A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Since Donna Tartt recommended it to Jenna Bush Hager, I resurfaced my own review of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice by JF Martel this week:
Tartt didn’t tell Jenna about her reverence for Charles Dickens, but she used to mention it often. Since I write on Christmas day, I offer two brief pieces I published on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (and Joyce, capitalism, queer theory, Orwell, paganism, etc.) over the years on Tumblr. Please enjoy!
Dickens, Joyce, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past
The pseudonymous Prospero writes a very beautiful little essay at the Economist, “Forget ‘A Christmas Carol’—‘The Dead’ Is the Greatest Christmas Story,” though it disappointingly doesn’t provide the title’s promised Joyce vs. Dickens showdown:
"Gabriel realises “unresentfully” (the story’s key word) that Gretta and he will never share such love. The time that, supposedly, draws couples and families together has laid bare the gulfs that separate them. Bonhomie alone cannot erase the past pain that still severs Nationalist from Unionist, Catholic from Protestant, old from young, even wife from husband. Grief and loneliness endure, yet “all over Ireland”, the snow “falling faintly through the universe” will wrap everybody in a kind of peace."
I once taught both novellas in a British literature survey course, and did note that “The Dead” was a modernist Christmas Carol—though A Christmas Carol is much the weirder of the two texts. The opening, with its hyper-self-conscious narratorial awareness of language and ironic scrutiny of cliché—
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
—could be from Ulysses! And as a student in the aforementioned survey course pointed out in his final paper, Dickens, for all his sympathy with the poor, chastises Scrooge for miserliness, dismisses public provision, and praises shopping, personal charity, and the circulation of money as the engine of social melioration. I detect a similar ambivalence toward—verging on approval of—capitalism in Joyce. Christmas makes consumers of us all.
Defending Scrooge, Defending Christmas
In where else but the Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm and the wonderfully-named Mike Solon issue a defense of Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge. They argue that the businessman was not a miser but an investor, and that the projects he invested in—railroads, industry, etc.—improved the lives of many more people than his charity ever could have.
I was impressed by the difference between Gramm and Solon’s argument and academic literary theory’s canonical defense of Scrooge, which belongs to Lee Edelman in his No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). For Edelman—and I’m sure I’ll ignorantly vulgarize the Lacaniana underpinning the argument—Scrooge does not invest for the future but stands for the queer death drive against all reproductive heteronormativity until he is disciplined by the novella’s family-values narrative arc.
The divergence between these arguments—Scrooge as benefactor to a burgeoning middle class, Scrooge as a figure that blocks any progressive future—testifies to the oft-neglected literary value of Dickens’s novella: as a billion studies of Shakespeare and Joyce have shown, there is no greater sign of such value than when a work incites mutually exclusive interpretations.
A Christmas Carol is too often regarded as mere kitsch and treacle, when it contains more of what matters in Dickens—the visionary cityscape, the romantic realism, the delight in abundance, the playful narrative voice—than we might expect to find in such a short work by a writer more famous for writing three-volume doorstoppers. While it may lack the grit, complexity, and breadth of, say, Bleak House, it remains a good place for a new reader to begin with Dickens, to get a taste of his qualities
It is also extraordinarily strange. Orwell resolved the conundrum of Dickens’s politics—being fought over like Christmas pudding in the early 20th century by Catholics and Marxists—as those of a lower-middle-class “nineteenth-century liberal” who spoke for values that transcended class and party:
All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society. The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it.
But Orwell also says in the same essay, “All art is propaganda. […] On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.” The ideological analysis hardly by itself explains a literary uncanniness, a convincing because unforced and untheoretical modern paganism, that influenced Poe, Kafka, and Nabokov as much as it affected the subsequent development of the realist novel. In his blend of wisdom, cynicism, naïveté, exuberance, and sentiment, Dickens might resemble his own Ghost of Christmas Past, an eerily congruent, comic, and illuminating assemblage of disparate elements—like Christmas itself, that Christian holiday grafted onto Saturnalia and Yule, its Santa Claus an amalgam of St. Nicolas and Wotan:
It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.