In
response to my post providing a dozen links to posts of mine during the past
year about the dark Darcy of the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice, my friendly and polite skeptic Nancy, pithily
observed:
“I don't
think you will convince many that Darcy , KNIGHTLEY and Wentworth are
villains. “
To which I reply, at
least let's be clear on what I do wish
to convince anyone to believe. I claim that there are two Darcys, two
Knightleys, two Brandons, etc.—i.e., in each case, an Austen character is
either a hero or a villain—and both are plausible interpretations of their
characters, fully intended and skillfully created by Jane Austen. Each has a
full life, independent of the other, in their respective fictional worlds.
So, I am not trying to convince anyone
that the "normal" way of seeing these characters as heroes is wrong,
merely that this is not the exclusively correct interpretation. As I’ve said a
thousand times, Jane Austen was all about giving the reader a direct experience
of the ambiguities of human cognition and perception, the better to enable each
of us to teach ourselves how to be more flexible in interpreting our own real
lives. This is best exemplified by Jane
Austen’s famous comment to Cassandra about the recently published P&P in
January 1813:
“There
are a few Typical errors–& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make
the Dialogue more immediately clear–but ‘I do not write for such dull Elves as
have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'”
I have
long believed that many Austen scholars and lay Janeites have missed the irony undergirding
this passage, and have understood Jane Austen to sincerely mean that any immediate
unclarity of reference to characters in P&P was such a “typical error”. However
it was only today that I realized they are actually misreading her actual
syntax, as I will demonstrate, below.
The following
is a typical misreading by Anne Toner in her 2012 Persuasions article: “What we seem to see in this letter is both
anxiety and justification about missing said hes and shes, or rather anxiety
swiftly followed by justification. Austen's thoughts run from printer's errors
to a potential authorial misjudgment, but she concludes by shifting
responsibility to the less able of readers. Fascinatingly, Austen seems to be
grappling here with the risks she took with the dialogue of Pride and Prejudice, dialogue that would
become celebrated for its vivacious dramatic qualities.”
But
go back and carefully reread the above quotation. What Toner describes as “anxiety”
about “a potential authorial misjudgment” is NOT what Jane Austen actually wrote! She said there were a few
typical errors---by which we may all fairly infer she was referring to what we
today call “typos”---but then that dash, followed by an ampersand, was NOT Jane Austen calling the occasional
lack of clarity (in identification of speakers in dialogue) an error!
Parse
the syntax carefully, and you will see that Jane Austen was actually giving two
independent examples of instances in which she expected her readers to be sharp
elves applying ingenuity:
--- the first example was the lower-grade ingenuity
required in order to recognize and then mentally correct any typos caused
during the printing process;
---the
second was the higher-grade ingenuity required in order to figure out who said
what in certain passages, and to be ready for the possibility that Jane Austen deliberately wrote some of her dialogue
so as to be plausibly interpretable in two
different ways!
I.e.,
JA was not saying that unclarity was her own misjudgment, but was instead
saying it was her own deliberate outside-the-box authorial strategy!
I am also
certain that Jane Austen deliberately wrote this famous bons mot about her fiction to NOT be “immediately clear”, and
therefore so as to be easily misconstrued. In other words, she creates an
epigrammatical matrioshka, in which her saying itself invites the same sort of
misreading as she describes vis a vis her novel! She writes so that any careless
reader of her letter (especially one who did not accord her sufficient respect)
would jump to the erroneous conclusion that she was cheerfully acknowledging
that she was a careless editor of her own “darling child”, a novel which she
had revised so many times over 15 years before final publication. To which I
say, “Nonsense!”
This
is the same Jane Austen who put into Lizzy Bennet’s mouth the startling Zen
Buddhist aphorism I’ve so often quoted: “We all love to instruct, though we can
teach only what is not worth knowing.” Her comment to Cassandra is a perfect
example of the paradox of a sort of teaching what is worth knowing by a kind of
“not teaching”. In the act of navigating
the narrow channel between the Scylla of that dash and the Charybdis of that ampersand,
the alert reader teaches him or her self
how to read very carefully and flexibly. Such a careful flexible reader avoids the
temptation of lazy reading based on the assumption that Jane Austen was the
kind of writer who would have cheerfully accepted producing a slovenly product
with errors that first time readers (of much inferior intelligence to herself)
would immediately spot on first reading. To which I again say, “Nonsense!”
In
short, it requires one level of ingenuity to spot typos and to figure out the
correct word—that is merely the job of a skillful editor. But it requires an
entirely different, and higher level of ingenuity to spot deliberate
ambiguities in dialogue (and narration, for that matter) and then to discern both plausible “right” answers that a
sly, riddling author might have left behind to be found—like “courtship” and “Prince
of Whales” as (two out of several plausible) answers to the Chapter 9 charade
in Emma..
In checking
the archives of Janeites, I see that Elissa wrote the following relevant
comment in relation to the above quote from JA’s 1813 letter: “…this reminds me of Dr. Johnson's famous
quip when he was compiling his Dictionary "'Tis a dull mind, truly, that
can think of only one way to spell a word."
At
first, I got excited when I read that, as it appeared very promising as a common
ancestor of both Austen’s famous quote, and also of Scott’s line in Marmion. However, when I checked via various
online resources, I could not find that Samuel Johnson actually wrote this, or
anything close to it. If he did, I’d love it, but it doesn’t appear to be the case.
But he did address, in the Preface to his great and influential 1755 Dictionary,
the issue of spelling variation, not as a witty epigram, but in the following lengthy discussion:
“When
I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without
order, and energetic without rules. Wherever 1 turned my view, there was
perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated. Choice was to be
made out of boundless variety, without any
established principle of selection. Adulterations were to
be detected, without any settled test of purity, and modes of expression
to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical
reputation or acknowledged authority. …In adjusting the Orthography, which has
been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish
those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with
it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has
produced. Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in
themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human
things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be
increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language
has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the
lexicographer to correct or proscribe.
In
examining the orthography of any doubtful word, the mode of spelling by which it
is inserted in the series of the dictionary, is to be considered as that to
which I give, perhaps not often rashly, the preference. I have left, in the examples, to every author
his own practice unmolested, that the reader may balance suffrages, and judge
between us: but this question is not always to be determined by reputed or by
real learning; some men, intent upon greater things, have thought little on
sounds and derivations; some, knowing in the ancient tongues, have neglected
those in which our words are commonly to be sought…In this part of the work,
where caprice has long wantoned without control, and vanity sought praise by
petty reformation, I have endeavored to proceed with a scholar’s reverence for
antiquity, and a grammarian’s regard to the genius of our tongue. I have
attempted few alterations…”
If I
may attempt a very brief summary of Johnson’s elegant formulations re spelling,
he seems to be saying that his monumental effort in determining proper spelling
was an art as much as a science. And given his enormous influence, it is ironic
the case that from 1755 onward, his influence was so great that spelling in
English became more of a learning standardized spelling, rather than creating
it.
But…Elissa’s
quotation did not spring from her imagination-as best as I can ascertain from
Google, the actual quotation was spoken in a different form by some famous
figure (who was George Washington, or Andrew Jackson, or Horace Greeley, depending
on who was repeating it) ---it more or less went like this:
“I
didn’t suppose that you were one of those damned fools, who think that there is
only one way to spell a word.”
For
me, the significance of all of this is the same when it comes to an accurate
understanding of what Jane Austen meant about unclarity in her fictional
dialogue---we all need to break the chains of slavish rigid adherence to a
belief in objective, unitary meaning, and to use our imagination to see many
worlds of possibility of meaning, and then use ingenuity to make difficult and
subtle judgments about how to balance multiple perspectives, and proceed more
effectively in daily life.
And so,
to come full circle, I say that the ability to see both the shadow Darcy and the overt Darcy, and to recognize
that neither is the only “right”
answer, is the ingenuity I have worked hard to develop over the past 13 years,
and that I believe Jane Austen hoped her “darling children” would receive from
her best readers.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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