{"id":84251,"date":"2015-03-31T16:59:06","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T20:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84251"},"modified":"2015-04-01T16:44:28","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T20:44:28","slug":"novels-are-made-of-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Novels Are Made of Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

More on automated sentiment-analysis, and <\/em>Moby-Dick.<\/p>\n

\"neiman<\/a>

Leroy Neiman, Moby Dick Assaulting the Pequod<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Paul Val\u00e9ry tells the story: The painter Edgar Degas was backhanded-bragging to his friend St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 about the poems that he, Degas, had been trying to write. He knew they weren\u2019t great, he said, \u201cBut I\u2019ve got lots of ideas\u2014too many ideas.\u201d \u201cBut my dear Degas,\u201d the poet replied, \u201cpoems are not made out of ideas. They\u2019re made of words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paintings, for that matter, are not made of pretty ballerinas or landscapes: they\u2019re made of paint.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Syuzhet, Matthew Jockers\u2019s new program that analyzes the words of a novel for their emotional value and graphs the sentimental shape of the book. Dan Piepenbring has explained it all here<\/a> and here<\/a> on the Daily<\/em>, with links to the original postings and the various outcries, some of them in the comments, that have blown up around Jockers.<\/p>\n

Many people apparently find Jockers\u2019s research the latest assault of technocratic digitocracy on the citadel of deep humanistic feelings, but that\u2019s not how I see it. What the graphs reveal about potboiler narrative structure versus high-literary arcs, for instance\u2014Dan Brown\u2019s higher average positivity than James Joyce\u2019s, and his more regular cycle of highs and lows to force the reader through the book\u2014is insightful, useful, and great. <\/p>\n

In some ways, it\u2019s hard for me to even see what the fuss is about. \u201cIt\u2019s not that it\u2019s wrong,\u201d one commenter writes. \u201cIt\u2019s just that it\u2019s an extremely poor substitute for reading, enjoying, and discussing literature.\u201d But who said anything about a substitute? Does this commenter not notice that the discussions <\/em>of the graphs rest on having read<\/em> the books and seeing how the graphs shed light on them? Another: \u201cOkay, fuck this guy for comparing Dan Brown to James Joyce.\u201d Well, how else can you say Joyce is better and Brown is worse? That\u2019s what\u2019s known as a comparison. Or do you think Joyce can\u2019t take it?<\/p>\n

Freak-outs aside, there are substantive rebuttals, too. What seems to be the most rigorous objection is from SUNY<\/small> professor and fellow digital-humanities scholar Annie Swafford, who points out some failures in the algorithm. \u201cI am extremely happy today\u201d and \u201cThere is no happiness left in me,\u201d<\/a> for example, read as equally positive. And:<\/p>\n

\n

Longer sentences may be given greater positivity or negativity than their contents warrant, merely because they have greater number of positive or negative words. For instance, \u201cI am extremely happy!\u201d would have a lower positivity ranking than \u201cWell, I\u2019m not really happy; today, I spilled my delicious, glorious coffee on my favorite shirt and it will never be clean again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But let\u2019s actually compare \u201cWell, I\u2019m not really happy; today, I spilled my delicious, glorious coffee on my favorite shirt and it will never be clean again\u201d to \u201cI\u2019m sad.\u201d The positivity or negativity might be the same, assuming there could be some kind of galvanometer or something attached to the emotional nodes of our brain to measure the \u201cpure\u201d \u201cobjective\u201d \u201cquantity\u201d of positivity. But the first of those sentences is<\/em> more emotional\u2014maybe not more positive, but more expressive, more histrionic. Ranking it higher than \u201cI\u2019m sad\u201d or even \u201cI am very happy\u201d makes a certain kind of sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no happiness left in me\u201d and \u201cI am all sadness from now on\u201d are the same seven words to a logician or a hypothetical emotiomometer, but not to a novelist or a reader. Everyone in advertising and political wordsmithing knows that people absorb the content of a statement much more than the valence: to say that something \u201cis not horrific and apocalyptic\u201d is a downer, despite the \u201cnot.\u201d Or consider: \u201cGone for eternity is the delight that once filled my heart to overflowing\u2014the sparkle of sun on the fresh morning dew of new experience, soft envelopments of a lover\u2019s thighs, empyrean intellectual bliss, everything that used to give my life its alpenglow of hope and wonder\u2014never again!\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m depressed.\u201d An algorithm that rates the first piece of writing off-the-charts positive is a more useful quantification of the words than one that would rate the emotional value of the two as the same.<\/p>\n

Some years back, Orion Books produced a book called Moby-Dick in Half the Time<\/em>, in a line of Compact Editions \u201csympathetically edited\u201d to \u201cretain all the elements of the originals: the plot, the characters, the social, historical and local backgrounds and the author\u2019s language and style.\u201d I have nothing against abridgments\u2014I\u2019ve abridged books myself<\/a>\u2014but I felt that what makes Melville Melville, in particular, is digression, texture, and weirdness. If you only have time to read half the book, which half the time is more worth spending? What elements of the original do we want to abridge for?<\/p>\n

Moby-Dick in Half the Time <\/em>seemed like it would lose something more essential than would Anna Karenina in Half the Time <\/em>or Vanity Fair in Half the Time <\/em>or Orion\u2019s other offerings. I decided to find out. So I compiled every chapter, word, and punctuation mark that Orion\u2019s abridger cut from Melville\u2019s original Moby-Dick; or The Whale<\/em>, and published the result, with its inevitable title, as a book of its own: a lost work by Herman Melville called ; or The Whale<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Half the Time <\/em>keeps the plot arc of Ahab\u2019s quest, of course, but ; or The Whale <\/em>arguably turns out closer to the emotional ups and downs of Melville\u2019s novel\u2014and that tells us something about how Melville writes. His linguistic excess erupts at moments of emotional intensity; those moments of intensity, trimmed as excess from Half the Time<\/em>, are what make up the other semibook. Chapter sixty-two, for example, consists of a single word, \u201chapless\u201d\u2014the only word Orion\u2019s abridger cut from the chapter, trimming a 105-word sentence to 104, for some reason. That\u2019s a pretty good sentiment analysis of Melville\u2019s chapter as a whole. Reading ; or The Whale<\/em> is a bit like watching a DVD skip ahead on fast forward, and it gets at something real about Melville\u2019s masterpiece. About the emotion in the words.<\/p>\n

So I would defend the automated approach to novelistic sentiment on different grounds than Piepenbring\u2019s. I take plot as seriously as he does, as opposed to valorizing only the style or ineffable poetry of a novel; I also see B\u00e9la Tarr movies or early Nicholson Baker novels as having plots, too, just not eventful ones. Jockers\u2019s program is called Syuzhet because of the Russian Formalist distinction between fabula, <\/em>what happens in chronological order in a story, and syuzhet, <\/em>the order of things in the telling (diverging from the fabula <\/em>in flashbacks, for instance, or when information is withheld from the reader). It\u2019s not easy to say how \u201cplot\u201d arises out of the interplay between the two. But having minimal fabula <\/em>is not the same as having little or no plot.<\/p>\n

In any case, fabula <\/em>is not what Syuzhet is about. Piepenbring summarizes<\/a>: \u201calgorithms assign every word in a novel a positive or negative emotional value, and in compiling these values [Jockers is] able to graph the shifts in a story\u2019s narrative. A lot of negative words mean something bad is happening, a lot of positive words mean something good is happening.\u201d This may or may not be true, but novels are not made of things that happen, they are made of words. Again<\/a>: \u201cWhen we track \u2018positive sentiment,\u2019 we do mean, I think, that things are good for the protagonist or the narrator.\u201d Not necessarily, but we do mean\u2014tautologically\u2014that things are good for the reader<\/em> in the warm afternoon sunshine of the book\u2019s positive language.<\/p>\n

Great writers, along with everything else they are doing, stage a readerly experience and lead their readers through it from first word on first page to last. Mapping out what those paths might look like is as worthy a critical approach as any.<\/p>\n

Damion Searls<\/a>, the <\/em>Daily\u2019s language columnist<\/a>, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More on automated sentiment-analysis, and Moby-Dick. Paul Val\u00e9ry tells the story: The painter Edgar Degas was backhanded-bragging to his friend St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 about the poems that he, Degas, had been trying to write. He knew they weren\u2019t great, he said, \u201cBut I\u2019ve got lots of ideas\u2014too many ideas.\u201d \u201cBut my dear Degas,\u201d the poet replied, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[17631,17629,17627,17626,17488,17630,4083,16905,4145,10601,17628,2393],"class_list":["post-84251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-or-the-whale","tag-abridgment","tag-annie-swafford","tag-edgar-degas","tag-emotion","tag-emotional-valence","tag-herman-melville","tag-matthew-jockers","tag-paul-valery","tag-stephane-mallarme","tag-syuzhet","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNovels Are Made of Words: Moby-Dick, Emotion, and Abridgment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Damion Searls on sentiment analysis and Moby-Dick.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Novels Are Made of Words by Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 31, 2015 \u2013 More on automated sentiment-analysis, and Moby-Dick. Paul Val\u00e9ry tells the story: The painter Edgar Degas was backhanded-bragging to his friend St\u00e9phane\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-03-31T20:59:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-04-01T20:44:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/neiman-mobydick.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"372\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Damion Searls\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Damion Searls\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4c1f756f0bf1ff08b44f7e01400e6d2a\"},\"headline\":\"Novels Are Made of Words\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-03-31T20:59:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-04-01T20:44:28+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\"},\"wordCount\":1385,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/neiman-mobydick.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"; or the Whale\",\"abridgment\",\"Annie Swafford\",\"Edgar Degas\",\"emotion\",\"emotional valence\",\"Herman Melville\",\"Matthew Jockers\",\"Paul Valery\",\"St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9\",\"Syuzhet\",\"words\"],\"articleSection\":[\"On Translation\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\",\"name\":\"Novels Are Made of Words: Moby-Dick, Emotion, and Abridgment\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/neiman-mobydick.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-03-31T20:59:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-04-01T20:44:28+00:00\",\"description\":\"Damion Searls on sentiment analysis and Moby-Dick.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/neiman-mobydick.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/neiman-mobydick.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/31\/novels-are-made-of-words\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Novels Are Made of Words\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. 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