Bleak House: Reacquiring the Taste

Some very excellent flavors...after sopme reconsideration.

INTRODUCTION

This is very sad to say, but I almost skipped over Bleak House to move on to Madame Bovary in the Nabokov sequence, because for many years…I harbored something of a distaste for Charles Dickens. Yes, you can be shocked now. How can a student of British Literature, nineteenth-century British Literature at that, not like Dickens? This post alone might get me expelled from Chicago before I even start. But let me explain how I fell out of love with the man…then fell right back in.

When I was in elementary school and first began reading the Western Canon, I devoured Dickens. Today, I still remember reading David Copperfield and Oliver Twist over and over again, as well as A Tale of Two Cities and a short, obscure novel called A Christmas Carol. Dickens's stories were the literary equivalent of riding the Thunderbolt at Kennywood, filled with plot and vivid imagery and outlandish characters, with a few jolts along the way but always a happy ending…or, in the case of Tale of Two Cities, an uplifting one at least. But after the most Dickensian romp I had yet encountered, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, I did not pick up any of his novels for the entire run of my Emerson career and almost my entire stay in Los Angeles. There were two reasons for this…

First, more than any other writer, Dickens oversaturated me. Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol are so ubiquitous in the culture (the former is the only Victorian novel to be the basis for a Best Picture-winning movie, while Henry Winkler, Mr. Magoo, the Muppets, and 50% of all TV sitcoms and children's shows have done variations of the latter) that hardly a month went by without my encountering Dickens in some way, shape, or form. No writer living today makes such an impact, not even Roberts or Meyer. But being constantly exposed to him made it that much harder to want to read one of his books. Heller, Lessing, and O'Hara do not have that quality. They are writers you DISCOVER with the thrill of the new. Second, the more enthralled I grew with Victorian literature, the less enamored I became with Dickens…comparisons with every other writer whose works I read made me judge his oeuvre as terribly melodramatic, rambling, overstuffed tales filled by people with no relation to reality. Trollope (who parodied Dickens in The Warden) wrote stories with just as much plot and emotion, but with a realism I had rarely encountered. Eliot drew her characters with the most subtle but vigorous brushstrokes I had ever found…she created people I could have met on the streets of Boardman and Boston. And even Thackeray, writer of the most brilliant satire of all time, succeeded in part because his comic excess was tempered with strong doses of reality. And so I dismissed Charles Dickens as a writer who certainly and deservedly had a reputation, but was almost as overrated as Salinger.

Slowly but surely, my opinion began to change. Daniel J. Boorstin's essay on Dickens in The Creators portrayed a man with wit, passion, and a burning desire for political and social reform. Sir David Lean's extraordinary 1946 film of Great Expectations gave me a renewed appreciation for the Dickens style. Finally, my increased literary pursuits led me to discover another side of Dickens, the later Dickens, his life dominated by many children, a devoted but illicit love affair, and ambitions to match or surpass the works which had already made him a legend in his own time with novels full of humor, sentiment, and biting, angry criticism of his times. Bleak House was judged the best of these, so one day I bought it on clearance from B&N…but didn't read it. Then Nabokov gave the order and I began.

At first I really liked it. Then I hated it…the over-the-top melodrama seemed to be taking over again. But a few chapters later, everything came together with the sureness and beauty of sperm fertilizing egg…and it was like a peanut butter-and-bubble gum mixture glued it to my hands.

Bleak House is amazing. It tells multiple stories and blends them together with logic and surprise. It is funny to the point of inducing laughter in public. It is emotionally manipulative, but also inspires genuine empathy for the characters. And behind all the comedy, romance, suspense, and action, it is an angry book which mounts an all-out assault on EVERY SOCIAL INSTITUTION KNOWN TO MAN. This is NOT an exaggeration. Charles Dickens in 1852-53 had his eye on so much which plagues us in 2009-10.

Moreover, in terms of Nabokovian Structure and Style and Eagleton's Rhetorical Theory, Bleak House is a case study for the ages. As I shall explain at the appropriate time, the narrative discourse is one of the most intricate and thought-provoking ever created by any writer, so much that just writing this sentence is enough to boggle my mind at its implications again...and I hope anyone who has ever experienced the interaction between Charles Dickens and Esther Summerson will agree.

In short, I now adore the titan of the century again, to the point where there is now much more I am anxious to read, Little Dorrit, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Our Mutual Friend most of all.

At the very beginning of his lecture, Vladimir Nabokov said that with Jane Austen, you have to make "a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room," while with Charles Dickens, "we remain at the table with our tawny port." That was it for me exactly. The first time my Uncle Tom ever gave me port at a Thanksgiving dinner, it knocked me out cold. Drinking too much still will lead me to intoxication of the worst kind. But when approached with the right attitude and temperament, port is a drink to savor, enjoy, and revitalize the body. You just need to acquire the right taste in time.