New Left Review 41, September-October 2006

FRANCO MORETTI

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

A reply to Christopher Prendergast

Christopher Prendergast’s critique of Graphs, Maps, Trees in ‘Evolution and Literary History’ raises objections of an empirical, theoretical and political nature. [1] The main disagreement is this: for Prendergast, nature and culture function in such incomparable ways that evolutionary theory, which was devised to account for the one, cannot possibly work for the other. This conceptual misalignment makes evolutionary ‘explanations’ of literature incapable of mastering any actual historical evidence, and forces them to rely on circular reasoning and various petitiones principii instead. In this analytical void, the market acquires an exaggerated importance, that makes it appear as ‘a cognate of Nature’; and the final result is that Graphs, Maps, Trees’s ‘no-nonsense realism . . . deteriorates fast into the language of the winner-takes-all attitude’ that is typical of social Darwinism. [2]