Tuesday, January 28, 2014

a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a wager - or butchering Great Expectations

The problem I have with Great Expectations is that it was the first Dickens novel I read and yet it was not.  A mangled carcass identified as Great Expectations was mummified inside the 10th grade reader used in my high school.  What unthinkable horrors the editing vivisectionist committed against the innocent text, which must have been amputated fore and aft and middle for length and also, even worse, much worse, for reading level.  Fortunately, I have repressed most of my memories of my encounter with this freak, aside from a cartoonish illustration of an old lady burning to death, but I now – I still – read Great Expectations with the sense that I am brushing against the ghosts of murdered passages.

The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.  An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.  (Ch. 11)

This cannot possibly have survived the censors – epergne! – and I fear that everything interesting was whacked, everything but the spiders.  They must have kept the spiders.

Maybe it was not as bad as I fail to remember.  I do remember discovering, when I read the real book, that everything resembling a joke had been killed off as inessential to the plot.  No way that last bit about the spider community survived.  So we poor, helpless, little ignoramuses were given a Dickens who was not funny, as if the design were to poison any further interest in Dickens, or literature, or printed texts of any sort.

So much of the pleasure and art of Dickens is in the unnecessary aside, the spider community, Wemmick discarding his white gloves in the church font (Ch.  55), the Gogolian funeral attendant “(a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a wager)” (Ch. 35), that last fellow only mentioned that once, as far as I can tell a marvelous example of pure play by Dickens.  Someone should write a 500 page neo-Victorian novel about that fellow.  And someone else should create a children’s picture book about the spiders and beetles who live in Miss Havisham’s old fruitcake.

I have been meaning to reread Great Expectations ever since I named the book blog, but instead read thousands of other pages of Dickens.  Dolce Bellezza gave me the shove I needed.  She decided to write about the cleanlinessand soap theme.  So that is what I will write about tomorrow.   Or maybe dirt and bad smells, because why else would Dickens need soap?

22 comments:

  1. You find the most intricate details and bring them out to the forefront. I love that about your posts, they make me want to read the book again. ;) Seriously. Only now do I remember about the dude who ate two geese for a wager...but who could forget the spiders out of the cake? Such an example of decay and rot and horror. See, I guess I find more of that than out and out humour. But, you help me see the absurd side, the funny side, which certainly every tragic moment can possess.

    Now, the idea of high schoolers reading a mangled mess of classics is a whole other post. I could go in for days about that! Poor Tom, glad you stuck around to thread this with me instead of keeping that as your lasting impression.

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  2. That is my training, my self-training. A seemingly thrown away parenthetical is a place to stop. A true deconstructionist - I have the temperament but not the theoretical tools - would write an entire article about the guy who ate two geese on a wager.

    Pip is always undercutting the horror and hardship with humor - thus the sudden absurd drop into the public doings of the spider community. He is incessantly ironic. I was thinking about using the passage where his sister makes him (and Joe) drink tar-water. Horrible and hilarious. Maybe I will use it today. It is part of the hygiene theme. Pip ends up "smelling like a new fence."

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    1. One of the great things about reading with fellow bloggers is the way that I stretch and grow because of them. You teach me, a person who tends to look at the Gestalt, to look at more minute pieces. Pieces that ought not to be lost.

      This is fun, a hygiene theme. It wasn't my first thought when I came to Dickens. :)

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  3. I had better luck with my school readers. I still remember the one from my second grade of grammar school. It included a little thing by Kafka, the butterfly dream of Chuang Tzu, and a couple of other Chinese fantastic stories, all boiled down to one paragraph each. Plus lots of funny and ironic verses about animals and insects. It impressed me so much, that now, decades later, I still remember it with joy.

    Throwaway jokes, situations and characters by Dickens are still purloined by some of the best of our writers. There's this very popular manga/anime (probably read by more people than Our Mutual Friend has ever been) about a group of geeky/shut in young women who break into the fashion world. One of its most memorable characters is this little midget seamstress who only sews doll's dresses and who calls normal people 'oversized worms'. Amazingly her name is not Jenny Wren.

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  4. I am suspicious of the idea that there is such a thing as a Gestalt independent of all the little pieces.

    "In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected." (Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature)

    My great hope, continually dashed, for book blogs is that they will be the place for readers to accumulate and display the sunny trifles.

    humblehappiness - how sad, the destruction of hope that occurs between 2nd and 10th grade. Maybe your 10th grade reader was good, too. For a while, I wondered if I imagined that book, but I subsequently met people who had also been afflicted with its desiccated Dickens.

    Dickens is perfectly suited for plunder.

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  5. I loved your post today. I've been away from Wuthering Expectations for far to long. This post cracked me up. Your reader sums up one reason why I think Dickens should just wait for senior year, maybe even college. The people who need to find his books would find them on their own.

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  6. I think my school readers generally avoided this kind of chopping and changing of longer texts -- we had excerpts from John Smith's autobiography, as I recall, but that was a rare exception, and there wasn't much literary merit there to be ruined. Mostly it was short stories by the authors in question, or else assigned full novels.

    (No excuse for my dislike of Charles Dickens, is what I'm saying.)

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  7. I should say that my 10th grade reading did not cause me to dislike Dickens. It caused indifference, calm indifference. I had to find my way around old novels before I could fins a way back into them.

    I will also note that this was in the bad old days, before the "whole book" idea got going. Why, just a few years earlier "reading class" had meant working through a box of SRS cards. And people say assigned books damaged their interest in literature!

    Is that right, SRS? Maybe they had another name. What a bad idea.

    I wonder what the advantage was thought to be of Great Expectations hash compared to, say, A Christmas Carol complete. I guess the latter is about an old dude and of little interest to the youth of my day.

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  8. I once found such a nice old copy of Bleak House (with Edward Gorey drawings!) only to get home and open it to find the word "Abridged" under the title. Ugh. Maybe I'll cut out the drawings and use them as bookmarks in an unabridged edition.

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  9. SRA boxes. And I never got to aqua like Cecile Renich in sixth grade.

    But, I did continue my love of reading despite education's best efforts, and my students love to read through what I hope I teach them. Without a box, just good literature.

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  10. SRA, that's right. This - reading books, reading literature - is a part of pedagogy that has improved, that has unquestionably improved.

    Scott - bookmarks, inserts, good. An abridgment of Bleak House - were they insane?

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    1. Actually, it may be worse than I remembered: it doesn't say "Abridged" - it says "Arranged for modern reading."

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    2. Just as disappointing was the arrival of the Tale of Genji, much to my disappointment, they were able to put it all in fifty pages or so. You know. For the reader with a short attention span.

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    3. Fifty pages!

      The fact is, though, that I have read The Tale of Genji only in much shorter summaries, in the form of essays on Genji.

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  11. The editing jobs as characterized by your early experience are something that I think is a terrible symptom of an impatient and as a result, unfocused society. (I know that this was years ago, but i am 46 and things were becoming impatient and unfocused when I was a child).

    Your point about the unnecessary being a major part of what makes Dickens valuable is, in various forms, true of so much literature.

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  12. In this case, luckily, there has been a return to patience and focus. I suppose this is more cyclical than a steady move in one direction.

    The "unnecessary" is what makes up style. Anyone who tells you he just reads for story has not thought about what he is saying. If he means it, a Wikipedia summary of a novel is just as pleasurable as the novel itself.

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  13. I guess I was lucky. I was given "Great Expectations" in high school, but had already investigated Dickens on my own. I started with "Pickwick," which is not much of a novel, really, but is colorful and funny, and not a bad intro for a kid.

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  14. The odd thing is that the year before, the assigned novel was Huckleberry Finn, the whole thing, the real book, and the year before that everyone read "Julius Caesar." So it was really the choice of that reader that locked in the teaching of that poor mauled semi-Dickens.

    Pickwick is wonderful. I doubt I would have made much of it as a youngster, though. I read a bit differently then. I hope I would have enjoyed Sam and his father composing a walentine.

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  15. As I recall, I just enjoyed it. I thought it was funny, and I liked the Wellers. I'm not sure my reaction would be that different today, actually...

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  16. Gogol and Dickens really were quite close cousins, weren't they? Except that Gogol was completely mad, and Dickens was only a bit mad, I think. But I could be wrong.

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  17. Gogol was only a bit mad, no madder than Dickens, when he wrote his best work. Later, sadly, he went completely mad.

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