What's Been Happening to Jane Austen?

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Pritchard, William H

To recognize the Broadway musical for one of "the signs," the stupefied audience of network television has become as competent as the professionally trained psychiatrists and literary critics to whom Tennessee Williams once threw a subtly flavored bone when he conveyed the "latent homosexuality" of a character by the fact that as a youth the sweet bird had sung in the chorus of Oklahoma! In the admittedly monstrous case that he isn't gay, the aficionado of the Broadway musical must resign himself to being thought so, or work as hard as Frank Rich to establish his improbable but true sexual orientation.

This is good, strenuous fun, the product of someone who stakes everything on the clever unobvious moves of his original sentences, his Style.

I capitalize the word because Miller, in speaking of Jane Austen, does so, calling her the epitome of Style or Austen Style or Absolute Style. In Austen, style is impersonal; No One speaks it; there is no enunciator, no person to be intuited from its matchless sentences. For Miller and those others in the group of eleven-year-olds who discovered Austen Style in "the creative eye of daydream"

we saw ourselves already wielding, already flashing the wondrous brand: saw its brilliant surface dazzle our enemies, and its sharp point, when they persisted in attack, pierce them to the quick: saw, to crown everything, its genius for detachment-for clean cuts-sever us once and forever from all the particulars of who and what we were, including of course those most responsible for the pain of our being thought peculiar.

Better, even, than musical comedy after school in the basement! But then this discovery of Style puts the "boy all wrong," at least so it happened to Boy Miller when he found that Austen Style had, as it were, "put him in a dress," leaving him to make an "asinine transvestite spectacle" of himself that would spell "the most awful social doom imaginable." As a capping anecdote for this "doom," he quotes Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?," an essay containing the "classic putdown" where one gay man exposes another's pretensions to manhood by finding, after having been picked up at the gay bar and taken home to the seducer's flat, the complete works of fane Austen gracing that flat.

Yet it is possible, even exercising the utmost sympathetic recognition for Miller's jouissance, to wonder exactly what it all has to do with the secret of Style in Jane Austen. Late in the short book's final chapter, Miller confesses to practicing "ever-necessary watchfulness" in the fear that his own literary style will betray itself, will commit some "scarlet illiteracy" or "ludicrous suggestion of the signifier" that, having caught such a lapse in himself, will make him feel "the full force of the shame I imagine I would have felt if I hadn't." But then the watchfulness in turn needs to be watched, since "where style is concerned, neither must one be too careful, or the desired effect will rigidify into affectation, a manner that, like certain muscular spasms, chokes the underlying nerve." From the sentences I've quoted thus far, it may be agreed that "arch" is a feeble word to characterize Miller's full-time effort at practicing a writing so "close" (he is in favor of close reading) that affectation (or archness) will be totally absent. Readers of the book will decide for themselves the degree of his success; but it (the style) does threaten more than once to usher, ever so elegantly, Jane Austen into a back seat.7