Harvard University Press Blog

The New Supernatural

Vampires, zombies, Dan Brown. The books sell like crazy, movies fill seats, cash registers ring, young folks swoon. What’s happening? Fad? Trend? Passing fancy? Or the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity?

That last one, says Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. In what’s certainly the first HUP book to include both a photo of a shirtless, shimmering Robert Pattinson and a Guillermo del Toro Hellboy II character sketch, Nelson argues that popular culture is now saturated with a supernaturalism reminiscent of Pre-Modern Christian European culture. But it comes with some new twists: these figures aren’t just evil monsters as in the classic Protestant Gothic, but are semi-divine. And they’re no longer just males—the new heroes are joined by heroines.

Gothicka picks up where Nelson’s widely praised and deeply loved The Secret Life of Puppets leaves off, tracing the movement of this “unconscious religiosity” from what she calls the “sub-Zeitgeist” (“the grab-bag mass market popular culture lying beneath or around or on top of the secular-materialist mainstream”) to the everywhere.

In the years since The Secret Life of Puppets was published, this trend has emerged as a much more explicit spirituality expressed in performance and practice as well as in fiction and film. Where that book tracked, through the end of the twentieth century, the nature of the supernatural in the post-Reformation popular imagination, Gothicka attempts to describe the surprising new turn toward the light taken in the increasingly transformed subgenres of the Gothick. Still accessed through the grotesque and monstrous but displaying some striking new features, the twenty-first-century Gothick is showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inherited from its eighteenth-century ancestor.

We recently spoke with Nelson for an episode of the HUP podcast, wherein you’ll learn all about avatars of self-realization, Protestant iconoclasm, and the watershed moment of Interview with the Vampire. Have a listen:

 

The book covers an awful lot of ground, but Nelson was kind enough to prepare a little “playlist” for us – call it the greatest hits of the new supernatural:

Fiction

• Max Brooks, World War Z
• Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
• Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
• Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
• Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
• William P. Young, The Shack

Film and Television

• Alan Ball, True Blood series
• Park Chan-wook, Thirst
• Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland
  
• Patrick Lussier, Dracula 2000
  
• George Romero, Night of the Living Dead
  
• Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and Hellboy

Graphic Novels

• Jamie Delano, John Constantine: Hellblazer series
• Garth Ennis, Preacher series
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman series

Roleplaying Games

• Chaosium, The Call of Cthulhu
• White Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade

Videogames

• Capcom, Resident Evil
• Cyan, Myst
• Electronic Arts, Left 4 Dead
• Konami, Castlevania

Those are the primary sources for your crash course in the fusion of post-Christian spirituality and mass media.

And, for super extra credit, pair Gothicka with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, or at least spin their podcasts back to back. Here’s Gregory:

 

A Literary History of The Autobiography of Malcolm X

This week the late Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X was quite rightly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention gives us as clear a portrait of the man as we’re ever likely to have, and in the process sifts through many of the stories and myths that Malcolm X told about himself. Many of those stories are best known through Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malclom X, an absolute classic of American letters that now sees itself superseded as historical document by Marable’s work. In the piece below, excerpted from A New Literary History of America, David Bradley considers the life of The Autobiography as spark of a movement, mainstay of colleges and prisons both, social science, prophecy, and postmodern literature. A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, is available in paperback this spring.

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On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. The Saturday Evening Post, though it had published an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography, eulogized him as “a violent and baffling young demagogue” and wondered “did he really have a major role to play?” Time magazine pronounced him “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred” and “creed was violence.” Doubleday terminated the contract for his autobiography.

Enter Grove Press. And when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, enter Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, calling it “an eloquent testament.” And enter I. F. Stone, in the New York Review of Books, predicting for it “a permanent place in the literature.” Enter also Truman Nelson, in the Nation, lauding “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose.”

Nelson also praised Haley who, he said, provided “the great revelation” in an epilogue, written with Malcolm X’s permission but independent of his control. In fact, the epilogue offered a series of revelations: that the interviews, which took place late at night, when Malcolm was usually exhausted, often seemed more like interrogations or therapy sessions; that when Haley served coffee he purposely provided only paper napkins, so he could later analyze Malcolm X’s doodlings; that he kept two sets of notebooks, one for Malcolm X’s thoughts, one for his own.

The epilogue, more than the narrative, revealed a faceted Malcolm X, who, certain the room was bugged, initiated interviews with, “Testing—one, two, three,” who “went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying,” who cried out in frustration, “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!” It revealed also a subplot, in which Malcolm X, who once called Haley “one of the white man’s tools,” came to trust him “twenty-five per cent,” and finally said simply, “I’ll trust you”—while the middle-class, ex-military Haley, whose Playboy interview suggested a distaste for Malcolm X, confessed, “I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met.”

And the epilogue told the story Malcolm X could not tell: how he “walked out onto the stage, into the applause” . . . and the gunfire; how he was carried to a hospital on a makeshift stretcher, where “surgeons cut through his chest to attempt to massage the heart”; how “the effort was abandoned at 3:30 p.m.”

According to Time magazine he had been, “in life and in death . . . a disaster to the civil rights movement.” Certainly many who’d grown impatient with nonviolence heard in his voice a cadence more compelling that King’s “soul force.” In June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a six-year veteran of the nonviolent trenches, survivor of two dozen arrests, punctured the orotund rhetoric of yet another peaceful march with the Malcolm-esque cry, “Black Power!” The civil rights movement, and its rhetoric, would never be the same.

But Malcolm X’s voice was heard beyond the political arena. The day after his death, playwright LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, formed the Black Arts Repertory Theater, the crucible of a Black Arts movement that would influence two generations of black writers. Three years later, at a celebration of Malcolm X’s birth, a group of musicians later known as the Last Poets fused percussive rhythm with politics-and profanity-laced lyrics into a sound that came to be called rap.

Recorded and amplified by The Autobiography, Malcolm X’s voice spoke to black men languishing in prisons in language they could comprehend, inspiring some to their own tough, uncompromising eloquence: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother.

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

"So Overcome By Such a Trifle"

In a round-up of recent “sex novels and novellas” in last week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella refers to a moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion as “one of the most erotic episodes in Western literature.” In that scene, Anne Elliot is tending to an ill nephew in the presence of Captain Wentworth (a former suitor, returned), and Charles Hayter (who sees the valiant Wentworth as a threat to his station), when another nephew enters the room, bent on attention:

There being nothing to be eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

“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 not you 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 the 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 that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the 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 the 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. It might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the four; they were now all together, but she could stay for none of it. It was evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth. She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after Captain Wentworth’s interference, “You ought to have minded me, Walter; I told you not to teaze your aunt;” and could comprehend his regretting that Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor any body’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.

To modern readers, versed in the Nicholson Bakers and Helen DeWitts that are Acocella’s real subject, it’s an exceptionally subtle scene. Which, of course, is her point in praising it.

Robert Morrison’s new annotated edition of Persuasion—from which the above passage is excerpted—presents this moment along with Charles Edmond Brock’s illustration of it, dated 1898:

In Defense of Yesterday's Papers

In her new book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks presents the results of her year-long experiment in rereading, undertaken in an attempt to understand what pleasure we gain from indulging in familiar books. Spacks, a past President of The Academy of Arts & Sciences and a National Book Award finalist, was interested in exploring how the particular joys of rereading old books can outweigh the faint guilt that attends the avoidance of all of those new and classic titles we’ve yet to read even once. She learned that the experience of rereading is intensely personal, an occasion to revisit one’s former self or selves, to balance familiar feelings with new realizations:

The dynamic tension between stability and change lies at the heart of rereading. Every renewed exchange between book and reader contains elements of both, and both provide pleasure. Our psychic needs vary, and reread books answer different needs at different times. Seeking solace, we return to a treasured children’s book. A beloved piece of light fiction answers our yearning for pure recreation. We find excitement in a rousing plot even though we already know how it will turn out; we contemplate our past as we reread something first encountered in adolescence.

On Rereading is an intensely personal book that has made many of us here at HUP consider our own rereading experiences and habits. When we sat down to record Spacks talking about the book, we couldn’t resist adding in some thoughts of our own. Take a look:

 

We’ve also been thinking about the rereading experiences of booksellers. They’re surrounded by books all day, the familiar old titles and the never-ending stream of exciting new ones that it’s their job to digest on behalf of the rest of us. If anyone should know the faint guilt of rereading, it’s booksellers. Do they even try to reread? HUP Sales Rep John Eklund, who wrote earlier this year about rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, polled a few booksellers about whether they’ve had memorable experiences rereading.

Here’s Conrad Silverberg of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company:

I first read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985 and, of course, fell in love with his elevated, almost biblical prose and complex yet readable writing style. I was, however, utterly in ignorance about anything else about the book (its historical setting or the real people he fictionalized). Now, some twenty-six years later, I am better informed (having read Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, The War of a Thousand Deserts by Brian Delay and Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne) and can safely say that, sometimes you really do not need to be well-informed to love a book. I am loving it again for the same reasons I did the last time.

And here’s Mark Paprocki, also of Boswell Book Company:

The Life of John and George Keats

One gets a clear sense of the direction of Denise Gigante’s new book The Keats Brothers from its subtitle: The Life of John and George. That use of the singular (“life” as opposed to “lives”) is itself an argument against the standard telling of John’s life, in which George is usually cast as a mere bit player, or, worse, something of a villain. With The Keats Brothers, though, Gigante sets out to give us an understanding of a relationship that was absolutely central to John, and to the composition of some of his finest poems. In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey commends Gigante for succeeding “brilliantly.”

George Keats, two years younger than John, was swept up by the emigration fever of 1818, when many ambitious young men left England. Gigante writes of this as a moment when the modern world was coming into being, with the industrial revolution and capitalization propelling a complete reshaping of society. It was John who helped to answer the question of the role of the poet in this new modern society, and it was the entrepreneurial George who was his closest link to it, as he made his way in the U.S. Gigante’s account recreates George’s adventures, and her presentation of the rich correspondence between the brothers shows that their relationship withstood George’s absence.

In addition to being a lively story of the 19th century, The Keats Brothers is an important contribution to our appreciation of John’s poetry. As Gigante explains in an episode of the HUP Podcast (listen here), understanding the relationship between Keats and his brothers helps us to understand the haunting quality of some of the poems for which John is best remembered. His well-known odes, written with such pace in 1819, are colored by John’s sorrow over the new distance between him and George, and also by the recent death of their youngest brother Tom. The new perspective that Gigante offers here also helps readers to grasp the transatlantic context of John’s writing. 

When John died of tuberculosis and a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1821, at just twenty-five, George had just been back in England seeking more capital for his American ventures. He’d returned to the U.S. and didn’t learn of John’s demise until months later. John’s death is often projected onto George, and his absence at John’s end is cast as abandonment, but Gigante shows that George’s emigration had been inspired by his desire to provide for his siblings, who’d been orphaned young. Throughout The Keats Brothers, she works to show that George was far from a scoundrel, and that his life was as emblematic of the time as John’s:

However much it might jar with the traditional version of the story to suggest, the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism. While the medium of their dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—“Man of Genius” and “Man of Power”—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism.

That bit comes from Gigante’s Prologue, where she invites her readers for an adventure on which they’ll join generations in trying to see the world through the eyes of John Keats. 

Robert Morrison on Annotating Austen

Robert Morrison’s take on Persuasion is the second installment in our series of sumptuously illustrated and engagingly annotated editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Persuasion can be the most disorienting of Austen’s works, but, to Morrison, it’s also the most profound, and contains her most compelling and adult love story. In the exchange below, we asked Morrison about the experience of editing Austen.

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Q: An acclaimed biographer of Thomas De Quincey, you’ve also served as editor of De Quincey’s collected works. How many of the techniques you developed in that role carried over to editing Persuasion: An Annotated Edition? Where did you find you needed to develop new approaches?

When I worked on De Quincey, I learned a lot about what kind of information readers are looking for, where to find reliable sources for that information, how to corroborate it effectively and accurately, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, when I edited De Quincey I worked with a large number of his manuscripts, and this proved invaluable when I came to edit Persuasion, for there are two cancelled manuscript chapters from the novel housed in the British Library, and I drew heavily on my experience of working with De Quincey’s manuscripts when I transcribed Austen’s two cancelled chapters.

There are, however, key differences between editing De Quincey and editing Austen. De Quincey is an essayist and immensely erudite. He likes to parade his knowledge, so that editing him often means annotating references to Greek and Roman history, German philosophy, British and French politics, and a wide ranging series of contemporary events. Austen, on the other hand, is a novelist, and the emphasis when editing her is frequently on her immensely insightful views on social structures, sexual politics, economic pressures, and individual obligations and aspirations. Editing her means developing a very clear sense of the difference between riding in a barouche and riding in a curricle, of what it means to command a frigate as opposed to a sloop, of the implications of being the daughter of a baronet rather than the wife of a knight, and so on. Perhaps most memorably for me, there is a moment in Chapter Twelve when Captain Wentworth is speaking to Charles Musgrove about who should remain with Louisa Musgrove after she has fallen on the Cobb. Wentworth speaks of “Mrs. Charles Musgrove,” and he ought to speak with the same formality of “Miss Anne Elliot.” But he does not. Under duress, and with a dawning sense of her worth, he calls her “Anne,” a burst of emotion that reveals how close he still feels to her. I am not even going to tell you how many times I had read the novel before I noticed this wonderful nuance! Editing Persuasion proved to me how remarkably incisive Virginia Woolf was when she observed that Austen “fills every inch of her canvas with observation” and “fashions every sentence into meaning.”

Q: The commentary-in-the-margins format of Persuasion: An Annotated Edition means that you’re sharing a page with Jane Austen. How did you approach going toe-to-toe with one of the foremost stylists in the English language?

Knowing my prose was going to appear right beside Austen’s really did change the way I approached writing my commentary. Endnotes of course mean that you are at the back of the volume. If readers want to consult you they can, but it means they have to stop reading the text, journey to the end of the book, and track down the relevant note. Some readers will choose to do this on some occasions, but many others will consult you only infrequently, if at all. Footnotes are on the same page as the text, but they are still relegated to a decidedly secondary position in relation to it, and readers consult or ignore the notes as they choose. I have to say that, in the past, I found writing endnotes or footnotes quite a comfortable position. In effect, it enables you to say to your reader, “I am here with relevant information if you want me, but I don’t want to intrude on your reading experience, and if you’d rather carry on without me, that is fine.”

In Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, however, the situation is very different. My annotation runs parallel to Austen’s text, meaning that it is a good deal harder for readers to ignore! I have found this very exciting. I have tried to use the commentary to illuminate the text as often as I can, and from as many different angles as I can, and to emphasize both what I believe to be central in Persuasion, and what the finest critics from Austen’s day to ours have written about it. I have attempted to produce a commentary that is in immediate and active dialogue with her text, rather than in a relationship that is more distant and intermittent. I hope this kind of sustained and expansive commentary enables readers to enjoy a more intimate relationship with Persuasion, and to move more seamlessly between text and annotation.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Becoming Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s new biography, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, focuses on the 1830s, when a young, restless Londoner was just becoming the novelist who would define an era. Douglas-Fairhurst’s approach to the book was to make the reader feel all of the insecurity that the young Dickens felt by avoiding the usual biographer’s tendency to telegraph his subject’s eventual success. In the exchange below we ask Douglas-Fairhurst to explain that approach, and whether his book should change the way we read Dickens.

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Q. You’ve referred to Becoming Dickens as something of an experiment, in that it’s driven by a counterfactual approach that most biographers and historians would typically avoid. What led you to embrace that approach for this book?

The inspiration for this book was the realization that life-writing often seems to be strangely at odds with life itself. However much we try to organize the future – from making New Year resolutions to taking out life insurance – everyday existence is alarmingly good at resisting our attempts to give it a shape. As the old joke has it, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” However, you wouldn’t know that from reading most biographies. In the biographer’s hands, every part of their subject’s life becomes just another piece in a neat jigsaw-puzzle; every stray detail is shuffled into a meaningful pattern. Because the biographer already knows how their story will end, every sentence starts to resemble an arrow whooshing towards its target. And that can be comforting to read: biographies allow us to entertain fantasies of a world in which everything happens for a reason; chance is mastered by destiny.

What I wanted to do in Becoming Dickens was to restore the experience of the writer’s early years – a period in which every decision he took, and every sentence he wrote, was a set of forking paths. My aim was not just to follow in Dickens’s footsteps, but to put the reader in his shoes, as he confronted the early crises that helped to shape his character, and also the smaller decisions that helped to create his reputation: What should I write about today? Which word comes next?

Q. So for you the story of Dickens’ rise is one of contingency, and you show us just how tenuous his early years must have felt. How do you think that power of contingency manifested itself in Dickens’ plots? And should our new awareness of its role in his life change the way that we read him?

Critics have long been aware of the pressures created by Dickens’s chosen mode of serial publication – a monthly or weekly narrative rhythm that meant each novel remained invitingly open-ended until the final sentence was hammered into place. Inevitably this has led to two rival ways of reading him, one of which stresses his powers of organisation while the other observes that his writing revels in muddle and mess. Both are true. If Dickens sometimes enjoyed thinking of himself as a weaver at a loom, there was also a good deal of fellow-feeling in his description of a lunatic asylum inmate who was busy studying a piece of matting and trying to find a pattern in its fibres.