MORE than 10 years ago, Fay Weldon wrote a series of letters to an imaginary niece, in a book sub titled On First Reading Jane Austen. She says in one letter that she had been listening on the car radio that day to a dramatisation of Emma.
"Does it not seem to you most extraordinary," she asks the niece, "the phenomenon of shared fantasy? I can never get used to it. I suppose half a million people listened to Emma this afternoon".
"All over the country irons were held in suspension and car exhaust bandages held motionless and lady gardeners stayed their gardening gloves and cars slowed, and Emma spoke... We join each other in shared fantasies, it is our way of crossing barriers when our rulers won't let us. Hand in hand the human race abandons the shoddy imperfect structures of reality and surges over to the City of Invention."
How happy a passionate Austenite like Fay Weldon must feel today, when Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and now Emma have entered the mainstream and become great popular successes - great shared fantasies - approximately 200 years after Jane Austen invented their characters and plots.
They are meaningful in America as well as in Europe and to masses of people as well as to the highly educated few. This is one of the good things about recent times. Cinema and television, in going back to classic fiction, have been providing vast numbers of people with a shared reference bank in a wealth of shared stories which themselves lay out the landscape of a shared moral scheme.
It is a rough and ready scheme, about good people and bad people and deserved punishment and just reward. But at least it is a moral scheme. It is perfectly possible to be alive and intelligent and to be utterly asocial and amoral read Bret Easton Ellis and you'll see. Or think of the criminals whose white, startled faces look back at us as they are hustled into court - startled because they can't grasp that such a fuss is being made about victims who were non people to them.
At least tales from the past like Emma and Michael Collins and Jude - all around at the moment and all being talked about as if they were the gossip of a village - place their weight in the scales against a decline to dehumanisation. The tale tellers in our society are fulfilling an almost religious function now, in a first world culture which though full of religions is hardly pervaded by religious feeling.
The film Michael Collins would be an empty adventure story but that it proposes that Michael Collins was a moral being. But it is also of value, quite simply, as information. One of the limiting things about the recent media debate on Michael Collins is that it has been conducted by vociferous middle aged men who know a lot of history. They left me and a lot of others behind.
I don't remember doing modern Irish history in school. We did the Fronde and Rinnucini and things like that, but from 1803 onward we were on our own. The television series a few years ago, with Brendan Gleeson, about the Treaty negotiations, was the first thing that allowed meto grasp a narrative of those times.
And at that, I'm one of the elite, with second and thirdlevel education and room in my life to take an interest in these things. I dare say that at least one third of the population of the country were none too clear until recently as to who exactly Michael Collins was.
For good or ill, the Neil Jordan film is going to constitute our first shared story of the foundation of this State. It is the first myth the details of which we will all have in common. Rich and poor, stupid and bright, all equal, under the great democratic dispensation of Hollywood.
A lively girl I was talking to doesn't want to go to Michael Collins. She had a difference with her boyfriend about booking for it. "Ah for God's sake, not on a Saturday night," she said to him. "It's too educational."
This same girl, however, is actively looking forward to Jane Austen's Emma starting on the television. "We did it in school," she enthused, "and I just loved it." The boyfriend will also be brought to the Gwyneth Paltrow film whether he considers it educational or not.
Yet Emma, too, instructs. It is about the necessity of apprehending the reality of other people, just as centrally as Schindler's Ark is, if on an utterly different scale. The domestic life as much as the large public life has its moral abysses.
I don't know when I've had a more thrilling moment inside a cinema than at Emma in London recently, when a whole audience of popcorn eating, Doe Marten wearing nose ringed young people gasped - literally gasped - at Emma's rudeness to Miss Bates at the picnic on Box Hill. I thought rudeness as a bad thing had died out. I thought the modern world was too indelicate to care about the wound to a boring old spinster's pride which is the moral point on which the novel Emma turns.
But it turns out that those fundamental touchstones are still in place.
AS WORLD cinema becomes more and more resourceful and inclusive and mature, it is forming a huge lake of race memory, dammed up behind us, irrigating the inner life of the people of the planet and uniting them in the nearest they have to a shared universe of sentiment.
And this has somehow to do with the materiality of the medium of film and video, and of how it is distributed to the individual, and of how encountering a film or a video never makes the individual consumer less self respectful.
Even a complex and subtle work - like Henry James's Portrait of a Lady - which is just about to come here and I'm holding my breath till I see it is toughened enough to be scrutinised by the world, once it is made (the word "made" is important) into a film. Yet none of this applies to live theatre.
In Dublin at the moment, having just finished with a version of an 18th century play, another 18th century play is on at the Abbey, and if that were to go on happening it wouldn't feel right. Isn't theatre at best the innovative art - the one whose intuitions lead a culture forward? Whereas film retrenches: it is conservative, massive.
It is engorging at the moment stories from many of the great novels in English. Their return to us in sound and vision is making a community of us, just as their first readers were a community. In the mid 19th century in the slums of England, when most people were illiterate, the one local person who could would read that month's episode of a Dickens serial to the others, gathered around a candle.
With film - now we can all read.