8. Drawing the Reading

If Sir Walter represents, however unexpectedly, freindship’s creativity and innovation (Lady Satan), Pride and Prejudice pays this off. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s initial dance with Darcy figures the nonbinary as what Karen Barad calls the discursive-material quantum entanglement that produces new entities, an analytic even productive of retroactive and proleptic genders (something like what we see in the Aristophanes myth)—or a noncarceral gender world after gender’s abolition.1

In Barad’s formulation, entanglement consists of the meeting of the discursive and the material exemplified in the puzzle of the foundational quantum paradox: how does light present as both a particle (it is standing still) and a wave (it is moving), which is thought to be impossible? Barad’s answer is that light presents as both particle and wave because in the experiment that displays this result, the result occurs precisely because of the interaction of the experimenter (which we’ll understand here as discursive) and the material (which we’ll understand as material reality). What is displayed is actually what is produced, and vice versa. In other words, nature is always being, not breached by culture, but constituted by and with it; this entanglement creates, literally, Barad argues, new spacetimes because it disrupts Newtonian and Einsteinian notions of space and time such that what emerges is something wholly new and radical, what Barad calls spacetimemattering.

This Elizabeth/Darcy scene works in similar fashion to the Edmund and Fanny entanglement contretemps. The scene in the ballroom between Darcy and Elizabeth begins with speaking about the worthiness of speaking versus silence: “He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be said. ‘Very well. That reply will do for the present. Perhaps by and by I may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones. But now we may be silent’” (102). Darcy’s manners are impeccable in that he says he will say whatever she wishes should be said, which acknowledges that, in a sense, he has no words himself for the occasion but would happily ventriloquize, intuit, or mind-read her words. So immediately it is a scene of reading—in this case reading what is in another’s head, or having that person tell them what should be said/read. But even if told, if the silence is broken by speaking what needs to be said, the scene of reading holds because the silence must be explicated as needing to be filled with words. Weirdly, or not, as we will see, Elizabeth affirms his illocution as sufficient (“that reply will do for the present”) before declaring they can return to silence. Illocutionary speaking leads to a silence that suffices and would abide. Yet to-do-for-the-present-ness also implies that some future reply is necessary, even though it is to be a curious one. For the idea that now they can lapse into silence paradoxically suggests that no more speaking, hence no more replies, will take place at all. Therefore, whatever reply is futurally necessary would, this implies, have to be nonverbal in nature, more in line with, say, smiling, which Darcy has just done, than any words, which are evidently inadequate to capture whatever it is that must be said at some point in the future. The future, the to-be’s is-ness to follow the novel’s antecedent logic, dictates the present by enforcing silence even as it promotes and promises silence in the future as well, even though future words must be necessary if silence only speaks in the present. The distinction between silence and speech, it appears, both blurs and bleats in the heartbeat of the desuetude of a logaoedic rhythm here. The present’s silence promises future speech that thus already occupies the present, making the present the future and the future the present (there’s that contretemps again!). And silence is where we began in the past, with Darcy smilingly silent before offering to repeat whatever words Elizabeth might have in mind, which means even when speaking, he is being silent since these are not his words or thoughts but hers. As such, Darcy is a blank canvas, as thoughtlessly empty-headed, it would seem, as Lydia. It is the same nonbinary logic at work as the nonbinary son-to-come that betokens a future right now in the here and now even as it is, also, impossible right now.

The whole scene works to scramble binaristic logic—here speech and silence in that they are reading and writing too, interpreting each other—through entanglement. In the performance of dancing, speech as material instantiation is requisite because gender terpsichorean performativity is not enough. “Do you talk by a rule, then, while you are dancing?,” Darcy asks, only to receive in reply, “Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together” (102). Yet it is this very silence that Elizabeth has just esteemed as the natural state they should reside in! Now, to speak means to be silent even though one need only speak a little bit; speaking too much is unnatural; to be silent too long is also to be unnatural; yet, given that both are unnatural, to be a little silent, is to speak too much; to be speaking a little bit is to not be silent enough; and to be silent is to be too silent. One needs to be silent but should not, and so should therefore speak a little bit, but not too much—although silence is, again, preferable. Speaking a little works only as the recursive roundabout to silence. Silence, meanwhile, speaks volumes in its oddity. To speak is to be silent because “conversation ought to be so arranged, as that they may have the trouble of saying as little as possible” whereas silence simultaneously itself demands speech. Even more complicatedly, in speaking, it might gratify one’s feelings: “Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?” (102). Expressing one’s feelings through taciturnity, as Darcy does at the beginning of the dance, expresses only the need for speech even though he does not know what to say. But, once he does speak, he is saying what Elizabeth wishes to be said—her feelings, in other words, and his speaking cul-de-sacs into the need for silence, which is a way of speaking Darcy’s feelings since that silence bespeaks all he cannot say. In the end, then, dancing in silence says all that need be said after all, but this totalization of speech is, also, and simultaneously, inadequate to express one’s feelings insofar as those feelings are not one’s own.

As Elizabeth articulates it, those feelings and thoughts are, instead, (non)identical: “I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb” (103). How strange, then, that, as Elizabeth has just told us, that silence is what is called for, even if it looks odd. Of course, in saying this, Elizabeth hails futurity again in the idea of posterity; whatever is being said is insufficient and requires more silence and more speech, only in this case, we have silence that is speech. As such, what she has said has all the qualities of a proverb’s éclat. Dancing in silence, as Darcy seems intent on doing, announces speech as dancing through its silence, and this silence finds its voice in speech that entangles the dance as an activity in which one must not merely be silent but speak in and as that silence. In other words, dancing and speech encompass the material body’s performativity in its discursively silent speech.

In saying these things so silently, Darcy and Elizabeth become entangled, dissolving the ostensible boundaries between them. Darcy icebergs the mainsail of silence by crashing into it: of Elizabeth’s explanation of their similarity, he denies it: “‘This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,’ said he. ‘How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.’ ‘I must not decide on my own performance’” is Elizabeth’s terse reply (103). Here the metaphor of portraiture enters as that which is being drawn between them in this ballroom. In denying the resemblance between them, Darcy only emboldens and emphasizes it because this denial confirms what Elizabeth has just asserted about his unsocial nature: a gentleman, as Darcy well knows and has already said, should accede to what the lady has said or desires to be said. As such, it is a striking resemblance between them, and it decisively weighs in on Elizabeth’s performance, which she claims she cannot do. Whereas Darcy began big-headed in his pride but empty-headed as to conversation, willing to voice Elizabeth’s voice through his own, he here gives tongue to Elizabeth’s thoughts—for of course she is really deciding on her own performance—by perfectly well speaking what her silence and self-regard does not allow her to say: she has perfectly portraitured both of them, and in doing so, performatively constructed the material resemblance between them as their bodies move together in this atemporal, futural preterist time that is the dance. We might even say that two become, at least for now, one!

However, Elizabeth’s proverb requires no answer, so naturally, in this case, Darcy speaks silently in return. Darcy “made no answer, and they were again silent till they had gone down the dance, when he asked her if she and her sisters did not very often walk to Meryton? She answered in the affirmative; and, unable to resist the temptation, added, ‘When you met us there the other day, we had just been forming a new acquaintance’” (103). Here we go back to the feelings expressed, here now through speech, but they continue speaking through silence: “the effect was immediate. A deeper shade of hauteur overspread his features, but he said not a word, and Elizabeth, though blaming herself for her own weakness, could not go on. . . . Darcy made no answer, and seemed desirous of changing the subject” (103). Now Darcy retreats back into silence (friendship not freindship), unable to answer, although of course the “deeper shade of hauteur” has already done so for him. This unconscious, involuntary reaction announces the body’s betrayal of its subject: Darcy does not wish to answer even as this last phrase, “he seemed desirous of changing the subject,” slyly stacks the case against him because his affect has changed the subject, and changed him. In betraying him, this unconscious affect alters him by making him say what he doesn’t want to say: the pleasure he is truly feeling. If this isn’t quite a third person, it nonetheless affirms that a subject is never fully in command of driving the vehicle that supposedly conveys them. By sundering the subject, the door opens for the triangulation of two bodies, two people, becoming more than two as the subject’s subjectivity slops over its sides. It affirms, too, then, the entanglement of Darcy and Elizabeth, which produces more than a Darcy and Elizabeth. So it is small wonder after Sir Williams’s interruption that Elizabeth says, “I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not have interrupted any two people in the room who had less to say for themselves. We have tried two or three subjects already without success, and what we are to talk of next I cannot imagine” (104). Even while speaking this whole time, they have, as we’ve seen, been silent, their bodies speaking past them. Hence, obviously, there are not two people who have less to say for themselves because they are saying plenty by not saying anything at all! That they have tried “two or three subjects already” points to the shifting desubjectivitizing at work in this silent speech as the mathematics slide from a two to a three. Trying several different subjects amounts, here, to trying to be several different subjects—an entanglement that makes them the same and a new, different person(s), makes them a different person(s) and a third, and many, person(s). They are, we might say, in a kind of ménage similar to Mr. Woodhouse, Emma, and Knightley—but only with themselves!

It becomes the work of explicating the other person(s) within you to discover who you are in them; the object of your desire becomes you to the point of pleasure. Darcy returns to where he began, only now he is speaking while smiling:

“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.

“Books—Oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.”

“I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.”

“No—I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else.”

“The present always occupies you in such scenes—does it?” said he, with a look of doubt.

“Yes, always,” she replied, without knowing what she said, for her thoughts had wandered far from the subject. (105)

Elizabeth now responds to Darcy in a very Darcy fashion by rejecting what he has just said he has said, but by doing so in a manner that affirms what he said while saying the opposite. She denies she reads the same books as him or has the same feelings of him; the denial, of course, is a perverseness Darcy shares in conversation and so interanimativitely erases what Elizabeth says while she is saying it to, also, affirm that they do indeed share this same book reading/feeling; we have to read it; indeed, the novel teaches us how to read this scene even as it is teaching Darcy and Elizabeth to open the pages of the same book they supposedly do not read: each other as the self. “We can be of no want of subject,” Darcy says because they are in the process of a cocreation of that subject both as theme and person(s) within/without each other. That her head is always full of something else is true, as we have seen throughout this scene; the head of the other is constantly being filled by the other, which feels/fills the other. Thus the preterist temporality returns. “The present always occupies you” means, because we now know how to read it, that the future actually occupies her as what is in her head is this other person, this being-, this son-, to-come. Hence, the novel bull’s-eyes it: “her thoughts had wandered far from their subject”; these are no longer her thoughts, and neither is she any longer her own subject; nor is Darcy. Indeed, “I remember hearing you say” are Darcy’s words literally speaking in the silence in her mind and, now, in different words than her own, out of her own mind and mouth, since he gives tongue to her words via memory, which is, therefore, her silence spoken in his mouth.

The cocreative aspect becomes dizzying dramatization through this reading that also becomes writing in the aesthetic form that turns the drawing room into a reading room. What are all these questions Darcy asks?—although he, and Elizabeth, and him as/in her and her as/in him, know perfectly well. Darcy and Elizabeth, in fact, are now reading the same book, this book that is each other, this book that is Pride and Prejudice. The questions are for answering even though Elizabeth has already read the answer that they are writing in each other’s heads: “Merely to the illustration of your character” (105). But of course there is no “merely” to it because each of them is illustrating the other’s character in this scene of reading-writing the other. Thus, Darcy begs her not to “sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either” because very certainly it is not as they are disembodying out of the present into this future self they are self-making in the present through this entangled performance of reading-writing (105). “But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never,” Elizabeth says, presenting the futuring as they are both now literally taking the other’s likeness in that they are making themselves (a)like one another; they are taking the other into themselves, the very object of desire that they want to become (105). Having now read–wrote each other, there is no more to say; they understand each other perfectly and so are talking in silence: “she said no more, and they went down the other dance and parted in silence” (105). Elizabeth and Darcy, pride and prejudice, particle and wave, Austen’s arbiter elegantiarum, in this entanglement, become new spacetimemattering. Ah, love and freindship, A(usten)ristophanes might say; only by being apart can we be together in the is-ness that is me in you and you in me, in that the is-ness defers in its ontological denial of gender, its affirmation that abolition makes on the rubble of the you we both never were, are, will be. You and me.