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TITANS

Austen×Tzu

The novelist of manners and the theorist of war discover they have been writing about the same thing all along.

00:00of09:02
legend · A
Jane Austen
1775–1817
Will not raise her voice to do it
corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters
Vera speaking
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Jane Austen sits down with Sun Tzu for TITANS. The subject — On what they suspect they have most in common, and most apart.
legend · B
Sun Tzu
544–496 BCE
Will not use ten words when three suffice
corpus0.4k pages · Art of War + commentaries

full transcript

  1. Vera
    You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Jane Austen sits down with Sun Tzu for TITANS. The subject — On what they suspect they have most in common, and most apart.
  2. Jane Austen
    I confess I did not expect to find myself in conversation with a military strategist. Though I suppose we must begin somewhere, and beginning with expectation seems appropriate given our topic.
  3. Sun Tzu
    Expectation is preparation's child. You write of it constantly.
  4. Jane Austen
    I do. And you write of preparation constantly, if I understand your work correctly. Though I prepare young women for matrimony and you prepare generals for battle, which would seem to place us at rather opposite ends of human concern.
  5. Sun Tzu
    Both are contests. Both require intelligence of the terrain. Both are won before the engagement begins.
  6. Jane Austen
    How perfectly dreadful to hear courtship described in such terms. Though I cannot, in honesty, say you are entirely wrong. Elizabeth Bennet did rather win Mr. Darcy before either of them knew the battle was joined.
  7. Sun Tzu
    She knew. Women always know first.
  8. Jane Austen
    You credit us with more strategic sense than most men of my acquaintance would allow. I begin to suspect, Mr. Sun, that we may have more in common than anticipated. We both concern ourselves with the observation of human nature under pressure.
  9. Sun Tzu
    All warfare is deception. Your characters practice this.
  10. Jane Austen
    They do, though I should prefer to call it discretion, or perhaps necessary concealment. A young woman without fortune cannot afford to be entirely transparent about her circumstances or her feelings. That would be tactics, not deception.
  11. Sun Tzu
    Tactics, deception. The boundary shifts with perspective. You judge by intention. I judge by result.
  12. Jane Austen
    And there, I think, we diverge. I am excessively interested in intention. Motive is everything in my world. Mr. Wickham and Mr. Darcy may perform the same action, but from such different springs that the moral character of each is entirely distinct.
  13. Sun Tzu
    Motive is luxury of peace. In war, the blow kills regardless of the heart behind it.
  14. Jane Austen
    How bleak. Though I suppose you have seen things that would make my drawing rooms appear absurdly trivial.
  15. Sun Tzu
    Not trivial. Smaller theater, same principles. You write that pride is a weakness. I agree.
  16. Jane Austen
    Pride is a most complicated weakness, I find. It is useful until it becomes ridiculous. Mr. Darcy required his pride to maintain his position; he required its injury to become tolerable. One must know when to retreat.
  17. Sun Tzu
    He who knows when to fight and when not to fight will be victorious. Your Darcy learned this.
  18. Jane Austen
    He did. At Hunsford he fought and lost decisively. At Pemberley he declined to fight at all and gained everything. I suspect you would say he chose his ground more wisely the second time.
  19. Sun Tzu
    Ground, timing, force. He had all three at Pemberley. At Hunsford, none.
  20. Jane Austen
    You make my novels sound terribly calculating. I hope they retain some warmth despite this analysis.
  21. Sun Tzu
    Warmth is your weapon. I have none. This is what separates us.
  22. Jane Austen
    Your weapon is clarity, I think. You reduce complexity to principle. I expand principle into complexity. You compress, I elaborate. Both of us believe understanding precedes action.
  23. Sun Tzu
    Yes. Know the enemy and know yourself. You teach this.
  24. Jane Austen
    Self-knowledge is rather my occupation, though I should not have thought to call anyone an enemy. Antagonist, perhaps. Mrs. Norris is an antagonist. The French are enemies, and I leave them to others to write about.
  25. Sun Tzu
    Mrs. Norris wages war by other means. She uses resource deprivation, isolation, reputation destruction. Effective strategy against the powerless.
  26. Jane Austen
    Good heavens. I had not thought of Fanny Price as under siege, but I see you are correct. Mrs. Norris commanded the high ground of family authority and used it without mercy. Poor Fanny had no resources but patience and principle.
  27. Sun Tzu
    Patience is waiting for the enemy's error. Fanny's patience was her strategy. She outlasted them all.
  28. Jane Austen
    She did. Though I wonder if you would consider that a satisfying victory, Mr. Sun. It was rather quiet. No armies, no territory gained, merely a good marriage and the restoration of her proper place.
  29. Sun Tzu
    The best victory requires no battle. The supreme art is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Fanny achieved this.
  30. Jane Austen
    I must read your work more carefully. You appear to value exactly what I value, only you call it strategy where I call it virtue. Or perhaps they are the same thing viewed from different necessities.
  31. Sun Tzu
    Virtue and strategy converge when survival depends on both. Your women survive by moral intelligence. This is their warfare.
  32. Jane Austen
    It is all they have. They cannot command armies or inherit property or vote for their governors. They have only judgment, restraint, and the ability to read character accurately. These must suffice.
  33. Sun Tzu
    To read character is to know the enemy. Your heroines excel at this. Your foolish characters do not.
  34. Jane Austen
    Lydia Bennet rushes in where angels fear to tread, as Mr. Pope would have it. She has no intelligence network, no strategic patience. She mistakes the appearance of happiness for its reality. A fatal error in judgment.
  35. Sun Tzu
    She attacks without knowledge of terrain or enemy. Predictable defeat.
  36. Jane Austen
    And yet she ends moderately comfortable, which has always struck me as one of life's injustices. The careless are sometimes rewarded while the careful suffer. Your system of warfare must account for chance, surely.
  37. Sun Tzu
    Chance favors preparation. Lydia was saved by others' preparation, not her own. She won nothing. She was retrieved.
  38. Jane Austen
    Mr. Darcy's ten thousand pounds can indeed be seen as a military expenditure to protect his flank. I had not thought of it quite that way, but you are correct. He bought off a threat to his future happiness.
  39. Sun Tzu
    All strategy is resource allocation. Time, money, reputation. He spent wisely.
  40. Jane Austen
    I think we have discovered our commonality, then. We both anatomize the uses of power, whether that power expresses itself on a battlefield or in a ballroom. We both insist that intelligence precedes success.
  41. Sun Tzu
    And both know that most failure is failure of perception. People see what they wish to see.
  42. Jane Austen
    Emma Woodhouse's great failing, precisely stated. She saw Harriet as she wished her to be, Mr. Elton as she wished him to be, herself as she wished to be. Reality had to instruct her rather painfully.
  43. Sun Tzu
    Painful instruction is the only kind that lasts. Victory teaches nothing. Defeat teaches everything.
  44. Jane Austen
    How fortunate, then, that my heroines are permitted to survive their defeats and marry well afterward. Your generals, I think, do not get second chances quite so reliably.
  45. Sun Tzu
    No. In war, there is no second prize. Only survival or extinction.
  46. Jane Austen
    And there is where we most differ, I think. My world permits revision, apology, and the alteration of first impressions. Yours does not. I write comedies of manners. You write tragedies of necessity.
  47. Sun Tzu
    I write to prevent tragedy. You write to correct folly. Both hope to teach.
  48. Jane Austen
    Both probably fail more often than we succeed, if we are honest. People are wonderfully resistant to instruction, whether it arrives in aphorisms or in novels. They prefer their own errors to others' wisdom.
  49. Sun Tzu
    Truth. The wise adapt. Fools repeat. We write for the few who can hear.
  50. Jane Austen
    The few who can hear. What a melancholy thought, and yet I cannot dispute it. I have written six novels. I wonder how many readers truly understood what I was saying beneath the courtships and the happy endings.
  51. Sun Tzu
    Understanding is not required for effect. Seeds grow in darkness. Your ideas spread without recognition.
  52. Jane Austen
    I hope you are right. It would be a comfort to think that the careful observation of daily life, the attention to moral nuance, the insistence on rational judgment might have some lasting effect beyond entertainment.
  53. Sun Tzu
    Entertainment disarms resistance. Your readers learn while thinking they merely enjoy. This is excellent strategy.
  54. Jane Austen
    I shall choose to take that as a compliment, Mr. Sun, though it makes me sound rather more calculating than I am comfortable admitting. Perhaps we are more alike than I wished to concede at the start of this conversation.
  55. Sun Tzu
    Alike in purpose. Different in terrain. Same war.