Jane Austen’s Word Process
Marilyn
Butler
- Computation into
Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method by J.F Burrows
Oxford, 245 pp, £25.00, February 1987, ISBN 0 19 812856 8
London Review
of Books – Vol 9, no. 12 – 25 June 1997, p. 11-13
Why put the novels of Jane
Austen onto a computer? The first thing that strikes you about Computation into Criticism is what
it says about its Australian author’s dedication, or obsessiveness, or just
plain nerve. Most literary research is cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as
long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s
project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first
going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence
overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and
secretarial time, each of his 211 pages of text and 34 pages of statistical
appendices comes to represent a sizeable public investment.
He has been supported in his
native Australia by his own university of Newcastle, New South Wales, and by
the central government, through the Australian Research Grants Scheme. The
Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, have three times been his hosts, and
he has used computing facilities, or received expert advice on computing, at
both Cambridge and Oxford. He must have had to explain to each of his
benefactors precisely why a book at once on computing and on Jane Austen was
worth paying for. It’s interesting to imagine what went through the minds of
the members of the committees concerned. There was, of course, something
up-to-the-minute, the smell of New Blood, about a project that offered to apply
technology to English Literature. Whether it seemed that technologists would be
humanised, or aesthetes set to learn about computing, this one certainly looked
educational. Some people
must have relished the sublimely unobvious choice of Jane Austen as a target
for modernisation. But they also had to face the risks. What if the finished
book stayed on the shelves: too literate for the number-crunchers and too
numerate for the literati?
The diversity of the
specialisms Burrows had to reconcile is graphically stated in his title and
subtitle – as fine a balancing act as one of Pope’s couplets. First and last,
emphatic and aggressive, the pincers of ‘computation’ and ‘experiment in
method’; in the middle, defensive or safely entrenched, ‘criticism’ and the
reassuringly particular promise to study Jane Austen’s novels. Burrows, an
exact writer, means just what he promises – one book that speaks two languages.
As far as an amateur can tell, his book succeeds as a model exercise in
computing and in statistics. It is certainly a model account of such an
exercise. Literary readers are shown, with exemplary lucidity, how statistics
can inform issues of style, and transform our understanding of the
representation of character. Surprisingly general conclusions are arrived at by
marshalling minute particulars. From among the tables and graphs there emerges
the most accomplished ‘close reading’ to date of Jane Austen’s dialogue, and the
most stylish book written on Austen since Mary Lascelles’s Jane Austen and her Art in 1939.
The fact that Burrows writes
like Austen herself is splendid. But other people may write well, and not get
the much smaller sums they ask for, so it’s worth considering why those who put
our money into this project seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature
is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more
dispersed, now that so many of the world’s populations learn English as a second
language. To add substantially to its methodologies or to its theoretical
understanding is a challenge, but also a problem, especially if you live far
from the big academic centres in America and Britain. It is a major headache in
Australia (and presumably throughout the southern and eastern hemispheres) to
get the latest books, which will arrive selectively, slowly, and at twice the
price asked in the country of origin. Had Burrows proposed, say, a sensitive
new reading of Wordsworth, or a robust new application of Foucault to the
18th-century novel, or a helpful new commentary on Bakhtin or Deleuze, his
scrutineers might reasonably have wondered, not just if the book was worth
writing, but if Newcastle, NSW was a good place to write it.
At any one time, a large
percentage of the professional books appearing in America or Britain represent
small adjustments, or applications, of an immediately current idea, and in such
cases speed, currency, the air of sharing a new vocabulary and of belonging to
a club, must be an asset. Though it’s impossible for most books of this type to
look individually distinguished, they represent the mainstream, and thus
collectively are not useless. But Burrows’s project stands apart from all of
this, its method ensuring its independence. His discussions only rarely
introduce the views of others, and scarcely ever on issues of critical
interpretation or evaluation. He generates his own evidence, and
single-mindedly addresses it. If his book had failed, it would have looked
eccentric or marginal, but since it is in general extremely persuasive, it
derives further strength from its autonomy. Among its other ways of being
exemplary, it demonstrates how to execute a research project in the humanities
so that fellow professionals anywhere will take account of it.
[*] For avant-garde novelists, though not necessarily for popular ones, and
certainly not for the middlebrow reader. Brian Southam’s new volume in the
Critical Heritage series, Jane
Austen, Vol II: 1870-1940 (Routledge, 308 pp., £18, 28 May, 0 7102
0189 3), shows that she achieved her status as the best-loved classic novelist
in 1870, just as the novel of distinctive minor characters was losing its
literary prestige. Southam’s 132-page introduction gives invaluable insights
into the history of readers’ tastes, and extracts such as Anne Thackeray
Ritchie’s influential popularising magazine article in 1871 and Reginald Farrer’s
highbrow classic essay in 1917 seem to confirm that her general popularity owed
most to the distinctiveness and charm of her comic minor characters.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austens-word-process
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