Over the weekend I reread Jane Austen's Persuasion. The direct reason, of course, was that a student is doing her senior project on the novel, and she asked me to be the first reader for the paper. But I thoroughly enjoyed rereading it.
Austen's novels have been relentlessly adapted these past couple of decades. Around the time I was in college the now famous Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice came out, and that seems to have either created, or have been a part of, a tremendous revival of interest in the works of the regency-era novelist. Upon teaching her novels in a couple of different classes, I have usually tried to ask my students why all this interest; why do they seek out these films, and even, in some cases, actually read the novels? The students--usually overwhelmingly female in these cases--have responded that in these novels the men simply treat women as women. The men are kind, considerate, and even romantic. My students are not (or at least not all) naive conservatives. They do not, apparently, want to lose the right to own property, vote, and appear in public without a chaperon. They also, apparently, appreciate the benefits of modern plumbing and medicine, but perhaps that goes without saying. Jane Austen almost seems to function for them the way that porn does for others; it's a fantasy that that the person having the fantasy can recognize as unrealistic, perhaps even undesirable, but that meets some deep-seated need.
I like Persuasion because--at twenty-eight--the heroine is today's equivalent of a woman in her mid-forties. There's something sweet about the idea of this rather shy, kind woman finally getting the man that she lost when she was younger, and more powerless. I also simply enjoy the prose; Austen writes with a clarity and precision that was unusual then, and is completely gone now.
On a side note: the TV show Reading Rainbow has been canceled. I'm not sure what I can add that some other people haven't already said. I particularly liked what the 19th floor guy had to say. I haven't watched the show in years; I'm not even sure that the PBS affiliates I have been living around even carried the show, and of course I have no children that would have caused me to look it up. But I have very fond memories of watching that show on idle summer mornings growing up. It remains one of the few shows--that I remember--dedicated to the sheer pleasure of reading. So much of our society is about the utilitarianism of capitalism; everything must be justified in terms of its productivity. Yes, kids who are strong readers do better in school, are more likely to go to Harvard, make a six-figure salary. For me, the show reminded me that--even as I was growing out of the level of books promoted on the show--that reading was as much fun as Bugs Bunny and chocolate milk. It was pleasure, not homework.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. . .
Last weekend I read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. A student was thinking about doing his senior project on it, so I said I'd take a look. The novel--half-forgotten today--was almost certainly one of the first in a long series of cold-war era apocalyptic nuclear scenarios. A late 1950s Florida small town survives the initial nuclear attack from the USSR, while Miami, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and eventually Orlando go up in a mushroom cloud around it, along with quite a bit of the rest of the planet. The survivors, of course, have to fashion new modes of survival, including transportation, medicine, and a new economy.
The novel was amusing in at least one way that it probably wasn't when it was first published. The novel is almost charmingly dated--it was a bit like watching an episode of _Mad Men_, except one where the Cuban Missile crisis doesn't end well. Imagine Don Draper and Pete Campbell climbing over the ruins of a destroyed Florida, saying things like "Well, this is a fine donnybrook, I must say," and you might get a rough feel for the novel.
Frank apparently wrote the novel, in part, because he didn't think his contemporaries realized how bad a nuclear war could be. He wanted to show that the world would NOT get back to normal after a nuclear exchange, and today it's an interesting reminder that anyone ever thought that that would be the case; it goes a long way to explaining the early years of the cold war when you realize that people on both sides thought that a nuclear exchange would be like a conventional war, only more so. Frank wanted to point out that the U.S. would essentially turn back the clock of civilization by at least a couple of thousand years. From my perspective, Frank was still almost charmingly optimistic about nuclear annihilation. Within a year after The Day, his heroes and heroines have new food sources, new sexual partners, and a new economy. There's almost something bracingly Thoreauean (if I can use that word) about the whole thing: these people have had to simplify their lives with a vengeance, but after having done so, they seem to be enjoying themselves. Yeah, okay, there's the little matter of radiation poisoning, but, Frank seems to say, life ain't ever going to be perfect.
As I was reading, I also couldn't help think about the way in which recent fiction has turned its back on the nuclear scenario. My favorite 'end of the world as we know it' novel of the past few years is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, wherein an engineered super-virus, introduced into the world through vitamins, takes out all but a handful of engineered mutants. Despite the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, we're more worried about catching a super-cold these days.
The novel was amusing in at least one way that it probably wasn't when it was first published. The novel is almost charmingly dated--it was a bit like watching an episode of _Mad Men_, except one where the Cuban Missile crisis doesn't end well. Imagine Don Draper and Pete Campbell climbing over the ruins of a destroyed Florida, saying things like "Well, this is a fine donnybrook, I must say," and you might get a rough feel for the novel.
Frank apparently wrote the novel, in part, because he didn't think his contemporaries realized how bad a nuclear war could be. He wanted to show that the world would NOT get back to normal after a nuclear exchange, and today it's an interesting reminder that anyone ever thought that that would be the case; it goes a long way to explaining the early years of the cold war when you realize that people on both sides thought that a nuclear exchange would be like a conventional war, only more so. Frank wanted to point out that the U.S. would essentially turn back the clock of civilization by at least a couple of thousand years. From my perspective, Frank was still almost charmingly optimistic about nuclear annihilation. Within a year after The Day, his heroes and heroines have new food sources, new sexual partners, and a new economy. There's almost something bracingly Thoreauean (if I can use that word) about the whole thing: these people have had to simplify their lives with a vengeance, but after having done so, they seem to be enjoying themselves. Yeah, okay, there's the little matter of radiation poisoning, but, Frank seems to say, life ain't ever going to be perfect.
As I was reading, I also couldn't help think about the way in which recent fiction has turned its back on the nuclear scenario. My favorite 'end of the world as we know it' novel of the past few years is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, wherein an engineered super-virus, introduced into the world through vitamins, takes out all but a handful of engineered mutants. Despite the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, we're more worried about catching a super-cold these days.
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