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

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

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"

(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"

(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)

(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.) 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)

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.

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.

If I Had a Million Dollars...

A member of the VICTORIA listserv just brought this to our attention:

GREAT EXPECTATIONS – DICKENS’ WRITING DESK AND CHAIR TO BE OFFERED AT CHRISTIE’S IN JUNE WITH PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL

Yes, it's the set seen in this famous engraving "The Empty Chair." Christie's expects the set to go for L50,000-L80-000.

A Very Merry Dickensian Christmas To All!

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

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?

Dickens and "The Limitations of Anguished Humanism"

(Expanded version.)

Here's some context for the post I quoted on Friday from The Sharp Side. The discussion begins with a piece in The Guardian by Ronan Bennett criticizing "Islamophobic" statements by Martin Amis and broadening into a more general indictment of hostile expressions and actions towards Muslims, particularly by "writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism." Towards the end of the piece, Bennett asks how novelists have behaved in this context, and he recalls the essays Ian McEwan wrote for The Guardian immediately after 9/11:

Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote on these pages: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality." As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan's formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one direction, the anger in another. I can't help feeling that Amis's remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.

And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

(McEwan's essays can be found here and here.) The Sharp Side posted a response that pointed to "the limitations of anguished humanism" the author sees in responses such as McEwan's:

McEwan’s brand of compassion is oddly reminiscent of George Eliot’s. Her solution to working-class unrest was a change in the human heart. Instead of nonsense like trade unions and an 8 hour day, she advocated that everyone should just be nicer to each other. Compassionate understanding – not social equality.

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity.” According to McEwan, this is the novelist’s gift. And who was better at imagining a whole cast of characters than Charles Dickens? And what happened when the Indian mutiny broke out? Did Dickens use his prodigious imaginative gifts to understand why there was resistance to the British occupation of India? He certainly dreamed of being Commander in Chief of the British army of occupation. In this role, he assured his dear friend Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the [Indian] Race” and “with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution…blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.”

This is the post remarked by This Space, who concludes "Again, Kafka is proved right to recognise "a heartlessness behind [Dickens'] sentimentally overflowing style". Then came the longer "indictment" of Dickens at The Sharp Side, which has since followed up with further contextual information; follow-up discussion can also be found here.

I wanted to at least begin sorting out my thoughts on this exchange. There are a number of issues mingling in these discussions, probably the least interesting of which (from a literary standpoint) is the biographical question of Dickens's racist / imperialist views. One question is how far admiration of writers' work commits someone to admiration of the writers personally--or, coming at it from the other direction, whether distaste for a writer's character (personality, values, politics, etc.) ought to affect our estimation of his or her work. (Do we also wonder whether whole-hearted endorsement of writers' values or politics ought to motivate us to value their literary productions especially highly? I think we allow, in such cases, for plenty of "yes, but..." responses.) A further question is whether writers' work inevitably (if not explicitly) reflects or reproduces their stated values, so that if we learn something distasteful about a writer, we should re-examine our understanding of their work expecting to find traces of that quality. If Dickens was racist, is it inevitable that his works are, in some way, also racist? Do we--must we--read them differently once this biographical aspect is known? Does an indictment of Dickens's ideology lead us towards an indictment of his fiction? The initial Sharp Side post suggests that the answer is yes: that the stance of "anguished humanism" attributed to his novels is inevitably a flawed or inadequate attitude, as we should expect from someone who could express "genocidal" sentiments. So the biographical criticism is meant to affect our literary criticism (at least insofar as that criticism is political).

Not wholly 'by the way,' I think the above account of George Eliot's "compassion" is not just reductive but inaccurate. "A change in the human heart" is not a bad summary of Dickens's proposed solution to class conflict, but GE (while admittedly a skeptic about rapid social transformation by way of mechanical devices such as suffrage--see Felix Holt, for instance) has much more complicated and demanding views on sympathy. She is certainly one of those who believe fiction can (and should) help us "imagin[e] what it is like to be someone other than [ourselves]," though. From "The Natural History of German life":

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

Perhaps it is helpful to consider that this sympathetic imagination of others is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for morality ("raw material," as GE says). This essay also contains her well-known criticism of Dickens for the "transcendent unreality" of some of his representations, which limit, she argues, his contribution to the "awakening of social sympathies." The two of them can't be quite so simply lumped together.

Addendum: I think bloggers need a code that indicates something like 'had I but world enough and time'--it would be at least as useful as LOL, at least for academic types. But HIBWEAT is unwieldy... suggestions welcome. In any event, I do want to add some bits and pieces to what I've been able to post so far. The questions Sharp's post provokes are not new ones, of course, but they continue to be difficult ones, and (HIBWEAT) I think it would be worth working through them more patiently with reference to some of the thoughtful contributions made by those working at the intersection of literature and ethics or moral philosophy. (The discussion would also bring in the question recently raised at A Comfortable Place about why, if we can no longer be sure that the humanities "improve us," we should continue to study them.) In Philosophy and Literature a few years back, for instance, there was a piece by Richard Posner called "Against Ethical Criticism" (21:1, 1997); it was followed by responses from Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, and then Posner's reply (22:2, 1998). Among the topics they debated were the relevance of an "author's moral qualities or opinions" to our "valuations of their works" (they basically agree that no, it should not--which, for what it's worth, seemed to be the consensus in my afternoon class today when I asked whether it changed their view of Dickens's novels to learn of his "genocidal" views). Here's Booth, right on topic:

Should the moral qualities of the flesh-and-blood author affect our evaluation of any work? For example, should a brilliant story celebrating the triumph of compassion be dismissed when we discover that the author actually beats his wife? Should my judgment of the literary worth of the novels by the Marquis de Sade be determined by learning that he committed atrociously sadistic acts, or, in the opposite direction, that Sade could behave generously, however rarely?

I hope we would all answer "no." Moralistic criticism that answers "yes" is dangerous. Authors whose daily behavior is scandalous can compose stories of wondrous moral richness, sometimes actually realizing, as Samuel Johnson liked to insist, their own genuine ethical aspirations better than they ever do in "real life." As he says, "a man writes much better than he lives." I love living with the Tolstoy I meet in his novels. But I would certainly not want to live with the man that his mistreated wife had to live with. Does this view of the man change my judgments of War and Peace? Absolutely not. On the other hand, a perfect angel might write a tale exhibiting every conceivable fault, including a lot of ethical balderdash. ("Why Banning Ethical Criticism is a Serious Mistake")

Readers who can't reconcile their readerly experience of Dickens via his novels with revelations about his personal prejudices can be helped out with Booth's idea of the "implied author": "the full engagement is with the chooser, the molder, the shaper" of the story--"it is that chooser who constitutes the full ethos of any work" and Booth argues (persuasively, I think) that it is "that chooser" with whose ethics we must engage. Of course, the question of whether Dickens's novels are morally admirable or objectionable begins, not ends, here. Both Booth and Nussbaum provide extensive examples of how we might pursue such an ethical inquiry through attentive reading of literary form, while Posner defends a version of aestheticism according to which "the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature" ("Against Ethical Criticism"). (Interested readers will find Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction a particularly rich and engaging source of ideas and questions.) This cluster of essays also includes discussion of what Nussbaum calls "the empathetic torturer" and the "bad-litterati" arguments, including the example raised at A Comfortable Place of the art-and-music-loving-Nazis. I think among the most salient points to be made in this context is that there are ways and ways of reading (and listening). Here's a sound-bite from Nussbaum to indicate how such an argument might get going: "reading can only have the good effects we claim for it if one reads with immersion, not just as a painful duty." Both she and Booth are great advocates of the reader's responsibility to give the story "a fair chance": "only after such an effort to understand should we engage in overstanding" (Booth). "I am not aware," Nussbaum also notes--a bit deadpan?--"that Nazis were great readers of Dickens"--thus returning us more or less to where we began, and certainly running me out of time for tonight.

Further Addendum: Finally, HIBWEAT, I think the next step, and the one that perhaps goes to the heart of Sharp's criticism (I don't know the character of the blog well enough to be sure, but the Dickens posts certainly point in this direction), is to consider some arguments against the idea that humanism itself is an inadequate literary or moral stance. After all, the post points to the "limitations of anguished humanism" and then uses Dickens as an example of that theory apparently running up against its inherent limitations. Included in this discussion would be critiques of literary criticism that, like Booth's and Nussbaum's, is itself essentially humanistic (though terms would need to be defined, historicized, etc.). As this post is already too long for almost any blog reader to make it to the end (see previous discussions about the limitations of the blogosphere...), I'll just say that it does not go without saying that humanism has lost all credibility. Interesting sources on what a modern, theoretically-aware critical humanism would involve include Richard Freadman and Seamus Miller's Re-Thinking Theory: A Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and an Alternative Account, Daniel R. Schwarz, The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller, and Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. It's not that the arguments of these (and other related) books are conclusive; it's just that it often seems too readily assumed that once you've named Arnold and Leavis as the elder statesmen of literary humanism, you've killed it off as a viable option.

I hope it's obvious that the point here is not to defend Dickens the man but to complicate the moves that people might make from feeling "shocked and utterly appalled" at learning he said such things to feeling that this negative judgment automatically extends to his novels. Maybe most readers would (like my students) shrug off that suggestion. I hope so. The thing is, most people who would say something like "I love Dickens" really mean they love what they experience as readers of his novels. Unless that experience is itself somehow caught up in his "genocidal" views, those people have nothing to worry about, and the test of that possibility is in re-reading the novels. For the record, then, I love Dickens...though I don't agree that Great Expectations is his greatest novel. This year anyway, my vote is for Bleak House. And if anyone is still reading, I think we've proved that we can use a blog for something fairly sustained after all.

"Indicting Charles Dickens"?

From The Sharp Side, a post "indicting Charles Dickens":

This Space is shocked to learn that Dickens was an advocate of genocide. In fact the novelist’s wish to see Indians wiped from the face of earth was perfectly consistent with his lifelong racism. In his massive Dickens biography Peter Ackroyd acknowledges but softens the relevant material (just as Ackroyd’s biography of Sir Thomas More passes lightly over the astonishing reality that More imprisoned and brutalised religious dissidents at his Chelsea home).

It’s interesting just how much the sentimental popular image of Dickens is at variance with the realities of his life. When the standard biographical introduction to the Penguin English Library editions of Dickens’ novels used to assert of his wife Kate that she was ‘a shadowy, slow person’ who ‘had never suited his exuberant temperament very well’ it simply reproduced the version which Dickens orchestrated in his lifetime. He fathered ten children on her but she was never really his type. Just how effectively Dickens controlled his public image is revealed in Claire Tomalin’s illuminating and entertaining investigation of his secret life.

What should most concern us now, of course, are Dickens’s crimes against literature. His use of exclamation marks, say – scattered like sugar across the marzipan treats of anagnorisis and peripeteia. Worst of all, perhaps, is what he did to his finest novel, Great Expectations. Here, the whimsy and the sentiment are held back and Dickens delivers a dark, troubling study of delusion and obsession. But when his friend the hack bestseller writer Edward Bulwer Lytton deplored the unhappy ending, Dickens rushed to make amends. In place of the bleak and desolating original, Dickens substituted a trite romantic coincidence and the serene reassurance of closure. Of this cop-out new ending he wrote, ‘I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.’

I don't have time for an extended response (maybe on the weekend, though my 'must get done' list is terribly long!). But, just quickly on the issue of "crimes against literature," I will just say that I think the revised ending of Great Expectations offers only the most ambiguous promise of 'closure,' and its tone and imagery seem to me to improve on the fairly blunt, abrupt first try.

This Week in My Classes

The warm-up period is over: now we're really getting down to work.

1. English 3032, 19thC Novel. This week, we start Great Expectations. In addition to placing the novel in the context of Dickens's career and a range of social and intellectual issues (from the alienation induced by modern urban professional society, to anxieties about the moral implications of Darwinism), I like to focus on Pip's retrospective narration and the ways his personal development prepares him, ultimately, to become the kind of man (especially the kind of "gentleman") who is capable of telling us this story. Great Expectations is also good for shaking up casually-held stereotypes about Victorian 'realism,' as from Pip's palindromic name to Miss Havisham's wedding feast to Wemmick's castle to Magwitch's splendidly eerie reappearance, nearly every element in the novel pressures us to read it literarily rather than mimetically. Plus, there's Joe's hat falling off the mantel in Volume II Chapter 8...

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers. Here, we are taking one more look at the 'real' life of a Victorian woman novelist before turning our attention to the novels themselves. But with Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, we have the added interest of one Victorian woman writer writing about another, and in the process exploring the ideas of femininity, authorship, vocation, and duty that preoccupied them both, though in different ways, throughout their writing careers. Last week we considered Margaret Oliphant's writing her own story in response to a literary representation of George Eliot's life (she points to Cross's biography as having prompted her to begin the Autobiography). But Oliphant has been reading Gaskell's Life of CB as well, so as we read on, we are accumulating a range of interrelated ideas about these women and their work--from them and from their respondents, interpreters, and critics--to carry forward with us into our analysis of the fiction they produced. In class we struggled somewhat with the idea of Oliphant's Autobiography as a literary text because at times both its form and its content seem so unselfconscious, spontaneous, and diary-like that we weren't confident attributing intent or design (though we also considered, of course, that it has literary qualities and other effects regardless of how deliberately they were developed). Gaskell's biography of Bronte is much more conspicuously constructed with its own aims and purposes. Critics have disputed how far Gaskell's stated goals--such as defending Bronte against her critics and presenting a sympathetic portrait of someone we are often reminded was Gaskell's "dear friend"--are sincere or unproblematic and how much she is using Bronte as a prop to establish her own literary credentials or to resolve larger debates about the "vexed question of sex" in authorship, as she calls it (she is emphatic that whatever their domestic responsibilities, women also have a duty to use their God-given talents, even if that means stepping outside the 'normal' bounds of female propriety). I expect we will have some good discussion along these lines. Reading The Life of Charlotte Bronte right after Oliphant's Autobiography should also prompt some conversation about their very different views and experiences of being women writers.

What does a novelist do for us?

Partly prompted by a recent debate in the comments section of Bookninja over Yann Martel's recent challenge to the Prime Minister (which led some contributors to the site to debate the importance of literature)--and partly just by my own interest in the question, here's an excerpt from an essay by Leslie Stephen called "The Moral Element in Literature" that I have been editing for the anthology I'm working on. Stephen is considering, among other things, why (in his opinion) novelists fail aesthetically when they write too much "with a purpose." Such efforts as, to use his example, Dickens's attack on government bureaucracy by way of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit "implies a confusion of function," he suggests. And yet "if a poet should not have the same purpose as the politician or the economist," the conclusion is "certainly not that he should have no purpose. To have no purpose is simply not to be a reasoning being." So if poets or novelists should have no direct practical aim or purpose, or not seek to prove particular theories about the world, what can they do for us? Here's part of Stephen's answer:

He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof--if it be a proof--has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.

Elegantly put. But how close is Stephen coming here to James's idea of being "one of those on whom nothing is lost"? The emphasis on perception over action (currently very trendy in ethical/philosophical approaches to literature) leaves me dissatisfied, for reasons I have discussed in some of my academic writing. Still, Stephen does suggest a role for the novel in the world, albeit an indirect one. After all, if we never changed our views of life, we would never seek to change our, or others', experience of it.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

In addition to the reasons laid out in the introduction to this blog (see left), I wanted to try writing up informal notes on my reading because of my ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the kind of writing about books I am expected to do professionally, namely literary criticism. Although I believe that literary criticism has its own kind of interest and value, as an avid reader I often find it frustrating and bizarre when the conversation about a book becomes remote in both form and feeling from the conversation I think the book itself is supposed to be a part of. My own area of academic expertise, for example, is the Victorian novel, and if any one quality could be said to be typical of so many books so widely varying in subject and style, it would be a sense of engagement with the world--not that they aspire to represent it mimetically (any reader of Victorian fiction knows there is nothing naive about what often gets called its 'realism'), but that these books challenge their readers to think and care about all aspects of social, political, economic, and romantic life. "Dear reader!" Dickens concludes his polemical anti-Utilitarian novel Hard Times. "It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be!" And of course his "Let them be!" is a call to action, not to complacency or passivity: let the world be the way you and I can imagine it to be, better, more just, more loving, more humane. But current literary criticism communicates little of this urgency, and none of Dickens's humour, or, as he would have it, fancy.

My concern is not so much that literary criticism is often written in difficult, obscure prose (after all, every specialization requires its own jargon)--although I have finally achieved the courage and professional security to adopt Nick Hornby's poetry-reading philosophy for my own reading of criticism and theory ("If something doesn't give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is "F--k it" [p. 91, my polite hyphens]). My objection is more that we have distanced ourselves so completely from ordinary conversation about books that we have become irrelevant to all readers but ourselves. Of course, there are some exceptions, academics who have produced the textual equivalents of cross-over albums. But most of us know that when we write and publish even our most supposedly ground-breaking article, it is destined straight for the dustbin of other scholars' footnotes. Most of us are presumably OK with this result, or there would be a revolution. Or perhaps the necessity of publishing such material to secure and keep our jobs and our professional credibility drives doubts away. But Dickens, to stick with my example (not least because he is one of Hornby's favourite examples as well), certainly hoped his words had more life in them than that.

All this is by way of saying that I wanted to experiment a little with writing in a different way about books, a way that would reflect my experience of reading them and thinking about them in a more immediate, personal way than academic writing allows without letting go altogether of the analytic habits built up by years of professional training. Surely there can be an informed, educated conversation about literature that allows, for one thing, for judgment, for values, for affect, for liking and disliking. And, of course, there is such a conversation--indeed, there are many such conversations today, just not in the pages of academic journals. One contribution that I have just finished re-reading is Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree.

I first read sections of this book last year, when a graduate student passed it on to me thinking (rightly) that I would enjoy Hornby's infatuation with David Copperfield (thanks, El!). Since I began thinking about alternatives to academic criticism, partly through my work on 19th-century literary reviewing, I have begun looking for examples of contemporary writing about books that achieves something like the balance I am interested in between analysis and immediacy, and going back to Hornby's collection this week, I think he gets fairly close. Unlike those in Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time, for example, which I am reading now, Hornby's commentaries, though engagingly personal and idiosyncratic, focus primarily on the books and not on himself. He attends to questions of craft, though my academic side wishes he would introduce some technical terms here and there for greater precision, and he thinks about the books in terms of the means they use to their ends while still considering also the value of those goals. For all his breezy style, he has a knack for summary judgments, as when, after recounting a particularly horrific detail from a rape scene in Pete Dexter's Train, he objects that it seemed to have happened "through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability" (97). For me, the great charm of this collection is its combination of these moments of intense literary and moral scrutiny with irreverence and humour. Who says you can't be both serious and funny? I loved his idea of the "Cultural Fantasy Boxing League" in which, he supposes, "books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. 'The Magic Flute' v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six..." (58). Of course!

But Hornby really won me over when he articulated what I think book lovers everywhere feel: the extent to which our own libraries are extensions or reflections of our identities. This is why we recoil from well-intentioned and practical advice to 'clear some space' on our existing bookshelves to make room for new purchases! "I suddenly had a little epiphany," he says, as he files away some volumes: "all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. . . . with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not" (125).

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

White Teeth

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, which seemed as generous and humane as I expected from its reviews, and from the comments of other readers I had talked to about it. On the other hand, though I have heard the term 'Dickensian' applied to it--perhaps because of its length, and the diversity and eccentricity of its cast of characters--White Teeth struck me as more worthy of the 'loose baggy monster' epithet than such genuine Dickensian candidates as Bleak House or Little Dorrit. Where was the unifying pattern, whether of plot, imagery, or idea? Compare the climactic (?) shooting incident near the end of White Teeth with Krook's spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, for example. While the former was high in drama and yet somehow comic, and while it brought elements of the story around to a kind of neat circularity, the latter (despite being entirely outrageous in realist terms, despite Dickens's famous defense of it) is much more richly emblematic of the social and moral crises of its novel. Though I would not have expected to say quite this about Dickens, his is by far the more compelling moment aesthetically as well as intellectually.