Jane Austen

To return to my summer course, I also taught Austen’s Persuasion. In part, I wanted to teach one of the Austen novels that seems to be assigned less often. I also thought my students would find the social criticism in it more readily apparent than it sometimes can be in Emma or even Pride and Prejudice. That criticism was, indeed, accessible to them–many wrote about their sense that Austen valued the navy over the aristocracy. In general, I think characters like Sir Walter Elliot are one of Austen’s delightful sources of humor. However, our emphasis on Austen’s adulation of the navy began to feel almost dull (perhaps because we didn’t more closely consider the war that would follow the narrative or the faintly absurd pop star status naval officers acquire for the Musgrove daughters).

The ambiguity that did surface over the course of our discussions was what Austen seems to make of Anne’s past. Some passages, in which Anne criticizes Lady Russell’s advice against her engagement to Wentworth before he attains a fortune, made students confident that Anne regrets her earlier decision. Yet in another moment, Anne insists that she did not act wrongly, nor does she “blame” Lady Russell. That she marries a wealthier Wentworth in the end suggests her decision was not so troubling, after all. These moments leave me wondering whether Anne arrives at any firm conclusions about her past, or whether the novel invites one particular reading of the events.

I find this ambiguity engaging. Anne refuses to criticize with any command her own past or the attachment to the past that Lady Russell represents, as the close friend of Anne’s dead mother. This is striking given Anne’s ultimate association with change and the future: she happily marries a self-made man, who realizes she still loves him in the midst of her playful diatribe on the social conditions of women’s lives. Instead of an estate, they procure a carriage and soon, likely, a war ship. But still, the past is important to her. Austen mocks Sir Walter through his obsession with his ancestry and his vast collection of mirrors. But she grants Anne a profound nostalgia for her mother. The buried past (figuratively meaning Anne’s rejection of Wentworth and literally meaning Lady Elliot) holds more weight for Anne than do its living  embodiments (Sir Walter and the continually open Baronetage).

I think I like this because it offers Anne something, besides a self-important family, to struggle with. She regains her beauty, receives both the sincere admiration of the prodigal heir and the more idyllic love of her former fiance, and even marries into money. That she may not be able to provide a consistent narrative of the past and that her aristocratic heritage still holds meaning for her, make her more sympathetic. For ultimately, they soften Austen’s apparent insistence on the beauty and rightness of the navy and the future.

Michael Chabon

In notes on other writers on which I am not becoming an expert, I read and really, really liked Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union this summer. I already liked Chabon, thanks to Kavalier and Clay. But given my impressive ability to forget everything specific about books that I don’t discuss, it was good to read something new of his, to have something to tie to these vague good feelings. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is different, of course. It fits nicely within the detective novel genre while replacing often cringe-worthy potboiler language with his delightful writing, full of precise words and sometimes crazily expansive metaphors.

When I was younger–perhaps middle school and/or high school–I read a number of page-turner novels, from John Grisham to Michael Crichton. That seems to have made suspense-writing pleasantly familiar, nostalgia-inducing. I find the smart but self-destructive and often wounded detective a comfortable protagonist, even as Chabon affords this particular protagonist (Meyer Landsman) amusingly bizarre foibles. This type calls to mind my very different father, perhaps as another embodiment of middle-aged masculinity. More likely because the novels I read, at first surreptitiously, were his.

As I consider how this book makes me think of my father, I am reminded that one of my favorite passages is a family metaphor:

Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes , whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts. (Chabon 308-09)

This passage reminded of how when I walk around campus, I can often tell immediately when students (who I don’t know) are on the phone with their parents. There is a tone of sheer exasperation, like that I imagine Berko using in the lines preceding this passage. And it is supremely uncool. Not the less so because it reminds me of a tone I’ve heard myself use. But more than that, what I love is the sprawl of the metaphor. Chabon deliberately halting a sentence and beginning the next with “And,” calling attention to the mutliplicity of the family’s significance and roles, of their crazedness, of the difficulty of capturing this dynamic. In the sprawl Chabon calls up that frustration with the family, even more their potential deadliness to one another, but also their potential to create drunken revels, and, finally, life. It steers around trite, to a place both humorous and true.

Finally, it is also the family Landsman creates that endears this novel to me. His ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, is probably one of the strongest female characters in a detective novel I have read. Yes, she is strong and capable and returns to town as her ex-husband’s boss at the police department. But Chabon makes her strength most interesting in the way that Landsman is able simultaneously to admire and to forget it. He is so confident that he knows just where their marriage went wrong, what he did, and what failed as a result. And we, as readers who follow him closely throghout the novel, come to assume that he is right. But she provides the reminder of other perspectives, that their mistakes were more complex because shared. She challenges our ability to pin down one simple, seemingly inevitable narrative of why things go wrong. And we believe her challenge to that narrative because we remember again that she is so strong he could not have controlled their marriage and their losses alone.

So strangely, the dark, often lonely detective story is pleasurable to me because it is, here, about family. I like it for other reasons, too. In particular, for the suspense and for Chabon’s management of interweaving plot threads and contrivances. But it is unsurpising that this story–about a detective who pursues a murder case because the victim reminds him of himself and his family–finds its power in its ability to characterize family and to invite my identification with and sympathy for these families.

Virginia Woolf

Eating lunch with a friend yesterday I mentioned that Virginia Woolf’s writing offers me one of those essential reminders of why I’m pursuing a PhD in Literature. In some ways, a terrifying thought as my choice to specialize in 19th century American literature excludes her from my field of study in two ways! Still, she is a source of pleasure that feels more genuine than my sometimes concerted efforts to appreciate literature that’s both “relevant” and not already taken, like Melville’s Pierre.

The pleasure of Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, comes from the ability of her sentences and words to change the cadence of my thoughts, to lengthen their rhythm. I picked up Friday Night Lights today, having enjoyed the first season of the TV show, looking to be enthralled by more of the high stakes high school drama. And yet, I found myself skimming. The opening stage work Bissinger crafts of the town’s historical context left me wanting to skip ahead, to jump into the relationships, conflicts, renegotiations of how each character will fit into the lives and minds of the others. Woolf, meanwhile, holds my attention—my mind—by opening with these relationships, by making them central throughout the novel. But more than that, she makes the internal reflections on these relations a narrative, one that does not feel the smaller for being about reflection and reaction. She slows my thoughts to linger in the twists and turns of others minds.

Of Rezia, watching her husband withdraw into his own mind full of crazy-seeming platitudes and discoveries and images of WWI comabat: “To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now” (23).  In Woolf’s hands Septimus’s narrative is compelling, his loathing for the doctors who approach him to contain him, contagious. But she also gives us Rezia, isolated by Septimus’s disappearance into him mind and by her own foreignness. She gives us both his impulse to die and the sorrow its expression creates.  Here is the power of another’s words to alter the world, of another’s perspective to shake and isolate.

Thus, Woolf consistently shows the power, the import of the characters’ changing and repeating words to one another. Offhand remarks, insults, complaints, proclamations become talismans, repeated and re-imbued with meaning. Richard Dalloway declares, “My name is Dalloway,” only to have his words repeated by Peter and Sally, and finally defended (or at least cordoned off from mockery) by Clarissa. They move from an offhand remark, meant to establish his relationship with Clarissa more properly, to a way of defining the difference between the proper Richard and Clarissa’s more daring/demanding friends, and finally to a way of asserting Clarissa’s alliance with him.

By extension, the reactions to the words that are spoken and repeated also become weighty. Again, we have both Septimus’s declaration of suicide and Rezia’s subsequent sense of isolation. Alongside Clarissa’s protective gesture, we see Peter’s subsequent knowledge that she would marry not him, but Richard. The conclusion to this novel is not an event, not even Mrs. Dalloway’s long anticipated party, but one character’s surge of feeling for another. That such an ending, a fleeting thought in just one of the many minds that the novel explores, is beautiful and satisfying here, suggests Woolf created a novel which make such thoughts, as well as the words and images to which they respond, of incredible value.