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Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
That's the title of Laurie Viera Rigler's new and fun book. The basic premise is that a pouty L.A. girl "wakes up" in the body of a character in a Jane Austen novel; here is the book's website. She also finds herself courted by an ardent suitor, Edgeworth, who wants an answer to his marriage proposal and soon. My wonderings were skewed as usual:
1. Would I, at first, have to act sick and crazy so as to cover up what are in fact more systematic lapses from accepted codes of social behavior?
2. If I am a rational Bayesian, what percentage of "transported people" should I expect to find in my new world? (It is indicative that our heroine thinks she is very special and isn't much concerned with this question.) Would such people be natural allies or enemies?
3. If I met another transported person, could I figure this fact out? How long would it take and what are the best hints to drop? Should I just mention "the Boston Red Sox" and see what happens?
4. Living in such a world, how useful is it to know how the novel ends? (This is a theme in the story.) Could such knowledge compensate for not understanding the non-articulated rules of this world very well? What rate of interest should I pay on borrowed money, given the presence of speculative opportunities?
5. Being a rational Bayesian, how should I revise upwards my estimates that the world is ruled by an evil Demi-Urge, and what does this imply for the optimal degree of ethical behavior?
It is a sad commentary on our educational system that Courtney, the heroine of the novel, never ponders such a question.
6. At what percentage of "transported people" would we expect to see an impact on real GDP, and would this impact be positive or negative?
Readers, what other questions should I be asking?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 8, 2007 at 06:48 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
You seem to assume that the transported will be American.
Most of my friends would be just as confused as confused by the Red Sox remark as Darcy would be.
Posted by: stuart at Aug 8, 2007 8:06:41 AM
yeah; I'd assume you could just say 'football'. You could call it a sport played "overseas".
You could also say "bush sucks". That seems to have a ubiquitous response.
Posted by: shawn at Aug 8, 2007 8:17:57 AM
You'd have to be careful with being so sure how the novel ends. It might not even end up getting published:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=279765
Austen wouldn't if she wrote today.
Posted by: shawn at Aug 8, 2007 8:21:24 AM
Large crowds assembling to watch unexpected events (eg, bridge collapses, 9/11, unexpectedly good
ball games) would be good evidence of time travel. At least a good place to poll the crowd for
their opinions on the topic (or stock tips).
It's hard to see how sports books would function if any meaningful level of time travel occurred.
Posted by: mkl at Aug 8, 2007 9:21:54 AM
Think of all of the technological innovations you could bring. You could pretty quickly amass great wealth if you wanted to. Perhaps time traveling "inventors" were the source of the industrial revolution...
Posted by: Alex J. at Aug 8, 2007 10:02:24 AM
Another book where characters transport into Jane Eyre, it explores the effects of changing the original manuscripts.
http://www.amazon.com/Eyre-Affair-Thursday-Next-Novel/dp/0142001805/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5154809-8220762?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186582604&sr=8-1
Does it matter which edition she has transported into?
Posted by: Phil at Aug 8, 2007 10:24:32 AM
My main thought experiment would be predominately introspective: assuming that my actions within the period covered by the plot of the book would be predetermined, could I detect any difference between my actions pre and post and end of the fictional narrative? Could I change anything within the narrative? What does success or failure tell me about free will generally?
Posted by: Seamus McCauley at Aug 8, 2007 11:56:28 AM
Have I actually been transported to a different world or am I in a simulation? What are the rules of being transported?
Posted by: sort_of_knowledgable at Aug 8, 2007 12:07:10 PM
Is there a true world outside the obvious setting of the book? Or is the scope of the book all there is?
If there is a larger world, might there may be more than one book/story being told in it? Are they related?
When the story ends, will you remain in the world, or somehow be transported back out?
Is there a way to transport yourself back out?
Will your actions and choices in this world affect you in the other?
BTW, this sort of scenario is addressed in Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Convenant books.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at Aug 8, 2007 12:32:06 PM
The evil demi-urge issue might pretty much distract me from the others actually.
I don't see how transported people would hurt GDP, but I would expect them to make their presence generally known fairly quickly if they were at all numerous unless 5 is true.
Posted by: michael vassar at Aug 8, 2007 12:35:22 PM
Just a plug for "Replay" by Ken Grimwood, which deals with some of these questions more directly
Posted by: at Aug 8, 2007 1:18:45 PM
I make no excuses for my irrational prejudices, but I have an almost insuppressible aversion to any book that meets one of the following two criteria:
1. Contains characters from Jane Austen's novels, or Austen herself, but is not written by Austen.
2. Title begins with "Confessions of..."
Call me crazy. That said, my questions would be dominated by variations on #5 and Seamus McCauley's thoughts. Are there any supernatural constraints on free will? Can you deviate from what you believe to be the author's intended outcomes?
What would be the possible impact on RGDP by the presence and proportion in the society of "transported" people? I'm not sure I understand Tyler's question. Would you expect it to be negative due to their lack of 19th century street smarts, or positive due to knowledge of events and technology of a later period?
I believe that I would be almost useless to 19th century European society, except that my ability to read, write, and perform mathematics would most likely be above average (there were certainly many who were smarter than I am, but the average person would be less educated than I, unless I'm mistaken). It isn't as though I know how to make penicillin. I certainly know nothing about farming.
Posted by: d.cous. at Aug 8, 2007 3:03:54 PM
3. Good point that a phrase like "Red Sox" may be obscure even to near
contemporary transportees if they're not American, or possibly even to
some who are. I would think using a word whose semantic meaning has changed
a lot over the intervening years but still doesn't mark you as particularly
odd to the people of your new era. "Gay" might be a good word to use.
"I wonder if that fellow's gay?" you could say, and see how your interlocutor
responds. In reality though, most modern people would probably have great difficulty
speaking in convincing early 19th century English. Think how hard it would be
for many Americans just to pass convincingly as a modern Briton, then add an unfamiliar
spoken accent just a little different from any you've actually heard, the topical
references, the semantic shifts, the deep grounding in Bible stories, Greek myth and rural folklore that, chance are, you don't share, etc.
I think transportees would be pretty easy to spot, certainly by other transportees.
Posted by: vanya at Aug 8, 2007 3:26:39 PM
It may not be a good idea to assume that any transportees around you will act like fish out of water. Nothing says that all transportees will be taken to the same point in time, so your fellow transportees may already be acclimated. It's probably also a good possibility that the transportees weren't taken from the same point in time as you. Considering that there is no public record of transportees and no explanation of how such a trip would be possible, you would be rational to place a low value on meeting other transportees.
For #3, Take a cue from Dr. Evil and play a song that hasn't been written yet. If you don't play an instrument, or play an instrument that is unavailable (how old is the saxophone?) just hum. Transportees will recognize the song and everyone else will just consider you brilliant (Well, not if you just hum it). Do you best to make it as close to the current era as possible. If you're in a Jane Austen novel, hum Beethoven's ninth (I'm 99% sure Austen wasn't alive when Beethoven wrote it). It should be recognizable to people in many cultures over a wide "future" time period. It's a little hard to play on one instrument of course, but you get the general idea.
Posted by: Patrick at Aug 8, 2007 3:55:56 PM
But be careful Patrick. If you play or hum the "ode to Joy" from
Beethoven's 9th people may just assume you're playing Haydn a little freely.
Posted by: vanya at Aug 8, 2007 6:06:15 PM
I'd tell the truth about myself and admonish them not to be timist.
(That's like "racist", but against people from a different time.)
Posted by: Person at Aug 8, 2007 8:32:53 PM
Heh, I wish I were musically literate (I know there's a word for that, I just don't know the word). On the plus side, a transportee would most likely have as much knowledge of Haydn as I do, and still identify the song as Beethoven. I just have to adjust the odds of being considered a musical genius downward.
Of course, I completely disregarded Tyler's question at the end of the post.
You should also be considering how much time you will spend in the Austen novel. Your actions depend greatly on whether you spend a day, a month, a year, 10 years, or the rest of your life in the book (there could bean epilogue with your character as an elderly man/woman and you have to live out the parts the book omits). And can you reliably say the odds of you being transported back in the next 24 hours don't change the longer you spend in the period? If you are transported into the novel somewhere in the middle, what's saying you won't be transported back out until the end?
Also, you know you're a recovering econ grad student when you hear "Edgeworth" and immediately design a simple exchange economy in your head.
Posted by: Patrick at Aug 8, 2007 8:35:23 PM
This is probably too mechanistic, but I would wonder how much energy was required to move a body through time, how reversible the process is, whether it suggests reincarnation is feasible and would actually force me to consider the multiple universe scenarios so beloved of pseudomystical physicists might have some basis in reality.
The demi-urge concern would probably not concern me terribly. Much as I love having all the mod cons, there is little urge to place a moral or ethical value on them. Working backwards then, the fact I had been moved to a time where the conveniences were gone would not increase my belief in some underlying evil force that might have moved me there.
I might be very tempted to invest in developing good vineyards in various parts of the world and try to preserve records of indigenous cooking from as many areas of the world as possible.
Posted by: iam at Aug 9, 2007 2:33:21 AM
Why do you assume the transports would be from contemporary times? Wouldn't it be just as likely to have transports from far in the future or past? Even aliens, or other characters from someone elses fiction?
Posted by: Doug at Aug 9, 2007 2:12:57 PM
'If I am a rational Bayesian, what percentage of "transported people" should I expect to find in my new world?'
With one confirmed instance of transported people, namely you, as a rational Bayesian I suppose you should say that there is not enough data to make a reasonable prediction.
By the way, how many people were alive in the time of Jane Austen, compared to how many in the present world, and what percentage of each population does the transported individual make up?
Posted by: Bryan at Aug 9, 2007 6:45:50 PM
The first concern would have to be to find a way of blending in to the family you find yourself with. I would suggest that saying you are from the future, and everyone else is merely fictional, would be a pretty good way of booking a ticket to the nearest asylum. Possibly a fall, followed by a complete loss of memory may be the safest way of explaining why you have no recollection of your name, your family members names, how to dress yourself, where things are in the house, etc. I know its a cliche, but it might not have been in Austen's time.
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