The Reading Experience

Behold the Man

The most important argument James Shapiro makes in his book Contested Will is not that the author of Shakespeare's plays and poems is William Shakespeare (the "Stratford man")--anyone who honestly examines both the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship and the evidence for all of the rival candidates (most notably the Earl of Oxford) can only conclude there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare--but that the whole controversy over authorship has arisen because of the assumption held by so many people that a writer's work is a reflection, direct or indirect, of that writer's life.

Of course, the work is a reflection of the life, in the trivial sense that writers have only their life experiences (including what they've read or imagined) to lean on in producing the work, but the assumption goes farther than this: Events in the work recapitulate events in the life, social circumstances determine both manner and matter. Writers don't just write from their lives, they write about it, and the work can't escape its biographical influences. Once this logic is generally accepted (as Shapiro demonstrates it did under the dominance of Romanticism), it almost becomes inevitable that the "facts" of Shakespeare's life, so mundane as they generally are, become irreconcilable with the extraordinary occurrences in the plays and with the great verbal facility manifest there and in the sonnets. The poorly educated glover's son from Stratford, whose experiences apparently extended no farther than this provincial town and the London theaters, could never have written the great work attributed to him. As Shapiro puts it,

The extent to which so much that now gets written is autobiographical can easily alter the expectations we bring to all kinds of imaginative writing. We now assume that novels necessarily reveal something about a writer's life. . .At the same time, many literary biographies are supplanting the fictional works they are meant to illuminate, to the point where Ariel and The Bell Jar struggle to find a readership that books about Sylvia Plath's suicide now command. In such a climate, it's hard not to assume that literary works--of the past no less than of the present--are inescapably autobiographical.

This has been a blessing for those who deny Shakespeare's authorship, whose claims stand or fall on the core belief that literature is, and always has been, autobiographical. . . .

Thus, the authorship "controversy" is a fiction dreamed up out of a suspicion of fiction the creation of which would seem to be the writer's first task.

If anything, the distorting effects of the belief that fiction is just autobiography slightly altered are even more widespread than Shapiro suggests. Not only are biographies making claims on readers' time that would more appropriately be spent on the subjects' work, but biography has become about the only writing about literature to be reviewed in print book review sections, and, coupled with the focus in academic criticism on sociology and culture, is really the only kind of literature-centered commentary available to interested readers. New biographies are lauded or dismissed according to their capacity to explain "how he did it"--as if appreciating the process of literary creation is more important than appreciating the creation itself. Even this is just a barely disguised desire for a more elevated form of gossip, which is finally and unavoidably the stock-in-trade of all biography and almost always emerges as the contribution a biography makes to the "understanding" of its subject.

That this fascination with the life lived by the author over the purely literary implications of the work can be traced to the rise of Romanticism surely can't mean that Romanticism itself is responsible for the reduction of literature to an illustration of autobiography, recoverable through the research of the biographer. Although Shapiro convincingly maintains that the notion of reading autobiography into an author's work was alien to the literary culture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it's hard to believe that audiences had no interest in the personal details of playwrights' or poets' lives, that the drama-filled life of, say, Christopher Marlowe attracted no attention. Curiosity about other people's lives (real people, not just the "people" depicted in literary works) must surely be a long-standing and universal human characteristic.

But while fiction and drama exploit this curiosity by depicting the lives of imagined people, it is apparently difficult to convince all readers that the integrity of narrative art depends on granting the imagination a free rein. Presumptions that the novelist or dramatist is "really" writing about some real person, including possibly himself, betrays either a distrust in the imagination, a suspicion it promises more than it can deliver, or outright disdain for it as the foundation of literary narrative. This explains the current infatuation with memoir among American readers (and the increase in writers willing to provide it) and the dogged persistence of the Shakespeare deniers. Of course, not all readers who delight in the disguises of the roman a clef or thrill to the juicy memoir are going to be led by their preferences to doubt that Shakespeare among all writers had a vigorous imagination, but the authorship controversy is of a piece with the more general impatience with the transformative role of imagination.

Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly, given his background as a New Historicist), one of the readers who seems skeptical of Shakespeare's imagination is the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 2004 book, Will in the World, attempts to fashion a biography of Shakespeare by attending closely to echoes and suggestions in the work. Greenblatt's knowledge of Shakespeare, his times, and his plays, is immense, but he unfortunately deploys that knowledge to reinforce connections between the life and the work. Shapiro writes of Will in the World that it

gave [the autobiographical thesis] the seal of approval of the leading American Shakespearean of the day. Greenblatt admits straightaway that 'the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare's life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.' Rather that consider what historical developments gave rise to this conviction, he focuses instead on how firsthand experience can be retrieved from Shakespeare's surviving works, allowing extraordinary access into the poet's desires and anxieties.

I think Shapiro is being rather reticent in criticizing Greenblatt's project. In trying to show that the work actually does confirm Shakespeare's experiences as its source, he only winds up giving support to the assumptions that made the authorship controversy possible. Greenblatt too underestimates the reach of imagination. Why couldn't the primary thing Shakespeare "knew firsthand" be the capabilities of his own imagination? Why couldn't "body and soul" simply be the springs of that imagination? Why isn't this enough?

 

Earthbound and Conventional

Vladimir Nabokov, from Lectures on Russian Literature:

My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me--namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one--with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. . . .

. . .All the humiliation and hardships he endured [in prison] are described in detail [in Memoirs from the House of Death], as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoevski had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. It is only natural that some of the convicts among whom he lived showed, besides dreadful bestiality, an occasional human trait. Dostoevski gathered these manifestations and built upon them a kind of very artificial and completely pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk. This was the initial step on his consecutive spiritual road. . . .

. . .His attitude toward the Government had completely changed since the days of his youthful radicalism. "Greek-Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and the cult of Russian nationalism," these three props on which stood the reactionary political slavophilism were his political faith. The theories of socialism and Western liberalism became for him the embodiments of Western contamination and of satanic sin bent upon the destruction of a Slavic and Greek-Catholic world. It is the same attitude that ones sees in Fascism or in Communism--universal salvation. . . .

. . .Dostoevski never really got over the influence which the mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence supplied that kind of conflict he liked--placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. When after his return from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen--the idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defence of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-antichrist Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-Russia on the other--when these ideas. . .suffused his novels, much of the Western influence still remained, and one is tempted to say that in a way Dostoevski, who so hated the West, was the most European of the Russian writers. . . .

. . .Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity--all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place." Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoevski the Prophet. . . .

. . .It is, as in all Dostoevski's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal--all the worlds of writers are unreal--but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . .

I disagree with Nabokov only in that I've searched in vain for the "excellent humor."

Asserting the Truth

A.N. Wilson on Dostoevsky (as examined in Rowan Williams's new book on the Russian writer):

. . .In the conclusion to his book, Williams makes the striking claim that the fusion of incompatibilities in which so much of Dostoevsky’s work consists, creates something comparable to the traditions of icon-painting.

It is this fusion of a surrender to the claims of an independent truth and a surrender to the actual risks and uncertainties of asserting this truth in word and action that makes the entire enterprise of spiritual – and specifically Christian – life one that is marked by the decentring and critique of the unexamined self. What is so distinctive about Dostoevsky’s narrative art is that he not only gives us narratives in which this difficult fusion is enacted; he also embodies the fusion in his narrative method, in the practice of his writing, risking the ambitious claim that the writing of fiction can itself be a sort of icon.

This seems right to me, and is precisely the reason why Dostoevsky is, in my opinion, such a terrible writer. He's a religious dogmatist and a reactionary conservative who uses fiction as, in Wilson's words, "demonstrations of the areas which have to be explored if one is to make sense of any of the great questions of philosophical theology." Unsurprisingly, most of Dostevsky's novels tell us that, once we've "explored" these areas, we would be well advised to become. . .religious dogmatists and reactionary conservatives.

It is incomprehensible to me that so many readers and critics have fallen for Dostoevsky's cheap tricks (and endured the unrelenting tedium of his fiction) and declared him an "existentialist" or religious "seeker" or some other such rot. Wilson's account of Dostoevsky the journalist--the "hectoring satirist, the bombastic nationalist, the predictable anti-Semite"--has always seemed to me a perfectly obvious description of Dostoevsky the novelist as well.

One People

Richard Jenkyns believes that, although a "canon" of literary works is necessary in providing us with a stock of appropriate "shared references," such a canon does not have to be exlusively "high cultural."

It is surely vain to suppose that poorly educated and disaffected young Asians can be brought to a stronger sense of belonging in Britain by a diet of Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms. The truth is that shared references and resonances mostly need to evolve naturally, that most of them derive from popular culture, and that many of them are like family jokes. Television has had enormous power as a unifier; this power is now declining with the proliferation of channels and new media, but in their time Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one people.

The obvious flaw in this argument comes from that "in their time." The accomplishments of Morecambe and Wise notwithstanding, the ultimate point of a canon is that it includes "shared references" that are timeless, not merely of unifying value in a particular historical era. Unless future generations will likely value Morecambe and Wise as much as those "in their time" did (although, who knows, maybe they will), there seems little point in enshrining them in a "canon," which will only come to seem as much an imposition on the tastes of those later generations as Milton and Wordsworth.

(I'd love to see Monty Python's Flying Circus become canonical, but something tells me that 50 years from now not everyone will find the show quite as bracingly funny as I did when first exposed to it in the mid-1970s. To in effect insist that it is that funny by enshrining it in a canon would not accomplish much.)

Jenkyns correctly locates the origin of our notions of a canon in the deliberations of the Church over which Biblical texts deserved its official sanction, but he doesn't really much discuss the two primary purposes for which the concept of the canon has been adapted to secular culture: to help enhance "national greatness" and to create academic curricula. (Sometimes the two projects overlap.) A canon of great writers focuses attention on the cultural accomplishments a country can claim, the contributions it has made to "culture" and "literature" on a broader, global scale. (Thus, say, Great Britain can claim that "its" poetry is perhaps the greatest any nation has produced.) It also allows the academic study of literature to claim for itself a "subject" of study. "Literature" as a disembodied category of "great writing" is unsustainable as the foundation of a curriculum of study; a semi-official list of sufficiently great writers and texts to justify their inclusion in a prescribed set of courses is needed to give literary studies the status of a "discipline," the core elements of which students will be expected to master.

Because I've never been able to accept the asssumptions behind either of these impulses to canon-building, I've never invested much energy in defending the canon against its supposed enemies, those identified by Harold Bloom as the "School of Resentment." Although I agree with Bloom that much of the hostility directed at canonical writers is misplaced and counterproductive, I can't see that preserving the canon in its pre-Theory/Cultural Studies form is either possible or desirable. I have enough regard for most of the texts usually invoked as canonical that I think they will continue to attract readers without the need to place them in a pre-established heirarchy that only invites efforts to divest them of their privileged status, from whatever angle of skepticism or resentment.

Most of the efforts to "interrogate" the canon over the past two decades have not really questioned the need for heirarchy in organizing literary study. Indeed, the focus of much canon-busting has been on making room for other texts, sometimes on replacing existing canonical works with those deemed worthy for other than traditionally defined "literary" qualities. (In some cases, non-canonical works, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, were shown to have such qualities despite their previous neglect.) The canon was altered or reconceived, not abandoned. Canonization, it would seem, continues to be "socially useful," as Jenkyns explicitly puts it, while the idea of literature as something that mostly provides "shared references and resonances"--or at least should be made to do so--is further reinforced.

If all "great books" can do is allow us to resonate with one another, then I don't think finally abandoning the canon altogether would do much harm. It might do literature a great deal of good, if we can then more profitably think of reading it as a particular kind of experience the ultimate reward of which lies in the experience itself and can't be reduced to its political utility or its role in the academic curriculum. Jenkyns himself, in discussing the popularity of Jane Austen, convincingly maintains that literary works survive through a kind of bottom-up process whereby authors and books appeal over time through their "actual merits." This kind of informal canonization should be enough to keep the greatest books in circulation, while whatever "shared references" they also encourage are references that persist because they're really worth sharing.

Fixations

In last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin (who has, in my opinion, considerably improved this publication since taking it over several months ago) contributes a generally insightful review of the Library of America's collection of early Faulkner novels. However, in his conclusion, Ulin suggests that in Faulkner's fiction

The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it's a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner's genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist — his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation — the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action — becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That's an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of "Soldiers' Pay" to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In "Novels 1926-1929," we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.

That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism. Does this mean T.S. Eliot, a self-confessed classicist, was also no modernist? Has our definition of "modernist" evolved to the stage where it simply means "chaotic"? No work that moves through apparent disorder to achieve a different kind of order need apply to the "timeless" club? With modernists, nothing matters?

I'm pretty sure I don't at all understand what Ulin means to imply in asserting there is "orthodoxy" in the work of Joyce and Pound. That they are orthodox modernists? That they were thus too committed to the idea of originality, of "making it new"? This strikes me as a pretty bizarre notion. Is he suggesting that some other kind of political, cultural, or religious "orthodoxy" gets expressed in their work? That Pound had some thoroughly obnoxious political views is well known, but Joyce was surely one of the least ideological of writers. What Ulin is getting at remains to me mysterious, but at any rate his degree of orthodox whatever seems a pretty thin measure with which to separate William Faulkner from the other important modernists.

I have to say I find the claim that Faulkner "is not using language to play games" the most wildly mistaken assertion in this whole generally misleading summation. Faulkner at his best is full of game-playing. When Vardaman, the young illiterate Bundren in As I Lay Dying, narrates one of his sections of the book in hyper-fluent Faulknerese, most readers must find the device first of all hilariously funny and probably conclude it is an example, in part, of Faulkner indeed playing a game, having a little fun with the reader. (If this was not Faulkner's intent, it is certainly an effect of this section, one that only enhances the novel's appeal, at least for me.) Or to take The Sound and the Fury: Is not Benjy's chapter an example of verbal/rhetorical gamesmanship? We accept that it is an attempt to reproduce the thought process of a mentally handicapped character, but would Benjy's monologue really stand up to scrutiny as an accurate rendition of the way such a person thinks? I don't think so. It's a compelling illusion, created by Faulkner's skill with words.

The enabling assumption behind Ulin's effort to disentangle Faulkner from the modernist web seems to me to be expressed in the observation that his "stylistic innovation" is really just "a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived." In other words, if you ignore "the blurring of chronology, of memory and action"--the textual features of Faulkner's books that are otherwise their most notable achievements--he's really a perfectly conventional novelist. To give Ulin more credit, he probably means to say that Faulkner's innovations have a purpose, that they are alternative methods of making "art" out of "life," the latter being the subject held in common by all great writers, conventional or experimental. But can't the same thing can be said of Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, of all the modernist poets? Isn't modernism all about finding new ways of portraying an enduring human reality? Ulin's prejudice seems to be for fiction that "re-create[s] life as it is lived," but no writer is in the business of "re-creation of life." As I've insisted before, a novel is a construction of words, "artifice" by nature. No "life" is to be found anywhere within it, only words, sentences, paragraphs. Some writers want to convince you that their words evoke images of the world as we think we know it, summon up "characters" we can accept as like real people; the best of these writers do produce powerful illusions of this kind, but they are illusions, the strategies involved as artificial as any of those dismissed as less "three-dimensional." Faulkner is at times a writer like this, but his fiction always forces awareness of the way these images are produced, and it's hard to believe he didn't know this. Such self-awareness makes him a quintesstial modernist.

I have highlighted this passage from Ulin's review because it encourages a view of both modernism and postmodernism that distorts and devalues their aesthetic ambitions. This view makes precisely the distinction between "artifice" and "art" that Ulin thinks distinguishes Faulkner's lesser from his greater work. "Artifice" is about style or form, while "art" is about life. But how can any work of fiction or poetry be about anything but life? On what can a writer base his art other than his experience as a living human being? That some modernists/postmodernists are preoccupied with aesthetic questions is true enough, but why are these kinds of questions not considered properly "human"? Isn't the ability to formulate the concept of the aesthetic one of our defining features as a species? Presumably Ulin wants Faulkner's books to be sources of wisdom, while I want them to be sources of aesthetic delight. But I can see no reason why the former rather than the latter should be the deciding factor in judging a writer's work sufficiently "profound" to be art.

Life Records

According to Daniel Swift,

. . .It is often claimed that we know little about Shakespeare's life, but this is untrue. We have many life records. The picture they paint, however, is of a man we are unwilling to recognize. He was baptized and buried; he bought malt, houses and land; he sued people who owed him money, and he failed to pay his taxes; he gave legal testimony in a lawsuit over the financial settlement of a marriage, and his will is formulaic and businesslike. According to one seventeenth-century account, he was "not a company keeper," and when asked to a party, he excused himself with a headache. How did this money-worried little capitalist, who conducted his life in a flurry of land deeds and small business ventures, write Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet?. . . .

I confess I've never understood the supposed urgency of this question. All of the controversy about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays has been cooked up by people who don't want to think that an otherwise ordinary, even nondescript man from the provinces could have written what have turned out to be the most accomplished and compelling works of literature in the English language. Putting aside those who adopt such a view purely from class prejudice, what exactly is it about Shakespeare's character and circumstances that would have prevented him from becoming a great literary artist? To take the two plays Swift mentions: Why would it have been impossible for someone from Stratford, through an empathetic imagination and great feeling for language, to convey the inner torments of characters struggling against the constraints of family dysfunction and social convention, against the impositions of "outrageous fortune"? Hamlet in particular is almost entirely an internal drama; what advantages did his more externally eventful life provide Edward de Vere such that we would conclude he was more likely to portray this inner drama more adeptly than William Shakespeare?

So what that de Vere was "a warrior and a playboy; bisexual, promiscuous, generous, dashing; 'a brilliant and troubled man with whom one might enjoy sharing a beer but loathe sharing a house.'"? That he "spent a lot of money on clothes, and threw great parties"? That he "killed a man, by mistake, in a duel"? Even if one accepts that some of the events in Shakespeare's plays could have been taken from the life of someone like de Vere, to assume that de Vere must therefore have written them amounts to an account of literary art by which "Shakespeare's imagination becomes no more than a mechanism for reproducing biographical experience," as Swift himself puts it. We know that an insurance lawyer from Hartford, Connecticut wrote the great poems attributed to "Wallace Stevens." But will some clueless "scholar" four hundred years from now be claiming that the insurance lawyer could not have been the author of these poems, that they must have been written by, say, Errol Flynn?

Swift concludes that "If there is a lesson to be learned from the mismatch of Shakespeare's life and works, it is that we must clear a space for wonder." Presumably the "wonder" is that the "Stratford man" and "William Shakespeare" the playwright are one and the same, that Shakespeare is indeed Shakespeare. But why should this be a wonder? Surely the injunction that one must "live" in order to write does not mean that only warriors and playboys can be writers. It means only that the aspiring writer must pay attention, must learn from his/her experience no matter how mundane it might sometimes seem to be. If you think William Shakespeare could not have learned profound things about life from the apparently commonplace course his own life took--although the Elizabethan theater actually must have been rather uncommon--you don't have much appreciation for the vicissitudes of either life or literature.

Blind Alleys

Steve Mitchelmore quotes this passage from Reiner Stach’s biography of Kafka:

[Kafka] demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images, and concepts. Beginning with "The Judgement," he was generally able to achieve this unity in the stories he completed. These writings leave no narrative residues or blind alleys. Not one detail of Kafka’s descriptions, whether the color of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something, and recurs.

He then asks: "Curiously, one might compare this with the detective novel. So why do I loathe that kind of book?"

I'd volunteer this answer: For the most part, detective novels create a "seamless linking" that's meant to point us forward, to the solving of the crime. "Motifs, images, and concepts" are the means to an end, interlocking parts to a puzzle that is finally assembled in its entirety, only to then be disregarded except insofar as it gives us a finished picture--mystery resolved.

Kafka's fiction evokes a unity that points only to itself, to its existence as an aesthetic creation. Kafka directs us not to the resolution of his metaphysical mysteries but to the impossibility of such a resolution. His "motifs, images, and concepts" are ends in themselves, interlocking parts of a puzzle the signficance of which lies in the process of their assembly, not in the finished picture, which can never be brought quite into focus.

Detective novels explore guilt--the specific guilt of specific characters in specific circumstances. Crimes have been committed. Kafka's fiction also explores guilt--the guilt of being alive, of feeling one's existence cannot be justified and will never measure up. Crimes have been committed before we were born, but we must pay for them nevertheless.

Once a detective novel has been "consumed," the reason for its being goes with it. How many detective novels bear re-reading? (There are exceptions, Raymond Chandler for one.) Kafka's novels and stories must be re-read because they can never be consumed. They're poison to the system. They leave their readers as perpetual hunger artists. The next time we read, say, The Trial, perhaps we will finally perceive it for what it is, not ask it for answers to questions it never promised to provide.

If "everything carries meaning" in Kafka's fiction, it is meaning that ultimately undoes itself. Everything portends, nothing is settled. Detective novels assure us that things will be settled, that knowledge is possible. Our world, although brutal, makes sense. We exchange the one for the other. Kafka tells us that this a delusion. The world may be cruel, but it also makes no sense.

Aestheticizing

Another post related to Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His Life and Work. Scott Eric Kaufman remarks of Delbanco's contention that "Melville should not be censured for his failure to condemn slavery because the experience of living in a tumultuous time includes 'both the yes and no of [a] culture'" that "Normally I find this quasi-æstheticist pose painfully insufficient—a flaccid defense of New Critical orthodoxy. . . ."

But this is not an "aestheticist" pose at all. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. "New Critical orthodoxy" would hold that whether Melville was an abolitionist or not has no bearing one way or the other on how we judge his work. We might indeed condemn Melville himself for failing to become an abolitionist (at least overtly), but I can't see how our condemnation would then extend to his fiction. Some of it does deal with slavery ("Benito Cereno"), although even if we were to conclude that, for example, the slave ship captain in this story is portrayed too sympathetically (I don't agree with that interpretation), our literary judgment would (or should) have nothing to do with our moral judgment of Melville's reluctance to see the United States split itself apart to wage civil war.

"Historicism in the service of moral and political complexity," as Scott characterizes Delbanco's approach, is not the same thing as historicism in the service of aesthetic complexity, or any other kind of aesthetic effect. (It should be pointed out that Scott goes on to discuss the merits of "moral and political complexity" in the context of William Dalrymple's NYRB essay, "Inside the Madrassa.") Unfortunately, New Criticism has apparently come to be seen as an all-purpose kind of apologia for complexity of all kinds, a convenient whipping-boy in circumstances in which "complexity" is seen by some as an excuse for evading obvious moral distinctions. But let's be clear: New Criticism was a method of reading works of literature that emphasized the aesthetic qualities of those works, that attempted to identify the characteristics of literature--and of reading literature--that marked it off from other modes of discourse. In doing so, it minimized the importance of history, politics, and ethics, but only to remind us that those are subjects with their own discursive conventions and to suggest how little they are enhanced by yoking poetry or fiction to their service. It says nothing about the role of these subjects--or their complexity--in human affairs more generally.

The only thing "quasi-æstheticist" about Delbanco's account would be an attempt to transfer to Melville's political attitudes a notion of "complexity" that finally applies only to literature, not to life. Melville doesn't get off the hook for transferring the literary complexity of his novels and stories to his decisions in life. (Although some issues are indeed very complex.) Similarly, Delbanco shouldn't be allowed to make Melville's life into another version of his work. I don't say that he does this, but it's the only way I can make sense of the claim that there's something "quasi-aetheticist" about his argument.

Biographical Fetishism

At the end of her review of Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work, Vivian Gornick asserts that:

What is needed for a figure as iconized as Melville is a biographer possessed by a flash of original insight around which the "life" can be organized, the kind that is very little dependent on documentation. The only obligation of such insight is that it prove genuine, not fabricated, and that it deepen the writing until something true about the man who wrote Moby-Dick is acutely felt by responsive readers who are sure to recognize the close of a yawning gap when they see one.

Actually, what is needed is for would-be biographers to give Melville a rest from their labors for a while. Maybe forever. All that such works accomplish, in my opinion, is to encourage the idea, which Gornick expresses here, that what readers need is to know "something true about the man who wrote Moby-Dick." Readers don't need to know anything about the author of Moby-Dick; they need to read the novel. They don't need a biographer to organize Melville's life-story around "a flash of insight"; they need to read Melville's stories. The "yawning gap" that needs to be closed is not that between "the miles of scholarship informed by received wisdom that already surround Melville's life and work" and the effort to make Melville "live anew for the current generation of readers"; it is the gap between experiencing Melville's work for what it has to offer and settling instead for biographies that only deflect our attention from the work in favor of gossip about the writer. (From what I've read about Delbanco's book, it seems to be less guilty of this than many other biographies of writers.)

Gornick's main objection to Delbanco's biography seems to be that it is too dependent on the "authority" provided by previous commentators on Melville: "Now, Delbanco is a sophisticated writer who could easily have put these sentiments into words of his own. Yet he chose not to. Not, I think, out of the ordinary academic habit of piling up superficial appeals to authority but rather because he is intent on creating a brilliant surround for the work of a writer he does, in fact, love indiscriminately; one that is meant to draw us irresistibly inside the persuasion that Melville's work is not only majestic but inordinately protean: It can and does mean all things to all people in all times, accommodating itself easily to whatever system of interpretation the cultural moment brings into focus. . ."

"Inordinately protean" is really just a way of saying that a book like Moby-Dick is always worth reading and re-reading, that readers' experiences of the novel are always going to be productively various. No one interpretation is going to pin it down, and, despite Gornick's impatience with the citation of critical sources, becoming familiar with other interpretations is only going to enrich one's appreciation of Moby-Dick's literary accomplishments in the long run. In other words, the existence of so much critical commentary on Melville's work is only testimony to its continued relevance as writing that still lives in the present: an interpretation is always an act of recovery for the present, a translation of the work into currently pertinent terms of understanding. Gornick's "original" biographer identifying "something true" about Melville would actually have an effect exactly opposite of the one she supposes. It would remove Melville's fiction from the critical conversation surrounding it and subject it to the biographer's "insight," which, since it is an insight about the writer rather than what he wrote, would be all the more constrictive and extraneous, Melville the dead celebrity.

Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote something similar about Dmitri Nabokov's reluctance to have his father's legacy embroiled in biographical controversy:

I understand Dmitri's impatience with the biographical fetishism that has invaded literature—a product of celebrity culture, I’d argue. I certainly see it in the cultural capital of Shakespeare biographies as compared to studies of Shakespeare’s work.

If the destruction of The Original of Laura [V. Nabokov's unpublished final work] is inevitable. . .it’s the reductive biographizing—pathographizing—of literature that is responsible.

Read the works! Life is too short to care more deeply about the life of the one who wrote them, whose secrets are usually irretrievable anyway.

Safely Ensconced

Apparently Steve Wasserman believes that "The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living."

This remark (actually among the first words to come out of Wasserman's mouth during the Open Source interview) certainly tells us a great deal about why the Los Angeles Times Book Review has never fulfilled its promise, or really even come close to being a reliable guide to contemporary letters.

The truth is pretty close to exactly the opposite of what Wasserman would have us believe. Not only is it the case that, as Ed Champion has put it, "the very form of the novel has evolved precisely because of efforts from the ambitious living" (one could say the same thing about other literary forms as well), but the "worthy dead" were probably the most intensely "ambitious" writers one could imagine--not necessarily ambitious for worldly success (although many would have no doubt gladly accepted it) but, because until the mid-nineteenth century (at the earliest) financial success as we would define it was more or less unthinkable (not enough readers), for "literary immortality." The great writers of the past literally wanted their work to survive through the ages, as testimony to their "success" as literary masters. (Remember the first stanza of Paradise Lost?: "Sing, Heav'nly Muse. . .I thence/Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song,/That with no middle flight intends to soar/Above th' Anonian Mount, while it pursues/Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme." How audacious to think your poem could successfully "justify the ways of God to men"!)

Furthermore, one suspects that Wasserman finds reading the "worthy dead" the best way to occupy his time precisely because it doesn't have to be an overly strenuous "reading experience." After all, these writers have already been pronounced "worthy"; all one has to do is nod sagely while passively absorbing all the greatness previous generations of readers have been kind enough to pre-determine for you. What a nice way to pass a rainy day. Some people might even be impressed with your good taste and admirable discernment.

In fact, the best (defined as "challenging") reading experience is precisely to read the "ambitious living." Judgments have yet to be reached about these folks; their work has to be explored and assessed. Some of it even strikes out in directions with which one is unfamiliar, and requires more than ordinary concentration. This sort of writing has yet to be certified as Literature, and while reading it might not provide the same sense of security that one's experience will be "worthy," it does test one's ability to comprehend what makes literature literary in the first place.

Ultimately, Wasserman's pronouncement is at least as condescending to the "worthy dead" as it is to the "ambitious living." It implies that their work is safely ensconced in the collective literary mausoleum, no longer embroiled in the petty concerns of the living. It expresses a view of Literature that only makes living readers less likely to be interested in the literature of the past, held out by the likes of Wasserman as something so much grander than what the puny present could produce. Younger readers especially recoil (justifiably so) at such a display of supercilious superiority (itself so thoroughly unjustified). In my opinion, if the literary work of the "worthy dead" is perceived as detached from the affairs of the present, with nothing to say to those who must live in it--and in many cases this is simply not the case--it doesn't have much value to anyone. It's not what is passed on to us from the worthy dead. It's just dead.

Withdrawn

Trent Walters recently put up a very interesting post on Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "Wakefield." This is a story about a man who leaves his wife and home, only to move to a nearby street where he "dwelt upwards of twenty years" unnoticed and free to, in effect, keep observing his wife and the life he has himself left behind.

Trent interprets the story as one about depression:

Again and again, Wakefield nearly leaves, "excited to something like energy of feeling [if he had used his imagination, he could have felt his wife's pain]." Later he tries wake himself up: "Wakefield! Wakefield! You are mad!" Come on. If he's aware of his crime, what's stopping him from rectifying it for twenty years?

He is "unwilling to display his full front to the world," and "an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. Wakefield is spell-bound." Are these not perfectly apt descriptions of depression? Perhaps in Hawthorne's day he saw the influence as other-worldly. Even when energy breaks the heavy spell of depression, it is too brief to be effective:

[He] throws himself upon the bed. That latent feelings of years break out; his feeble mind acquires a brief energy from their strength.... [His situation] so moulded him to himself, that, considered, in regard to his fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could be said to possess his right mind.

This is a perfectly coherent interpretation of the story (one of my favorite Hawthorne tales, probably one of my favorite short stories period), and I certainly would not decry finding access to such a story, which is admittedly one that invites disparate readings, through discovering in it certain personal resonances. But I would say that it is certainly not the only coherent interpretation of "Wakefield." The protagonist does indeed seem to be characterized by "solitude and self-absorption," and Hawthorne himself could indeed have been described in such terms as well. (Trent goes on to highlight other language Hawthorne uses to describe Wakefield: "his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings, that ended to no purpose, or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words.")

But Hawthorne is quite self-conscious in portraying Wakefield in this way. It is not the sort of portait by which the words seem to hide another, different and unconscious meaning. And Wakefield shares the attributes of some of Hawthorne's other characters, particularly the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, who agrees to join an experimental New England commune but finds himself mostly withdrawing from the whole scene in order to observe it more closely. (At one point he climbs up a tree so he can observe and listen to two of his fellow members without being noticed.) More than anything else, in my opinion, these characters embody the habitual attitude of the writer: solitary, detached, to some extent isolated from his own feelings in favor of heightened observation of others and the world around him. Although obviously he isn't a writer, Wakefield nevertheless seems to me a portait of the artist, not of the human being behind the artist's demeanor, but of the behavior the artist is almost compelled to exhibit in order to be an artist.

And insofar as this behavior can be self-destructive, oblivious to the effects it has on other people, arises from impulses the human being perhaps can't even control, Hawthorne also seems to condemn it.

A Sad Commentary on Our Age

As much as my instincts tell me I should take issue with this essay on Shakespeare (by Paul A. Cantor) in The Claremont Review of Books, I just can't. All too much of it is all too true. Still, this summary passage has its own conceptual problems:

It is a truism that every age remakes Shakespeare in its own image. If so, Wood's Shakespeare is a sad commentary on our age. In both academic scholarship and popular accounts like Wood's, people today struggle to translate Shakespeare into contemporary terms, to make him speak our language and echo our peculiar concerns. The result is to cut Shakespeare down to size and lose sight of everything that makes him unique among authors. In the distorting mirror we hold up to Shakespeare, we see reflected back only what we wish to see—all the obsessions of our particular moment, and that means chiefly the obsession with victimization, of people oppressed in terms of race, class, and gender. In the age of victimology, Wood thinks he has done Shakespeare a favor; he has found a way to present Shakespeare himself as a victim, a closet Catholic in a Protestant police state. "Catholic" is about the only oppressed minority to which Wood could assign Shakespeare with any plausibility.

The approaches to Shakespeare these days are particularly reductive, but I really can't see an alternative to the attempt "to translate Shakespeare into contemporary terms, to make him speak our language and echo our peculiar concerns." If we can't make Shakespeare's plays "speak" to us in our own historical circumstances, then literally he can't speak to us at all. And, as Cantor acknowledges, all generations of readers and critics rewrite Shakespeare for their own purposes. This includes the generations who presented us with Shakespeare the pillar of culture and civilization, which was no more accurate an "image" of Shakespeare as the one Cantor deplores. The only way to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare both for what they were and what they are is to devote much, much time to studying them and their various contexts. This is, unfortunately, probably no longer something many people are willing to do.

Strange and Wild Books

This essay by nature writer David Gessner is really quite provocative. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. It's been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as "quiet" by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office dressed in his pajamas ("Doesn't he work, Daddy?") or having those same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names for excrement (while talking a lot of scat).

Worse still, it's been four years of living within a literary form that, for all its wonder and beauty, can be a little like going to Sunday School. A strange Sunday School where I alternate between sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit (writing nature). And not only do I preach from my pulpit, I preach to the converted. After all, who reads nature books? Fellow nature lovers who already believe that the land shouldn't be destroyed. Too often when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is awed, hushed, reverential. The same things that drove me away from Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews.

Gessner goes on in the next paragraph to observe astutely:

As the 150th anniversary of "Walden" approaches on August 9, it may pay to remember that Thoreau's great book also has its share of fart jokes, including references to Pythagrians and their love of beans. Bad puns, too, but you get the feeling that that isn't what the anniversary party is going to focus on. Instead the same, tired old cut-out of Thoreau as nature saint will be dragged out, St. Francis of Concord, our sexless -- and increasingly lifeless -- hero. It makes you wonder if anyone's actually taken the time to read his strange and wild book lately. If they did they would find sentences that fulfill Emerson's epigram: "My moods hate each other." Sentences that are, in turn, defensive and direct, arch and simple, upright and sensual, over-literary (even for the times) and raw. Of course I'm not claiming that Thoreau's book is free of nature reverence, just that the pious tone is often contradicted -- delightfully, thornily -- by moments like his confession that, for all his reasoned vegetarianism, "I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary."

In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that not many people, including most nature writers, have "taken the time to read [Thoreau's] strange and wild book lately." Indeed it wouldn't surprise me to learn that few people have really read Walden at all, at least as it really is and not through the prism of a romanticized revisionism that sees the book as the kind of prissified environmental tome most people take it to be. There's plenty in it that's cranky, imperious, inflexible, and manifestly not politically correct. Most of all there's Thoreau's sometimes dense and allusive style: "I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something, about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of the tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even thes forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness."

This hardly seems the sort of thing one would now expect of the tea-sipping kind of nature writing Gessner describes, writing that seeks to describe nature in translucent language and dulcet tones and that seeks to elevate the scenery so described above the writer's own subjective perceptions. In effect, an image of Thoreau as a certain sort of nature-worshipper has replaced Thoreau the writer his texts actually present him to be.

One might say that this kind of inattention to what objectively characterizes the work of writers from the past, a failure to actually read it, is almost inevitable when these writers become known to us only--or at least mostly--through their inclusion in curricula of academic study--through being listed on course syllabi of various kinds. Familiarity with their books or plays or poems comes entirely in the "textbook" variety, although we don't necessarily read them only in literal textbooks. We read them in snippets, abridgements, condensed versions. It becomes very easy in this context for Thoreau to become the solemn nature-writer or Dickens to become the creator of Tiny Tim and other sentimental characters, or Hawthorne to become the grim chronicler of Puritanism, tags that efficiently describe them--or a version of them--and make it unnecessary to read them further.

This dilemma becomes especially acute with Shakespeare, who becomes the great Bard, the English National Treasure, the all-wise and perfect poet, and, most frequently, the measure by which we judge our qualifications to "culture." It was Shakespeare who created the most towering monuments of Culture in its pristine form, and thus the reason to read or view Shakespeare is to admire these monuments. That some people would rather not do this, especially when they're given little help in further understanding why their admiration is warranted, is perfectly understandable, this conclusion being my immediate response to a recent newspaper article explaining its author's refusal to any longer accord Shakespeare such reflexive respect. (This article is unfortunately no longer available online, but I thank The Elegant Variation for the link to it, nevertheless.) The author is wrong in assuming that Shakespeare really doesn't have anything to say to him, at least in my view, but it's hard to deny that the general assumption shared by too many of those who highly value Shakespeare is that one should esteem the plays because, well, just because one should.

Since the dominant attitude toward canonical literature among those who would otherwise be entrusted with educating readers or playgoers in the appropriate strategies for appreciating literature--that is, in the academy--has actually become a skeptical if not belligerent one, this situation will only get worse.The culture mavens will continue to insist on the spiritually pharmaceutical properities of Literature, and the professors will continue to use the snippets and abridgements to advance whatever preconceived agendas they have in mind.

Yet at some point it does become necessary to acknowledge that perhaps some writers, perhaps some great writers, just no longer engage present-day readers as effectively as they seem to have done in the past. Perhaps people no longer read Walden because its voice seems too alien, too prickly, for current sensibilites. Perhaps even the time will come when overcoming all the obstacles to understanding Shakespeare in his own language and according to the appropriate literary conventions will become too difficult, at least for all but the few. Neither insisting on the greatness of these writers nonetheless, nor attempting to reinterpret or literally retranslate them into contemporary idioms and assumptions will forestall this for long. It is true that we live in a time when any kind of difficult or unorthodox writing is often decried as an offense to the "common reader," and it is possible that at some time in the not so distant future such writing will again be welcomed. At that time the difficulties involved in reading works of literature from the past might again be seen as worth the effort as well. But there is effort involved, and it remains an open question whether "literary reading," as it was called in the recent NEA report, will ever really be an interest shared by more than a small, if ardent, minority. And, if not, whether this would be such a bad thing.

Not Really About Shakespeare

In the March issue of First Things, R.V. Young, an English professor at North Carolina State University, seeks to praise Shakespeare, and not to bury him. Here is the first paragraph of his essay:

More than any other writer, Shakespeare embodies the distinctive principles of Western Civilization. Men and women of the West are drawn to Shakespeare because his plays and poems continue to express their aspirations, to articulate their concerns, and to confront the tensions and contradictions in the Western vision itself. He is admired not as an uncritical encomiast of his own culture and society, but rather as an exemplum of the spirit—both critical and conservative—that is among the West’s most enduring legacies to the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that academic literary critics, who owe their very existence to Shakespeare and other great writers, have cast doubt upon Shakespeare’s exalted position at exactly the moment in history when the societies of the West have become most anxious about their own integrity and probity.

Now, I think Shakespeare is indeed the greatest writer in the English language (and I have read all of the plays). I also think the passage just quoted is garbage.

When I come upon essays like this one, ostensibly defending Shakespeare from all of his many supposed detractors, I also come as close as I ever do to feeling sympathy for the academic critics who have rejected "bardolatry" and used Shakespeare as one more opportunity to "depreciate the merely literary" (Sven Birkerts) and politicize literary study to advance their own agendas. These critics assume (wrongly, in lots of cases), that this sort of Western-Civ rah-rah was really the goal of academic literary study all along and have understandably enough recoiled from it.

But of course to uniformly boo and hiss at "the West" is no better than to always celebrate its wonders, and my sympathy is short-lived.

What I really seem to hear when reading passages like the one above is the sound of Shakespeare himself frantic to free himself from the grave if only to seek out the likes of Professor Young and throttle him. Shakespeare of course had no interest in the "distinctive principles of Western Civilization" (wouldn't have known what they were), did not in the least express something called the "Western vision," was certainly no "encomiast of his culture and society" (far from it), and sought to exemplify nothing but the possibilities of the forms in which he wrote and whatever personal "vision" of human existence he had managed to acquire. (And fortunately he did possess a vision that has seemed to express the aspirations and concerns of many of the rest of us--the one point on which I agree with Professor Young.)

But in Professor Young's "vision" Shakespeare's plays and poems disappear in favor of an "encomium" on behalf of Western Civilization, Shakespeare becomes a Great Figure to admire and exalt (but not to read), an opportunity for the Professor himself to posture and declaim. And Shakespeare is not the only writer to fall victim to this sort of reactionary praise ("reactionary" in the literal sense of the term, as it is a reaction to the perceived loss of prestige among the "great" Western writers). Sadly, writers from Milton and Swift to Emerson and Twain are accorded this dubious defense, their obvious enough human limitations in terms of racial attitudes or class solidarity not simply acknowledged or explained but erased. Young, for example, struggles mightily in his essay to demonstrate there's really nothing at all wrong with Shakespeare's depictions of Shylock and Othello, that in fact he really portrays Jews and "Moors" as stand-up guys. I would agree that there's great amibivalence in the portrayal of these characters, and that the plays in which they appear ought not to be merely dismissed, but there's no point in denying that some of the ambivalence is unattractive, to say the least.

Sometimes people come to have questions about even great writers not because they despise Western Civilization but because every new generation of readers has to be convinced anew that the work of these writers actually stands up to present scrutiny. (The sort of indoctrination Professor Young seems implicitly to favor never works.) "Criticism" of the kind this First Things essay represents doesn't help to resolve such questions because it ultimately discourages serious reading in the first place. An acquiescent and unequivocal esteem will do. It might still be presumed that previous generations of academic critics all essentially engaged in this kind of empty rhetorical gesturing, but most of them did not. "Close reading" was an approach to literature that precisely encouraged readers to take literature seriously, but, at its best, it attempted to show these readers a more resourceful way to do this.

Ordinarily, First Things has a relatively limited audience, one that is presumably already receptive to the message R.V. Young has come to bring them. But the essay was featured at Arts & Letters Daily, so it might have reached others who could be tempted to believe it. The more broadly such misguided and unhelpful messages manage to get purveyed, the more important it becomes to intercept them.

On Charles Dickens

Steve Mitchelmore at In Writing bravely confesses to all of the "great" writers he hasn't read. The first one he mentions is Charles Dickens.

I suspect Steve isn't alone, if not in having read no Dickens then certainly in having read very little of his work. This is no doubt in large part, at least in the U.S., to the horrible way Dickens has been "taught" in American high schools. (The extent to which literature is actually taught at all in high schools, or even whether it ought to be, are entirely separate questions to be left for another day.) By and large, the Dickens novel most frequently thrust into the hands of high school students is A Tale of Two Cities, inarguably his least representative work, and arguably his weakest. It is used in this way, in fact, because it generally contains fewer of those characteristics that make Dickens Dickens: his picaresque abandon, his outsized characters, his exuberant and fluent style, above all his humor. In my opinion, no writer in any language is funnier than Charles Dickens.

Here's a passage that illustrates many of the features I've just mentioned. It's from Dombey and Son and introduces "Miss Tox":

The lady thus specially presented was a long lean figure, wearing such a faded air that she seemed not to have been made in what linen-drapers call "fast colours" originally, and to have, by little and little, washed out. But for this she might have been described as the very pink of general propitiation and politeness. From a long habit of listening admirably to everything that was said in her presence, and looking at the speakers as if she were mentally engaged in taking off impressions of their images upon her soul, never to part with the same but with life, her head had quite settled on one side. Her hands had contracted a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of their own accord as an involuntary admiration. Her eyes were libale to a similar affection. She had the softest voice that ever was heard; and her nose, stupendously aquiline, had a little knob in the very centre or keystone of the bridge, whence it tended downwards towards her face, as in an invincible determination never to turn up at anything.

Miss Tox is a relatively minor character in the novel, but she's as absolutely vivid a character as many a protagonist in novels by lesser writers. And Dicken's novels are full of such characters, all of them at once both distinctive and colorful as well as fully recognizable as "types" that must have been instantly recognizable to readers in Victorian England--creating this sort of characterization itself being one of Dickens's great gifts, perhaps unrivaled by any other novelist. The humor of this passage is also typically "Dickensian": observant, tolerant of eccentricities, and devastating all at the same time. His comedy can sometimes be "gentle," but it is frequently also quite caustic, even dark. Here is the first paragraph of Dombey and Son: "Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new." This seems a homey enough scene, except that, as it turns out, Dombey's ultimate actions toward Son are indeed such (if unintentional) to "toast him brown." (And the fireside vignette is taking place at the same time Dombey's wife is dying after giving birth to Son.)

The ultimate effect of both the comedy and the characters in Dickens's novels is to convey a world that is utterly real and also completely removed from the "real world": a Dickens-world that no one could mistake for another writer's creation, or for that matter the usually banal world we all inhabit. This does not mean Dickens is for "escapist" readers. Few novelists have ever been as engaged with the social and cultural and economic conditions of his/her time as Dickens. Dombey and Son depicts the horrendous consequences of the mercantile mindset in a way that should make us ashamed to have sentimentalized A Christmas Carol as much as we have done. There's no more scorching indictment of "the law" as Bleak House. (Perhaps Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own.) Hard Times portrays the ill effects of utilitarianism with compact (for Dickens) precision. But his novels are first and foremost fully realized aesthetic creations in which the comedy and the satire and the characterization and the social commentary are all inextricably joined.

Which is not to say there are no flaws in Dickens's fiction. If we've sentimentalized Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim, there's truth in the charge they're latently--maybe more than latently--sentimental figures to begin with. Florence Dombey is the Tiny Tim of Dombey and Son, and here's a description of her: "Florence was little more than a child in years--not yet fourteen--and the loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where Death had lately made its own tremendous devastation might have set an older fancy brooding on great terrors. But her innocent imagination was too full of one theme to admit them. Nothing wandered in her thoughts but love--a wandering love, indeed, and cast away--but turning always to her father." This at a point in the novel when Florence's father could not be less deserving of her love. There's no getting around the fact that Dickens's novels are to some degree enfeebled by the too-frequent appearance of characters and scenes like this. Luckily, his best books are relatively free of them, and such characters as Florence Dombey do have a role to play in the overall moral dynamics at work in his fiction. (One of the consequences of assigning them this role, however, is that with these characters we are deprived of the great comic flourishes of which Dickens is otherwise such a master.) Furthermore, the great strengths of his work, the strengths I have tried here to indicate, however sketchily, vastly compensate for the emotional flaccidity the sentimental moments occasionally introduce.

In short, if there is an impression that Charles Dickens is old-fashioned, stodgy, associated with a now superseded approach to writing fiction, that assumption is totally wrong. Readers and writers can still learn much about what fiction is capable of achieving by reading him.

Nor should his immense popularity, both during his lifetime and subsequently, be held against him. It is merely one of the few examples of the public actually being right.

For the uninitiated--perhaps even Steve?--there are several ways of beginning with Dickens. Of the earlier, more loosely structured books, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby would be good choices. If you'd prefer to start with something briefer and more concentrated, Hard Times is the choice. If you want to go straight to the masterworks, these would be Bleak House and Great Expectations. (Dombey and Son falls just short of these books, as does Our Mutual Friend.) Although David Copperfield is perhaps Dickens's most popular book, it is also a great novel as well.

For a much longer appreciation of Dickens, see Edmund Wilson's "Dickens: The Two Scrooges" in The Wound and the Bow. If I can't persuade you to read Dickens, perhaps Wilson can.