Jane Austen and Broken-Hearted Octopuses

In Martin Amis' novel Other People there's a girl whose only knowledge of life comes from reading the novels of Jane Austen.

She read The Jane Austen Gift-Pack. The six stories it contained spoke more directly to her than anything else had done. The same thing happened in every book: the girl liked a bad man who seemed good, then liked a good man who had seemed bad, whom she duly married. What was wrong with the bad men who seemed good? They were unmanly, and lacked candour, and, in at least two clear instances, fucked other people.

This limited experience of life is a problem when she has to lie to the police:

'How old are you . . . Mary Lamb? Do your parents know what you get up to?'
'I'm in my twenty-fifth year,' said Mary carefully. 'My parents died.'
'Of what?'
Mary hesitated. 'One of consumption,' she said, 'the other of a broken heart.'
'People don't die of those things any more. Well they do, but we call it something else these days.'

Actually, we don't. A cardiologist friend of mine told me that, just as it is possible to tug on somebody's heart-strings, so it is medically possible to be broken hearted. It is actually called broken-heart syndrome and involves the sudden weakening of one of the muscles of the heart. It is sometimes brought on by emotional strain, such as the death of your beloved, and is usually fatal. This means that it is quite possible to die of a broken heart.

However, doctors don't usually call it broken-heart syndrome. They call it takotsubo, which is Japanese for octopus trap. That may sound a trifle odd, but when you're broken hearted your left ventricle swells up until it's just the same shape as a traditional Japanese octopus trap. Like this:

The poor (but delicious) octopuses find the pot and think it would make a nice home, so they crawl inside and, once snug, the wily fisherman pulls it up to the surface, cooks his tenant and leaves the other octopuses broken-hearted.

They usually die.

Nothing Compares...

Yesterday, I heard Nothing Compares 2U playing on the radio and I was reminded of how bloody fantastic the first line is.

I've mentioned before that I think first lines are overrated things, but they have a job; indeed they have a couple of jobs. There are two things that a first line should do. First: it should establish something important. The sky was blue and the grass was green is a bad first line because it could be prefixed to almost any story without adding anything (unless your hero is colour-blind).

The other thing that a first line should do is throw the reader off slightly. Only slightly. There's always a danger that a chap will settle down to appreciate your book, and books should not be appreciated, they should be experienced.

You don't want your reader to appreciate that your joke is funny, you want him to laugh. You don't want your reader to appreciate your plot-twists, you want him to be startled. This problem is horribly acute when the reader picks up the book for the first time, because of course he is probably going to use his judgement of your first line to decide whether to continue. So you need to, as it were, pull his seat of judgement out from under him.

But here's the paradox: if you do that too obviously, the reader is likely to say 'Oh! How wonderfully unexpected! He's pulled my seat of judgement out from under me in a very clever way.'

This is a failure. So you must be cunning. You need to be subtle. That's why Call me Ishmael is the best first line in history. On the surface, nothing has happened. The main character is called Ishmael. Onwards to the second sentence.

But he's not named in a normal way. The first line is not My name is Ishmael. It's Call me Ishmael. Most readers don't notice that the narrator of Moby Dick is anonymous. Instead, a sort of ad hoc deal is set up between narrator and reader that Ishmael is the name we shall use, but that for all we know he's really called Brian.

And the vital thing is that that ad hoc deal is set up just quickly enough and just subtly enough that the reader barely notices. He's on the second sentence, but somewhere at the back of his mind there's that nagging feeling that something is wrong.

The same thing goes with It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Right ho! On to the second sentence, barely wondering whether this is a statement of truth (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the sun rises in the East) or of satire (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if a girl doesn't have a Gucci handbag she might as well be dead). Is this the omniscient or sarcastic narrator? Does Jane believe this, or is she laughing at those who do?

Subtle. The reader barely notices, but they are that much less able to stand in dissociated judgement.

Which brings me around to the song by Prince, first recorded by The Family, and made famous by Sinead O'Connor. It's not on a level with Melville or Austen, but it's damn close.

It's been seven hours and fifteen days
Since you took your love away.

All Prince did was to reverse the usual order of weights and measures. Most people start with the largest - three pounds and fifty pence, eleven stone and six ounces, fifteen days and seven hours.

It's hardly a dramatic shift. Seven hours and fifteen days is quite comprehensible, you might not notice. But it's enough to tip you off balance so subtly that you don't even notice your fall. Moreover - and this is the beauty of it - it establishes the character. After the first two lines the rest of the song is barely necessary. It's somebody who split up with his girlfriend* more than a fortnight ago, but is still counting their separation in hours. That's why they're listed first.

That's all you need to know about the poor fellow: lovelorn enough that his measurements are reversed. And the real beauty is that the listener might never notice that all that information has been conveyed in the first seven words.

It's enough to make you forgive the 2U instead of To You.

Almost enough.



*Working from the original version.

Jane Austen and Latin

Professor Kathryn Sutherland, who, through no fault of her own, is an academic at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire, has, in a paper much reported in the national press, suggested, to the surprise and consternation of many, that Jane Austen, who has for so long been regarded as the mistress of English prose, may have relied more than a little upon the corrections of William Gifford, a classical scholar in the employment of John Murray who was her publisher, a translator of Juvenal, and an imitator of Persius.

Christ, it's hard to write like Austen. Take the fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility:

But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

Now let's cut away the subordinated stuff:

Her death....produced a great alteration...for...he invited... the family 

The last seventeen words are apposite clauses relating to the possessor of the object of the second main clause. The extraordinary thing is that the prose is so readable, so lucid, despite being grammatically so distant from spoken English.

English doesn't like to be complicated. It's a bluff, crude language that likes to stride around in a series of main clauses. The spoken equivalent of that sentence would be something like:

She died ten years before he did. That changed things. He needed someone to replace her. So he invited Henry Dashwood's family to come and live with him. Dashwood was the legal inheritor...

In fact, spoken English isn't quite like that because the sentences of spoken English rarely end. But if you replace all the full stops with and then you'll end up with something approaching normal conversation.

As I say, it doesn't make sense in English, but it would in Latin. English likes to be simple because English has so few inflections. Unlike Latin (or German for that matter), you can't pin a suffix to the end of the word family to show how it relates to the main verb. This means that, in English, your grammar's complexity is your reader's confusion; unless you're very, very careful.

However, as Latin prose was thought the model of good writing, and Latin language the palace of good thinking, its grammar crept into our literature, if not our language. Milton read all the classics, and wrote poetry that Ezra Pound denied was English at all. Thomas Browne knocked out jormungandrian sentences that nonetheless delight. Over breakfast, De Quincey used to improvise translations of the newspapers into Greek. Dr Johnson wrote a Latinate English that nobody ever spoke, but which was, when Austen began writing, considered the peak, pinnacle and pineapple of prose perfection.

I always thought that that was where Miss Austen got her prose style. She imitated Dr Johnson and Dr Johnson imitated the Ancients and thus... well, thus that fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility. But now I have a new suspect: William Gifford, possessor of a classical education, and the man to whom Austen's prose was entrusted.

I have, though, not read Professor Sutherland's paper and can't find it online, so this must be taken as nothing more than the suspicions of a suspicious suspecter.



N.B. I'm working on the basis that Jane Austen herself didn't know Latin. This is reasonably safe, as she once wrote in a letter that she didn't know Latin. However, some scholars think that she only pretended not to know Latin in order to avoid getting a job.

On Tenterhooks in -Shire

This is what a tenterhook looks like. Don't pretend you knew.

You take some cloth. You wash it. You fasten it to a wooden frame called a tenter using tenter-hooks and that stops it shrinking as it dries.

Riveting, isn't it? I presume, gentle reader, that you are nailed to your seat. Otherwise you would leave.

My eyes were once caught, peeled and glued to the stage. I have required glasses ever since.

Incidentally, the first recorded use of the phrase to catch somebody's eye is in Pride and Prejudice at the moment when Mr Darcy first sees Elizabeth:

"Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

"Which do you mean?" and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said: "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me."

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him.

Even more incidentally, Pride and Prejudice was originally called First Impressions, and it was under that title that it was rejected for publication (publishers were as brilliant then as they are now).

Sense and Sensibility did get published and was such a success that Miss Austen decided she'd better stick to the alliterative-abstract-noun formula. So she changed First Impressions to Pride and Prejudice and the book has since sold (roughly) twenty million copies.

In America the novel was first published as Elizabeth Bennet with P&P demoted to the position of subtitle.

Even more and more incidentally (and I promise I'll stop in after this) Pride and Prejudice is the origin of the phrase "my humble abode", which is how Mr Collins always describes his house.

The Inky Fool's humble abode