Cornel West on Power & Freedom in America today & in Jane Austen’s novels

Cornel West, who has been a leading African-American advocate for social justice for many years, is in the news again today, as he so often is when he’s needed because of a tragic denial of racial justice in our society:

https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%22Cornel%20West%22&src=typd

I wish I were in NYC, I’d go to hear him speak tonight in that church on W 86^th Street, but I do urge anyone reading this who lives in NYC to go. He is a dynamic, brilliant and poetic public speaker, and his is a voice and mind I’d want to hear on this, the most important, pressing social issue in America today---the unending Gothic nightmare inflicted on people of color by our sadly deficient criminal justice system.

And it is not unrelated to the above, that he is also, as many Janeites know, an avid lifelong Janeite, who gave a great plenary address at the 2012 JASNA AGM in NYC that I attended, entitled “Power & Freedom in Jane Austen’s Novels”. It was really wonderful, and so I am very happy to see that JASNA has now put up  links for audio of his talk, AND ALSO of the Q&A that followed it, here:

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number34/west.html

I urge you all to listen to his entire talk, it was very thought provoking, and he has his own very personal and interesting take on JA, one that I resonate with closely, but could only dream to present so eloquently.

As I watched and listened that day, several questions came to my mind that I wanted to pose to him, but one in particular, and fortunately for me, my raised hand (among the many that wished to ask him questions) was recognized. And so now you can hear my question, and Cornel West’s answer, at about half-way through the Q&A.

For those who would prefer not to listen, or can’t access the audio link, here is a transcription of my Q and his A. Because the audio was spotty at times as I listened on my computer, I could not faithfully capture every word in his reply to me, but I got nearly all of it, and got the gist (but there is no way to transcribe his rich Austenesque laughter):

Me: “Professor West, you’ve been a great voice for the Occupy Movement during the last year or year and a half, and I’ve had a lot of arguments with Janeite friends, because they think she would have been against the Occupy Movement, and to me it’s so painfully obvious that she would have been in the front line of the satirists, who would have been mocking the 1% and praising the 99% making themselves heard. What do you think?”

Cornel West: “... this is true for most great artists--her capacious spirit would be one, she would be writing satirical critical profoundly humanistic  readings of both Wall Street, but also we Occupiers—‘cause that’s a RICH subject for a novel. Oh, comic novel? Come see us (with the tents, you know what I mean?) .

But that’s what artists do, they don’t just do propaganda or didactic, it’s showing the humanity in these various contexts, and acknowledging the degree to which we’re all cracked vessels, and there are structures of domination, there are various forms of oppression, and those who resist ought to resist in the spirit of both strength and fortitude, but also humility, because we’re gonna fall on our faces.

But I appreciate your kind words, brother, absolutely. “

I love his answer, and entirely agree with him—while I believe JA would have taken her hardest and sharpest potshots at the hypocritical 1%’ers like Mitt Romney, she would indeed have also been fair and balanced, in a real (and not a Fox-News way), and would therefore also have shown the foibles even of those who were on the right side of this great moral, social & class divide.

And I am quite certain that if JA were alive today and living in NYC, she would be there in the audience at Cornel West’s address tonight, taking a lot of mental notes, and then working it all into her novels in some extraordinarily inventive way that would do justice to his great oratory and moral clarity.

Or maybe…she’d have been doing it as the replacement for Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Why serious crossword puzzle solvers should read Jane Austen’s novels

For those of you reading this post who are unfamiliar with Jane Austen’s fiction, and therefore totally unaware of my theories about her novels, here is a brief summary I wrote last year about my decoding of what I call “the Jane Austen Code” , which is a necessary introduction before I then immediately get to the main point of this post, which is to explain to you why serious crossword puzzle solvers unfamiliar with Jane Austen have a special reason to read her novels:

“since 2002, I’ve become the Arch Heretic of Jane Austen studies, an independent scholar approaching her novels and life story from far outside the “proper” litcrit box. I’ve been the staunch (and often lonely) originator of, and advocate for, a seemingly preposterous theory about Jane Austen’s fiction, which is that each one of her six published novels is actually a double story, and that Jane Austen was actually a radical feminist, far more so than has previously been recognized.

By “double story”, I mean that Austen’s novels are anamorphic, i.e., they can each be read as depicting two parallel fictional universes---one which I call the “overt story”, being the reality that most readers of her novels perceive, by uncritically assuming the narration to be straightforward and objective. But the other reality, which I call the “shadow story”.

This shadow or alternative story is accessed by reading much of the narration of the novel against the grain, realizing much of that narration is subjective, i.e., from the prejudiced, flawed point of view of the young and often clueless heroine-and not just the famously “clueless” Emma Woodhouse, either.

Jane Austen masterfully exploited the potential of a severely restricted point of view, forcing readers to work to spot what is “really” happening under the noses of her highly intelligent, yet clueless, heroines. And the primary purpose of Jane Austen’s shadow stories, beyond the artistic satisfaction in pulling off such an amazing literary stunt six times, was the covert venting, to those capable of decoding her shadow stories, of Austen’s radical feminist outrage at how women were so casually and unreflectively treated like domesticated farm animals or pets.

The cover of deniability provided by this shadow story structure—an analog of Jane Austen’s brilliant surface ironic wit-- kept Jane Austen personally safe from detection by disapproving male eyes two centuries ago in England. She lived in a sexist hypocritical society (sorta like we see in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere where women have little real power) where powerful men might have smeared her reputation with impunity, just as they smeared the reputation of her contemporary, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, for explicitly challenging male domination.” END QUOTE

Okay, so what does all of that have to do with crossword puzzles? The full answer is both complicated and interesting, but I’ll give you a brief answer for now. First of all, I am certain that I would never have discovered Jane Austen’s shadow stories in the first place in 2002, had I not first spent decades solving hard crossword puzzles, especially since 1992 when Will Shortz took over as editor of the gold standard of American crossword puzzles, at the NY Times.

As all who do the NY Times puzzles know, Will Shortz revolutionized the Times puzzles by changing them from tests of knowledge of extremely obscure and arcane trivia, to tests of mental flexibility and ingenuity, being able to think outside the box (literally) to flash on a non obvious answer which at the same time had that “Doh!” quality of having hidden in plain sight all along.

And that’s exactly the skill that is required in order to interpret the Jane Austen Code I have described above, and to “solve” the shadow stories of her novels. I see all this now with perfect 20:20 hindsight, and it is most applicable when we are talking about solving one of Will Shortz’s hard puzzles (meaning, Thursday, Friday, & Saturday puzzles)—recognizing double meanings, puns, and other forms of wordplay, in which the first meaning that one sees is not the answer sought (as would be the case in a Monday or Tuesday puzzle). Instead, it’s the non-obvious meaning—especially those suggested by crossword clues which end with a question mark—which you need to see in order to gain access to the shadow story interpretation.

Let me give you one prototypical example. I’ve raised a few thousand Janeite eyebrows during the past decade with my claim that Jane Fairfax, the mystery woman of ;Emma, is, in the shadow story of the novel not concealing a secret engagement to Frank Churchill, but is instead concealing a pregnancy during the last 2/3 of the action in the novel.

Now, the narrator never tells us this explicitly, and that is why the novel has been read for 2 centuries by millions of readers without anyone before me coming out publicly and saying that she’s not just sickly, but she is pregnant. So, how does Jane Austen paint this subliminal portrait of Jane F. as pregnant? That’s what the Jane Austen Code is all about—she does it in a hundred different ways—but one of the most important ways is through puns and double meanings. So when we hear, late in the novel, that Jane has exclaimed to her aunt, Miss Bates, that “it must be BORNE”---it sounds on the surface like she’s wailing that her difficulties in finding her way through her courtship difficulties must be “endured”---but “borne” is also is a homophonic clue to the reader sensitive to puns that “it” can also refer to a baby in utero who “must be BORN”!

There are over a thousand such puns scattered throughout Jane Austen’s novels (you will find a number of them covered in the multitude of posts at this blog, which I invite you to browse in), and that is why it has taken me over a decade to collect so many of them—it’s been like solving a crossword puzzle a thousand times more challenging and satisfying than even the best Will Shortz puzzle—because it truly never ends, and so that feeling a solver gets during the last stages of solving a very difficult puzzle, when clues which have resisted dozens of attempts to solve them finally surrender to an “Aha!” moment, is repeated over a period of years, not hours!

I could go on endlessly with details just like that, but instead will leave it to anyone interested in hearing more to reach out to me with specific questions and comments, which I will welcome. I want to finish with a final thought experiment that just occurred to me, as a result of my experience competing in the National Crossword Puzzle championship in the year after the hit documentary Wordplay first brought the world of crossword solving to the wider public.

At the end of the competition, all the participants were given the same crossword grid, but the ordinary mortals (like myself) were given a set of clues that were of the same difficulty as a really hard NY Times Saturday puzzle, while the 3 finalists who were competing for the championship were given a different set of clues that were ten times harder to solve than the rest of us had been given. Even though the filled-in grid for both sets of clues was identical. I.e., each answer was derived from two completely different clues. It was really something for the rest of us to watch the astonishingly rapid progress of each of the 3 finalists in their respective grids projected onto large screens at the front of the hall.  

I give you all this detail because I only realized last night how closely that final round of competition  parallels Jane Austen’s double stories. In effect, imagine her novels, and all the words in them, as a filled-in grid of a puzzle, as, collectively, the “answers” to a good crossword puzzle. Following that analogy to its conclusion, we can see the overt story, the one that ordinary readers take from the novels, is derived from the less diabolical clues that the mass of contestants had to solve. Whereas the shadow story consists of the set of truly diabolical clues which only a reader skilled in decoding them will be able to solve.

This is how one text can tell two different stories, using the identical words. The fictional reality behind those words involves all the same characters, but they are all different as between the two realities.

This analogy begins to explain why I can see things in the novels that other Janeites, even those who’ve read the novels dozens of times, cannot see. It’s not that I am a delusional schizophrenic who has a “beautiful mind” imagining patterns that don’t exist. It’s that Jane Austen’s novels are like very hard crossword puzzles, and we find no mystery whatsoever in the fact some people look at them and cannot see the answers, while others can see them right away. Someone who has become hard wired into seeing her puzzles as Monday or Tuesday puzzles simply cannot shift their minds so as to let in the other reality.

And my final point is that because the skill set is so similar between decoding shadow stories like Jane Austen’s (she is not the only author to have created them, I think she learned how to do it from reading Shakespeare), and doing hard crossword puzzles, it follows that getting better at one will tend to help you get better at doing the other, going in both directions.

So, for those crossword devotees, especially the guys, who have been misled by the Myth of Jane Austen into thinking there is nothing interesting in an Austen novel for you, rest assured that the opposite is the case—her novels are the best puzzles ever created, bar none! And, conversely, to those Janeites reading this post, maybe you want to begin to try your hand at doing NY Times crossword puzzles. You might just find that it brings you, paradoxically, to a better understanding of Jane Austen’s novels.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The shadow story of Easter in JA’s novels & letters

 For those who might be interested today on Easter Sunday, here is a quick summary of Easter in Jane Austen’s novels and letters, viewed through the lens of my admittedly outside-the-box, against-the-grain shadow story theory.

In S&S, as the story is generally understood, it is very shortly after Easter that Marianne Dashwood nearly dies at Cleveland, but then is miraculously “resurrected” and begins her new married life with Brandon no longer a selfish person. But those Janeites who find Marianne marrying Brandon deeply unsatisfying, might see just the opposite—i.e., Marianne marrying Brandon is the true act of self sacrifice, since she doesn’t really love him, but she marries him nonetheless, and in effect then gives up her life as she previously lived it, selflessly, so that Brandon will perform his end of a secret bargain, and make it possible for Elinor to marry Edward. And Marianne never burdens Elinor with the details of any of this.

In P&P, it is actually on Easter Sunday that Darcy and Elizabeth have their famous exchange at Rosings while she plays piano, in which he concludes with his very famous line  “We neither of us perform to strangers.” That’s a very curious decision on JA’s part. Given that I have demonstrated previously that Darcy believes he is engaging in veiled sexual repartee with Eliza, it’s hard to reconcile that exchange occurring on Easter Sunday with the humble religious piety that some (but not myself) ascribe to Jane Austen.

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In MP, the old coachman recalls to Fanny that she was scared to death after being mounted on a horse for the first time at Easter six years earlier at age 12:

“Lord bless you! how you did tremble when Sir Thomas first had you put on!"

That seemingly random detail is, I believe, a hint from Jane Austen that Fanny was scared to death at 12—being the start of puberty and sexual maturity--at being required to “mount” (as in Sermon on the Mount) a “horse” of a very different kind---i.e., Sir Thomas himself. And that sexual abuse, which she is powerless to resist, is a horrific cross that Fanny then bears for the next 6 years, until Mary Crawford comes along and subtly empowers her.

Also in MP, “after Easter” is almost a mantra in the latter part of the novel—it is when, curiously, four different seemingly unrelated events are stated to be planned to happen (Fanny’s being fetched by Sir Thomas to return from Portsmouth, Mary’s visit to Mrs. Stornaway, Edmund’s going to London, and Maria leaving the Aylmers). Is it possible that there is some hidden coordination amongst them all, that JA repeatedly hints at?

But then Tom (just like Marianne in S&S) falls seriously ill right before Easter, and then it is at Easter that Maria runs off with Henry, and is in effect crucified by Sir Thomas for this, but then is allowed a limited resurrection with Mrs. Norris later. And Tom, like Marianne, “miraculously” recovers, and, also like Marianne, is now reformed from his former selfishness.

Or was his illness nothing but a fabrication, as part of a larger scheme to evict the Crawfords from Mansfield Park?

I do have one question about one thing that Mary writes to Fanny about Maria’s Easter:

“I suppose Mrs. R.'s Easter holidays will not last much longer; no doubt they are thorough holidays to her.”

What does Mary mean by “thorough holidays”?  

In Emma, Isabella. John & the kids last came to Hartfield the previous Easter, and that is when Mr. Weston gives her his much appreciated assistance with a kite at midnight (whatever that really refers to).

And finally, we have the following passage in JA’s Letter 64 dated Jan. 10-11, 1809, from JA in Southampton to CEA at Godmersham, which, as I have previously posted, has a Passovery subtext:

“…the very day of our leaving Southampton is fixed; and if the knowledge is of no use to Edward, I am sure it will give him pleasure. Easter Monday, April 3, is the day; we are to sleep that night at Alton, and be with our friends at Bookham the next, if they are then at home; there we remain till the following Monday, and on Tuesday, April 11, hope to be at Godmersham. If the Cookes are absent, we shall finish our journey on the 5th. These plans depend of course upon the weather, but I hope there will be no settled cold to delay us materially. To make you amends for being at Bookham, it is in contemplation to spend a few days at Barton Lodge in our way out of Kent.”

Great Bookham is where the Cookes all lived, and JA is writing about an otherwise joyous subject, reporting to CEA the plans for the “exodus” of the Austen women from their four years wandering in the “desert” of Southampton (or, given that the trip was to begin on Easter Monday, perhaps even more appropriate to refer to the “resurrection” of the Austen women).

And there ends this brief tour of Jane Austen’s Easter, shadow story style.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The wild subversiveness of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia did NOT disappear in her novels-it just went underground!

In the 2/18/15 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, there is an excellent review (which I only first saw today) by the always forthright and insightful Paula Byrne of new editions of JA’s Juvenilia edited by Kathryn Sutherland and Christine Alexander, respectively. I particularly enjoyed, and was struck by, the resonance of the following comment by Byrne with my own thinking:

“As Kathryn Sutherland writes in her introduction to a splendid new edition of the “juvenilia”: “Jane Austen’s earliest writings are violent, restless, anarchic and exuberantly expressionistic. Drunkenness, female brawling, sexual misdemeanour and murder run riot across their pages”. When I was a schoolteacher, nothing gave me more pleasure than shocking cynical teenagers by teaching Austen’s early works. Without knowing the identity of the author in question, though recognizing the eighteenth-century style of the work, the students were invariably delighted by the irreverent, Monty Pythonesque absurdity of the comedy. The knowledge that this was the work of an early-teen Austen, known to them only as chronicler of the marriage plot, increased their pleasure.”

It happens by serendipity that my attention was brought to the fiction written by Austen before her six complete, published novels by recent news reports that filming (in Ireland) of Whit Stillman’s upcoming adaptation of the early twenty-something Jane Austen’s short epistolary novella Lady Susan is now complete. For reasons known only to Stillman, it is entitled Love and Freindship, thereby creating  confusion for Janeites who might recognize this as the title of one of JA’s earlier Juvenilia, which has a completely different plot from Lady Susan. But the good news is that release of the film cannot be that far off in the future.

As far as I can gather online, which is not much, the following IMDB blurb makes it sound like the film will stick to Lady Susan:  “Set in the 1790s, Love and Friendship centers on beautiful widow Lady Susan Vernon, who has come to the estate of her in-laws to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances circulating through polite society. Whilst there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and her rather reluctant debutante daughter, Frederica.”

That sounds pretty bland, which I hope is not matched by the tone of the film itself. I.e. I hope the full-bore sociopathy of Lady Susan is faithfully preserved by the cleverly subversive Whit Stillman. And I am looking forward to seeing it, with cautious optimism.

The serendipity of these two recent online pieces about Jane Austen’s juvenilia for me is that it raised in me renewed hope that film adaptations like Stillman’s, watched by viewers who read pieces like Byrne’s, and editions like Sutherland’s and Alexander’s, will help project into the wider Janeite world (which still widely subscribes to the Myth of Jane Austen that Byrne touched on one aspect of, as quoted above) the radically unsettling notion of a young adult Jane Austen writing a story told from the point of view of an amoral, witty, sophisticated sociopath whom you would expect to see as the protagonist of a frankly subversive text like Liaisons Dangereuses. Definitely not your grandmother’s or your schoolchild’s Jane Austen.

This all also got me thinking yet again about the awesome power of that Myth to make Janeites believe ten impossible things before breakfast, and to blind them to what would otherwise be obvious in her writings, had they been written by another author. I.e., when I think about the high B.S. quotient of scholarly and lay opinions that Jane Austen as an adult put aside her “childish” anarchism and became a political and religious conservative who wished to preserve the status quo in sexist Regency Era England, and who would never never never put any sex in any of her novels, I want to laugh—except that this blind acceptance of such a distorted view of Jane Austen—like the cow-like expression on the Bowdlerized version of the hard-edged countrywoman whom Cassandra sketched, that the Bank of England wants to put on the new 10 pound note---is absurd beyond a laugh, as Jane Austen herself might have put it.  It’s very very sad.

To be more precise about how the Juvenilia fit into the Myth of Jane Austen, the whopper that has been sold to an unsuspecting Janeite world is the still mostly universally held notion that:

ONE: Jane Austen, between the ages of 13 and 18, wrote a number of short pieces of Juvenilia which (it is also universally recognized) are filled with every variety of social mayhem, including violent murder—all presented with an over the top, unapologetic, exuberant, almost savage glee and wit, that could only come from the pen of a teenaged genius of a girl who reveled in letting the dark side of her imagination run wild and free. She was reacting to the pervasive hypocrisies and cruelties of the supposedly mature, Christian, and benevolent society into which she was born, and she took no prisoners whatsoever; and

TWO: A few years (we don’t know exactly how many) after her last Juvenilia, Catherine or the Bower, she produced a startlingly mature novella, Lady Susan (broken off abruptly as if in midstream, just when it was getting really complicated and interesting, as if she suddenly became bored with the writing, and wanted to get it off her desk) which, in a much more polished style, nevertheless continued that same spirit of dark anarchy and rebellion against prudent societal norms which suffuses all the Juvenilia; but then; and yet, mysteriously,   

THREE: The Austen family (most of all that arch-deceiver, James Edward Austen Leigh,  JA’s nephew), joined by the mainstream of modern Austen scholars like Deirdre Le Faye, has managed to convince the Janeite world that Jane Austen abruptly abandoned the divine madness of her youth and early adulthood, and that she suddenly started writing novels which were diametrically opposed to those earlier productions. Instead, they are supposed to demonize the two characters from Austen’s novels who most closely remotely resemble Lady Susan’s smooth, sophisticated sociopathy: Lucy Steele who comes from the gutter (Sense &Sensibililty) and Henry Crawford who comes from elite society (Mansfield Park)—both of them relishing their power to manipulate others with ease.

Whereas Occam’s Razor would dictate a much simpler one-step explanation for what we see in Jane Austen’s six novels, all published after she was 35 years old—which is that she NEVER gave up her youthful perspective, but became such a masterful writer in her maturity that she was able to hide the savagery of her satire in plain sight just beneath the surface of her novels, and preserve it safe from censorious critics who would have crucified her, and kept her novels from even being published, had she been as overt in them as she was in Lady Susan and her Juvenilia.

So, it should be really interesting to see if Stillman really dishes out a cinematic version of Sevigny’s phallic lobster (Google to see what I am referring to), and raised a bunch of Janeite eyebrows wondering what exactly is going on in an “exploitative” adaptation of “poor Jane Austen”.

I personally can’t wait, and have every hope that Stillman’s film will be very very subversive, and will therefore then be greeted with howls like nothing we’ve heard since Patricia Rozema gave us her 1999 Mansfield Park  with Sir Thomas Bertram as a savage monster raping his slaves on his Antiguan plantation—an interpretation of MP that is ENTIRELY supported by the text of the novel itself, when read with proper sensitivity to JA’s subtextual hints.

Bring it on! And let the real Jane Austen finally be seen for who she was as a precocious ;teenaged writing rebel, and who she remained till her dying day as a subtle mature writing genius rebel.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter