Northanger Abbey

Between pages 112 and 115 in Northanger Abbey there are two scenes in which Austen does one of two things, and I have not been able to decide which. At first, I thought it was pretty obvious that she was satirizing the gothic genre. The scenes are almost too dramatic, too intense, to be taken seriously. The first one involves a chest that Catherine believes to be special and important enough to become really involved in a deep study of it. The second a cabinet that catches her eye, and she simply must know what it contains. She finds a collection of papers amounting to little more than bills and shopping lists, but as she is discovering them and reading them, it is described feverishly, as though she is in some sort of danger or committing a crime in which seconds decide the success or failure. Of course it's all over the to, and of course the papers and the cabinet are essentially meaningless, as if Austen, at the end of the scene is to say, "Of course there was nothing to it. It's a cabinet. In a house, where people live. Why would there ever be some sort of hidden horrible mystery hidden in the cabinet in the very room they assigned to you?" 
And yet, and perhaps it is just me, but I actually felt Catherine's anxiety. Even knowing that this was not intended to be a horror or suspense novel, but a parody, I felt the way I might while reading one. We might account for this on the skill of Austen as a writer, to parody a genre so well, and make the reader feel so foolish as to get caught up in the same nothingness as Catherine. The scenes, the descriptions, and Catherine's own disappointment verge on being so well done that it becomes difficult for me, as the reader, to not be disappointed in the contents of the papers. So then I am left to wonder, how much of the novel may be read as a caution to believing to strongly, or being to entirely caught up in the world of fiction, and how much of it is an admission to how easy it might be to so completely lull the reader into that state of acceptance? A further turn might be to consider if the novel is perhaps about learning that the real world does not so often reflect the world in books, how does that affect the reading of John Thorpe, the character least given to reading novels and being under their influence? He is rarely portrayed in a good light, and in one scene this is directly attributed to his aversion towards novels. 

Alternative Blogging

I found Novak's article to be pictured in my mind as a man attempting attempting to defend too much ground from too many attackers. There are points of self-defense, a rather lengthy defense of Defoe (a general one about his life, and another one of Robinson Crusoe), a brief but extremely kind defense of Ian Watt and his work. I think the hinge pin of his many defenses comes on page 249 when he states, "Although I have recently been accused of 'condescension' towards these writers, none was intended." And I don't think this door is going to stay up very long. On the surface, the use of the words 'these writers' produces at least a sense of dismissal of their abilities and the works produced by them.  As Novak progresses, he only seems to be digging himself a deeper whole, especially at the point where he professes that it is simply more difficult to teach Behn and Haywood than Defoe, as I am not sure where the objective metric for difficulty of classroom usage can be found and Novak certainly does not offer one. I would think, that for a man working in defense of himself, Defoe the author, and Watt the scholar, Novak might have put a little more care into his language so as not to be the exact thing he is writing in defense of. If, as Novak points out, a criterion for inclusion into the canon is level of influence, not only natively, but internationally, than it logically follows that the same mechanisms Novak points to in place in France to marginalize female authors (and uses as a defense of why a feminist argument on canonical inclusion works in French literature, and not in English) would also work against the import of feminine writing, therefore limiting the amount of influence they are likely to have regardless of skill/importance?
Switching to Max  Byrd's "Two or Three Things I Know About Setting," everything changed. My irritation from Novak was soothed by Byrd's nearly self-deprecating tone and tongue in cheek wordplay. Even more remarkable, on the second reading I noticed that Byrd structures this essay in the format that he espouses for what makes the setting in a work effective. In the 'Divide and Contrast' section he talks about how a novelist will use one part of the setting against the other one, is quite effectively (or obviously) duplicated by Byrd's use of both his scholarly career and his wayward diversion into fiction writing. After reading the section titled "Present Your Setting in Motion" I cycled back to note that he remarks on his change in career as the action of 'straying' and presents two opposing spaces with himself as a line moving between them.
To round out my three articles Michael Siedel left me a bit perplexed. Throughout I had much trouble attempting to identify his stance in relation to Watt, suggesting a fair amount of ambivalence about him. So I wonder how well an argument can be made while attempting to play on alternate sides of it. On the one hand Siedel wants to hold up Watt's work (albeit not as admiringly as Novak) as something like truth while attempting to point out flaws and missed opportunities in it.