In Janeites & Austen-L, Diane Reynolds quoted from a recent online
article:
“I know we will never agree on this, but
I found this definition of mystery interesting in light of our ongoing debates
about Emma:
"I once heard someone say that at
the heart of every good story is a mystery, and I’ve spent a lot of time
thinking about what that statement means. At face value, it’s ridiculous. There
are romances, horror stories, westerns, fantasies, crime dramas, and a dozen
other genres in addition to mysteries, but for the moment, let’s put those
definitions aside and think about the problem a bit more abstractly. What’s a
mystery? It’s a puzzle. And what’s a story? It’s a series of events that
unravel in an interesting way. So, where do they intersect? Well, you need a
puzzle to keep a story unraveling in an interesting way. If you know what’s
going to happen, when, and why, then it’s probably not being told well, which
is to say it lacks that puzzle—that mystery—that forms the heart of every good
story."
Diane then commented:
“Of course, we do, on one level we do
what is going to happen in Emma, almost from the first pages: she
and Mr. Knightley are going to get married, but it's all the other things that
Emma--and we as readers-- miss, the mystery of Frank and Jane that's not
revealed to the end of the book, that keeps us coming back for more. And as I
write Frank and Jane, I can't help but think this story might point to the deep
hidden friendship (and I mean nothing more than that) between the real Jane and
the real Frank.”
First, bravo, Diane, on your brilliant
catch about the parallel between the fictional and the real Frank and Jane – I
do believe that is significant on more than one level, particularly because it
really fits with my notion that Frank C. and Jane F. really are biologically
related, as half-siblings, with different mothers but sharing the prolific Mr.
Woodhouse as amnesiac papa!
Second, of course you know I have for a
decade and a half been firmly in the camp of those who see Emma as
sitting at the apex of literary mystery, holding a perch right alongside
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 25 years ago, PD James famously
identified Emma as a detective story without a murder – and,
as I’ve noted, it’s not clear whether she added that parenthetical because she
had recently read Leland Monk’s 1990 scholarly article “Murder She Wrote”, in
which Monk suggested that Frank Churchill had indeed murdered his imperious
aunt (an insight which, when I first heard that in early 2005, catalyzed my
understanding of the entire shadow story of Emma!)
But you get to the heart of the deeper
meaning of the mysteries of Emma,when you rightly take a conceptual
leap out of the straitjacket of thinking literary mystery must be confined to
detective fiction. I’ve been saying for a very long time that Jane Austen’s
deepest, most passionate agenda as a fiction writer, was epistemological, not
literary. I.e., I believe she saw herself as a practitioner of a kind of
literary Zen, seeking in a myriad of subtle ways to surprise and jolt readers
into recognizing their (our) inherent human proclivity to treat our own
subjective perceptions and assumptions as if they were objective facts. She
understood, as have great thinkers from the Buddha to modern constructivist
philosophers and psychologists, that we do not merely registering “reality”,
like an inanimate camera lens. Isherwood’s famous title notwithstanding, we
humans are not cameras, our eyes do not register the world, they are subjugated
to the subjective constructions of the world that our minds create. Knightley’s
recall of Cowper’s poetic line in that regard is not a one-off reference to his
attempt to pierce the mystery of Frank and Jane playing cryptic word games at
Donwell Abbey – it goes to the very heart and essence of the entire novel – as Adena
Rosmarin so aptly put it in 1986, Jane Austen turns us all into Emmas, daring
us to find a way to escape from Emma’s field of vision, and see what lies just
outside it.
Because, in the end, Jane Austen the
social psychologist knew that social life is a mystery – people mostly assume
that our snap judgments about others are accurate, only altering our judgments
when they smack us in the face, like Emma’s shocked epiphany in the Christmas
Eve carriage ride with Mr. Elton. But it’s not just snobbish young Emma who
falls victim to mistakes of this kind, it’s all of us, all of the time,
whenever we let down our vigilant self-monitoring. It’s just that we mostly
never find out about most of them, because the world does not bother to correct
them, so we never know all the times we are wrong. It’s human nature at its
most elemental, and Aunt Jane Austen, like Aunt Jane Marple, knew human nature
so well.
And as in Shakespeare’s most enigmatic
masterwork, the mystery is spread around liberally, including in the eponymous
protagonist of each. Not only is Emma a mystery, but Emma
(Woodhouse) is herself a multilayered mystery, above all a mystery to herself:
both in the conventional reading (she doesn’t realize that she loves Knightley
for 47 chapters), but also in my shadow story interpretation (she doesn’t
realize that she has been systematically manipulated by Knightley from the very
beginning of the novel, into eventually believing that she always loved
Knightley, when it was never the case until that moment).
And finally, not only is Emma a
mystery, what I find most mysterious, and most miraculous about it, is that its
mysteriousness is simultaneously so readily dissectable in so many interesting
ways, and yet that scrutability never seems to exhaust all the mysteries. All
that is required is to flip on the different lenses on Miss Bates’s magic
spectacles, take a fresh look at one of the characters, and a whole different
view presents itself to our mind’s eye. Because, as I and Diane have long
maintained, Miss Bates is also a deeply mysterious character, who is, most
significantly, Jane Austen speaking directly to the reader, like a kind of
constant chorus, whispering in the reader’s ear, if we will only listen to her
“yada yada yada” that is anything but that.
My wife and I have just ended a lovely
vacation in the Northeast U.S., our first trip back there together since we
moved out west to Portland nearly 3 years ago. Our trip included seeing two
dance recitals at Jacob’s Pillow, a visit back to my alma mater, Williams
College, during which we saw a new play at the famous summer theater there; and
also, at the suggestion of a couple of our great new Portland friends, a trip
to Mass MOCA in North Adams, just a short country road ride from Williamstown: http://massmoca.org/event/
As you can read in MOCA’s blurbs, it is
a wonderful example of a community turning abandoned industrial buildings into
exciting new centers of art and culture—but the most striking exhibit, for me,
was the installation by James Turrell, a true visionary, in which he somehow
taps into the mechanisms of the audience’s brains, in order to change our
visual perceptions, particularly of light and color. It reminded me immediately
of what Austen has managed to do with words on a page, most of all in Emma –
with Turrell, looking back out of the carefully constructed room at the
anteroom where we had been sitting just before, we watched the color of that
anteroom seem to change a half dozen times in less than 10 minutes, from orange
to green to yellow, etc – and yet, factually, we knew that the color of that
room did not change at all, as was reconfirmed to us within seconds of our
going back into the anteroom, as the rug changed colors as we looked. What
actually changed, inside our brains, were the patterns in which impulses
traveled through synapses governing the perception of color. And yet, the
changes seemed so real. For 10 minutes, Turrell turned us into
Emmas.
Emma is exactly that sort of magic “room”, in
which, by acts of imagination, we, Austen’s readers, can alter our point of
view, and read the same words on the page differently, changing the “colours”
of the characters –e.g., one minute seeing Harriet as a naïve simpleton, the
next as a calculating manipulator.
In short, the mystery of Jane Austen’s
genius can never be fully plumbed, because the mystery of the human mind can
never be fully plumbed – so, like Jeffrey Rush’s Henslow, let’s just celebrate
the mystery and thank our lucky stars that Jane left these six priceless
“installations” for us to inhabit, whenever we wish, for the rest of our lives!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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