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A Digital Humanities Approach to Narrative Voice in The Secret Scripture: Proposing a New Research Method

This paper is situated within debates surrounding modes of “close” and “distant reading” [Moretti 2000] as they are played out in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies. It proposes an alternative digital humanities approach to the study of world literature, advocating new methods of close comparative reading rather than the mode of “distant reading” endorsed by Franco Moretti and Alan Liu [Liu 2012]. Specifically, the research method proposed here is focused on a close reading of the novel The Secret Scripture (2008) by Irish author Sebastian Barry, with comparative reference to Pat Barker’s well-known war novel Regeneration (1997). Through the development and implementation of a digital humanities research method which facilitates new forms of digital literary analysis, we demonstrate that close reading and digital humanities can too be “practicing partners” in a way that serves to advance work in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies. Introduction: World Literature, Distant Reading and the Digital Humanities Since the publication of Franco Moretti’s controversial essay “Conjectures on World Literature” [Moretti 2000], “distant reading” has become a buzzword among scholars in the literary studies community. Distant reading, understood in opposition to “close reading” is, according to Moretti, a method of analysis which “allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems” [Moretti 2000, 51]. In tracing patterns as they occur across large corpora of texts, Moretti’s methodology is increasingly dependent on quantitative research methods and data visualization techniques. Owing to the close affinity between Moretti’s distant reading and these methods, Alan Liu has recently suggested that the concept has brought the digital humanities into closer proximity with the traditional humanities discipline of literary studies: “the digital humanities are now what may be called the practicing partner of distant reading” [Liu 2012, 492–3]. Interestingly, however, few literary scholars have acknowledged or addressed the digital humanities methodologies underlying Moretti’s concept.[1]Similarly, few digital humanists consider distant reading within the context it was first proposed, namely, within the field of world literature. Subsequently we find that while members within both the literary and the digital humanities communities are purportedly addressing the same concept, they are doing so in quite different ways and from still divergent standpoints. This paper aims to bring together the two strands of these debates and by doing so to advance current understandings of the relationship between digital humanities and the literary practices of distant and close reading — the latter practice, we argue, being too quickly jettisoned within recent studies. Taking a work of contemporary Irish fiction,The Secret Scripture [Barry 2008], as a case study, we describe the evolution and implementation of an innovative new research method, incorporating digital humanities and traditional literary methodologies which enable an enhanced form of close reading of the novel within a world literature framework. Situating our research within the debate between modes of close and distant reading, we focus on what Moretti has identified as the element of literary texts for which modes of distant reading are unable to account, i.e.“local narrative voice” [Moretti 2000]. We describe the development