Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  Irony, as in the passage from Tom Jones, may start out symmetrical or balanced but is appealingly prone to destabilizing swerves, away from the merely scathing observation or the devastating summing-up toward compassion or delusion or any one of a number of different affects. Consider these sentences from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Pope (though it is biography, not satire, it is a biography of one of England’s great satirical writers, and Johnson brings to bear on Alexander Pope’s story a set of tools that include irony, paradox and aphorism):

  He tried all styles, and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epick poem, with panegyricks on all the princes of Europe; and, as he confesses, thought himself the greatest genius that ever was. Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings; he, indeed, who forms his opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of other men, is very liable to errour; but it was the felicity of Pope to rate himself at his real value.5

  Johnson dislikes aspects of Pope’s personality but is scrupulously fair about his poetry, here and elsewhere in the Life of Pope; quoting Pope’s own mocking-but-still-self-aggrandizing youthful self-assessment, Johnson is moved to offer a generalization (“Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings”), then a blow (ironic in its diction but still devastating in its judgment) at those who rate themselves too high, before reining in the verbal aggression and retracting some (not all) of the implied criticism of the poet’s character. The lightly ironized diction (the Latinate “felicity,” for instance) has no specific target but contributes to give the reader a sense of the relative detachment of Johnson’s critical judgment, so that the irony can be considered as being only partly at Pope’s expense.

  The opening line of D. A. Miller’s essay “No One Is Alone,” in the book called Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, offers a singular provocation: “Of that godlike authority which we think of as the default mode of narration in the traditional novel,” Miller writes, “Jane Austen may well be the only English example.”6 The narrators of Henry Fielding and William Thackeray and George Eliot, he asserts, are all associated with human characters, each of whom has at least implicitly a sex and a social position in which the narrative authority is grounded. In contrast, Miller suggests, “Austen’s divinity is free of all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of power/knowledge in the world under narration…. Nowhere else in nineteenth-century English narration have the claims of the ‘person,’ its ideology, been more completely denied.” One of Miller’s most striking observations in this essay concerns the extent to which “whoever wishes to illustrate Austen Style regularly gravitates toward the maxim, assuming that the perfection of this Style is highest, most visible and delectable, in bite-size form,” even as such maxims are actually relatively uncommon in Austen’s fiction; the tendency to extract morsels for anthologies of famous quotations (what Miller calls “the Lilliputian volumes of ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen’ for sale at the counter of certain gift shops”) ignores “not just the fact, but the strangeness of the fact, that Austen Style elects to express itself in, of all things, a narrative form” (40–41). The practice of quotation associated with this sort of anthology will always distort the sense and workings of the language in the longer narratives from which such quotations are drawn, erasing in particular the tension between the amplitude or unfolding tendencies of narrative and the punctuated or abrupt quality of the aphorism.

  I want to invoke an example from Flaubert in order to show this tension at its clearest. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity”: an aphorism, certainly, perhaps even an overextravagant one, almost “unearned” or glib—histrionic to a degree that verges on melodrama—when it is taken as a self-standing unit of prose. Consider it in its context, though, at the end of the passage in Madame Bovary that describes the response of Rodolphe to Emma Bovary’s expressions of passion:

  He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.7

  To my ear, that sentence, which when taken out of context can only be described as a bit much, becomes heartbreaking when placed as it is here, as the culmination of a movement from the narrow angle of Rodolphe’s thoughts to the broad summing-up vantage-point of the middle of the paragraph. I think here, too, of an aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche’s often uttered by Harold Bloom (it is the epigraph to his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human): “That for which we can find words is already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

  It is often worth asking, about moments in prose that display the acoustical elegance and critical force of the aphorism, at whose expense they come. Is a particular aphorism associated with a character’s point of view? A narratorial or authorial point of view? The point of view of a real historical author or of an authorial persona like Fielding’s? (There is a slight but distinct difference between saying “narratorial” and “authorial”—the authorial persona is very strong in the narration of Tom Jones, for instance, whereas Emma’s narrator has a distinct voice but could not be identified as an authorial persona as such.) Aphorisms of judgment are everywhere in Austen’s fiction, and they are often curiously and conspicuously unlocalized—associated with but not technically linked to the character whose viewpoint we are closest to at the moment of judgment. Sometimes, indeed, there is no character in the vicinity but merely an impersonal narrative pronouncement, as in the account Emma’s second chapter provides of Mr. Weston’s earlier marriage to a wealthy young woman whose family disinherited her and who thereafter found his income insufficient to her requirements:

  It was an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness. Mrs. Weston ought to have found more in it, for she had a husband whose warm heart and sweet temper made him think every thing due to her in return for the great goodness of being in love with him; but though she had one sort of spirit, she had not the best. She had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasonable anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home. They lived beyond their income, but still it was nothing in comparison of Enscombe: she did not cease to love her husband, but she wanted at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe. (Emma, I.ii, 13)

  This is the impersonal narrator’s judgment, surely—we don’t hear these words as being associated with the “voice” of a particular character, although it may be that the position would have something in common with the judgment of Emma Woodhouse or the Knightley brothers. The tone is perhaps Augustan in its impersonality; this is a narrator comfortable with discriminating between “one sort of spirit” and “the best” sort of spirit, and the Augustan oppositions continue in the next sentence (“enough…not enough…nor”). There is no triumphant rounding-out at the end of the paragraph here, as one might find in the closing couplets of certain poems by Pope or Swift (“Such Order from Confusion sprung, / Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung”), no verbally resounding clincher, but instead a sort of “sideways” summing-up that flowers out o
f the word Enscombe as a kind of second thought. The words “it is nothing in comparison of Enscombe” may indeed be Mrs. Weston’s own, filtered into the third-person narrative by means of free indirect style, which allows the words or thoughts of an individual character to migrate into a free-floating narrative voice that both is and isn’t associated with that particular person, but they prompt a ratcheting-up of verbal intensity on the narrator’s part, and the final observation about the lady’s contradictory desires is calmly devastating.

  More often, though, moments of satirical judgment do seem to be linked to an individual character’s point of view. It is a striking characteristic of Austen’s style, this use of the third-person voice that can home in so closely on a single character’s thoughts that we get them seemingly almost unmediated—and yet always necessarily mediated by their frame. Free indirect style (as opposed, on the one hand, to direct speech, and on the other to a close or limited third-person paraphrase that lacks the quality of freedom, that ability to swoop freely in and out on multiple characters’ perspectives) is a powerful and flexible tool for the novelist writing in the third person. Such narration is able to zoom in on the thoughts of an individual character and then move back out again with astonishing rapidity and effectiveness. (James Wood, in How Fiction Works, gives us a classic example from the opening of Joyce’s story “The Dead”: “‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’ But no one is literally run off her feet.”8) In Austen’s version of the mode, at least, there’s also a strong component of judgment or summing-up, the sense that a narrator has selected crucial phrases or sentences from some conjectural conversation to which we don’t have direct access but that will represent not just telling details but in many cases damning ones, characters condemned by having the words borrowed out of their own mouths.

  In the taxonomy of Austen’s style, then, the reporting of a character’s thoughts or speech in a third-person voice often exposes that person’s foibles. A good instance in Emma can be seen in the narrative handling of Mr. Woodhouse’s anxieties concerning the disposition of the wedding cake at the end of chapter 2, and the thoughts of Mr. Woodhouse or Mr. Elton or Harriet Smith may come through very strongly and revealingly at individual moments, almost as though the narrative voice is a radio tuned briefly to the channel of one character’s thoughts and then to another’s. We also see the use of a lightly ironized diction that is not clearly directed toward a specific target. “Not unfrequently, through Emma’s persuasion, [Mr. Woodhouse] had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him” (I.iii.17): the double negative of “Not unfrequently” and that phrase “the chosen and the best” both sound lurkingly satirical, but whose judgment is it? Does Emma use the phrase “the chosen and the best” self-mockingly, or is it the narrator’s mockery of the smallness of the social circles of Hartfield? These questions can’t be answered—yet neither can the sentence be taken as simple denotative description absent all judgment.

  Style is itself one of Emma’s great topics. Think of the moment when we first hear, about the collection of riddles that Emma is amassing with the help of her submissive new friend, Harriet Smith, that “as Harriet wrote a very pretty hand, it was likely to be an arrangement of the first order, in form as well as quantity” (I.ix.56). This is funny because of word choice: a standard opposition might place quantity on the one hand and quality on the other, and neither form nor quantity is really a good criterion of evaluation for such a collection, properly speaking. Elsewhere, the intellectually feeble Mr. Woodhouse offers a verdict on the smooth and plausible letter written by Frank Churchill on the occasion of his father’s remarriage that at first seems to discredit Mr. Woodhouse’s judgment but that also obliquely discredits Frank Churchill, too, for precisely the pliancy and prettiness of manner which Mr. Knightley has already criticized in Frank. “It was an exceeding good, pretty letter, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Weston a great deal of pleasure,” Mr. Woodhouse observes. “I remember it was written from Weymouth, and dated Sept. 28th—and began, ‘My dear Madam,’ but I forget how it went on; and it was signed ‘F. C. Weston Churchill.’—I remember that perfectly” (I.xi.77). Not, then, a letter of substance—but when Isabella Woodhouse exclaims in response to this description “How very pleasing and proper of him!,” it is not just a banality. She responds specifically to Frank’s choice to use his father’s name when he signs the letter, rather than exclusively the surname of the family into which he has been adopted. It was a common practice at this time for a relatively impoverished family of gentry with surplus sons to offer one of them up, as heir, to another branch of the family with more wealth and no offspring, with the name change often being made a condition of the adoption: Jane Austen’s brother Edward was adopted by Austen cousins Thomas and Catherine Knight and changed his name to Edward Austen Knight. It seems as though Mr. Woodhouse, with all his trivializing impulses (his lack of a sense of proportion), has after all singled out the letter’s most salient feature.

  Many of the sharper insights of Emma the novel seem to be at least loosely aligned with the point of view of Emma the character, but this is not always the case—and even when it is, it raises as many questions as it answers. Whose irony is it, for instance, when the narrator proclaims, of the visit from Emma’s sister and her family, that “she had nothing to wish otherwise, but that the days did not pass so swiftly. It was a delightful visit;—perfect, in being much too short” (I.xiii.86). “She” is sister Isabella, but the insight that a visit should always be “much too short” cannot derive from Isabella’s dim consciousness, and part of the joke—I will spell out the obvious, in a way that leaches out the humor but that lets me draw attention to the mechanics of the sentence—is that even people we like very much become tiresome when they visit us for too long, especially if their children are noisy. If this is Emma’s dry aside, though, how does the narrator move so quickly from Isabella’s consciousness to that of her sister? Or is it simply the narrator’s interjection, as it were, from on high? The same cadence can be heard in a later, better-known line concerning the elaborate preparations for a group visit to Box Hill: “Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there” (III.vii.288). This is certainly the kind of thing that Emma might think or say, but it is unanchored, unmoored—the novel gives it no unambiguous point of origin in a single character’s filtering consciousness.

  Here is another, fuller example that even more clearly bares the enigma of the novel’s narrative voice. Emma has undertaken the difficult task of breaking the news to Harriet Smith that despite Emma’s encouragement to both parties (and particularly to Harriet), Mr. Elton has understood the object of his pursuit to be Emma herself rather than her less-well-off friend. Harriet’s “tears fell abundantly,” the narrator comments (we deduce from the rest of the sentence that this is not much to her credit),

  but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma’s eyes—and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding—really for a time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two—and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do.

  It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life. (I.xvii.112)

  The modifier “really” is a signal of sincerity—there is nothing sarcastic about Emma’s conviction, short-lived though it may be, of Harriet’s superiority. But what has happened between the end of that paragraph and the beginning of the next one? “It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant”—is the sarcasm Emma’s or the narrator’s? Surely the ring of the words owes something to the sound of Emma’s own unspoken thoughts. The sentence is funny because of the tension between the status of these adjectives as performing a function of simple desc
ription and as they fulfill a function of judgment—the comedy arises from the nonmalicious use of judgmental words as though they are simply neutral. The rest of the sentence takes an interesting turn. It absolutely doesn’t have the rounded-out cadence of a rhymed couplet; instead, it swerves. There is no irony in Emma’s own state of mind at her departure; whatever irony resides in the passage must arise from the narrator’s framing and phrasing of the situation. (In that sense, the joke here is surely at Emma’s expense rather than being produced by Emma’s own consciousness.) The passage, in other words, at once gives voice to Emma’s thoughts and offers a place from which they may be held up to judgment or critiqued themselves; it is not, perhaps, an unstable form of irony, but it destabilizes the reader slightly, wrong-footing us a little and putting us off balance.