Dickens

[Corpsey]

Back to Heep - I read yesterday that the description of him as being damp or moist handed would have been a signal to Dickens’ readers that Uriah was a masturbator. Umble but ‘orny

Heep's a funny character because you can't help but feel that little Davey C is being a right little C for finding him so repulsive without any (initial) cause but of course Heep IS repulsive.

OTOH, the irony DC as narrator applies to DC as a young man suggests that there are things about DC and his chums that are worthy of Heep's calculations.

What I'm now beginning to suspect, thanks to Jenks, is that there is a shadow Dickens, impossibly cynical

This is interesting.

 

[jenks]

I think he does a similar thing in GE - where the older Pip narrator steps out of the narrative to judge the younger Pip, often unfairly.

 

[Corpsey]

Steerforth is another figure like Micawber whose mood switches on a dime, although with Steerforth there's obviously an element of conscious deception going on... Although with both, perhaps, there's a deliberate effort to block out gloomy thoughts with cheeriness.

I read somewhere Micawber is based on Dickens's own father. Perhaps Dickens himself was similar? He's certainly capable of summoning both cheeriness and desolation.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I absolutely loved Micawber, what a great character. But there's at least 3 or 4 legendary characters in this book isn't there? David himself is one of the least interesting ones, which might be a weakness of the book.

How far into it are you @Corpsey ?

 

[Corpsey]

I don't think I agree with that, given the access we have to his conflicted, self tormenting psychology--plus he's the narrator. It's true that from the outside he wouldn't be as interesting. Probably the same is true for Pip.

Dickens characters seem to be exist on a sliding scale of grotesquerie, with the more grotesque being the comical/evil characters, automatons driven by their selfish desires (or selfish misery). The heroic characters are more boring--the saintly young women in DC, for example. Then there are characters like Steerforth and Micawber who are cartoonishly consistent but also have depths to them, compelling compassion.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah you're right, I was thinking about it from the outside perspective and it's about a year ago since I read it, so the characters I really remember are Heep, Micawber, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth...

David himself is less memorable to me cos he's not so stereotypical, and he's being shaped by his experiences as he goes along, rather than having a firm type that you can latch onto from the beginning.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I say stereotypical, but maybe a lot of what we think of now as sterotypical characters nowadays didn't really exist before dickens invented them, or at least immortalised them. And that's one of his greatest achievements.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Maybe sterotypical isn't the word I'm searching for actually.

 

[Corpsey]

David is interesting in particular because he is (apparently) in many ways Dickens himself. That's why Dickens says at the start that he put more of himself in that book than any other, and why it was his favourite.

I think DC (like Great Expectations) has more interiority than other books by him -- though this is my speculation based on reading about him a bit.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah I think DC is supposed to be the one that marked a turning point in his writing in that way. That's why I want to read Pickwick papers next, cos I've already done GE and DC.

 

[Corpsey]

I read with unalloyed joy the chapter "My First Dissipation' last night, wherein DC, SF and chums get wasted in David's new digs and go to the theatre. Such a great evocation of the bliss, confusion, humiliation, hell of a (probably late teen) piss up. The way the narrative skips unannounced forward in time and elsewhere in place, how he finds himself wondering who's talking to him and then sees it is him, stepping out of the theatre box directly into his bedroom, the hangover with a tongue like the "well furred" bottom of an old kettle over a fire.

Steerforth, well, I have to admit I've gone as gaga/gay for him as David, at this point. Along with several other characters (Betsy Trotwood first and foremost), he's a character I'm always delighted to see turn up, as delighted as DC himself. I know (thanks to the film) that it doesn't end well for Steerforth but in the honeymoon phase you can't help but feel you'd love a friend like that (and have known some friends who were a bit like that, probably).

 

[Corpsey]

Somebody was smoking. We were all smoking. I was smoking, and trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder. Steerforth had made a speech about me, in the course of which I had been affected almost to tears. I returned thanks, and hoped the present company would dine with me tomorrow, and the day after—each day at five o’clock, that we might enjoy the pleasures of conversation and society through a long evening. I felt called upon to propose an individual. I would give them my aunt. Miss Betsey Trotwood, the best of her sex!

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as ‘Copperfield’, and saying, ‘Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn’t do it.’ Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair—only my hair, nothing else—looked drunk.

 

[Corpsey]

The next chapter is great too, the pompous imbecilic aristocrats discussing "blood" over dinner, David's constant repressed impulse to hurl Heap over the bannister or run him through with the poker, and the fireside scene of Heap at his most slitheringly demonic, and then David unable to stop going in and look at him sleeping with his mouth open "like a post office", attracted by his repulsion

The only bum note (not an original observation) is the saintly Agnes.

David is appealing as a character because he's fundamentally good but also capable of getting ruinously pissed on a night out and feeling irrationally (if justifiably) murderous towards Heap, etc.

I'm closing in on the halfway point and I feel like I'm admiring it and Dickens more and more as I go on.

 

[Corpsey]

I've not read Dostoevsky for ages but i keep thinking of how influential I suppose dickens must have been on him. Heap in front of the fireside reminds me of a scene from Dostoevsky, a confrontation with a character who is half human half demon, the long speeches, and David's tortured psyche. (Even the saintly Agnes, like one of Fyodor's holy prostitutes.)

 

[Corpsey]

Dickens characters seem to be exist on a sliding scale of grotesquerie, with the more grotesque being the comical/evil characters, automatons driven by their selfish desires (or selfish misery).

Heep isn't the automaton except in his outward guise, beneath all those verbal and physical tics there's some sort of reptilian calculation going on.

 

[Corpsey]

1. DC/Trot's hatred of Heep is very funny, his hatred of e.g. his "mulberry-coloured" great coat. How hatred for a person attaches to every part of their person, how enjoyable it can be to hate someone, or to observe someone else's hatred of someone.

2. The letter he writes to Agnes, drafting various options, very funny parodies of pompous prose/poetry styles.

 

[Corpsey]

"We had an adjourned cause in the Consistory that day – about excommunicating a baker who had been objecting in a vestry to a paving-rate"

 

[Corpsey]

I'm 52% in now, according to my kindle.

I think I like Dickens best when he's being comical—or David best when he's being ironical, such as when recalling how ridiculously he acts when in love with Dora ("I turn hot when I remember the cravat I bought. My boots might be placed in any collection of instruments of torture.")

I like him less when he's being tragical, when he has a tendency to become a bit sentimental and hokey, straining for effect. At such times as Barkis's deathbed scene, which don't get me wrong has its virtues, you can see how hard he's TRYING to be moving, that it can be hard to be moved.

I am detecting, at this point, a theme (the 'bildungsroman' theme) of David learning to distrust his first impressions of people. I mean it's obvious—Steerforth turns out to be some sort of villain and Miss Mowcher the comic dwarf turns out to be sensitive

"‘What can I do?’ returned the little woman, standing up, and holding out her arms to show herself. ‘See! What I am, my father was; and my sister is; and my brother is. I have worked for sister and brother these many years—hard, Mr. Copperfield—all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me, what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that? Mine?’"

Anywayyyy, it's hard to believe I'm only halfway in at this point but I am still enjoying it—and when he is being comical, REALLY enjoying it.

 

[Corpsey]

Life as a lesson

Is this how life works out, ever, in your experience?

I suppose you must learn from experiences. I wonder how many Dickensian figures we meet though—either comic grotesques or otherwise who teach us a moral lesson.

 

[Corpsey]

The book is tolerably naturalistic up unto the prison scene, I think

Wondering if you picked that 'tolerably' up from reading Dickens