John Barth (1930)

 

From Hart and Leininger, Oxford Companion to American Literature:

BARTH, John [Simmons] (1930-). Maryland-born novelist, educated at Johns Hopkins, whose fiction set on the Eastern Shore of his native state includes The Floating Opera (1956), the experiences of a man recalled on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, and The End of the Road (1958), another existential and nihilist view of experience set in a travestied conventional love triangle. Although placed in the same setting, his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is more fantastic and funnier in its lusty parody of an 18th-century picaresque tale re-creating the life and times of Ebenezer Cooke. This was followed by  Giles Goat-Boy (1966), another lengthy, complex, and comic novel full of ingenious parody in its satirical allegory of the modern world conceived in terms of a university campus. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) consists of 14 pieces of fiction related in part by their concern with what happens when a writer writes (he makes himself a persona) and a reader reads. Chimera (1972) is also a volume of short fiction, retelling in elaborate style tales of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon dealing with social and psychological problems of modern life, also introducing the author Barth along the way. The last-named work won a National Book Award. Barth returned to the long novel in Letters (1979), an unusual development of epistolary fiction, in which seven more or less parallel narratives are reveales through correspondence written by seven characters from his earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure, the intricate story comprising an inquiry into the patterns into which the characters have been previously set and the degree of freedom they may possess. Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) tells of the adventures and ideas occasioned by a long cruise of a college professor and her husband, an aspiring novelist. The Friday Book (1984) collects essays and other nonfiction. The Tidewater Tales (1987) is a lengthy novel about a novelist who claims he cannot write a projected novel as he and his wife sail full of friction along Chesapeake Bay. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) probes the connection between memory and reality in a postmodern style of narration.


The Sot-Weed Factor, novel by John Barth, published in 1960 and in a revised version in 1966.

In a lusty picaresque tale that satirizes conventional historical fiction, the novel creates a fictive biography of the real Ebenezer Cook, endowing him with a twin sister, Anna. After failing in his studies at Cambridge, though abetted by a tutor, Henry Bullingame, Ebenezer is ordered by his father to manage the family tobacco plantation in Maryland. There he spends most of his time writing poetry and protecting his virginity, both of which are under constant assault. Finally he achieves fame as a writer while simultaneously losing his poetic inspiration and his virginity.



Giles Goat-boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus, novel by John Barth, published in 1966.

In the metaphoric world called the University, control is held by a computer, WESAC, which is able to run itself and to tyrannize people, for it has the ability to subject them to a radiating and disintegrating force, that is, to EAT them, an acronym for its power of "Electroencephalic Amplification and Transaction." WESAC is so out of hand that one of its developers, Max Spielman, believes it can only be controlled through reprogramming by a Grand tutor, a prophet, who will bring a "New Syllabus," that is, a new philosophy. For this role and this purpose he selects George Giles, whom he had raised among goats as a goat, though he was actually a human found as an infant in the tapelift of WESAC. In his undertaking George has to contend with a troublemaker, Maurice Stoker, who alone fully understands the operation of WESAC, and with a minor poet, Harold Bray, who contends that he is a Grand Tutor. George enters the computer to destroy it, and learns to confound WESAC by answering its questions through paradoxes that paralyze the machine. When George emerges, authorities eager to put WESAC back into operation seize him and send him back to the animal site of his boyhood, for he is now the University's scapegoat.



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Later works (Wikipedia: John Barth):

• The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
• Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)
• On with the Story (stories) (1996)
• Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)
• The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
• Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)
• The Development: Nine Stories (2008)
• Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)

Nonfiction

• The Friday Book (1984)
• Further Fridays (1995)
• Final Fridays (2012)

 

Postmodernity in Prose

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

 

from American Literature: A History, by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen

(from "After the war: 1945-80 - Jewish American novelists") (...)


Still, although Malamud's characters are not invariably Jewish, in his presentation of Jewish milieus in The Assistant and in his early stories he is the most Jewish of all Jewish American writers of the fifties and sixties. Here, mainstream America is a vague presence in the background, just like Poland and its inhabitants only feature in the distance in the ghettos and streets of I.B. Singer's stories (Gimpel  the Fool, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961) or novels (The Family Moskat, 1950; The Magician of Lublin, 1960). Far more usual in Jewish American fiction is a continuous interaction with mainstream American culture and an unending negotiation of territorial boundaries. Such interaction even takes place when mainstream America is nowhere in sight, as in the title story of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a wistful story about class differences within Newark's Jewish community, in which the narrator's lover-for-a-summer has had her nose 'fixed'—'I was pretty. Now I'm prettier"–to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. With this collection of stories, Roth (1933-[2018]) found himself at the center of controversy, especially because of the stories 'Defender of the Faith', in which a calculating Jeish soldier tries to exploit the loyalty he expects from a Jewish superior, and 'Eli, the Fanatic', in which suburban, assimilated Jews try to prevent orthodox co-religionists from establishin a yeshiva in their mostly gentile neighborhood. Roth's fiercest critics, supset by what seemed a cynical view of middle-class American Jewry, accused him of self-hatred, even of anti-Semitism. What Roth captures in 'Eli' is the self-censorship and the dissembling that in the 1950s were part and parcel of assimilation and the deep sense of alienation—experienced here by the lawyer hired by his fellow Jews—that such a forced way of living may bring with it. This is in fact one of the overriding themes in Jewish-American writing of the first decades after the war. In order to be accepted by mainstream America, Jewish Americans abandon much of what may characterize them as Jews—sometimes, as in 'Goodbye, Columbus', even the shape of their nose—and move out of typically Jewish neighborhoods. But that estranges them from their background while their new environment never fully accepts them, leading to a sort of alienation that differs from that felt by young mainstream Americans but is felt even more profoundly.

After two rather traditional novels featuring a more mainstream cast and dealing with the familiar themes of relationships and personal problems and ambitions (Letting Go, 1962, and When She Was Good, 1967), Roth returned to more specifically Jewish themes with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a virtuoso rant on a psychiatrist's couch in which the novel's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, exhaustively lists all his frustrations at having been brought up Jewish, and in between details his insatiable lusting after blonde, all-American girls. Lust would from then on return regularly in Roth's novels, as in The Professor of Desire (1977) or the fairly recent Sabbath's Theater (1995), and has contributed disproportionally to his public image, but in those novels, too, Roth is concerned with Jewishness, even if he sees himself first of all as an American writer. In the last four decades, Roth has brilliantly chronicled Jewish life in the Newark of his younger years and has through an alter ego, the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman who features in for instance Zuckerman Bound (1985) and The Counterlife (1987), offered incisive meditations on what it means to be a Jewish American writer. Early in his career Roth worried that 'the actuality is continually outdoing our talents', that the technical skills of American writers were no longer a match for the outrageous images and events that the culture casually produced. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.


(From "The End and Return of History: 1980-2010 - Philip Roth")

Philip Roth has remained extremely prolific also after 1980, even to the point of becoming perhaps the iconic American author of the entire period. To begin with, Roth wrote a third novel in the David Kepesh series with The Dying Animal. Then, he has continued the series of novels featuring Nathan Zuckerman, the first instalment of which, The Ghost Writer, appeared in 1979, and the seventh, presumably also the last given its title of Exit Ghost, in 2007, with as other titles Zukerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman has often been interrpeted as an alter ego for Roth himself, but as of 1990 there also started appearing a new series featuring a protagonist called 'Roth', comprising Deception: A Novel (1990), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004). There is also a free-standing novel, Sabbath's Theatre (1995), and finally a series of short novels, Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). We will here briefly treat three exemplary instances from this overwhelming oeuvre.

American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, starts from the premise of the good life in the country as the culmination of the American Dream and a counterweight to the chaos, oppression and misery of the Old World. This is also what the protagonist of the story, whose life Zuckerman records, seems to have been bound for all his life, until everything fell apart. The novel is set in Newark, and the turning point is the 1960s, when Newark's earlier prosperity has melted away under the onslaught of beginning globalization, the city's older population of first and second generation immigrants, many of them Jewish, like the protagonist, have moved away or been minoritized by the large numbers of African Americans that have moved in. Instead of a harmonious community Newark now is the scene of race riots and labor conflicts. On the level of the U.S. as a whole the havoc wrought in Newark repeats itself in the radical youth and political movements rocking the country. Roth returns a hard verdict on what has gone wrong with America during his own lifetime.

A similar feeling speaks from The Plot Against America, winnner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005. Roth finds his initial inspiration in a plea Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic by airplane in 1927 and a national hero, made in 1941 to prevent the U.S. from entering World War II, for which he blamed the Jews, the British, and President Roosevelt. Lindbergh was in good standing with the Nazi regime and especially with Goering, the commander of the German air force. Roth takes the poetic liberty of situating Lindbergh's speech not in 1941 but in 1940, in the run-up to that year's Presidential elections, and casting Lindbergh as the Republican challenger of Roosevelt. When Lindbergh wins the election, life in the U.S. turns bitter for American Jews, and hence also for little Philip Roth. Things look even more somber when Lindbergh disappears on a solo flight with his famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane and Vice-President Wheeler, an extreme rightwing politician, assumes office. In the end, everything returns to normal, Rososevelt triumphs in a special election, Pearl Harbor signals the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and history resumes its familiar course. The Plot Against America asks some hard questions about the nature of American democracy and American politics more generally. For most commentators it was hardly a coincidence that Roth published a novel focusing on these questions, and with such characters, in the run-up to the 2004 elections, with an incumbent who in the wake of 9/11 had institued an authoritarian regime such as the U.S. had hardly ever seen before, and with a Vice-President of known conservative sympathies.

If American Pastoral and The Plot Against America address wider social and political issues, Everyman sticks to the personal level. In all of Roth's later work the consciousness of approaching death is overwhelmingly present, and particularly so in the foru short novels he published towards the end of his career (Roth in 2013 announced that he thought he had written enough and would write no more). In the futher unspecified 'he' protagonist Roth gives us a reincarnation of the medieval 'everyman' from the eponymous morality play. but whereas the medieval Everyman finds that with death all material worries and constraints dissolve and only spiritual virtues remain, because after death comes resurrection, noting of the sort happens in Roth's version. Everyman as the chronicle of a death announced, a merciless march from the cradle to the grave marked by disease, illness, the relentless deterioration of the body, deaths and funerals. Like the medieval play it holds up the mirror of our own fallibility and ephemerality, but without the consolation of faith.

Hemingway, Ernest Miller

(from The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger)

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST [MILLER] (1899-1961), born in Illinois, while attending school made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in Northern Michigan, which helped condition his later primitivistic attitude. After working as a Kansas City reporter, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in France, then transferred to the Italian infantry until the close of World War I, after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star, and settled in Paris as a member of the expatriate group.

Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, wholse style strongly affected him, he published Three Stories & Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and *In Our Time (U.S. 1925). These early stories already exhibited the attitude of mind and technique for which he later became famous. As the leading spokesman for the "lost generation" he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that, their atrophied nerves not permitting them to attack their betrayers, they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions. The stories are mainly concerned with "tough" people, either intelligent men and women who have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians, and professional athletes, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. Emotion is held at arm's length; only the bare happenings are recorded, and emphasis is obtained by understatement and spare dialogue.

After Hemingway returned to New York and wrote the lesser satirical novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), he carried the style and attitude of his short stories into the novel *The Sun Also Rises (1926), which tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war, who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in *A Farewell to Arms (1929), the poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war. Besides further distinguished collections of short stories, *Men Without Women (1927) and *Winner Take Nothing (1933), he wrote only two lesser books during the next few years, although his work continued to exercise a great influence on the literature of the period. *Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting with digressions on literary matters, show a further cultivation of the primitive and brutal levels, contrasted with the hollow culture that had cheated his generation.

In *To Have and Have Not (1937). Hemingway for the first time showed an interest in a possible solution of social problems though collective action. This attitude continued in newspaper articles from Spain about its civil war, whose espionage was the subject of his realistic play, The Fifth Column, adapted for the stage (1940) by Benjamin Glazer, and printed in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), in which appeared two of his finest stories, *"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and *"The Snows of Kilimanjaro". *For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, on an incident in the Spanish Civil War, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. He edited an anthology, Men at War (1942), but issued no new novel until Across the River and into the Trees (1950), which was considered to show that Hemingway had become bitter and defeatist like his tale's protagonist, and aging colonel. With *The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a parable of man against nature in a poignant novelette, he recaptured his critical acclaim, recognized in a Nobel Prize (1954).

In his last years he published nothing, and he had been seriously ill for some time before his death as a suicide by gunshot. However, several posthumous works followed, most notably *A Moveable Feast (1964), sketches of his life and acquaintances in Paris, 1921-1926, and Islands in the Stream, (1970), a novel in three parts about a painter's unhappy marriage, his affection for his sons, their deaths, his bravery in war, his pleasure in deep-sea fishing, and his loneliness. Another novel, written in the 1940s, edited and published in 1986, The Garden of Eden, begins with the honeymoon of an enticing young couple, David and Catherine Bourne, he a good wirter, she an heiress, who break up over serious sexual differences. Later compilations include The Wild Years (1962), his journalism for the Toronto Star; By-Lines (1967), selected journalism of four decades; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), eight of them previously unpublished; and three collections of verse, the last and most inclusive being 88 Poems (1979). Selected Letters was issued in 1981.



In Our Time, 15 short stories by *Hemingway with vignettes serving as interchapters, published in the U.S. in 1925. In Our Time (Paris, 1924) contains only the vignettes. Most stories treat life in the Middle West, but the interpolated sketches describe war in Europe and bullfights.

"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and others tell of the boyhood experiences of Nick, the author's counterpart, who grew up in the Great Lakes region, learning the bitter as well as the beautiful facts of existence through the work of his father, a physician, and through his association with Indian guides and their families. Such stories as "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," "Out of Season," and "Cross Country Snow" are brief, poignant tales of American expatriates in Europe and their complex loves and friendships. "My Old Man" is the story of a boy's loyalty to his father, an American jockey forced to work in Europe because of unsportsmanlike conduct at home, and of the boy's disillusion following his father's death. The author's enthusiasm for sport and the American wilderness is shown in "Big Two-Hearted River," an account of a trout-fishing expedition.


The Sun Also Rises, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1926. The title is derived from a pessimistic passage in Ecclesiastes, expressing a cynical disillusion in keeping with the postwar attitude. The English title of the work is Fiesta.

Lady Brett Ashley, "as charming when she is drunk as when she is sober," is traveling on the continent, waiting for a divorce in order to marry Michael Campbell. Among her other satellites are Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent; his friend Bill Gorton; Robert Cohn, an American Jewish novelist; and an eccentric Greek count. Cohn is weary of his mistress, Frances Clyne, and falls in love with Brett, although neither she nor his other acquaintances feel any real affection for him. The group leave Paris for an excursion in Spain, where they visit the fiesta at Pamplona. They are enthusiastic fans of the bullfights, finding in the ritualistic spectacle a mysterious beauty of precision. Brett and Jake are in love, but unhappily, because a wartime injury has emasculated him. She falls in love with a young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, with whom she elopes; and Cohn departs, expressing his anger by beating Jake, Michael, and Romero. When Romero wants to marry her, Brett decides to return to Michael, who is one of her own kind. She tells Jake, "We could have had such a damned good time together," and he concludes, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?"




A Farewell to Arms, novel by Hemingway, published in 1929, and dramatized by Laurence Stallings (1930).

Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service during World War I, falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. She returns his feeling, and when Henry, wounded during a bombardment, is sent to a hospital at Milan, Catherine comes to nurse him. They spend a happy summer together while he recuperates, and in the autumn Catherine confesses that she is pregnant, but will not marry him, fearing to be sent back to England. Henry returns to his post, finds his comrade Rinaldi depressed by the monotonous horrors of the war, and shares the suffering during the disastrous retreat from Caporetto. He deserts, learns that Catherine has been transferred to Stresa, and joins her there. Although he is in civilian clothes, he is suspected, and forced to flee with Catherine to Switzerland. They go to Lausanne for the birth of their child, but both mother and baby die, leaving Henry desolate and alone in a strange land.


Men without Women, 14 short stories by *Hemingway, published in 1927.

"The Undefeated" tells of the futile heroism of Manuel Garcia, a Spanish bullfighter just released from a hospital, who stubbornly refuses to retire, secures an ill-paid "nocturnal" engagement, and gives an adequate performance before an appreciative audience, but is seriously injured and returned to the hospital. "The Killers" describes the tense atmosphere in a small-town lunchroom, when two Chicago gangsters enter to await Ole Andreson, whom they have been paid to murder. He fails to arrive, and they finally leave. Nick, the waiter, goes to Andreson's room, and finds the victim aware of his impending doom but paralyzed by fear and unwilling to attempt escape. "Fifty Grand" is the story of a champion prizefighter, Jack Brennan, and his bout with the contender Walcott. The midde-aged champion, worried by his responsibilities, cannot train properly, decides that he is bound to lose, and bets $50,000 on his own defeat. He fights well for several rounds, until brutally fouled by his opponent. Insisting that this was an accident, he continues with difficulty, then suddenly ends the matter by an obvious foul on Walcott. "'It's funny how fast you can think when it means that much money'", he says.


Winner Take Nothing, 14 stoires by *Hemingway, published in 1933.

"The Light of the World," set in a small town in the Middle West, has for its chief character a fat, blonde prostitute, who recalls nostalgically the prizefighter who furnished the one rudimentary romantic episode of her life. *"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" portrays the desolate lives of a writer and a customer of a Spanish café. 

At a sidewalk table of a Spanish café an old, deaf man sits drinking brandy late at night as the two waiters discuss him, the older one with sympathy because he too is lonely, fearful, confident of nothing, and also in need of the security of a clean, well-lighted place.

"The Sea-Change" tells of the tragic separation of a young couple, when the girl drifts into a homosexual relation with another woman. "A Way You'll Never Be" describes the hysterical reaction of a young American officer in the Italian army, when he is relieved from active duty and thus has time to become aware of the significance of the war. "Homage to Switzerland" contains three vignettes of fatuous middle-class American tourists in Europe. "A Natural History of the Dead" is a bitter satire on the results of modern warfare. "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" is concerned with two hospital patients, a Mexican gambler and an author, and the way in which the writer cynically plays upon the phrase "the opium of the people."


Death in the Afternoon, discursive work by *Hemingway, published in 1932. In it he describes the rearing and fighting of bulls in Spain, and depicts the bullfight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy, in which the death of the bull is inevitable but must be achieved by the observance of ritual, which gives the animal a maximum chance to destroy the matador. The discussion includes lengthy digressions, in the form of conversations between the author and an old lady, presenting his philosophy through the discussion of various aspects of life and death.


To Have and Have Not, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1937.

Harry Morgan, a tough "conch," as natives of Key West, Fla., call themselves, has devoted his life to the single-minded effort of keeping himself, his wife, and his children on the upper fringe of the "have-nots." He hires out his powerboat to wealthy men for fishing trips, but, when the Depression destroys this source of income and a rich tourist welshes on payment for lost fishing tackle, he is obliged to turn to illegal activities. He contracts to smuggle Chinese from Cuba into the U.S., but, taking their money, murders their leader and abandons the others. While smuggling illegal liquor, he is captured in a gun battle by federal officers, loses an arm, and has his boat confiscated. In a last desperate attempt to obtain money, he aids in the escape of four bank robbers, although realizing that unless he kills them they will kill him. This he does, but they wound him fatally. Picked up by the Coast Guard and accused of being a member of the gang, he stammers, "'A man . . . ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out . . . One man alone ain't got . . . no chance.' He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it."

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, short story by Ernest *Hemingway, published in Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

An American couple on a safari in Kenya, the Macombers have long given the impression of a glamorous and comparatively happy marriage, although the basis for their union is that "Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him." The marriage comes to a new straining point when in cowardice he runs from a wounded lion that he has shot badly, and she, in disgust, gives herself that night to the professional hunter and guide, the sturdy Englishman Robert Wilson. The next day, in a surge of excitement, Macomber discovers self-confidence and happiness as he shoots three wild buffalo, but Margot is suddenly made insecure as she sees him at last as a man who will dominate their marriage. Forced to go into the hiding place of one of the animals he has only wounded to administer the coup de grâce, Macomber seems about to be gored by the buffalo when from the car Mrs. Macomber shoots at the beast and kills her husband instead, after which Wilson says wryly, "Of course it's an accident. I know that."


The Snows of Kilimanjaro, story by *Hemingway, published in Esquire (Aug. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

Dying with "a great tiredness and anger" of blood poisoning from his gangrenous leg, the novelist Harry lies in camp on his African safari, accopmapnied by his wife and native attendants, waiting for a rescue plane that he knows will arrive too late, and remembers experiences that were to have served as subjects of stories when he knew enough to write them well. But he realizes too that he has destroyed his talent by sloth, by enjoyments such as the marriage with his rich wife could bring, and that he hates himself as he vents his cruelty on her. As he knows he will die that night, he tries to write, but vividly he feels and sees and smells death as he drops off, dreaming that the plane has come and taken him not to a hospital but to the very top of Kilimanjaro, said to be the highest mountain in Africa, where, according to the story's epigraph, close to the summit that is called the House of God "there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

For Whom the Bell Tolls, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1940. The title is derived from a sermon by Donne: "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent . . . And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." 

Robert Jordan, an American, has entered the Loyalist army during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and has been sent to join a guerrilla band in the mountains near Segovia to blow up a strategic bridge at the exact minute that will help a Loyalist advance. During the three days and nights that he spends in the guerrilla's cave, he awaits with a romantic opposition to heroism what he suspects will be his own destruction and that of his companions. He falls in love with Maria, daughter of a Republican mayor, who has seen her parents killed and was herself raped by Falangists. Her close-cropped hair is a symbol of her tortures; Jordan helps her to regain her desire to live. Their passioinate love is abetted by the powerful woman Pilar, who dominates the group by her force of character, gusto, and love of the Republic. Her man Pablo is wily but lacks belief and hence courage. The others include foul-mouthed Agustín; pedantic, dignified Fernando; the gypsy Rafael; and the adoring Andrés. A sense of impending disaster develops, with smolering opposition within the group, a Falangist attack on the guerrilla leader El Sordo on a neighboring hill, acts of cowardice by Pablo, and a mission by Andrés to Loyalist headquarters to carry a note from Jordan saying the advance is likely to fail, with the messenger impeded by the Communists' bureaucracy and suspicion. The generals finally realize they should have cancelled the attack, but it is too late. Leaving the retreat, Jordan successfully blasts the bridge. In the attempt to flee he is wounded, and forces the others to leave hism. He lies on the hillside almost delirious, restraining himself from suicide so that he may shoot the leader of the Fascists, and thinks, "I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. . . ."




The Old Man and the Sea, novelette by *Hemingway, published in 1952.

This parable of man's struggle with the natural world, of his noble courage and endurance, tells of the Cuban fisherman Santiago, who for 84 luckless days has rowed his skiff into the Gulf Stream in quest of marlin. At first accompanied by the boy Manolin, with whom he talked of better days and about the great sport of baseball, he is now alone. Aged and solitary, he goes far out and hooks a great fish that tows his boat all afternoon and night and into the next day as he pits his skill and waning strength against it the way he once did as a wrestler called "El Campeón." As the second night turns to dawn he finally harpoons his catch, lashes it to his small boat, and makes his weary way home. As he sails down to port sharks attack his catch and he fights them as best he can with a knife lashed to the tiller gripped in raw hands. Whan he makes land his marlin is but a skeleton. Proud in defeat, Santiago furls his sail and staggers to his shack to be found by the boy and other fishermen, who marvel at his catch, while the spent man sleeps and dreams of past experience.


A Moveable Feast, memoir by *Hemingway of his life in Paris (1921-26), published in 1964. In brief sketches the work summons up the sense of what Paris meant to him as a writer beginning a career and to other expatriate Americans. It tells how Gertrude Stein came to employ the term "lost generation" and of his friendship and falling out with her, of Pound, Fitzgerald, and other associates.

Une Vie, une œuvre : Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

The World of James Joyce (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Is There Anyone Who Understands Me? The World of James Joyce. 

Prod. and dir. Seán ó Mórdha. Ireland: RTE, 1982. Written by Colbert Kearney. 

YouTube (Manufacturing Intellect) 4 Nov. 2017.  

("The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986) [sic]").

https://youtu.be/4IwrHkNUk24

         2020

Doris Lessing (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From The Salon.com Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

Lessing, Doris (1919-[2013])

b. Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) [Premio Príncipe de Asturias 2001, Nobel Prize for Literature 2007]

FICTION: The Grass is Singing (1950), This Was the Old Chief's Country (stories, 1952), Martha Quest (Children of Violence series, 1952), A Proper Marriage (Children of Violence series, 1954), Five: Short Novels (1955), Retreat to Innocence (1956), The Habit of Loving (stories, 1958), *The Golden Notebook (1962), A Man and Two Women (stories, 1963),  African Stories (1964), Landlocked (Children of Violence Series, 1966), The Four-Gated City (Children of Violence sereis, 1969), Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971), The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories ([republished as Volume 1 of Collected Stories, 1978] 1972), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), To Room Nineteen (Volume 2 of Collected Stories, 1978), The Diaries of Jane Somers (including The Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983)and If the Old Could (1984), originally published under the pseudonym Jane Somers], 1984), The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992), Canopus in Argos: Arvhives ([contains Colonized Planet V, Shikasta (1979), The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments: The Report of Ambien II, of the Five (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)], 1992), Playing the Game: Graphic Novel (1993), Winter in July  (Stories, 1993), Love, Again (1996), Mara and Dann (1999), [The Sweetest Dream, 2001, The Cleft, 2007]

NONFICTION: Going Home (1957), In Pursuit of the English (1961), Particularly Cats (1967), A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1975), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987), African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992), Under My Skin (Volume 1 of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, 1994), Walking in the Shade (Volume 3 of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, 1997), [Time Bites (2004), Alfred and Emily (2008), On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (2007)]

For over half a decade, Doris Lessing has turned her prolific pen to just about every prose form—fiction, autobiography, essays, drama. Yet all of her writing stems from the impulse to lay bare the grid of class, race, and gender relations that governs her middle class characters' lives. Lessing brings the microscopic intensity of George Eliot and the combative sexual consciousness of D. H. Lawrence to bear on English culture, whether the context is the provincially hierarchical "settler" society of Southern Rhodesia in A Proper Marriage or the beleaguered bohemia of "free women" in The Golden Notebook. Lessing's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the post-World War II period rests firmly on her contribution to the grand tradition of English social realism. Yet Lessing herself once dismissed George Eliot, to whom she is so often compared, as "good as far as she goes"; she prefers to claim the more cosmopolitan influence of Tolstoy and Balzac.

Indeed, this apparently most British of writers was thirty years old before she set foot in England or published her first novel. Her upbringing on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) acquainted her more thoroughly with the isolation and racial exploitation of white colonial culture than with an imperial literary heritage. Her formal schooling ended at age fourteen, and in Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography, Lessing notes with pride the real accomplishments of her youth: the ability to "set a hen, look after chickens and rabbits, worm dogs and cats, pan for gold, take samples from reefs, cook, sew, use the milk separator and churn butter, go down a mine shaft in a bucket, make cream cheese and ginger beer . . . drive the car, shoot pigeons and guineafowl for the pot, [and] preserve eggs." By the time she left for London in 1949, she had augmented these accomplishments with two divorces, three children, the obloquy of Communist party membership and anti-apartheid agitation, and the unpublished draft of her first novel.  

Colonia race relations, political activism, and the burdens of women have remained her central concerns. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, about a farmer's wife drawn into a doomed affair with an African worker, approaches its material from a distance. Lessing infuses a simple plot with the intensity of a Greek tragedy. She portrays the wife's murder by the African, Moses, as the inevitable outcome of male violence and female passivity fostered by white settler culture. Lessing depicts the white experience of colonial Africa more urgently and directly in her five-novel Children of Violence sequence (1953-1969), in which she embeds the sexual, political, and intellectual development of her protagonist, Martha Quest, in a detailed evocation of the communist and progressive political and intellectual life of Rhodesia and London in the 1950s and 1960s.

Anna Wulf, the novelist heroine of Lessing's most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, continued Martha's quest: political activism, sexual experimentation, maternity, female friendship, and authorship all feed into her struggle for authentic, integrated selfhood. The declarative simplicity of the novel's opening line—"The two women were alone in the London flat"—belies the explosive effect on several generations of women intellectuals struggling to reconcile the life of the mind, the imperatives of the body, and hte gender roles they inherited from the 1950s. But as Lessing herself insists, The Golden Notebook achieved innovations bneyond its contribution to what she dismissively terms "the sex war." The novel combines omniscient observation, Anna's own musings in four different journals, and sections from Anna's novel manuscript. These interwoven narratives capture both an individual consciousness and a particular cultural moment with something of the multilayered depth of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Public events shape private histories in Lessing's novels, often violently. In The Good Terrorist, for example, middle-class Alice Mellings keeps house for a pseudo-communist cadre until a too-successful bombing destroys her illusion of control. In the chilling The Fifth Child, terror emerges from the bosom of the family, when Harriet Lovatt gives birth to the sociopathic Ben, the embodiment of a disaffected savagery that, Lessing suggests, will inherit the urban future. Lessing anatomizes a less dramatic, but perhaps more pervasive, anguish in The Diary of a Good Neighbor, If the Old Could . . . , and Love, Again, in which women whose familial nad productive relationships have passed away confront the isolation of aging.

Lessing's scary genius lies in her ability to bring her readers face-to-face with an unadorned reflection of some of our more depressing, but all too human, features. At the same time, her realism has always coexisted with a tendency towards mysticism. Her novels of the 1970s compellingly combine a surface of social and geographic detail with journeys into an inner space that Lessing has described, in The Real Thing, as "so much more intelligent than the slow, lumbering, daylike self." In the haunting Memoirs of a Survivor, for example, worlds separated by time and space interpe etrate through the vision of the unnamed female narrator, enabling her to save herself and her companions from extinction. But when Lessing leaves humanity entirely behind, as she does in the science fiction sequence Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983), her depictions of warring galactic empires lack the individuality and emotional insight she brings to earthly society. In Lessing's most recent novel, Mara and Dann, she returns once again to the theme of earthly apocalypse, with human, if visionary, protagonists.

In Under My Skin, Lessing describes her long-ago attempts to explain to her young children her departure from their lives: "[I told them] I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful world where there would be no race hatred, injustice, and so forth . . .  One day they would thank me for [leaving] . . . I was absolutely sincere. There isn't much to be said for sincerity, in itself."

It is typical of Lessing to emphasize the limits of good intentions, even her own. Yet in doing so, she paradoxically underlines her dedication to a more rigorous sincerity, a vision as stripped of illusion as her art can make it.

 

See Also: Writers who share Lessing's unsentimental vision of contemporary mores include Margaret Atwood, Diane Johnson, and Alison Lurie.  

 

—Laura Morgan Green

Morrison, Toni

 

By Adam Begley.  From the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).

 

MORRISON, Toni (1931-[2019])

 

FICTION: The Bluest Eye (1970), *Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) [Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015)]

NONFICTION: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) 

Sula—I'm talking about the character here, not the novel—would have winced at the sentimental streak running through Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known book. Sula is bad news, a skeptical fatalist, an idle, amoral artist, an accident so sure to happen it doesn't bother waiting. But she's my favorite; and she lights up Morrison's second novel like a torch. She's a good part of the reason why I insist that Sula, the skinny, 174-page novel, is Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved—I'm talking about the novel here, not the character, who's really just a ringer from The Exorcist—is something of an icon, a bit like Morrison herself, the unassailable Nobel laureate, supremely confident in herself as a woman, a black woman, and a black woman writer. Beloved is a "contemporary classic," a big book with a colossal subject: slavery. Who wants to knock it? Not m, because in fact it's beautiful, rich, fierce, harrowing. A damn fine book. But also sentimental. Why should uplift and overripe prose poems clog a novel about a runaway slave willing to slaughter her own children, including her newborn baby, rather than be dragged back to captivity, children in tow?

In Beloved, Morrison strains to remind us of goodness and love, as though she feels she has to counter the world's gross tonnage of evil. So we have a white girl busy saving Sethe's life (Sethe the runaway slave, half-dead, hugely pregnant); the white girl chatters all the while about how "Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling." And we have two of Morrison's specialties, food and sex, served up luscious enough to make us forget all that looming horror. Here, for example, the erotic version of corn-on-the-cob: "How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free . . . [N]o accounting for how that simple joy could shake you."

I can already hear a grad-school clever argument about how Morrison binds food and sex and the monstrosity of slavery in one tangled life-like whole, but that doesn't change a thing. The music swells, Sula winces.

Morrison began with a bone-dry book, The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl raped by her father and driven mad by her yearning for blue eyes, epitome of the white world's ideal of beauty. A sad and bitter story, choked by too many voices, it contains passages as lovely as anything Morrison has written—but it's a minor work in a minor key.

Then comes Sula, the story of two little girls, best friends, who grow up very different in "the Bottom," the black neighbourhood of a small Ohio city. Sula and Nell are bouncing with life, vividly real but also emblematic. Sula becomes the radical individualist, Nell the pillar of the community, steady, maternal, dutiful. Morrison weaves her tale with just three strands, a place and two families, but she seems magnificently omniscient, as though she had access to the pooled insight of every sociologist, every psychologist, every anthropologist; as though she had solved the riddle of what holds society together, what holds the solitary self together—and what blows it all apart. Though packed with comic scenes and and brilliantly inventive, Sula ends on a note of rich, full-throated sadness. There's plenty of laughter in the Bottom, but only visiting white folk manage to "hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under [the] head rags and soft felt hats . . . . [T]he laughter was part of the pain."

Song of Solomon—another marvel, a rambling tale, almost picaresque, freer and more daring than Sula, though less precise, less perfect—follow a callo young man's slow steps to redemption. If Sula is about self and community, Song of Solomon is about self and family. Hints of the fantastic in the first two novels—folklore, and the maybe-magic of myth—blossom here. The ordinary takes wing: Our hero flies.

The weakest of Morrison's novels is Tar Baby, a dubious jumble set in the Caribbean, featuring a white candy magnate, his black servants, their beautiful niece, and an ugly cruelty inflicted years ago. Morrison's first extended excursion into the heads of white folk. Only for the loyal fan.

Beloved wiped the slate clean and beckoned, with the same gesture, the august attentions of the Swedish Academy. After which, of course, a disappointment: Jazz, a curiously dispassionate, plotless love story set in Harlem in the 1920s. A teenage girl, an older man, and his jealous wife generate some bizarre domestic violence. In the background, the threat of race riots.

Another kind of violence powers Paradise: the defensive violence of black people intent on protecting their community. Ruby, Oklahoma, is an all-black settlement founded in 1950, a patriarchy, fortress of rightenousness, a prosperous, peaceable community. Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have shut out the white world. A few miles from Ruby is the Convent, nun-less since 1970, a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, some black, some white. There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. In 1976, the misguided men of Ruby, who think of the Convent as a witches' coven, stage a deadly raid.

The narrative is choppy and needlessly confused, but Morrison's messabge comes through loud and clear. No haven can be heavenly, no home can smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or thrives by triage—some in, some out, some damned, some saved. Morrison is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

As a storyteller Morrison combines a poet's grace, a radical's fervor, and a great preacher's moral majesty. She writes for and about the African-American community ("If I tried to write a universal novel," she once claimed, "it would be water"). And yet she reaches us all.

 

See Also: Nobody who "writes like" Morrison is anywhere as good as she is. If you're after other African-American writers, try James Baldwin or John Edgar Wideman (avoid Alice Walker). If you're after nuanced treatment of racial isues, try Nadine Gordimer. If you just want a novel as good as Sula, try The Great Gatsby or Billy Budd.

 

—Adam Begley

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (NIVEL AVANZADO)

John Barth

 BY PETER KURTH

From The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

 

BARTH, JOHN

1930-

b. Dorchester County, Maryland 

FICTION: The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles, Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (Stories, 1968); *Chimera (1972), LETTERS (1979), Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), On with the Story (stories, 1996)

NONFICTION: The Literature of Exhaustion, and the Literature of Replenishment (1982), The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984), Don't Count on It: A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights (1984), Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (1995)

 

As the doyen of "postmodern" novelists in America, John Barth has typically enjoyed two discrete followings. The first are academics, who have found in Barth's playful, wildly-convoluted fictions a permanent gold mine for analysis and criticism. The second are college students, who identify romantically with Barth's existential heroes and his vision of the world as a random, madcap, menacing place, where nothing is what it seems to be and truth is just a construct, a fiction in itself. There are no answers to anything in the Barthian universe, and no solace beyond stories, legends, and narrative invention.

"Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of all my main characters," Barth has said. "We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equeals life: to cease to narrate . . . is to die." As a writer, barth's model and muse is Scheherazade, of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who spun stories for the sultan every evening to escape execution. Generally, Barth's novels are huge, labyrinthine affairs, shot through with comedy, fantasy, ribaldry, wordplay, allegory, literary allusion, and structural culs-de-sac. Just when you think you've grasped Barth's point, rest assured—you haven't. There is always something else behind the door. Barth undercuts himself at every turn, tells you straight out that he can't be trusted, and begs you only to enjoy the ride—the "funhouse," as he constructs it fresh from book to book. 

Barth grew up in the Tidewater region of Maryland, and most if not all of his novels are set there. He was one of a set of fraternal twins, and became a write in adulthood, he thinks, "in part because I no longer had my twin to be wordless with"—hence his fascination with the mechanics of language. His first three novels, all of them comedies "dealing with the problem of nihilism," were conceived as a piece and written in quick succession. Todd Andrews, the hero of The Floating Opera, recognizes that nothing has meaning and decides to commit suicide, only to realize before the deed is done that his vision of reality is neither more nor less significant than anyone else's, and that suicide is just as meaningless as staying alive. The theme is repeated in The End of the Road, with the exception that the hero's object lesson is far more terrible and utterly closed to humor. And in The Sot-Weed Factor, written in the style of an eighteenth-century hero quest, innocence is lost completely when Ebenezer Cooke, first Poet Laureate of Maryland, is subjected to every indignity the nascent colony and its inhabitants can heap upon him.

Giles, Goat Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, for which Barth wrote the National Book Award in 1973, are all difficult, willfully self-conscious fictions that seek to extend the traditional boundaries of the novel, a goal Barth sets for himself in his famous 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," More recently, Barth has doubled back, spewing out "prefaces," "postscripts," mock treatises, and windy explanations for all his books to date. The unreadable LETTERS finds characters from Barth's earlier novels corresponding with him in the hope of justifying themselves. Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor are all set in boats on Chesapeake Bay, where fables of life, love, death, sex, fiction, meaning, and the lack of it are traded back and forth among characters old and new. The Tidewater Tales is the best in this series, or at least the best contained; readers can be forgiven for tiring of the game by the time they've finished all three. A collection of autobiographical pieces, as illusory and open-ended as any of Barth's fiction, appeared in 1994 as Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, bringing Barth's work full circle and further blurring whatever "truth" the reader can perceive. As always, Barth is obsessed with narration, myths, and the ultimate futility of words. 

For many years, Barth has taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is currently professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars. He remains the academic's dream novelist, his work arbitrarily challenging in structure and form but redeemed by inventiveness, huge erudition, humor, and an unquenchable sense of adventure.

See Also: Barth accepts the postmodernist label while remaining sui generis, linked at least in flights of fancy with Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, and Thomas Pynchon. 

 

 

Watching Nothing: Postmodernity in Prose

—oOo—

 

Charles Dickens - Victorian Values (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

From The Short Penguin History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote ("Victorian Values", 3):

(...) Bulwer-Lytton also developed many other genres of fiction. Paul Clifford (1850), for example, is a 'novel with a purpose' in which the author campaigned against 'a vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary penal code'. His resurrection of the eighteenth-century 'Newgate novel' was to influence the Dickens of Oliver Twist (1838), while occult fantasies such as Zanoni (1842), ghost stories such as 'The Haunted and the Haunters' (1859) and works of science fiction furthered Bulwer-Lytton's popularity. So did The Caxtons (1849), a gentle saga of domestic family life, and one of a trilogy of pleasantly reassuring works which include My Novel (1853) and What Will He Do with It? (1858). Compromise and good humour are the essence of these works.

Two contemporary exponents of comic fiction were Charles Lever (1806-72) and R. S. Surtees (1805-64). Lever's works were principally concerned with Ireland and the Irish, and range from picaresque military adventure through to Lord Kilgobbin (1872), a more sombre reflection on the life of the Irish aristocracy. The picaresque was also to be favoured by Surtees in Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities (1838), his sporting sketches of a rumbustious 'Fox 'unting' grocer whose Sancho-Panza-like servant Pigg is introduced in Handley Cross (1843).

With such novels as these, the enormous range of Victorian prose fiction had begun to be explored. Social and political theory, protest, and historical and domestic works had all been essayed, but it is with the comic possibilities opened up by social reportage that we come to the early career of one of the supreme figures of nineteenth-century English literature: Charles Dickens (1812-70).

3

Dickens began his career as a freelance journalist, reporting legal and parliamentary affairs with an accuracy that was to win him a high reputation. An increasingly informed and passionate response to Victorian social conditions sustained the great achievements of his maturity, while the exuberance apparent in his early pieces led to the writing of anecdotal sketches, character studies and tales. Derived in part from the essays of Leigh Hunt and the young Dickens's extensive reading in the novels and journalism of the eighteenth century, these very successful essays were issued in volume form and under Dickens's pseudonym as Sketches by Boz (1836).

The publishers Chapman and hall were aware of this early work, and when the failing artist Robert Seymour approached them with some sporting illustrations of cockneys in the countryside, they asked the newly contracted Boz for linking passages of narrative prose. Confident now of his imaginative power, Dickens insisted that the illustrations serve the narrative rather than the other way around. The publishers agreed, and at the close of March 1836 they began the monthly serial publication of one of the great comic works in the language, Pickwick Papers. As the novel developed along its haphazard route and the plump and prosperous hero acquired his worldly wise servant Sam Weller—a figure who shows Dickens's remarkable powers of characterization through speech—so this genial comedy of middle-class life slowly became a publishing phenomenon. The eighteenth-century picaresque novel had been given fresh life, and the newly married author of twenty-four eventually found his work circulated in print runs of 40,000 a month.

The commercial success of this experiment in serial publication was to have an immense influence on subsequent Victorian fiction. Authors and publishers were now often to issue their works in parts before republication in a 'three-decker' or later as a single volume. The demands and conventions of issuing a novel in what was often as many as twenty monthly parts of three or four chapters, with a concluding double issue, challenged authors to organize their themes, plots and character developments within a regular framework of climaxes. In addition, writers learned how to bind their material together through parallelism and imagery. The enormous length of such publications encouraged the depiction of a comprehensive social range, while the relatively low cost of serial publication—a shilling an issue compared to the guinea and a half charged for a bound novel—greatly enlarged the market.

In Pickwick Papers itself, many of the technical possibilities offered by serial form are still unexplored. However, with Jingle as the none-too-serious villain of the work and the humorously contrived misunderstanding whereby the innocent Pickwick is mistakenly supposed to have offered marriage to his landlady Mrs Bardell, the work develops via such hilarious scenes as Bob Sawyer's bachelor party (later one of Dickens's favourite recital episodes) towards the high comedy of the trial of Bardell v. Pickwick. Pickwick's refusal to pay damages and his consequent stay in the debtors' prison gave Dickens the chance to confront boyish innocence and the charitable high spirits of Dingley Dell with a suggestion of the claustrophobic horror that characterizes the world of his maturity. Against this he then set the hero's magnanimity—the essential Pickwickian benevolence—by which Pickwick himself contrives to relieve the wretchedness of his fellow prisoners. The rich man who intervenes to alleviate suffering was to remain a standard figure in Dickens's fiction.

With Pickwick gaining ever-greater popularity, Dickens began a work whose characters were to obsess his imagination and whose incidents began to probe the painful worlds of abused childhood and official incompetence in a manner that reveals the great social critic. The sentiment and high melodrama of Oliver Twist (1838) derive from the popularity of the Newgate novel, while the somewhat clumsily handled conventions of the wronged woman, the dispossessed heir and the death-bed secret explore the social horrors of Victorian England with considerable power.

Oliver in the Malthusian hell of the workhouse is an image of eternal innocence caught in Victorian corruption, in particular the evils of the 1834 Poor Laws and the blighted imagination and sheer ineptitude of Bumble the beadle. The institutionalized physical hunger of the workhouse is at one with the emotional starvation, and both lead to legendary pathos: 'The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: "Please, Sir, I want some more."' Here is an emblem of a heartless, system-dominated world that tries to crush the individual and stands perpetually indicted for failing to protect the innocent and the weak. Dickens's loathing of the mechanical inhumanity of systems places him firmly in the line of the great Victorian sages.

Where supposedly respectable adults have abused their trust the Devil steps in, here as Fagin the red-bearded master of the underworld frying sausages with a toasting fork and ironically encouraging the cockney resilience of the Artful Dodger and his school of thieves in the Victorian values of hard work, family loyalty and useful education. If official charity is heartless, the criminal world at first appears warm. The irony is scathing, but it leads to the nightmare of the Devil trying to reclaim his own, of Nancy menaced by Fagin and Sikes, and Dickens's portrayal of the wicked pursued by justice after the brutal murder of Nancy herself.

Perhaps no moment in Dickens more surely raises melodrama to high art than this last—the strands of Nancy's hair crackling in the fire as Sikes burns his murderous club echo forever in the mind—and it is the sheer imaginative force of Dickens's underworld that remains with the reader long after the machinery that leads to Oliver's security in the middle-class world of Mr Brownlow has been forgotten. A simplistic faith in acceptable Victorian values pales when confronted by the anarchic forces that underlay them and suggests that the artist and the moralist were not yet at one.

Such problems of focus are also evident in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), where they partly derive from both being novels of the road. However, where the first is comic and resilient, the second is often sentimental to a maudlin degree.

In his previous novels, Dickens's heroes had been a portly old gentleman and a child. In Nicholas Nickleby, he took what he described as 'a young man of impetuous temper and of little or no experience' and placed him in a plot that is too often dependent on eavesdropping and coincidence. It is also uncomfortably suspended between the stage villainy of Uncle Ralph and the sickly benevolence of the Cheeryble brothers. Such effects suggest the world of Victorian melodrama, and Dickens's love of the theatre is evident throughout. Popular culture, indeed, was one of the mainstays of his art.

If the stage villainy of Ralph, the pathos of the mentally defective Smike and the often rather priggish virtue of the hero strain credibility, what gives the novel its continuous fascination is Dickens's portrayal of a cast of grotesques acting out their roles with conscious hypocrisy like Ralph or the superabundant dottiness of Mrs Nickleby. The success and limitations of such a proceeding can be seen in the book's most famous character: Mr Squeers, the sadistic and rapacious principal of a nightmare school for the unwanted sons of the gentry. Evil is here tempered by broad comedy indignation Squeers certainly rouses but also laughter, and in the end it is sufficient that he is flogged by Nicholas who then absconds with his chief victim, Smike.

In contrast to Squeers are the Crummles, that marvellous theatrical family who become ever more vivid as their plays become ever more absurd. Mr. Crummles's memory of falling in love with his consort as she stood 'on the butt-end of a spear surrounded with blazing fireworks' has a bizarre yet heart-warming innocence, a richly imaginative psychological verisimilitude. Such invention suggests that uniquely Dickensian gallery of snobs, fools and minor villains, obsessives who are often the life of his work. Among such figures here are Mrs Nickleby herself whose mental flutterings rise to the greatness of Mistress Quickly as she hears of the death of Smike:

'I am sure,' said Mrs Nickleby, wiping her eyes, and sobbing bitterly, 'I have lost the best, the most zealous, and most attentive creature that has ever been a companion to me in my life—putting you, my dear Nicholas, and Kate, and your poor papa, and that well-behaved nurse who ran away with the linen and the twelve small forks, out of the question of course.'

In The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel developed out of a story in Dickens's unsuccessful periodical Master Humphrey's Clock (1840), the death of Little Nell is a transfiguration of innocence in a corrupt world, the world of London and the industiral cities of the Midlands, of darkness, vain hope and the evil Quilp.

In a world built on contrasts of light and dark, Quilp is the deformed embodiment of evil, the Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy-tale elements of the plot. As a grotesque, he is a masterly creation. 'He ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on . . . and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon feats that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature.' And therein lies the problem. Compelling as he is and revolting as the sexual and financial plots he hatches are, Quilp is unable fully to embody Dickens's loathing for 'the mountain heap of misery' in the novel. He is a figure of fear rather than a means of analysis. He belongs to fairy-tale, and the lurid hellisness of his death is too obviously his creator's revenge on horrors not yet fully understood.

By contrast, the plangently sentimental death of Little Nell, exhausted after forced wanderings with her grandfather, is too obviously an attempt by Dickens to come to terms with his own very personal feelings about the deaths of girls whose lives were too good for the world. Nell and her grandfather's flight from the city to the supposed innocence of the countryside is essentially a pursuit of sentiment and a place 'where sin and sorrow never came . . . a tranquil place of rest, where nothing evil entered'. Only here, Dickens seems to suggest, silent under a moonlit tomb, can innocence finally be left in peace with God. Meanwhile, the world goes on in the life of the stalwart Kit (one of Dickens's most delightful heroes) while the dead and the houses in which they lived pass away 'like a tale that is told'.

One of the most alarming horrors faced by Little Nell was violent industrial unrest in the Midlands. With Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dickens's historical novel on the Gordon Riots of 1780, the mob surges to the centre of attention. While the Scott of The Heart of Midlothian was an important influence here, the range of Dickens's social analysis had now been deepened by his contact with Carlyle, and in Barnaby Rudge itself a number of important elements from Carlyle's thought are clearly present. In the opening chapter, for example, we are shown the sins of the fathers that are to be visited on the sons. Sir John Chester—'soft-spoken, delicately made, precise and elegant'—personifies Carlyle and Dickens's loathing of the eighteenth-century 'Dandiacal Body', of feckless patrician government and of the paternal irresponsibility by which Chester himself casts off his son Edward while also causing the bestial Hugh, his 'natural' or illegitimate child, to join in the destruction of the Maypole inn and the traditional values suggested by the nearby great house. Hugh is the personification of the corrupt old order, 'that black tree of which I am the ripened fruit'. In this, he forms the perfect complement to the simple-minded Barnaby Rudge, the 'natural' or idiot son of a murderous servant. Together, Hugh and Barnaby suggest the brutality and idiocy which will lead a rebellion in society against the values their parents have betrayed.

The forces of the Terror as presented by Carlyle made a deep impression on Dickens, and the wanton destructiveness of the mob roars throughout his novel with a power that is as ruthlessly conceived as his master's. The mob gives frightening expression to contemporary fears of a Chartist uprising, and its mindless fury is exactly caught when Dickens describes the sacking of Lord Mansfield's house. To ravage the work of the father of the common law is to bring about a society where all coherence has gone. In the end, the heroes of the novel—Varden, Joe, Edward Chester—are obliged to align themselves with the older forces whose weakness they all too painfully know. For Dickens, society must redeem itself through traditional resources, however corrupt these may have become.

Between the completion of Barnaby Rudge and starting on Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Dickens made the journey described in his American Notes (1842), much of which had in fact been toned down from the private letters on which his book was based. In Martin Chuzzlewit—and partly as a response to criticism levelled at American Notes—Dickens painted an even harsher picture of the United States. It becomes a morass where the 'cash nexus' had reached such appalling dimensions that 'men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioned, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars'. Dickens's powerful symbol of this thin self-destructive greed is the putrid swamp which his hero is tricked into investing in and which goes by the name of Eden.

The American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit, excellent though their satire is, are nonetheless too loosely connected to a novel which is itself messily constructed. Martin is sent to the States (partly, it has been suggested, to boost the book's poor sales) after falling in love with his grandfather's ward and becoming a victim of the machinations of that ogre of hypocrisy, Mr Pecksniff. And it is with figures like Pecksniff and Sarah Gamp that Dickens's genius for moral caricature is seen at its most developed. The energy with which these figures have been created takes over the book, while their actions and speech lead in the case of Pecksniff especially to a portrait of hypocritical duplicity and self-seeking that was without parallel in Dickens's work so far.

Pecksniff is financially ruined by the trickster Montague Tigg, a character who again took Dickens's imagination into areas that had never been so powerfully explored, a world not just of financial chicanery, but of claustrophobic criminal psychology, nightmare and murder. The death of Tigg at the hands of Jonas Chuzzlewit points forward to Edwin Drood (1870) and the horrors of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866). If the focus of Martin Chuzzlewit as a whole is rather too diffuse, it is nonetheless one of the most richly inventive of all Dickens's works and suggests powers that his mature genius was to harness to triumphant effect. 

Part of this discipline was provided by Dickens's deepening awareness of social problems, and throughout his career he was to turn to journalism as a means of publicizing abuses and venting his anger. For a brief period he was editor of the Daily News, but the most telling of his journalistic pieces from this period are the 'Letters on Social Questions' (1846-50), published in his friend and biographer John Forster's Examiner. In these articles (so superior in their passion to the contemporary Pictures from Italy (1846) and their labored travelogues) Dickens railed against capital punishment, ragged schools, 'Ignorance and Crime', the vile exploitation to be found on paupers' farms and the wretchedness of a legal system where 'A Truly British Judge' could linger over the possibilities of flogging, transporting or imprisoning a ten-year-old child who had stolen 5s 3d.

In A Christmas Carol (1843), the first and finest of the Christmas Books Dickens issued up to 1848, the heartless forces of Malthus, the Utilitarians and the market-place are presented by means of a fairy-tale that has become a permanent part of the mythology of modern man. Scrooge—'hard and sharp as a flint, from which no steel had ever struck out a generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster'—is the eternal type of the miser. His solipsistic existence is at once a psychological deformity and a satire on the hard-faced Victorian business man bound to his work, dutifully contributing a pittance to the workhouse, yet ultimately indifferent to the means that serve to 'decrease the surplus population'.

The ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the reverse of this state. The domestic virtues of Bob Cratchit his wretched clerk—values which, in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), Dickens was to dwell on a maudlin degree—reveal a Christian benevolence that allows the Cratchits to toast Scrooge's health amid the poverty he has inflicted on them. When the ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge the scenes after his own death, the miser is finally converted into that essential Dickensian figure, the wealthy but benevolent man who, far from seeing money as his chief business, can say with the ghost of Jacob Marley: 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.'

Dickens's next work again conveys the conversion of a hard and life-denying business man, but where A Christmas Carol is a moral fable, Dombey and Son (1848) is the first work of Dickens's maturity and a novel of exceptional range and subtle suggestiveness. In offering a panoramic view of a society in the throes of change, Dickens here emerges as one of the supreme figures of nineteenth-century fiction, the first great English novelist to describe the discontents of urban industrial life. His genius at last stands fully revealed.

So great an advance required a major extension of technique. What in Dickens's earlier works often appears improvised or even careless is here focused through telling juxtapositions of character and a play of imagery that at once probes the personal and social influences at work in the late 1840s and relates these to a view of the ultimately mysterious forces of life, a view that is truly poetic in its subtle comprehensiveness.

At the centre of the novel stands Dombey himself, the representative of the great business house of Dombey and Son. And it is the implications of a 'house' as both a commercial enterprise and a home for living souls that lie near the heart of the work. In a world of pride and money-consciousness however the first meaning brutally crushes the second:

The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprise; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.

Dombey is stiff and cold with commercial pride, a man whose blinkered, utilitarian vision reduces all around him to the chilling soullessness of the cash nexus, a brutal, masculine and ultimately self-defeating rigidity. The birth of his son, little Paul Dombey, is seen by him not as the coming into the world of a human being but as the arrival of a commodity that will extend the life-denying existence of the firm. Paul's coldly funereal christening at which Dombey's glance seems to freeze even the water at the font is a brilliantly ironic rendering of a heartlessness that turns all to ice.

But the boy's birth has been accompanied by his mother's death, and with this comes a source of imagery opposed to that associated with Dombey. We are shown the warm salt tears of his daughter Florence, the novel's heroine and the apparently redundant female embodiment of sentiment and love. And with Florence's tears are associated the great, ever-moving expanses of the sea. Throughout the novel, the ocean suggests death, eternity and the natural rhythms of life—mysterious, profound, but ultimately spiritual and free. It is to such forces as these that the dying Mrs Dombey surrenders when, with Florence in her tearful embrace, and 'clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world'. The dying Paul is also identified with the waves. Later, the sea cruelly separates Florence from her father's clerk Walter Gay when Dombey and Son has become merely Dombey and Daughter. Nautical images also sustain the warm but threatened world of Captain Cuttle and his kin.

One threat posed to these old and often decaying forces of life is that of modern industrial progress, here symbolized by the railway. Dickens's handling of this theme shows the power of his imagination whereby social forces can be portrayed almost as characters. The railway invades lives, is praised or reacted against, but changes all about it irrecoverably. People like the inhabitants of Staggs Gardens see an old-fashioned life transformed into a new world of threat and promise. As the tracks are laid, so such characters are forced to recognize how 'the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement'.

But if the railway is a power for new life in the novel it is also a force for death. After he has been left a widower, Dombey marries into a hollow and heartless aristocracy (the ancient nobility and the nouveaux riches are lethally described) only to have his new wife deceive him with his villainous employee Carker. But Carker himself is eventually crushed beneath the iron forces of progress. In addition, Florence deserts her father and Dombey's business fails. His house is reduced to a hollow shell for thoughts of suicide and despair.

The ending of Dombey and Son is not pessimistic however. The man who frozed his daughter with a stare is humanized and redeemed. Florence returns amid rain and tears in a scene of the greatest Dickensian melodrama. Nor are Walter and Florence herself finally parted. The sea brings the boy home while turning to good his uncle's investments. Walter's path to success is now assured and is tempered by our knowledge of his humanity. Hearts do change. An improvement in the sometime leaders of society can be wrought. As the ageing Dombey sheds tears of love over his family, so a mechanistic world is redeemed by natural feeling.

David Copperfield (1850) was Dickens's own favorite among his novels and has remained so with generations of his readers. The reasons for such popularity are not far to seek. In this work, Dickens drew on the traumas of his own childhood and the unhappiness of his youth to create a fictional autobiography in which the psychological forces of personal experience are revealed through a series of the most vivid characters and incidents, thereby suggesting a richly human passage to maturity.

The hero's boyhood is deprived of strong parents (David's father is dead, his mother is flighty and empty-headed) and it is populated by good fairies and ogres: Peggotty, the loving, rough-handed opposite to David's mother, and the sadistic Murdstone and his repellent sister by whom David is humiliated on his return from his idyllic stay at Yarmouth. It is Murdstone who also sends the boy first to a cruel school and then to the horrors of the blacking factory. Here Dickens the novelist touches the anguished centre of Dickens the man. His own parents, confined to the debtors' prison, had obliged him to similar degradation, and it left a permanent scar on his emotions. As Dickens wrote to Forster:

The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time in my life. 

In the novel, only the Micawbers, feckless and irresponsible as they are, can bring laughter into this hell. Mr Micawber—comically orotund, hopelessly optimistic that 'something will turn up'—is an image of Dickens's father and one of the most memorable of the author's inventions. That he is later used to work the downfall of Uriah Heep, whose hypocritical fawning makes him an equally effective character, suggests the novel's intricate patterning of good and evil, of thwarted childhood innocence and fallen idols, themes personified in the lubricious Steerforth and his seduction of Little Em'ly. Similarly, David's first wife Dora, a psychologically telling simulacrum of his mother, proves to be an illusory angel. It is only when David has married Agnes Wickfield, dispatched many of the figures of his childhood to Australia and then established himself as a successful novelist that this archetypal Victorian hero finally feels able to count his blessings.

During the composition of David Copperfield, Dickens launched his weekly periodical Household Words (1850-59). 'Conducted', as the rubric expressed it, by Dickens himself, this twopenny magazine was to reach a circulation of 40,000. Dickens's own contributions, some of which were later issued as Reprinted Pieces (1858), reveal the passionate social commentator. In 'A Nightly Scene in London' (January 1856), for example, we see him shaking a ragged bundle by the workhouse door. 'The rags began to be slowly stirred within, as little by little a head was unshrouded.' Asked if she has eaten, the woman twice denies it. But proof leads to helpless compassion. 'She bared her neck, and I covered it up again.'

Such was the Victorian England of Malthus and the disciples of laissez-faire, the butts of Dickens's profound moral indignation. 'I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity,' he wrote, 'and I address people with respect for the spirit of the New Testament, who do mind such things, and who think them infamous in our streets.' These streets were now those of the richest capital in the Western world, of an England mounting to the high plateau of mid-Victorian prosperity, and celebrating its confidence in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Against the vulgarity of the Crystal Palace however, Dickens now juxtaposed the nightmare of Bleak House (1853). The most famous novelist of Victorian England became one of its greatest critics. Dickens's engagement with his age was complete.

Bleak House is a labyrinthine indictment of contemporary conditions and a work in which Dickens's range of techniques was wrought to its highest pitch and then augmented with a new daring. Brooding over the whole is the court of Chancery and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Dickens's fog-bound, life-denying symbol or what John Jarndyce himself calls 'trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration . . . false pretences of all sorts'. The Court of Chancery and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce itself which eventually swallows the disputants' moneys are Dickens's images of an England debilitated by 'the system' and a hideously perverse society.

This last ranges from the magisterial pomposity of Sir [Leicester] Dedlock to little Jo the crossing-sweeper, ignorant, abused, neglected, yet central to the whole vast and hideous machinery of the Victorian England that crushes him. As in his life, so in his death from smallpox, Jo is a figure who links the highest to the lowest. He is the most pathetic of many victims of political mismanagement and complacency, of filth, the slums and the absurdity of philanthropists who ignore the wretched sitting on their own doorsteps. In Bleak House, these forces collide as Victorian society gropes its way through a fog of corruption, greed and terrible spiritual deadness.

Dickens's imagery of corruption is one of his supreme techniques for exposing the society about him while binding together a novel whose social range—the awareness of a whole society— is an imaginative achievement of the highest order. Yet within the complex entanglements of Bleak House, and worked out with an assured narrative mastery, are other devices which, for original readers of the monthly parts, provided a degree of suspense comparable to the detective fiction Dickens here helped to inaugurate. These techniques also offered a diversity of comment and a range of incidents that were without precedent. The interconnectedness of this huge work is a phenomenal achievement, and repeated readings bear out Forster's claim that 'nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre'.

The narrative of Esther Summerson is one of these devices. Virginal, self-deprecating and sensitive, Esther is Dickens's largely passive voice of human decency and a figure who develops from a maudlin dependence on John Jarndyce, through a recognition of her love for the worthy Alan Woodcourt and the ravages of smallpox (no figure is immune to the contaminations of society), and on to the nightmare revelation that she is the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock. Finally, she achieves happiness.

Esther observes nearly all the characters in the novel and provides a moral register against which to measure them. She is involved, for example, with many of the victims of Chancery: Ada Clare and the weak Richard Carstone, who inevitable deteriorates as he is drawn into its workings; Gridley, another figure destroyed by the system; and the marvellous figure of Miss Flite, half-crazed yet full of humanity and suggesting in her confused way that the day of judgment in Jardndyce and Jarndyce will be at one with the Day of Doom itself. Miss Flite's cracked mind prompts thoughts of the fall of the mighty and the coming of divine vengeance. We might laugh at her obsessions, but she also suggests that in this corrupt land the day of the Apocalypse may well be nigh.

Such an awareness of doom is also suggested through other grotesquer yet sinister figures in the subplot, above all 'Chancellor' Krook, the villainous rag-and-bone dealer with his 'liking for rust and must and cobwebs' and his sadistic sense of power and greed. The masterpiece of symbolic narrative that is Krook's death by 'Spontaneous Combustion' suggests the inevitable end of an entire way of life. 'Chancellor' Krook is incinerated by a force 'inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupt humours of the vicious body itself'. An incident so amazing that only a novelist of genius could have risked it provides a grotesque summation of all the evils in Victorian society.

Dickens's comic genius flays the social parasites in the novel with merciless inventiveness, while Esther's appalled response deepens his criticism of such figures as Mr Skimpole, the irresponsible and mercenary aesthete, and Turveydrop, the dandy and exploiter of his wife. Other grotesques include Chadband, the nauseating voice of evangelical Anglicanism; Mrs Pardiggle, the High Church philantropist 'pouncing upon the poor, and applying benevolence to them like a strait-jacket'; and Mrs Jellyby, reducing her home to slovenly chaos and ignoring the likes of Jo as she pursues plans for 'cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger'.

Yet the comic grotesque is only one aspect of the rottenness in Bleak House. Nearer Chancery and the rapacious centre of a corrupt society move figures of sinister and sterile energies. There are the Smallweeds, that 'horny-skinned, two-legged, monkey-getting species of spider'. There is 'Conversation' Kenge, who, as he praises the law, gently moves 'his right hand as if it were a silver trowel, with which to spread the cement of his words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for a thousand ages'. There is Vholes the solicitor glimpsed as he 'takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands', and, above all, there is Tulkinghorn. Lone, sadistic, secret, 'mechanically faithful without attachment', dead to all feelings save his own perverse relish of power, Tulkinghorn stalks through Chancery, the slums and the houses of the great, closing in on Lady Dedlock in order to blackmail her over her long-dead affair with Jo's friend the drug-addict Nemo and his knowledge of Esther, the child of Lady Dedlock's liaison. Tulkinghorne's murder is one of the novel's greatest moments and ironically deprives the lawer of his victory over his prey.

In these terrible areas, the voice of the third-person narrator carries the weight of Dickens's indignation by the exhilarated variety of his language. This range is one of the supreme achievements of nineteenth-century fiction. Here is the voice that can create the image of a fog-bound Chancery and connect it to the inertness and horror of the Dedlocks' home at Chesney Wold. It is the voice of invocation and apostrophe that winds about Nemo in his pauper's grave, the voice that conjures up the slum of Tom-All-Alone's. The narrator's is a voice that explores every variety of hell and hypocrisy in Victorian England and, as a result, it is finally the voice of righteous indignation. Nowhere does Dickens more effectivelly combine pathos with prophetic denunciation than as Woodcourt watches over the dying Jo:

'Jo, can you say what I say?'
'I'll say anythink as you say, sir, fur I knows it's good.'
'OUR FATHER.'
'Our Father!—yes that's weery good, sir.'
'WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.'
'Art in Heaven—is the light a-comin', sir?'
'It is close at hand.
'HALLOWED BE THY NAME!'
'Hallowed be—thy—'
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, both with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

As Dickens here speaks out in his own person and addresses the whole community of his readers, so, in a manner of the greatest importance to nineteenth-century fiction, we hear the novelist himself rousing what he can assume o be the best, fundamental and shared values of his audience. His art is an appeal to the experience of stable and universal moral truths. However bizarre his characters, however contrived his events and however far the world he criticizes has veered from these assumptions, Dickens believes he can share with his readers an essetially New Testament morality, a core of timeless values against which to denounce the aberrations of the present.

In Hard Times (1854), Dickens's voice of denunciation is levelled at the irresponsible excesses of industrial laissez-faire and the blighting force of utilitarianism. Coketown, Dickens's image of the industrial cities of the North, is an unnatural hell sweltering in machine oil, a place where nature has been ousted by insdustry and 'the whirr of shafts and wheels'. Such an environment is the hideous outcome of a hideous philosophy, the utilitarianism caricatured (much to Mill's annoyance) in Dickens's portrayal of Gradgrind and his school:

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

This is a philosophy tht brings its terrible revenges. The life of Gradgrind's daughter is blighted, while his son finds relief in compulsive gambling. When Tom Gradgrind is eventually tracked down by Bitzer, a product of Gradgrind's school, a callous system rebounds on its patron's head. Bitzer brings a villain to justice but also serves his own ends. He will be promoted to Tom's job. Gradgrind himself is horrified at this, but he is the victim of the very rules he has promulgated. '"I beg your pardon for interrupting, sir," returned Bitzer; "But I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest."'

The paranoid logic of this belief is personified in Josiah Bounderby the self-made industrialist, a man wholly devoid of compassion and yet, by a telling paradox, driven partly by the forces of imagination he himself would deny. So obsessive is his ideal of the self-made man that he himself would deny. So obsessive is his ideal of the self-made man that he invents for himself a destitute childhood, an imaginary gutter from which he has risen by a triumph of commercial drive. In his delusion, Bounderby believes that he has genuinely brought about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. For him, the pollution and industry of Coketown are not a nightmare but a dream come true. Smoke becomes 'the healthiest thing in the world', while the grinding toil of the factory is 'the pleasantest of work there is, and it's the lightest work there is, and it's the best paid work there is'. with a bizarre flight of fantasy, Bounderby even claims that Turkey carpets on the factory floors might be a final refinement of felicity, but this is an expense he will not be put to. Inflated with self-satisfied delusion, Bounderby is Dickens's horrific image of the triumph of modern industrial man and laissez-faire gone mad.

Dickens's portrayal of his working-class characters is less successful, and points to the limits of his social criticism. Massively indignant though his response to contemporary suffering was, his anger was essentially what Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), the miscellaneous gentleman journalist and mildly progressive authority on The English Constitution (1867), was to call 'sentimental radicalism'.

The crushing effect of the mechanical and unimaginative is sharply delineated in Hard Times, yet in the character of Stephen Blackpool, Dickens fails to give a wholly adequate account of the industrial proletariat. Blackpool is too easily the martyr, a victim of the plot as much as of the system. His refusal to join a trade union leads to him being ostracized by his fellow workers and paradoxically to his being sacked. Dickens's portrayal of the union movement itself as a hectoring and aggressive centre of self-interest is crude and suggests the author's failure adequately to come to terms with the forces of the industrial world about him. In the end, what stands against heartless exploitation is not the genuine efforts of the workers and a real engagement with society but a retreat into the innocent glitter of the circus world of Mr Sleary and his kind. 'There was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people,' Dickens wrote, 'a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much generous construction, as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world.' But this is mere sentimentality, and its obverse was the profound pessimism embodied in Little Dorrit (1857).

Little Dorrit is an intricate maze of real and metaphorical prisons and of characters trapped in the worlds of self-seeking aristocratic patronage, bungling bureaucracy, criminal financial schemes, rigid class loyalties, wretched families and corrupting self-deceit. It is Dickens's darkest work. 'I have no present political faith or hope—not a grain,' Dickens had written to a friend in 1855. His disillusion with public life is conveyed in Little Dorrit through one of his most telling social symbols: the Circumlocution Office. Here, under the pompous sway of the Barnacle and Stilstalking families, nepotism and incompetence thrive, while the England that this corrupt civil service is supposed to administer is paralysed by institutional inertia and jobbery. 'The Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion . . . The Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions, that extinguished him.'

Where the Circumlocution Office is an image of corruption in high and public places and of a system that emasculates those who come into contact with it, Bleeding Heart Yard is a prison for the unfortunate, a poverty trap of soul-destroying squalor. Here live families like the Plornishes whose father has eventually to be consigned to the workhouse. This prison of the spirit has its governor in Casby 'the Last of the Patriarchs', the useless and exploitative landlord who in his turn is the victim of his agent who eventually exposes him for the sham he is. It is part of Dickens's purpose in the novel to show that Casby is a bad father, a man who has played his part in separating the novel's middle-aged and depressive hero Arthur Clennam from his first love. Dickens's most telling image of parental irresponsibility and the effects of imprisonment however is William Dorrit, the 'Father of the Marshalsea'. Twenty-three years in the debtors' prison turn the feckless Dorrit into a foolish and often heartless victim of self-delusion. Just as society outside the prison is conceived as a series of gaols and cells, of lying and hypocritical characters trapped in the confinement of their fantasies, so the Marshalsea sets up its own absurd and debilitating illusions. As Mr Dorrit languishes his life away, 'a disposition began to be observed in him, to exaggerate the number of years he had been there; it was generally understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain, the fleeting generation of debtors said'.

Among these drunken and shabby inmates, Dorrit himself acquires a spurious social status and with it an ever-deepening moral blindness. This is suggested when he suddenly inherits the money that frees him, throws a party for the prisoners and leaves the Marshalsea in a triumphal procession but without Little Dorrit herself who has fainted and been forgotten. Shades of the prison house never leave the family however. The proudly nouveaux riches Dorrits roam Europe, constantly meeting people whose empty lives 'greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea'. Finally, in Dorrit's pathetic speech to his horrified dinner guests in Rome, the senile recidivist is transported back in his imagination to the gaol he has never really left.

The world of high society is likewise a gaol and place of corruption. Mrs Merdle the financier's wife believes society has 'made its mind up on the subject, and there is nothing more to be said'. Her caged parrot hideously mimics such attitudes, and together mistress and bird suggest a claustrophobic and foolish world that is a sham beneath. Mr Merdle the financier, as mysterious in his origins as in his activities, admired and courted by society, proves to be a villain whose suicide removes from the world 'the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows'. This was nonetheless the man whom bishops courted and politicians praised.

But just as society is seen in terms of fraud and the prisons in which it would place its erring members, so the dour religion of Mrs Clennam is a monstrous hypocrisy which masks criminal actions, emasculates the man she pretends is her son and reduces the woman herself to a neurotic cripple imprisoned in a crumbling house. The worst excesses of Victorian piety are here revealed as a festering gaol of the spirit. In such a world, heroes and heroines can be no glittering figures. Amy Dorrit, living by the New Testament, forgiving, meek and loving, and Arthur Clennam, blighted yet eventually finding love and a home, suggest by their marriage the only positives Dickens could now offer. After a ceremony solemnized in the shadow of the Marshalsea, they go down the church steps together and to 'a modest life of usefulness and happiness . . . and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar'. The couple find an autumnal happiness in a world of stifling corruption and psychological constraint. The romantic triumphalism that concludes David Copperfield is here chastened to a brave and modest ordinariness which marks the deepening of Dickens's mature thought.

The psychological effects of long imprisonment are one of the more telling areas in a novel that is otherwise a historical melodrama written to launch Dickens's magazine All the Year Round (1859-95). A Tale of Two Cities (1859) clearly shows the influence of Dickens's reading of The French Revolution and Carlyle's analysis of a decadent aristocracy. Dickens's use of the identical figures of Charles Darnay and Sidney Carton is deft rather than analytical however. Much of the tension and historical detail are well handled, while Carton's last speech is perhaps the best-known passage in all of Dickens's work—a highly professional tear-jerker. It is in the figure of Dr Manette however, imprisoned for nearly eighteen years and just holding on to his sanity through the exercise of his shoemaking craft, that the novel's most telling power resides.

Great Expectations (1861) is an altogether finer work. Here Dickens turned from corruption in society to the corruption of the individual. The novel is much concerned with the nature of true gentility and discusses this theme through the voiceof an autobiographical narrator. Pip's chastened reflections after the collapse of his hopes reveal his youthful aspirations to status to have been a hollow and heartless sham. Such a procedure allowed Dickens to ally shrewd and sensitive moral awareness to a plot in which mystery and suspense are expertly controlled. Great Expectations also reveals the mature dramatic mastery that allowed its author to create some of his greatest set-piece scenes.

None of these is more powerful than the boy Pip's first encounter with the convict Magwitch. The superbly sensationalistic effects are nonetheless subtly related to the book's main themes. The innocent and frightened charity that provides food and a file for the starving prisoner, for example, is finely contrasted to the disdain with which the adult Pip observes Magwitch's gross manners on his illicit return from transportation. We see not only how the child has matured to a snob, but how the snob is a product of his ignorance of his true nature and circumstances. Pip's growing charity and Christian forgiveness however show a reawakening of moral virtue. In addition, the  dawning realization that it is the criminal Magwitch who is both the true source of his wealth and the father of his beloved Estella unites the narrative to the theme of growing self-awareness.

Pip slowly realizes that his aspirations to gentility have been founded on money rather than goodness of heart. But that money itself proves illusory. As the worldly wealth of an illegally returned convict it is forfeit to the Crown. In the midst of growing self-awareness, Pip is suddenly left penniless. He has been trained for nothing useful and is also deeply in debt after a feckless life spent dancing attendance on Estella. The discovery that this superbly characterized embodiment of frigid sexual allure—the product of the jilted Miss Havisham's desire for revenge on men—is also Magwitch's child reduces all Pip's expectations to dust.

At the nadir of his fortunes he is saved by the resources of true gentility. First, Herbert Pocket, the natural gentleman, offers his friend a job. Pip must now earn his keep. He must also recognize who his true benefactors are. The orphan boy, who, led into moral delusion by Magwitch's money, thought he was Miss Havisham's heir and wilfully adopted her values, finally discovers that his real mainstay is neither a criminal nor an old and embittered woman but Joe the blacksmith who first took him in as a child. Big-hearted, honestly simple, well adapted to his world and his work, it is Joe who nurses Pip in his sickness and Joe who wins Biddy, the country girl Pip in his pride had shunned.

Self-awareness and the knowledge that human goodness is true gentility are bought by Pip at the cost of painful isolation and suffering, a process that Dickens, swayed by his friend Bulwer-Lytton, brought to an end in the revised close to the novel by hinting that Pip would eventually marry Estella. many readers however may prefer his first thoughts and the original anticlimax of Pip's last meeting with the chastened woman who has wrecked his emotional life and who, in truth, he can never marry.

Dicken's concern with the moral damage inflicted by the obsessive pursuit of wealth and social position is again central to his last completed novel. In Our Mutual Friend (1865), the blighting effect of money on individuals and their society and environment is luridly symbolized by the mounds of 'dust'—the accumulated piles of human waste—that are at once the sources of wealth and of corruption in the work. At the centre of the immensely intricate plot, and suggesting the forces of death and power Dickens associated with money, are the will of old Harmon and the wealth he has built up from 'coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery-dust, rough dust and sifted dust—all manner of Dust'. In life a miser gaoling the spirits of those around him, in death Harmon still asserts his power. His servants the Boffins inherit his wealth, while his son, required by the terms of his father's will to marry Bella Wilfer, is obliged to watch the seeming corruption of both the Boffins and his future bride as they appear to sink into the depths of mercenary corruption.

Around the Boffins gather the forces of society in a world where money is all and the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches is triumphant. 'Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manner; have shares.' Such a society becomes a chorus of bigotry and banality. We are shown the Veneerings whose name aptly suggests the brittle and gaudy surface glued over the rotten wood beneath, and Podsnap that incarnation of the worst excesses of Victorian jingoism and prudery who waves aside any topic whose impropriety misght raise a blush on his repellent daugher's cheek. A bored, languid and trivial aristocracy swells these ranks. As Boffin's money buys him position, so we see 'all manner of crawling, creeping, fluttering and buzzing creatures, attracted by the gold dust of the Golden Dustman'. Dickens offers a compelling picture of the gaudy and complacent society of the new rich in alliance with an emasculated nobility. These voices are his most powerful satire of a money-obsessed world and of a Victorian England whose leaders are portrayed as gilded scavengers on a waste tip.

Around and beneath these stifling figures, choking in the shadows of the dust mounds or drawn to the polluted waters of the Thames, move other figures variously caught in speculation and fraud. The Lammels, victims of the mutual deceit by which each wrongly believed the other to be rich, batten on society to exploit it. Dickens's presentation of this couple, his mixing of narrative with symbol, reveals depths of psychological and technical resource which are again reflected in his presentation of extreme states of violent and barely repressed emotion. Indeed, the most successul parts of the novel are much concerned with sterile lives and dark forces. The grotesquely gilded London of high society, of lowering dust heaps and emotional death, is also the London of the night river, murder and attempted murder.

Of the two rivals for Lizzie Hexam the boatman's child, Bradley Headstone is Dickens's portrait of emotional and social dislocation and of suppressed passion. Eugene Wrayburn, his victim, is initially presented as his perfect complement: blasé, privileged and spiteful. His love for a girl wholly outside his class and his symbolic rebirth after Headstone has nearly drowned him in the Thames suggest Dickens's concern with the regeneration of society through the education of the heart. Nonetheless, it is Headstone himself we most vividly recall as, in defeat, he sinks to the floor 'and grovelled there, with the palms of his hands tight-clasping his hot temples, in unutterable misery, and unrelieved by a single tear'. Such melodrama points forward to Dickens's last and uncompleted novel, Edwin Drood (1870) with its atmosphere of murder, drug addiction and confused identity.

Charles Dickens (Oxford Companion to English Literature)

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