“That’s what makes it so timely now,” Fernando offered. “That’s what they say in the book itself in the opening materials.”
“It’s so lacking in context, that becomes the context.” Carmen Gloria gestured for a moment as she struggled to articulate her thoughts. “It’s another way to see history, because basically what she’s showing is that there are coexisting worlds that don’t touch each other.”
Marcia joined in. “The bourgeois life they live is the context. They’ve got so much leisure, so much time on their hands to do the stupidest things. Their whole lives are centered around social activities—their own lives, and nothing else. That little nucleus of upper-class people was disconnected from the social events and the politics of the period.”
“Unfortunately, there are people just like that today,” Carmen Gloria added, to general consensus. I was curious to see how far she might pursue this connection with contemporary Chile, but talk quickly swung back to Austen’s original context.
“There’s a part in the novel,” Marcia said, “when Elinor says that the men always enrich the conversation, specifically because they talk about politics. Just think about it—how cut off they were from life.”
“It wasn’t until I got to page 182 that I found a reference to somebody actually working,” Carmen Gloria pursued. “I kept asking myself, what part of the year is this, anyway? Are they all on vacation? Surely by December or January somebody was going to have to get moving with something!”
With a smile I thought back to Juan in Puerto Vallarta, so put out by Austen’s shiftless male characters.
“Well, things in general aren’t represented in much detail,” Silvia joined in. “There’s very little concrete detail, even about things like what they eat. It’s all very distancing, somehow.”
As the others concurred, Carmen Gloria directed a glance at me. “I realize this is your specialization and that this is the only Austen novel I’ve read, but I have to say that it doesn’t seem like there’s much detail on the characters either. I’ve read lots of Russian novelists that I adore, who really leave me stunned with the depth of their descriptions, but with Austen I feel like something’s left hanging.”
Silvia, eager to agree, overlapped with Carmen Gloria’s thoughts: “I feel the same way. The sisters themselves can’t even ask each other things directly. I haven’t read any other Austen novels either, but maybe it’s the English character, to distance themselves from profound emotions. Supposedly, to this day that’s a notable difference between our cultures.”
Isabel Allende’s comments about how Chileans are “the English of Latin America” came to mind, but before I could form a sentence to share the idea, Carmen Gloria added, “There’s also a difference in reading between Latin Americans and North Americans here, too. I don’t feel like I identify with the characters, and I’d actually be ashamed to say, ‘Hey, my brother is just like that character.’ When we were talking about Austen before this meeting, it surprised me when you mentioned that in the United States it’s common to do that.”
“Look,” Marcia interrupted, “I agree on the issue of distance in the novel. Also, I see a real poverty in this world, in spite of the reading they discuss, the painting and music—although actually, I’d love to have one tenth of the free time they’ve got to dedicate myself like crazy to those things! But how horrible to be subjected to such controlled relationships. I really find that Austen’s got a very broad understanding of female psychology within this framework, the sort of tricks women play on themselves to keep up the illusion of being in love, or the attitudes about how to handle commitments. I found it really contemporary—it works for any context.”
“Does that mean, then, that you identified with a particular character or recognized one as familiar?” Carmen Gloria asked.
“No,” responded Marcia, “I recognize our gender, in general. Both men and women, actually.”
That led to a line of discussion about Austen’s style as a woman. I took a moment to explain her anonymous publication and the fact that some readers, owing to her clean style, assumed her to be a man.
“A cold style, even flat,” Marcia said. “Especially with respect to emotions, very flat. It interested me, it really grabbed me. It’s very precise, clean, and distant. Austen’s distant from her own story.”
“She uses very precise words.” Silvia picked up the line of thought. “But it’s as if she’s not involved. She describes, she shows, but doesn’t put herself in there.”
“Personally, I think she really does,” Fernando contradicted politely. “What she does—and this has to do with the English character, I think—is use a screen of humor between what she says and how she says it.”
I was struck by how often these readers were commenting on the techniques Austen used to delineate the characters more than on the actual characters. But they were writers themselves, after all.
“It’s irony, yes,” he continued, as someone raised this point. “That makes the story colder, but it also makes it less obvious from what perspective the story is told, although I’d say Elinor emerges as the heroine. But one thing that really struck me was how cut short the end of the book feels, as if at some point she just got tired of writing,” Fernando finished, to nods all around. No doubt they could all identify with the desire to wrap up a work, but not at the expense of quality.
“Yes, because Marianne spent most of the book saying that Brandon was a pichiruchi—there you go, Amy, there’s some good Chilean slang for you!” Carmen Gloria laughed over the word that, as far as I could make out, best translated in that context to something like “geezer.” “And Elinor wasn’t as perceptive about Edward in some ways as she should have been.”
Elvira, silent up to this point, finally joined in. “Not about Edward, but with her sister and with herself, she was. Elinor is very perceptive—either Elinor or it’s the narrator who’s perceptive. The irony and the criticism of their social environment are very important.”
“I looked for that sort of criticism,” Carmen Gloria countered. “I really looked, but I didn’t find it.”
“I did,” Silvia responded, “but it’s subtle.”
“There’s actually a passage that’s not even irony, because it’s so direct,” Fernando pointed out. “Lady Middleton feels discomfort around Elinor and Marianne because they read books that are satirical. She doesn’t know what satire is, but it makes her feel offended and suspicious all the same. There are lots of criticisms in the book, but that one is the most direct, because it has to do with the very act of writing and of reading.”
“There’s also the situation of how dependent women are and the issue of the first born inheriting,” Elvira said. “The first born is supposed to improve the family fortunes by marrying well, but when the money is taken from Edward, it’s given to the brother who won’t spend it wisely, since he’s a reckless type and he married Lucy. That’s satire.”
Elvira paused for a moment but with the air of having more to say. She hadn’t spoken up much, so the others waited for her to continue—a striking contrast with the lively verbal dog-piles of the Ecuador group.
“Austen’s narrative style is distant,” she added, “but the characters communicate their world. The physical world of the novel isn’t very concrete, but there’s an internal world you enter. There’s the Colonel, for example, and the nature of the love he feels for Marianne, one that seems somehow diluted and might even be closer to what we’d call friendship here. And there’s all of the busywork that defines the women, embroidering, making comforters. The whole world of the novel is very rigid, very closed. The richness of it all for me is the analysis Austen provides of their feelings.”
Elvira spoke slow, clear Spanish, but I still struggled a bit, mostly because I was trying to pull together the threads on Austen’s depiction of feelings. If I understood correctly, the c
onsensus seemed to move in the direction of Austen not showing her character’s feelings directly but rather filtering them through an interesting narrative voice.
“I have to say that Elinor seems to me to be a lot older than she’s described as being in the book,” Carmen Gloria said suddenly.
“And just think,” Silvia added, “the Colonel says he’s old and he’s only thirty-five or so.” Thirty-five was at least a few birthdays back for all of us in the room that evening, and a wave of laughter and agreement met her comment.
“Death’s approaching!” exclaimed Marcia.
“Oh, my back hurts!” Carmen Gloria cried, pretending to be an ailing old Brandon. Then she turned to me and said, “And what led you to choose Austen as a specialization? What drew you to her?”
“To be honest, in part it has to do with the entire cult of Austen we’ve got in the States. It’s fascinating to see how many people are crazy about her.”
“But I read a criticism by Mark Twain that was incredibly harsh!” Carmen Gloria countered. “Something like, ‘if you’ve got a library with a book in it by Austen, then it’s not worth much.’”
We could certainly have used Ramon right about then—chances are he’d have known the exact quote, which runs as follows: “Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
“There are writers who hate her and writers who love her,” I said.
“Supposedly Rudyard Kipling loved her,” Carmen Gloria returned, nodding.
“Virginia Woolf, as well. And so did Vladimir Nabokov, especially for her clean, pure style. But Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, didn’t like her at all. She thought her world was cold and her characters, insignificant. She was very hard on Austen for the distance she maintained.”
“Well, I see it as a criticism of that world,” Marcia interjected, “and anyway, it’s what makes it interesting. If she had been too involved, it would have been harder to criticize the trivialities.”
“Comparing how tall the kids are,” Fernando offered, hitting directly on one of Austen’s best eye-rolling scenes from the book, one that makes clear how little the lesser characters have going on in their heads.
“And that opening dialogue, when the brother keeps lowering the amount he’ll give his sisters,” Marcia added, as Silvia joined in: “So ridiculous!” I wasn’t surprised that this scene came to mind so readily for them, as well; Diego had loved it, although it had really made Salvador angry.
“That was impressive,” Fernando agreed. “That woman really bargained him down.”
“I think it was only half ironic,” Marcia said. “The text is really current because that kind of thing still happens, but now, with the people who’ve got economic power, it’s better hidden, better disguised.”
“And marriages of convenience, for money,” Silvia put in.
Carmen Gloria shifted slightly in her seat, smoothing her skirt. “I’ve always said that culture imposes so much on relations, especially for women. That imposition of ‘maternal instinct,’ all of the cultural impositions on women’s behavior.”
“And to think how a woman born so long ago wrote a novel exposing that,” Marcia said. “There was so much pressure for women trying to find husbands with a certain amount of money to be a certain way. If you didn’t draw or have this skill or that, you might not find anybody.”
After pursuing this line of conversation for a while we lapsed into a comfortable group silence, during which people reached for their drinks or flipped through their copies of the novel.
Carmen Gloria drew us back together again, returning to a point Fernando had made earlier. “This book makes me think of the old custom of publishing novels in magazines, with chapters coming out one at a time, where you’re moving toward a happy ending, but the action is drawn out to get you there and then suddenly,” she leaned forward then threw her hands in the air, “here it is!”
“I didn’t like the end either,” Silvia said. “It wasn’t consistent with the earlier level of the language, the descriptions of the characters, and most of all, their feelings. Everything was lost, and the actions weren’t consistent with where the characters really were, psychologically. How did it all happen so fast with Marianne?”
“In two or three lines we’ve got a change that runs against what Austen was narrating for three hundred pages!” Carmen Gloria agreed.
“A lot of critics agree about the abrupt end of this novel,” I offered. “It’s the first one she published, and it’s not as polished. There are lots of people in the U.S. and U.K. who write their own sequels, and when they don’t like how things turned out, they change them. There’s a sequel where Marianne decides she’s made a mistake and runs off with Willoughby instead, and they—”
A crowing rooster cut me off. What the heck?! Fernando leaped up, with apologies and sheepish looks at the rest of us, to grab the book bag he’d set on my desk in the living room. Since I doubted he’d smuggled in tiny Uriel from the Franciscan monastery gardens, I had to assume he was hunting for his cell phone.
As we all laughed, Marcia picked up the sequel topic. “I had no idea people did that. If I don’t like the end of a book, I might think about how I’d do it differently, but it seems really funny to me to write a whole new novel.”
“That’s bizarre,” Silvia concurred.
“Well, there’s Borges,” Elvira pointed out. “He encouraged writers to take some of his characters and work with them, and he did the same with characters from other fiction.”
Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinean (so, more about him later), is arguably the most important writer in Latin America. Surely if Borges did it, it was legit?
“But to take a novel and write another ending to it,” Silvia intervened with a dubious look, “that really surprises me.”
“It’s rewriting,” Elvira said.
“Yes, but with Borges it had to do with admiration,” Carmen Gloria countered.
“For me, I’d think about how I might end a novel differently,” Marcia added. “But to write, publish, and put my name on a sequel, that would be kind of embarrassing.”
“In a society of mass communication, it’s not surprising this sort of thing happens,” Fernando suggested.
As the line of conversation turned toward the “cult” aspect of Austen’s fame, I opened my computer to show the group a photo that summed up the level of adoration certain folks feel for Austen.
“Tell me that’s not a picture of you!” Carmen Gloria glanced at me with horror then turned her gaze back to the close-up of a tattoo on a woman’s arm.
“I took this at a conference held in England. It’s a quote from one of Austen’s first novels, Northanger Abbey.” It read, “Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” The text wound around her upper arm in the shape of the symbol for woman. Someone who takes her Jane seriously—I loved it!
“Are there other authors people are this fanatical about?” Carmen Gloria asked, as the group all exchanged wondering looks. “Like Mark Twain?”
“There are fan groups for lots of different authors, but none as large or as widespread,” I responded.
Before we moved too far away from the ending of Sense and Sensibility, I couldn’t resist checking in about something. Most of the Mexico readers had opposed the match between Marianne and Brandon on grounds of the age difference—especially Josefa and Juan, thinking about their own daughter’s marriage. Was a mismatch what these readers didn’t like?
“Many of my students in the States feel disappointed with the end of the novel, like you are,” I began. “Some even say that it seems like a punishment for Marianne to end up with a husband so much older than she is.�
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“I don’t think it’s bad in that sense—that seems pretty common for the period,” Silvia replied quickly. “My problem is with how poorly the narration works in comparison with the rest of the novel.”
“In fact, it’s not even ‘narrated,’ really, it’s just mentioned,” agreed Fernando.
“I also got the impression,” added Carmen Gloria, “that Austen created one character at the beginning, but didn’t quite stick with that character for the ending.”
Again, I couldn’t help but notice how “writerly” their reactions were compared to those of the other groups. Nobody was focusing on how they felt about the characters—nobody was taking Fanny Dashwood’s greed personally or worrying that Marianne won’t really be happy with Brandon. Given their interest in Austen’s technique over her subject matter, I decided to share a bit about her juvenilia, assuming they’d be interested in her development as a writer. We discussed the wild stories of Austen’s youth as I refreshed people’s drinks.
“Was Austen very religious?” Carmen Gloria asked during an opening in the conversation. “It surprises me that the theme doesn’t come up, given the time period when she was writing. Since her father was a clergyman, it seems like she would have spent more time on that subject.”
“She was religious in her private life,” I answered. “We know she wrote some prayers. But while morality is important in her works—keeping your word, being loyal—morality’s not tied with observing a specific faith. That makes it easy to adapt her novels. There’s even a Bollywood version called Bride and Prejudice. It’s set in modern India, but the plot’s essentially the same.”
“Has she been translated into many languages?” Carmen Gloria asked. “Because I think Austen’s really not known in Chile. I’ve mentioned her to a few people here, and they have some idea who she is but only because of the film versions of her novels.”
All Roads Lead to Austen Page 19
