Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sanditon : Austen's pre–post Waterloo

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2012.696486

1470-1308

Clara Tuite,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Abstract Written in 1817 and not published until 1925, Austen's posthumously published novel fragment, Sanditon, has always enjoyed a privileged relation to temporal discontinuity. My essay re-examines the question of Austen and history by engaging Sanditon in relation to a historicity of participant-witnessing and productive anachronism. I take as my starting point a particularly rich example of one of those oblique, sparing, and, consequently, ironically overdetermined world-historical signifiers that inhabits Jane Austen's textual world – a passing reference to Waterloo by the Speculator, Mr Parker, which satirically marks the commodification of history and the new cultural obsolescence of Trafalgar that obtained in the wake of the summer of 1815, when the battle of Waterloo ended the twenty-two year war with France. Mr Parker's bubble of Waterloo registers the contemporary practice of souveniring relics from the field of Waterloo, and enacts capital's strange prerogative for spatial and temporal disjunction that blooms post-Waterloo when commerce is liberated from the protection of national borders. The essay examines these new spatio-temporal logics of commercial speculation that characterize the post-Waterloo moment, as witnessed in Austen's posthumously published fragment, with its seaside milieu of invalids and projectors who are producers and consumers in a service economy of domestic tourism predicated upon the commercial exploitation of nostalgia and the pleasures of corporeal debility. Relating the nostalgic futurity of Mr Parker's commercial projections for “sad invalids” to the enigma of a retrospective style in this belated text – its original moment of production projected still in the extant manuscript unique to Austen's mature oeuvre – I consider Sanditon as a participant-witness to this pre-post-Waterloo moment marked by the somatic and commercial activity of a nostalgics of speculation and a preposterous anticipation of retrospection. Keywords: Jane Austen Sanditon Waterlooanachronismpreposterousnesshysteron proteroneconomicsmanuscripttextual criticismmateriality Notes Jane Austen started work on the untitled manuscript that was first published as ‘Sanditon’ on 27 January 1817. The last page contains a single line of manuscript, and is followed in the same hand with the date ‘March 18’. Austen died on 18 July 1817. Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 176. David Greatham, ‘What Is Textual Scholarship?’ in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds.), A Companion to the History of the Book (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 26 Sutherland, Textual Lives, p. 338. K.K. Ruthven, ‘Preposterous Chatterton’ ELH, 71 (2004), pp. 345–375 (345). Ruthven argues against ‘the degeneration of preposterous into preposterous’ and for the recuperation of the preposterous in ways that suggest the productive uses of anachronism for literary history: ‘The ubiquity of preposterous readings calls for a supplementary literary history’ (p. 346). Jane Austen, Sanditon, in Janet Todd and Linda Bree (eds.), Later Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 156. All further references will be to this edition and will appear within the text, excepting quotations from the holograph manuscript which will be referenced separately in footnotes. Mary Poovey, ‘From Politics to Silence: Jane Austen's Non-Referential Aesthetic’ in Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 251–252. See Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo’, Representations 49 (Winter 2000), pp. 9–37. Mr Parker's fantasy of re-naming Trafalgar House Waterloo House mimics the renaming of the Strand Bridge in 1816 as Waterloo Bridge. See Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: National Maritime Museum, 2005), p. 263. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, p. 271. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (eds.), Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 275. See J.H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback, Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers (London: John Lane, 1926). The title that Cassandra Austen knew the unfinished manuscript by was ‘The Brothers’. Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1814), reprinted Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 54. Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 55–56. Sanditon, Booklet 2, f.17r (21-2), holograph manuscript of Sanditon, King's College Library, King's College, Cambridge. I thank Peter Jones and Patricia McGuire, of King's College Library, Cambridge, for assistance in the examination of the manuscript. Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 32. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 3. Gallagher, Body Economic, p. 22. Gallagher, Body Economic, p. 23. Gallagher, Body Economic, p. 192. Dames refers to ‘nostalgics’ as ‘a strategic logic of nostalgia that Austen's fiction works out with care’, in ‘Austen's Nostalgics’, Representations 73 (Winter 2001), pp. 117–143 (118). Dames, ‘Nostalgia’, Companion to Jane Austen, p. 418. Jane Austen, Emma, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 251. Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), p. 291. Constant, Spirit, in Political Writings, p. 100. Franco Moretti, ‘Waterloo Story’, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 94. Constant, Political Writings, p. 161. Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory, 45 (February 2006), pp. 1–29 (7). Ibid., p. 1. Here, I substitute ‘author’ for Runia's ‘historian’. Ibid., p. 27. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 23. ‘Jane Austen’, Common Reader I, 1925, reprinted Collected Essays, Vol 1 (London: Hogarth, 1980), p. 153. Nevertheless, the question of point of view or focalization (‘who sees’) should be distinguished from that of voice (‘who speaks’); see Mieke Bal, ‘The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Narrative’, Style, 17 (1983), pp. 234–269; and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 213. Sutherland, Textual Lives, pp. 172, 173, 188. On the ‘anachronies’ or various types of ‘discordance’ or dissonance between story and narrative that structure narrative, see Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 35–36. On the so-called ‘temporal shift’ that marks free indirect discourse, see Monika Fludernik, ‘The Illusion of Linguistic Alterity: The Free Indirect as Paradigm of Discourse Representation’, Diacritics, 25.4 (Winter 1995), pp. 89–115 (99). Sutherland, Textual Lives, p. 173. Ibid., pp. 119–120 (120). Ibid., p. 197. Sutherland, Rev. of D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Review of English Studies 57.228 (2006), p. 117. Greatham, ‘What Is Textual Scholarship?’, p. 25. For a detailed critique of the persistence of such ideality in relation to the so-called New Bibliography of the twentieth century, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘The essential Shakespeare’, Textual Practice, 2.1 (1988), pp. 69–86. Wai Chee Dimock, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112 5 (October 1997), p. 1062. Ibid., p. 1061. Sanditon, Booklet 1, f.1v, bottom of page. Holograph manuscript, King's College Library, King's College, Cambridge. Steven Knapp, Literary Interest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 23. George Puttenham, Chapter XII, “Of Ornament”, in Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (eds.), The Arte of English Poesie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 170. The song is of course ABBA's ‘Waterloo’ (1974), and its resonant line: ‘How could I ever refuse? I feel like I win when I lose’, ABBA: The Singles: The First Ten Years. CD.