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D. Murali

Graphs and literary history don't quite go together, do they? Or perhaps they do, says this novel initiative. Read on.

A FEW years ago, a professor was reading bibliographies, those long lists of books you see at the end of most works. The more he read them, the more did he realise "what a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on". For instance, can we boast that we read at least 1 per cent of all published novels? Hardly. Since a close reading won't help, and so you finish off `a novel a day every day of the year' but that too would take a century or more.

Meet Franco Moretti, professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford and director of the university's centre for the study of the novel whose article titled "Graphs, Maps, Trees - Abstract Models for Literary History", published in New Left Review is stimulating interest in computer labs and literary circles. "A field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole," writes Moretti, eager to devour all of the printed stuff. "And the graphs that follow are one way to begin doing this." Looking at the graphs, one may wonder if the article is on economics or literature. The author adds: "A more rational literary history: That is the idea." He tries to imagine what would happen if we shifted our focus from texts to the large mass of literary facts.

So, jump on, we are on to a quantitative approach to literature; it can take several different forms, "from computational stylistics to thematic databases, book history, and more." The first graph is on the rise of the novel between 18th and 20th centuries, and the lines are steep. It charts the take-off of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria. "See how similar those shapes are," beckons the author. "Five countries, three continents, over two centuries apart, and it's really the same pattern, the same old metaphor of the `rise' of the novel come alive."

The New York Times had this to say about the research: "If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars would stop reading books and start counting, graphing and mapping them instead." Oliver Twist is but a tiny dot on another graph. "But graphs are not models," clarifies Moretti. "They are not simplified versions of a theoretical structure in the way maps and evolutionary trees will be in the next two articles." So, watch this space. "Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations, and that is of course also its limit: it provides data, not interpretation."

The best way to study literature is to look at three time frames, viz. event, cycle, and longue durée (the very long time span). Event is "all flow and no structure" and the longue durée is "all structure and no flow", so let us study cycle, notes the author. "Cycles constitute temporary structures within the historical flow." His analysis and findings, plotted on a graph, show a series of waves - "each wave produces more or less the same number of novels per year, and lasts the same 25-30 years, and each also rises only after the previous wave has begun to ebb away."

Over 160 years, from 1740 to 1900, there were 44 genres. Here is a peek into the data crunching involved: "From individual cases to series; from series to cycles, and then to genres as their morphological embodiment. And these genres seem indeed to follow a rather regular `life-cycle', as some economists would call it. Is this wave-like pattern a sort of hidden pendulum of literary history?"

As in a drama festival, where every two hours or so, a whole new group of people take the stage, "genres tend to disappear in clusters." So, what do you make of it? "Books survive if they are read and disappear if they aren't: and when an entire generic system vanishes at once, the likeliest explanation is that its readers vanished at once."

If that is already giving you the incentive to vanish, take this last one: "Problems without a solution are exactly what we need in a field like ours, where we are used to asking only those questions for which we already have an answer."

Moretti wants to turn his class into a lab, rather than a lecture-session, where the students electronically digest thousands of titles spanning centuries, working on "literature without texts". With computers only too willing to take on such work, one can easily extrapolate to think of more abstractions of this nature.

ITworks@thehindu.co.in

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