“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.
Read MoreJane Austen's Fantasy
Jane Austen published “Persuasion” posthumously in 1817, which meant that the novel was composed by her in her late thirties, far beyond when she was likely to marry, but she seems still in her later years to have pined about having never managed to marry. She was, in fact, a maiden aunt, tending the children of relatives, which is just what Anne Eliot, the fictional heroine of “Persuasion” believes has begun to happen to her, nursing children and putting up with her whiny and self indulgent sister as best she can. Anne’s is a rather grim future, even if Jane seems to have gotten along with her real life sister. So Austen, so committed to the notion of bourgeois matrimony, as it includes both romance and children, crafted “Persuasion” as a fantasy about what might have been: how a lover she jilted comes back on the scene and after a while she and he reawaken their mutual sense that they were meant to be together, that they both had persistence in their mutual devotion despite the fact that people will persuade them to be otherwise and so lose several of their years before finding one another again. Anne gets everything: a suitor arises before she gets the man she wants, and even gets the childhood estate she wanted as the place where she and her new husband will live. What makes the story other than a silly girlie romance is the perspicacity whereby Austen looks into family dynamics and the context of the times that make what is happening to the characters’ individual lives. First off, however, is how harsh Austen is to the people in this last of her novels, much more so than was the case with other Austen figures who are also undeserving. Mr. Collins is a clown and so is so patently insufferable that he is amusing. Even Mr. Wickham, who is a cad, is discovered to be just what he is and so to be avoided or sent away, his main purpose is to let Darcy to be seen as how noble he is. But the people who surround Anne are dangerous and insufferable and deplorable and it is a wonder that Anne can follow through the crowds of ingrates and social climbers so as to find her own true love. The main setting for the romance of Anne and Frederick Wentworth is set in Bath, the fashion spa developed only recently in the 1770’s,where the wealthy live in what we would call a planned community of mostly grand apartments, as accompanied with musicals and shops. The poor are there only so as to provide service., as is the case with a modern ski resort. As in all of Austen’s novels, the pace races ever more quickly towards its ending, and Anne does so, going to see Frederick before he will leave and admit to him that she loves him even as he is trying to send him a letter admitting that he loves her, and so both of themselves proposing to one another, which is just a perfect thing. The anxiety comes from all those other people interfering, and most of them malicious, including a distant relative, a Mr. Eliot, who is told by another that he was a cad who wanted her title and would have had a mistress if he had married Anne. It would not seem that it was much too fit that Anne learned he was right to distrust Elliot, but Austen tends to do that, making who was good and bad all too certain rather than left murky, as happens when Mr. Wickham is not just an opportunist but a seducer and the good people overcome the bad rather than just do what they do while the particularly good people find one another. In “Persuasion”, there are so many bad people, and we have to sort out their kinds of badness. Jane is getting bitter.
Read More"2034" Is About The Past
I read a recently released future history novel about a naval conflict between the United States and China. “2034” was written by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavrides. The novel was entertaining even though it had very elementary skills at fiction writing and so provides a good sense of how elemental are the properties of fiction, that fiction is an enterprise that is pleasing in its basic idea, and so to be examined to find out just what that is. I think of it as “painting by the boxes” which was a pastime of some decades ago when people would use the paints provided by dabbing each of the thousand square boxes with the number designated in each square. The painter, not really an artist, found some satisfaction from completing the project. It was less demanding than doing a crossword puzzle. And what resulted was a picture that had the elements of painting, however rudimentary and mechanical was the process. The painting had color, texture, composition and emotional tone, which is what emerges from any painting even if there is little art that makes it deeply feeling or thinking. The same is true of this novel which alludes to the elements of the novelistic style rather than freshly or vividly engaging it as that of a distinctive accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, it also has a moral theme and a sense of war that at least reminds the reader of more significant fictional and real events and are worth noting because even people, including writers, also have takes on the military life and the history of nations that are worth observing because they render cliches rather than insights.
Read MoreApparant Meaning and Actual Meaning
Here is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
Read MoreMelodrama is a Major Genre
Melodrama is usually thought of as an inferior genre. It pits bad people against good ones, as if it were not a simplification to separate people in that way. Melodrama also has exaggerated emotions which people dwell on for much too long and present themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own lives, and so lose or lessen their dignity. Moreover, melodramatic plots are resolved by arbitrary intrusions of coincidence or derring do, when what ordinarily happens is that people work their way through circumstances and character. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is melodrama because his escape allows his hero to engage in a passion for revenge so as to exquisitely appreciate the suffering inflicted to make up for the suffering that has been caused, everyone drowning in their bad feelings, everyone, including the protagonist, a victim and also malevolent. This is the set of feelings that settle into the Nineteenth Century, supposedly because a more popular audience was not well enough educated to consider finer feelings, though one wonders whether the audiences for Greek tragedy were as elevated as the spectacles to which they attended.
Read MoreIshiguro's "Klara and the Sun"
Early blurbs about Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” sounded as if they would be disappointing. They promised the book to be about a clone who becomes like a human being or about the dire consequences of technology. Neither of these themes were to be the case even if Ishiguro’s earlier masterpiece, “Never Let Me Go” does show how a clone is recognized by the reader as having become human because one pair of them does find a family and one of the pair finds art by doing doodles. Rather than these themes becoming inevitable for the sci-fi universe, as when in “Blade Runner”, the robots, however short their life spans, have seen great experiences and so are the equivalent of humans, Ishiguro works to an opposite tack, which is to show how the clones, in this case the mechanical artificial intelligences, are of a very different kind of species, subject to their own initiatives and feelings, and the reader only gradually learns what is universal to all sentient species, including both humans and those not biologically based. This is a much deeper inspection into this particular sci-fi genre, in that it goes beyond showing creatures to be human like by showing what is natural to a species, any species, and so does the work that was done to Rousseau and others to find out what is the nature of human beings if they are shed of social conventions and left only with their most primitive or elementary sensations. Rousseau was the end of a century or so long experiment to find a bare bones psychology in Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke and Hume, the collection of them usually understood as contract theorists when what they were more importantly dealing with was philosophical anthropology, which meant the elementary origins of human emotions, that sequence overturned by Kant, who took up a critical stance, whereby he demonstrated what had to be there in actual rather than original life and society, because without these assumptions the world as it is wouldn’t make sense.
Read MoreJane Austen's Invention
I am afraid that I am going to stick to my guns, however much my view of romance is contrary to the long history of romance in world literature, I thinking that, Ovid and Chaucer to the contrary, love is understood until Jane Austen as it was with Dante’s Francesca and Paolo, who resided in the second circle of Hell because they were people separated by a mad passion from social life rather than integrated with one another and into society. Romance is not part of human nature and so there as long as there have been people. To the contrary, it was invented much more recently, even after the American and French revolutions. What Jane Austen invented in the second decade of the Nineteenth Century was that real romance meant that the couple would find their mutual devotion by coming to deeply understand their characters and would also find a way for the lovers to find the social situation that suited them and that the couple could emotionally prosper by being part of social life rather than isolated from it, which is also the idea that marriage counselors will say. This revolution was so powerful that the previous dispensation was suffused in its light even if Twentieth Century critics reinvent the Dante idea of love as the real meaning of love, but such are the avenues and lanes whereby cultural adaptations evolve, ever tracking back on themselves as they claim to be doing something new, as happens when politicians think they are inventing new ways to be free when they are repeating cliches of previous generations.
Read MoreShakespearean Excess
Among those authors that have contributed to “the great works of the Western imagination”, the position of Shakespeare is well known and assured, however much his plays require allowances that need not be granted to other authors, whether they work in drama or in poetry or in novels. Other great works are complete in themselves, benefiting from an exquisite unification of their parts though a generic device of the author’s own choosing. The device of a journey through hell and then purgatory and heaven supplies a unity for the stories Dante, the character, has told to him and the various awful settings in which those often first person narratives take place. Indeed, the device, the architecture of the afterlife, is the most memorable conceit the author Dante leaves us with, far more telling than the stories of major and minor miscreants and the poetry of the description of those people and places. For his part, Chaucer crafts tales that are gems of multilayered meanings and intersections of plot motifs and narrative devices, those arranged in a format, the journey of travelers, which need not strain for unity or overall dramatic structure, even if one can claim that, indeed, there is an arc in “The Canterbury Tales”, moving them, one might say, from concerns of everyday life to matters of the soul. Certainly, Milton is always full of his own Miltonic seriousness, clearly a presence that combines the author’s personality with a form for his artistic presentation. Mark Van Doren found this a weakness. Milton never gave you a breather, was always high minded. Van Doren liked Cervantes for taking time to provide bathroom breaks for his characters. I like the redactors of the Old Testament who never let on to whether their characters (Ruth, David, Joseph) ever themselves caught on to the complexity of their own motivations and their own situations. That is the unity of tone, more important than is the intermittent presence of God, that holds the narrative books of the Old Testament together.
Read MoreWhy Jane Austen Loves Romance
Love stories about the adventure of courtship and love are so popular, such a standard sub-genre of the genre of domestic histories, that people think it has always been the case. Yes, there are sexual and lustful couplings as well as fits of passion in the Bible and in Greek and Roman romance but there was something new that happened in the early Nineteenth Century, rightly beginning with what is called the Romantic Period, that does engage people with love and courtship as being a pivotal matter, as is elaborated by Goethe’s Werther, by Mozart’s trilogy of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Così Fan Tutti” and “Don Giovanni'', all dedicated to the idea that love was revolutionary in that it unsettled social relationships and also made love independent of ordinary social relationships, nevertheless until that time everyone understanding that people were still attracted to but opposed to the lovers in Dante because the two are entwined but wafted about by the currents of the wind, and so therefore not the right way to be. Jane Austen, for her part, is preoccupied in every one of her books with how people will create a marriage out of elective affinities, as Goethe put it, rather than for some other reason or to deal with some other subject so as to fill out a novel. Jane Austen could have written about the improvement of agriculture, as was indeed a social development in the area of which he lived as well as a theme of the time, or the state of politics, about which her mentor William Shakespeare had more than dabbled and whose contemporary perturbations, as with the Warren Hastings Impeachment, Austen had followed. But instead she did focus on this new found topic of romance, which just a few generations ago Samuel Johnson had only gingerly advanced the idea that people should consider how well they can get along with the people they marry rather than just the fact that they might carry with them property or wealth or social position. And here Jane Austen is presenting the aim of her stories as treating marriage as people so deeply emotionally involved with their spouses so as to be the be all and end all of their purposes in life, however much the pursuit of romantic happiness has to overcome many hurdles of disparate wealth or personality. The pursuit of happiness, that Eighteenth Century idea, had been limited, in the early Nineteenth Century, to the pursuit of romance. How did this happen to a person remarkably circumspect about the traditions of society and who embodied a Conservative political philosophy which led her to believe that people, like as not, were better off to marry to people of their own class rather than try to cross over as spouses with people of different social backgrounds?
Read MoreEmpiricism in "A Winter's Tale"
Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Read MoreShakespeare's Greatest Melodramas
The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
Read MoreThe High Victorian and The Late Victorian
The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.
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