Day 104: Book Excerpt: Graphs , Maps, Trees

The quantitative approach to literature can take several different forms— from computational stylistics to thematic databases, book history, and more. For reasons o f space, I will here limit myself to book history, building on work originally done by McBumey, Beasley, Raven, Garside and Block for Britain; Angus, Mylne and Frautschi for France; Zwicker for Japan; Petersen for Denmark; Ragone for Italy; Martl-Lopez and Santana for Spain; Joshi for India; and Griswold for Nigeria. And I mention these names right away because quantita­tive work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared by others, and combined in more than one way. Figure 1 which charts the take-off of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria, is a case in point. See how similar those shapes are: 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: in twenty years or so (in Britain, 1720-40; Japan, 1745-65; Italy, 1820-40; Spain, 1845 to early 1860s; Nigeria, 1965-80), the graph leaps from five-ten new titles per year, which means one new novel every month or two, to one new novel per week. And at this point, the horizon of novel-reading changes. As long as only a handful of new titles are published each year, I mean, novels remain unreliable products, that disappear for long stretches of time, and cannot really command the loyalty of the reading public; they are commodities, yes— but commodities still waiting for a fully devel­oped market. A new novel per week, by contrast, is already the great capitalist oxymoron of the regular novelty: the unexpected that is produced with such efficiency and punctuality that readers become unable to do without it. The novel ‘becomes a necessity o f life’, to paraphrase the title of a book by William Gilmore-Lehne, and the jer­emiads that immediately  multiply around it— novels make readers lazy, stupid, dissolute, insane, insubordinate: exactly like films two centuries later— are the clearest sign of its symbolic triumph.

The rise of the novel, then; or, better, one rise in a history which had begun many centuries earlier, and will go through several other accel­erations, as emerges quite clearly from the data on the publication of new novels in Britain between 1710 and 1850 (figure 2). Here, three phases seem to stand out, each subdivided into a first period of rapid growth and a second one of stabilization, and each modifying in a specific way the social role of the novel. The first phase, from 1720 to around 1770, is the one discussed above: a leap in 1720-40, and a consolidation in the following decades. In the second phase, which runs from 1770 to around 1820, the further increase in the number of new titles induces for its part a drastic reorientation of audiences towards the present. Up to then, I mean, the ‘extensive’ reading so typical of the novel— reading many texts once and superficially, rather than a few texts often and intensely— would easily outgrow the yearly output of titles, forcing readers to turn to the past for (much of) their entertainment: all sorts of reprints and abridge­ments of eighteenth-century bestsellers, British as well as foreign, plus the old, and even the few ancient classics of the genre. But as the total of new novels doubles, compared to the previous phase— 80 in 1788; 91 in 1796; 111 in 1808— the popularity of old books suddenly collapses, and novelistic audiences turn resolutely (and irreversibly) towards the current season.

The third phase, which begins around 1820, and which unfortunately I can only follow for the first thirty years, is the one in which the internal composition o f the market changes. So far, the typical reader of novels had been a ‘generalist’— someone ‘who reads absolutely anything, at random’, as Thibaudet was to write with a touch of con­tempt in Le liseur de romans. Now, however, the growth o f the market creates all sorts of niches for ‘specialist’ readers and genres (nautical tales, sporting novels, school stories, mysteres): the books aimed at urban workers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, or at boys, and then girls, in the following generation, are simply the most visible instances of this larger process, which culminates at the turn of the century in the super-niches of detective fiction and then science fiction.


~~ Graphs , Maps, Trees -Abstract Models for Literary History -by- Franco Moretti