The Thing About Charlie...
I occasionally spend some time ghosting here. (Even though writing book reviews aren't really my main 'thing', I like to see what the reviewers are talking about and there's always something fun going on.) Over the weekend, Laura Smyth brought up the subject of Dickens: Is he still relevant?
Notwithstanding two recent books spun from the stuff of his final (and unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it's an open question. Dickens thus-far seems to have been skipped by the renaissance being enjoyed by other classic authors such as Jane Austen.
So... does he need an infusion of post-modern zombies to bring back the readers? Or is he already just another zombie author refusing to shamble off to the churchyard and a peaceful afterlife confined to the shelves of English Lit professors, destined for a messy end on the killing fields of postmodern lit crit?
I think he's so relevant that the biggest publishing phenomenon of recent memory doesn't fully make sense until you view it through his works.
The main trouble with Charlie is that he was made victim of his own success. So many see elements central to his plots as cliche (Orphans? Wicked stepfathers? That is SO overdone!) but what Dickens did was not cliche -- it was made cliche by endless repetition from the pens, typewriters and laptops that followed him.
It's a mental space that a reader needs to get themselves into before embarking upon any of the classics. This is doubly-true of Dickens whose plots and twists and characters have become so inedelibly woven into modern fiction. His ideas and plots and characters have been endlessly plundered by nearly everyone because his voice was so persuasive that he set the bar that we're all trying to clear.
Not long ago I was reading a music critic talk about the number of bands whose entire catalog and careers could be summarized as "Variations on one song from the Beatles' White Album". (I'm still looking for the article so I can quote and attribute accurately). So too could many more authors and screenwriters be summed up as churning out endless variations on the source material drawn from Dickens. Some of it has been amazing, epic tales built upon a 'Dickensian' and some of it should remain nameless and fade from our minds. Regardless, the quality of imitation does not strain the strength of the source material.
In a time when optimism is oft times treated as though it were a contagious disease, perhaps the inveterate optimism of Dickens' characters can't catch hold upon the modern mind. Perhaps the moments of astonishingly-modern wit are too weighted with the passages of florid Victorian prose.
I tend to disagree. Dickens' voice was so modern and his wit was so sharp that we can still hear ourselves in it. There has been no more profound reflection of this in modern times than Harry Potter.
The boy wizard aside, this is a time of literature cast in the light of Hemingway, awash in the blood of a million murdered adverbs. Despite Rowling's cinder-block sized tomes, for the most part grandiose prose and sweeping tales are being pared down and scaled back ever more as writers and publishers chases an allegedly dwindling attention span.
Have our attentions so dwindled, though that we're in need of a zombie incursion into the classics to renew the spark of literature that has aged? I enjoyed the heck out of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I do fear however, that this is going to spawn a trend of duct-taping postmodern monsters into classic tales until it devolves into an Abbot & Costello movie.
In my opinion, P&P&Z only worked because of a brilliant blend of two gifted writers (Austen and Grahame-Smith) hundreds of years apart to create a comedy of manners and it took off because the readers were primed by the Austen renaissance (and zombies are kind of a thing right now). If nothing else, before we're ready to receive Little Dorrit Versus the Zombie Debtors of Doom, we'll need to reacquaint ourselves with Dorrit's creator.
However, I'm thinking of shopping around a story about a zombie antihero escaping a zombie-infected prep school to bum around New York for a day. He'll have a thing for ducks, wear a funky red hat and spend a lot of time trying to eat the brains of the prostitutes in he meets. Just kidding, Mr. Salinger. Just kidding.
----
Reposted (with minor edits) from Pages to Type Before I Sleep... , a blog about books, writing, technology and literary culture.
Notwithstanding two recent books spun from the stuff of his final (and unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it's an open question. Dickens thus-far seems to have been skipped by the renaissance being enjoyed by other classic authors such as Jane Austen.
So... does he need an infusion of post-modern zombies to bring back the readers? Or is he already just another zombie author refusing to shamble off to the churchyard and a peaceful afterlife confined to the shelves of English Lit professors, destined for a messy end on the killing fields of postmodern lit crit?
I think he's so relevant that the biggest publishing phenomenon of recent memory doesn't fully make sense until you view it through his works.
The main trouble with Charlie is that he was made victim of his own success. So many see elements central to his plots as cliche (Orphans? Wicked stepfathers? That is SO overdone!) but what Dickens did was not cliche -- it was made cliche by endless repetition from the pens, typewriters and laptops that followed him.
It's a mental space that a reader needs to get themselves into before embarking upon any of the classics. This is doubly-true of Dickens whose plots and twists and characters have become so inedelibly woven into modern fiction. His ideas and plots and characters have been endlessly plundered by nearly everyone because his voice was so persuasive that he set the bar that we're all trying to clear.
Not long ago I was reading a music critic talk about the number of bands whose entire catalog and careers could be summarized as "Variations on one song from the Beatles' White Album". (I'm still looking for the article so I can quote and attribute accurately). So too could many more authors and screenwriters be summed up as churning out endless variations on the source material drawn from Dickens. Some of it has been amazing, epic tales built upon a 'Dickensian' and some of it should remain nameless and fade from our minds. Regardless, the quality of imitation does not strain the strength of the source material.
In a time when optimism is oft times treated as though it were a contagious disease, perhaps the inveterate optimism of Dickens' characters can't catch hold upon the modern mind. Perhaps the moments of astonishingly-modern wit are too weighted with the passages of florid Victorian prose.
I tend to disagree. Dickens' voice was so modern and his wit was so sharp that we can still hear ourselves in it. There has been no more profound reflection of this in modern times than Harry Potter.
The boy wizard aside, this is a time of literature cast in the light of Hemingway, awash in the blood of a million murdered adverbs. Despite Rowling's cinder-block sized tomes, for the most part grandiose prose and sweeping tales are being pared down and scaled back ever more as writers and publishers chases an allegedly dwindling attention span.
Have our attentions so dwindled, though that we're in need of a zombie incursion into the classics to renew the spark of literature that has aged? I enjoyed the heck out of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I do fear however, that this is going to spawn a trend of duct-taping postmodern monsters into classic tales until it devolves into an Abbot & Costello movie.
In my opinion, P&P&Z only worked because of a brilliant blend of two gifted writers (Austen and Grahame-Smith) hundreds of years apart to create a comedy of manners and it took off because the readers were primed by the Austen renaissance (and zombies are kind of a thing right now). If nothing else, before we're ready to receive Little Dorrit Versus the Zombie Debtors of Doom, we'll need to reacquaint ourselves with Dorrit's creator.
However, I'm thinking of shopping around a story about a zombie antihero escaping a zombie-infected prep school to bum around New York for a day. He'll have a thing for ducks, wear a funky red hat and spend a lot of time trying to eat the brains of the prostitutes in he meets. Just kidding, Mr. Salinger. Just kidding.
----
Reposted (with minor edits) from Pages to Type Before I Sleep... , a blog about books, writing, technology and literary culture.
Tags: austen, charles, dickens, harry, jane, jk, literature, pagestotype, potter, rowling
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by pussreboots on -
I have The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl on my TBR pile and I just read Lost by Gregory Maguire which was inspired by A Christmas Carol. Dickens is hanging around.
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