Pulling a name out of nowhere, or pulling anything out of nowhere, is contrary to the spirit of Radcliffe, a writer who surrounds the emotions in Romance of the Forest with calm explanations and can describe the movement of any character's mind from one state or feeling to another -- the plot twitches with shock sometimes, when banditti appear, or ghosts, but the prose itself is indomitable -- the plot tries to smack it in the head and it never raises an eyebrow, it cruises on serenely like the swan of folklore, a spectacle I have seen myself, in Australia, where the black swans heaved around on the salt waves like carved stoics, brave as a doll nailed to a rocking horse -- for example --
Adeline, mean while, in the solitude of her prison, gave way to the despair which her condition inspired. She tried to arrange her thoughts, and to argue her herself into some degree of resignation; but reflection, by representing the past, and reason, by anticipating the future, brought before her mind the full picture of her misfortunes, and she sunk in despondency.
There is no despondency in the voice though, this murmur that asserts itself. No decision in her book comes from nowhere, and no behaviour is spontaneous. Her prose doesn't imitate the speed of the events but always moves at its own pace. Her commas soothe thought by dividing it into portions. Each sentence proceeds like a menu. One item then another. Characters are startled, the writer is never startled. "Adeline was surprized and shocked," she observes, "at this careless confidence, which, however, by awakening her pride, communicated to her an air of dignity that abashed him," moving on serenely from surprize and shock to the product of surprize and shock and then to the result, the abashment of a villain, one thing connected so logically to another that the abashment in retrospect was always his imperative destiny, laid down by a creature that is like the idea of God in Boethius, a being that can see past, present, and future as though they were all happening at the same time; it's only mortals who have to move through time to catch up with events.
Jane Austen read Radcliffe, and the reasonable tone surfaced again in her like a dolphin (and not only her, though English society at that point had loved Reason so much that it was also abandoning it and loving Romance, the long century of Enlightenment becoming Counter-Enlightement as they wrote), yet Radcliffe never made a Mr Collins, and Austen did not write an Adeline; and there is no sign that Radcliffe ever joked as Austen joked in a letter to her sister: "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." (Sent from Cork Street, Mayfair, London in 1796.)* I haven't seen the biographical Austen movie Becoming Jane but I know that it represents the meeting between them by using actors, which sounds like a sane way for a film to engineer an encounter, even if one of the actors was really playing a book, Austen in reality speaking to the book and listening to the book, and not the real woman, who was reclusive in her husband's house.
Two users on imdb.com have submitted this dialogue:
Mrs Radcliffe: Of what do you wish to write?
Jane Austen: Of the heart.
Mrs Radcliffe: Do you know it?
Jane Austen: Not all of it.
Mrs Radcliffe: In time, you will. But even if that fails, that's what the imagination is for.
The Romance of the Forest has an implicit message that goes like this: I, Ann Radcliffe, I believe that "all of it" could be known and explicated if you took the time to think your behaviour through one step at a time. Nothing but the constraints of space and literary convention prevent me following every one of my characters' emotions to its ultimate progenitor, whatever that is.
A woman who can go a little way so clearly could go the whole way if she had enough time. She would follow the stages of each feeling until the start was revealed. The moment beating in her hand.
* I wouldn't have thought of the letters if Whispering Gums hadn't written a post about them yesterday.
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Ah DKS, I came here today on a whim and find that not only do you talk about Radcliffe, and then Austen, but you also link to my post. Thanks. I have yet to read Radcliffe though a few in my JA group have read her, including Romance of the forest. I haven't, however, heard anyone talk much about the prose. You've intrigued me.
ReplyDeleteI love your mention of commas and her use of them. I'm rather sad to see the comma being so little used these days. I'm a bit of a less is more person but when it comes to commas they play a great role in structuring sentences and directing meaning or, as you say, "soothe thought by dividing it into proportions". Bravo - or is it Brava!
It wasn't until I'd read your post that I realised the difference between Radcliffe's tone and Austen's could be skinned down to one word, which was wit. One of them is constantly witty, the other never seems to realise that such a thing as wit is possible. It never occurs to her. It's not part of her writerly brain. The chances of Radcliffe being dry about crippled children (as in Northanger: "A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number") are nil. But her commas are beautiful. They speak for her. They say, "Ladies and gentlemen, you may have been kidnapped, tied up, carried off, betrayed, imprisoned, cheated, targeted for murder, and left alone in a room with a human skeleton in the furniture and a bloody knife on the floor, but none of that is any reason whatsoever for irrational behaviour."
ReplyDeleteAs for WIT ... that word really stood out in this last group of letters I read. It's what we know her for but it was interesting to see it played out so clearly in the letters.
DeleteWit is the bedrock livingness of her writing; it lets you know she was alive; it's a sign saying, "I'm here, I'm alert," surviving even now when of course she's not there, and not thinking, and not alert, and not living, and if I keep following this train of thought I'm going to end up calling it the muscular twitch of the recently post-death corpse, which doesn't sound right.
DeleteNope, it wouldn't sound right but I was enjoying watching where you were going with it ...
DeleteUp my own sentence to the top rung where I commenced staring at the view.
Delete"I'm rather sad to see the comma being so little used these days." I think people would probably use them more if we still liked to read out loud to one another. When you're reading silently, eye able to go here and there across the sentence, taking in the whole thing, then you don't need them so much because you're revolving across a page-bound version of three dimensions, but when you're reading out loud (going in only one direction, forwards) then the commas let you know when a pause would give the listener an opportunity to swallow the building block piece-of-idea you've just given them.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, that's a very good point ... you can get by without them in silent reading and in fact, sometimes, they can get in the way but they are so useful for reading aloud (as one does something at a reading group).
DeleteI was going through a book of Robert Browning a few days ago, when, in mid-poem, I switched from silent reading to reading out loud and my attention immediately began to focus on the commas. They told me where to lay my stresses and where to breathe; suddenly they were incredibly important. Before that I'd hardly noticed them.
DeleteI remember my daughter when she was all of 11 disagreeing with her high school principle about a comma in a piece of creative writing. The school had a small grant to publish a little book of the student's creative writing and the principle was editing it. She removed a comma from my daughter's piece and my daughter argued that she wanted it there. She had a reason. It went though ... however, some time later the principal (who was good and with whom I got on well) said to me out of the blue "she was right you know, about that comma".
DeleteVindication is extremely nice. I remember how hard it can be, when you're at school, to make anyone believe that you're right about anything, because the whole idea behind education is that you're wrong and need to be taught. I used a slightly archaic word in a high school short story competition once and a member of the staff decided that the word didn't exist. I don't remember what it was. Something like "moiled."
DeleteI never conceived of a WWF smackdown between plot and style!
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to think of a modern parallel and my mind keeps going to the fight scenes in Zhang Yimou's Hero, which was playing in a bar the other day while I sat at a table nearby examining my ramen with one of those scooplike spoons -- there's two people trying to murder one another, which is terrifying, but the style we're seeing it though is so elegant, so handsome, so careful, so beautifully coordinated.
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