Missing his gifts
Between Shakespeare and Joyce, there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language. He can be a misleading guide, because if you pay attention to what is usually said about Dickens, you will miss his gifts altogether.
A Temple of Texts, p. 275
On Dickensian “realism”
I am interested in exploration, not experimentation. What passes for experimental (when so-called experimental fiction was in vogue) is often just rejection of the 19th century bourgeois world view that their fiction depicted. If Dickens depicts the real world, I am Humpty Dumpty. Narration, characterization, scene omnipotence—these techniques were regarded as essences, and the result was to be “the way it is.” Middle-class novels wallow in these comforting illusions. Most of my crowd were heartily sick of it—not that we didn’t admire the great 19th century writers. It was the claims made for their work we rejected. Traditional narration is OK with me—it is one chosen device among many—but it is as artificial as pie crust. You don’t have to be a “realist,” but if you want to be you have to write The Tunnel not Vanity Fair. The real world is mean, confused, chancy, as ill-ordered as ordered, evil oftener than good, and as pointless as a broken pencil. The serious writer should not feed readers who are smug and lazy, reactionary yet faddy, leering but unobservant. Nor satisfy the critics who pander to their tastes.
William H. Gass: Interviewed by Eric Day, 2004
On putting down and picking up Dickens
Gaddis had bade the Quad a pissy good-bye during the sad senior year of his Harvard career, so he was largely self-taught and would not be disabused of his youthful enthusiasms as I suspected most of us were who went on through the levels of snobbery one’s momentary peers deemed necessary to an education. I remember having to leave Spengler and Tchaikovsky, Emerson and Nietzsche, E. E. Cummings and Thomas Wolfe behind on my journey to more elevated realms-—as much as I had loved them once. And the higher one rose in the ranks of the system, the greater the sacrifice the system asked for: eventually, Verdi was dumped for Monteverdi, Tolstoy for Flaubert, and everybody for Cezanne. It took twenty years for me to return to Nietzsche, Emerson required even more self-discipline, while Dickens was recovered the day I believed I had at last learned to read.
A Temple of Texts, p. 195
The Test of Time
That is why the Test of Time has to be invoked, because the Test of Time puts people at some distance from their selfish selves, allows them to correct more immediate mistakes, permits missing manuscripts to be found, contexts of interest to be enlarged, local prejudices to be overcome. The visionary and the vulgar, the discriminating and the sentimental, the precise and the vague, are so frequently, and against all rational expectation, found together in the same bed that the finer qualities present are compromised and besmirched in the eyes of those otherwise fit to see them. The crude laugh out loud or easily weep at the scandalous scene set before them, the way Dickens’ readers giggled and gasped at the doings portrayed in his lively but sentimental cartoons. However, Dickens’ language, his rhetoric, which rises sometimes to Shakespeare’s level (as well as so much else which rises with it), is ignored by those bent on melodrama, while it is discounted by the snobbishly fastidious who see it as servicing only soap opera and special pleading. The Test of Time sieves inhuman failings like silt through a prospector’s pan, leaving a residue which is clearly either gold or gravel.
Tests of Time, p. 110
Hearing nearly everything
We can gather nearly everything from Mr. Dickens, but here is just one more passage to ponder, containing a device that, in the hands of Henry James, becomes transcendent. The sentence some times moves as its meaning moves; in this case, like a camera in terms of what it perceives. This camera is able to say what it is doing: I am now backing, tracking, zooming, closing in. A younger, smaller Copperfield is looking down the hall from Peggotty’s kitchen into a churchyard, although the eye’s move (following a blatant pun on “passage”) is an imaginative one:
Here is a long passage—what an enormous perspective I make of it!—leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front-door. A dark store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at night; for I don’t know what may be among those tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly burning light, letting a mouldy air come out at the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one whiff. Then there are the two parlours; the parlour in which we sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty—for Peggotty is quite our companion, when her work is done and we are alone—and the best parlour where we sit on a Sunday; grandly, but not so comfortably. There is something of a doleful air about that room to me, for Peggotty has told me—I don’t know when, but apparently ages ago—about my father’s funeral, and the company having their black cloaks put on. One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.
I shall rest my case with “soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee.” If you switch “pepper” with “pickles,” retaining both meter and the pattern of alliteration, you will immediately hear why Dickens had it right: “soap, pepper, pickles, candles, and coffee” is hard to say because the two l e’s aren’t as easily articulated when placed that close together, yet their closeness pulls “pickles” into orbit with “candles and coffee” rather than leaving it with the “soap,” where it belongs.
Just a detail, don’t I hear a critic complain? There are no details in execution, Paul Valéry wisely said. He said everything wisely. Even when what he said wasn’t wise, it was wisely said.
A Temple of Texts, pp. 277-278
“Ands”
‘Ands’
are almost essential for excess. They are perfect if you want to make big piles or imply an endless addition. One ‘and’ may make a tidy pair, closing a couple like a lock: War and Peace, ham and eggs, Pride and Prejudice. Add another, however, and the third ‘and’ will begin to alter the earlier ones the same miraculous way the squashed and flattened condition designated by ‘mashed’ is lent the fully contrasting sense of ‘heaped’ simply by putting it near the word ‘potato.’ No one is any better at this energetic mounding than the Dickens of Dombey. Here is part of a long passage describing the ruination of a neighborhood by some new laid railroad tracks. It implies he is not telling us the half of it:
There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dust-heaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summerhouses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance.
[…]
Dickens, by repeating “oyster shells in the oyster season” and “lobster shells in the lobster season,” not only collects these two kinds of shells in the same place, his ‘and’ identifies two rhetorical formulas in which these four little tumuli of shells and crockery and cabbage leave are given to us. So there are ‘ands’ that vary in their meanings, and ‘ands’ that differ in terms of the kinds of objects they connect: things, inscriptions, concepts, or syntactical shapes and rhetorical patterns.
Habitations of the Word, pp. 174-175
And a final word…
All books occupy the same space. Dante and Dickens: they cheek by jowl. And although books begin their life in the world at different times, these dates rarely determine the days they begin in yours and mine. We forget simple things like that: that we are built of books.