Convergent Divergence (Divergent Convergence): Doodling Moretti's Trees

In his thorough and quite civil response to Franco Moretti's Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Cristopher Prendergast returns (ironically?) to a critique of Moretti's circularity. Though this critique appears in a number of different locations throughout his essay, I take its most concrete manifestation to be in Prendergrast's discussion of the reciprocal relationship between convergence and divergence among the branches of Moretti's trees. In Moretti's text, the convergence is the precondition for the divergence, and divergence provides ever more opportunities for convergence as well. Prednergast seems to take this as a "chicken-egg" problem. He says,

These are however strictly reversible propositions: if convergence preupposes divergence, then divergence presupposes convergence. We are back in the chicken-and-egg world, yet again opening onto the infinite regress that leads back to a hypothetical First Cause. It is best to avoid this morass. (57)

Though Tsuda counters many of Prendergast's arguments against Moretti more effectively than I could, I want to take a bit of time to examine this particular hang up, this concern with circularity and convergence as it relates to divergence and vice versa.

I object, first, to this notion of circularity, and instead want to reaffirm along with what I think Moretti would call reciprocality. There is nothing to my eyes in Graphs Maps Trees that suggests a search for whichever came first. Moretti's goal in outlining the give and take of divergence and convergence is conjoined to his attempt to combine the wave with the tree. The point in that combination is the perpetual preexistence of the one over the other. The effect of Moretti's divergent convergence (convergent divergence) is one of entanglement, not linear causation. He simply has the good sense to not append "quantum" as an adjective. Prendergast is sensing in this entanglement a question which isn't there. Moretti has no need to answer which came first, divergence or convergence. Neil Degrasse Tyson once said in response to the chicken-egg question: "The egg, but it wasn't laid by a chicken." In much the same way, Moretti's divergence and convergence morph and change, creating a heritage with as many conjunctions as disjunctions.

In Moretti's discussion I was reminded once again of the similarities between the models that DH theorists generate in an attempt to chart literary history and the decision-making trees that form the backbone of simulated experiences. Moretti's tree of clues is certainly of the same structural family as the reader's progress through a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. This is evolution written as OHCO. Here I wonder at the possibilities of McGann's deformance and Drucker's speculative computing as they apply to a simulated, computer generated representation of divergence and convergence. How might someone play through literary history, utilizing data from the other 99.5%, the unread, and as a result generate new divergences and convergences that would otherwise be invisible?

Last year I became briefly addicted to a small mobile game called Doodle God developed by JoyBits. It is, in a few important ways, a possible resolution to Prendergast's concerns about circularity as well as possible imaginative platform for playing in Moretti's trees. In Doodle God, the player starts with four basic elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. From these elements, players combine and recombine them in different arrangements, generating new elements along the way. As each combination yields yet more elements, the game creates a tree of equations, tracking the heritage of each new convergence. Here again we encounter the fecundity of a text. Doodle God is a small, simulated example of numerous discourses in DH which have come to a head in Moretti's text. It conjoins the concept of convergence and divergence to Latour's fecundity as well as McGann and Drucker's speculations. The results of these combinations are often quite unpredictable, though in hindsight, always explicable. This seems to me to be the logic of divergent convergence (convergent divergence). It is progressive yet reciprocal. The question I would like to ask is this: How can we doodle literary history?