JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #37
January 28, 2021
In my research I recently came upon a paper titled "A Quantitative Philology of Introspection." This paper purports to use surviving texts of the Classical world to track a literary correlation with a supposed shift in human introspective capacity. Quite a few of the assumptions in the underlying scholarship strikes me as problematic, but, nevertheless, the quantitative semantic analysis of corpora is fairly intriguing. So, rather than representing the development of a new cognitive ability, the data seems to suggest a shifting of cultural interest or attention to what was undoubtedly an extant capacity. Daniel Dennett is cited in the paper as preferring a "soft hypothesis" wherein the textual shifts represent a mere "increased concern with introspection" rather than some neurological development, and this is the thesis I prefer.
The data seem to confirm that at various points in the Classical corpora, the textual focus drew closer to considerations of conscious introspection and the inner workings of the human mind through metacognitive insight. Some of this corresponds to the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine, the last of whose Confessions tracks the development of his own thought and thus is inevitably drawn to an introspective perspective. (It’s tangentially interesting to note that St. Augustine’s teacher St. Ambrose is the first human being recorded as being capable of reading silently to himself.) Applying a similar computational analysis to data from the Twentieth Century, the authors note a shifting concern with introspection that dips before the two world wars and then skyrockets after World War II.
I’m intrigued by this line of inquiry (though I’m a bit cautious about the methods employed by the authors), as it may have use in discovering cultural shifts in the way we think of literary characters and their portrayal. The Modernist turn in literature took explicit interest in exploring the motivating thoughts of characters (think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, etc.). The post-war spike shown in this paper suggests not merely a continuation of that interest, but a dramatic rise during the post-modernist period. It might also be possible to draw correlations between this growth in literary attention to introspection with shifts in, for example, point of view, where the omniscient point of view more or less fell out of fashion in the latter half of the last century. Other correlations may be drawn.
Such shifts in cultural interest in various features that can be shown in this kind of semantic-computational analysis might demonstrate further changes in our expectations of fiction. At the very least, they might help explain why the advice on craft for writers might change from time to time.