All Roads Lead to Austen (14 page)

“But it's not a book with a lot of surprises, really,” Fernanda shook her head, and Leti overlapped her to agree, adding, “It's a very open, obvious book.”

Yolanda, protecting her injured arm as she rose from her seat, chimed in for the first and last time. “Well, it's got a happy ending, and that's what I like. But now I'm afraid I've got to go—my ride's outside by now.”

Hugged, kissed, and told to take care of herself, she was helped to the door. Conversation drifted into a consideration of the merits of the various cookies and cakes our absent hostess had left for us.

Ignacio José had barely called us back to order and opened a new line of discussion on the shades of distinction between pride and vanity when suddenly we were greeting a late arrival who rushed in with apologies for being held over at work. Meli was the youngest and most animated of the group. In her mid-thirties, she had light brown hair in a short, flattering cut and a dramatically husky voice.

“I have to tell you, I'm in love with Mr. Darcy,” she greeted me playfully then shared warm hellos with the other group members. When Ignacio José pointedly raised his voice to continue, Meli hushed like a schoolgirl and settled in next to Leti.

Ignacio José pursued the pride/vanity line of thought further then suddenly stopped himself. “Actually, why don't you share your ideas on the book with us, since we don't always have the chance to talk with a professor? We'd enjoy hearing more from you,” he prompted, as all the others nodded agreement.

Shoot—and I was hoping they'd do all the work, especially since I still wasn't feeling so hot.

There were any number of threads in the conversation I could pick up, and I was especially tempted to circle back on the point made about Austen's works being “obvious” in their plotting, to add some shading to that perspective. But rather than haggle, I decided that some context might be more interesting for them. “In British literature prior to Austen, heroines tended to be perfect beings, faultlessly beautiful, and multi-talented. Austen is the first novelist who really lets women be human beings. Her heroines aren't idealized, fairy tale creatures. In fact, when her novels came out, some people assumed they were written by a man, for the realism.”

Oscar spoke up again, nodding. “Her style is incredibly clean and frank, something people tend to associate with men. She's direct, concise, with really good judgment. It's very impressive.”

Ignacio José agreed. “Yes, Austen writes incredible dialogue, and she really knows how to introduce a character, too—it's very dramatic, the way we meet Mr. Darcy, for instance.”

“Oh, I love that character, just love him!” Fernanda, Leti, and Meli layered over each other's cries of enthusiasm.

“And I love to picture him as that actor, the one from the older film, the really long one,” Leti said. Meli seconded with lascivious yummy noises as Leti continued: “But I didn't like that new one much, because the balls were totally
de
medio
pelo
—low brow.”

“But they were country families giving the balls,” Meli pointed out.

“I don't care about that.” Leti dismissed this with a “talk to the fan” flick of her wrist. “That older film had real elegance, real aristocratic magnificence. And Darcy, he's any woman's dream.”

Back on common ground, Meli agreed emphatically. “I loved him from the first moment.”

“Darcy is detestable,” Ignacio José cut in, supported by nods and frowns from Oscar.

“Darcy is
not
detestable!” cried Meli, while Leti and Fernanda rushed to declare him shy with strangers but wonderful, adorable, fabulous.

“Maybe by midway into the book we can see that,” Ignacio José conceded. “But in that first scene, he's awful.”

“
Es
de
matarlo
a
palos
,” Oscar agreed. This is strong stuff, worth giving in the original. Translated literally, Darcy deserves to be beaten to death with a stick or “
palo
.” This phrase, however, is an extreme way of saying somebody deserves a serious beat-down but
not
actual death. Still, the sentiment earned Oscar the prize for “First Reader in Latin America to Want to Manhandle an Austen Character.” This was something I'd had my eye out for since leaving the States, given how often Larry and my California students mentioned wanting to shake or dope slap some of Austen's more irritating literary offspring.

The ladies rushed to Darcy's defense and the gender gap widened. Ignacio José tried to mediate, first commuting Darcy's sentence to a less severe beating with a stick—“
Sí, es de darle palos
”—then adding, “But all of his behavior is explained later, when we come to know him better.”

“I like him just the way he is,” Meli insisted, unintentionally echoing Darcy's literary descendent Mark Darcy of Bridget Jones fame. “I liked him from the first moment.”

“But not that Bingley, ugh!” Leti grimaced at the thought of Jane's gentle suitor.

“He's a big nothing,” Fernanda agreed.

Wow! I'd never heard Bingley so maligned. I was reminded of the harshness of the women's judgments in Guatemala on men perceived to be weak.

“The one that's really the worst,” offered Meli, “is that cousin, Collins.”

Leti rolled her eyes and groaned. “All of his pontificating, his tackiness!
Horrrrrriiiiiiiible!
”

A colorful list of insults followed. Collins is
un
tarado
(a cretin),
un
blando
(a coward),
un
fofo
(a wimp)—in short,
ridículo
.

“We're in agreement on all of that.” Ignacio José put a period to the verbal thrashing. “What about the father, Mr. Bennet?”

“Doesn't even exist.” Leti and her fan dismissed him.

“Well, I liked him,” Meli countered.

“But that marriage between the Bennets is a nightmare!” Leti continued, raising her voice. “He doesn't just make fun of his wife—I think he actually
hates
her for making all their lives so difficult!” She suddenly gestured toward my tiny digital recorder on the table next to the Christmas goodies. “That thing's right here in front on me, why on earth am I talking so loudly!?” She laughed and set the others off, as well.

Ignacio José took the opportunity to shift the topic. “Leti mentioned earlier that she felt Austen's novels are very similar to each other, with all the concern about getting married. But if you think about it, Herman Melville wrote constantly about sailors, in “The Encantadas,”
Benito
Cereno
,
Moby
Dick
, on and on with sailors, without being criticized for it.”

“That's what he knew about, and what Austen knew about was the whole issue of marriage and competing for husbands,” Fernanda said.

“This was precisely the problem for women in that period,” Leti observed, “the fact that they didn't have options, they could never live the same as men.”

Fernanda pounced. “And
that's
why I say that Austen has feminist concerns, pointing this out.”

“But she's not criticizing her culture. It's not a feminist focus,” Leti insisted.

“Sometimes it is,” Fernanda countered.

“Another way to see it is that she's simply presenting the reality and allowing the readers to use their judgment—like a spokesperson for her era,” Ignacio José suggested.

“She did like to write about what she knew, just as Ignacio José points out with the comparison to Melville.” I steered us out of the feminist shoals. “In fact, one of Austen's nieces was working on a novel and needed help with a scene she wanted to set in Ireland. Austen basically replied, ‘Why take your characters somewhere
you've
never been? Stick with what you know.'”

Oscar weighed in again. “Is there a character in the novel that's like Austen herself?”

Ah, that question again. People really are endlessly curious about the connection between Austen's life and her works. “A lot of people assume that she's Lizzy, but the fact is, we're not sure—any idea like that is speculation.”

He took this in with a nod. “I'm not sure if the rest of you had this reaction, but I felt it was Lizzy because we know the most about her. It seems that the author connects best to this character.”

“She's the heroine, the protagonist,” Fernanda agreed.

“No, there are two protagonists—the two closest sisters,” Leti corrected.

“Lizzy's more important,” Fernanda responded firmly.

I couldn't tell if this was good-natured sisterly bickering or if there were more behind it. Nobody else seemed uncomfortable with the number of times Uruguay and Argentina were locking horns, so I decided I shouldn't be either. “It's important to keep in mind that during that time period,” I said, “you couldn't assume there was a close relation between the author's life and their work. These days, we often think of writing as a way of working out personal issues.” I struggled to frame the idea that modern psychology has changed how many writers approach their work, but before I could get this out, the conversation took a different turn.

“I do think Austen was talented,” Leti said directly to me, “but this book is really very light. We've read books together that are much more complex.”

Ignacio José came to Austen's defense. “We can agree that the basic theme is light, although it was crucially important during her time period. But I must say that I believe Austen's capacity to delineate characters, to enter into their thought processes, to expose the psychology behind their actions is extraordinary. The lightness of her theme contrasts brilliantly with the profundity of her vision.”

“That's well said,” Fernanda agreed. “Just like
The
Unbearable
Lightness
of
Being
.”

“Exactly,” Ignacio José said, “That's also light yet profound.”

“Well, there's
Lolita
; that's an easy book to read, but it's definitely profound psychologically,” Leti conceded. “He's a genius, Nabokov.” Oscar murmured agreement, nodding emphatically.

“And he loved Austen,” I pointed out. “Nabokov said that Austen's works may seem superficial, but that's, um, that's a delusion that changes when you know more about her.” Actually, he'd said, “This is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs.” Not only did I have no idea how to say “succumbs” in Spanish, I also didn't want Leti to think I was calling her a “bad reader”—which she wasn't—so I paraphrased.

“Austen's work is marvelous, too, for how it allows us to enter into her time period.” Fernanda carefully selected a cookie from the table, passing along the plate as she continued. “We don't have to work at all ourselves to step into the era, this little window into England that she opens for us.”

Here was my opportunity to treat the topic we'd arrived at in both Guatemala and Mexico. “Do you believe that this story is particular to its original context, that it could only happen just the way it does in the England of Austen's time? Or could you change the names and relocate it to Guayaquil, for example?”

Ignacio José didn't hesitate. “Impossible. You couldn't set either the people or the places here.”

“Or in France or in Spain either,” Leti seconded.

Fernanda agreed, joining the cross-talking between Leti and Ignacio José. “Religion is just one of the issues. These people are Protestants. There's the man who doesn't want to be a clergyman and goes into the army, and the other who's a clergyman and is hunting for a wife. It's just like in Agatha Christie's novels—there are things that could only happen in the particular time period in England that she's describing.”

“I've got to disagree.” Oscar spoke quietly but firmly, again magically silencing the group. “There are values laid out in this novel that you can definitely translate into any culture. She's discussing the end of the eighteenth century, beginning of the nineteenth. When you asked that question just now,” Oscar turned to me as he continued, “I found myself thinking of what Chile was like during our time of independence in 1810. There's a Chilean novel called
Martín Rivas
, by Blest Gana. The things that happen in that novel, the problems it examines, like what happens to women without dowries or husbands, all of those things are in Austen. The books aren't identical, but the issues are very similar.”

“On that issue, on women's roles, I agree,” Fernanda concurred.

Before the feminist debate could flair again, Meli added, “I agree with Fernanda, but I have to say, if you moved the setting to France, for example, I just don't see Mr. Collins fitting in there!”

“There are a lot of specific things that would have to change,” Fernanda responded. “Even the countryside they live in, the way land is distributed, and how communities are made up.”

“But the real question here,” Ignacio José said in his best moderator tone, “is whether or not the book demonstrates universal values.”

“Yes, it definitely does.” This from Fernanda, firmly.

“On the broadest level, it does,” Ignacio José continued, “and from that perspective, it could be moved to whatever situation, not just to our modern day but back to the time of Christ. But I still believe that the specific way these values are examined, the actual cultural configuration in which the values are examined—no. That's specific. These characters are not people I could picture living in Guayaquil, with a house in El Portijo or in San Brandón, with a little cottage nearby.”