I've been slowly reading my way though Terry Eagleton's The English Novel: An Introduction for a while now, at the gentle rate of one chapter per week. I'm not sure why I haven't included it in my 'currently reading' in the sidebar - probably because I picked it up one weekend on a whim, never imagining that I would follow it through to the end. But I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I like Eagleton's criticism quite a bit - The English Novel is full of generalisations and deals with the vast history of literature through only a small sample of 'canonical' authors, but it is always insightful and, most importantly, resists the trend to write biography as criticism. My only previous encounter with Eagleton was with Literary Theory: An Introduction in my first year at university, and I found it impenetrable; this introduction is supremely transparant in comparison.
In a fortuitous confluence of events [admittedly, several weeks ago now!], I found myself reading the chapter on Charles Dickens at the same time that I was reading Great Expectations (1861). Since 'reviewing' such a well-known, well-loved book is mostly redundant, especially given my shallow acquaintance with Dickens' fiction, I thought I would bring the two together and use Eagleton to reflect personally on the novel instead. Reading his essay, which was all of 20 pages long, I was struck alternately by how relevant and how irrelevant it was to my own experience of the original pulp writer; how it both expressed and repressed what I enjoyed most about his storytelling. Since it is the first full-length Dickens' I have read, I can't say how true this would be with his ouvre as a whole - I understand that Eagleton is compressing a response to *all* of the novels into one short piece, necessitating some contradiction and not a little hyperbole - but I felt quite strongly that he was doing Great Expectations a disservice in his overall assessment.
The first thing that struck me about the novel, as unexpected as it was welcome, was Dickens' wry sense of humour, which is closely related to his finely honed sense of the everyday ridiculous. This doesn't come across so clearly in A Christmas Carol, probably because of its nostalgic earnestness, although it too is lighter than I had expected. I'm not sure what made me think that Dickens was a dark, difficult writer, although I have some distant memory of being given The Old Curiosity Shop for Christmas, aged 9 or so, and finding it impossible. But I suppose I should have known that his popularity was partly in his clarity and levity. One of scene stands out for me as the perfect example of how Dickens produces his 'funny scenes', marrying story and comedy in tableau. It takes place early in the novel - in Chapter 4 - and sees Pip's sister (and adoptive mother) hosting a Christmas dinner with relatives and neighbours, including Uncle Pumblechook, the local corn-factor, and the delightfully named Church clerk, Mr Wopsle. Seated with the corner of the table jutting into his chest, and served the scrap ends of chicken legs and 'those obscure pieces of pork which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain', Pip also finds himself the focus of the gathering's moral discourse:
It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation - as it now appears to me, something like a religious cross of the ghost in Hamlet with Richard III - and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye and said, in a low reproachful voice, "Do you hear that? Be grateful."
...Mrs Hubble shook her head and, contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr Hubble tersely solved it by saying, "Naturally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.
Pip's only ally, his hen-pecked brother-in-law Joe Gargery, is incapable of defending him and, instead, ladles his plate with extra gravy as compensation. As the company waxes lyrical on Pip's supposed sins (at this point he is no more than nine or ten years old), his food is almost lost beneath the swim of Joe's sympathy. Which is wonderful. It is so... purely enjoyable, and well-observed. It is even a little too human, discomfortingly so: the way the adults use the child to buttress their views of the world, not to mention their cohesian as a group, and Joe's boneless attempts to console. (Although I do wonder the extent to which models of human behaviour have been created by Dickens. So that we are encouraged to see people in the pattern of his grotesques and tableau and the minute compassions of one person to another? They create such an impression, and we've had so many illustrations, and seen so many TV adaptations, that we re-envision the world in a similar light. Isn't there something Dickensian about The Royle Family after all?)
Eagleton doesn't really make much of this aspect of Dickens. He reads it as a form of parody - the literature of alienation and satire, rather than of humanity:
'There is a kind of alienation built into Dicken's very way of seeing, a fetishism of appearances by which characters come to be defined by their noses, waistcoats, boots, knees, fob-watches, tricks of speech or peculiar gait.'
I agree with this to an extent. No one could claim Mr Wopsle or Pumblechook as well-rounded, multi-faceted characters in the tradition of a liberal Victorian novelist like Gaskell or Eliot. We never learn, for example, that Mr Wopsle's penchant for drama is a response to his father's ignoring him as a child, or that Pumblechook's self-importance hides an inferiority complex. But I don't agree with Eagleton that Dickens' characters are more about idiosyncracy and pervisity, than about personality or development. A figure like Magwitch or Jaggers is more complex than the sum of his oddities; certainly I think Magwitch develops - from his deprived, nomadic childhood to his extroadinary industry in Australia - and even, if Jaggers isn't transformed by the narrative, a complex personal history is apparent. And nobody can claim that Pip isn't on a narrative journey - his character arc is the novel's raison d'etre. It is a form of bildungsroman, after all.
It also strikes me that Dickens' characterisation is a game of hide and seek. Eagleton suggests that one-dimensionality is the point of his cast: that, as a great novelist of the city, Dickens' is imitating the way urban communities experience and understand each other, ie. all surfaces and appearances. I'd be tempted to take it a little further though, and say that Dickens' characterisation seeks to demonstrate how surfaces at first conceal and then *reveal* an individual's inner life. In Great Expectations this is demonstrated most clearly in Jaggers clerk, Mr Wemmick, who uses his sharp, professional persona to cover up the domestic softness (and, consequently, vulnerability) of his home life. Pip, like the reader, is invited to witness both sides of his proverbial coin, and see how one informs (and rejects) the other. Thus what is initially alienating is revealed as entirely familiar: putting up a protective front and waiting for someone to break it down is a human tradition.
I agree with Eagleton, however, that Great Expectations is primarily a novel about identity, and particularly about how identity is transformed by the urban environment. Like any young person embarking on, say, a univerity course, or a career away from home, Pip is the archetypal child set adrift. He moves from country to city, poor to rich, child to adult, all in one wrenching movement and the usual personal identifiers of kinship, community and genealogy are lost to him. (Of course, he is already an orphan, without a nuclear family, and so somewhat misplaced at birth.) The novel continually asks: How do we define ourselves in these circumstances, and against what? What Pip does is typical, I think. He distances himself from his old life, rejecting the simple love of Joe and Biddy, and the hard labour of the forge, in favour of sophisticated dissolution amongst the burgeoning upper middle classes of the city. But while the urban environment is stimulating for him, it is also disorientating - he doesn't know how to handle money, or react to new emotional situations. It is only when his affectations are destroyed by the revelation of his mysterious benefactor, that he is able to reconcile his old identity with the reality of his new wealth.
Eagleton is right too, when he says that:
'If Dickens is an urban novelist, it is not just because he writes about the city, but because he writes about it in an urban way. His prose style is alive with the swarming energies of his surroundings, full of hyperbole, extravagent gestures, unpredictable connections, rapid thumbnail sketches, melodramatic explanations.'
It is impossible not to conjure with Dickens' writing. But at the same time, it's clear that he wrote with speed and that his fluency is, to some extent, unthinking. Sometimes he is a little too extravagant with the life of the streets, blindingly so, and seems better when he is describing the misty fens or the haunting graveyard of the novel's opening sections:
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered - like an unhooped casket upon a pole - an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate.
In my own view Dickens' is more comfortable in these moth-eaten and eery early sections of Great Expectations, which are so good precisely because they play upon and expose the paper-thin surface of society and its ritual gestures, but he is still excellent at interiors, and feasts, and the clamour of the streets. In either setting he is a writer delightfully obsessed with life's nooks and crevices, describing them with brio, exuberance and a wayward pervisity that is unenthralled by the average and the orthodox. He scorns what is oppressive and unreal and prefers the underbelly: the violence of the debtors prison, the workhouse and the harsh labor of the rural poor. And yet, there is an arch geniality to his tone and, finally, Eagleton seems right to me when he says:
It is remarkable that an author who painted evils so graphically should nevertheless preserve such an abiding faith in human goodness and generosity. He is both a serious novelist and a great entertainer, careless of the boundary between high and low art.
And for my next Dickens'? Bleak House, I should think.
Happy Christmas everyone!
~~Victoria~~