Wegenerds

I was surprised by how little charmed I was. My last Austen novel (”Mansfield Park”) which I read about two years ago (?) seems much more serious, in my memory. Persuasion didn't let me in on a lot of important inner struggles within either Anne or Wentworth. Austen feels more repressed than ever: Anne as a central character is distant, and distances herself from her own emotions; both character and narrator reframe in negatives or "ought have been"s to keep us innoculated from feeling her feelings of despair, self-contempt, or even disappointment with others. It could be that this is connected to Anne's "constancy." At the end of the novel, we find out Anne doesn't even blame herself for following Lady Russell's advice, as a 19 year old. This seems defensible; but how does she deal with the fallout of that justifiable decision? We are told (early on by the narrator) that Anne got over it because of distance of time; we are told (by Anne) that she had no "change of scene" or occupation with which to busy herself, so she never got over it. Where is the virtue in remaining in love with someone who has jilted you? Capt. Wentworth is presumably to blame for the break-up, since he was hurt by her prudence, and too proud to go back to her after a year, once he'd made his fortune; he takes some of the blame on himself -- but he's also valorized, since Anne thinks she should have said yes, and in key scenes, other characters editorialize that getting in the way of a young couple's fervent happiness just because of a little thing like money isn't ever a good idea. We are supposed to think that Anne's feelings were enough that she could have weathered hardship with him, even if it meant losing her family face -- though she never makes this defense of herself. Anne's only manifesto, in the last chapters, is about how long her feelings lasted because she was bored! Speaking of the family: the aristocracy never so neatly parodied and dispensed with: father Sir Elliot is repulsively vain and status-conscious, and so is sister Elizabeth. Not a single strand of authorial sympathy. The narrator intrudes to give us reason not to particularly value many characters: the Musgroves (although they are warm, child-friendly, and unaffected, they are also rather stupid, fat, and impetuous). One of their older sons died; "good riddance," says Austen. Louisa Musgrove proves she is no better than she should be by jumping playfully off some kind of pier on the beach and cracking her head open. She almost dies -- she deserves it, we all agree. Not wife material for a man of understanding like Capt. Wentworth. Ultimately, there's just something lacking in Persuasion. The only character whose basic moral status is unknown for longer than three pages is Capt. Wentworth, and the only compelling problem in the novel is that he has reason to doubt Anne's character; Anne, I think, also has reason to doubt his... yet, Anne just isn't the type. Constant. There are genuinely sweet moments where he moves outside of his posture of resentment and doubt to offer her human kindness: taking the toddler off her back (lol, it's a big deal), getting her a ride in a carriage because she's tired from a walk. Anne is a quiet outsider for much of the book, yet people like her for her understanding and her humility: not her wit, but, perhaps, keeping a cool head in a crisis, and having the "judgment" to know a good pianist from a bad one, a slick performer from an authentic gentleman. Frequently revisited: the loneliness of being the ONLY one in a crowd with good judgment. But this starts to feel somewhat contrived. Family and society shouldn't restrict all of Anne's interactions with others; but it really does. The British Navy has never looked better, and she responds to their fresh, unaffected way of life and conversation -- but we're not sure if she's fit for it. She is respectable and kind. She is not heroic, nor daring; she hurts when her loyalty is suspected, but she does nothing to put herself really in harm's way; every step of the pursuit must be made by others, and we don't even get to hear her declaring her feelings aloud in any of the final conversations with Wentworth. She is the only victim in her family -- of the death of Lady Elliot, of her father's vanity -- and yet she doesn't seem to have much of the "warmth and authentic feeling" that she responds to in others. She's not a radical question, the way that Fanny Price is ("what if you had good morals -- and nothing else?").

On the “rules” of baseball compared to the rules of society: being able to stand outside the rules is the greatest result of reading the Great Books. “Standing outside” is not problematized; a normal (perhaps ‘enlightened’?) activity, at least for all those writers of the Great Books, and for all students who discover doubt and therefore distance. Change is inevitable. There may be rules that never change (hat tip to Kant), but presumably it won’t be the inculcating of this particular tradition that teaches you what those are in any obvious way. For him, it is “proven that none of us… have any choice but to judge by our custom,” and that “we have no right to judge by our custom unless we accept responsibility… that is, the obligation to reflect on our custom” and be willing to change it when instructed by (true) justice. Good text to discuss with faculty or HL teachers (Q: “Why does it help to read Great Books?”), not necessarily as an endorsement -- is he a Hegelian? Kantian more certainly. Read more.

This essay shows Eco at his best: learned and ironic, but sympathetic to his subject and never descending into sarcasm, which is sometimes his weakness. He throws in his lot with a string of patristic, medieval, and early modern literati, both Christian and Jewish, in a collaborative attempt to determine what language Adam spoke in the Garden before the Fall, and what that means for theories of human linguistics.

Eco is not only the chronicler of past intellectual controversies, but a theorist in his own right: unraveling Dante's idiosyncratic poetic ambitions and his linguistic theory as he suggests that the poet's final statement on language (its relationship to reality, its origin and universality and subjection to convention) actually grew out of an admittedly unproven encounter with 14th century cabala.

Along the way Eco showers us with his characteristic joy in the unexpected and coincidental, recounting the unresolved exegetical question as to whether or in what order Adam named the fish (undersea creatures being difficult to parade through the Garden, even for God) -- the curious fact that Dante considered Eve the first being to utter real human speech (a discomfiting notion for our medieval poet) -- that the first to conceive of Chomsky's "black box" were actually a group of 14th century grammarians and radical Aristotelians -- and the activities of a group of Jewish intellectuals in a 13th century Italy, some of whom gave public readings on the Comedia, transliterated it into Hebrew for their fellow Jews, and even traveled to Rome with the intention of converting the Pope.

In Eco's hands the middle ages are always a wild and woolly place, but here his affinity for Italian poetry and the world of Dante flings him far above the dark wood of conspiracies and hoaxes and the tangle of minds which he indulges so much in his historical fiction. That a longing for communion with prelapsarian Adam can strip the cynicism from such a knowing man is one of the delights of this chapter.