Status (part 2)

a "slow productivity" report

Welcome new subscribers; this is the second of a two-part post. Here’s the first (coincidentally a nice introduction to quite useless):

V. A Secondary Definition

Of status—e.g., “where you at”; the management consultant’s red-yellow-green. Big milestone to report on this front: I’ve finished my new novel. Or at least a full draft of it, which for me comprises the bulk of the (writing) effort:

I’ve been working on this book since 2019, but with extreme irregularity. The first chapter came easily enough, in between rounds of edits for The Portrait of a Mirror with my agent. I was paralytically anxious while “on sub,” however—and even after Portrait sold, made little tangible progress for a variety of reasons until my DIY writing residency last summer. In those three months of near total focus I wrote over three quarters of the novel, chipping away at the remainder since.

The chipping was by far the hardest part, the entire experience (as with the first one) in spectacular alignment with Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity. My husband recently alerted me to this via

Sam Harris

’s latest conversation with Newport about, among other things, what knowledge workers can learn from novelists. Such as? You guessed it. Jane Austen.

VI. Jane Austen’s Agile Backlog

Slow Productivity’s three main tenets, “do fewer things,” “work at a natural pace,” and “obsess over quality,” are in close alignment to (real) Agile development practices and probably familiar not only to “traditional” knowledge workers like novelists and academics, but also most product and software-types. That said, the book provides a wealth of clever tactics to combat the endemic grotesqueries of performative white-collar “pseudo-productivity”—and I was utterly riveted by the section on Austen:

A popular explanation for Austen’s productivity is that she mastered the art of writing secretly, scribbling prose in bursts between the many distracting obligations of her social standing. The source of this idea was Austen’s nephew James, who in 1869, more than fifty years after Austen’s death, published a gauzy Victorian biography of his aunt [. . .]

A closer look at Austen’s life, however, soon reveals issues with her nephew’s tales of secret writing. Modern biographies, drawing more extensively from primary source material, reveal that the real Jane Austen was not an exemplar of a grind-it-out busyness, but instead a powerful case study of something quite different: a slower approach to productivity.

Aided by Claire Tomalin’s biography, Newport goes on to recount the ebbs and flows of Austen’s life and literary work:

[The Austens] inhabited a social world of “pseudo-gentry,” made up of “families who aspired to live by the values of the gentry without owning land or inherited wealth of any significance.” But it’s clear that Austen did not grow up like a character in one of her books, spending her days in a well-appointed sitting room, taking visitors while servants prepared lavish meals. She had work to do. Though Austen was a voracious reader and, encouraged by her father, began dabbling in writing at a young age, she was much too busy with the daily work of running her family’s house, farm, and school to seriously explore the craft.

I’m as fascinated by these ebbs as the flows. Austen’s gentry-adjacent youth reads awfully low-mimetic heroine / “scholarship kid at boarding school” to me—not a conducive environment to novelistic production, per se, but a highly conducive one to novelistic social research. As was, I’d wager, the decade Austen spent not writing in Bath. Meanwhile—and no surprise—her literary output proper skyrocketed when she was directly relieved of other responsibilities: from 1796-1800 in Steventon, then again after leaving Bath for Chawton in 1809:

Critically for Austen’s work, her family, wrung out from the complications and trials of the preceding years, embraced a much-needed respite by deciding to largely absent themselves from the social scene in Chawton. This was not a decision made lightly. The fact that Austen’s brother essentially owned the town, and lived in an impressive estate just a few hundred yards down the road, meant that opportunities for active social striving were likely abundant. But the Austen party wasn’t interested. “There were no dances and few dinners,” writes Tomalin, “and they remained largely withdrawn into their private activities.”

[. . .] a tacit agreement was formed that would free the youngest Austen daughter from most of the remaining household labor. She prepared the morning breakfast for the family but, beyond this duty, was free to write.

Relief from domestic duties is pretty much every novelist’s dream. Certainly it’s one of mine! (and no small part of why the new book is dedicated to my long-suffering husband). But more intriguing still is Austen’s voluntary status retreat. Opportunities for active social striving were likely abundant. But the Austen party wasn’t interested. Might this disinterest have extended beyond prioritization, beyond simply “doing fewer things”? For all of Austen’s status-savvy, her novels also make clear she understood the imitative nature of desire. I can’t help but wonder: how explicitly?

VII. Mimetic Desire

Which brings me to the big Batumanian post-publication “adventure” The Portrait of a Mirror so fortuitously prompted: my introduction to

Luke Burgis

and the work of René Girard. Luke’s nonfiction debut, Wanting, was published the same day as Portrait, and alongside Deceit, Desire & the Novel itself gave me a new vocabulary with which to discuss my own debut and art more generally.

Girard’s feather-duster effect on my mind not only tidied the shelves in a way that allowed me to see what was already there; it also made room for new metaphysical objets.

I spoke a good deal about this vis-à-vis process and the novel I’ve just finished drafting at the Novitatē conference Luke hosted last November—and found myself, as my fellow panelist

Trevor Cribben Merrill

recounts in his since-launched Substack devoted to “Writing Fiction After Girard,” in the minority:

“To me, [Deceit, Desire & the Novel] feels very much like a guide…”

(And yet, she also mentioned that the narrator of the novel she is working on now “is a modern-day prophet, a modern-day Cassandra, and that sense of knowing too much is part of what I’m channeling into the next book.”)

What I didn’t yet realize when I said this? The relationship between my optimistic stance and sense that Girard’s genius rested more in explaining how than why. Like, I can fully articulate the mechanics of mimetic desire now—but can still be thrown for a loop by Phoebe Philo pants! I still want my new novel to sell, to write a third. Perhaps this is because I remain unconverted—though I’ll note we all tend to describe mimetic theory in terms of its “mechanics” and “laws.” And if mimetic theory doesn’t fully explain the great psychosocial why, if the Mother-Doll human quest for status encases still deeper mysteries—well, then even setting beauty and pleasure aside, literary fiction’s raison d’être seems not just intact, but extremely urgent.

VIII. Status Anxiety

This starts getting into the foundational myths and themes of my new novel, so I’m going to paywall the rest. Whether or not you care to continue, thanks for reading—ANJ