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Monday, October 20, 2008
Bleak Dorrit
Bleak Dorrit is, as you can see from that link, the title of a posting on the course blog for the Royal Holloway University of London MA in Victorian Literature and Culture on which I teach. Last week I wandered into a two hour seminar on Little Dorrit with a copy of Bleak House in my hand, just because, well sometimes I’m dozy like that. This year’s group happens to be a good one, and they saved my blushes with some on-the-ball discussion of a variety of aspects of the novel: anticlimax, financial and other hollownesses; flattened or empty characters, the representation of alienation. But, as I note in the blog post, I started to wonder whether both their and my praise of the novel carried a sort of latent assumption that its virtues put it on a par with Modernist novels rather than those loose, baggy, Victorian sentimental confections the academy finds it so easy to patronise. ‘Hey, hey, maybe Old Curiosity Shop is kinda gooey, but, but look here: Little Dorrit is practically a Modernist masterpiece of alienated and fragmented subjectivity! Just look at Mr F.’s aunt!’ I wonder whether the drift of our judgment, in other words, was predicated on a tacit belief that Modernist art is in some sense more worthwhile (more relevant, more sophisticated, whatever) than Victorian art. That’s not something I believe, actually. Indeed, last year the seminar on The Portrait of a Lady specifically discussed how we might respond to James’s novel if we were to take it not as a proto-Modernist text but instead precisely as a High Victorian boiling pot. What’s going on here? Is it that my bias takes the Victorian to be more lively, comedic and rounded; and reserves the hollowed, the alienated, the flattened affect for the Modern? Hard to justify that position. Or maybe my doziness goes deeper than I realised.
Comments
Adam, this is wonderful. It seems to me that in the back of our minds, we still think of modern and postmodern phenomenologies unhistorically, as the truth, and that the logical propositions of 20th Century philosophy and art blend with our love for whatever is “darkest.” Diderot is better and more modern than Voltaire precisely because he’s “darker,” just as the later Harry Potter movies are better because they’re darker, and so on. Hamlet, which is darker than Much Ado About Nothing, must therefore be more modern.
But, that said, there is more to the praise of the modern than the prejudices of the moment. If Dickens or James perceived (and then represented formally through their work) where the current of styles and ideas was headed, then they saw their own time very complexly, as a series of contradictory and simultaneous impulsions. A real Victorian potboiler, with all the conveniences and trim we expect from that age and nothing else, is really a falsification of the Victorian era.
Adam asks, I wonder whether the drift of our judgment, in other words, was predicated on a tacit belief that Modernist art is in some sense more worthwhile (more relevant, more sophisticated, whatever) than Victorian art.
I think that this unstated assumption lies behind much literary discussion (including on literary blogs). My impression is also that it has motivated the (relatively recent) critical elevation of the big dark Dickens novels (Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend especially) above the looser and more sentimental ones. Not just aesthetic but also critical judgments often seem predicated on a post-Jamesian model, or a teleological theory by which the more a book approximates Modernist values, the better it must be--I agree with this bit I quoted from the Case/Shaw text I’m working through that these assumptions may limit our ways of thinking about works that were operating under different assumptions.
There’s something about Modernism’s hold on the critical imagination that I find very troubling. Not that I dislike Modernist works, but that too many people seem to think that Modernist aesthetic values are the only worthwhile ones.I see this in poetry all the time; it came up here a while back, for instance, that some people who taught and wrote poetry seemed to think that Modernist concision was a prerequisite for a good poem. Using Scott McCloud’s division of artists into classicists, formalists, animists, and iconoclasts is somewhat more helpful, I think.
I blame Trilling, at least in my own case: I don’t think I’ll ever transcend the credence I gave in my youth to the standards he uses in praising Little Dorrit.
too many people seem to think that Modernist aesthetic values are the only worthwhile ones
I don’t want to obsess on this issue, but something like Rich’s concern, expressed above, motivated my rambling post a few days ago, which was sparked by the discussion of Dostoevski at Dan Green’s site, or more specifically, by my own frustration with the insistence on ‘aesthetic’ qualities being all that matters in the novel.
I don’t want to do a long-distance drive-by on Dan Green, though I find his insistence on nothing but aesthetics far too limiting. But even if you’re focussed on aesthetics, there’s more than one aesthetic. I mean (going back to poetry again) what do people think Whitman was doing? Or Ginsberg? Were they just shabby monstrosities of non-concision? I’m left with the feeling that people who insist on a Modernist aesthetic just don’t get some kinds of art, and want to universalize their likings. Which is fine, but not fundamentally different from the guy who thinks that science fiction is great because it has ideas and literature about real people is boring.
As I wrote above, Scott McCloud’s thing (which came out of comic book criticism) is valuable, I think, in making people consider that there are different sorts of artists with different goals who have different kinds of aesthetics that they need to be evaluated by.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s _Contingencies of Value_ is useful here. She tackles head on the valuation of literature in different times and cultures, and demonstrates how contingent these valuations are. The book is certain to infuriate some recent posters ;)
Here’s a link to a review of the book:
http://web2.ade.org/ade/bulletin/n096/096050.htm
Thanks for the link, Trent. Most interesting.
We can try to understand a book in the terms of its author and contemporary audience; we can see how a book fits into the intellectual and literary history that actually followed; we can ignore all of that and use a book for our own imaginative purposes.
Or we can all do three things at once, right?
I suspect the large majority of readers do 3 and don’t even consider 1 and 2. And there’s certainly a sneaky group who does 3 but tries to tart it up as 1. & they probably don’t even know that’s what they’re doing.
Amateur Reader, I don’t think of evaluative criticism as being necessarily any of those three things. We can read a work for what seems to be its own coherent purpose, and evaluate how well it accomplishes the purpose. That need not actually be the purpose intended by the author, or read by its contemporary audience. We need not know its intellectual and literary history. And it isn’t strictly our own imaginative purpose, since it’s constrained by needing to not misrepresent the actual text.
Of course, I wouldn’t claim that each text has some kind of singular, inherent purpose. And in practice evaluations are often constrained by what we know about the author or the form—if we’re reading a novel, say, there’s a whole lot of ideas about how novels work that we can’t just ignore. And the whole idea of an evaluation only makes sense as an implicit comparison. But the three things you’ve mentioned don’t seem to me to be necessary features of an evaluative reading.