Let Her Speak
On Jane Austen
To go from Don DeLillo to Jane Austen is hardly that far in the history of the novel. Which is to say that the history of the novel as we know it is not terribly long and drawn out. So, DeLillo and Austen: crafty and observant, both famous for their funny dialogue. As people used to say of Woody Allen films back when they still talked about Woody Allen films, I prefer the early funny work. Except that I don’t, really, prefer the early work. DeLillo and Austen nevertheless are vulnerable to this distinction. In both cases, the early funny work (Northanger Abbey, Running Dog) gives way to a deepening intellectual seriousness, a dramatic autumn of aesthetic life (Persuasion, Underworld). Not that they lacked intellectual power to begin with; and just as important, not that the funny dialogue ever stops.
1
What is it in Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility that makes the reader so certain that the novelist’s allegiance lies with Elinor, the sibling of “sense,” rather than her younger and sensibility-stricken sister, Marianne? Sure, there’s Elinor’s deliberateness and humor. These suggest a certain sympathy between author and character. Then there is the fact that it is through Elinor’s eyes that we observe, with affection of course, the ridiculousness of Marianne and the girls’ mother, for “[Elinor] knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next.” Finally, there’s the sense that Elinor has the judiciousness of an author herself. Like the woman who’s written the novel that she’s in, Elinor is taken with characters. She suggests as much when she describes her interest critically:
“I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes,” said Elinor, “in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”
The virtue of mistakes is that they are material, meaning they are the stuff out of which a truer or simply renewed experience or thought can be refined. Elinor never ceases to observe and outline the character of those around her. She writes and rewrites them ceaselessly, as Marianne perhaps writes them only once, until she is somewhat violently forced to revision. (In a much later realist novel, American Pastoral, Philip Roth writes, in a mood of ironic celebration: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.”)
But Marianne, too, has a sharp sense of character. When Elinor chides her for visiting a house that does not belong to her with an unmarried man who stands, perhaps, to inherit the property, Marianne objects to the way in which propriety is decided. She uses the example of local gossip, Mrs. Jennings: “If the impertinent remarks of Mrs. Jennings are to be the proof of impropriety in conduct,” she says, “we are all offending every moment of all our lives.” She is not unsophisticated; she has wit. She suggests certain alternatives to “sense” that differ from Elinor’s offerings. Most importantly, for it’s a novel, she stands to learn as much if not more from her mistakes as her judicious sister.
2
There are all these parables about realism. Roland Barthes commented about the conventions of literary realism that one of its moves constituted “reality effects,” i.e. those fictional details, like a superfluous description a character’s shoes, that refer only to themselves, to the fictional world. The shoes are there only to be the shoes the character is wearing, and we don’t even care about the shoes, which are drama free. Details like shoes lend fiction a certain “reality” by a circular logic: being made up and having no point but themselves, such shoes give off the air of a world not so much made up as given: “real.”
That’s fine. I understand. But another thing that makes a novel “realistic” and that makes its world seem given is when the characters speak. Really speak, I mean. If Sense and Sensibility, in which Elinor is ostensibly sealed, as though she were the novel’s pilot, seems to suggest certain critical attitudes about Marianne, these attitudes look less prosecutorial when Marianne speaks. Or to put it another way, what is it in Sense and Sensibility that makes the reader so uncertain that Marianne is ultimately sensibility stricken and Elinor so rigidly sensible? It’s the dialogue.
What happens in Sense and Sensibility at the level of exposition and point of view goes ever so slightly on hiatus during the dialogue. Marianne speaks, in a voice not quite the voice of the novel. Her objections to this or that proposal from Elinor, for example, are not dismissible in advance; the energy flows the other way, as she seems to talk back. Except for the fact that she more or less says that she is, she’s no foe in the war of sense and sensibility. She speaks. Marianne seems to differ from the text in which she’s stuck, as a character should, as even Elinor does.
3
Elmore Leonard wrote westerns, then he wrote crime novels. Like Austen and DeLillo he was always funny and had from the beginning a particular facility with dialogue. To take one example, his crime novel 52 Pick-up (1974) is one of his earlier efforts, and it does have some creaky load-bearing elements, including the act of adultery that sets the novel in motion. But then there’s the dialogue.
When Leonard spoke in later years about the evolution of his writing, specifically his writing of women characters, he may have had 52 Pick-up in mind. The jilted wife in the novel doesn’t have terribly much to do aside from be married and jilted. In a later novel like Killshot (1989) or Out of Sight (1996), Leonard remedied this gap in imagination by giving his female protagonists a lot to do; it’s probably worth asking what difference the difference makes, but for now I’ll leave it at that. More to the point, while 52 Pick-up wouldn’t be my recommendation if you wanted to sample some Leonard,1 that jilted wife in her tidily painful adultery plot has one tremendous advantage over the tedium of her story: Leonard lets her speak. I’m not sure of the alchemy involved, but the guy seems to have been congenitally incapable of abandoning a character to the safe and reliable precincts of cardboard. Barbara in 52 Pick-up talks in way that makes her welcome on any page of the novel she cares to enter. She’s kicky; her pain feels painful, her anger angry, the stone stony. It’s the dialogue. Let her speak.
If I had to make a recommendation like this, I’d say try Leonard’s Swag (1976), which is a rather wonderful Detroit buddy comedy of fool’s errands, with one of my favorite final sentences of any novel ever. Or try Killshot. I haven’t even read Get Shorty. One of Leonard’s virtues, in my opinion, is that he’s a writer without a masterpiece. Instead he has a universe of characters which he enters and exits everywhere, at will.