The line between choice and duty
Does counting words in books reveal anything about our morals? Not for Philip Hensher
PATRICIA Greenfield, a psychologist at UCLA, has undertaken a systematic analysis of 1.5 million books published over the past 200 years, to discover how values have changed.
However, rather than read them, she fed the texts into the Google programme Ngram, which analysed the frequency of vocabulary, in particular the vocabulary of choice compared with the vocabulary of obligation.
Greenfield’s test asked how frequently the words “duty” and “oblige” occurred, compared with “choose” and “get”. She found that the word “duty” is much more common in Jane Austen, and the word “choose” much more frequent in presentday novels.
It is suggested that present-day novels are more reflective and internal, and have less sense of unarguable duty.
I hope Greenfield’s analysis took account of the fact that Austen usually spells “choose” “chuse”. Examination of the collected works on my Kindle shows she uses the word “duty” 120 times and “chuse” 61.
These studies fill one with envy for the analysts, who apparently feel no requirement to read books before asking computers to draw conclusions about them. The assumption that duty and obligation in a novel are only expressed by the use of the words “duty” or “obligation” is staggeringly naive.
And an age that speaks ceaselessly about duty may value it highly, or have a nagging anxiety about it.
Furthermore, there are statements of obligation that don’t use that exact term, which analysis of this sort can’t pick up.
Duty has always been a key topic of novels. The conflict between inclination and obligation, between what someone must do and what they want to do, has generated literature right from the beginning.
It is true that with modernism came a questioning of conventional requirements, and a suggestion that you didn’t have to act in accordance with upright principles. When duty was mentioned, it was often with scorn and dismissal. In her novel Pastors and Masters, Ivy Compton-Burnett made a character say: “The sight of duty does make one shiver … the actual doing of it would kill one, I think.”
And yet, in real life, Compton-Burnett was keen on the question of duty, and once told Sonia Orwell, complaining about the labour of compiling her husband George’s journalism, that “it’s your plain duty”.
The term “duty” may have passed out of common usage in novels, but is the conflict between inclination and requirement really disappearing in favour of a world of wilfulness?
A good test is this year’s Man Booker long list. It is, admittedly, hard to find the word “duty” in most of them; it occurs most frequently in Eleanor Catton’s pastiche 19th-century novel, The Luminaries, which may seem to prove Greenfield’s point.
But when one actually reads the novels, rather than running a word search, a different conclusion emerges. They are as obsessed with duty as ever. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland turns on the felt obligation of a man to marry his murdered brother’s pregnant widow. Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic contemplates the requirement to act well in a public sphere, including that of an anti-slavery campaigner in 1840s Ireland. Ruth Ozeki’s narrator in A Tale for the Time Being feels a plain duty to track down the author of a manuscript for her safety’s sake. Donal Ryan’s hero, in The Spinning Heart, feels a mysterious duty not to deny that he killed his father.
And so it goes on; duty and obligation are balanced against choice and personal freedom in almost exactly the same way that they are in Persuasion or Our Mutual Friend. The vocabulary may have changed, but there is no suggestion that the raw materials of duty and expectation have disappeared.
Analyses of novels through vocabulary take one so far, but in the end, they have to be read. That, I am afraid, is Greenfield’s own professional duty. — © The Daily Telegraph