Power and Freedom in Jane Austen's novels.

West, Cornel

WHAT A BLESSING to be here. I want to begin with this daughter of Reverend George and Cassandra Austen, this literary daughter of the finest critic in the English language, Samuel Johnson, who said that wisdom is the fundamental criterion of our evaluation of literature. Form of course plays its role, has its place; mastery of craft, mastery of technique, has its place indeed. But it's all about wisdom, how to live. And she is the daughter of Shakespeare. Let us be very, very clear. Shakespeare is the bard of bards, the poet of poets, no one like him. And last but not least she is the generic daughter of Samuel Richardson when it comes to the novel as genre. Jane Austen, dead at 41, but like Chopin at 39 or Gershwin at 39 her accomplishments go far beyond our capacity to actually keep track of them.

It's true. So each time I get a chance to talk about someone like Jane Austen or Shakespeare or Chekhov, it makes me shudder. It makes me tremble because I know I fall so radically short.

So I want to begin first by just situating Jane Austen. She's one of the great exemplars of the greatest tradition produced in the West, the humanist tradition. It goes back to line 38A of Plato's Apology: "the unexamined life is not a life for the human." Our English word "human" is related to the Latin word humando. Humando means "from the earth or ground," suggesting burying. It has to do with burial. It has to do with the fact that we are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces. That's who we are. Now I know it's going to be magnificent tonight at the Regency ball to see all of those wonderful costumes, but just like me, you emerged from your mother's womb. One day our bodies will be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. What it means to be human: Jane Austen, like all the great artists, raises the questions of what does it mean to be human and what kind of human beings will we choose to be in our brief trek from our mother's womb to tomb?

What the Greeks call paideia, which is this deep education that tries to shift our attention from frivolous things to serious things: even when it's light and playful, it's still very serious to shift from the superficial to the substantial. And for her it's the shift into the quotidian, the commonplace, the every day, wrestling with the steady ache of misery--even catastrophe--shot through the commonplace and yet still being able to straighten one's back up and stand for integrity or her wonderful word constancy. Constancy, the threat to all of those forces that somehow try to shatter the self. And it goes back to the legacy of Athens, beginning with Plato on Socrates, but also Sophocles, wisdom connected to eloquence. Remember that wonderful line 24A in Plato's Apology when Socrates says in the face of the jury, it's parrhesia, which is free speech, frank speech, plain speech, no jargon, no obtuse language. Being faithful to life, to use the language again of Samuel Johnson. Having the courage to confront the night side and still emerge with a smile, and with style, and that rich sense of irony and comedy in realistic engagement.

Yes, that is our dear Jane Austen, but it goes back to the Greeks. She cannot be understood in any serious way without connecting her with the largest tendencies and ways of thought and feeling going back to the beginning of the West. I talk about it in this way: I tell my students, each time they enter my classes at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Union Theological Seminary, in the spirit of Jane Austen, you have entered this class in order to learn how to die. And they look at me: oh, I don't know whether I want to take Professor West's class; I don't know about that. Jane Austen teaches us that to learn how to die is to unlearn slavery, to learn how to die is to engage in courageous self-examination and self-interrogation and self-scrutiny, and any time you let a certain prejudice go, or let a certain conception of yourself go, as you mature, as you develop, as you grow, that is a form of death. There is no growth, development, maturation without learning how to die, giving up certain assumptions, giving up certain presuppositions, giving up certain misperceptions and misjudgments as you actually come into being the person that you can be at your best.

Montaigne used to say, to philosophize is to learn how to die, because what he had in mind as well is the recognition that life is not only a battlefield, but it can also be a carnival. It's the battlefield because, yes, there's a civil war taking place on the site of our own souls day in and day out, and the question is whether you have a formation of attention, attend to the right and proper things. The question is whether you have a cultivation of a self, a self with a deep core, no matter how much elasticity on the periphery, a core that will allow you to endure, to prevail, to persevere. And then there's a maturation of the soul. And, again, humility is always the benchmark of deep maturity. And by humility, I'm not talking about false modesty. You get that sometimes in her letters: I'm one of the most uneducated.... Well, if you talk about matriculation, she didn't go to Oxford, but at least two Oxfords went through her. And I know a lot of brothers who went to Oxford, and Oxford couldn't get through them. Too much boating and drinking and other things. We had the same challenge at Princeton.

But I'm just trying to set up this brief framework before we get into Austen herself: this legacy of Athens, self knowledge at the center, the courage to examine one's self. And of course any time you examine yourself, you see that history, society, heritage leave deposits inside. So when people say that she doesn't deal with the larger social context, that she's only a miniaturist, well so is Chekhov. But when you dig deep enough inside of your soul, especially the dark precincts of your soul, on the margins, you are always already dealing with what society has shaped you into. You're already dealing with what your family, or your church, or your mosque, or your synagogue, or any other civic institution that has influenced you has shaped you into. And the question is, how do you get some kind of critical distance on the one hand, but on the other hand not fall into the fallacy of thinking that somehow you will forever transcend all of your past, all of your history?

And this is where the legacy of Jerusalem comes in. Of course--we have to be quite explicit about this--she is a Christian sister. And I know a lot of secular critics don't like to deal with that, but that Anglicanism is real. The biblical texts are real. The clergy and the navy, those two fundamental institutions she ends up exalting at the end of her literary career, are very real. She's a PK: she's a preacher's kid.

Brothers, what do I mean by the legacy of Jerusalem? I'm talking about, of course, the great gift of our Jewish brothers and sisters that gave the world a prophetic tradition that says to be human is to spread hesed, loving kindness, to the orphan and the widow, the fatherless, the motherless, the weak, and the vulnerable. And that first searching Palestinian Jew named Jesus, coming out of that prophetic Judaic tradition, says what? To be human is to love thy neighbor as thyself, and, yes, even love thy enemies. (But don't try that on your own: we need a little grace for that. We need some help and aid for that.) But that's also formative for Jane Austen.

Piety, going back to Plato's Euthyphro, is the debt we owe to those who have shaped us. I know I am who I am because somebody loved me. I just buried my pastor, who baptized me fifty-one years ago. And I know you are who you are because somebody loved you. And we have debts we pay to parents, or nation, or religious institution, or jazz musicians who helped to sustain you, or the Mozart who keeps joy in your life, whoever it is, could be Stephen Sondheim. (I'm a Sondheim freak, too. I pay debt to him: Company means something to me, and so does Follies, so does Passion.) Jane Austen understood that's constitutive of being human.

Everybody has debts to pay if they are honest. For the very notion of being self made--and so autonomous and isolated ego--is radically called into question. That's why she loves Edmund Burke. She knows that tradition is inescapable. It's not a question of whether you have a tradition; it's which one. If you think you have no tradition, that's the tradition of the new. Or a tradition of the one: just you, or one or two of your friends you convince. There's no escape. That's what it means to be human in time and space, so that in connection to the wisdom, the eloquence, and the prudence, the practical judgment that she gets from the Greeks, she gets this piety, she gets history, and she gets charity. Love, in her wonderful word: affection, exquisite affection. By that she means philia, friendship, which is so fundamental for Persuasion, but most importantly it's always something that cuts deeper than any set of categories that connects us to a group or community.

So, yes, we can talk about gender. Gender is real because patriarchy is real, and patriarchy is vicious in terms of terrorizing, traumatizing, stigmatizing sisters of all colors, the vast majority of human kind. Similarly so in terms of class; similarly so in terms of nation, empire, race, sexual orientation: all of these are categories that lose sight usually of the rich individuality of human beings making their trek from mama's womb to tomb. Jane Austen, like all of the great artists, says, I'm going to pierce through those categories. Of course they are operative. They are nothing but compromises with the chaos called history, or what Samuel Beckett called "the mess."

So wonderful, of course, Samuel Beckett loved Jane Austen, loved Jane Austen. Don't think that in his absurdist plays lacking in plot, that seem to get nowhere, as in Waiting for Godot, that characters like Didi and Gogo are not fundamentally connected to the preoccupation with the catastrophe in the quotidian that you get in the light, playful, subtle, sophisticated, complex stories of Jane Austen. Beckett understood it well. In fact, he hungered for Jane Austen right after he had his breakdown. Jane Austen is always waiting for those who have just had a breakdown. That's another reason why I love my dear sister because I'm subject to breakdown at any moment all the time. I need her.

But what I want to put forward this morning is I think it's interesting that Jane Austen has either never or has not adequately been compared to the greatest literary figure in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, Anton Chekhov. Jane Austen in many ways is the Chekhov of English literature. There's only one figure who has tried to take Chekhov in the English literary tradition to the heights: William Gerhardie, who wrote the first book on Chekhov in 1923. Gerhardie was actually the most popular English writer in the 1920's, along with Henry Green and a few others, but he's completely dropped out because he quit writing and had a forty-year silence. He died in 1977; his last book was in the 1930's; he lived in a basement all by himself. (A. N. Wilson and others have talked about this.)

But Austen and Chekhov belong together. They belong together. Why? Because they are poets, the highest level of poets of the catastrophic and compassionate, of catastrophe and deep, deep love and affection. Yes, Chekhov can be much darker than Austen, but oh, in Persuasion--I don't know, I think Harold Bloom is right, this is the greatest text. I used to believe it was Emma, but I've had to change my mind. This is the beginning of that classic Persuasion: "Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way;--she was only Anne." In fact, in rereading this novel, just underline every time you see the word "nobody" or "nothing." There are three or four uses on every page in the first forty pages or so. Anne begins as a nobody even within the context of her family, and yet we know, as Jane Austen says in one of her letters, Anne is "almost too good for me."

What a character. She exemplifies an intellectual integrity and a spiritual integrity, but she is, in the language of Arthur Miller, "a misfit." She can't find a place in such a narrow and truncated social order, from family to civil society, let alone the state. And the experience that she does have is one in which, as in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, she needs a second chance. She misses out. Why? Because of her duty to Lady Russell. Following the counsel and advice of her superego, whom she refuses to either demonize or marginalize even though she fundamentally disagrees with the counsel. She may miss out on her one chance at some deep sense of fulfillment. But keep in mind, any time we talk about fulfillment or even happiness, as with Chekhov, it's always open ended.

Jane Austen is not a happily-ever-after kind of writer. Even when it ends with a marriage or two, you don't know what happens thereafter. It's like the second act of Into the Woods. Jane Austen's sense of the comic might be patched on, like in the plays of Moliere, but you have a sense that at the end--wait, let me just give you a sense of that and let you know I'm not lying here. I want to read this at the very end. She might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy. Her spring of felicity was in the glow of her spirits, as her friend Anne's was in the warmth of her heart. Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth's affection. His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.

I want to read that again: The dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor's wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.

That reminds us of the end of Chekhov's "Lady with a Lap Dog": that even after the magnificent triumph, the restoration if not the resurrection of her soul is owing to the tenderness of the past, recollected, memory now on the side of consciousness over against the counsel. And this is before Wordsworth's Prelude though after Lyrical Ballads. The fundamental role of memory is now at work in this text, and the tenderness of the past is a force for good--a lot of Edmund Burke there--the role of piety and tradition. But the problems are just beginning in a certain sense.

And this is very important because so many of the movies that we see of our dear genius sister project this kind of glib Hollywood version of things. All you need is that last kiss and hug, and of course they do some other carnal activity that's not in the text. That's Hollywood, but what it tends to do is downplay the rich philosophic and existential activity that is actually taking place because there's a profound sense of sadness, especially in Persuasion. It reminds me in so many ways of Chekhov again, who would say over and over again, I am a sad soul with a cheerful disposition. I can hear Jane Austen in her own private space saying, If people could survey my soul, very much like the soul of Anne Elliot, profoundly melancholic and yet still melioristic, which is to say sad but still tied to betterment, sad but still believing that maybe the best is yet to come, but that might not be saying a lot because I haven't had too much of the best. The bar is set pretty low. I've only had moments of possibility. And then there's that wonderful friendship with Mrs. Smith across class lines: crippled physically, been mistreated, been abused, and she becomes the exemplar of the highest level of integrity.

Please don't tell me and don't tell us that Jane Austen was not aware of class dynamics and was not aware of the capacity of intellectual integrity and spiritual integrity to traverse and cross class lines, as difficult as that is. Because she is raising issues about what kind of human beings we are going to be and how we wrestle with that question of what kind of human beings we're going to be.

Let me get back to the text because there are some other wonderful moments: "the art of knowing our own nothingness." That's going to sit at the very center. But what I just read, where she's talking about the tenderness and the affection that brings them together, this is where it starts: "[T]here could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement." Look at the transformation that will take place. She begins as a nothing. Captain Wentworth begins as a nothing, a "stranger without alliance,'" in the language of Lady Russell, the very reason she counsels against Anne making that leap of faith with Wentworth. And yet Wentworth is going to manifest--this is something very rare in literature of so many women writers--to be able to be at the deepest level in contact with the humanity of the brothers. That's what I love about Toni Morrison's work, that her men are just as complicated as the women. And of course it goes the other way too, doesn't it? How many male writers are dealing with complicated women in their text? Philip Roth? Norman Mailer? Uh-oh. We love the brothers, but they can't pull it off.

If you want a complicated brother, look at Captain Wentworth. They say he was modeled on Lord Nelson of the British navy, influenced as well by her brothers in the British navy. But being able to capture that: do you know what sensitivity, what empathy that requires? Do you know what that means to create such an alternative world, a world that you yourself never inhabited but your imagination allows you to do it? It reminds me of the last line of Shelley's great pamphlet of 1821: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." By poets he doesn't just mean versifiers; he means all persons who have the capacity to imagine and empathize a different world, create a different world, bring it forth. Using what? One's power.

This is where the issue of power is very important. The power of language. The power of art. The power of love--not just of persons, but love of learning, love of wisdom, love of daring, love of adventure. Jane Austen, allow us to enter this other world that you as poet provide in stark contrast to so much of the nightmarish, catastrophic world that we inhabit every day. Not in the form of cheap escape: we are not talking about a cheap form of intellectual refugee status, but of an alternative world that allows us to get critical distance so we can reengage the real world. And by reengaging that world we have a power, a power of self, a power of soul, a power of mind, and, most importantly, courage. Most importantly, courage. When we think of the towering figures from Sophocles to Chekhov, mediated with the Austens and Shakespeares and others, we are talking about those who not only have highly cultivated talent, craft, technique, but also something inexplicable, something mysterious. They are on fire.

And that's one of the reasons why she is so fresh and vibrant and vital. It's one of the reasons she has so profoundly enriched my life, even as one trained in philosophy. Philosophers tend to be obsessed with the theory of flames. But Jane Austen is the fire.

NOTE

(1.) The Editor gratefully acknowledges the help of Hallye Skillion and Celia A. Easton in preparing the transcript of Dr. West's talk for publication and further acknowledges Marsha Huff's skillful proof-reading.

Cornel West, who retired as Class of 1943 University Professor from Princeton, is now Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan and the author of many books, including Race Matters and Democracy Matters. What follows is an edited transcript of his remarks as the AGM's North American Scholar. (1)