Pride and Prejudice

Further Reading: Second Impressions

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Knowing little of the person but what I read in The New York Times, Sandy Lerner, as an idea, has long fascinated me, to the extent that she inspired a minor character in The Jane Austen Project, an ancient Ph.D. mathematician and tech billionaire with an obsession with literature, thought to be bankrolling the Jane Austen Project. When it turned out that Ms. Lerner (who for the record is neither ancient nor a Ph.D.) was giving a talk at my own local Jane Austen Society chapter, on a night that I already had off, no less, that I would be going to hear her was obvious.

I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching a historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading →

The Trouble With Normal

~ Flynn ~ Leave a comment

the-bennet-girls

I was near a TV, and the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice was on, which meant that  I watched it. Amazing! And not in such a good way. I saw it in a theater when it came out five years ago, but was distracted by the problem of how very beautiful Keira Knightly is, and how having a drop-dead gorgeous Elizabeth  Bennet utterly transforms the plot dynamic,  since much of the charm of P&P resides in the fact that Mr. Darcy falls in love with her mind. Also, the movie itself is beautiful. The costumes, the houses, the landscapes all feel beautifully composed and yet slightly  imperfect, like real life, except more so. I think on a large screen all this beauty kept me from noticing the stunning omission that was immediately apparent 4.5  years later on a tiny television: It is not at all funny.

Pride & Prejudice. Not funny. How is that even possible?

It’s not surprising to find a film version of P&P devoid of irony,  since, like most literary devices, irony  transfers poorly to film.  And while the irony that suffuses P&P is perhaps the book’s most distinguishing feature, you don’t have to appreciate literary irony to recognize that P&P is also very funny. It’s witty, full of sparkling dialogue and hilarious exchanges that both move the action of the story forward and illuminate deeper themes of plot and character, as here in Chapter 10. As many before me have observed, P&P relies heavily on dialogue and is almost playlike in many places.  What could be simpler than transforming it into a screenplay, as the makers of the 1995 version learned to their lasting delight? You stand back and let Jane Austen do the heavy lifting, sometimes adding a scene of someone bathing or fencing or jumping into a lake just to take a break from all the talking and dancing and gowns.

This version did not. In the quest to keep the plot moving forward at a rapid clip, something had to go. Actually a lot of stuff did: Mr. Bingley was reduced to one sister, for instance, which had the effect of making the surviving one seem much friendlier with Mr. Darcy than she really had any right to be. Some of the funniest scenes in the book were brutally abbreviated, but even those that got their due (like Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s interrogation of Elizabeth at their first meeting) were, strangely, not funny.  Once Darcy and Elizabeth’s most famous exchanges have lost their subtle restraint and their sophisticated syntax, the characters also seem to lose all respect for each other, and express their unacknowledged passion by bickering like fishwives.  The only attempts at humor seemed of the stupidest slapstick variety,  more Three’s Company than Marx Brothers, as in two separate instances near the end of the film when various members of the Bennet family listen at doors — to overhear Mr. Bingley’s proposal to Jane, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s interview with Elizabeth. Besides not being that funny, it seems a deliberate lowering of standards, for in Jane Austen’s world the only person crass enough to eavesdrop deliberately is the dreadful Anne Steele.

Maybe a lowering of standards is the wrong way to put it. This is a Pride and Prejudice that seeks to shake the dust off a classic, as one reviewer put it. It attempts to make a nearly 200-year-old work seem up to date, and the way it does this is by making the people seem more like normal people today, who tend in the main to flatly state what they are feeling, lack a sense of irony, shout when they get angry, listen at doors.

But the whole charm of Jane Austen 200 years on is that these people she writes of are not like us: they are recognizably human, in their emotions and their failings, yet they are also very different, in their acceptance of social restraints that would seem highly limiting to us, were we forced to abide by them. The tension between one’s true feelings and these social constrictions is the real problem in Jane Austen’s work, and the movie adapters who seek to update her work by having characters toss off the restraints so that only the feelings remain (as when poor Anne Elliot is made to run through the streets of Bath, hatless and panting, in the 2007 adaptation) do so at their peril, at the cost of a fundamental integrity.

On Beginnings and Endings

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A lot of advice to beginning novelists hoping to sell their work emphasizes the importance of a beginning that grabs the reader by the throat and makes he or she compelled to keep reading. And that, at the same time, sets the tone of the novel and provides accurate cues as to what it will be about.  In this respect, one cannot outdo Jane Austen’s opening sentence in Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

This is so well known and so often cited that it is easy to forget what a thing of beauty it really is. What it accomplishes, in less than 25 words, is nothing less than to set out the major themes of P&P: money and marriage, to be sure, but also the power of public opinion, which functions as a kind of Greek chorus throughout the work. In addition, it establishes, in this single, masterful sentence (which pays homage to her favorite Dr. Johnson at the same time it subtly mocks him), the prevailing tone of P&P, which is a relentless, though good-humored, irony. In fact, the sentence means the very opposite of what it seems to be saying. (Single men in possession of good fortunes, whom the reader meets two excellent examples of shortly in the persons of Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy, seem in no hurry at all to find wives and settle down. They are enjoying the social round, shooting, riding around the country, managing their estates & etc., thank you very much.)

The first sentence. The first page. The first chapter. The first three chapters. Everyone agrees, you have to keep people turning those pages.  But there is an unfortunate lack of attention paid to something equally important, with regrettable results that are visible everywhere one turns: the need for a good ending to a novel.

The list of good books that fall apart at the end is a long and melancholy one, but time grows short and I can bear to mention only a few. (Spoiler alert)  Think of The Mill on the Floss, in which George Eliot, no slouch in the plot game, apparently decided she simply could not  get Maggie Tulliver out of the impossible situation she had gotten her into. So she drowned her!  Along with her brother, who was a bit annoying, but not worthy of death. Yes, we started with a mill, it’s in the title, there are foreshadowings of the flood, but it’s still ridiculous.

Think of The Emperor’s Children, which masterfully evokes a particular time and world (late 20th century, privileged New Yorkers), creates a very complicated and rich plot tending toward a really rockin’ conflict… and then, whoops, deus ex machina alert: The airplanes fly into the Twin Towers. But that actually happened, one might object. And people were really surprised! And it did change everything! All true. But this only points out how different fiction and real life really are. Because fictionally, it was totally unsatisfying. It was not integrated into all the things that had  happened up until that point.

A good ending has to be both inevitable and surprising. History can do the heavy lifting, as in War and Peace or  The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, but history has to fit into the plot in a logical way, not be shoehorned in as in The Emperor’s Children.

I find very few good endings. Perhaps I expect too much. Or perhaps people spend too much time polishing those first three chapters and think the ending will take care of itself.

Here are a few books with endings that did not let me down:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

I am struggling with my own ending right now. I know what has to happen but exactly how I get there is not yet clear. Though this post may not seem to drip it,  I feel great sympathy for writers who write otherwise lovely books and blow the ending, because I see,  now, how narrow and steep the way is, how easy it is to go wrong.