Longue Duree

By Harry van Vliet on 22 July 2011

There is a dominant tendency in historical, literary and theatre research to focus on ‘highlights’, be it ‘important’ events, writers, actors, plays or theatre patrons. History in ten chapters (or 10 ½ as Julian Barnes did), the fifty most important plays, or the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, are just a few examples. The current trend of making a canon on every possible topic is just one expression of this more general infectious. After the beta and gamma canon, the canon of journalism has already seen the daylight, and we must seriously consider the possibility of someone pencilling down a canon of crossmedia, oh horror….

Obviously a selected view on history (a canon of two-hundreds novels for nineteenth century Britain is only one per cent) gives a selected view on issues researched. An approach that considers the complete ‘corpus’ of texts, plays or whatever. Recently Karel Dibbets, historian and brother in arms with regard to our program on building a digital infrastructure for (historical) cultural events, gave me a copy of Franco Moretti’s book Graphs, Maps, Trees. In this book Moretti follows exactly this line of thinking: he started counting, graphing, and mapping works of literature instead of analysing concrete individual works. Using maps from geography and trees from evolutionary theory. And if he zooms in on a novel it is done through ‘distant reading’: a deliberate reduction and abstraction into shapes, relations, structures, forms and models. It is refreshing, insightful and fun to read.

Moretti finds cycles of 25 to 30 years for genres to come to the forefront and disappear, the reason seems unclear but it is there. It is no coincidence that the name of Braudel pops up: “Traditional history, with its concern for the short time span, for the individual and the event, has long accustomed us to the headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative…The new economic and social history puts cyclical movement in the forefront of its research…large sections of the past, ten, twenty, fifty years at a stretch…Far beyond this…we find a history capable of traversing even greater distances…to be measured in centuries…the long, even the very long time span, the longue duree.” (Braudel in Moretti, p. 13). In a soon to be published book on theatre history we will also present evidence of these patterns of longue duree in theatre audience visits. It took more than twenty years to gather the data but its reward is in beautiful patterns, with the collateral damage of the falsification of long held hypothesis on cultural participation.

tagged with: braudel, patterns, theatre

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