things have been quiet around here lately. I don’t have any good excuses really, it’s just one of those periodic dry spells that seem to happen for no good reason occasionally here at davidcomeaux.com. i do hate to see good writing fall off on the site, so here’s a promise to make more of an effort to get back into the swing of blogging. i blame the august heat, which stiffles one’s creative juices as much as it sizzles the grass outside.
this tuesday, i admit to loving the novel pride and prejudice. yes, i know. how very 10th grade girlish of me. even those closest to me probably don’t know that i re-read ms. austen’s classic at least once every year, and that i have been doing so since i first encountered the novel in 9th grade. why?
well, first of all, i just love the story(ies) – if i have an effeminate streak, it certainly must manifest itself in my interest in all things relational – i love to hear about people’s relationships, talk about my own relationships – generally what my guy buddies call ‘gossip’. p&p’s entire story-line revolves around this kind of stuff.
of course, this kind of talk isn’t gossip – it’s far from it. rather, it’s an exchange of information that shows a profound interest in the lives of others. it’s also a strongly affective-kind of dialogue, conversations which revolve around feelings and bodies more than they revolve around ideas or other abstractions. if you’ll allow me to make a gross generalization: a large portion of men try to purposefully avoid these types of conversations. i’m not one of those men, and frankly i’m not sure why this is the case, but the truth is that if a person avoids talking about these kinds of things, they are missing out on a very important aspect of their life.
but back to pride and prejudice:
i also re-read the novel because of it’s emphasis on family – having a family and dealing with all the ensuing drama can seem like a drag sometimes, but austen makes a powerful case for why family is so important. indeed, without the family schemes in the book, there would be no great elizabeth-darcy romance.
which brings me to why i shamelessly enjoy p&p: the romance, of course! sure, some of it is contrived, unrealistic, and perhaps even a bit too melodramatic, but that doesn’t lessen the affective impact of the development of darcy and elizabeth’s relationship. the 2005 film version of p&p lucidly captures this dynamic – medium range close ups linger on hands and eyes, on touches and brief eye contact between the two characters. as the audience, we literally see and somehow feel the passion between darcy and elizabeth that ripples just below the mannered surface of the film.
the brief moments that the camera lingers are more important to the film than any one scene because they reveal that it is often in the everyday, the ordinary, that one is able to glimpse the real love between two people. in this kind of story, there doesn’t need to be any overtly heated scene of passion – it’s all there in the small details of the characters lives, if only we (and they) are willing to look.
in creating this kind of story, turning something ordinary into something that borders on the sublime, ms. austen anticipated the great message of other twentieth century writers like joyce and beckett: that the spectacular and epic exists in the everyday, if only we are able to discern it.
so if you find girls (or boys) sitting around idly chatting about who’s in love or who’s at war, don’t dismiss their talk as trivial or mere ‘gossip’. listen closely, and you’re likely to find people engaged in stories as complex, interesting, and deeply affecting as any treatise by plato or any theorem by newton.
and if you don’t believe me, just go back and read pride and prejudice. although i hate to admit it, the book really is that good.
