Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Prose, prose, prosing about Bleak House

How about a week of Bleak House (1852-3)?  Now that I have reread Bleak House, and Great Expectations earlier in the year, I have not only read every Charles Dickens novel, but have read them all within the last ten years.  I doubt I will ever do that again, although it would be great fun do it over and over, every decade until I expire.  There are not many books I have read even three times.

I took more notes than usual, as many as I took earlier this year for Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, but I was going to be tested on that one.  This time I was mostly wallowing in the Dickens stench and breathing in the Dickens fog.  “Fog everywhere” (Ch. 1).

The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall.  The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass.  The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud toward the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain.  (Ch. 2)

I fear this is what some readers are criticizing when they call Dickens “wordy,” as if the passage would be improved with fewer words, perhaps without “loppings” or “crackle” or “soft.”  The paragraph and page only improves as it continues – “the oaken pulpit breaks out in a cold sweat,” or “[t]he pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has passed along the old rooms, shutting up the shutters.”

The book has the most marvelous things for the reader interested in looking for them, so many that I find myself a bit paralyzed at the moment. 

In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the chairs, serves for cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man.  (Ch. 10)

That one just popped out as I randomly paged through the novel.

That method will not work everywhere in the novel because of its unique dual narration, with half of the novel written by the usual omniscient Dickens narrator, made unusual only the extraordinary rhetorical and artistic effects he achieves this time around, and the other half written in the first person by one of the characters in the novel, Esther Summerson, in terms of the omniscient narrator’s story a secondary character at best, but, given that she gets half of the actual 880 pages, the novel’s protagonist.  Summerson is an implausibly great writer, but not at the level of Charles Dickens.  She is comparable to David Copperfield, and he's a professional novelist, while this is Summerson's first book!

A little more than half, actually, 53%.  This time I counted pages.  The novel alternates from the omniscient to the first person narrator, not by any fixed rule.  I thought that perhaps I had imposed a false symmetry, but no.  The fluidity with which Dickens varies the length, pace and tone of the alternating narrators is a minor pleasure of its own, now that I know the book.

I have no idea why more writers have not used this device.  It solves so many problems; it creates so many opportunities.  Not so long after Dickens, fiction writers grew tired of the omniscient narrator, preferring to explore the limited third person brought to prominence by Flaubert, or messing around with all of the variations of the pure first person.  The Bleak House narrator is a griffin, no doubt about that, a fantastic beast created to tell a fairy tale.

Boy, if I keep going like this, I’ll be able to write about Bleak House for two weeks, or ten.   “I went on prose, prose, prosing, for a length of time,” says Esther (Ch. 23).  Tomorrow, I’ll try to focus.

17 comments:

  1. I'm currently reading an Irish crime novel (A genre that Dickens would probably enjoy). It's a contemporary novel, so like so many contemporary crime novels, it shifts point of view every couple of pages to tell the story of a large cast of characters. But this shifting every few pages drives me nuts. I keep thinking, why don't people read Dickens!!!! He shifts point of view just as much but he keeps his focus on one character long enough to really get to know the character. He's just so much easier to follow.

    I look forward to your posts on Bleak House.

    ReplyDelete



  2. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud toward the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. (Ch. 2)

    I fear this is what some readers are criticizing when they call Dickens “wordy,”


    An interesting exercise- try to imagine what Hemingway or the other "less is more" writers would have done with the opening of Bleak House. Equally, if Dickens had worked on Hemingway- the plot of The Killers had to be expanded for the film- just think how Dickens would have filled it out!

    ReplyDelete
  3. My recent reading of Dickens has been the opposite to yours: I haven't read a single Dickens novel in the last 10 years. This was after reading Little Dorrit and David Copperfield back to back. I have recently bought Bleak House though, and will get around to it soon enough (by which I probably mean, some time in the next 5 years).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Looking forward to this week. Wordiness is part of the point of Bleak House, anyway, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Irish crime novel just needs an omniscient narrator to step in and sort things out once in a while.

    I fear many readers of Hemingway find him wordy as well. He writes with style. I think "wordy" means something like "get on with it." A way to make my impatience with style the fault of the author. If like me you think of wordiness as the use of words, as rhetorical effects and imagery, then it is the point. If you think it means too many words for some specific effect, then it is like complaining that John Coltrane played too many notes. Why didn't he just play the melody?

    As much as I love Dickens, I would not be shocked if it turns out to be ten years before I read him again. Ten years is not that long, is it? No. Lots of my favorites that I haven't touched for ten years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is my favourite Dickens novel, and the quotes just bring all that back. I just finished re-reading Anna Karenina, and it's amazing what sticks the second (or third) time around.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Congrats on reading all of Dickens' novels! That's a real accomplishment. Love Bleak House and love the passage about the fog. Your comment about Esther and David Copperfield made me laugh. Perhaps if David wasn't so distracted by his silly first wife he would have developed into a better writer.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I could just quote and quote, all of these amazing blocks of imagery that are in almost every omniscient chapter. One of the problems Dickens solves with the first person narrator is that it gives him a break from this kind of invention, or allows a different kind of invention - more dialogue in Esther's chapters, more social comedy, and fewer of the big cinematic effects, the camera swooping through the trees or focusing in on Krook's greasy cinders.

    I think we got Copperfield at his peak as a writer. That he is not as good as Dickens is not exactly shameful. For people who do not know what I am talking about, David Copperfield is by profession a novelist, but he writes three-volume novels, not serials like Dickens. And people say David Copperfield is autobiographical!

    As for reading them all, Dickens is a grope-your-way-forward kind of writer, the greatest improviser in fiction, so the benefit from knowing a number of his novels, and knowing the chronology, is substantial. He uses his current novel to work on problems from his previous novels. His creative or artistic biography is fascinating.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The omniscient narrator in Bleak House is one of Dickens' greatest inventions, a really magnificent thing. I would go so far as to say breathtaking.

    My copy of the novel comes with an appendix showing Dickens' fairly detailed (and long) outline of the story, including rejected ideas and a list of possible titles. Which in no way diminishes his genius as an improvisor (just as Coltrane's knowing the chord changes to the tunes in no way diminishes the genius of his solos).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh wait: I was gonna say that I'm excitedly looking forward to your posts about this novel. Go, Tom, go!

      Delete
  10. As I lounge in the hospital room, enjoying the post-op dripping Rx and the glamour-girl nurses (2 so far), I look forward to being sprung soon and returning to Bleak House -- not my house but the novel . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If what I just said seems a bit foggy, write up to drip, drip, drip -- and my fondness for Bleak House.

      Delete
  11. Dickens has a progression in his early novels that moves from accidentally writing a novel (Pickwick) to writing novels with no plan at all (Old Curiosity Shop) to meaning to have a plan but either never finishing or ignoring it to, finally, making a plan (Bleak House). But Dickens knew himself well enough by this point to leave areas inside the big structure for improvisation, again like in a jazz score.

    These 20 part serials must have been murderously tricky to write.

    RT, get well soon.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I can never decide which Dicken's novel to reread and so have gone a long, long time since reading him, the last one being Bleak House which I didn't read properly as I was in college and rushing to finish it for a tutorial that never happened. That is a lot more than ten, or even twenty years ago. Maybe I should take a pointer from your post and just start reading them again in chronological order. He was my absolute favourite writer for a few of my teenage years.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Bleak House is superb, so there's that argument. But I am already getting the itch to go back to Pickwick, rough and messy but in places - characters, scenes, and that fine last plot - many places - well, it will look very different than it did long ago.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I have read all the Dickens novels now ... not in the last ten years, but in the last forty. I really should read them again, but, while I'd be keen to read again Bleak House or Little Dorrit, i don't know that i'd be so keen to plough through, say, Barnaby Rudge or Martin Chuzzlewit, although both have some fine passages in them. There are some things one has to rad because one is a completist, and, once read, one need not return to...

    ReplyDelete
  15. There's one of the benefits of re-reading - you can just skip to the good parts. Just jump to the Gordon Riots in BR. Ignore the pointless romance and the botched mystery.

    ReplyDelete