Karen L. posted a comment with a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times in reference to the Joyce Carol Oates quote we posted earlier in the week:

To the Editor:

As summer reading lists beckon, surely The Times owes its younger readers better than Joyce Carol Oates’s dismissal of Jane Austen’s alleged “too many descriptions of furniture and balls and ballroom gowns.”

Austen’s fans admire her economy of description of physical objects; any first-year English student has learned that Austen uses things only when necessary for characterization.

I hope that this will encourage your readers, who lack demanding publication schedules of their own, to use the summer to actually look into a Jane Austen novel.

Kate Ward
Chicago, May 21, 2007

To which we responded when we read it: “Oh SNAP!”

Then Cub Reporter Julie B. posted a comment:

Wasn’t this meant ironically? I mean, maybe Oates is a Janeite and knows there were very few such descriptions in her novels, and was certain we’d all get the joke?

We didn’t think so, but just to be fair went back and read the full text of Ms. Oates’ comment in the original article:

I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.

And let’s say Jane Austen: too many descriptions of furniture and balls and ballroom gowns. I’m sure I could think of many other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own.

Saying there is “much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway” has GOT to be a joke. Hasn’t it? Because there is a lot of it, certainly, but it’s kind of the point. Suggesting cutting it is quite funny.

But then, to say in the same vein that there are “too many descriptions of furniture and balls and ballroom gowns” in Jane Austen’s work is wrong, because there are hardly any such descriptions. Whereas there are lots and lots of the to-be-cut items in Hemingway. So if there is irony in Ms. Oates’ comment, they are opposite kinds of irony, if that makes any sense. Perhaps if there IS a joke there, that is why so many of us normally-not-without-humor types missed it.

We feel it’s quite possible that Ms. Oates is making a subtle point that the premise of the article is rather stupid (which it is). Or perhaps our chapeau d’etain just needs some adjusting.