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Sunday, April 24, 2005

Plunge Deep: Jane Austen

Posted by Amardeep Singh on 04/24/05 at 09:56 AM

I wanted to point people to Laura’s account of her investigation of textual references in Jane Austen, while she was assisting with the preparation of a new critical edition of Mansfield Park. (Laura is a grad student in Melbourne, not to be confused with the Laura at 11D)

In this blog post she recounts how she started with this passage from Austen:

I do desire that you will not be making her really unhappy; a little love perhaps may animate and do her good, but I will not have you plunge her deep, for she is as good a little creature as ever lived, and has a great deal of feeling.

A question mark comes up on “plunge her deep,” which sounds a little, well, you know. In this beautifully-written post, Laura shows where Austen probably got the phrase. (Read it)

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From Trilling, “A Sense of the Past” (it was either Sean or I; one of us has to post this):

“Somewhere below all the explicit statements that a people make through its art, religion, architecture, legislation, there is a dim mental region of intention of which it is very difficult to become aware. We now and then get a strong sense of its existence when we deal with the past, not by reason of its presence in the past by by reason of its absence. As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multifarious intention and activity is stilled, all the buzz of implication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer.

Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet – the great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace – we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the remote unconscious corners of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.”

This is related to the aesthetic purism question in ways that aren’t simple. But, simply: there is a species of purism that prefers the silence and may deride the buzz as ‘historicist’. When the buzz can really be just as aesthetic.

By John Holbo on 04/25/05 at 12:42 PM | Permanent link to this comment

thank you for that. I feel it’s very apposite. And ironic, since Trilling’s essay on MP is still one of the few that really gets the novel, but his historicism is very crude (he suggested MP is ruled by Victorian conceptions of Duty.)

By laura on 04/26/05 at 03:18 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Sunday, April 24, 2005

Plunge Deep: Jane Austen

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