jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2013-07-10 03:40 pm
jsburbidge) wrote2013-07-10 03:40 pm
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Why you can't write like Jane Austen any more
I just finished Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey, and it made me think about some of the issues surrounding Jane Austen tributes / pastiches / homages. There have been a number of these over the years (among which are the execrable Pemberley and P. D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley), and none of them really manages to get very close to the real experience.[1]
I'm prepared to argue that the barriers, taken together, make it almost impossible to do this with full success, short of a Pierre Menard approach.
At the simplest mechanical level, there's the problem of getting the language right. Words change, vocabularies change, and using only George III/Regency language and using it in the right way requires a great deal of knowledge and care. (I won't say that it's impossible -- teachers who specialize in the period might have a chance at it -- but it's very difficult.) In addition, there's the additional constraint that you should exclude period language of a level that Austen herself excluded. I'm pretty sure, for example, that she never once refers to the ton, beloved of Georgette Heyer. (There's a reason for this: Austen didn't care about the ton, and to the degree that she did, she distrusted them.)
At the next level, there's getting the referents right. An abbey did not usually mean a Gothic building; it would have been far more likely to be a Palladian or Georgian residence of some scale on land acquired from the Crown which had belonged to an Abbey in Henry VIII's day. (It was occasionally used loosely to refer to such a residence even if the land did not go back to an actual abbey). Being aware of the material culture of the time is tricky (condition of roads, details of clothing and the constraints they imposed, etc.).
Austen's style is not as easy as it seems to imitate (of which more anon: it has to do with her aims and intent as much as idiosyncrasies).
In choosing Dramatis Personae, one has to be careful yet again: the figure of highest rank in all of her novels is a Baronet, and her main figures are almost all gentry ("almost" because there are a few servants and people in trade -- and note that the line isn't easy to draw -- Austen was generally suspicious of cits, but she also gives us the Gardiners). So playing with nobility immediately marks one's work as un-Austenish.
Except when parodying it, she avoids melodrama. Nobody ever runs away to Gretna Green in an Austen novel; not even Lydia Bennett. There are no duels, despite Mrs. Bennett's fears about Mr. Bennett. Nobody dies on-screen, as it were. The single most violent thing that happens to anyone is a young woman slipping on a step and hitting her head.
She excludes current affairs; except for a few references to naval action in Persuasion and the presence of soldiers in Pride and Prejudice, it would be hard to find any indication at all of the Napoleonic wars.
However, the biggest barrier has to do with the nature of the project itself.
Jane Austen is, in attitude, probably closest to Dr. Johnson of all the English authors. She's a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, deeply suspicious of anything urban or modern; she's the daughter of a C. of E. Rector with that Augustan view which reduces religion to morality but still values it heavily. (There's no piety surrounding religion in Austen, but the church is assumed to be appropriately there as an institution.)
She is writing works which engage the present -- her present -- critically but subtly from a deeply moral (and conservative) point of view. She is deeply concerned with issues surrounding the status and power of women, but she advocates no radical changes: in her view if everyone within the system did as they ought, the system would work; but she sees all sorts of people not doing so.
In a way somewhat analogous to the way in which Stanley Fish's Milton writes in such a way as to engage the reader actively in Paradise Lost, Austen's prose is a steady flow of invitations to the reader to make (or at least recognize) small moral judgements. Her comedy of manners is about figures who are all somewhat flawed (although most of them are basically "good") -- including her heroines. In particular, she achieves something of the effect Pope does in balancing couplets by pairing precisely chosen verbs or adjectives with slightly different meanings to evoke their fine distinctions. (For a Popeian example of this sort of parallelism, consider the verbs in "true genius kindles, and fair fame inspires" -- genius is "kindled" because it is ultimately a flame and fame (= rumour) is inspired because both have to do with breath; genius can be true, but fame is only "fair" (attractive, but not necessarily true).)
Note that the virtues assigned to Wickham are both among the most shallow ones possible("There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."); that if Elizabeth deserved his regard then his "present pursuit" (which itself has a hunting tone around it, making Miss King his prey) is a decline; that Elizabeth's responses (listen and pity) do not include any form of critical assessment (such as she later realizes she should have made). (There's also, of course, a large dollop of dramatic irony, given that Elizabeth's "opinion of everybody" is about to get a thorough upsetting.)
This is prose which begs for close attention to fine meanings, and also invites our own judgement of what is transpiring -- and the standards for judgement which are held out by the narrator are moral ones.
In contrast a modern day writer setting a novel in the Regency period is almost certainly doing so not because that is the best way to address current concerns critically -- the relations between men and women, particularly, and the forms which society imposes on them, have changed radically since then. We place fiction in the past because it is one of the few "safe" places left which are exotic. To visit the Regency is to take a vacation from the concerns of everyday life.
If Jane Austen were to be writing today, she would be writing contemporary fiction, because her sort of fiction engages with contemporary issues. Vice-versa, if someone is inclined to place their action two centuries in the past, it may not be with an intent to avoid critical engagement with human nature entirely -- it may not be just to produce froth -- but it will not be with the same sort of engagement as is required to drive a truly Austenish novel. In addition, it's hard to imagine any serious author today with the values of an Augustan Tory providing the operative canon for judgement.
I actually think that Kowal's book is good -- although from an Austen point of view it drops into melodrama in the latter part of the book. (In addition, I think her characters are a little too flawed for Austen:many of Austen's characters are basically good but with a single character making them ridiculous (Sir William Lucas' vanity, for example, does not make him an unsympathetic man, just a tedious one)). I look forward to reading the novel's successors -- but I'm not doing it for their Austenish qualities, but for their own virtues
[1]Note that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is not in this category. Clarke is certainly not imitating Austen -- her style is more Victorian -- and it doesn't seem to be homage to any particular author.
I'm prepared to argue that the barriers, taken together, make it almost impossible to do this with full success, short of a Pierre Menard approach.
At the simplest mechanical level, there's the problem of getting the language right. Words change, vocabularies change, and using only George III/Regency language and using it in the right way requires a great deal of knowledge and care. (I won't say that it's impossible -- teachers who specialize in the period might have a chance at it -- but it's very difficult.) In addition, there's the additional constraint that you should exclude period language of a level that Austen herself excluded. I'm pretty sure, for example, that she never once refers to the ton, beloved of Georgette Heyer. (There's a reason for this: Austen didn't care about the ton, and to the degree that she did, she distrusted them.)
At the next level, there's getting the referents right. An abbey did not usually mean a Gothic building; it would have been far more likely to be a Palladian or Georgian residence of some scale on land acquired from the Crown which had belonged to an Abbey in Henry VIII's day. (It was occasionally used loosely to refer to such a residence even if the land did not go back to an actual abbey). Being aware of the material culture of the time is tricky (condition of roads, details of clothing and the constraints they imposed, etc.).
Austen's style is not as easy as it seems to imitate (of which more anon: it has to do with her aims and intent as much as idiosyncrasies).
In choosing Dramatis Personae, one has to be careful yet again: the figure of highest rank in all of her novels is a Baronet, and her main figures are almost all gentry ("almost" because there are a few servants and people in trade -- and note that the line isn't easy to draw -- Austen was generally suspicious of cits, but she also gives us the Gardiners). So playing with nobility immediately marks one's work as un-Austenish.
Except when parodying it, she avoids melodrama. Nobody ever runs away to Gretna Green in an Austen novel; not even Lydia Bennett. There are no duels, despite Mrs. Bennett's fears about Mr. Bennett. Nobody dies on-screen, as it were. The single most violent thing that happens to anyone is a young woman slipping on a step and hitting her head.
She excludes current affairs; except for a few references to naval action in Persuasion and the presence of soldiers in Pride and Prejudice, it would be hard to find any indication at all of the Napoleonic wars.
However, the biggest barrier has to do with the nature of the project itself.
Jane Austen is, in attitude, probably closest to Dr. Johnson of all the English authors. She's a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, deeply suspicious of anything urban or modern; she's the daughter of a C. of E. Rector with that Augustan view which reduces religion to morality but still values it heavily. (There's no piety surrounding religion in Austen, but the church is assumed to be appropriately there as an institution.)
She is writing works which engage the present -- her present -- critically but subtly from a deeply moral (and conservative) point of view. She is deeply concerned with issues surrounding the status and power of women, but she advocates no radical changes: in her view if everyone within the system did as they ought, the system would work; but she sees all sorts of people not doing so.
In a way somewhat analogous to the way in which Stanley Fish's Milton writes in such a way as to engage the reader actively in Paradise Lost, Austen's prose is a steady flow of invitations to the reader to make (or at least recognize) small moral judgements. Her comedy of manners is about figures who are all somewhat flawed (although most of them are basically "good") -- including her heroines. In particular, she achieves something of the effect Pope does in balancing couplets by pairing precisely chosen verbs or adjectives with slightly different meanings to evoke their fine distinctions. (For a Popeian example of this sort of parallelism, consider the verbs in "true genius kindles, and fair fame inspires" -- genius is "kindled" because it is ultimately a flame and fame (= rumour) is inspired because both have to do with breath; genius can be true, but fame is only "fair" (attractive, but not necessarily true).)
The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly friendly; on his side even more. His present pursuit could not make him forget that Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to deserve his attention, the first to listen and to pity, the first to be admired; and in his manner of bidding her adieu, wishing her every enjoyment, reminding her of what she was to expect in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their opinion of her—their opinion of everybody—would always coincide, there was a solicitude, an interest which she felt must ever attach her to him with a most sincere regard; and she parted from him convinced that, whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable and pleasing.
Note that the virtues assigned to Wickham are both among the most shallow ones possible("There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."); that if Elizabeth deserved his regard then his "present pursuit" (which itself has a hunting tone around it, making Miss King his prey) is a decline; that Elizabeth's responses (listen and pity) do not include any form of critical assessment (such as she later realizes she should have made). (There's also, of course, a large dollop of dramatic irony, given that Elizabeth's "opinion of everybody" is about to get a thorough upsetting.)
This is prose which begs for close attention to fine meanings, and also invites our own judgement of what is transpiring -- and the standards for judgement which are held out by the narrator are moral ones.
In contrast a modern day writer setting a novel in the Regency period is almost certainly doing so not because that is the best way to address current concerns critically -- the relations between men and women, particularly, and the forms which society imposes on them, have changed radically since then. We place fiction in the past because it is one of the few "safe" places left which are exotic. To visit the Regency is to take a vacation from the concerns of everyday life.
If Jane Austen were to be writing today, she would be writing contemporary fiction, because her sort of fiction engages with contemporary issues. Vice-versa, if someone is inclined to place their action two centuries in the past, it may not be with an intent to avoid critical engagement with human nature entirely -- it may not be just to produce froth -- but it will not be with the same sort of engagement as is required to drive a truly Austenish novel. In addition, it's hard to imagine any serious author today with the values of an Augustan Tory providing the operative canon for judgement.
I actually think that Kowal's book is good -- although from an Austen point of view it drops into melodrama in the latter part of the book. (In addition, I think her characters are a little too flawed for Austen:many of Austen's characters are basically good but with a single character making them ridiculous (Sir William Lucas' vanity, for example, does not make him an unsympathetic man, just a tedious one)). I look forward to reading the novel's successors -- but I'm not doing it for their Austenish qualities, but for their own virtues
[1]Note that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is not in this category. Clarke is certainly not imitating Austen -- her style is more Victorian -- and it doesn't seem to be homage to any particular author.