Seeing Double: a Response to Dan Sinykin

Ted Underwood's Distant Horizons is a book that concerns continuity and courts consensus. That sets the tone just right for this response, as there is much in Dan's review with which I agree. Here is the first point that I would echo: Distant Horizons is a fantastic book. The adjectives that Dan applies — "masterful," "lucid," and "precisely tuned" — suggest no obligatory hyperbole; they capture the book exactly. Underwood's commitments and proclivities are not my own; and yet I'd barely change a sentence of this book.

Underwood's basic argument, as Dan notes, is that computational modeling, and perspectival modeling, in particular, can offer new perspectives on literary history. He finds that when we focus less closely on relationships between small stretches of literary history, like 1900-1930, and focus more broadly on a longue durée, like 1800-2000, we notice the continuities that undergird apparent change. In this respect, Underwood challenges the dominance of a "conflictual model" of literary history, whereby new phases replace old ones. He counters with the logic of "even more so," whereby existing tendencies intensify.1 The two perspectives merge into an ever more holistic picture, fortified by this process of "parallax."2

For Dan, there is some irony in Underwood's appeal to the non-conflictual model of literary history, because he embraces that very model — "we used to do x, but now we'll do y" — in his own discussion of literary critical history: he overestimates how seriously we've been taking literary historical periods, and thereby how much of a departure his own account entails. That's a good point; when one takes a position like Underwood's, it's hard to avoid some such irony. But I'd hate for it to distract from the broader fact: that Underwood's book is so very good — at least for me — because of how thoroughly it embodies its own "anti-conflictual" model of literary critical "parallax" at almost every level of argumentation.

This begins on page two. Here, Underwood does not assert a stark, "conflictual" division between his own work and that which came before. Rather he dispenses with scholarly self-positioning: "I will be less concerned to trace academic genealogies than to describe specific discoveries that are redrawing our map of the last 300 years of English literary history."3 When I read a sentence like this, I hear the sound that plays in soft-drink ads, after the can's tab pops and someone takes a drink: a brief, relieved exhalation. A few pages later, Underwood offers a more barbed iteration of the same idea: "Endless rebranding is tiresome."4 There it is again. Another sigh-worthy sentence.

In place of stark conflict, Underwood embraces parallax: a process that elegantly integrates distinct perspectives. Put another way, Underwood argues like a disciplinary philosopher: rather than stake out a strong position and then refuse to budge in the face of opposition, he allows counterarguments to refine his initial hypotheses. This iterative approach to position building makes each of his chapters formidable and inviting. We get the bird's eye view of its benefits when, in the book's conclusion, he explains how experimental results, in order to make it into the book, had to be capable of persisting through scrutiny. Broad historical trends had to be more than statistically significant; they had to be overwhelmingly apparent.

Here's another satisfying sentence: "At the end of this book, after exploring a new scale of description, I will weigh its inherent interests against the price humanists might have to pay for this expansion of their horizons."5 When Underwood addresses debates about whether or not literary critics should use computational tools, he again builds a position capable of incorporating and accommodating its opposition. Of course, literary critics have long prided themselves on their capacities to undo binaries. But this intellectual process is conceived of, too often, as one of merely muddying the waters. In place of the common operation of "troubling" or vexing fixed oppositions, Underwood, more precisely, makes an argument that integrates both sides.

There are exceptions to this rule. Dan rightly notes that one of Underwood's positions, here, stands out for its idiosyncratic extremity. For many, literary criticism is distinguished from other disciplines by the unique type of knowledge that it produces: knowledge of the subtleties of life and language, of ambiguity and paradox, of plurality and diversity. For Underwood, literary criticism's only truly distinguishing quality is its focus on objects of study that produce or generate pleasure. He writes: "I am only willing to separate literary history from social science by bluntly emphasizing literary interest and enjoyment."6

I agree with Dan's apt diagnosis, that Underwood, here, "exaggerate[s]." Certainly, Underwood is right to broach the topic of pleasure. Sometimes, literary critics interested in distinguishing our discipline speak as if, like linguists, sociologists, or philosophers, we exclusively produce propositional knowledge about language, social life, or the broader world. In that case, it will be difficult to distinguish our findings. We are hardly, as Underwood notes, the only academics who understand "the subtleties of language," the "constitutive paradoxes of thought," or the "ethical consequences of human diversity." Anyone interested in defending our discipline as unique may need to consider, as Underwood does, that our uniqueness lies less in the type of knowledge that we contribute to the pool of human wisdom, and more in the process through which we produce that knowledge: by engaging with aesthetic objects.

But to suggest that what it is to engage with aesthetic objects is simply to experience enjoyment is much too simple. I've never much gone in for that Kantian argument that all aesthetic experience can be described as a form of "pleasure." The experience of reading, as Underwood himself acknowledges, is far too varied to be summed up by a single slogan — it can be pleasing or infuriating; it can be rationalist or emotive; it can concern the particular or the general; it can force encounters with difference or speak to members of an arcane community. The truth may be that literary experience, or, the experience of reading carefully wrought accounts of human (or nonhuman) life, is defined not so much by its radical singularity, as by its lack thereof: the book contains the world, and the world contains it all.

Underwood closes by reassuring those who still fear the digital — and he addresses us directly — that our discipline, too, can contain it all. At best, he reassures us, only 2% of scholars will obtain the skills necessary to do advanced quantitative work. There's something uncanny about this mode of address: Underwood reassures us of the difficulties that the expansion of distant reading's domain must face, even while laying out an agenda for how to overcome them — how, for example, to introduce quantitative tracks into English PhD programs. When he comforts anxious readers with the soothing reminder, that "disciplines change slowly," it can feel like the physician's palliative: Don't worry. This won't hurt at all. For those who still feel some lingering fear, this much may be true: that Underwood's persuasive force, his stylistic verve, his rare combination of elegance and analytic rigor, are the scariest things of all.

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Tess McNulty is a PhD candidate at Harvard, working on contemporary literature and digital culture.

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