Jane Austen and Comedy

Erin Goss

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684480791
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen's books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen's books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen's work. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Part One

COMIC ENERGY AND EXPLOSIVE HUMOR

1

AUSTEN, PHILOSOPHY, AND COMIC STYLISTICS

ERIC LINDSTROM

When I am doing something intelligently, i.e., thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two.… The clown’s trippings and tumblings are the workings of his mind, for they are his jokes; but the visibly similar trippings and tumblings of a clumsy man are not the workings of that man’s mind. For he does not trip on purpose. Tripping on purpose is both a bodily and a mental process.

—Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)1

1

Side by side in Jane Austen’s youthful manuscript writings (“Volume the Second”2) appear two short texts entitled “The female philosopher—a Letter” and “The first Act of a Comedy.”3 Each of these texts indicates a writerly identity toward which Austen was energetically drawn but from the practice of which she felt herself excluded. I reach this conclusion not mainly on account of the fragmentary nature of these pieces (they are, in fact, complete at an intentionally small scale), but from the downright zany perspective of their foreshortening. These productions are not little bits of ivory, two inches wide, labored over with great effort, but clowning skits likely dashed off in a sequence of moments. Their “trippings and tumblings” count among the rehearsals for Austen’s later more complex comedy. Highly valued objects to be sure, nonetheless these texts and others in the Juvenilia volumes do not focus the reader’s attention on the polished finish of the writing, but on the dynamic intelligence and humor of the writing act. In testifying against the sometimes clung-to image of the later novels as pictures of perfection, such rough and ebullient early pieces can help us do needed work on the comic energies of Austen’s prose, early and late.

The philosophical stylistics of Austen’s practice as a writer of comic prose is my subject in this chapter.4 My argument will draw from twentieth-century Ordinary Language philosophy (including J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Stanley Cavell) in discussing the exemplary attention that such an unofficial grouping of thinkers awards to Jane Austen. Starting with the anecdote told about Ryle that, when asked if he read novels, he replied, “Yes, all six, every year”5 (the honoring of Austen, via a joke, both a stand-in for all novels and their stand-out example), the Ordinary Language philosophers repeatedly use Austen’s fiction as a touchstone in arguments about affective responsiveness and emotive intelligence. While admittedly using Austen as the currency of honor for a male homosocial gesture of bonding, they also indicate the grounds and leave suggestions for how to explore a performative philosophical conduct pioneered long before them in Austen’s own writing.

Austin takes the Austenian title Sense and Sensibilia for his 1947–1948 lecture series on modern sense-perception philosophy. In these lectures Austin critiques the dummy usage of philosophical notions of sense-data and material things. Austin satirizes the relation through which these forms of thought “live by taking in each other’s washing.”6 He contends that the attention shown by positivist philosophers to examples from everyday life has the sole purpose of referring the world of material things to the underlying reality of sensa—and from the start gives such “things” no other role to play. In his 2005 book Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cavell in turn relates the “passionate exchanges” and rational play found in Jane Austen’s novels in an aim to honor his teacher in the field of Ordinary Language philosophy:

Because it is not to my hand here, or perhaps ever, to lay out a fuller geography of the courses that ‘endless’ passionate exchanges can take in satisfying the conditions of perlocutionary utterance, and because I think of myself here as wishing to honor Austin’s work, I cite one brilliant source of such passionate exchanges that I imagine Austin would feel quite happy to be associated with, indicated in his announcing one of his once famous courses of lectures at Oxford, the one on the foundations of empirical knowledge, in roughly the following form: SENSE and SENSIBILIA. J. AUSTIN.7

Finally—from a philosophical theorist known widely for his jokes if not as a practitioner of ordinary language—Slavoj Zizek maintains in a section titled “Hegel with Austen” from The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book published in English): “Austen, not Austin: it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart to Hegel in literature: Pride and Prejudice is the literary Phenomenology of Spirit; Mansfield Park the Science of Logic and Emma the Encyclopedia.… No wonder, then, that we find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition.”8

Misrecognition surely is in the very genetic stuff of comedy. I want to take a step aside, though, in what is perhaps a more idiosyncratic direction, philosophically speaking, and argue that at the level of prose style we may discover (or recover) something of the philosophical standing of Jane Austen the writer. As intellectual drive, Austen’s main theme of love lies at the root of philosophy. Just as there can be no aspiration toward philosophy without the aspiration to love, there is no motive or method for thinking about the relation of philosophy to literature without considering the dimension of style. Attention to style may reintegrate what reason in academic philosophy has put asunder.9 Not for nothing does the 1818 “Biographical Notice” appended to Persuasion and Northanger Abbey commend the author as “sensible to the charms of style, and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language.”10 With its implied syllepsis (a figure where one clause bears two divergent references divided in type, a joke springing forth from a category mistake), or zeugma, Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia points my way in this approach.11

Syllepsis and zeugma figure prominently in the response of Ordinary Language philosophy to what Ryle calls the impact of “Descartes’ Myth” on the theory of mind. Ryle summarizes in The Concept of Mind:

If my argument is successful, there will follow some interesting consequences. First, the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter will be dissipated, but dissipated not by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind, but in quite a different way. For the seeming contrast of the two will be shown to be as illegitimate as would be the contrast of ‘she came home in a flood of tears’ and ‘she came home in a sedan-chair’. The belief that there is a polar opposition between Mind and Matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type.12

Perhaps the most famous literary example of syllepsis comes from Alexander Pope’s verse in The Rape of the Lock. The line, “Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,” relates a dualistic moral tenor of serious and nonserious concerns—and underlines it through a contrast of the figurative (and spiritual) with the literal (and material). Yet Pope’s wit, in making the line, arguably undoes its controlling symbolic perspective as suggestive of legitimate contrast. In his allusion to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Ryle uses the figure of syllepsis in order to “dissipate” the “hallowed contrast” of mind to matter as briskly as possible.13 Similarly, both the title and the full argument of Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia lectures aim to identify and dismiss the grounds of what he views as a powerful and long-standing philosophical myth. (Incidentally, Austen exemplifies the use of syllepsis or zeugma to perform the gesture of dismissal in Sense and Sensibility when, “Thomas and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon afterwards dismissed.”)14

Henry Austen’s account of Jane Austen’s cultivation of style misses its largest potential insight by maintaining that her comic practice is anodyne. Playing upon more than the social, sentimental, and gendered script of Pope’s Belinda, or the comic grotesquerie of Dickens in “She came home in a flood of tears and in a sedan-chair,” the zeugmatic style renders a way of thinking critically and comically about category mistakes. The kind of positivist philosophy that would exclude style here stands accused by style (through the figure of zeugma, syllepsis) of making an error of logical type. The Dashwoods’s servant, Thomas, is not fired, but is served his ordinary dismissal stylistically along with the cloth he has spread on the table (that “material thing” par excellence). How “ordinary” and unburdened can such a moment be, and bear any philosophical weight?

Historically, Jane Austen has seldom been claimed as a “philosophical” writer on her own terms—that is, without externally grounding her claim to philosophical thought through comparison of her self-described fine brush to, say, the big bow wow of an Aristotle, Adam Smith, or David Hume. This chapter argues that Austen is underappreciated at large as a philosophical novelist even as she is acknowledged by Ryle and others as an underappreciated resource to philosophy.15

2

One reason that Austen is seldom understood as a philosophical novelist reflects the legacy of a constraining historical discourse. The passage in volu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Jane Austen and Comedy
• Part One: Comic Energy and Explosive Humor
• Part Two: (Emma’s) Laughter with a Purpose
• Part Three: Comedic Form, Comedic Effect
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index