One of these things is not like the other things...
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“In the imaginary battle of homo americus versus homo homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize.” Where Homer shows compassion and pathos, it is of a general sort in the way all emotions Homer uses take second place to “blood puddles and dung heaps on marble.” Nabokov goes on to praise the lasting immortality of Homer’s epics, but while I share his respect, the Iliad and Odyssey have never been works I could see myself re-reading unless absolutely necessary. Homeric heroes may be personifications of the warrior state and of great virtue, but honor, a quality I hold dear, is the only emotion which is allowed to take on a life of its own. Odysseus’s love for Penelope is an abstract sort…he appears more concerned with insuring the patriarchal succession of power than any deeper feelings for her. In the Iliad, the characters are as a rule petty, secretive, quarrelsome, and use women as pawns. Hence my preference for the Aeneid. Virgil writes a long, long poem with as much excitement, action, and manly philosophy in service to the nation, but the Carthaginian episodes and their aftermath rise to the sentimentality I and Nabokov esteem. The Homeric hero may cry, but I cannot picture Achilles or Odysseus crying as Aeneas does when Dido scornfully turns her back on him in the underworld, crying from lost passions and guilt.
“Don Quixote does interfere in the flogging of a child, but Don Quixote is a madman. Cervantes takes the cruel world in his stride, and there is always a belly laugh around the corner of the least pity.” Recall from my last post on Bleak House that empathy requires a mix of feeling and reason, the intellectual capacity to put yourself in the place of others. Don Quixote is a man who has lost intellectual capacity. In fact, the more I think about it, I see him as an analogue for the Homeric hero. In his chivalry obsession, he clings to an ideal of honor, but the world he wants to practice that honor in is no longer a warrior state. It is a state founded on emotional connections, structured civilization, and rules. Quixote transcends the rules in his single-minded pursuit of honor, which is heroic in its way, but it leaves him with no connection to the people around him, and thus may be a contributing factor to his madness by isolating him…Jane Smiley has pointed out how chastity is Quixote’s most unusual feature, separating him from the romantic subplots popping around the rest of the novel and which sometimes push him out of it. When Quixote is persuaded to drop his devotion to chivalry, he regains his sanity and his ability to relate to others, but at the cost of an individualism as pronounced in its way as that of Odysseus. To pull all this back to Bleak House, Quixote’s benevolence is not that of sentiment over a situation which Dickens would have mined a Sutter’s Mill of dramatic gold from but of an individualistic principle, and Cervantes’s novel on the whole does not shy away from pain and suffering but always will reveal the other side (the rejecting lover of the dead shepherd, for instance) or turn a scene to comedy; the work in totum becomes a metaphysical narrative joke by the time it’s over, anyway. This is great for an intellectual exercise and psychological development, but not for Dickensian emotion.
Esther’s choice of a maid. In a sharp observation not used in the lecture, Nabokov notices that Hortense, recognizing Esther’s goodness and generosity, offers her services to Esther after Lady Dedlock dismisses her. Instead, Esther accepts Charley as her maid, referring to her as a “sweet little shadow” at one point. Hortense would have cast her dark, greedy shadow over Bleak House, just as she will in great future-stereotypical noir fashion in the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn.
88
Skimpole urges Mr. Jarndyce to turn Jo out of the house and back to his natural state. When Jo is brought to Bleak House by Esther and Charley after finding him ill, Skimpole insists he be cast out as a sick (and therefore extra-resource-using) creature. In his apathetic view of the world, Skimpole sees people scraping by in the gutters of London every day and chooses to ignore them, give them a bit of pocket money to ease any conscience pangs, and let them die as they live. Jo, for all his disadvantages and lack of book-smarts, is one of the ideal Dickens children: kind, respectful, honest, eager to help out, needing love and capable of stirring love in the hearts of Dickens’s heroes. He is more of a human than Skimpole ever will be.
89
When Mr. Jarndyce, Esther, and Ada visit Skimpole’s home, he compares himself to a caged bird whose wife and daughters (the Beauty, Sentiment, and Comedy daughters) pluck his wings but he keeps on singing. But through this setting and his sustained abilities with metaphor and thought, we realize Skimpole cannot be caged since he has so many friends he can sponge off, and no one with a “child’s mind” would talk like him and adopt such a knowing-yet-cavalier attitude toward his family. Skimpole is a fraud, and his childishness is the dominant part of that fraud. Nabokov called his course “a kind of detective investigation into the mystery of literary structures,” and the house and the daughters represent an apex of the Skimpole structure. Dickens has let us hear Skimpole too much and grow accustomed to him, so when he reclines in his house of “shabby luxury,” shows off his cleverly-named daughters, and still calls himself a “caged bird” (in contrast to the caged birds of Chancery, who are actually trapped—VN again), we realize the two parts of the picture do not go together at all. Skimpole is far too clever to be a child, and he has none of the positive attributes of the real children of the story. In one innocuous, joking paragraph, Skimpole’s danger strikes us with the force of fifty lightning bolts.
“A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” Poetic and true. For much of my reading life I was a customs official who absorbed the story and distinctive features of books but never took the time to reason WHY they had an affect on me, why I wanted to keep reading. There was a point I would have read Bleak House with impatience, skipping over parts which would have bored the old me (probably Lady Dedlock) to get to what I wanted to read. Now, I would only do that if the book is amateurish, and even then probably with the further caveat of the book being assigned. In a good novel, every aspect fits together just as it should, and we can never know what it means to us and to the world until we carefully link up all the words and sentences, understand their relations. The novel is like a Monet painting. Every word/sentence/chapter/paragraph a brushstroke with its own beauty. We look at them up close. Then we step back, order them together with both logic and emotion, and see the beautiful whole.
“In the imaginary battle of homo americus versus homo homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize.” Where Homer shows compassion and pathos, it is of a general sort in the way all emotions Homer uses take second place to “blood puddles and dung heaps on marble.” Nabokov goes on to praise the lasting immortality of Homer’s epics, but while I share his respect, the Iliad and Odyssey have never been works I could see myself re-reading unless absolutely necessary. Homeric heroes may be personifications of the warrior state and of great virtue, but honor, a quality I hold dear, is the only emotion which is allowed to take on a life of its own. Odysseus’s love for Penelope is an abstract sort…he appears more concerned with insuring the patriarchal succession of power than any deeper feelings for her. In the Iliad, the characters are as a rule petty, secretive, quarrelsome, and use women as pawns. Hence my preference for the Aeneid. Virgil writes a long, long poem with as much excitement, action, and manly philosophy in service to the nation, but the Carthaginian episodes and their aftermath rise to the sentimentality I and Nabokov esteem. The Homeric hero may cry, but I cannot picture Achilles or Odysseus crying as Aeneas does when Dido scornfully turns her back on him in the underworld, crying from lost passions and guilt.
“Don Quixote does interfere in the flogging of a child, but Don Quixote is a madman. Cervantes takes the cruel world in his stride, and there is always a belly laugh around the corner of the least pity.” Recall from my last post on Bleak House that empathy requires a mix of feeling and reason, the intellectual capacity to put yourself in the place of others. Don Quixote is a man who has lost intellectual capacity. In fact, the more I think about it, I see him as an analogue for the Homeric hero. In his chivalry obsession, he clings to an ideal of honor, but the world he wants to practice that honor in is no longer a warrior state. It is a state founded on emotional connections, structured civilization, and rules. Quixote transcends the rules in his single-minded pursuit of honor, which is heroic in its way, but it leaves him with no connection to the people around him, and thus may be a contributing factor to his madness by isolating him…Jane Smiley has pointed out how chastity is Quixote’s most unusual feature, separating him from the romantic subplots popping around the rest of the novel and which sometimes push him out of it. When Quixote is persuaded to drop his devotion to chivalry, he regains his sanity and his ability to relate to others, but at the cost of an individualism as pronounced in its way as that of Odysseus. To pull all this back to Bleak House, Quixote’s benevolence is not that of sentiment over a situation which Dickens would have mined a Sutter’s Mill of dramatic gold from but of an individualistic principle, and Cervantes’s novel on the whole does not shy away from pain and suffering but always will reveal the other side (the rejecting lover of the dead shepherd, for instance) or turn a scene to comedy; the work in totum becomes a metaphysical narrative joke by the time it’s over, anyway. This is great for an intellectual exercise and psychological development, but not for Dickensian emotion.
Esther’s choice of a maid. In a sharp observation not used in the lecture, Nabokov notices that Hortense, recognizing Esther’s goodness and generosity, offers her services to Esther after Lady Dedlock dismisses her. Instead, Esther accepts Charley as her maid, referring to her as a “sweet little shadow” at one point. Hortense would have cast her dark, greedy shadow over Bleak House, just as she will in great future-stereotypical noir fashion in the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn.
88
Skimpole urges Mr. Jarndyce to turn Jo out of the house and back to his natural state. When Jo is brought to Bleak House by Esther and Charley after finding him ill, Skimpole insists he be cast out as a sick (and therefore extra-resource-using) creature. In his apathetic view of the world, Skimpole sees people scraping by in the gutters of London every day and chooses to ignore them, give them a bit of pocket money to ease any conscience pangs, and let them die as they live. Jo, for all his disadvantages and lack of book-smarts, is one of the ideal Dickens children: kind, respectful, honest, eager to help out, needing love and capable of stirring love in the hearts of Dickens’s heroes. He is more of a human than Skimpole ever will be.
89
When Mr. Jarndyce, Esther, and Ada visit Skimpole’s home, he compares himself to a caged bird whose wife and daughters (the Beauty, Sentiment, and Comedy daughters) pluck his wings but he keeps on singing. But through this setting and his sustained abilities with metaphor and thought, we realize Skimpole cannot be caged since he has so many friends he can sponge off, and no one with a “child’s mind” would talk like him and adopt such a knowing-yet-cavalier attitude toward his family. Skimpole is a fraud, and his childishness is the dominant part of that fraud. Nabokov called his course “a kind of detective investigation into the mystery of literary structures,” and the house and the daughters represent an apex of the Skimpole structure. Dickens has let us hear Skimpole too much and grow accustomed to him, so when he reclines in his house of “shabby luxury,” shows off his cleverly-named daughters, and still calls himself a “caged bird” (in contrast to the caged birds of Chancery, who are actually trapped—VN again), we realize the two parts of the picture do not go together at all. Skimpole is far too clever to be a child, and he has none of the positive attributes of the real children of the story. In one innocuous, joking paragraph, Skimpole’s danger strikes us with the force of fifty lightning bolts.
“A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” Poetic and true. For much of my reading life I was a customs official who absorbed the story and distinctive features of books but never took the time to reason WHY they had an affect on me, why I wanted to keep reading. There was a point I would have read Bleak House with impatience, skipping over parts which would have bored the old me (probably Lady Dedlock) to get to what I wanted to read. Now, I would only do that if the book is amateurish, and even then probably with the further caveat of the book being assigned. In a good novel, every aspect fits together just as it should, and we can never know what it means to us and to the world until we carefully link up all the words and sentences, understand their relations. The novel is like a Monet painting. Every word/sentence/chapter/paragraph a brushstroke with its own beauty. We look at them up close. Then we step back, order them together with both logic and emotion, and see the beautiful whole.
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