Till I was angry, said I was pleased

Rob Gilchrist I never knew personally, or never any more than as a familiar face at protests, a figure at meetings, someone amongst the eccentric pattern of the Wellington left. I disliked him in passing, certainly, but that’s hardly significant given the number of people one ends up irritating or being irritated by in the course of a political campaign and, besides – given what I’ve learnt since about his foully misogynistic behaviour – this was the right enmity for quite the wrong reasons. A whole anarchist social-political sub-culture in Wellington in the early to mid 2000s cultivated an air of hostility and righteous snobbery. Being told one time too many by a group of identikit vegan anarchos dressed all in black that my political philosophy was conformist and authoritarian produced certain automatic responses, none all that helpful or edifying.

So the revelations, when they came, were both very surprising and unpleasantly affecting. The years-long betrayals of trust, the entrapment, the personal abuse, the carefully-organised poisonous interventions; this was state-funded wrecking on a significant scale, and damaged individuals’ lives as well as social movements.

People are right to be angry, and anger and outrage feel like essential starting points and registers; the supposedly hard-headed retort that things like this happen all the time, and that it’s to be expected that the state will spy on dissent is really little more than a capitulation to the ways of the world, a resignation parading as worldliness. I’m not ready just yet to check into Grand Hotel Abyss. But more systematic answers are harder to formulate.

Plenty of responses come to mind, naturally, almost all of them bad. Spy-baiting is the most natural, and the worst of all. This kind of undercover surveillance and provocation – a global trend, as Eveline Lubber’s new book from Pluto documents in worrying detail – succeeds as much in the atmosphere it creates as in the specific details it gleans. The movements Gilchrist floated within were, after all, legitimate and established parts of the democratic culture we’ve won, no much how much those in power may dislike this achieved legitimacy. The sense of suspicion, and of motives questioned, however, creates its own fears: a movement torn by ‘accidents and incidents, hints and allegations’ comes apart as we all start to undermine each other. Political action relies, in the social movements, on voluntary work, constructed solidarities, negotiated areas for trust. Suspicion destroys all of that. The outed spy, in some senses, achieves as much for the police as the active agent.

But ‘nothing can be sole or whole’…learning isn’t often pleasant. A now-known spy in Australia I worked with closely for a brief period, and he never aroused the slightest concerns for me. Charming, attentive, calm, I liked this agent, and realise now that some of the flattery involved in that kind of political exchange was what made me so open. We talked about family, friends, pasts, and all the usual beginnings of an intimacy. The discovery of his betrayal means I won’t ever be as open again.

Sometimes there’s a place between secrecy and openness, the space in which the old joke about the fact you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you has real and practical uses. For the first months of the war in Iraq a number of protest organisers were routinely followed by police from demonstrations, and accompanied, at a few metres’ distance, through protests. Nothing much came of this, and it stopped after a while, but the intended intimidation was clear. The best way of coping was to recognise the attempt and, consciously, to remain in the public and democratic spaces the movement created – it ought to be a source of pride and satisfaction that you were on anti-war demonstrations in 2003 (as Tony Blair himself half-admitted recently), and anything that encourages an attitude of secretiveness and counter-surveillance works against the chances of that kind of feeling being shared and spread.

[SIS agents collected notes on the young Keith Locke attending public meetings.]

Spies are well-trained in what targets to aim for, and it’s here that the reasons for upset become more complicated. The COINTELPRO case in the United States makes for fascinating reading now; for decades the FBI infiltrated and disrupted the US Socialist Workers Party, fomenting splits, encouraging damaging behaviour, working to undermine the party. Their methods weren’t particularly complicated, but they recognised the weaknesses of the left perfectly. Agents would either start rumours about other members’ racist and sexist behaviour, or behave in racist and sexist ways themselves, and it was the Party members’ responses to this that then prompted further conflict. The FBI didn’t always create the conflict so much as foster and develop contradictions already existing, and hone in on the weaknesses and hypocrisies of personal politics. That all this was an assault on the most basic democratic rights to organise should go without saying. What might offer itself for current reflection, however, are the ways in which the assault targeted and intensified weaknesses. If the left organisational cultures we have created are hospitable to bullying and sexism there is bound to be wide spaces there for provocateurs to operate within.

Gilchrist worked in much the same manner, it seems, although with less subtlety and with a approach fitting his own status as a fantasist possessing rather poorer human qualities. The tragedy in the United States is on an altogether greater scale, too; Black Panthers died as a result of covert work within their ranks. Still, this is the kind of moral company Gilchrist finds himself amongst.

Informants and spies have been employed for as long as working people and the oppressed have organised to challenge the existing order, so it is possible to draw some themes and lessons from diverse experiences of betrayal. Victor Serge’s What Everyone Should Know About State Repression retains a queasy contemporary relevance. And openness, across everything I’ve read and seen, returns as a keyword. Growing up in Dunedin, this makes sense; down there, even on the coldest winter mornings, you need to open your windows. Mould grows in rooms that are not aired, and in people like Gilchrist we find a human equivalent of that process.

Openness, to me, means above all occupying the democratic spaces we’ve created; for all the many problems with the liberal discourse of rights, it remains true that if enough people believe and act as if a right is theirs they can make it a reality. Organisation, activity, demonstration, protests; no matter how much the police may want to make this dissent impossible, it persists. This sense of openness as a necessary condition for the possibility of action is why I see the wearing of masks – in a country like New Zealand, certainly – as at best pretension and at worst wrecking. Does anyone really believe, given what we know of police surveillance, that masks grant anonymity from the state forces? Of course not. What they do grant, dangerously, is anonymity from each other, and from the communities we work and protest within. That freedom from others removes the kind of face-to-face communication, and challenge, occasionally, out of which real solidarity can be built. Anonymity online functions in much the same way (although I’ve no time for chest-beating about ‘cowardice’, and do wish some commentators could learn the difference between pseudonymous and anonymous) – the longer we can attach names to arguments, and the longer we can keep dissent normal and public, the stronger we are. Campaigning in Wellington I often meet public servants who tell me they are not allowed to sign petitions, a clear nonsense. But this is a nonsense which comes from somewhere.

The hardest openness, though, is the most essential – a openness in the cultural and political sphere, and a corresponding generosity towards others’ views and stance. An example: George Fraser worked for the Police and SIS in the 1950s in Wellington, infiltrating the Communist Party and campaign groups around Wellington and the Hutt Valley. A fervent Christian, Fraser believed the Cold War mythology of the time and sincerely hoped to combat Communism. His experience of the Wellington Left was disillusioning in two ways. The first, most prosaically, was that he got bored; a life of meetings, paper sales, discussions, and more meetings made for dull reading for his SIS managers, so he started making things up. The wilder his stories, and the more sinister his scenarios, the happier his managers were to receive them. The reality, naturally, was rather plainer, but better for that:

In the days that followed, Dave Patterson gave instructions on picking up communist reading material at subsequent meetings, on making myself known to kerbside sellers of the People’s Voice – the official party newspaper – and on delving into the bookshelves of Modern Books Ltd in mid-city Manners Street, which was run by the Wellington Co-Operative Book Society, but where manager Ray Nunes (later to become the CP’s district secretary) held sway.

Although the Special Branch referred to the premises as the ‘Communist bookshop,’ I soon realised that such a label was an assumption only and had never been investigated. I found that Ray Nunes was the only person connected to the shop who had any Communist Party connections. It could more accurately have been called an alternative bookshop, as it imported books not only from communist countries but most countries of the world and on subjects that covered most religions and dogmas of the world. The shop belonged to the book society, which had about 3000 members until it folded in 1967.

Fraser’s real undoing – and here he reveals himself as rather better human material than Gilchrist – came after contact to openness of another kind. He was invited to share the house of Conrad Bollinger, a leftist in the English Department at Victoria and well-connected with Communist circles around Wellington. The strain tells, in Fraser’s memoirs, as he accepts Bollinger’s hospitality and sorts through his mail, enjoys nights on the town on Friday and then reports the proceedings to SIS on Monday. Drink plays a more and more central role. The silly puritanism of the Communist circles (they won’t let Fraser sing jazz, and drown him out with ‘Green Grow the Rushes O’) is deflated by Bollinger’s rather surer grasp of cultural life, and then diligently fed back to Special Branch minders.

It becomes an impossible situation. Fraser, concluding that the SIS were ‘not worth a cracker’ to New Zealand, sees his life begin to break apart. He leaves for the United States, promised various vague new lives by the security services. Upon arrival there is no one to meet him at the airport. He’s served his uses for power, and so now is just so much waste. The memoirs, unsure whether they’re aiming at comedy or bitter exposure, rattle in their prose, unsure and drifting much as their author must have been in the last decades of his life.

Gilchrist’s self-pitying confessions in recent stories have a similar quality. Deception hurts, obviously, and it can’t be easy being a moral wreck. He’s a symptom, and a not particularly interesting one, of a wider anti-democratic course, and of what goes on in a society like ours all the time. This is what they would like to see happen to dissent.

But it hasn’t happened, has it? We’re still here.

Source

George Fraser’s memoir Seeing Red: Undercover in 1950s New Zealand was published by Dunmore in 1995.

東京ラブレター

Shukichi and Tomi, the retired couple who travel to see their son, daughter and daughter-in-law in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, find themselves neglected as their children, transformed by the metropolis, let the turbulence of busy lives distract them from proper family affections. The pace, even by Ozu’s standards, is, shall we say, measured, but the atmosphere and emotional currents he generates stay in the memory in ways the lightly-handled plot details make unexpected.

A Tokyo Story is a story of loneliness, dislocation, changed ways, misrecognition. Quite rightly.

But why is loneliness not seen, outside the metropolis and our fantasies of its functions, as the normal state of affairs, or part of their essential mix? I wasted many months moping my way through a decent supply of self-pity through 2010. Having returned, reluctantly, from Tokyo to an all-too-familiar Wellington, it took a while to work out what to make with the realization that my experiences there weren’t going to mean anything unless I turned them to personal use. It’s not just that New Zealand can seem insular and overbearingly intimate after a big city, although that is true. It’s that the self-pity of the lonely returnee is really a form of self-regard: can’t you all see me changed?

Now, a little less reluctantly, knowing I’ll be here a while, it’s the job of thinking through how I could bring those experiences – and locations – into productive relation that gets me excited, both in its difficulty and in the sense of quite general but still undefined shared connections being grasped, connections Carl Shuker’s The Method Actors convinced me are set to develop further.

*

It’s common to use Tokyo as short-hand for the future itself. William Gibson is the master of this in English-language writing, and his novels capture “the new global way-stations and the piquant dissonances between picturesque travellers and the future cities they suddenly find themselves in. Tokyo, to be sure (Tokyo now and forever!)” That city is there, for sure, and the very particular, almost dystopian, and cyberpunk, certainly, pleasures of Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building remain undiminished after many visits and awed glimpses.

That is not my Tokyo, though. There are good economic reasons, as I’ve argued before around Ghost in the Shell, that the sense of Tokyo as the future contains within it a nostalgia for a future that belongs properly to the past, or has passed to somewhere else. 

But what always presses on me in Tokyo, and feels like my Tokyo, isn’t this future but, instead, an almost touchable past. A very old resident of the city might just be able to remember patches of countryside in parts of the Toyoko line out from Shibuya to Yokohama. Certainly, so much of the seemingly eternal present of the central stations was fields and space not all that long ago. There are baby-boomers – Takayuki Tatsumi among them – who remember childhoods in central Shinjuku.

The force and scale of the rupture the Meiji Restoration represented – industrialization, full-scale capitalist development, political transformation – and the speed with which it was achieved frame all this. We’re used to thinking about the breaks that invasion produced in White Settler Colonies – of disasters, in other words, and worlds taken from indigenous people – but Tokyo offers the same kind of overwhelming awareness of historical transformation in the other direction. How many generations back do you have to reach before someone has a passed-down memory of Edo?

My Tokyo feels like it offers History itself, just around the corner, at the end of the train line, beyond.

*

Loneliness has its pleasures too, and no amount of deadly, overworked academic articles about the flaneur can ever quite remove the satisfactions of walking around a big city on your own.

My Tokyo is bookshops; books tied together in bundles with twine to be carried home though subway lines; great racks of bargains piled outside impossibly narrow Kanda stores; scratched-out kanji indicating subject areas. Dust.

This is Mosakusha, Shinjuku’s radical bookstore, a block away from a busy street and so self-effacing I missed it on each first attempt at a visit.

Here’s the Communist Party bookstore, just across from their Central Committee’s office in Yoyogi, along from their newspaper’s printery.

Both connect through alleyways and off-streets, and both stand as landmarks in my cognitive mapping of Tokyo – my city is almost all laneways. Not for their excitements – there’s little of that – but for their details and promise.

*

One moment of History I seemed never to be able to find when I lived in Tokyo connected to politics. What happened to the Tokyo of student rebellion and revolutionary organisations, the Tokyo of the Narita airport struggle, of anti-war demonstration and May Day riot?

The official city – and Tange’s architecture fits here – managed, or so it felt five years ago, to erase that history entirely. Part of the source of my obsession with the style and sound of the Showa era has been to do with getting some sort of access to that world, a world which, beyond the some fragile and enfeebled works of memory, seemed so close to eradication.

That’s changing now. The Tokyo of the anti-nuclear movement isn’t my Tokyo, either, but I’m glad to have seen it. And I wonder if it might reach back to this History.

A box, an archive, a scaffold (or, buying, reading, selling)

Nothing dates more quickly than yesterday’s news, right?

Governor Romney wound up his recent 19-day tour of the slums in our major cities with the warning that time is getting short before they break out in open rebellion.

“As I have rubbed elbows with those who live in the ghettos,” said this wealthy capitalist who is hopefully seeking the Republican nomination for President. “I am more convinced than ever before that unless we reverse our course and build a new America, the old America will be destroyed.”

Indeed, as Romney asserts, the old decadent America needs to be destroyed and a new America built in its stead. But the questions remain: Who can be relied upon to abolish the America of segregation, poverty and war and create a country of equality, security and peace? And how is it going to be done?

That last line gives it away. This isn’t yesterday’s news at all, but a report on Romney père from October 16, 1967, with socialist Evelyn Reed analysing how ‘Romney goes slumming’ for her column in The Militant.

A student recently gifted me a box of old socialist newspapers and pamphlets they’d been given from a 1968er cleaning out his garage; flicking through their pages just after this year’s presidential election I skimmed over Reed’s article and received one of those little shocks of the uncanny and historical recognition.

A box of yellowing old papers in a family garage. The image is at once commonplace and banal, and a symbol of so much that’s at stake in the shift from print to electronic reading technologies. Giovanni’s meditations, over a few years now, on what the relations between memory and technology mean for our historical sense (and for our institutional memory and record, in my own university especially) have set me thinking more seriously about the role of print in politics and political life. This unexpected gift of an old box set those associations working again.

Here’s how Giovanni describes the importance of the physical space of the library:

Think of the act walking in an aisle of twentieth century political writing. Somebody has selected the books that surround you. For better or worse, it’s a canon, bearing traces of accumulated institutional practice. But together the books also constitute a series of arguments. Their adjacency means something. And by physically being there – as opposed to scrolling through keywords in a database – you can survey the topic, acquire a sense of its breadth. Notice what’s missing. Make discoveries. In other words, browsing the shelves of a university library is – or should be – an education ­in itself.

Personal collections and physical archives offer insights into political formations. This inherited box, form the garage of a former member of the Socialist Action League – one of New Zealand’s earliest Trotskyist groups, and a real force on the 1970s far left – gives some sense of what texts were circulating, what international voices were heard, which debates had local currency. There are plenty of copies of The Militant from the United States, stacks of Socialist Outlook from Britain, cyclostyled internal bulletins from Australia, all much underlined and annotated. A small portrait of influence and intersections emerges.

Other physical traces matter in less quantifiable ways. These newspapers were obviously handed around for discussion and re-reading; CB, their one-time owner, has marked his name and address (in Devon Street, just a few doors down from where I once lived) on the top of each page. Second-hand books offer these kinds of occult lines too; I never met Judith Bird, but often wondered who she was due to the number of her books I’ve bought through the years. I found out recently, and after her death, that she’d been a stalwart of the Wellington union movement. Most of the Trotsky books I own were once RT’s, an activist at some stage in one of the factions of early New Labour. These are details that can’t be erased, or can’t easily be erased, and they remind us of the book as history, of history in books and papers and in the reminders and remainders political traditions leave as their traces around us.

But who’d be without the internet? I almost can’t imagine what political life was like before we could go online. All those groans – usually, it must be said, by people themselves inactive – about the naughtiness of ‘clicktivism’ miss the point entirely. We are able to follow events world-wide now, to share analyses and calls to action, to get responses to and critiques of right-wing media reporting produced and disseminated in a matter of hours. In a country as isolated geographically as New Zealand, this is about money as much as time. I read far more socialist newspapers and analyses now than I’d ever have been able to afford to subscribe to in the days before the internet; the excitement of following the Egyptian revolution day-by-day, and the gathering sense of the urgency of solidarity and action, give the old slogans of internationalism a quite new energy. It’s possible now to access many of the classics of the Marxist tradition for free – of vital importance for activists and scholars in poorer countries, and helpful for the rest of us – and many protests and actions have been coordinated internationally on a scale and in ways inconceivable even a decade or two ago.

For oppressed groups, these contacts have been even more precious. Online connections break down the ways geographical isolation compound alienation. There are now, I hope, fewer gay teens imagining they are alone in their feelings and fantasies. For people for whom a meeting in the evening – to say nothing of a meeting scheduled up a flight of stairs – is a difficulty or an impossibility, other forms of communication exist and flourish. That’s all a huge boon.

What does it mean for the socialist newspaper? Egyptian revolutionary Hossam al-Hamalawy has written a very detailed and thoughtful piece on the ‘website as revolutionary organiser.’ It reflects on the experience of the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt in using social media and websites in their work. The level of detail and analysis in this article stands in marked contrast to most of the blether around the ‘Facebook revolutions,’ and repays reflection.

Newspapers and the newspaper industry are, as you all know, in crisis; fewer and fewer young people read newspapers regularly, more and more of our information sources come from online. So, in one sense, the socialist newspaper goes the way of all the others. Just as one never sees paper boys selling bourgeois newspapers or evening editions anymore, so it is, one could argue, that left-wing publications change their form.

This gets me thinking about political shifts and the traces of tradition again. When I first moved to Wellington a decade ago there would be, on any given Saturday, at least three or four groups of paper sellers gathered around different parts of Cuba Street. The year I was born there would have been, on a Friday night, anything upwards of six or seven, all the way from HART News to the People’s Voice to the Evening Post. Nowadays, when we sell Socialist Review, we’re often the only grouping active in the Mall. So the visibility of different kinds of politics changes and, with it, the culture of a city. Whatever the links and openness of the Kindle or smart phone, their uniformity carries out a kind of erasure in the physical space of the city.

Technologies change, and political organisation makes use of this. The Bolsheviks were quick to grasp the significance of cinema; Raymond Williams and others wrote thoughtfully about television. Most of my own work now goes into online and open-access publications, political, literary, and academic.

But the old claims about what’s involved in selling a paper or magazine –the organisation, the routine, the work of argument and advocacy – still feel relevant and are, for me, lived experience. A magazine, unlike a series of discrete links and articles, promotes, in its very form, an analysis and a set of connected claims that, at their best, work together.

Selling something makes you work to convince others, which is why the hostility of some on the left to the presence of socialists selling newspapers has always mystified me. It’s simple to hand out thousands of copies of a leaflet or newsletter without getting any sense of its cogency or appeal. The (often marginal and, in our case, unprofitable) cost involved in buying a magazine involves some minimal commitment – if your claims or slogans are too far from your desired audience this minimal commitment doesn’t happen. That’s an education in itself.

The act of selling a magazine or newspaper – of being physically associated with a certain political line and slogan, of interacting with strangers, of embodying a political tradition – involves you and your political claims in very clear relationship with others. Sometimes this can be unpleasant, in encounters with racists and bigots; often times it is inspiring and rewarding, as you learn from the stories and experiences of people you wouldn’t otherwise know. I find the chance to listen and interact with others one of the great joys of political activity, and one of the ongoing values of a street presence.

None of this, to be sure, ends up in the archive, whether that archive’s a university library or a box in a garage. The ‘feel’ of a paper is in the tension and connection between its intended audience – and the imagined stance its writers hope that audience are ready to take – and their actual relation.

Issue after issue of the Socialist Organiser collected in this box stress the need to ‘Join the Labour Party and fight for socialist politics.’ They are all from 1982 and 1983, and argue angrily against those on the left who see a downturn in class struggle, who imagine the Labour Party isn’t shift to the left, who can’t see the possibilities opening up around them. Each of those arguments turns out to be wrong, of course, as others on the left argued at the time, but it’s an education to encounter this history in physical objects, to try and reconstruct these arguments as they connect to one another, to imagine ‘forecasts of the past’ from a year before the Miner’s Strike, Kinnock’s purges of the left, Blairism, all that’s to come. It doesn’t change my view of the analysis presented, but it does give me a sense of the past, and of tradition, that feels valuable.

Archives have their own forms of invisibility. In the new year I will have an article on Dispute , the great New Zealand journal of the New Left, published in Ka Mate Ka Ora. My research would have been impossible had my library not held copies of this journal – it was in their fragments and details, the advertisements, the brief articles, the shifting bylines, that its significance became clear. It was, in other words, all the ephemeral details together that made Dispute’s place in left and intellectual history cohere. But, preserved as it was, Dispute had fallen out of active tradition; most of my friends and comrades had never heard of it, letalone grasped its significance.

Selling in the streets, then, for me, feels like a form of active memory and tradition, a way of linking back to campaigners past, to the presence of older newspapers, older struggles, older battles to gain public spaces. Whatever technological changes mean for political speech, that isn’t a tradition, or a way of speaking and interacting, we should abandon without care, reflection, and thought.

And, Sam, thanks for the box. It’s getting put to good use.

Sources

The image of Dispute is reproduced with the permission of Vanya Lowry, the journal’s wonderful designer and illustrator.

Thanks to Sam Oldham for gifting me all the newspapers.

Chris Harman’s pamphlet on the revolutionary paper has been a constant source for me over a dozen years now. Thanks to Andrew Tait for introducing me to it.

It will, during this summer break, have been three years since I started this blog, a country away and in a cold and impermanent room in Meguro-ku Tokyo. Thanks to all of you for reading and for your support. I really appreciate your support.

How to do things with words

There’s a nice piece on ‘re-reading Austen’from Alison Croggon in Overland 208 I finally managed to read on the bus earlier in the week. You should read it, too (there’s no need for you to catch a bus, though); it’s written with Croggon’s customary wit and perceptive intelligence, and offers a novelist’s and technician’s view of Austen. We’re both ‘habitual re-readers,’ but I think writers read differently to the rest of us, and re-read differently in illuminating ways.

Croggon’s main point – that the etymological links between ‘propriety’, ‘proper’ and ‘property’ are key to the whole anti-Romantic comedy and vocation of the novels – is well made and important. I still, from time to time, have students approach me imagining that I’m going to be in sympathy with claims that Austen is outdated, narrow, conservative and generally outside the realms of what the politically-engaged critic ought to find interesting. How untrue! She is, as Croggon points out, quite specific in her range of social representational ambitions, to be sure, but these are pursued with a ruthless and clear eye. A passing encounter with the vast literature exploring all of Austen’s many philosophical and critical dimensions should give any of those with pretensions to be her detractors cause to blush. I’ve lost track of the many hours of stimulation Jocelyn Harris’ Jane Austen’s Art of Memory and Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas have given me, to name only two classic texts.

But is romance lost along the way? (I mean romance here in the sense the Beach Boys use it in ‘Barbara Ann’, and am not going to worry over literary history). It’s a symptom of the anxiety behind all those He Man poses of the best figures of literary criticism’s high moment last century (men reading books!) that they felt the need so insistently to separate a ‘proper’ reading of Austen from the dangerous frippery of the Janeites. From Edmund Wilson to Wayne Booth the rhetorical line continues, although, since feminism, one of the great pleasures of academic life has been the collective realization this separation needn’t be so: it’s among the Janeites that some of the best critical responses have been produced, Sedgwick’s ‘Jane Austen and theMasturbating Girl’ most famously.

Croggon’s too canny and deft a reader to fall Wilson’s way, but I wonder at some of her divisions. For her Austen is ‘a most determined anti-Romantic, in every sense’, a writer who, re-packaged in the marketing materials of ‘chick-lit,’ produces novels quite other than the ‘escapist models of romantic passion’ they’re promoted as exemplifying.

You get her point, of course: the best comedy in the novels comes from their clear-sighted sending-up of the absurdities and limitations of the very social world they serve, as comedies, to sustain and affirm. All of the satire here – and it's a very prudent satire, and all the more biting for that –is hard to fit into ‘romantic’ modes of appreciation without under-reading.

This, for example, one of the funniest moments in Pride and Prejudice, was suppressed in Joe Wright’s atrocious film version:

Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all the success she expected. He was resolutely silent however; and, from a determination of making him speak she continued,

``I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, "She a beauty! -- I should as soon call her mother a wit." But afterwards she seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at one time.''

``Yes,'' replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, ``but that was only when I first knew her, for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.''

He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself.

Take that, socially unbalanced society figures!

Finance, property, standing, and prudent social and emotional investment are all, in Austen, inseperable from the texts’ erotic or emotional economy, something Auden sends up nicely:

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Besides her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me uncomfortable to see
An English spinster  of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’, 
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

That doesn’t exhaust the matter, however; for all that her ‘romance is all about prudent behaviour, and at its root this prudence is fiscal and pragmatic’ (Croggon’s phrase) it is also romance itself, and this is why I think she can’t be denied her place in the marketing of chick-lit.

This scene – from chapter 9 of volume 1 of Persuasion – makes the counter-case perfectly. It’s one of the most sexually daring passages in the whole of English literature, and certainly one of the most emotionally affecting. Anne Elliott, oppressed by her ghastly family and relations and out of all hope of again finding love with Captain Wentworth, is caught in an upsetting and familiar situation:

“Walter,” said she, “get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.”

“Walter,” cried Charles Hayter, “why do you not do as you are bid? Do you not hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles.”

But not a bit did Walter stir.

In another moment, however, she found herself in a state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on that discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief – the manner – the silence in which it had passed – the little particulars of circumstance – with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay.

What makes this so moving? The brilliance of the writing is important, obviously; Austen’s use of free indirect discourse here to have her narrator track the disorder and arousal of her character’s feelings in their very inarticulate confusion matches almost anything the Modernists achieved. James Wood takes this passage to exemplify free indirect discourse in his discussion through How Fiction Works; it’s an example of what D.A. Miller calls Austen’s ‘secret of style,’ the anonymous No One of style itself her exercising mastery.

But what, again, of the romance? It’s such a complex passage: of course it’s not because ‘her conversation was the last of his wants’ (he still loves her, how can she not see this?) but what makes her so affected? There’s a powerful physical sense to the scene, for sure, the excitement of contact with a beloved, but distant, person, but what stands out for me is the way the jumbled pattern of the last paragraph’s free indirect discourse allows the narrator to fuse our sense of both his moral decency – or understated kindness – with a sense of the intense pleasure and distraction physical contact brings.

The choice, in other words, and here Persuasion is for me the triumph of all the novels, is not between realism and ‘witty fantasy’ or ‘escapist passion’ but through them both. What Austen offers – scandalously, and in ways which make her our contemporary – is a model, in prose, of the education of desire, of its transformation and elevation. The ways in which the meanings of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ have changed between her time and ours make this clearer still: it’s by the process of sense that sensibility (hers, and ours) takes on its positive charge. The path to clear-headedness is to be through a fantasy suitably ordered and directed (Wickham and all those cads as tests and delusion!): Wentworth's ability to recognise the need for, and to carry out, a simple but vital domestic intervention, and to act with kindness, are what make him so attractive.

Austen, for me then, remains the best realist at the very moments she working with fantasy.

Sources

D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style came out from Princeton in 2005. The Auden lines are from ‘Letter to Lord Byron.’