Distant - Close Reading has a History

Why set distant and close readings off against each other?  Surely they can play together?  These oppositions seem relevant only those dreading the end of the humanities or those looking to join a revolution.  As I sit in bed reading a 731-page dissertation from the 1970s, which never got published as a book, I feel like an old scholar, huddled in his cold garret after midnight.  Digital media has not changed all the habits of intellectuals.  This is close reading as Edgar Allen Poe or Walter Benjamin understood it. 

For our digital eyes, this dissertation is a curious material object:  It is hand typed, neatly by a professional.  The footnotes are numbered 1,2,3 for each page separately so you could adjust the notes as you typed.  Now, if we insert a footnote, Word automatically renumbers all the rest.  In the 1970s, you confined your numbering to a single page, and even then if you forgot a footnote, you had to retype the whole page, which this author didn’t always do.  Instead he used a pen and White Out to cover his few mistakes.  

This now archaic work had to be ordered from the University of Chicago library directly.  There are no digital copies available.  It arrived as two four-inch thick volumes--heavier that anything you have read in decades.

In good old-fashioned, close-reading fashion, the dissertation analyses one long eighteenth-century book with the hopes of explaining how the Jesuits represented China.  Only a University of Chicago graduate student would cite such a vast array of sources.  If only we could channel through the many tomes the Jesuits produced on China, then compare them with works of the New World.  Distant reading promises to churn through writing systems like the hundreds of thousands of missionary letters written back to superiors explaining the strange territory and fascinating people they had been sent to save. 

Theodore Foss defended his dissertation in 1979.  The title, A Jesuit Encyclopedia for China: A Guide to Jen-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description ….De La Chine (1735) looks straight-forward enough, but what it covers is the eighteenth-century attempt to compile all the scholarly books and missionary reports sent by Jesuits from East Asia to Europe. Sitting in Paris, Du Halde’s job was to read everything on China and then to edit the Jesuit sources into respectable publications.  Du Halde was the super-reader of a vast array of writing.  He came closest to becoming a machine reader that the eighteenth-century could produce.  All the while he had to keep his good style, rhetorical composure and diplomatic sense in selecting and revising which letters, which books would be recapitulated in the massive tomes he produced.

If eighteenth-century Jesuits could have used computers for running their global network, they would have been the best IT guys in Europe.  The Republic of Letters would have run on fiber optic cable.  Instead of the NSA, Rome’s Office of Propaganda Fide would have done large-scale searches looking for heretical, rather than terrorist, messages—all without disturbing the religious life of the faithful. Distant reading, in other words, has been a humanist dream for centuries.  It has always been compatible with close reading.  The Jesuit’s built their vast network, after all, to combat the heretical appropriations of the Bible.  

Ted Underwood explained at the last MLA and in his blog that distant reading allows us to more accurately defining the contours of a discourse.  Rather than taking Foucault’s word for it, we could have statistical analysis of a discourse, showing how Jesuits defined heresy, idolatry, natural theology, and science.  We could follow trends over at least 200 years to discover previously unknown patterns in European relations with the world.  As has been pointed out often, no single person can comb through the Jesuit correspondences, not even ten University of Chicago graduate students.  Thus, distant reading allows us to gather data together in order to better understand a single text.  One basic assumption of immanent analysis, as Adorno called it, was that the further you burrowed into the text, the more you learned about society as a whole.  This is the magic turn of mediation, wherein the microcosm transforms into the macrocosm.   

Mediation, the conversion of one media into another, the poem into the cosmos, has been a dream of humanists for centuries.  Distant reading helps bring the two poles together.  There is no need to abandon one epistemology for the other, rather we should think about how to combine them in our own reading practices.