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"We are now ready to tackle Dickens." Nabokov's very first sentence bears mention. In a way, Dickens has to be struggled with. The good reader must do a special kind of suspension of disbelief where all the ideas and sentiments are pure reality, but the story and characters outlandish. And there is SO MUCH of everything. I could argue Dickens is harder than Tolstoy, who for his verbosity keeps a consistent tone and Style.
"Personally I dislike porcelain and the minor arts, but I have often forced myself to see some bit of precious translucent china through the eyes of an expert and have discovered a vicarious bliss in the process." Following the comment about the port, Nabokov makes this enticing comment worth getting a little drunk on. His metaphor for moving from the studied fun of Mansfield Park to the all-out carnival ride of Bleak House has wisdom for all literary students. It is nearly impossible to like every book there is, as the Cervantes devotee may have little use for Milton, the Shakespearean may detest Brecht, the lover of James come to blows with the defender of Updike, etc. But if we are approaching a book with a passionate guide to take us along, or make the effort to see a novel we despise through another's eyes (although this will negate or at least distort our personal response to the text, which is dangerous, as it defeats the purpose of literature…thus we must, in these cases, take the double-consciousness of the classroom debate between master and students, or the relationship of historian and participant, to keep our own heart and mind engaged and growing), then we can foster an appreciation for what we had previously dismissed. And the more different literatures we absorb, the better we will be able to understand all literature. I'd say we need a bit of vicarious bliss every now and then.
Mansfield Park is a new look at old values, but Bleak House deals with new values. In between Austen and Dickens came the stretch of 1815-1830, a time which Paul Johnson aptly called in the same-titled book the birth of the modern. Mansfield Park is the work of a novelist sensing modernity coming and trying to preserve the traditions and ideals which she had known, which her family had kept as an institution for decades, believing only this could stem the threats of the outside world. Bleak House deals with a world transformed by the Industrial Revolution, the railroad, increased diplomacy, and more and more democracy where the lower classes were beginning to have as much say as the aristocracy. Radical change always brings new modes of living while keeping the old. What Dickens shares with Austen is a belief in the enduring affections and compassions humans have for each other, for this is what tips the scales in Dickens's world, where the changing of society carries side effects good and bad. England may grow economically mightier and more globally powerful, and use these forces to help build a peaceful world where diplomacy is reached for before war, but this comes at the cost of the lower classes being oppressed by urban tyranny. Everyone is getting a little more of the rights to which they are entitled, but an inability to keep from infringing on others' rights, or agree just how far rights should go, results in situations such as those taking place in the nightmare of Chancery. And most of all, while people attempt to behave with the same gentility and morality as Austen's characters, in a mere forty years so much happens in terms of class-mingling and permissibility that no one knows the rules anymore and they have to muddle through to create the rules. Worse, sometimes the rules don't change fast enough, creating the psychological stranglehold on people like Lady Dedlock.
This idea of "new values" may help explain the staying power of Charles Dickens. He was present at an epochal change in the way humanity was organized, sensed it like the smart man he was, and wrote stories which launched assaults galore on the worst excesses and failures of the experiments…and argued for how he felt humans should seize the opportunity for change. Dickens welcomed the new, as long as the new was carried out with sense and empathy. All of civilization was undergoing reform in the name of advancement and progress, but though these are lofty aspirations, they also give birth to immoderate children like the iPhone. Dickens wanted people to act with true purpose and true love, and in Bleak House, this is exactly how the heroes act, and the worst characters have no good purpose or take a good purpose and, using the mechanics of social change gone awry, twist the purposes to useless ends.
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"The romantic plot of the novel is an illusion and is not of much artistic importance. There are better things in the book then the sad case of Lady Dedlock." There are, and the sense of how much Dickens preferred all the other goings-on in Bleak House to what is ostensibly (by merit of narrative time at least) the main plot of the story can be found in how I almost put the book down after around twenty chapters because I was sure I knew exactly how the story would end…and proved to be about 75% correct! This is mainly because Esther carries the main plot in her narrative, while Dickens, dry, biting, witty, critical Dickens, so greater than passive, retiring Esther, gets most of the fun bits. However, Dickens narrates key portions of the Dedlock story, so my personal feeling is a combination of the aforementioned reason and that Dickens saw the plot as an afterthought, a stage-melodramatic bit of business easy to write (And probably fun as well…how much do we enjoy sometimes spilling purple prose all over our parchment?) which, with its similarity to other "lost orphan" plots such as he'd used in Oliver Twist, would hook fans and casual readers and novices alike to get them to the meat of his social portrait of England. There are worse ways to make your point then to spin a tearjerker of a story around it. (In this sense, Dickens is similar to perennial chart-topper Jodi Picoult, whose novels mix tales not out of place in romance and chick-lit with social issues, though Picoult, ambitious as she is, concentrates on one issue at a time. The world may not be presently equipped for Dickens-strength tackling.)
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