Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [218]
and Prejudice, since it is arguably the best example of pleasure from error in all of literary history—not to mention one of the world’s greatest meditations on certainty and wrongness. The book famously opens with the phrase “It is a truth universally acknowledged” (“that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”)—but in fact, “truth universally acknowledged” is the plaything of Austin’s novel. The more universally or vociferously any “truth” is averred in it, the more you can bet it isn’t true at all. This is particularly the case when it comes to ostensible verities about the novel’s characters; Pride and Prejudice is a book about people who, believing themselves to be astute scholars of human nature, persistently and dramatically misunderstand each other. Unlike in The Comedy of Errors, however, we the reader don’t stand aside smirking at the sequence of mistakes. On the contrary, we are wholly party to them—with the happy result that we are also party to the pleasurable shock of wrongness when the truth is revealed at the end.