Comments as Blogging

I’ve been taking part in an interesting conversation over at the Early Modern Online Bibliography blog, in a thread on the MONK Project. I’ve laid out some arguments about machine-aided work that I should probably pull together here at some point. In the meantime, see this post and thread. But check out the whole blog, too—plenty of smart to go around.

Back to Disgrace shortly …

On the Killing of Dogs

Answers in this post to two more of the baseline questions about Disgrace, both of which concern Lurie and the significance of his relationship to dogs.

Questions 6 & 5

• In what sense, if any, is Bev and Lurie’s euthanasia of the dogs an ethical/merciful/loving act?

Short answer: As ethical in sum, but complicated by the awareness that one could always do more.

• Why does Lurie give up the dog at the end of the novel?

Short answer: From kindness and in atonement, but with persistent overtones of the flagellant’s self-involvement.

Hmm … these questions are getting harder. First, to the text: “The dogs suffer … most of all from their own fertility. There are simply too many of them” (142). Note in passing a related allusion to Jude the Obscure in “because we are too menny” (146), which adds an obvious note of pathos. What Bev and Lurie offer isn’t treatment (they are untrained as vets and lack the resources to do much for the animals even if they were) but the relief of a painless death. Bev, we are told, has a particular talent for “easing the passage” of each dog, to which she “gives her fullest attention” (142). Lurie is less skilled, but finally no less devoted. He is shaken by the work, and takes over, metaphorically speaking, the role of “dog-man” from Petrus. It is he who takes the dogs’ corpses to the incinerator and feeds them individually into the flames in order, he says, to preserve an image of the world “in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing” (146). Finally and maybe most importantly, there is this description of their shared enterprise:

Sunday has come again. He and Bev Shaw are engaged in one of their sessions of Lösung. One by one he brings the cats, then the dogs: the old, the blind, the halt, the crippled, the maimed, but also the young, the sound—all those whose term has come. One by one Bev touches them, speaks to them, comforts them, and puts them away, then stands back and watches while he seals up the remains in a black plastic shroud.

He and Bev do not speak. He has learned now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love. (218-19)

A couple of things here. The fact that this is all happening on Sunday (as do all the euthanasia sessions; cf. “What the dog will not be able to work out (not in a month of Sundays!)” [219]), plus the persistently religious rhetoric (the communion-like procession of animals “one by one”; the crippled, the maimed, etc.; the shroud; love), plus the scene’s position on the penultimate page of the novel, push any reading toward terms of redemption. On the other hand, there’s the Holocaust-related Lösung (cf. Elizabeth Costello and The Lives of Animals), plus the decidedly non-euphemistic “killing,” plus Lurie’s decision at the end of this scene to give up Driepoot, the dog he could have saved (on which more below). So there’s real tension here, and we should be careful about flattening it out in any interpretation of the acts.

My take is that we are to understand Bev’s actions as driven by a love of animals generally, whose collective suffering it is her project to minimize. This is plainly both ethical and laudable. That part’s easy enough, and if the book went no further, things would be pretty simple (and uninteresting) on this point. It might be distasteful to kill the dogs, but it wouldn’t be a shattering experience. The reason, then, that the killing is so difficult—why it “gets harder all the time”—is that what’s good for the dogs collectively is in at least some cases (and perhaps most of them) bad for any one dog. That’s to say that while there clearly are instances in which killing an individual dog is an act of kindness (as when we put an aging pet “to sleep,” a euphemism the novel refuses), Bev and Lurie are aware that their toll includes as well “the young, the sound”—dogs, in short, that might go on living happily enough past the day of their execution, were it possible to do so.

A relevant question, then, is whether or not it is possible to save any one dog, something Lurie contemplates in the case of Driepoot:

He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush back the fur so that the needle finds the vein, and whisper to him and support him in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when the time comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing.

He crosses the surgery. “Was that the last?” asks Bev Shaw.

“One more.”

He opens the cage door. “Come,” he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does not stop it. “Come.”

Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. “I thought you would save him for another week,” says Bev Shaw. “Are you giving him up?”

“I am giving him up.” (219-20)

It is Lurie’s claim that he cannot save the dog, not in the long run, and if that’s true of this dog, it is surely true of any dog. I will admit frankly that I find this scene, which ends the novel, deeply affecting. And so I want to believe what Lurie says, that he can’t save the dog, not beyond the next week or the week after that, thus that his decision to give him up is a matter of mature acceptance rather than weakness. Such a reading works nicely with a larger interpretation of the narrative as one of ethical development and redemption, showing Lurie as finally able to cease clinging to his own interest (he enjoys the dog’s affection and company, even if he holds himself slightly aloof from it, knowing its inevitable fate) and to do instead what must be done, even at significant cost to himself.

[Incidentally, Lurie's fascination with the perfective ("burnt, burnt up") is a recurring feature of the novel and might certainly be related to this reading, both concerning the dog and his own developmental arc. Why this is the case might have been elevated to question of its own. There's a bit more on it below, and if I remember I'll say something more about it in connection with question one, on the relationship between the two rapes.]

I think there’s much in the novel that points toward this reading, which sees the “giving up” of Driepoot as the symbolic culmination (perfection) of a larger process of learning to live with less (or with nothing), i.e., without the historically determined advantages of Lurie’s initial position. This is a reading that restores maximum political advantage to the novel, though it might also be possible to tint it with irony and to complain (crudely, I think) that Coetzee thus likens the abuses of apartheid to losing a (potential) pet.

Still, even the unironic version of this reading strikes me as too neat by half. It aligns Lurie too closely with Lucy, who (for reasons I’ll talk about in a later post) serves as one (flawed) pole of a potential response to the crimes of history. It also removes much of the productive ambiguity that accounts for the bulk of the novel’s value; it is an intriguing and valuable book precisely because it refuses to give us obvious moral precepts (James Wood is wrong on this point), or perhaps more accurately because it takes seriously the defects of a field of related and competing precepts.

What’s the alternative? Well, that Lurie might indeed have saved the dog indefinitely and that while doing so would constitute only a small mercy in a field of enormous suffering, it would still be better than the alternative. The issue turns in part, I suppose, on what we’re to make of Driepoot’s life at the clinic, assuming Lurie cannot simply adopt him as a proper pet: the dog’s existence seems dull, of course, and he’s crippled, but he appears otherwise happy and certainly enjoys Lurie’s company. It’s hard not to feel a bit foolish trying to think this through, evaluating the utilitarian happiness of a lightly-described fictional dog, and I suspect I’d be unhappy with Coetzee if Lurie did save it (cheap sentiment, an animal better loved than humans, a minimal piece of literal grace or salvation to close the novel, etc.). But still, it’s not clear to me that killing the dog is as strictly required as Lurie claims; Lurie has come far down in station, but he’s not so utterly destitute that he can’t afford a bit of kibble. What he clearly cannot do, however, is save every other dog in Driepoot’s position.

The larger question, which hangs over not only this novel but much of Coetzee’s fiction, is what to do about problems so large that any individual action is dwarfed in proportion to it. Saving a dog will do almost nothing (“little enough, less than little: nothing”). The quote is pulled slightly out of context (it refers to what Lurie will do for Driepoot as the dog dies) but still, the slide from “little enough” to “nothing” is one that we ought not to overlook, which is the novel’s point. Lurie helps the dog’s passage because it is not nothing, even if on another level the result is the same in the end. The dog is still dead, but its final moments have been easier than they would have been otherwise.

The consequence of this final action, though, is to leave Lurie without salvation except in the most roundabout of ways. He cannot or will not save the dog, he cannot save Africa’s dogs, he cannot find companionship with an animal in lieu of a human. He has almost nothing. At best, he eases the death of dogs that do not wish to die and ought not—in a better world he is powerless of bring about—to need to. If there is atonement, it is through his affirmative role in the mortification of his own experience by killing Driepoot as a part of his (Lurie’s) world, that is, by seeing the dog as a part of himself that he is willing to give up. But to do that is to instrumentalize the dog as Lurie has done with people in so many earlier cases. A lesser sin, surely, than most of the others, but of a piece with them. If he is reformed, the novel tells us in the closing line, it is imperfectly.

Note that one of the features of our investigation of this and almost every other question to this point has been to undermine the prospects for reading the novel redemptively, with the result that it’s looking harder and harder to construct such a reading. Properly critical questions to keep in mind, then: Is it a problem if there’s no redemption here? And if there’s none, what’s the novel about anyway?

Answers to Some Questions about Lurie

Continuing with answers to the prerequisite questions about Disgrace, a couple on Lurie.

Question 8

• How are we to treat Lurie’s opera?

Short answer: As an aesthetic failure, thus as non-redemptive.

It’s tempting, I think, to see the opera first as an opportunity for social rehabilitation—which is Lurie’s own early hope for it, though never his primary motivation—and second as a type of compensation for his sins. “It would have been nice,” he thinks, “to be returned triumphant to society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that will not be” (214). Despite his resignation on this point, he continues to hope (and this is the basis of the second reading, of the opera as compensation) that the work will contain “a single note of immortal longing” (214), but has given up on recognizing such a note himself (leaving the question instead to “history”). Really, though, Lurie has already abandoned any hope concerning the piece’s value:

The truth is that Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage. … It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write.” (214)

We needn’t take Lurie’s word for it, of course, but we don’t have much else to go on and there’s no obvious reason to believe that he’s underestimating his own work’s merit. In light of the quotes above, the burden of proof should certainly lie with anyone who wants to read the work as redemptive, and I’ve not yet seen a compelling case for such a position. Still, there are a handful of readers who disagree to at least some extent: There’s Anker in the MFS article, for axample, and Derek Attridge’s chapter on Disgrace in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (see p. 174ff).

This matters, one way or the other, because it bears on the issue of redemption or reconciliation in the novel, hence also on any political reading linked to either contemporary South Africa or post-exploitative situations. Art as redemption or expiation is an old, old theme; if Coetzee’s point is something along those lines, the novel is, as far as I’m concerned, seriously diminished. Happily, I don’t see any reason to read it that way, and plenty of textual evidence on the other side. Redemptive art is a rejected alternative in the novel, not its proposed solution to the problem of guilt and atonement.

Question 7

• Why does Lurie sleep with Bev, and she with him?

Short answer: From a combination of compassion and desire, the precise amalgam of which remains uncertain.

This is trickier than it seems, though I go back on forth on how important it might be. As usual, we’re limited by Coetzee’s focalization of the narrative through Lurie alone. First, we should note in passing that we know for certain of only one time that they sleep together (the first, pp. 148-50); later we are told that although they “lie in each other’s arms” after “the business of dog-killing is over for the day,” they have “not made love; they have in effect ceased to pretend that that is what they do together” (161-62). It’s hard to gauge how much time has passed since their first encounter twelve pages earlier; enough that they can have “long since” ceased to pretend. In any case, we’re not privy to any further details of their affair, if that’s the right word for it.

As for the whys and wherefores of it, we can choose to believe Lurie’s explanation of Bev’s role, that she has acted so that “he, David Lurie, has been succoured, as a man is succoured by a woman; her fiend Lucy Lurie has been helped with a difficult visit” (150). This interpretation, that Bev is largely free of desire and principally other-directed in the affair, isn’t entirely implausible. Bev is an intensely ethical figure, almost sainted in the novel (unless her acts of euthanasia are somehow undermined; more on this later in answer to question six), so it wouldn’t be a stretch to see her as similarly directed with respect to Lurie (who has, after the attack, presumably lost most of whatever physical charms he once had, further reinforcing his status as an object of pity). At the same time, though, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the accuracy of Lurie’s assessments concerning other people in general and women in particular. Even if he’s right that one of the reasons she sleeps with him is a keenly developed sense of altruism, that judgment would be of a piece with his generally egocentrtic mode of explaining things. So we should probably keep open the possibility that Bev has her own reasons and desires (to which we are not directly privy), rather than taking the affair entirely as evidence of her selflessness.

As for Lurie, the proffered explanation seems likewise to fall between desire and something like compassion. On one hand, it may simply be the case that he will sleep with more or less anyone (there have been hundreds, he says, over the years [192]), Bev merely serving as an illustration of exactly how far he has fallen from “the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs,” of “what [he] will have to get used to” (150). But there’s at least a little more to it than that; Lurie is aware, when he explains Bev’s actions to himself, that her self-image is bound up with her ability to provide succor, hence that it is important that he “does his duty. Without passion but without distaste either. So that in the end Bev Shaw can feel pleased with herself” (150). This may not be much as other-directed ethics go, but it’s not nothing.

So Bev begins the affair from generosity and perhaps a bit of pity, mixed with some presumptive degree of desire, while Lurie is motivated by a baseline desire and a species of second-order generosity. Fair enough, if unexceptional. Why does this matter? A couple of reasons. For one, the affair might in a pinch serve as a mode of redemption for Lurie, particularly insofar as it transcends physical desire (the proximate cause of his initial disgrace). I find this option unconvincing, since it both oversimplifies the affair itself and implies a monastic morality, in effect turning the book into an object lesson in the evils of the flesh. Despite the novel’s obvious interest in the problems of aging and its effects on the body, there’s no generalized distaste for sexuality in Disgrace (nor elsewhere in Coetzee’s writing), and it strikes me as a serious error to introduce one here. More importantly, Bev’s motivations are of interest insofar as they are necessarily related to her euthanasia work, which is likewise presented as an act of generosity. Are these instances of the same impulse in her? How does the answer to that question shape our reading of her work with the dogs, and of the role of dogs generally in the novel? See the answer to the next questions for some thoughts.

The Inquiry and Lurie’s Defense

Here’s the first of my answers to the questions about Disgrace raised in this post. The questions were posed in arbitrary order, but the answers try to work forward in some semi-logical way, hence they don’t follow the original order.

Question 4

• Why does Lurie give up his job by refusing to defend himself before the inquiry?

Short answer: Because he doesn’t fear the consequences of doing so.

This question is leadingly posed; it might instead have read “Is Lurie mistreated by the university’s commission of inquiry?”

There’s not a lot of critical consensus on this point (in either version), and it’s an important one. If you think that Lurie is mistreated (see Anker in MFS, for example), then you have two options in reply to the question of why he doesn’t do more to defend himself. On one hand, you might deny that he fails to offer a vigorous defense, which means that you’d need to take seriously both his claims about the “rights of desire” and the perceived adequacy of that defense. You would, in other words, need to take Lurie at his word, to treat him as straightforwardly sincere (and as having badly miscalculated the effect of his testimony). I know of no critic who has espoused exactly this position in print, though it is not entirely unsupported in the text (Rosalind, for instance, imputes it to Lurie, and he sometimes—but not often—sounds like he takes it seriously himself).

On the other hand, you might instead see him as a kind of martyr, one who is unwilling to offer an insincere confession or apology even when he knows that his (honestly given) defense will not save him from punishment. This is Anker’s position, which she uses to read the novel as a critique of the inquiry’s (and by proxy the TRC’s) human rights discourse. It’s not wholly implausible (that’s as positive as I can be about it), but notice that it almost certainly commits you to seeing Lurie as the aggrieved party in the aftermath of his affair with Melanie, and hence as its true, noble victim, one unwilling to compromise his principles for politically motivated expediency. This is the basis of many readings of the novel that find its politics objectionable (e.g., Roos’ review in the Cape Argus), primarily because it is taken to suggest that, like Lurie, whites have paid too great a personal and political price in postapartheid South Africa, that they suffer out of proportion to their crimes. (This is a position that also depends, clearly, on additional evidence, mostly in connection with Lucy’s rape; more on this when I come to later questions.)

[Incidentally, the reader will also need to decide, in any case, what offense the inquiry is attempting to punish. Is it Lurie's rape of Melanie, or merely the fact of their affair? For reasons I laid out in this post, I think it's unlikely that the formal charges against Lurie include rape. But I also think it's proper for the reader to understand the inquiry as addressing the sum of Lurie's transgressions, rape included; if you want to argue that Lurie is wronged, you need to claim that his punishment is excessive relative to all the facts we readers know, not solely those contained in Melanie's statement (which is withheld from the reader entirely). Ditto, of course, Lucy's incomplete police report, on which more in a later post.]

If we answer the implied “Is Lurie wronged?” question in the negative, we likewise have two potential explanations of his meager defense. Well, OK, two and a half: The “half” is a rejection of the premise identical to the one above, i.e., the claim that Lurie does offer what he seriously considers to be an effective defense, but that he is simply (and badly) mistaken in this judgment. Again, I find little textual evidence in favor of this position. More plausible are two other readings: (1) That he recognizes the justice of his relatively severe punishment and therefore refuses to shirk it by defending himself more effectively, or (2) That he does not consider the punishment on offer particularly severe, and that he is therefore unwilling to make even relatively small sacrifices to avoid it.

The first case, I think, credits Lurie with entirely too developed a sense of justice and personal culpability at too early a point in the text. It’s an open question, it seems to me—or at least a very difficult and important one—whether or not he has by the end of the novel achieved anything like this level of ethical awareness. But while he’s not blind to the ethical dimensions of the affair while it’s taking place, neither does he seem especially troubled by them, and certainly not so much as to accept the justice of his punishment.

Which leaves us with the second possibility, namely that Lurie refuses to go along with the compromises offered to him because he does not regard the loss of his position at the university as particularly troubling, nor in any case as worth sacrificing his mildly Byronic self-image to preserve. He is by his own description an indifferent teacher, he has at best a dutiful interest in his subject matter (communications rather than literature), he is no more than a modest scholar, he’s fifty-two years old, in no fear (perhaps erroneously) of losing his pension, and he has both other projects to occupy his time (the Byron opera) and alternative practical arrangements (at Lucy’s farm) to support himself. He has few enough friends, it seems, at the university or in Cape Town, so his loss of social standing is moderate, and would likely be little better even if he were to keep his job by admitting fault and undergoing counseling. So why, finally, should he bend at all far to achieve a solution that on the whole may be worse (as far as he’s concerned at the time) than the worst-case outcome of the inquiry?

This last option strikes me as by far the most plausible, and it has several advantages as part of a larger reading of the novel. Most importantly, it avoids any suggestion of Lurie as a victim of the commission, which in turn preserves more interpretive options with respect to the later attack and reduces the risk of needing to read the novel (against all evidence of Coetzee’s own political convictions, not that these need necessarily be controlling) as politically objectionable. It also avoids sanctifying Lurie from the outset, which would produce a very static reading indeed. Finally, it preserves a sense of Lurie as a plausible character in his own right, rather than making him a solely allegorical figure. This last point is important not because we’re trying to avoid allegory (why and how could we?), but because the allegorical reading we eventually do construct will be much richer if it’s built up from complex characters than from simple ones.

…

So that’s one question down, many to go. More to come …

Eight Questions about Disgrace

A while back, I blogged about some issues in Coetzee criticism. As I’m continuing work on my own essay about Disgrace, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I think every critic should be able to answer about the book before writing on it. These aren’t the only relevant questions, of course, nor does answering them constitute criticism proper. But they’re the prerequisites of criticism; if you can’t take and defend a position on each of them, you haven’t thought hard enough about the novel and its tensions to offer a coherent reading of the work as a whole.

The questions, in no particular order:

1. What is the relationship between the two rapes?
2. Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape or otherwise pursue legal remedy for it?
3. Why does Lucy remain on the farm after the attack?
4. Why does Lurie give up his job by refusing to defend himself before the inquiry?
5. Why does Lurie give up the dog at the end of the novel?
6. In what sense, if any, is Bev Shaw’s (and Lurie’s) euthanasia of the dogs an ethical/merciful/loving act?
7. Why does Lurie sleep with Bev, and she with him?
8. How are we to treat Lurie’s opera?

[Note: Links from each question above point to the post with my answer to it.]

As I say, certainly not the only questions one could or should ask about the novel. But they’re crucial because they address the specific content of Coetzee’s allegorical meaning. It’s not enough to claim that the book is, for example, an allegory of South African society after apartheid (which is to say almost nothing at all, yet seems to satisfy many critics); you need to work out the tenor of that allegory. And it turns out that that’s a difficult and fraught thing to do, because it requires you to take positions on questions like these about which the novel is ambivalent or ambiguous or flatly contradictory. But that’s why we get paid the big bucks, isn’t it?

My own answers to each of these in the coming days …

POS Frequencies in the MONK Corpus, with Additional Musings

This post is on the work I presented at DH ‘09, plus some thoughts on what’s next for my project. It’s related to this earlier post on preliminary part-of-speech frequencies across the entire MONK corpus, but includes new material and figures based on some data pruning and collection as mentioned in this post (details below).

A word, first, on why I’m working on this. I don’t really care, of course, about the relative frequencies of various parts of speech across time, any more than chemists care about, say, the absorption spectra of molecules. What I’m looking for are useful diagnostics of things that I do care about but that are hard to measure directly (like, say, changes in the use of allegory across historical time or, more broadly, in rhetorical cues of literary periodization).

My hypothesis is that allegory should be more prominent and widespread in the short intervals between literary-historical periods than during the periods themselves. Since we also suspect that allegorical writing should be “simpler” on its face than non-allegorical writing (because it needs to sustain an already complicated set of rhetorical mappings over large parts of its narrative), it makes sense (in the absence of a direct measure of “allegoricalness”) to look for markers of comparative narrative simplicity/complexity as proxies for allegory itself. I think part-of-speech frequency might be one such measure. In any case if I’m right about allegory and periodization and if I’m also right about specific POS frequencies as indicators of allegory, then we should expect certain POS frequencies to exhibit significant (in the statistical sense) fluctuations around periodizing moments and events. (I wish there were fewer ifs in that last sentence; I’ll say a bit below about how one could eliminate them.)

So … what do we see in the MONK case? Recall that the results from the full dataset looked like this:

POS Frequencies, Full MONK Corpus

But that’s messy and not of much use. It doesn’t focus on the few POS types that I think might be relevant (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs); it includes a bunch of texts that aren’t narrative fiction (drama, sermons, etc.); and it’s especially noisy because I didn’t make any attempt to control for years in which very few texts (or authors) were published. (Note that the POS types listed are the reduced set of so-called “word classes” from NUPOS.)

Here’s what we get if we limit the POSs (PsOS?) in question, exclude texts that aren’t narrative fiction, and group together the counts from nearby years with low quantities of text:

POS Frequencies, Reduced and Consolidated MONK Corpus

And here’s the same figure with the descriptive types (adjectives and adverbs) added together:

POS Frequencies, Reduced and Consolidated MONK Corpus (Adj + Adv)

[Some data details, skippable if you don't care. First, note that the x axes in all three figures need to be fixed up; they're just bins by year label, rather than proper independent variables. I'll fix this soon, but it doesn't make much difference in the results. You can download the raw POS counts for the full corpus (not sorted by year of publication), as well as those restricted to texts with genre = fiction. These are interesting, I guess, but more useful are the same figures split out by year of publication, both for the whole corpus, and just for fiction (presented as frequencies rather than counts). Finally, there are the fiction-only, year-consolidated numbers (back to counts for these, because I'm lazy). The table of translations between the full NUPOS tags and the (very reduced) word classes presented here is also available.]

So what does this all mean? The first thing to notice is that there’s no straightforward confirmation of my hypotheses in these figures. There’s some meaningful fluctuation in noun and verb frequency over the first half of the nineteenth century—which I think might be an interesting indication of the kind of writing that was dominant at the time (see the noun and verb frequency section of this post)—but no corresponding movement in the combined frequency of adjectives and adverbs. This might mean several things: I might be wrong about the correlation between such frequencies and periodizing events, or I might not be looking at the right POS types, or (quite likely, regardless of other factors) I might not have low enough noise levels to distinguish what one would expect to be fairly small variations in POS frequency.

Where to go from here? A few directions:

I’ll keep working on a bigger corpus. The fiction holdings from MONK are only about 1000 novels, spread (unevenly) over 120+ (or 150+) years. So we’re looking at eight or fewer books on average in any one year, and that’s just not very much if we want good statistics.

There are a couple of ways to go about doing this. Gutenberg has around 10,000 works of fiction in English, so it’s an order of magnitude larger. There are issues with their cataloging and bibliographic quality, but I think they’re addressable and I’m at work on them now. The Open Content Alliance has hundreds of thousands of high-quality digitizations from research libraries, though there are some cataloging issues and I’m not sure about final text quality (which relies on straight OCR rather than hand-correction as does Gutenberg). Still, OCA (or Google Books, depending on what happens with the proposed settlement, or Hathi) would offer the largest possible corpus for the foreseeable future. I’ve been talking to Tim Cole at UIUC about the OCA holdings and will report more as things come together.

But I think it’s also worth asking whether or not POS frequencies are the right way to go; I started down that path on a hunch, and it would be nice to have some promising data before I put too much more effort into pursuing it. What I need, really, are some exploratory descriptive statistics comparing known allegorical and nonallegorical texts. One of the reasons I’ve held off on doing that was because it seems like a big project. The time span I have in mind (several centuries), plus the range of styles, genres, national origins, genders, etc. suggest that the test corpus would need to be large (on the order of hundreds of books, say) if it’s not to be dominated by any one author/nation/gender/period/subject/etc. But how much reading and thinking would I have to do to identify, with high confidence, at least 100 major works of allegorical fiction and another 100 of comparable nonallegorical fiction? And would even that be enough? A daunting prospect, though it’s something that I’m probably going to have to do at some point.

But I got an interesting suggestion from Jan Rybicki (who works in authorship attribution, not coincidentally) at DH. Maybe it would suffice, at least preliminarily, to pick a handful of individual authors who wrote both allegorical and nonallegorical works reasonably close together in time, and to look for statistical distinctions between them. Since I’d be dealing with the same author, many of the problems about variations in period, national origin, gender, and so forth would go away, or at least be minimized. I suspect this wouldn’t do very well for finding distinctive keywords, which I imagine would be too closely tied to the specific content of each work (which is a problem that the larger training set is intended to overcome), but it might turn up interesting lower-level phenomena like (just off the top of my head) differences in character n-grams or sentence length. It would take some work to slice and dice the texts in every conceivably relevant statistical way, but I’m going to need to do that anyway and it’s hardly prohibitive.

So that’s one easy, immediate thing to do. In the longer run, what I really want is to see what people in the field have understood to be allegorical and what not, which would have the great advantage, at least as a reference point, of eliminating some of the problems of individual selection bias. One way to do that would be to mine JSTOR, looking, for example, for collocates of “allegor*” or (more ambitiously) trying to do sentiment analysis on actual judgments of allegoricalness. I suspect the latter is out of the question at the moment (as I understand it, the current state of the art is something like determining whether or not customer product reviews are positive or negative, which seems much, much easier than determining whether or not an arbitrary scholarly article considers any one of the several texts it discusses to be allegorical or not). But the former—finding terms that go along with allegory in the professional literature, seeing how the frequency of the term itself and of specific allegorical works and authors changes over (critical) time, and so on—might be both easy and helpful; at the very least, it would be immensely interesting to me. So that’s something to do soon, too, depending on the details of JSTOR access. (JSTOR is one of the partners for the Digging into Data Challenge and they’ve offered limited access to their collection through a program they’re calling “data for research,” so I know they’re amenable to sharing their corpus in at least some circumstances. I was told at THATCamp by Loretta Auvil that SEASR is working with them, too.)

[Incidentally, SEASR is something I've been meaning to check out more closely for a long time now. The idea of packaged but flexible data sources, analytics, and visualizations could be really powerful and could save me a ton of time.]

Finally (I had no idea I was going to go on so long), there are a couple of things I should read: Patrick Juola’s “Measuring Linguistic Complexity” (J Quant Ling 5:3 [1998], 206-13)—which might have some pointers on distinguishing complex nonallegorical works from simpler allegorical ones—plus newer work that cites it. And Colin Martindale’s The Clockwork Muse, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while and which was (re)described to me at DH as “brilliant and infuriating and wacky.” Sign me up.

Some POS Frequency Factoids

I’ll be posting a couple of times in the next few days about DH ‘09, THATCamp, and the state of my project. First, though, a handful of (mildly) interesting plots concerning part-of-speech frequency correlations from the MONK corpus.

MONK contains about 1,000 novels and novel-like works spread over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. (The full corpus is larger and covers a longer timespan; it includes drama, witchcraft narratives, some nonfiction, etc.) I’ve counted occurrences of the major POS types across just the narrative fiction, divided them up by year of publication, and then grouped together a few nearby years in which few or no books were included. In the end, there’s coverage from 1742 through 1905, with all years (or groups of years) containing at least 500,000 words by four or more authors and no group spanning more than five years. This is the same dataset from which I’ll construct some POS frequency vs. time graphs in a later post (where I’ll also link to the raw counts).

First, two cases that that are easy to anticipate and serve as a kind of check that things aren’t too far off:

Adjective frequency vs. noun frequency

Adverb frequency vs. verb frequency

About what you’d expect: a decent positive correlation between the frequency of nouns or verbs and the frequency of words that modify them. Slightly weaker correlation in the adverb case, presumably because adverbs don’t always modify verbs.

Then there’s an interesting case that I think I can explain, but wouldn’t have predicted:

Noun frequency vs. verb frequency

Noun and verb frequency are inversely correlated. This makes sense, I suppose, if you think of novels as tending toward portraiture or action (and for all I know if may be a well known phenomenon). But I expected to see more nouns imply more verbs, since you’d need more things for those subjects and objects to do. In any case, I learned something here from my few minutes with GGobi.

Finally, one that leaves me at a loss:

Adjective frequency vs. adverb frequency

How can adjectives and adverbs be apparently uncorrelated? Shouldn’t there be flowery novels rich in both of them and plain ones rich in neither? I’ll investigate, but in the meantime I’d love to be told that this, too, is already accounted for.

Last note: GGobi is really nifty, even if it doesn’t produce beautiful figures out of the box (see above).

The Shakespeare Industry

Loosely apropos Ed Finn’s panel at DH on Pynchon, Matt Jockers and I were trying to guess the most-published-upon author in English. I figured Shakespeare, he suggested Joyce. This morning I ran a couple of quick queries on the MLA database and came up with the following:

	  Shakespeare	Joyce
2008+     	  716	  151
2004+     	 3826	  937
1999+     	 8159	 2135
All (1923+)	35489	 9315

There are some details to explain, but the take-away point is that Shakespeare seems to be the object of about four times more scholarship than Joyce.

The details: These are raw result counts for the subject queries “Shakespeare William” and “Joyce James,” both of which are defined subject headings in MLA. The counts are total matching items of all types (journal articles, refereed journal articles, books, chapters, and other) published from the listed year to the present. I didn’t make any attempt to distinguish major from minor works (e.g., books from articles), nor single-subject studies from multi-subject ones. This is obviously pretty non-rigorous, but it was good enough to satisfy my passing curiosity.

This is interesting and at least a little unexpected to me. I figured Shakespeare would be in the lead, especially over the full history of criticism, but I thought things would be much closer, especially in recent years. I wonder if part of the gap might be explained by a higher likelihood of talking about Shakespeare in any given English renaissance context than about Joyce in any given modernist one?

A Pretty (?) Picture

This graph is absurd, I know, but it’s a hint of what I’ve been working on. Click for largeness. More to come soon.

The Formal Charge Against Lurie

A bit more on Disgrace. Talking things over with Liz Evans, she pointed out that the specific charge leveled against Lurie by Melanie Isaacs isn’t entirely clear; we’re never told anything beyond the fact that it involves an alleged breach of “article 3.1 of the university’s Code of Conduct,” which “addresses victimization or harassment of students by teachers” and is a subsection of article 3, concerning “victimization or harassment on grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual preference, or disability” (38-39). Nor do we see the content of Melanie’s statement to the committee (which statement Lurie claims not to have read, though it has been provided to him). [Footnote: There's also the technical charge of irregularity in grading and recordkeeping, but that is obviously a subsidiary matter, probably best understood as a gesture toward bureaucratic verisimilitude and an attempt to raise the probability of conviction by including a lesser but more easily proven allegation.] The members of the committee refer to the charges alternately as involving “harassment,” “abuse,” and “exploitation.” But it seems unlikely—this was Liz’s point—that they involve rape; if they did, it’s hard to imagine the committee entertaining the possibility that Lurie would retain his position at the university (which does appear to be the suggestion, provided he is willing to make a sincere apology and undergo counseling, etc.).

Why is this important? Because it’s part of the analogy between Melanie’s mistreatment and Lucy’s, hence of the structural and allegorical parallel between colonial violence and retributive justice. I hadn’t noticed this fact concerning Melanie’s accusation, but it adds another important way in which she resembles Lucy; they both present a legal claim to the authorities, but withhold from their accounts any mention of rape. This strengthens the parallel between the two women, and thus reinforces our obligation to make sense of the similarities and differences in the way they’re treated, in the ways they respond to that treatment, and in their respective social and historical positions.