For all Moretti’s attempts to join formal and sociological analysis,
the two do not always get along. Literature, Moretti maintains, reduces social
tensions by integrating new experiences into meaningful symbolic horizons. But this
ideological-critical postulate is undermined by Moretti’s own formal analysis,
according to which Faust and Ulysses, the pivots of his argument and the
morphological innovators of the genre, are too complex, that is to say, lack the level
of formal integration needed to carry out the social function of constructing
meaningful (i.e. integrated) symbolic horizons. Put differently, there is a tension
between Moretti’s essentially Lukácsian belief that the modern epic represents the
new total world system in its essence, and his own analyses, which suggest that
modernity’s “essence” is precisely that it is no longer conceivable as a
totality. Fortunately, for the most part Moretti’s formal and system-theoretical self
won out over its ideological-critical alter ego. Modern Epics thus accomplishes what
Lukács was never able to do: provide us with a brilliant reading of modernism.
Andreas Gailus
University of Chicago

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