No Name - a Wilkie Collins headfake

The Woman in White was a smash hit for Wilkie Collins in 1860; No Name is the 1862 followup.  Those of you who have written a bestselling novel, or perhaps had a big hit record, or, like me, have read about people who have done so, will know that Collins faced all sorts of new anxieties, especially the problem of writing a book as good without merely repeating himself.  No Name is comparably good, and Collins repeats himself only in knowing, jokey ways.  Perhaps he experienced no anxiety at all.

The repetitions are, roughly:  two sisters are at the center of the story; one of the sisters behaves quite differently than I was first led to believe; characters who at first appear to be grotesques or caricatures move into central roles and achieve a pleasing degree of fictional reality; some of the story is told through documents.

Collins begins the novel with a clever expectations-defeating trick.  A happy couple lives in a jolly country house with their blissful daughters.  One of the daughters gets tangled up in a shocking affair – an amateur theatrical performance.  Romantic complications ensue.  Is Collins writing some sort of domestic novel – something like Trollope, who had just had his own first smash hit with Framley Parsonage.  Perhaps Collins has given up the Hitchcockian thriller game which he had more or less just invented.  I am pretending I am a contemporary reader, ignorant of The Moonstone (1868).

Suddenly – I will become increasingly vague about the details of the plot – there is a crash and the novel turns into a melodrama, perhaps designed to evoke tears of pathos or to reform a social wrong.  We learn the meaning of the title: a character has “No Name,” no rights, no property because she is of  illegitimate birth, a discovery caused by the melodramatic crash.

Collins is about ten percent of the way through the book, which perhaps does not seem like much, but this is a long book.  I remember wondering when the book was going to turn into a Wilkie Collins novel.  But here it comes:  No Name has been cheated.  No Name vows revenge!  And No Name is not exactly the Count of Monte Cristo, who is super-strong, unfathomably wealthy, and owns a steamboat, but is instead an eighteen year old girl without rights, property, etc.  Strangely, both the Count and No Name are Masters of Disguise.

What I am getting at is at this point the novel has, after some teasing, turned into a Wilkie Collins novel, with great promise for twisty craziness, and that Collins has set himself a fine challenge.  How can No Name avenge herself and reclaim her name.  It is impossible; there is no way.  What could possibly occupy the next five hundred pages?

Tomorrow I will try to write about how the plot works without writing anything about the plot, which will be a good challenge for me.  Collins employs an ingenious device.  The supporting characters, as in the other good Collins novels, are so much fun; I might write about that.  There is a particularly good chapter I might investigate.  At some point, I should quote at least one line from the book.

I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast - R. L. Stevenson reads Alexandre Dumas

Robert Louis Stevenson’s favorite book, which he claims to have read “five or six” times, was The Vicomte de Bragelonne, or Ten Years After (1847-50) by Alexandre Dumas.  It’s the 1,500 page third part of the Three Musketeers saga. Most readers seem to skip to the final third of the novel, issued in English as The Man in the Iron Mask.  Stevenson loved the whole thing.

Almost.  In “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s” (1887), Stevenson justifies his perplexing preference.  First, though, he is obligated to concede the novel’s faults.  The book “goes heavily enough” until Chapter XVII, which he admits is a bit long for an adventure, or any, novel.  The title character is inconsequential; the heroine is similarly weak, a fault that poor Stevenson finds understandable, if not forgivable:

Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no disease is more difficult to cure.  I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and beauty. (121)

I’m told that I can expect to find Stevenson’s only decent female character in Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped.

What does Stevenson love so in The Vicomte de Bragelonne?  Well, what’s not to love about this:

I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan. (119)

Stevenson spends some time defending the morality of the novel and praising the depth of characterization of d’Artagnan, which he says will surprise readers who only know The Three Musketeers.  But really, his experience of reading Dumas is not quite explicable.  Readers will have their own books, their own adventures, which they carried to bed and rejoined at breakfast.  “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s” is as much about the joys of reading as it is about Alexandre Dumas. And the subtext, of course: Stevenson is telling us what he is trying to do in his own books.

It’s curious that Stevenson never attempted anything of the sort himself.  His own novels, whatever their vices or virtues, are taut and efficient.  They are invariably well-written, by the standards of his day and ours.  They’re polished.  Which is the answer to the puzzle. Stevenson cared about his own writing, in a way that Dumas did not.  Stevenson wanted to write stirring, romantic Dumas-like scenes without giving up on good sentences.  So he wrote short, punchy stories rather than immense, sprawling ones.  Good.  Good.

This post is my contribution to the Alexandre Dumas Classics Circuit, which sneakily avoids any actual Dumas.  My own Dumas reading seems to have stalled out after The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5).  Despite Stevenson's best efforts, Twenty Years After (1845) remains on the shelf.

The point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one - everyone likes a good prison story

Strange how so many of the French novels contemporary with The Count of Monte Cristo prominently feature prisons. Stendhal ends The Red and the Black in a prison, and much of The Charterhouse of Parma is set in a strange prison tower. Merimée's Carmen is narrated from prison. The last quarter (half?) of A Harlot High and Low takes place in La Conciergerie. Dumas himself returned to the subject with The Man in the Iron Mask. Then there's Victor Hugo, who was obsessed with the subject of prisons and criminals - see not just The Last Day of a Condemned Man, but parts of Notre Dame of Paris, and substantial chunks of Les Miserables.*

I haven't read Les Miserables, but what I know of it makes me wonder if Hugo may have been deliberately responding to The Count of Monte Cristo is some way, maybe showing how to take the subjects of justice and vengeance seriously. The Count seems to share some qualities with Jean Valjean - they both have superhuman abilities. Both, in fact, owe a debt to Balzac's super-criminal, Vautrin (aka Jacques Collin, etc.), who appears in several Balzac novels. The Count, like Vautrin, wanders around disguised as a priest. Both command mysterious resources and have loyal retainers who owe their lives to their master.

The funny thing here is that although the Count is clearly modeled after Vautrin, the last part of A Harlot High and Low, the prison chapters which star Vautrin, were published two years after The Count of Monte Cristo. It's likely that Balzac influenced Dumas who then influenced Balzac.

Italo Calvino's "The Count of Monte Cristo", which ends t zero (1967), spins off from Dumas's prison scenes. Edmond Dantès ponders how to escape from the island prison; meanwhile the Abbé Faria tries to dig his way out, never quite getting it right:

"At times I hear a scratching at the ceiling; a rain of plaster falls on me; a breach opens; Faria's head appears, upside down. Upside down for me, not him; he crawls out of his tunnel, he walks head down, while nothing about his person is ruffled, not his white hair, nor his beard green with mold, nor the tatters of sackcloth that cover his emaciated loins. He walks across the ceiling and the walls like a fly, he sinks his pick into a certain spot, a hole opens; he disappears."

This is typical Calvino stuff. Time and space don't quite behave correctly, paradoxes fold into more paradoxes. Edmond concludes that the way to escape is to dig inward, not outward. Somehow the Abbé digs his way to the study of Alexandre Dumas, where he rifles the manuscript of The Count of Monte Cristo, looking for an escape route. Here's the final paradox:

"If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one - and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere else - or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here - and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it."

Is there an "escapist literature" pun here? The Italian term seems to be "letteratura d'evasione", so I wonder. The Count of Monte Cristo coincides with our world, the real one, in few points. It's just a marvelous, preposterous work of imagination.

* If I set aside the Gothic dungeons and debtor's prisons - big exceptions, both of them - I don't see such an interest in prisons in English literature. Scott's The Heart of Midlothian - the prison is in the title; Barnaby Rudge; Emily Brontë's poems. What am I forgetting? I'll bet A Tale of Two Cities has some prison scenes. I'll bet the prisons are French. I assume the French preoccupation with the subject is in response to the Revolution and Napoleon.

There is a Providence, there is a God - ideas, or the lack thereof, in The Count of Monte Cristo and Slumdog Millionaire

On Monday, I mentioned that I did not think there was much reason to re-read The Count of Monte Cristo. I meant something specific. I might want to re-read the novel because my brain has softened to the point where I have forgotten the story. The re-reading won't be much different than the initial one.

The novelist Lorenzo Carcaterra, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, appeals to nostalgia. This novel was important to him as a child living in a bad neighborhood; it spurred his imagination, led him into the bigger world. That's interesting enough as a story about one reader's response, but how it's useful to readers whose young imaginations were instead fired by Treasure Island or Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland, I don't understand. Still, another reason to re-read is simply to revisit the pleasures experienced in the past.

I suspect, though, that The Count of Monte Cristo does not offer much else to the re-reader. There won't be many moments of illumination - oh, now I see. No, it turns out I saw everything the first time. Dumas gives up his secrets right away.

This is just a guess, since I have merely read the book. It's my view of the lack of depth of the novel, its art and its ideas, the latter especially. Like many best-sellers before and since, Monte Cristo is plated with a thin layer of seemingly serious ideas about justice, evil, and providence that serve to motivate the characters and give the story a little more heft. See, for example, Chapter 84, "The Hand of God":

"'No,' said Caderousse, 'no; I will not repent. There is no God, there is no Providence - all comes by chance.'

'There is a Providence, there is a God,' said Monte Cristo, 'of which you are a striking proof, as you lie in utter despair, denying him; while I stand before you, rich, happy, safe, and entreating that God in whom you endeavor not to believe, while in your heart you still believe in him.'"

Not much in the way of subtlety here. Did I mention that Caderousse has just been stabbed and is expiring?

Is the Count justified in his revenge? Can evil acts be redeemed? Should the sins of the father fall on his children? If one wanted to discuss these ideas, the novel would work as a conversation starter, but I'll bet the discussion won't spend much time with the book itself. There isn't any depth, or resolution, or surprise in the content of the ideas. Dumas doesn't really mean any of it, or doesn't care.

I saw Slumdog Millionaire recently and was amused to find that another Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers, plays an important part. I was less amused to find that the movie was overlaid with a set of "ideas" about destiny that were just as shallow as those in The Count. They were decoration, slipcovers for the story's clichés. No one involved actually believes any of it.

I sound so negative. There may be other, more interesting, thematic ideas, in the movie or in The Count of Monte Cristo (the economic development theme, maybe?) and other reasons to see the movie. Still, most of the characters (the love interest, the gangsters, the cops) are clichés, as is most of the plot, and are reviewers mentioning that you have to sit through almost an entire episode of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? I could not believe I had paid money to watch something I didn't want to see when it was free.

As a counter-argument, I will link to an ingenious symbolic explication of The Count of Monte Cristo involving Dante's Purgatorio. I find it completely unconvincing, working only by ignoring most of the book, but it gave me something new to think about.

A streak of blood traced with a pencil - the best sentence in The Count of Monte Cristo

Sometimes Alexandre Dumas writes well. It's nothing like a priority, obviously, but there's some good writing here and there. Here's the setup for my favorite sentence in The Count of Monte Cristo.

The Count plans revenge on four people. How strange, then, when his servant describes how he, the Corsican servant, stabbed M. de Villefort, revenge target #1, in the chest and left him for dead many years ago. Those Corsicans and their vendettas, always getting in the way of more important vengeance.

The thriller-trained reader will assume that either the servant has his story wrong, or Villefort did not die of his wounds, so it is no surprise when Villefort turns out to be alive. I believe there are another 500 pages before the matter is actually explained. Before then the small issue of the stabbing is mentioned exactly twice, once when the servant glimpses Villefort and realizes that his stiletto had failed him, and once when the Count first meets Villefort in Paris.

Here's the description of Villefort from that scene:

“All his costume was black, with the exception of his white cravat, and this funereal appearance was only broken in upon by the slight line of red riband which passed almost imperceptibly through his buttonhole, and which appeared like a streak of blood traced with a pencil.” Ch. 49, “Ideology”

That's it, the only hint of the stabbing, for hundreds of pages. Pretty good, huh?

Let's try one more. "The Carnival at Rome", Ch. 36, is a favorite chapter, with some unusually good descriptive material about the festival. For example:

"Lovely women, yielding to the influence of the scene, bend over their balconies, or lean from their windows, and shower down confetti, which are returned by bouquets; the air seems darkened with the falling confetti and flying flowers. In the streets the lively crowd is dressed in the most fantastic costumes--gigantic cabbages walk gravely about, buffaloes' heads bellow from men's shoulders, dogs walk on their hind legs; in the midst of all this a mask is lifted, and, as in Callot's Temptation of St. Anthony, a lovely face is exhibited, which we would fain follow, but from which we are separated by troops of fiends."

I don't think the grammar of the last part is quite right, botched by either the translator or Dumas, since I can't find the lovely face in the Callot print, but you can compare Dumas to Callot for yourself. In plot terms, this is all filler, but it also reinforces the transformation / change of identity theme. Most of Dumas's sentences do one thing; these do more than one. That's almost what I think of as the art of fiction.

revenge!, Revenge!, REVENGE!

Although it is true that A Watched Plot Never Spoils™, much of the fun of The Count of Monte Cristo lies right on the surface of the story, so I'll watch my step. Fortunately, the two most interesting ideas in the book are structural, not incidental.

The story, from a high altitude: The dashing young sailor Edmond Dantès is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. On his wedding day, the poor sap. He spends many years in prison, in the section that is, I suppose, the most famous. The moment when Dantès leaves the prison, for example, is, I have to say, pretty great.* Edmond vows revenge!, Revenge!, REVENGE!**

The last 900 pages or so comprise the unwinding of a single, insanely elaborate revenge plan simultaneously directed at four separate targets. This is one of the best ideas in the book. The standard thriller revenge plot goes after its villains one at a time, least important to most. The Count could have had his enemies stabbed or poisoned, but instead he creates a Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme whose mainspring is the vanity and greed of his enemies. What, you don't want to see how that works?

The ingenuity of The Three Musketeers, by contrast, is the creation of an endlessly flexible vehicle for episodic stories, something plenty of people have done since, if not before. The inspiration may vary from episode to episode, but it doesn't matter much, because the structure is loose. Not like the final two-thirds of The Count of Monte Cristo, a single massive, crazy whatsit.

One might wonder why the first third was even necessary. V for Vendetta, to pick a contemporary knockoff, gets straight to the revenge. Dumas could have done that, but then we would have missed his most outrageous innovation, the pivot that occurs once Edmond is out of prison. He adopts a new identity to help enact his revenge - many identities, actually. What's nuts is that all of the other characters have also adopted new identities. One story basically disappears and is replaced by another, with only occasional, vague nods to the first story.

The novel is like a train that jumps the tracks but then miraculously lands on another set of tracks pointed in a different direction. Or like a movie that sudddenly changes both characters and actors a third of the way in, but occasionally makes shadowy references to the first set of characters. This is aside from the complementary device where four characters actually (symbolically actually) return from the dead.

For example, say that in the first part, Edmond is played by Errol Flynn, and then after prison Edmond becomes the Count and Errol Flynn becomes Groucho Marx. His enemies turn out to be Chico and Harpo, his fiancée becomes Margaret Dumont. Etc. etc. A few plot details would have to be changed. This would have been a great movie. Now I feel bad that I mentioned it - I want to see the Marx Brothers' The Count of Monte Cristo.

* I realized, as I read this scene, that I knew it from my childhood, from a 1975 TV movie starring Richard Chamberlain and Tony Curtis. Nothing else in the book triggered any memories; just this one scene. I had misunderstood it, I now discover, but I never forgot it.

** Here's how effective the story can be. Ma femme finished the book before I did. For days after, whenever the cat misbehaved, she would point at it and hiss "Vendetta! Vendetta!" Terrifying.

The Count of Monte Cristo - clichés, 1,462 pages, and jelly on the side

I'm not such a bad reader of literature. I pay attention to what the text says. I read each sentence. I store away the details. If the writer is good, they’ll show up later. When I hear someone say that he didn’t appreciate this or that book because he “reads too fast”, my sympathy is limited. Slow down, dude. Or get the plot out of the way, and then read it again for the good parts.

With a book like Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5), though, I’m the one reading it wrong. This is not a well-written novel. It’s a compilation of clichés - clichés of characterization, clichés of expression. Individual sentences, or dialogues, or, in mercifully few cases, entire chapters (see Ch. 52, “Pyramus and Thisbe”), are teeth-grindingly bad. It’s the skimmers who are reading The Count of Monte Cristo correctly. Speed up, pal, speed up. No, don’t stick around to the end of that sentence. It’s not getting any better.

In the Modern Library edition, which reprints an anonymous 1846 English version, presumably done in haste and packed with grotesque translation errors, that momentum-killing Chapter 52 (two young lovers deliver expostion to each other through a hole in a wall, like Pyramus and Thisbe, ain't that cute) begins on page 686. Good Lord, that's not even the halfway point -there are 1,462 pages total.

If the novel is so bad (which it isn't, quite), and so long, why is it one of the most popular stories ever written? I had to wrestle with this for a while, I admit. My tolerance for clichés - other people's clichés, at least, ha ha - is low. My interest in plot - incident, really - is minimal. What did readers like Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino see in this ridiculous book?

Oscar Wilde argued, or asserted, or anyway wrote, that we should divide books into three classes: Books to read, Books to re-read, and Books not to read at all (for example, “all books that try to prove anything”).*

The Count of Monte Cristo is definitely worth reading. I’m not so sure it’s worth re-reading, at least not for the reasons one re-reads, to pick some contemporaries of Dumas, Balzac or Hugo . I’ll spend this week grumbling about Monte Cristo’s defects, enjoying its virtues, and eating deep-fried sandwiches.

* The Artist as Critic: The Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman, p. 27