Walking with the medium and the message of Emma by Jane Austen

I come late to many good things, the books of Jane Austen being a regrettable instance. I was put off in my wanton youth by that sentence. You know the one: the most celebrated 23 words ever written in English. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. I was 22, six months out of military service as a Nasho in Vietnam, and a fresher at James Cook University of North Queensland (to give it its name at the time). Pride and Prejudice was a prescribed text for English 101. I read the first sentence and closed the book - slammed it shut, actually, and threw it against the wall - and never read another word of Jane Austen.

It is said, by people who claim to know - though I don’t know how they can - that at the moment of death, when confronted by the perfection of the beatific vision, we judge ourselves. Fifty years after my run-in with language used so skilfully that it provoked harsh judgement - I thought it sophisticated and superficial, in the way that a boy bought up on a farm hates the smartypants ways of townies - think the lowlifes who esteem themselves gentlemen in The School for Scandal who excrete “sentiment” from their minds’ arseholes - I now know that I was judging myself.

I still haven’t read any of Austen’s books. Any knowledge I have of them has come from film and television - until now. Prompted by a discussion by Scott Stephens, Waleed Aly and Gillian Dooley, I am now listening to the audiobook of Emma, narrated by Anna Bentinck. The very thing that triggered my PTSD enhanced fury in 1971 is what appeals to me now as I listen in 2023: the language. I now swoon when I read or hear that sentence. Has anything written as prose ever been so like poetry? I imagine single men in possession of a fortune, and thinking themselves in need of a wife, intoning those 23 words as a mantra.

By language I don’t just mean the vocabulary, but the way in which words are put together. Since 2015, when I first started listening to audio books, two hours a day as I walk, far in excess of the recommended 10,000 steps, I have noticed the truth of what Marshall McLuhan famously said: the medium is the message. No one I knew at the time understood what that meant, but now it is self evident that the language in which an idea or narrative is expressed bears almost as much of the burden of meaning making as the text: it is an indispensable subtext. The language mediates the thought. Using his accustomed language, Cormac McCarthy could not write The Portrait of a Lady, nor Ernest Hemingway A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, let alone Finnegan’s Wake. It is not possible to mistake Toni Morrison for Philip K Dick or Emily Bronte for Herman Melville.

Is it because I have listened to books rather than read them, for the best part of a decade, that I now pay as much attention to the feeling of a text embodied in the way it sounds as I do to the meaning of its words? I am now aware of a range of acquired feelings called Blake, Shelley (M), Poe, Bronte, Thackeray, Eliot, Melville, Alcott, Carroll, Stein, Maugham, Wolfe, Rilke, Christie, Kafka, Morrison, McCarthy, Atwood, Carey and - well that’s just a sample. So, when walking with Emma I was, from the outset, listening not just for the message but for the texture and feel of the medium as well.

The first two chapters were a bit of a romp. Already familiar with the language of Austen’s dialogue from film and television, I had a good idea of what to expect of the larger narrative. And so it was that I luxuriated, wilfully, in turns of phrase that evoke a  rigidly hierarchical society, a conspicuous attention to - or pretension of - propriety, and mannered formality, as characters and events emerged, not in their stark essence, but in a proliferation of details, arranged, not always in the order of efficient effect, but sometimes to achieve an elegant affect - what I called, in childhood innocence, lha d’dha - though back then I probably would have spelt it lar dee dar, or even lardy dar.

My listening euphoria was disturbed early in chapter three by two nearly simultaneous events. I heard what sounded like a grammatical error, which I thought as likely as God committing a sin, and dismissed it as something misheard. Yet the last eight words of the sentence would not let me pass. It wasn’t just an apparent problem with the sentence construction, whether grammatical or otherwise, but the resonance of a turn of phrase that made me press the Replay-the-last-30-seconds button to hear them again... and again... and again - failing each time to be convinced of the sentence’s integrity. It having become my intention to transcribe the sentence when I reached the end of my morning walk, some twenty minutes hence, I turned the machine off so as not to lose my place - inserting bookmarks being something I can do with actual books, but have not yet acquired as a skill in electronic access to knowledge.

As I walked, dwelling on the texture and feel of Austen’s words, I postulated what surely is known to others but is not generally the talk of barbecues and water coolers, viz., what I will call the King James Effect. Already archaic when it was written, the language of the King James Bible gives its text a sonority calculated to evoke a sense of awe that may not be felt if read or heard in common idiom. It made me wonder if something similar is going on with Austen’s novels. Clearly, Austen did not write in a contrived register but in the language of her time and place; so much so that one critic, referring to that very sentence, said she would never find an audience of any significance. Perhaps her language was not lha d’dha enough. Clearly, the audience that Austin has found vindicates her as a story teller. This was so before the recent spate of film and television adaptations. But I wonder if part of the mass appeal of Austen, in an age of plain speaking, is a “liturgical” resonance in the now archaic medium in which the story is read and heard. For my part, if I don’t genuflect in her presence, it’s not because the urge to do so isn’t there.

My morning walk ended and I sat at my computer to make a transcript of the sentence that had so compelled my attention. Almost as soon as I started typing, I saw why the sentence had seemed problematic, and realised that had I been reading instead of listening, the confusion would not have arisen. When listening, I missed the word “by” between the names Knightly and Elton ...

My transcription 

Real long standing regard brought the Westons and Mr Knightly, and by Mr Elton, a young man, living alone without liking it, the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegances and society of Mr Woodhouse’s drawing room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter, was in no danger of being thrown away.

… and, as seen in the published text, the semi colin after Knightly, missing from my transcription, would certainly have alerted me as a reader to what I missed as a listener, even after several replays of the sentence.
 

Published text 

Real, long-standing regard brought the Westons and Mr. Knightley; and by Mr. Elton, a young man living alone without liking it, the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse's drawing-room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter, was in no danger of being thrown away.

Hearing the names “the Westons and Mr Knightly”, and not noticing the word “by” before the name Mr Elton, created the expectation of a sentence about four guests. Instead, it singled out Elton and cranked up the lha d’dha. The substance of what follows the word “by” is: Mr Elton, a young man living unhappily alone and unlikely to prefer solitude to the company of others. The text embellishes company to “… the elegances and society of Mr Woodhouse’s drawing room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter”; and preferring company to solitude is construed as a privilege in no danger of being thrown away. Such textual embroidery is not to be unexpected. It is the remarkably - exquisitely - elaborate sentence construction that renders the passage lha d’dha though, because of the way it functions, not ostentatious. Austen has used the medium of convolution to show, rather than tell, something about Elton. He’s exquisitely mannered and of little other accomplished, initiative or personal resources.

So much for the medium. I turn now to the message, but for a very specific issue only - not, at this time, a general survey.

Scott Stephens said, at the outset of the discussion referenced above (0:06:00), that in her memoir, Austen said of Emma, the lead role in Emma, that she set out to create a character that only she (Austen) could like. For my money, she succeeded handsomely. Emma is a good yarn, but Emma is a piece of work. At 21, with no experience in anything that matters, she’s got the effrontery to behave as an influencer. She messes with people’s heads yet feigns disinterest by refusing to give a straight answer when her advice is sought. And she’s an appalling snob - perhaps a product of her time.

Waleed Aly, (0:23:25) having already pointed out another unflattering aspect of her character - her interest in Harriet Smith is totally driven by self-interest - says, in effect: but she’s well meaning and doesn’t intend to be cruel; and she cops a mouthful from George Knightly from time to time because he sees the good in her and does his best to nurture her better angels - and succeeds. There seems to be agreement between Stephens, Aly and Dooley, that all’s well that ends well - in in the manner to which Austen’s readership had become accustomed, by the time this final story published in her lifetime, was written. 

They’re probably right, but I would like to show obliquely how bad things are in a parallel universe in which Knightly’s influence is absent or rejected.

Are Emma’s actions less blameworthy because she doesn’t intend to be damaging and hurtful? Does the fact that she intends only to do good mean she isn’t a clueless but refined thug? Should we, in effect, give her the benefit of being, like, one of the good old boys? Putting it that way alerts us to the need to be careful that we’re not picking on her just because she’s a girl. So let’s look at two other people who’s intentions “are good” yet merit our contempt - mine, anyway - beside whom, Emma’s damage to other people’s lives pales to insignificance. I speak of Israel Folau and George Pell.

Folau’s defenders say you can’t criticise him for his faith. Bollocks! I question calling what he says and does statements and acts of faith. But that’s too big a topic for now. My point is that we all believe something whether we admit it or not - even claiming not to believe in anything is believing something -  but what gives anyone the right to assert that what they believe is right - especially if what they believe is that what they believe is right. Such a person has failed a test that is prior to the content of their beliefs. To see the nature of that test, imagine two people who “believe nothing”. The question each has to answer is: what gives me the right to assert my will over you for any reason? Answer: nothing. The next question is: then, how should we relate to each other? Answer: with mutual respect. Application: I’ve had an insight about the nature of reality. What do I do about it - shove it down my neighbour’s throat, or attempt to share it with him? What if we can’t agree on the validity of my insight - do we go to war over it or do we just agree to disagree and live in mutual regard of the right to life and difference of opinion? Folau’s personal audacity is an egregious instance of the same unjustifiable certitude that drives Emma.

Why mention Emma Woodhouse in the same frame Folau and Pell? Because she’s on the spectrum. Folau and Pell remain influential on a global stage. Emma was First Lady of her tiny world. All three of them were socialised in cultures that induced them to think themselves unmistaken in their convictions. All three of them were obliged as human beings to dig beneath their own certainties. All three of them are obnoxious arseholes because they either didn’t dig or denied what they found when they did - which is certainly the case with Pell, who lived through the digging done by the Second Vatican Council and said an emphatic no to what the Council found. Pell mounted a rearguard action against the Council and, in the manner of “conservative” leaders in the 21st century, frustrated the just and equitable development of his constituency. Folau shows no awareness of the sense of entitlement driving the ludicrous spectacle of doubling down on his anathemas in his family church, the name of which proclaims that thirty people, alone in all the world, know the Truth of Jesus Christ, having arrived at such a rarified iteration of The Elect after sampling and rejecting, Mormonism, the Assemblies of God and Hillsong.

Beside such behemoths of bloody-minded egotism as Folau and Pell, Emma Woodhouse is surely as blameless as Leunig’s Innocent Bystander. To be sure. To be sure. But they are invoked to illustrate the monstrance proportions to which Emma could have grown within the horizon of her tiny world had she not been called to account, from time to time, by George Knightly and had she not, though she resented it, taken his advice, the significance of which was not merely that she grew in wisdom, but that he in turn grew in awareness of what a prick he is, and confessed as much to her. They moved forward in mutual regard, and in that sense, all is indeed well, and it ends well.

I should say in closing that invoking Folau and Pell served a purpose external to the narrative of Emma and was by no means necessary to frame and give proportion to Emma’s presumption. Austin provides just such a foil in the person of Augusta Elton. If Emma might be thought of as a jumping jack, little explosions of startling effect in other people’s lives, Elton is surely a nuclear holocaust. Having said that, the impact of a character like Elton can vary in the reading or performance - as I saw in the contrast between my own reading of Teresa in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, by Will Arbery, and Madeleine Jones’ performance at the Seymour Centre in April 2022. One of the advantages of audiobooks is the differentiation the professional voice actor brings to the characters, in contrast to, in  my case, hearing every character as though they are speaking in my own voice when I read. As written by Arbery, Teresa is a rabid Trump supporter at a conservative Wyoming Catholic college (the actual institution on which it is modelled takes no state funding to ensure its ability to control the curriculum) rails against contemporary America as a partisan Catholic whose theology, like all of the enemies of Pope Francis, rejects the Second Vatican Council. Reading her part as though I was saying the words myself was a disturbing - nay, distressing - experience. Coming out of Jones’ mouth, however, Teresa is as ludicrous as she is fanatical. I saw the exact same transformation of Augusta Elton in Tanya Reynolds’ rendition of her in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film Emma. The bombast is exposed as abjectly ridiculous.

Appalled by the repulsive yet necessary character of Augusta Elton and stalked by the epiphenomenal intrusions of Folau and Pell, the memory of my ambulatory rendezvous with Emma has about it the odour of walking with beasts.