Dickens, Charles

This Week in My Classes (October 5, 2009): It’s Sensational!

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In 19th-Century British Fiction, we’re wrapping up our discussions of Great Expectations this week. I’ve written before about teaching this novel. Here’s a bit from that post, in which I focus on Pip’s moving speech to Estella after he learns Magwitch is his true benefactor and Estella, though she “cannot choose but remain part of [his] character, part of the little good in [him], part of the evil,” is not destined for him after all:

Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

I’ve been thinking even more this time about the “risks” Dickens takes, his excesses of both language and imagination. They press us so far beyond the realistic, in almost any sense of that elusive term. Take Miss Havisham, for instance. There’s really no excuse for Miss Havisham: to be confronted with her is to be challenged to forget plausibility–to abandon, not just suspend, disbelief. Less a woman than a grotesque embodied symbol of life without love, a kind of moral and emotional zombie, she is also a key agent of the plot, with completely commonplace control over money and property. What kind of undead figure has its own lawyer? So she exists in a strange liminal zone between human and inhuman, until woken to her own tragedy, and the tragedy she has spawned in Estella (“I am what you have made me!”) by witnessing Pip’s suffering:

‘What have I done! What have I done!’ She wrong her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. ‘What have I done!’

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will reverse that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equallywell. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Miss Havisham cannot survive this ordeal by moral revelation, which, in truly Dickensian fashion, leads to a literal conflagration of the “rottenness” and “ugly things” that made up her perverted identity. Pip’s ability to feel compassion for this creature who has captured and ruined his own best hopes and feelings is one of the signs that he is on his way to being, not the Pip who turned his back on Joe, but the Pip who has the ethical sensibility to narrate Great Expectations.

In Victorian Sensations, we’ve finished with The Woman in White and are nearly done with Lady Audley’s Secret. When I wrote about this novel before (in the context of a different course), I remarked, “It is always a bit discouraging to me how popular this novel is with my students, full as it is of cheap tricks and thoughtless language.” My feelings are a bit more complicated this time. Lady Audley’s Secret is certainly in the category of ‘novels I teach largely for reasons other than their overt literary merit’: even acknowledging the difficulty of defining that quality with any specificity, I do chafe at the excesses of Braddon’s writing–they aren’t the imaginative or linguistic excesses of Dickens but the novelistic equivalent of using a lot of exclamation points or TYPING IN ALL CAPS in an email. “We get it!” I want to say (no doubt, of course, many readers feel the same about Dickens). Here’s a sample, for instance, from a conversation between Our Hero, Robert Audley, and his BFF George Talboys. Robert has recently convinced George to come and visit Audley Court to meet his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, and his pretty, young, golden-haired new wife. George has been feeling melancholy since learning that his pretty golden-haired wife died (hmmmm) just before his return from three years in Australia.

‘I’m not a romantic man, Bob,’ he would say sometimes, ‘and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me since my wife’s death, that I am like a man standing upon a long low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon with with a great noise and a might impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding towards me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end.’

As Miley Cyrus might say, d’ya think something bad might lie in his future? And is it just me, or is it hard to maintain literary decorum with a hero named ‘Bob,’ as in this immortal line, “‘I trust in your noble heart, Bob'”?!

And yet there are sections of this novel that are as good as most others I’ve read. In particular, this time through, I was struck by how effectively Braddon evokes the psychological restlessness, even instability, of Lady Audley as she waits for what she hopes (or possible, just a little, fears) is the news of Robert’s death. Spoiler alert: she has double-locked his door at the inn and then set the place on fire, and we get this striking image as she leaves the scene of the crime:

Sir Michael’s wife walked towards the house in which her husband slept, with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

It’s a nice touch to identify her by the status she has risked so much to achieve, but also to hint, with the “blackness” ahead of her, that despite the devastation she has now wrought, her future contains nothing “but the blackness of the night.” Then follows a long chapter of waiting, a damp listless day with no outlet for Lady Audley’s energies by “to wander up and down [the] monotonous pathway” in the courtyard of her luxurious home. The day ekes itself out:

Sir Michael’s wife [again, nice] still lingered in the quadrangle; still waited for those tidings which were so long coming.

It was nearly dark. The blue mists of evening had slowly risen from the ground. The flat meadows were filled with a grey vapour, and a stranger might have fancied Audley Court a castle on the margin of a sea. [This image ominously echoes Robert Audley’s earlier dream of Audley Court ‘rooted up . . . standing bare and unprotected . . . threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea, whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved.’] Under the archway the shadows of fast-coming night lurked darkly; like traitors waiting for an opportunity to glide stealthily into the quadrangle. [Again, this image harkens back to an earlier one, in which the history of Audley Court is associated with secrets and conspiracies. Traitors to what, we might ask at this point?] Through the archway a patch of cold blue sky glimmered faintly, streaked by one line of lurid crimson, and lighted by the dim glitter of one wintry-looking star. [In Robert’s dream, the only stars are those in the eyes of ‘my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. See how completely this very suspenseful moment builds on images and ideas from earlier in the novel?] Not a creature was stirring in the qudrangle but the restless woman, who paced up and down the straight pathways [ones she has, metaphorically, strayed from quite a bit by this point!], listening for a footstep, whose coming was to strike terror to her soul. She heard it at last!–a footstep in the avenue upon the other side of the archway. But was it the footstep?

To find out whose footstep it was, you’ll have to read the book yourself! My point here is that this seems to me very effective writing–effective, that is, as a means to its end, which is suspense, to be sure (and if we are too easily dismissive of plot when we make up the terms for ‘literary merit,’ what, if any, room do we make for suspense?) but also the elaboration of a range of images, symbols, and ideas–that Lady Audley’s very presence on those “straight pathways,” for instance, represents a catastrophe for the ‘house’ of Audley. This section also effectively complicates the previously two-dimensional morality of the novel: the anxious activity of Lady Audley shows her to be more than “just” a villain, no matter how resolutely Robert seeks to contain her in that role. An actress, an infiltrator, a subversively ambitious woman who will not stop at anything to keep the gains she has made–but still capable of feeling “terror” in her soul as she awaits confirmation of her crime. Shortly, she will also give an account of her life and motives that forces the reader (if not necessarily her audience within ‘story space’) to entertain the possibility that she acts in self defense, or at least, like Becky Sharp (an obvious progenitor), she is simply using the limited means available to her, as a woman in a profoundly patriarchal world, to get–and stay–ahead. It’s provocative stuff, and entertaining, and if it’s inconsistently crafted (and, as I tend to think, inconclusively ‘argued’), it succeeds at what it seems to set out to do. I suppose that’s one definition of ‘well-written.’ Indeed, that’s George Henry Lewes’s definition: he describes Jane Austen as the “greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”

And that idea of “mastery over the means to her end” brings me to something I hope to write more specifically about soon, namely, how fast I think we (should) move, when the question of “literary merit” comes up, from the aesthetic to the ethical. Even supposing we could arrive at some resilient definition of good writing, it would have to (I think) make something like Lewes’s dodge here from the suggestion of universality implied in “mastery” to the issue of writing suited to a particular “means.” That’s why we can call both Dickens and Ian McEwan “good” (accomplished, skilfull, successful) writers. But at some point in that discussion, the question surely arises: how do we judge the ends? As Orwell famously said, “the first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up”:

If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman [well, OK, that makes me uncomfortable, though he does go on to suggest this book burning may be a mental, rather than a literal, result]. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

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I think there is a contradiction in my response to this book, one I’m not sure yet how to resolve. Why do I feel–how can I justifiably feel–that the novel conveyed very powerfully to me an experience wholly unlike my own, that is, the experience of suspense, deprivation, and, ultimately, horror, of the young narrator, Matilda, and yet find so unconvincing the novel’s central premise, that is, that Matilda and her comrades on ‘Bougainville’ could find Great Expectations so thoroughly engrossing–because everything about it is so alien to their own situation and experiences? I believed in the role “Mister Dickens” played in the story only at the level of allegory or fable. Perhaps that’s appropriate: perhaps Great Expectations plays the part in this novel that I thought opera did in Bel Canto, standing for artistic possibilities, here narrative rather than musical but still representative rather than particular: the ability of one voice to reach across time and place, to speak, to summon up other worlds, to express identity even when nothing else is left to believe in. But then Great Expectations is such a very specific choice: why use this book to do this job?

Is it simply that Jones really does consider Dickens “the inimitable,” the ultimate storyteller, and Great Expectations his masterpiece–and so what better book to stand for all the possibilities of the novelist’s art? And yet Mister Pip is not reverential towards Dickens’s novel, for all its alusive dependency, as the “original” text is constantly rewritten, especially as Mr. Watts plays Sheherezade to the audience of islanders and “rambos” and weaves together Great Expectations with his own life story and the combined wisdom of the village:

This wasn’t Mr. Watts’ story we were hearing at all. It wasn’t his or Grace’s story. It was a made-up story to which we’d all contributed. Mr. Watts was shining our experience of the world back at us. We had no mirrors. These things and anything else that might have said something about who we were and what we believed had been thrown onto the bonfire. I have come to think that Mr. Watts was giving back something of ourselves in the shape of a story.

So Great Expectations is the vehicle, or the occasion, or maybe the example, for other stories: a model for the ways words can create, express, and convey identity. Pip’s first-person narration is one formally crucial aspect for Jones’s purposes, I think, not just because Pip speaks so distinctively for himself, in his own voice, but because he speaks retrospectively. This technique gives the novel much of its power, as we hear young Pip’s story refracted through the much greater wisdom of his matured self–matured, crucially, into a novelist, so that much of what Great Expectations is about (like David Copperfield, too, of course) is the process of dawning self-reflection that enables morality–which depends so vitally on recognizing the reality of other selves or voices than your own. So Matilda, too, matures into the narrator of her own book. I admit I was a bit disappointed by the metafictional turn (“I took the top sheet of paper from ‘Dickens’ Orphans,’ [her thesis], turned it over, and wrote, ‘Everyone called him Pop Eye.'” Yes, that’s the first sentence of Mister Pip). Not only has this been done kind of a lot, but it felt like an awkward shift of register for the novel, as in fact did the whole last section after Matilda leaves the island. Again like Bel Canto, the novel seemed to lack the courage of its conviction, particularly about the magic of art. Why take us from the artifice (as I saw it) of the earlier parts, which (like Bel Canto) offer a fable pitting human creativity against violence and destruction, and then retroactively frame it as realistic? (This is not to say that Jones hasn’t evoked horrors that are, tragically, only too real, but he seems to have extracted their essence for his purposes here–this is not a novel about a particular civil conflict but about the degeneration of warring factions into “redskins” and “rambos,” symbols of inhumanity countered by the frail and all-too-human Mr. Watts, also surely a symbol more than a man.) Although of course the confusion may be mine, I think Jones is struggling with the genre of his book. Or perhaps it is Matilda struggling with the genre of hers. She says she has become disenchanted with the “grotesque” qualities of Dickens’s characters and tried in her own narrative “not to embellish.” She believes that behind their “masks” you can find”what their creator understood about the human soul and all its suffering and vanity.” But stripping away Dickens’s grotesque embellishments diminishes his art in the (supposed) interest of credibility–and isn’t his language itself his greatest contribution to the flourishing of “fancy” and thus humanity?

And so I still find myself asking (with Matilda’s friends, as it turns out) “Why Dickens?” and why this Dickens in particular. Jones, by way of Matilda, does bring out some thematic echoes–orphans, leaving home, losing or remaking or finding one’s identity. Most moving for me was what Jones does with the idea of the “gentleman”: this begins in Mister Pip, as it does for Pip, as a seemingly superficial dedication to good manners but develops through Mr. Watts and then Matilda’s mother into a commitment to a profoundly simple but far-reaching (and ultimately devastating) principle: “to be human is to be moral, and you cannot have a day off when it suits.” Pip eventually comes to something like this realization when he looks on the dying criminal Magwitch and sees in him “a much better man than [he] had been to Joe.”

Chime in on “The Chimes”

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(x-posted)

To be honest, “The Chimes” has left me a bit at a loss, and so I’m looking forward to hearing reactions from others. My biggest confusion was over Trotty himself: what did he do to deserve these terrible visions of deprivation and depravity, and what is he supposed to do about them? His sin appears to be his loss of faith in humanity:

‘Unnatural and cruel!’ Toby cried. ‘Unnatural and cruel! None but people who were bad at heart, born bad, who had no business on the earth, could do such deeds. It’s too true, all I’ve heard to-day; too just, too full of proof. We’re Bad!’

He has to learn to blame nurture, rather than nature:

‘I know that we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.’

But because he’s really such a kindly fellow himself, and so powerless that his error can hardly do any damage, while his redemption can hardly do any good, he seems a far more artificial device for this re-education project than Scrooge does. The story’s didacticism, in other words, seemed to overpower its aesthetic conception and thus blunted its emotional effects: it was always already about me (and you), not about Trotty, and unpleasantly so, as the underlying assumption about me (and you) is that we will blame and despise desperate mothers who make their terrible way towards the river to take “the dreadful plunge.”* In short, I didn’t like it that much overall.

Still, it’s Dickens, and he can’t help being brilliant, at least fitfully. My favourite bit was definitely the opening of the third quarter–yes, the bit with the goblins:

He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking down upon him, from the massive iron–girded beams; peeping in upon him, through the chinks and loopholes in the walls; spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water ripples give way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them. He saw them, of all aspects and all shapes. He saw them ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl. He saw the air thick with them. He saw them come and go, incessantly. He saw them riding downward, soaring upward, sailing off afar, perching near at hand, all restless and all violently active. Stone, and brick, and slate, and tile, became transparent to him as to them. He saw them IN the houses, busy at the sleepers’ beds. He saw them soothing people in their dreams; he saw them beating them with knotted whips; he saw them yelling in their ears; he saw them playing softest music on their pillows; he saw them cheering some with the songs of birds and the perfume of flowers; he saw them flashing awful faces on the troubled rest of others, from enchanted mirrors which they carried in their hands.

He saw these creatures, not only among sleeping men but waking also, active in pursuits irreconcilable with one another, and possessing or assuming natures the most opposite. He saw one buckling on innumerable wings to increase his speed; another loading himself with chains and weights, to retard his. He saw some putting the hands of clocks forward, some putting the hands of clocks backward, some endeavouring to stop the clock entirely. He saw them representing, here a marriage ceremony, there a funeral; in this chamber an election, in that a ball he saw, everywhere, restless and untiring motion.

OK, help me out: is “The Chimes” better than I think? What struck you most about it?

*A much better example of a ‘fallen woman’ story, just btw, is Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh.”

Ring in the Holidays with “The Chimes”

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(cross-posted)

It’s that time of year again–you know, the time for “paying bills without money,” for “finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer,” and, of course, for re-reading A Christmas Carol. But wait: we all know (or think we know) A Christmas Carol. What about Dickens’s other Christmas stories? I’ve actually never read them, and I’d like to. I thought I’d start with “The Chimes,” which is short and appears, promisingly, to involve goblins. It’s easily available in electronic editions (here and here, for instance); some contextual information and the illustrations are available here. At The Valve, I’ve proposed a miniature version of the Adam Bede project we did in the summer. I’ll post a reminder there in a week or so, and then somewhere around December 19 or 20, post a few comments and/or questions and see who comes to the party. If you think the story will go down easier with a little “Smoking Bishop,” here’s the recipe. Everyone’s invited; bring a friend! Or post on your own blog and we’ll make a decorative blog-link chain.

This Week in My Classes (November 14, 2008)

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(cross-posted, slightly expanded, at The Valve)

This is a great week for me because in both of my classes I am teaching books I am really passionate about. In Introduction to Prose and Fiction, we have started Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in 19th-Century Fiction, we are just finishing up Bleak House. It’s hard to imagine books more stylistically different: Dickens offers a teeming overabundance of words, characters, and plots, while Ishiguro at once models and thematizes restraint and understatement. Yet both are immensely moving and humane; their artistry is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, and their beauties are at once aesthetic and ethical. If, as Leslie Stephen said, we “measure the worth of a book by the worth of the friend it reveals to [us],” both offer us companionship of an inspiring kind. Wayne Booth proposes we consider what “kind of desirer” we become if we cooperate with the implied author of a text: “Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might well pursue together?” The best literary “friends” are identified by “the irresistable invitation they extend to live during these moments a richer and fuller life than I could manage on my own.” (All quotations from from Booth’s The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, the only critical work I’ve read in a decade or more that I know has had a profound impact on how I imagine and articulate the task of criticism.) ions */ @font-face {font-family:”Bookman Old Style”; panose-1:2 5 6 4 5 5 5 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Bookman Old Style”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;=By these standards, I think both The Remains of the Day and Bleak House are among the very best.

Still, the devil is always in the details. So here’s what I tried to get done this week.

In Intro to Prose and Fiction, the topic today was first-person narration–again, since we have already spent two classes talking about that. A major interest of mine is helping them work with the concept of unreliability so that they can talk about it with some precision. For instance, it is important to control the urge, once you recognize that a narrator is not altogether to be trusted, to assume that you can’t believe anything they say and can just speculate wildly about what really happens. Point A: there is no “really happens”–there’s only what’s in the novel. Point B: unreliability works as a fictional device because there are limits to it. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, we believe in the basic elements of the story: there is a house, there is a husband, there is a room with hideous patterned wallpaper. What we don’t believe is that there are women trapped in the wallpaper, or crawling in the garden, etc. I’m fascinated by the artistic feat of presenting two (at least) very different versions of one story with just one set of words, so I usually spend a lot of time on this issue. More specifically, we have been talking about Stevens’s ‘butlerspeak’ and how the tone and diction of his language helps us understand his character, including its problems and limits. We have begun making connections between the inadequacy of his language for expressing the human qualities of his life and the inadequacy of his values more generally. We’ve watched some excerpts of an interview with Ishiguro in which he remarks that he had an idea, working on the book, that “most of us [are] butlers–politically, and morally, perhaps, too.” This idea about what it means to be a metaphorical butler will be important to our discussions next week, when we will have moved further along in the book.

In 19th-Century Fiction, we spent Monday’s class and part of Wednesday’s considering the novel’s two narrators–Bleak House is unique among Dickens’s novels (as far as I know, among Victorian novels) in dividing our attention in quite this way, and the dramatic differences between the prophetic sage-like voice of the 3rd-person narrator and Esther’s almost excessively self-effacing and evasive voice invite careful consideration about why both approaches are necessary to achieve the novel’s goals. (One theory we worked on: to solve the social problems he focuses on, you need both breadth of analysis and perspective, and depth–sensitivity to the personal implications.) On Wednesday I also talked about the theme of infection, about ways we can read Jo’s illness metaphorically, for instance, as a symptom of the broader spiritual disease Dickens sees plaguing his society. It’s illuminating to compare the depiction of poverty and social decay in a more literal novel, like Gaskell’s Mary Barton, to Dickens’s handling of Tom-All-Alone’s. It rapidly becomes clear that literal, material, social, or economic causes are not Dickens’s primary interest. Like his philosophical mentor (and the dedicatee of Hard Times), Thomas Carlyle, Dickens tends to present the tangible aspects of poverty as manifestations of an underlying spiritual malaise or failure–of human fellowship or compassion. We looked at the ‘Irish Widow’ excerpt from “Past and Present” and discussed the ways in which infection literalizes the premise of Bleak House that everything, and everyone, is connected, even if you can’t see or anticipate how.

For some reason, on this reading I found the work Dickens does with Sir Leicester especially moving. It’s interesting to consider that in his own way, Sir Leicester becomes a charity case in the novel, as much in need of our compassion and sympathy as Jo ever is, and deserving of them, too, because he proves capable of a moral transformation through love. Here are the affecting descriptions of him after the discovery of Lady Dedlock’s guilty secret:

Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though he were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted, rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems to stare at something.

Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.

It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced so well.

And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.

And just a bit later,

“My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall—having the full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see—no act I have done for her advantage and happiness.”

His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best–born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

Today, as we wrapped up our too-short time for the novel, I emphasized the importance of affect, pathos, and sentimentality in Dickens’s project of fiction as an agent of social reform. Though there are many respects in which I think Bleak House exemplifies self-contained aesthetic possibilities, in its formal structure and thematic coherence, its unifying metaphors, and so on, there’s no mistaking Dickens’s intention to shake us out of our complacence about the state of our world and our own responsibility for those who suffer. I can’t think of a novelist today who could do this and not sound ridiculous:

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

What makes this an impossible move today? Many things, I suppose, from the fragmentation of our sense of audience, or of readers (who is included in “you” or “us” these days?), to changing theories about the role of art in society. But for Dickens, there’s nothing inartistic about reaching out from his text in this way. His novels have nothing in common with the kind of literary artefacts meant to sit, like golden bowls on a mantlepiece, and be admired. At the end of Hard Times, he’s even more direct:

Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.

And here is where I feel the two novels I’m teaching converging. Both inspire reflections on how we might look at what remains of our own days and how we will judge our contributions to a wider world, as well as to ourselves.

This Week in My Classes (November 3, 2008)

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In my first-year class, we’re still working on short fiction. Today’s selection was “A Small Good Thing,” by Raymond Carver. One thing I enjoy about intro classes is the chance to dabble in material outside my usual range, and that certainly describes Carver. I find this particular story (the only one of his I really know besides “Cathedral”) very moving, and yet, as I was discussing with my class today, his conspicuously non-literary style makes the move from reading to interpretation initially difficult for me. By non-literary, what I mean is that he writes, with an almost flat affect, strings of fairly simple declarative sentences describing quite ordinary people and objects. It’s not immediately easy to get a purchase on what is important (beyond plot–which in “A Small Good Thing” is a strong factor, as the story turns on a couple of dramatic moments, including a car accident). Of course, what we realize is that the literary effect lies precisely in getting us to notice those ordinary people and objects, and seeing how they become infused with meaning or cease to be ordinary: a birthday cake, a bicycle, a car in a parking lot. I enjoyed reading through the material posted on the New York Times’s ‘featured author’ site for Carver, particularly Jay McInerney’s account of the rigor Carver brought to his teaching:

Though Ray was always encouraging, he could be rigorous if he knew criticism was welcome. Fortunate students had their stories subjected to the same process he employed on his own numerous drafts. Manuscripts came back thoroughly ventilated with Carver deletions, substitutions, question marks and chicken-scratch queries. I took one story back to him seven times; he must have spent 15 or 20 hours on it. He was a meticulous, obsessive line editor. One on one, in his office, he almost became a tough guy, his voice gradually swelling with conviction.

Once we spent some 10 or 15 minutes debating my use of the word ”earth.” Carver felt it had to be ”ground,” and he felt it was worth the trouble of talking it through. That one exchange was invaluable; I think of it constantly when I’m working. Carver himself used the same example later in an essay he wrote that year, in discussing the influence of his mentor, John Gardner. ”Ground is ground, he’d say, it means ground, dirt, that kind of stuff. But if you say ‘earth,’ that’s something else, that word has other ramifications.”

Wednesday it’s Alice Munro’s “The Found Boat” and Friday (for fun, before a long weekend), it’s Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat.” I always find teaching a unit on short fiction a disconcertingly miscellaneous experience, but one hope is that the variety suits the mix of constituencies inevitably present in a first-year class.

It’s still Bleak House in my 19th-century fiction class. In the last two meetings I’ve been working on ways to organize the overflow of information we get in the novel as new plots and characters tumble out relentlessly at every turn of the page. Last time, for instance, we worked on houses and families, with a particular interest in ways the idea of ‘housekeeping’ becomes a metaphor for national concerns as much as domestic ones and small acts like Jo’s sweeping the entry to the paupers’ graveyard become emblems of grace in a corrupt environment. Today we’ll turn from this ‘theme and variations’ approach to the novel’s detection plot, its pursuit of the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s connection to the mysterious law-writer ‘Nemo,’ which provides a strong forward momentum for the novel. We’ll talk about what’s at stake in the contest between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, about the relationship between knowledge and power, or evidence and control, and about sexuality and morality. If I can work it in, we’ll consider the role played by affect or emotion in directing our judgment in the novel. The strongest example will come with Jo’s death later on, but in the installment for today we have what we might consider the emotional case made for Lady Dedlock–for our compassion and forgiveness for her sexual fall:

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet–tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

“O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!”

Fog. Mud. Smoke. Soot. Gas. Fog.

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No, that’s not today’s prediction from Environment Canada (though there is something implacable about today’s weather, even if it’s not yet November). This week in one of my classes, it’s time for Bleak House–by comparison with which, nothing else I’m doing at work really matters. The introduction to our Oxford World’s Classics edition remarks that the opening ‘set piece’ is ‘too famous to need quotation.’ Well, I don’t know about that, especially because I consider it an aesthetic accomplishment self-sufficient enough to render critical commentary not just redundant, but irritating. Here are the first four paragraphs, then (three of them composed entirely, it’s worth noting, of sentence fragments).

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time–as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Sure, there’s plenty to be remarked about this passage, beginning with its literary virtuosity and metaphoric ingenuity. Dinosaurs and compound interest? Snowflakes in mourning? ‘Fog’ used 13 times in one paragraph? Gas that’s ‘haggard and unwilling’? I’m reduced to the exclamatory mode some critics objected to in James Wood’s How Fiction Works: “What a piece of writing that is!” It puts to shame other writers called ‘Dickensian’ for no apparent reason except that they write multiplot novels with quirky characters and lots of emotion. There’s also its extraordinary efficiency at launching both governing ideas and dominant images of the vast novel it introduces; fog, mud, and infection order the thinking of Bleak House as much as webs do the same for Middlemarch. But really, the point of this passage is just to read it, to experience it, and then to carry the impression of it with you as you read on. (Is this response ‘aesthetic’? I’m not sure, or at least I’m not sure I could separate my admiration for the literary features of this passage from my sense of its ethics–or, better, its ethos.)

Today I’ll give a brief introduction to Dickens and some context for the first publication of Bleak House. Then my chief concern is to help my students find some reading (and note-taking) strategies to make their experience of the novel rewarding, which means helping them organize the mass of material (and the array of characters) they will be rapidly confronted with. We’ll do some ‘getting to know you’ work first of all: who do we meet in each of the first few chapters, and how are they connected? I’ll encourage them to keep a list of characters in each plot or location and to draw lines between them as relationships are discovered. They will have a chaotic criss-cross of lines before too long, which of course is the point–everything and everyone is connected, as Dickens challenges us to realize with his disingenous questions in Chapter 16:

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of sunshine on him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

My other main strategy is to get them thinking in terms of themes and variations. Today, for instance, we’ll look at how many ways the idea of housekeeping is refracted across the different story lines. Finally (though this is certainly not my last priority) I will try to convey, and make contagious, my enthusiasm for Dickens’s language in the novel, and to get them thinking about how his literary strategies (including the kinds of wild metaphors we get in the first few paragraphs) are important to his conception of the ‘condition of England question,’ and to his answer to it.

A Very Merry Dickensian Christmas To All!

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There’s no avoiding the association of Dickens with Christmas festivity. Indeed, it’s about the best ‘press’ the Victorian period gets, so I figure we should make the most of it. With that in mind, here are some Dickensian links for the season.

First, the TLS has published the second installment of their “guided tour” to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:

Does his ecstasy have something of mania about it? Perhaps. And more than a little of evangelical conversion, surely – though only in the loosest sense. (The religious claims made for Carol, which relishes sensual glut, are overstressed.) Because, far from being reborn into that world of systematic moral conviction inhabited by the Murdstones, the Gradgrinds, or the Revd Chadband, Scrooge is on the contrary released into a profoundly happy uncertainty – “I don’t know anything!” – which describes reality rather well: that state of continuous creation and anticipation which we can call doubt, or hope, as we choose. I think, I am almost sure, that Dickens preferred the latter. (read the rest here; for Part I, see here)

Second, if you’ve got anyone who’s fond of Dickens on your gift list, a last-minute idea might be to head over here for a Dickens-themed e-card.

Third, the Guardian offers up Booze By Boz, including ‘smoking bishop’:

Smoking bishop
“‘A merry Christmas, Bob!’ said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. ‘A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!'” (A Christmas Carol)

5 oranges * 1 grapefruit * 1/4 lb sugar * 2 bottles red wine * 1 bottle ruby port * 30 cloves

Bake the oranges and grapefruit in the oven until they are pale brown and then put them into a warmed earthenware bowl with five cloves pricked into each. Add the sugar and pour in the wine. Then, either (i) cover and leave in a warm place for a day, or (ii) warm the mixture gently (do not boil) for about three hours. Squeeze the oranges and grapefruit into the wine and pour it through a sieve. Add the port and heat (again, don’t boil). Serve in warmed cups/glasses and drink hot.

And finally, Patrick Leary of the excellent VICTORIA list-serv sent us all this inspired excerpt from one of R. L. Stevenson’s letters, and I can’t resist passing it along:

“I wonder if you ever read Dickens’s Christmas Books? I have read only two of them yet, and I have cried my eyes out, and have a terrible time not to sob. But, 0 dear God, I feel so good after them, and would do anything to make the world a little better for people. I wish I could lose no time; I want to go out and comfort some one. I shall never listen to the nonsense they tell me about not giving money. I shall give money; not that I haven’t done so always, but I shall do it with a high hand now. Oh, what a jolly thing it is for a man to have written books like these books, and just filled people’s hearts with a desire to do good!”

A jolly thing indeed!

A Little Something Seasonal

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From the TLS, a “guided tour” of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:

The rapidity of construction shows in the story’s gappy psychology (why, one might ask, does Scrooge become a miser?), but it also permits a number of strokes of genius, which, aptly for a haunting, seem to loom quickly and then vanish with a laugh. One or two of these are just metaphorical phosphorescences, such as the “dismal light” of the knocker that has become Jacob Marley’s face, shining “like a bad lobster in a dark cellar”. But others seem to me to be good examples of a writer’s highly refined process of selection and discard working at an unconscious level. (read the rest here)

I agree that in A Christmas Carol, as in many of Dickens’s novels, there are “gappy” bits, but it does usually seem beside the point to fret over them, as his brilliance lies in other directions–or perhaps, as this piece suggests, his brilliance lies precisely in the rapidity of his ideas and images. One of our festive treats is listening to the wonderful recording of Michael Bawtree, formerly director of drama at Acadia University, reading A Christmas Carol. To borrow from another Dickens moment, he “do” the ghosts in different voices; it’s a lovely version (but sadly, as far as we can tell, not commercially available, otherwise I’d link to it). This year we’ve also added the Muppet Christmas Carol to our stash of children’s movies. Not only is it fun and fairly true in both detail and spirit to the original, but it features all our friends from the old Muppet Show, including Kermit as Bob Cratchit and the crotchety guys from the balcony (what are their names, anyway?) as Jacob and (in a slight variation!) his brother Robert Marley (“It’s good to be heckling again! “It’s good to be doing anything again!”). We even get Gonzo as Dickens to provide intrusive commentary and a bit more besides: “Wait a minute: how did you know that?” “I told you, storytellers are omniscient; we know everything!” “Well, hoity-toity, Mr. God-like Smartypants!”). Who could resist?