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Reflection for February 11, 2007

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"Everybody wants to get into the act!"

"I really believe," said Henry Crawford, "I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce . . . I feel as if I could be anything or everything, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh or cut capers, in any tragedy or comedy in the English language. Let us be doing something. Be it only half a play - an act - a scene; what should prevent us?"

Thus Jane Austen (in her masterpiece Mansfield Park) captures the spirit of her times. For after centuries of tradition upheld by the lords and ladies of such estates as Mansfield Park - traditions maintained as well by the rural tenants of the English countryside - revolution was in the air. Industrial, commercial, political, imperial ambitions had been unleashed; cities were encroaching with all their helter-skelter upon the once placid past. And now, as Jimmy Durante used to say, everybody wanted to get into the act! Why sooner or later the Queen of England would (reluctantly?) be knighting people like the Beatles, the Who (who indeed?), oil executives and golf pros!

Jane Austen foresaw all this in her own day much the way the prophet Jeremiah (from whom our first reading is taken today) saw something of the same thing happening in his day - back around 600 B.C. - what with Israel forgetting its divine origin and opting for the idolatry and power politics of the Middle East - resulting in the erasure of its monarchy and nation and its exile to a region somewhere in modern Iraq - called Babylon.

And notice the metaphor Jane uses to display this change in Western civilization! While the lord of Mansfield Park is away, his son (and heir) and daughters, influenced by up to date people like Henry Crawford from the big city, decide to stage a play - a modest play to be acted out in the family billiard room. But no sooner do they decide on one (and a risqué and "infectious" play at that) than they compete for the juicier parts. Egos get inflated or punctured. Costs are incurred as they disrupt the long settled interior of the home. The idea of theatre also opens up so many opportunities to abandon one's own real identity to be this, that or the other, to be a villain or a hero; to wear a false face; to emote as one wouldn't normally do; to grow addicted to applause. It introduces the notion of life as "free", episodic, sporadic, punctuated by high points with everything else in life left to languish off stage. It also introduces the art of criticism (which now flourishes as never before by way of this thing called the blog). Henceforth our modern motto must be; "The show must go on!" What a profound way of describing not only Jane's world but our current life style as well!

Of course, Jane Austen is hardly opposed to genuine theater. Nobody loved a play more than did the younger brother of the story Edmund. He was willing to travel far to see a good one - but only to see "good hardened real acting". On the other hand he says, "I would hardly walk from this room to the next to look at the raw efforts of those who have not been bred to the trade." In the hands of truly great artists theater is held up as a mirror wherein we may know ourselves better - and find ourselves. Jane Austen herself is great theater. In that regard the Bible too is great theater - a prolonged drama from Genesis to Revelation that ultimately challenges us to undertake the greatest role of all - as St. Paul did and did so well that he was able to say; "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me."

-- Geoff Wood