9. The End of the Whole World

Having now learned how to read this Austen, we must of course think about that famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which we often take as a kind of propaedeutic: “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (3). Surely we can recognize what is funny about this sentence now and laugh, with Ahmed and Aristophanes and Austen, as we never could before: there is no single man in Pride and Prejudice, at least in the personage of Darcy, because there is only the nonbinary radicality of the Darcy/Elizabeth interrobang that inters gender. An interrobang: ?/! In this sense, the question and the answer mix and match, fold, fallow, and plough, fickle and freckle, into what cannot be asked.

The nonbinary son-to-come is here in this first sentence as an invisibilized becoming that they want us to read—the truth truly universally acknowledged, because both the idea of universality and acknowledgment do not rest easy precisely because of Austen’s abolition of a carceral gender politics. “Single” signals the opposite of coconstitutive self-making Elizabeth and Darcy’s coexplication exemplifies in which single means multiple. The “good fortune” of a “single man” is thus not “to be in want of a wife” but to not even be single, let alone a man—let alone that there should be wives, because we are outside that carceral biopolitical logic completely. The sentence does not affirm the marriage plot but denounces it; it abolishes what it says. It is speaking a kind of Lady Satanism: women are not objects, nor are men, but rather are subjects coming-to-be in a coconstitutive process of new multiplicities such that self-identity becomes ongoing ongoingness, possibility and plurality. “Possession” here is a self-keyword about the son-to-come that relinquishes the explosively violent carceral institution we call gender. We no longer have to be fucked with or by it (unless we want—which, if we do, must absolutely be respected). It is a sentence that reminds us of the originary myth of the others separated from themselves in Aristophanes’s myth—which is what is at work here in an ongoing ongoingness of love and freindship. We are not single, ever, since singleness contains the multitude you always already will be, are. Thus we can hear “want” as “cleaves” in Barad’s sense of entanglement that produces something new, as in Darcy and Elizabeth above, who prove that the novel does not believe in the proposition this first sentence announces and seems to affirm. The truth it states it states to show its very falsity—its, how to put it, undesirability. And so there is a pleasure here, then. It is Austen’s ultimate irony, as if Lady Satan wrote it: your “I” in this new Austen World, made after the abolition of the old one.

The “I” in Pride and Prejudice announces that Mrs. Bennet remains as irrepressibly insensible as (cl)ever: “I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life” (427). (Amiable indeed!) She remains who she is, through and through, although stuck in the carceral logic of the marriage plot she happily foists on her daughters. This is a warning. Mrs. Bennet’s uninformed, ignorant, clueless bliss works as the ultimate red herring in Austen World; the establishment of her daughters in socially acceptable and appropriate heterosexual marriages perpetuates the heteropatriarchy, so the status quo of the marriage plot, the prison plot, is maintained. Thus, as Fanny looks at Edmund and sees in him the man that she is, and Edmund looks at Fanny and sees in her the woman that he is in order to dissolve gender altogether, and Elizabeth in Darcy, and Darcy in Elizabeth, still the nonbinaristic son-to-come, in Austen World, remains to come.

So why, finally, the “I”? Because it is a merry-go-round that seeks to escape the marry go-around. The “I” does not marry but makes merry in its refusal of its deification and reification. Gender and even sexual orientation and identity shift and blur when outside the binaristic logic that holds society in its iron grip of an identificatory “I.” We might even say that Austen Style contains so many multitudes that even Christ couldn’t feed it.

Insofar as Derrida’s Of Grammatology is a reading of Rousseau (it is and it isn’t) in that it reads Rousseau to show us différance, then the same might be said of this book in that it reads Austen to show us a type of nonbinary, so it is also not a nonbinary reading but a reading that moves past such additive logic. It is, in a sense, a book that makes Austen exist through a process of making her evanish: a room for her. As Derrida remarks, cribbing from the Talmud, the end of a life is the end of a whole world. Austen thinks so too. As Snorton writes, though, “perhaps black and trans lives’ mattering” in the present “would end the world but worlds end all the time.”1 Just as for Snorton it is a good thing, this end of the old, bad world built on Black and trans death, so it is a good thing for Austen. In Austen’s evanishment, the world ends, the end of this whole world that is Austen World, in order that this other world named Austen World can come to be. Persuasion’s Anne Eliot perhaps says it best. Speaking of men, she says, “I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as—if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you” (256). Men can only love as long as their object lives, and does so for them. Anne’s comments indicate the need for the world’s end of cispatriarchal heteronormative desire; in this end of the world, love and freindship sweep us over the edge into new waterfalls of contingent becoming. As Anne caveats, love and freindship become when the woman lives in and as the man and the man in and as the woman such that neither any longer exist but rather nonbinaristic love and freindship appear under their own son-to-come erasure. As Anne says, “all the privilege I claim for my own (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone” (166). Anne’s desire plays out wholly differently than Man’s: it is something not to covet at all since Man cannot yet comprehend it; nor can her desire as yet be operationalized. Rather, only with the extinction of existence and hope, the end of the world of cispatriarchal heteronormative desire, can her desire, her pleasure, be brought to life as otherwise than her and Man. When existence is gone; when the world of the “I” ends; when hope emerges only from that which it cannot, as hopelessness is indeed the only time when hope can emerge: when love is found in a hopeless place. It is a time, too, to come from the future love and freindship in the present. So there is an object for the man, but, as with Darcy and Elizabeth, it is only the woman he wants to be in Anne’s telling, and the man she wants to be; it is the son-to-come in its erasure of, in, as, under, and over itself that forgets itself in its fragile, fleeting fugitivity. Let’s all evanish together.

Austen Voice, then, as such, is nowhere in Austen fiction; it is still waiting to be, to come, just as Austen is whenever we can hear Austen so faintly, so feintly, feignedly, saying “I.”

And so where and when will Austen appear? I guess it is to interrobang, to ask, to exclaim, if we can answer when the answer is already in the question, a nonbinary figure of a question-answer that dissolves in its own appearance/attenuation. Well, can we say that “I” is the freedom Austen wants, the freedom to say not “I do” but “I,” whatever that might mean to Austen and to those who would read Austen as they wish—or against Austen’s wishes, those we held in ourselves in our would-be read–write selves we still wish for in and on the page that read–write us as we read–write ourselves?/! It is in this sense that the triangulation/attenuation of Austen Style, Austen’s texts, and Austen defies nonbinary logic. It is in this sense of the “I” that we can see Austen as the nonbinary son-to-come that appears only as the herald of his disappearance?/!