Menu
This work does not yet have the references attached, they will be included when I add the document for download. “Words. Was it their colours ... No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself...was it that ... he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose.” (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) The networked age breaks from traditional borders of culture, identity and geography, the networked society follows a code of creation best summed up by Roland Barthes who asserts “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” (142[K1] ). In keeping with this ethos, quantitative criticism can, without value-laden signifiers, provide grounds for identification of a text’s linguistic particulars. To a machine colour has no metaphoric meaning, a machine only sees items in terms of correspondence and correlatives. #ff0000 or 255,0,0 do not have the same semantic history as ‘red’ when reported in written text even though they are synonymous with it in today’s posthuman envisaging. For many generations critics have been building interpretations upon the works of older critics and thus inheriting their bias towards certain modes of thinking. This paper aims to highlight the hermeneutic automisation of colour and question how this cultural landscape may be challenged. The first key notion to consider is defamiliarisation, the taking of an object and treating it in such a way as to provide the audience or reader with a fresh perspective of it. This is something thrown around all too often in criticism since Shklovosky first penned the term but its application is never without merit. Second to this is the cosmopolitan culture, a lifestyle which brings sameness to the globe but also brings together competing ideologies and traditions. The fact that you may go to any country and eat the same Big Mac meal indicates the similarities, a juxtaposition may be seen through superstitions such as red being evil or demonic in the west and lucky in the orient. Competing cultural traditions are setting colours as combative realms of interpretation for global marketing strategies and literary criticism. Yutong Xie[K2] outlines the “contradictory metaphorical meanings of the colour green” and attributes it to Joyce’s confused feeling about Ireland. When we look to Xie’s reading it is quite apparently a deep reading, engagement with the text is frequent and detailed. Yet Xie is relying on interpretations drawn from a long history of tradition. Using an inherited bias, he comments “the colour green, which is the national colour of Ireland, mainly endowed with a metaphorical meaning of rottenness”. The methodology employed in this paper shall endeavour not to rely on such culturally infused readings as are held by previous inclinations but to forge new correlatives and questions from empirical metadata. To begin a quantitative reading suitable tools must be acquired with which to generate data. Kevin Ashton reports “There’s only so much that can be done in terms of accuracy and volume when it comes to scanning, typing, photographing, pressing buttons to create data ‘about things in the real world’ ”(Ashton, 1999. In: Jones, 2014[K3] ). Ashton is perhaps rewording the work of Plato and recalling the allegory of the cave to establish the failing of language, written or oral, to accurately represent reality. However, in regards to universal truths, there is no greater human correspondence with the cosmos than the sciences. Literature, for all its merits, cannot create so succinct a representation of the universe as can be equated into formulas, modelled as graphs or shown through chemistry. This standard-bearing of the scientific method has started to creep into how we approach literature and how we are using new technologies to break literature down and decode it in new ways. Digital humanities is a field which is developing many new approaches to analysing, reconfiguring and manipulating texts as data. Andy Liu’s collection of digital toys *ahem tools, is something that stands testament to the growing interest in this field of academia. But the success of their application is mixed and their usefulness is marred by the appropriation of ludic influence that connects itself ubiquitously around the digital. The issue remains in literary criticism that our use of these tools finds itself trapped within Huizinga’s definition of play “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is different from ordinary life.” (1955:28[K4] ). The application of digital tools has not yet become ‘ordinary life’ for the contemporary critic and critics have yet to find that application of digital tools which transitions the process from voluntary to necessary. Taking this criticism of the methodology on board it would perhaps be better to embrace this playfulness of the digital and instead of seeking out the elusive nature of truth or other such grand pursuits, to merely seek out the curious for fun. In order to find oddities of interest we must only seek out that which is not expected and provide discourse on it. Pedantry is perhaps a new aesthetic form as ‘grammar Nazis’ run rampant and there are numerous forums dedicated to finding mistakes in movies. Rather than allowing for a ‘suspension of disbelief’ as Coleridge would have us do, we do the opposite, we accost the diegetic world with our own logic and find fault with everything that is unfamiliar to the story-world. This supposes a great investment of culture into maintaining accuracy of how possible worlds are portrayed and in doing so opens the avenue to take issue with any work purporting to be as close an approximation to real-life as is possible. In Joyce’s conversations with Frank Budgen he says “I want, to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” (Budgen, pg 69). It cannot be helped in such a situation but to ignore the intentional fallacy and suggest otherwise. Having tools to play with gives us the ability to be so ruthless in this pursuit of pedantry that we can expose Joyce’s intention for the failing that it is upon one seemingly minor discrepancy. Yet, in the creation of worlds, a minor deviation is all it takes to throw the entire representation out of sync in a Brobdingnagian fashion. By using Google books NGram viewer, the large body of works collected by the online search giant paints a picture of humanity’s relationship with the prismatic colours (1700-2000); This presents us with an empirical account of how humanity has, in general, reported colours by frequency. The information can be used to suggest that the world may consist more of red things than green things, more green things than blue things and so on…however this is reliant on a humanised gaze. Traditionally we can delve deeper into this information and recount many key observations and interpretations of the colours and their use throughout human history. Red is one of the more archaic colours along with white, black and yellow (Berlin & Kay, 1969) and its significance is used unilaterally around society hence giving it good reason to be atop the list. Red means danger, action, warning; it is dynamism, evil, vibrancy and blood, the colour of life. Colours weave a rich tapestry of hermeneutics through history, their relation to meaning and mysticism has provoked a rich field of interpretation in psychology. Stripping away the meaning of a word and viewing it in its quantitative form allows the critic to see where discrepancies lie in individual works. The ability to draw conclusions from discrepancies between a text and its chronological peers gives greater significance to the arbitrary use of colour. Truthfully, it is never a requirement that colour be included in narrative and yet it is used so frequently that its absence would be profound. However, as I suggested earlier it is not the truth of the matter that is important but the curious, the difference between the world and the text that fundamentally and irrevocably excites our disbelief. When we consider the above chart and then contrast it to the actual appearance of colours in Ulysses we may notice a distinguishing feature that separates Joyce’s work from its diegetic world. Indeed, it is the fact that in Ulysses, Joyce’s masterfully meticulous novel, there appears to be more violet than orange, the discrepancy itself being 2%. But this exposes one of the hurdles researchers must face with quantitative tools. How much data is too much data? By using a dataset that begins in the 1700s and ends in 2000 certain liberties are taken by the computer when presenting the information. As the chart indicates there appears to be no point in which violet and orange ever have their roles reversed. But when we look closer at the years in which Joyce was writing, the NGram viewer can show a remarkable correlation within Joyce’s writing of Ulysses between 1914-1921. The chart below contains the same information as was used in the creation of the three-hundred-year chart but condensed, specifically, to the years Joyce was writing. The difference is perhaps underwhelming at first sight, during the year 1919 the dataset indicates that violet was actually reported more frequently than orange. This may lead us to assume that a disproportionate amount of Ulysses may have been written in that one year thus accounting for the oddity in Joyce’s choice of colour frequencies. We can use this initial basis to create a hypothesis that a disproportionate amount of Ulysses was written in 1919. Taking this hypothesis, we can search for correlating evidence within the text itself. Below is a ‘bubbleline’ graph taken from a Voyant tools analysis of the text. In it we can see where each use of violet or orange appears; Initially both colours occurred infrequently but later appear with a greater frequency. It would be easy to assume then that the second half of Ulysses was written predominantly in a way that alludes to the 1919 style of writing based on the many appearances of violet in the second half of the novel. However, whilst the appearance of the words in a text can indicate one reasonable hypothesis, their frequency in relation to one another juxtaposes this assumption and renders the analysis fraught with difficulty. Both colours are reported more frequently in the latter half of the novel, yet it is not within the second half of the novel where the style matches what can be said of the 1919 reliance on violet. The frequency in relation to each other supposes that the writing of a violet-heavy style occurs between the 3rd and 6th segments and returns in the final 10th segment. It would not be uncommon for authors to return and rewrite areas of a novel, especially one as large as Ulysses. This accounting for a change in style, however, alludes to something more curious which will be commented on in the concluding conclusion below.
In summation, though we have gleaned some interesting facts about the novel itself it has not elucidated any great truth about existence. Nor has it enhanced or developed any existing debates in either criticism or writings on Joyce. Yet for all this effort, it would not be without purpose to add some final destination to the paper (one which you may consider chance or the work of a well-researched topic). I’ll remind readers of Joyce’s ambiguous phrase regarding an initial style “I understand that you may begin to regard the various styles of the episodes with dismay and prefer the initial style much as the wanderer did who longed for the rock of Ithaca[K1] .” (1919). It would be humorous to assume that the initial style Joyce is commenting on would be his balance of orange and violet and that Harriet Shaw Weaver would be offended by such gross misrepresentations of 1904 by the style of 1919 writing which favoured an overly violet prose. But, surely, it is only a coincidence that he says as much in the one year that would possibly account for a change in style so massive as to recolour an entire city, if only by 2%.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
November 2019
Categories
|