Saturday, July 13, 2013

On the "Spray and Count" Approach to Understanding Literature

This piece in the Times' Sunday Review for July 14 gets a mixed review from The Omnivorous Reader. On the one hand, it makes The Reader quite happy that the Times believes readers need to be reminded that "Not long ago, for example, critics focused their attention almost exclusively on white male authors." O to have those dark days of my undergraduate years become faint memory! On the other hand, I have to wonder if any regular feature called "Gray Matter" could have applied less of that substance to the printed matter at hand? 

Apparently the author of this essay and of the essay in the journal Social Science History, to which he refers us, has concluded that simply toting up the occurrence of certain words in an era's literary output offers a keen insight into the pressing concerns of the day. What a time saver! For example, the immediate post-Seneca Falls writings of many women did show a marked increase in the words "women's rights" so the author of the study concludes that women's rights was of increasing concern during those decades. Golly. And  the uptick in the occurrence of some words after 1960 "caringnurturinginfanttoddler and childhood" proves that a positive focus on children was the hallmark of the era, thus Thomas Pynchon (a nihilist? really?) was an outlier.

The author of the Times essay--an historian, but not, apparently ab hiustorian of literature--concludes  that the "insights [these word frequency databases] make possible should encourage scholars to revisit longstanding assumptions with a critical eye."

Let's set aside for the moment that David Lodge predicted and admirably spoofed word-frequency analysis in  Changing Places (or possibly its sequel Small World--no matter, both are brilliantly funny). And let's further set aside that entomologists deride a similarly mechanical approach to understanding  insect ecologies as  "Spray and Count." Let's simply think about the possibility that writers may have lots of concerns, frequently highly mixed concerns. If they just wanted to espouse viewpoints they would have written pamphlets or bumper stickers.  "Domesticity No! Women's Rights Yes!" would have been an admirable, a positively Strunkian, savings of words over, say, the 500 pages of Fettered for Life, or, Lord and Master: A Story of Today or even over the relatively brief "A Jury of Her Peers" to name two literary works concerned with the competing pulls on women's psyches (and their social worlds) of women's rights and domesticity, neither of which literary work, I am sure, ever uses the terms "domesticity" or "women's rights."   And while I will bet that Thomas Pynchon never included the words caringnurturinginfanttoddler  or childhood  in his early fiction, the early novels are full of poignant scenes of children, frequently abandoned (or wandering away), or abused or neglected by institutions, but always sweetly charming in their innocence and resilience: think of the dreaming lost children Oedipa Maas encounters in the night, the horrifying children's camp in Gravity's Rainbow, the plucky and adaptable Prairie Gates. Think of, for that matter, all of the adult children wandering through his landscapes, trying (and sometimes succeeding) to put together temporary structures of meaning to hold out against the assault of the repressive state apparatus--then tell me he's not positively focused on children?

Spray and count kills. Kills Bugs. Kills the Literary Experience. Kills, dare I say, Historical Understanding. Fiction is nothing if not profoundly ambivalent--just as we are, as our culture is. The sheer multiplicity of characters in a fictional work--as Bakhtin pointed out a century ago--means the author does not control every message in the work. The ultimate incapacity of language, no matter how refined, to directly bridge the gap between our inner and outer selves, its reliance on figurative speech to get close to, but not absolutely at, what may be unspeakable --as Freud pointed out over a century ago--means the author may not even be using the most direct language to address his or her more direct (or unconscious) concerns. And our taste for having our news from afar (even when "afar" means simply "of other experiences and understandings") in narrative form--as Benjamin pointed out somewhat less than a century ago--means that understanding of that news happens in the taking in of the whole story, possibly in community, but certainly while the mind is partly on something else (say, for example, on unpacking the strands of narrative enrobing the wisdom or news, or unpicking one's knitting while taking in the storyteller's words). 

Nobody ever gathered round a Storyteller who just shouted out words of concern--although I have a nagging sense that Kurt Vonnegut imagined something like that somewhere. "Children" or "Women's rights" or "Parent-child bonds are important" or "Nixon is the enemy" or "Jesus saves" may be pleasing concepts. We may wish to emblazon them on our T-shirts or hire a plane to fly them over the football field. We may even read or write books which demand we think about them. But in and of themselves, they do not literature, nor literary understanding, make.