Camille on her deathbed (detail) by Claude Monet, 1879 // Twin Peaks (1x01) by David Lynch, 1990
Monet was so fascinated by the face of dead Camilla, that he could not help but capture it. ‘I found myself staring at the tragic countenance,’ he wrote to his friend later, ‘automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportions of light and shade in the colors that death had imposed on her immobile face. Shades of blue,yellow, gray, and I don’t know what. That’s what I had become… But even before the thought occurred to record the face that meant so much to me, my first involuntary reflex was so tremble at the shock of the colors. In spite of myself, my reflexes drew me into the unconscious operation that is but the daily order of my life.’
(…)
The posthumous image of Laura was most probably inspired by the painting of Monet. Reconstructed by Lynch in similar Impressionist tones, it produces the same magnetizing effect. It even appeared on the cover of one of the issues of the Esquire magazine: a photograph of a dead body wrapped in polyethylene was published with the signature ‘Woman of the Year’. (x)
"willow resurrecting buffy was a selfish act" im with you "because she didnt care about buffy" LOUD FUCKING INCORRECT BUZZER. willow resurrected buffy because she could not handle the grief or the loneliness it was an act born of a need for control and the childish want for her best friend and the belief that her pain weighs more against any force in the universe and it was an act born!!!! of the intense incredible love!!!!! willow has for buffy summers!!!!!!!
Lost another mutual to the hockey show. So few of us remain, and I fear we cannot hold out for much longer. We cannot get out. They have taken the bridge and the second hall. The end comes soon. We cannot get out. We hear drums, drums in the deep. They are coming...
The trauma people say survivors forget things to protect themselves because they were so horrible, but I think we can't or won't remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun.
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
__
(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
stormborns
izzy806
romaincrisis
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
dededos
