Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Mansfield Park: It’s Jane’s World, We Were Just Passing Through


Jane-slash-Anne and her very special dimple.

56 continued: Nabokov begins summing up

Mansfield Park has elements in common with Bleak House, which will come next in the lectures/commentary, which draw on the comedy of manners and are prominent in sentimental novels. The "comedy of manners" grew out of Restoration Comedy…and man, do I hope I have my history right or else 100 people will be yelling at me in Chicago in two and a half months…meaning that finding humor in archetypes and situations was an offshoot of rather more adult comedy. This suits Austen's aesthetic well. And that Dickens, the part-time actor (How many legends are there surrounding his work in Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep, one of the most pivotal moments in ANY author's career ever?), would draw inspiration from the stage is to be expected.

The three main features the two novels share are, first, "a young girl as sifting agent" or stand-in for the reader to see the world through her eyes… Dickens will play a wonderful narrative game with this, which will be discussed when the time comes, but essentially Fanny Price and Esther Summerson both describe the action and characters from their point of view, which in turn is the point of view of a young woman of outstanding capabilities who doesn't know how special she is. Again, an insecure protagonist whose good qualities WE recognize makes for good readers' empathy.

Second, the dislikable or silly characters have recurring grotesque traits or devices which are constantly associated with their presence in the story… I'll use Dickens for examples here. Bill Sikes being followed everywhere by a loyal dog, a cuddly contrast to a devilish man…which, of course, will nearly be killed by its master. Or Uriah Heep referring to himself as "very 'umble" every chance he gets. Austen establishes a precedent in her books: Mrs. Norris, whining and talking about money, and Lady Bertram, showering attention on her pug (both examples from Nabokov). These details are necessary to the cultivation of Style. Even as a child watching the Disney animated movies, I was always more drawn to the sidekicks of the hero and villain than the latter characters, because the sidekicks got the best lines and had fun and never worried about being suitably heroic or evil. When a character is peripheral to the main Theme, a writer is allowed to take more liberties in the "realism" of their portrayal, either to illustrate a Thematic point (it is through the larger-than-life we can sometimes see life more clearly) or to have fun and play with Style. It is often in the ancillaries that a writer's imagination runs, not best, but wildest…and we all need a little wildness.

Third, "the Price children tie up nicely with the child theme that runs through Bleak House." The child theme of Bleak House will be discussed fully when I can talk about Horace Skimpole, one of Dickens's most remarkable and despicable creations. But as a preview, for those of you who have read both books or Bleak House…in Mansfield Park, Susan, not even a teenager, takes the major responsibility in a house full of quarreling, not-doing-too-well siblings, an alcoholic, self-centered father living off past glories, and a mother worn out by it all to the point where she is incapable of giving love and motherly affection as she should. When we start examining Caddy Jellyby and Charley Neckett…they could have been Susan's daughters.

Austen does not trade in expansive imagery. "It is a shock to come to loud-speaking, flushed, robust Dickens after meeting delicate, dainty, pale Jane" even if she does sometimes "paint graceful word pictures with her delicate brush on a little bit of ivory." The latter description was used by Austen for herself. Her imagery is not as important as her skill in handling characters…this is a comedy of manners, after all, and when we watch a "chick flick" or a sitcom today, we do not think about the scenery (unless it's something like Under the Tuscan Sun) but about the people who are the source of all the fun. Where Austen does succeed with imagery is using it in relation to her major ideas. Her books usually revolved around money and property, and in Mansfield Park, the scenes are described so we know that Mansfield Park is a picture of order, a true stately home, compared to the hodgepodge and "wilderness" of Sotherton, the garish quality the home takes on during the play rehearsals, and the dirty chaos of Portsmouth. When imagery is called for here, Austen paints with just enough suggestive detail to establish the contrast.

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Austen uses few similes and metaphors. She works much more with participles, but "in a parenthetical way" to introduce character action, as in "stage directions…this trick she learned from Samuel Johnson, but in Mansfield Park it is a very apt device as the whole novel resembles a play." Nabokov refers to how "he saids" and "she saids" are replaced by phrases such as "with an arch smile." This is a fine mark of Style, because it allows for variance in sentence structure while also allowing more insight into the characters with excellent economy. Austen is a very economical writer, and when I read these notes of Nabokov's, I immediately thought of Mark Twain's adage that you should never write "policeman" when "cop" will do just as well. Such writing is delicate and dainty, but far from pale. I might even go so far as to compare Austen to Hemingway for the power of her sparse, plain-spoken language…and isn't Jane's style as representative of ordinary 1810's speech as Ernest's was for the 1920's and 30's? The Samuel Johnson reference probably refers to his prose fiction, Rasselas most of all, a book which relies on various ultra-individuals offering their opinions fully in character.

By the way, my esteemed colleague Mr. Clemens of the Wild Ride sent me a link to a clever piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that Johnson, on the 300th anniversary of his birth, would have fit right in as an Angeleno. I'm not convinced we would have tolerated his conspicuous consumption of meat and entire bottles of port, or his disdain for female writers (imagine putting Johnson and Stephenie Meyer together, as the writer suggests…hoo, boy), but the article by UC-Irvine's Amy Wilentz at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-wilentz7-2009jun07,0,7769149.story is a good one. I must try to see the Johnson exhibit at the Huntington before I leave.

The "knight's move:" a sudden emotional change for a character. Nabokov invented some of his own literary terms when he couldn't find one which fit his thinking. Outside of literature and butterflies, chess was a great fascination for him. The knight moves according to an unusual logic where it always must swerve sideways, so in a Nabokovian knight's move, a character's emotions will go to the opposite of where they were when an action began, but the change will be consistent with their mental state as established in the narrative. Fanny's gentle nature makes her more than usually susceptible to such moves. Nabokov points out how she feels guilty when she can't rouse an expected emotion, or mixes her jealousy of Mary with pity for Mary's poor personality, or unassumingly contrasts Mary's flippancy toward Henry with her longing for William. The central point is an interesting one, for Fanny never quite co-exists with Mary the way we might think she should. Mary is playing a bored but very successful game of seduction with Edmund, she steals Fanny's pony, she represents everything Fanny is against…but just as in Chekov's plays where characters who seem to be mortal enemies one minute are swimming along together the next, Fanny's increasing dislike of Mary is always tempered by the kindness she feels for all her fellow humans, and her forlorn, near-constant hope that Mary could change. Almost too good to be true, and definitely ALMOST, for Esther Summerson will really take the rest of the cake there.

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The "special dimple:" "delicate irony" popping up in the middle of an ordinary declarative sentence. Another Nabokovian term and another example of Austen's economic but meaning-laden style. He chose the words carefully, picturing the inflection as "a delicately ironic dimple in the author's pale virgin cheek." I am reminded of the seductive but impish smile Anne Hathaway flashes us on the posters for Becoming Jane…here was a quiet, proper Englishwoman who would one day—I wonder if she ever guessed—be hailed as one of her language's greatest writers, living a retiring life in the country, writing about gentle people trying to carve out a gentle existence, but relishing in details such as Mrs. Norris's talkativeness and Maria and Julia giving Fanny their "least-valued toys" as suitable presents. How much behavior like that was going on? And how much of a thrill did Austen get in sending up the most unpleasant aspects of a society she still defended? George Carlin once said that most comedians operate from a premise that life could be better than it is and their humor is a mockery of what they see as detrimental absurdities…this is Austen's Style, cherishing the big picture while laying low to its weakest buttresses. Knowing you're in the right brings a dimple to anybody's cheek.

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The "epigrammatic intonation:" "terse and tender, dry and yet musical, pithy but limpid and light" to express the paradoxical. The examples Nabokov gives are from descriptions of characters: Fanny is not extraordinary in ways special girls of the time were supposed to be extraordinary, but she is really better than the more showy Bertram sisters because of her sincerity. Tom is kind, but it is a kindness based in mockery. Mary dislikes Edmund's manner, recognizes it as antithetical to her own, but at the same time is charmed by it for its difference to what she is used to. Austen builds these thoughts by piling details on top of each other with flowing phrases and judicious comma usage, description of personality far more intently done than her imagery. It is both Style and Structure: Austen knows that it is her characters' interactions which fuel the plot, and arranges her descriptions to lend wisdom to our judgment of how the characters behave.

Austen acquired epigrammatic rhythm second-hand from the French, whose style was imitated by the English…"nevertheless she handles it to perfection." A bit of a back-handed compliment. If you can perform an act better than practically everyone else alive, does it matter if you had an innate ability or if you simply copied something and developed it with practice? History is full of innovators who lost out and copiers who won, who get remembered, who get studied. I'm not trying to defend these people, but…we should always look at the highest form of an art to inspire us in further creation of our own. Nabokov carried a personal predilection for the French almost as strong as his dismissal of female authors.

"Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone…[it] constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of an author's personality." The seven authors involved in this commentary, for instance. Nabokov's wordplay and intellectual sensibilities, Austen's genteel satire, Dickens's theatrical flamboyance, Flaubert's epic-poetic depiction of the commonplace, Stevenson's swirling paragraphs rooted in fancy, Proust's lengthy meditations on singular subjects which in the end all link up in a magnificent web, Kafka's plain, direct narrating of the grotesque and insane. None of these are "methods" you can turn on and off, all of them use much the same language to express thoughts, and I don't think any of these writers ever said, say, "today I'm going to spend twenty pages being satiric or flamboyant or epic or fantastic or dreamy or pathological." They were merely writing what they knew. I can pick up a John Grisham novel and put it down without having been literarily enriched at all. He tells a story, and little else. These books, once read, are never to be forgotten, because their authors each had a quirk in their personality which seeped into their pens without them having to think about it all. I'm not saying only the out-of-the-ordinary can be great writers, but if you have a sensibility or a vision you can never help but convey…it helps.

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All people have styles, but only styles of "peculiar writers of genius" are worth the discussion because they are proof of talent; the talentless "cannot develop a literary style of any worth: at best it will be an artificial mechanism" without a "divine spark." In other words, you can practice every technical form of storytelling under the sun and create new and unique Structure, you can have a gift for Plot, you can have meaningful Themes, but if you don't have a Style peculiar enough to transfer to your writing, it isn't worth discussing. I brought up John Grisham in the last comment and only now realized how appropriate that was. Grisham was trained as a lawyer and writes books about lawyers in a dry legal style familiar because so many people utilize it…how many lawyers are in the world? Dan Brown writes in a way where a major jolt happens every five pages, after centuries of melodrama, radio play, and TV serial. We do not study the derivative. We study those who are inimitable, or who might be praised best through so many trying to imitate them. This is why Nabokov took Wilson's advice and chose to teach Austen. He might not have been a fan, but he recognized an immortal, unequalled style, the style of a writer of genius.

The only people you can teach to write are those with talent. They learn to avoid clichés and clumsiness, be patient, and choose "the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought. In such matters there are worse teachers than Jane Austen." Half a century later in On Writing, Stephen King would say that you can't make a great writer out of a good one, but you can make a good writer out of a mediocre one. The great ones have the talent. The good ones build up the technique to the best of their ability. I THINK I might be a good writer. If I have greatness, I shall know after the next five years or so of developing my Style…and I can tell if I am imitating or evolving from within.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Mansfield Park may fall apart in Volume III, but it is a fine novel all the same. Austen's theme, as I see it, is the carrying forth of rational order in a tempest-tossed world, where the steadfast Wellingtons of Fanny and Edmund stand against the rebellious, upsetting-the-balance Napoleons, the Crawfords, told through the light mocking so typical of Austen's Style, but with a dark suggestion of behavior always under the surface…sex, violence, very un-English behavior with the slaves. It reads as another gentle love story with the Austen wit, but now her bite is directed at people and practices which shake foundations, not personal behavior. Pride and Prejudice is a superior book, but it is NOT this vigorous. Nabokov was right to select it, for it is a work of intelligence, superb Structure and Style, and carries some of the meta-literariness he practiced himself.

Thursday…Dickens…

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