What does Salman Rushdie know, anyway?
Alert Janeite Adrienne sent us a link to a post from Zadeblog in which Zade delivers a delightfully snarky response to Salman Rushdie’s not-really-critical comments about Jane Austen’s failure to engage in a literary sense with the big events of her time.
As to soldiers, in terms of J.A.’s world view, she does gives them their due. What’s not to like, decoratively speaking, about a flock of young men in white breeches and short crimson jackets/tailcoats with plenty of sashes and epaulets and as much passementerie as any curtains by Mésangère? They’re good for ballrooms just like they’re still good for Quality Street toffee tins.
Zade admits that Mr. Rushdie has a point and provides a quote from Vogue to show how the media of our modern times can be really disengaged in a way that Jane Austen really is not.
February 8th, 2006 at 12:23 am
I would like to know in what context Rushdie was addressing the notion of a public/private gap. I also find that he was extraordinarily insensitive and dismissive not only of Austen (sometimes you can’t tell if a comment is intended sarcastically or self-effacingly in this electronic medium given that it is isolated from it’s context) but of all literature before him and his times. I thought Rushdie would have at least put the point in a more nuanced way without having to resort to trite generalizations.
What does he mean when he says:
The public sphere was remote from private life in that time.
What’s happened, I think, as time has gone on is that space - the space between the public and the private — has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. Now the public and the private smash up against each other every single day….”
A pretty way of saying something that is meaningless. I can’t remember any definition or portrayal of humanity/ human actions in any of the literature that I’ve read that matches the breadth of separation that he implies. But as I said earlier, I am puzzled by Rushdie’s haphazard approach given that I do think highly of his novels and the range of intelligence he has shown therein.
Maybe a momentarily blip or a misrepresentation of his point.
Quite off topic but I just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I can’t say that I’m a Woolf expert but I think that Woolf is more elegant than Rushdie in using Austen to illustrate her discussion of the public/private divide and it’s subsequent effect on women writing fiction. What I really liked was Woolf’s use of Austen to comment on Charlotte Bronte. I think that Woolf did admire Austen but it appears to me as cold, detached praise. In terms of one of her main points about a lineage of women authors and the debts owed to these ancestors, Woolf questions why 18th-century women turned to novel-writing when their predecessors were determined to write poetry. Austen is held up as the most accomplished of a quartet (George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte are the others) in the sense that she was the most “serene” (not Woolf’s words but my interpretation of what she’s trying to convey). Consider the following comment on women authors still having to hide their work:
Yet Jane Austen was glad that hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was someting discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, ws the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thouhgt, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments [...]. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her fit and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Bronte, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice. (Chapter IV)
Then Woolf segues into a brief discussion of Charlotte Bronte by dissecting a particularly disjointed paragraph- chapter 12 to be precise. She then offers the following analysis:
The continuity is distvured. One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted? (Chapter IV)
Now whatever you think of Woolf’s assessment of Austen or her comparison of Austen and Bronte, I do think it’s interesting that Austen is used as a foil in the same detached way that Rushdie used her to make his point about whatever he was talking about. It also seems that Woolf would address Rushdie’s comments about why women novelists like Austen did not overtly address war and other male-determined events of importance:
The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pilled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authorit. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of the voice in whihc they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. [...] And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, aobut the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altred her values in the deference to the opinion of others. (chapter IV)
According to Woolf this deviation from the truth (the purpose of a novelist to relate to reality, as Woolf explains later) evident in many women’s works was due to the distraction imposed upon them by the outside(men and society’s dismissal of their writing). Yet she notes Austen was the exception but her explanation is once again down to the indefinable and undebatable explanation of human nature:
February 8th, 2006 at 12:33 am
Sorry, posted without finishing the quotation:
But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to that thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Bronte. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue- write this, think that. (Chapter IV)
Now perhaps it maybe clearer why I chose to bring out Woolf. I think it is at this point that she mirrors Rushdie in using Jane Austen to address the confounding question of private/public. Rushdie gave some mumbo jumbo about this barrier not existing in our age. Woolf says that the evidence of this barrier in Austen’s work is testament to her genius. Is either one a credible use of Austen?
February 8th, 2006 at 12:39 am
That is so like a man! War and Peace was written by a man who could roam the world. Austen was interested in domestic space, and how women maneuver in the tiny space afforded them. “I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space…..” Hamlet says. And who was it that said that if you’ve lived for 5 years, you already have enough material for an autobiography/memoir. Men think size matters, but it’s really only the size of the brain, the capacity of the heart, that does.
February 8th, 2006 at 9:57 am
I think the definitions of “private/public” space {nearly typed ‘pubic’, hahaha…} are a little fuzzy here. If JA’s ‘private/public’ categories overlap simply into today’s ‘homelife/worklife’, then I’m sure we could find a number of retired folk, at-home care givers, stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads whose lives are limited to the so-called private sphere. These people may have a stronger connection to global conflict via internet/television/radio etc than Jane did to the Napoleonic wars, but it’s still a connection that people can either willingly embrace or willingly sever.
On the other hand, you could say that someone who lives a life of 9-5 work then home (then work, then home, etc), where work life is always limited to the same group of people, could just as easily keep out of any kind of public sphere.
My point is; I don’t think the so-called breach (if it can be defined) is as much a thing of the past as SR claims.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:53 am
I just get annoyed at the constant harping of “Why didn’t Jane Austen write about the Napoleonic Wars” when Shakespeare never wrote about the Spanish Armada.
She didn’t write about it because SHE DIDN’T WANT TO! Sheesh.
And in re: Virginia Woolf: I don’t think Jane Austen “hid” her writing because she was ashamed of it. She just preferred to keep it to herself. She didn’t seem terribly upset once the word starting getting around about her identity; more exasperated with Henry for being a blabbermouth.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
‘…there’s essentially no mention of the Napoleonic wars in the novels of Jane Austen, except that soldiers show up at balls and look cute. The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austen is to look cute at parties, and defeating Napoleon was a side-issue.’ (Salman Rushdie)
Good gracious. If ever I saw a reason to bring out the cluebat of Janeite righteousness … ! Is the circumstance that he’s threatened by a hord of silly fanatics really a reason to spare S. Rushdie on this one? What an example of entirely self-serving, clueless balderdash! I bet he’s watched P&P3 lately, and now thinks he has fully understood everything Jane Austen.
I really don’t get this idiotic claim of authors to be up to every politic developoment of the moment in their writings, resulting in books that are everybody’s darling one day, and thoroughly forgotten the next. As for Tolstoi, I could rant on and on as to why I think he’s a sociopath with a set of outright shallow characters in his novels, and so I’ll shut up on this topic here; however, it’s for sure that his descriptions and interpretation of the Napoleonic wars was taken out of history books. He was much too young to have lived through those wars himself. So he chose to testify to things he knew only from hearsay. Jane Austen, on the other hand, chose to abstain from all things hearsay. As a reader, I prefer JA’s awareness of a writer’s limits.
February 18th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Pia, I let it go because Rushdie wasn’t really criticizing Jane for not writing about the Napoleonic wars. However, it drives me nuts that the subject is continuously brought up. There’s no rule that a writer must mention everything that’s going on in the world, and writing serious, politically aware fiction would have made Jane miserable. I have no doubt, however, that had she wanted to do so, she could have.