I would like to make something abundantly clear, here, which is that although I feel my criticism of Austen is completely valid and totally correct, I am also obviously an idiot, something that should be factored into any evaluation of my opinion. I posted the exaggerated, acrobatic hatred displayed in those stupid old essay stubs because it is ridiculous and hopefully funny, not because I'm actually planning to dig Austen up and beat her over the head with her own shinbone. Although, To improve the article's general readability, however, I did remove some of the less-relevant Austen-related whining. You're welcome. (I'm going to post it somewhere else.) Lastly, please remember that I'm not trying to take your ghastly romance novels away from you, O! Uskglassphilic Austen Fans; as long as you don't let them piss on the sofa, you're more than welcome to bring them with you when you visit me.

For me (and probably you, too), this the the worst part of the site. I really, really, really hate Jane Austen. I don't just mean her novels, either — usually when I profess to hate an artist what I mean is that I dislike the person's work, or perhaps the ubiquity of it, but in Austen's case I think I actually despise her. She was either a brilliant comedian or one of the stupidest people who ever lived; I'm not too sure, and I don't want to think about it, either. I see her as the Charles Darwin in a process of female devolution which she codified rather than created, and which, for elusive reasons, profoundly affects the way a lot of women look at themselves and their lives. For me, Austen opened the door to everything awful and misogyny-inducing about first-world feminine culture, starting with the inception of 'romantic comedy' as a genre and progressing through Bridezillas, Juno, Taylor Swift songs, and Sex in the Cashmere Lipstick to the tree-murdering depredations of talentless, cliche-rattling prose-generation appliances like Candace Bushnell and Jennifer Weiner. I think Austen made the world a worse and darker place with her ugly novels — which many, many generations of idiots seem to regard as photographs of the eternal and perfect happiness they have earned just by being born female, rather than as examples of synthetic fictional artifice. I have no idea why Austen has been so revered for so long by so many people. She was a cadaverously shallow writer, and not funny at all, except in the vaguest sense, by which I mean that all her characters are clowns. They're very humorless clowns, though, and boring besides, not to mention avaricious, narrow-minded, mundane, stupid, and incidentally always the color of cake flour. And dull! They're neuron-killingly dull, too. Can't forget that.

By stretching a thin skin of didactic, self-protective calculation over the most trivial depictions of love imaginable, Austen costumed her 'romances' in vestments both silly and offensive. She established a tradition of girlish, juvenile absurdity — which for some reason has been allowed to pose as a sort of sentimental naturalism — in which rich, perfect, beautiful men swoop in to rescue and adore ordinary-looking, "intelligent" women, despite the fact that the women in question are some of the most obnoxious characters ever devised by mankind. These are not stories that represent, even in the abstract, women and men falling in love with one another; they are stories that describe what might happen if Sunday-school exemplars were suddenly peeled off their tract pages and forced to stage third-hand productions of Marivaux. In addition to being devoid of skill as an author, Austen wasn't even a particularly astute observer of either the world or human behavior — what passes for wisdom in her books is either thuddingly obvious ("don't rush to judge people based on appearances, for Love comes in many forms") or not at all worth repeating ("don't rush to judge people based on appearances, for Love comes in many forms"). Her novels remind me more than anything of the old German proverb, "it's like a knife with no handle, and the blade's missing."

When it comes to the endless stream of ill-founded comparisons between Clarke and Austen (and I think fresh ones are minted on a daily basis), I usually do my best to point out the clear lines delineating each author's work — not to mention the centuries that separate them — but because Clarke herself is an ardent and vocal admirer of Austen, it's always a lost cause. But, I like lost causes! They remind me of the Restricted Section at the library. So, here we go: In the first place, although Strange & Norrell and the short stories in its continuity are set in the Regency, they weren't actually meant to have been written during the Regency. For generic proof of this I have first their consummate reader-friendliness. Regency authors — and I couldn't come up with anyone other than Austen, Shelley, and Walter Scott, no matter how much I thought about it or who I asked — are often a tiresome, circuitous read. Their books are stuffed full of monotonous, incessant character reinforcement, a weird obsession with intricate descriptions of clothing, and other kinds of wet narrative wool. Ivanhoe ought to have been six pages long. Strange & Norrell is a lengthy novel, but it never revels in self-indulgent bloviation. Furthermore, for textual evidence of the story's relative modernness, I'll cite the narrator of S&N describing John Segundus's "surviving papers " — and also that "lost" portrait of Strange and Norrell painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. It takes ages for things to survive, or, for that matter, to be lost. On the other hand, the narrator speaks of John Childermass in the present tense. So if I were to guess, I would estimate that Strange & Norrell was probably written in the imaginary 1830s or 1840s of its alternative England, once magic had become fully entrenched in the culture — thus allowing the story's magician writer to develop the thaumaturgical techniques that would permit her to narrate history, as well as private thoughts, omnisciently.

I do realize, among other textual allusions [1], that Susanna Clarke uses some of Austen's old side-plots in her own work. The superficial structure of The Ladies of Grace Adieu, for example, seems to have been crafted from the part in Pride & Prejudice (I think it was Pride & Prejudice, but I refuse to look) in which the one idiot sister, Dopey [2], falls in love with a good-for-nothing-but-loooking-at-him soldier named, I think, This Character Is Obviously A Douchenozzle. Dopey and Obviously become social pariahs or something after running away together, and eventually Mister Smarmy has to bribe Obviously into saving Dopey's 'reputation' [3]. In The Ladies, of course, the three female magicians find themselves Smarmy-less and so use magic to transform themselves into subtext-wealthy owls and, after turning them into mice, devour their own versions of Obviously and his compatriot. They then send the partially-intact representation of Dopey back home to Reigate. This — just one of Clarke's intelligent, unique reversals — is a much better idea than Austen ever had in her entire life. I fail to see how Clarke could ever be seen as standing in Austen's shadow, no matter how much she borrowed from her books.

Also, when it comes to love, Clarke is not a romanticizing idiot, or a even the regular kind of romantic, or actually any kind of an idiot at all. None of her characters are idealized in any way. Her 'social commentary' isn't gentle, knowing, and arch. It's a weapon. In Strange & Norrell, no one escapes the decrepitating influence of English society. Strange and Norrell themselves are more obviously revolting because so much of their bad behavior is shown, but even Stephen Black is careful not to be seen condescending to a beggar [4]. And although many characters are intelligent, brave, handsome, etc., they are all too human to fulfill the requirements of traditional heroism for either sex. There's a lot of love depicted in the novel — the love of John Uskglass for northern England, the love of Norrell for books, the love of Strange for himself, the love of Childermass for magic, the love of fairies for malice — but when Clarke does descend into depictions of romantic love, they aren't the stupid kinds Austen made popular. For example, early in the novel, when a character called Emma Wintertowne is revivified by magic and shortly thereafter married to an unattractive, middle-aged politician, the central tragedy of her life is not the loss of her youth to the offices of matrimony; it's the cruel, ensorcelled parody of marriage in which she is forced to participate, as a result of her resurrection, with a man who isn't her husband [5]. And although Clarke gives herself ample opportunity in Strange & Norrell to provide her readers with a prosaic and grating Austen-style ending between Jonathan and Arabella Strange which describes the nauseating (and completely imaginary) ability of love to conquer all — even the gravest enchantments! — she instead delivers a startling and beautiful depiction of real, adult lovers, characters who prove they actually comprehend the true mechanism of love by saying goodbye to one another when faced with odds that overwhelm any possibility of happiness. Thinking about it now, I suppose that final, sad farewell was intended by Clarke to contrast the unnatural damages of whimsical, ego-centric fairy love, which extends like a curse beyond the limits of time and logic and withers all it touches. But, whatever its purpose, I don't think anything so close to real human love could find a gable to perch on in an Austen novel.

Which is, I think, more to the point: Clarke doesn't write the same kinds of stories that Austen wrote, and not just because she's a vastly superior artist. Austen's novels were intentional trifles, meant to be guilty pleasures even in their own day. She celebrated her characters' (apparently) relatable vapidness, and the filigreed ridiculousness of the culture in which they languished. Strange & Norrell is a novel of exactly the opposite type — Clarke does acknowledge that her characters are strongly imperfect and greatly limited by ignorance and circumstance, but rather than deconstructing the whole world down to a romantic couple whose banality is surpassed only by their mutual terror of enjoying life, she expands it to include everyone, everything, every tree and bird and man and child who ever lived. The wind and the snow and the darkness are characters in Clarke's fiction; can the same be said of Austen?

Sadly, that's the sum of my constructive commentary. What follows are the beginnings of three different versions of this article, starting with three different Austen novels. I posted only the beginning of each because the longer they went on the more they tended to get KIND OF CAPSY, and also uselessly repetitive. I do think they're sort of amusing, although probably not for the reasons I thought they would be when I wrote them.

we are all just prisoners, here, of our own device

☓ On Sense & Sensibility:
Which is weird to me [comparing Strange & Norrell and anything Austen], because Austen's novels are all about shutting out the world; they're stories of nesting and settling and safety. She demands of her characters a submission to the ordinary and domestic, and although they're always delighted to reward her with compliance, their well-orchestrated happiness is a simple function of that submission. Strange & Norrell seems to be a much more complicated machine. Its England is the enemy of that kind of submission. It encourages its characters to submerge themselves in the midnight of the dark and dreaming earth, to empty out the vaults and let the rafters rot around them, to invite into their hearts the midnight soul of chaos and destruction. There's a safety of a sort in that surrender, I suppose — but it's the sanctuary anticipated by the weakening mind yearning toward death, or of the martyr eager to face and overmaster his tormenters in suicide. Clarke's surrender, damaging and awful as it often is, is always a function of faith, blinding and almighty, staggering and disparaging, graceful and exact. Austen's homely, controlled series of capitulations, on the other hand, depend on the notion that, circuitous and dramatic as the means may often be, the ends are never a surprise.

☓ On Persuasion, which is disgusting:
[As to Austen’s timelessness —] The novel I read was weak and depressing and hopelessly trapped in its era. It had no meaning to me at all, beyond being a sort of vague and exhausting tutorial covering a brief epoch of British history. If this is what they make students read in English schools, no wonder Posh hates books [6]. I have no idea why Austen is regarded as a literary behemoth, and read the world over by millions of people, except to hypothesize that "people," as such, are famously stupid. Really. What did the woman have against simple declarative sentences? Was her father murdered one foggy night by a bloodthirsty statement of basic purpose as his family watched in horror? Because that would explain a lot. If Austen had a motto, I imagine it would've been something like: "Why simply state something when you can log-jamb forty or fifty oblique, poorly-elaborated independent clauses together and inarticulately suggest it instead?" Really! Look at this: QUOTES IN HERE [7]. I began to feel that she hated me. Why else would she trap her unfortunate characters in such dense thickets of impenetrable, ungainly prose, and go to such elaborate lengths to prevent me from figuring out what in the name of God she was talking about?

As I read, I found myself experiencing a familiar twitching in my stabbing arm that I often get when I attempt to read, say, The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe. Who was insane. But Austen is one million times more awful than the terrible Radcliffe, who at least — and I think this statement bears repetition — had the common, ordinary human decency to be clearly out of her mind. Austen unfortunately fails to be a talented but obsessive schizophrenic, although her books would improve exponentially through the inclusion of a little tasteful madness; instead, she's a nitpicker of a grammar teacher masquerading as Juliet (not that being Juliet would necessarily improve the quality of the narrative) (but it would improve the quality of the hypocrisy). She has no sense of humor whatsoever; her books are as inert as doorstops. If she'd had even a little glimmer of self-awareness, at least one of her heroines would've decided she was better off a spinster — and she would've been, too, whichever one it was. What Austen wields in place of humor is something called "wit." Wit is often mistaken for humor, but they aren't directly related. Wit is the irritating forebear of irony, and it almost always expresses itself in the form of quips and quotes. Trapped inside these rigid, unhappy, observational irrelevancies, witty people and their fictional analogues are inevitably somber as funerals. Sometimes this can be managed properly, for adequately tragic effect, as in the case of Oscar Wilde or H.L. Mencken, but Austen doesn't have any sense of proportion, either. The wit leaks into her fiction like moldy rainwater, and douses her characters with a didactic imperviousness that not even the most hilariously unrealistic vision of hyposexualized "romance" can dilute. Moral-spouting characters are acceptable, as long as they're edifying us in distant and informative satires — but at the moment they attempt to win their audiences over as sympathetic, relatable projections, they lose their strength and fall to tedium. Austen's novels are a natural soporific.

☓ On Pride & Prejudice, which rocketed instantly to the top of my most-hated list:
What I find most offensive about the simulation of love presented by Austen is its characterization as a gaudy, public pageant. Without an audience, her stories have no substance. They have no substance anyhow, but their reliance on the reactions of uninvolved characters, and by extension the reader, is appalling. I recognize the artificial substrate upon which Austen built her unsound, windy manses, and I know she isn't at fault for creating it — it probably started, in broad popular fiction, with that French douche Chrétien de Troyes [8], who permanently injured dozens of innocent characters in his systematic mangling of the Arthurian mythological cycle — but that doesn't make it a less conspicuous eyesore. I also understand that without a drawn-out melodrama, there is no arena within which an audience can entertain itself. I just think there are many less repulsive ways of engaging readers than dragging out a boring forty-page love story over the better part of six separate books, under the auspices of dramatic suspense. I didn't spend Ivanhoe seething, for example, and it's almost as tiresome a read as Pride & Prejudice. I put this down to the jousting, actually; maybe if Mr. D'Arcy had come equipped with some armor or something, I wouldn't have spent my time with him daydreaming about smothering him in his sleep. The empty tin cans of chivalry are infinitely preferable to the elaborate and dusty drapery that is the Regency 'lover,' for any application you can think of.


TOP ♛ CYNN CORVUS