The best statistical graph ever drawn ... Charles Joseph Minard's 'carte figurative' of Napoleonic misadventures in Russia
"Come and look at my gorgeous bubble graph." How there's an offer you don't get every day! Not unduly weighed down by the woes of the market, the accountant-in-my-life, leaving aside fiddling with his abacus, has indeed produced some lovely graphs lately. I don't mean to take the proverbial here. Although there are only so many graphs a girl can admire, the recent proliferation of statistical displays in the living room has opened up a whole new world to me. Even an economics numbskull such as myself could not help but be impressed by the sheer beauty and graphic impact of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Dubbed the "da Vinci of data" by the New York Times, Tufte is an evangelist for excellence in statistical graphics, excellence defined by "complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency". The graph that Tufte suggests "may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn" hits you both intellectually and emotionally, its epic tale indeed told immediately, clearly and precisely. Charles Joseph Minard's "carte figurative" of the fate of Napoleon's army in Russia is described by EJ Marey as "seeming to defy the pen of the historian with its brutal eloquence". A superb example of time-space storytelling, two lines simply denote the "in-out" of the French troops. But the quantitative depletion of those lines as they progress across the time and space of the graph points to the human catastrophe that enveloped the French army in its journey through Russia.
Minard gives us a page plot of history as it happened. Plot is an obvious link between a visual pattern depicting change over time and a literary rendering of those changes in stories. The novel is the place where plot is to the fore. JK Rowling "plots Potter" on a time grid. James Joyce was a data-design obsessive, his father cracking the joke that "if that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he'd sit, be God, and make a map of it". The fruit of this obsession can be seen in the 1930 diagram printed by Stuart Gilbert in collaboration with Joyce - a diagram that brings gasps of horror from the mouths of literature undergraduates confronted with the narrative analogies in Ulysses.
Whether a year in the life of a schoolboy wizard or a day in the life of a Dublin flaneur, time is of the essence in the novel's plot. And time is a vital link between the modern novel and the modern graph. It was not until the second half of the 18th century that "statistical graphics - length and area to show quantity, time-series, scatterplots, and multivariate displays - were invented". Tufte can find only "one mysterious and isolated wonder in the history of data graphics" of a time-plotted series before the late 1700s. At the very point in history where the modern novel takes shape, change across time comes to be the object of quantitative enquiry and depiction.
Change is the engine of both the modern graph and the modern novel. The graph and the novel are modern narrative forms, almost inconceivable before the industrial revolution and age of enlightenment had brought about a shift in our relationship with time and history. Put simply, in the 18th century, the world and history stopped being things that happened to us or around us: we become agents in our own history. When the graphical pioneer William Playfair plotted out the price of wheat compared to labour from 1565 to 1821, his aim was not to show a divine constant but to illustrate human change: "the main fact deserving of consideration is, that never at any former period was wheat so cheap, in proportion to mechanical labour". When Laurence Sterne drew a linear graph to illustrate the narrative's progress towards the end of Tristram Shandy, he explicitly plotted all the minor diversions and idiosyncrasies of an individual's life against the forward thrust of a bigger narrative: "as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state."
In the novel, those "ins and outs" of life come alive against a background of historical change. Minard gives us the wide sweep of the "in-out" historical movement of Napoleon's army. What War and Peace gives us is the "in and outs" of individual consciousness living through every peak and trough of Minard's graph. And the strength of both is that they tell it to us straight.
