There’s nothing out of date about duty
It’s wrong to say modern novels and society ignore it, Philip Hensher says
Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has undertaken a systematic analysis of 1.5 million books published in the past 200 years, to discover how values have changed. Rather than read them, she fed the texts into the Google program Ngram. It analyzed the frequency of vocabulary, and in particular the vocabulary of choice compared with the vocabulary of obligation.
Greenfield’s test asked how frequently the words “duty” and “oblige” occurred, as well as “choose” and “get.” She discovered that the word “duty” is much more common in Jane Austen, and the word “choose” much more frequent in novels of the present day.
It is suggested that present-day novels are more reflective and internal, and have less sense of unarguable duty.
Well, I hope Professor Greenfield’s analysis took account of the fact that Jane Austen usually spells “choose” “chuse.” Examination of the collected works on my Kindle shows that Austen uses the word “duty” 120 times and “chuse” 61.
These studies fill one with a sense of envy for the analysts, who apparently feel no requirement to read a book before asking computer programs to come to conclusions about it. The assumption, that duty and obligation in a novel are only expressed by the use of the words “duty” or “obligation,” is staggeringly naive. An age that speaks ceaselessly about duty may value it highly, or have a nagging anxiety about it.
And there are statements of obligation and requirement that don’t use the abstract terms, which analysis of this sort can’t pick up. For instance, the future tense in English contains hidden degrees of negotiation and obligation without needing to state them. The differences between “I’ll see Pete next Tuesday,” through “I’ll be going to see …,” “I’m going to see …,” “I’m seeing Pete …,” and finally “I go to Pete …” — this last an expression of a non-negotiable arrangement — state degrees of obligation and free will. But no computer will pick them up.
Duty, imposed from outside, is a key topic of the novel. The conflict between inclination and obligation, between what someone must do and what he wants to do, has generated literature right from the beginning.
Nor is it true that the external origins of the requirement are at odds with internal contemplation. Conrad’s Lord Jim, a novel that turns on a man’s abandonment of his plain duty at sea, is agonizingly contemplative.
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 useful conflict between inclination and requirement really disappearing in favour of a world of wilfulness?
A good test is this year’s Man Booker longlist. 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 rather 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 famine-ridden 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 and perhaps has become more occluded, but there is no suggestion that the raw materials of duty and expectation have disappeared.
Without a doubt, questions of duty still animate our lives. What is the duty of Olympic athletes — to attend a Winter Olympics in a state like Russia, which abuses human rights or to take a stand with a gay and lesbian minority? Where did the duty of an Edward Snowden lie — with the state or with the inhabitants of the state?
These questions of duty are as urgent as they ever were, in reality and in novels, though the word “duty” itself may be as archaic as plum pudding.
Analyses of novels through vocabulary take one so far, but in the end, they have to be read. That, I am afraid, is Professor Greenfield’s own professional duty.