Persuasion by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion--what kind of titles are these? A fun game can be played by trying to turn other novels into Jane Austen Titles: The Guermantes Way becomes Precocity, Don Quixote becomes Fancy and Fallacy. A few titles can stay just how they are: Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, True Grit, Elective Affinities, etc. These are already "Austenian."

It has been remarked that every novel could plausibly be titled Lost Illusions, and this is particularly true of Austen's work. The romanticism of sensibility, the autonomy of pride, the reflexive self-valuation of prejudice, and the pragmatism of persuasion--all are so many illusions to be lost. (It has been remarked that the two main characters of Pride and Prejudice think that they are the actors in the novel Dignity and Perception.)

But then, has anyone ever stood up from a Jane Austen novel and, clapping their hands, felt the title to represent a lesson learned? "From now on, I will be less easily persuaded [sensible, prejudiced]--that's settled." [But there are novels that we put down having decided to change our lives.] Austen seems rather to be evaluative: the only way to enjoy her novels is as affirmations of values we already share.

I have always been appalled when anyone has expressed a nostalgia for Austen's world. It seems to me rather like a circle of hell: socially impoverished, ignorant, narrow, dominated by idle chatter and petty envy, a kind of barely-subdued Hobbesian war of all against all. Malice is everywhere; solitude is forever besieged.

The law that we must refer to Jane Austen as "witty" reminds me that we never apply that adjective to someone we like. It is impossible that Austen would like all of her readers back, so to speak. What her titles announce is not that the books are "love stories," but that they are records of mistakes, mortifications. Elizabeth Bennet is mistaken about nearly everything (Catherine Moreland, too). Emma Woodhouse progressively isolates herself from the good will of the community she lords over. Anne Elliot has fucked everything up years before her novel begins.

Anne Elliot is shuffled around England like so much leased furniture, ignored by her immediate family, broken-hearted and regretfully withdrawn from the one passion of her life, alone in nearly all of her judgments. No one can even be bothered to recollect her past, which they stomp over in careless gossip. Here is a passage where insensitive, amnesiac, mindless social speculation treads down the one defining regret of Anne's life. It is only after this passage that we learn that Wentworth (the curate's brother) is Anne's former fiancé, and can put back into her thoughts the precise agony of overhearing this frivolity and being herself the only one with the right word.

"'[The new tenant] is sister to a gentleman who did live amongst us once; she told me so herself: sister to the gentleman who lived a few years back at Monkford. Bless me! what was his name? At this moment I cannot recollect his name, though I have heard it so lately. Penelope, my dear, can you help me to the name of the gentleman who lived at Monkford: Mrs Croft's brother?' 

But Mrs Clay was talking so eagerly with Miss Elliot, that she did not hear the appeal. 

'I have no conception whom you can mean, Shepherd; I remember no gentleman resident at Monkford since the time of old Governor Trent.' 

'Bless me! how very odd! I shall forget my own name soon, I suppose. A name that I am so very well acquainted with; knew the gentleman so well by sight; seen him a hundred times; came to consult me once, I remember, about a trespass of one of his neighbours; farmer's man breaking into his orchard; wall torn down; apples stolen; caught in the fact; and afterwards, contrary to my judgement, submitted to an amicable compromise. Very odd indeed!' 

After waiting another moment-- 

'You mean Mr Wentworth, I suppose?' said Anne. 

Mr Shepherd was all gratitude. 'Wentworth was the very name! Mr Wentworth was the very man. He had the curacy of Monkford, you know, Sir Walter, some time back, for two or three years. Came there about the year 1805, I take it. You remember him, I am sure.' 

'Wentworth? Oh! ay,--Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.' 

There is nothing to decode here, no brilliant close-reading is possible. It simply has not been worth the time of the others to enter into, to recall, the central event of another person's existence. And this is all Austen is, is showing us these facts about selfhood.

Being a self in Austen is not something that one will be thanked for; it requires "resources for solitude," i.e. interests and concerns that have been forged in privacy; some compass of taste and decency not to be pulled out of deep currents by a moment's distraction; and, tautologically perhaps, being a self is a case of "like recognizing like." The vapid, pointless non-entities that rattle their jaws through the entire Austen corpus, may be morally evaluated on entirely other standards--but put two serious-minded fans of Byron in a room together, and they will find each out and recognize their value over the others.

As in the world, having a personality is something with infinite pitfalls (not only pride, prejudice, and sensibility--or Emma's insensitivity--the Crawfords, Wickham, and William Elliot are more or less charming sociopaths), something that by and large socially we have to do without (the workplace is a great testimony to the rarity of personalities). Austen's task is to work out all the permutations of having-a-personality, being-a-self, which (I repeat) is far from a moral value, indeed usually collides with morality at some point. The question is how to be a self with duration, depth, and self-reflection while surrounded by an incessant, unperceiving din of clichés and misinformation. How to be recognized (in a Hegelian way, by another one like me)? How to not tip over into solipsistic megalomania? And finally, how do we live with the inane, the careless, the tasteless?

To recap: Austen's world is not an idealized "period piece" or decorative stage for the unfolding of romance. It is a howling bestiary, or a bawling nursery of self-enforcedly one-dimensional mental infants, in which love and friendship are just names for the rare collision with another real, substantial self.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Like "The Window," the celebrated first section of To the Lighthouse, Solzhenitsyn's novella walks us through a single day of inconsequential yet highly detailed activity. Laying bricks, waiting in line, being counted at roll call, hiding tools and spoons from the guards... busy work. None of it could possibly add up to anything. And yet Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is riveted to these mundane, dysfunctional concerns from before dawn until just before sleep. The free moment is hoarded like so many crusts of bread: "Shukhov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once, for the next ninety minutes, until they assembled for work, belonged to him, not to the authorities." By contrast, the empty activity in Woolf's novel is performed inattentively, always serving as an instance for reflection, for diving into oneself. Knitting a stocking is only a cover for contemplating the fragility of our knowledge of other persons, the glimpses of our hidden selves that dart and vanish like wisps.

The "story" is crowded with paths not taken on this particular day, but which will be taken the next day, the next year. The squad will get sent out to work at the (colder) new settlement; this day, they dodge that fate. Another day, Shukhov's bread will get stolen; this day, it is still in his bunk when he returns. What suspense there is resides in these moments, potential turning-points where discovery, betrayal, or a brutal tenure in the guardhouse, threaten. But this is a story of "many strokes of luck," "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day." No decisions are made, no plans laid, none of Aristotle's reversals and recognitions.

In an essay on Solzhenitsyn, Georg Lukács compares One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Hemingway's The Old Man in the Sea and Conrad's Typhoon, as novellas which can only present a restricted scope of life and time. In Hemingway, everything is touched with the aura of the universal, every struggle, every wrinkle, every loyalty stands for something more than just that thing: Struggle, Age, Loyalty. Conrad's novella, while also a "trial at sea," does not give us an allegory of the human condition. It is a character study and an adventure yarn.

Solzhenitsyn's book is much closer to the latter. "No trace of symbolism is to be found in Solzhenitsyn's presentation," says Lukács. "[Solzhenitsyn has given us] a microcosm of everyday life as a whole under Stalin. He has achieved this by grappling imaginatively with the question of what demands that age made on human beings; who succeeded in remaining human and preserving his dignity and integrity as a man; who was able to stand firm and how was this achieved; in what characters the substance of humanity was left intact or was twisted, shattered, destroyed..."

Indeed, the book is not titled A Day in the Life of a Prison Camp, but is concerned with an individual, suffering person. What do we think of this Ivan Denisovich? It is not enough to say that he is an "everyman," a representative of the person who kept his head down during the Stalinist era and who survived--because that is not a "person" but an ideology. It is equally no use to write, as does Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Introduction to my edition, "To what extent is Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn himself? To a great extent, but he, unlike Ivan Denisovich, created a record from his experiences."

Unlike the characters of Stalinist "socialist realism," which Lukács tells us were "puppets contrived for the purpose" of providing "glosses on official directives," who "could not be allowed to have any past, [but] only official dossiers," Solzhenitsyn is presumed to have given us here a set of living, breathing figures, emerging from a historical word, surviving in the midst of complicated demands on their being and consciousness.

I confess that my taste is for characters who are self-conscious articulators of their experience, who soliloquize, debate, and grapple: Antigone, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Heathcliff, Raskolnikov, Isabel Archer, Socrates, Tristram Shandy. Shukhov is much more like a Robinson Crusoe. The most riveting passages in the novella are when someone else is talking: the squad leader Tiurin about his past life, the filmmaker Tsezar about Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and finally Alyosha the Baptist about prayer.

It is hard to show a character without delving into his thoughts, without putting him into conversation with others, without showing a decisive moment in his life, without showing him over time. Solzhenitsyn needlessly handicaps himself (take as a contrast the prison camp film The Human Condition, which over and over climaxes in heightened moments of moral choice). In the most successful pages of the book dealing strictly with work, the reader follows breathlessly the necessities and spatial reasoning of Shukhov as he sizes up a problem (Robinson Crusoe can also be fascinating).

What are Shukhov's values? Not confrontation, criticism, ambition, nostalgia, the purchasing of comfort, camaraderie, or the hope of a projected future. It is easy to define him negatively like that. But this is Solzhenitsyn's method:

"Now he didn't know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch--how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown bored with counting. And then it became clear that men like him wouldn't ever be allowed to return home, that they'd be exiled. And whether his life would be any better there than here--who could tell? Freedom meant one thing to him---home. But they wouldn't let him go home."

This is by a wide margin the longest passage where Ivan thinks about the future, and the conflict is abruptly dropped and met with a shrug. After all, this isn't an immediate problem for tomorrow. So even this facet of Ivan's character is a response to the exigencies of his world. Too true, but I still want to say, "He just isn't a compelling or strongly-drawn character."

There is something to be said for aesthetic failures (e.g. the "man without qualities") being elevated to principles of composition. For instance, one doesn't criticize Andy Warhol for the flatness of his colors. I'm sure this blog will meet this issue coming and going. But I also suspect that, even at a mere 139 pages, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a candidate for Dr. Johnson's remark about Paradise Lost, that "None ever wished it longer."

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

It was announced last year that Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would be reissued in a color-coded format, with the various timelines and streams of consciousness differentiated and highlighted. I am sure this was a fun task for the editors, but the published version would seem to promise all the fun of a pre-assembled jigsaw puzzle.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse could be approached in the same way as Faulkner's text (and Joyce in essence begged for this fate): something to be annotated, winnowed, and re-assembled, with a cooing awe that Woolf could take a mundane series of events--children running on the beach, a walk into the village, a boating excursion--and splice them into multiple temporalities and subjectivities.

All the time, our annotator--armed with colored highlighters, timeline charts, and a determination to sort out every utterance and retrospection--must imagine that at the bottom of all of this intricacy lies the work's imbricated, deepest secrets.

On the contrary, the fragmented, subjective style itself already is the meaning of the novel. The prose can be cleanly divided into description, performed action, dialogue, on one hand; and internal consciousness (the "real" action) on the other hand. The soul and the world can be sifted out into different sentences in the same paragraph.

In saying this, one has already arrived at the profundity of Woolf's worldview, as in the observation by Mrs. Ramsay of "the discrepancy--that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing." Self-consciousness for Woolf is what is deepest, most individual, a self-communion, a "free," "invisible" "core" without attachments. Our real being-in-the-world is an inauthentic "apparition." (This is basically Henri Bergson's philosophical dualism: the inner is free, unlimited, creative, temporal; our external lives are confined, determined, and ruled by natural laws.) At the same time, the entire novel is a document of the difficulties in living this way, of accessing this self, of having knowledge of those other selves outside of our own.

Here is a passage about Mr. Ramsay, the moderately successful philosopher who has married an extraordinarily beautiful woman, has eight children, and surrounds himself with adoring pupils, respected scientists and poets, at the Scottish beach house that gives the novel its setting. Notice how Mr. Ramsay's faults (vanity, sensitivity, pompousness) run together with his own painful awareness of them and the central fact of his life, that "he had not done the thing he might have done." His very (trivial, social) dishonesty is couched in (self-lacerating, inner) honesty.

"He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time."

Woolf's writing, like George Eliot's, situates acts and character. Minds are contextualized, their processes of feeling exposed down to the root. Resentment is exculpated, connections drawn. Self-consciousness, just in being one of many ongoing threads, is partial, ridiculous, vain, miscomprehending and miscomprehended.

What is left over from all this, then, other than the cliché that one must "walk a mile in another person's shoes"? (Note here the contrast with a Dostoyevsky novel, where the endless monologue of the central characters only renders them more opaque, more mediated by the desires of others, and framed by the red herring of spurious ideological "context."

What is left over, in Woolf's account, are what she (elsewhere) calls "moments of being."  The spinster-artist Lily Briscoe is struck at several moments by the way that transitory, everyday moments will get transfixed by meaning, dipped into symbolism, estranged from their surroundings and made to stand for more-than-themselves. Here is one such moment of being:

"The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, 'Life stand still here'; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere [the artistic] Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape."

This aesthetic, timeless, symbolical eruption of meaning is an escape from the quotidian and corresponds to the invisible core of self that Woolf prizes. Once Lily is "drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people," *then* she can face "this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on here" in the act of painting. Her word is "emergence," or "the thing itself before it had been made anything."

But perhaps the opposite is truer: what’s hard and rare is for us to see things as they really are, as mere physical items in the inventory of the world. For things are always already “more” than themselves. Our first encounters are fundamentally deja-vu. Other people’s words, and other meanings, are attached to everything in advance. Woolf makes things too easy on herself by seeing the symbolic as something rare.

Woolf writes that "intimacy itself is knowledge." Ah, but intimacy is hard. At a certain point, our failures are just who we are. The promises of youth don't take place, resentments set in. The self, in its very form, doesn't find expression in the world. It is hard to be a person without smothering others, reducing their concerns, drawing in upon oneself. Between the messiness of intimacy, of death, of banal getting-through, and the aesthetic, momentary conjuration of "life stand still," stands the entire problem of life.