Dickens Loud and Clear
By ANTHONY BURGESS
Ithe age of Levi-Strauss and the British 'Humanists, Christmas becomes an increasing embarrassment. Indifference to the feast is im- possible, and so the only two available postures are Scrooge-like—bah-humbug or whoops-how- l-love-the-whole-world. Both are 'camp,' though unreformed Scrooge is closer to the decent human norm and less likely to feel shame or crapula. How we curse Dickens for bringing Christ and Dionysus together. And yet the eupepsia, mistletoe kisses and loud protestations of universal charity represent neither naiveté nor hypocrisy. Christmas is a play to be acted. We remove our make-up and forget our lines the day after Boxing Day, but the performance was worth while. It demonstrated in the dark an approach to life that might—had history gone differently—have been as viable as the one to which we're committed. Every year the great showman bangs his drum and reminds us. And so, after this sad seasonal flourish, to our theme.
Professor William H. Pritchard, of Am- herst College, Massachusetts, in his perceptive study The Novels of Anthony Burgess, has drawn my attention (and whose attention could he, in the context, better expect to draw?) to a book by Mr Robert Garis called The Dickens Theatre. The art of entertainment as exemplified by Dickens (so says Mr Garis) is 'loud and distinct'; it eschews complex characterisation on Tol- stoyan or Jamesian lines; the reader must apprehend everything at once as a highly coloured simplicity, just as he would when attending a Victorian playhouse. See a Dickens novel as a prolonged display of showmanship— the barker's spiel or the music-hall chairman's comic sesquipedalian tour de force introducing or dismissing turn after turn after turn—and you will not start grumbling about a lack of Lamb House delicacy. The comic catch-phrases and the deliberate jerking of tears or indignation are devices proper to popular theatre, and that is what Dickens was trying to produce.
This is, as we know, not true purely in a figurative sense. Dickens was a full-blooded actor in the limited style of his time; he was mad about the putting on of melodramas; he achieved his final lionisation (and incidentally broke his health) by the public reading of his own works. T. S. Eliot saw the dramatic tradi- tion which began with Marlowe and continued with Ben Jonson and Massinger as reaching a late end with the 'decadent genius' of Dickens. Undoubtedly Dickens and Jonson come closest in creating an art of some depth out of the monoscopic interplay, or mere juxtaposition, of what the earlier master called 'humours.' Face, Mosca, Zeal-of-the-land Busy and Sir Epicure Mammon are close relatives of Bumble, Uriah Heep, Squeers and Mrs Gamp. But if Dickens represents a decadence, a falling-off from the classical purity of taste which prevents Jonson from ever becoming coarse, sentimental or mechanical, this must be accounted to the appalling dramatic, as opposed to fictional, tradi- tion that Dickens inherited. The Regulating Acts had limited the presentation of 'legitimate' drama to the theatres under royal patronage—chiefly Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Acting tech- niques, in such huge auditoria, where subtlety would be lost on the galleries, had to be based on crude gesture and cruder rhetoric. In the smaller playhouses of London, where only musi- cal entertainment was officially allowed, drama crept back in over the music—literally melo- drama. Whatever was to be seen on the stage in Dickens's lifetime, it never rose above the level of pop theatre.
Dickens's achievement was to create serious literary art out of pop material. This must seem to us very modern, though we will have difficulty in finding any piece of fiction today that is bold enough to fulfil in words what is pretty regu- larly done in the visual media. I was recently sent from San Francisco a highly philosophical, not to say theological, novel whose chief charac- ters were borrowed from the Popeye cartoons. The courage of this is exceptional; there seems to be nobody here who will transmute the elements of 'Garth' into a legitimate vision of life. Of course, Dickens worked in a rhetorical tradition that had not really been broken since Shakespeare—one that permitted the exploitation of language in even the most popular medium; he also worked in a climate of Christian evangelism that allowed big unqualified moral gestures. Language and morality add dimensions to his cartoons and turn them into literature. We lack enthusiasm and are embarrassed by moral fervour and grandiloquence alike. That is why our attitude to Dickens is ambivalent— nostalgia mixed with distaste, nausee in the presence of the spreading chestnut tree. We would really prefer not to be embarrassed, which is much to our credit.
Looking through Oliver Twist, which is the first volume in the new Clarendon Dickens,* I am struck anew by the composite nature of the entertainment offered. We are given a novel, but we are also given the 'score' of a dramatic recitation. The punctuation of Oliver Twist in its 1838-41 serial form follows normal printing- house conventions. But in the 1846 book edi- tion Dickens is working out an eccentric but consistent system of 'rhetorical' punctuation, designed to show how the voice is to be used rather than what the logical relationship is between the limbs of the syntax :
He had scarcely washed himself: and made everything tidy, by emptying the basin out of the window, agreeably to the Jew's directions: when the Dodger returned; accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night; and who was now formally introduced to him as Charley Bates.
And again : I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen Oliver Twist . . .
Kathleen Tillotson tells us that certain early critics were not happy about the 'fantastic style' of Dickens's usage and applauded his return (assisted by the silent correction of the printers) to orthodox punctuation. But, rightly, she says: `One has only to read passages aloud to be con- *OuvrR TWIST. Edited by Kathleen Tillotson. The Clarendon Dickens. General editors: John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson. (O.U.P., 75s.) vinced that Dickens knew what he was doing.'
Indeed, what might be termed Dickens's coloni- sation (full and semi) is an aspect of style. He is encouraged in the building of complex sentences by the knowledge that he can clarify their struc- ture with exact breathing signals. That first sen- tence quoted above strikes with no awkwardness when read aloud according to Dickens's cm n directions; give it orthodox punctuation and take it in solely with the eye, and it becomes a very clumsy construction. Dickens is working in an auditory tradition, and if he cannot himself deliver his work to us in his own voice, he can at least show the paterfamilias, reading aloud in the parlour after dinner, how the job is done. The tyranny of orthodox rules, as exerted in most modern Dickens editions, hammers the words flat and blows out the stage candles.
Another aspect of the composite entertain- ment is the Cruikshank illustrations. In only two writers do we find a genuine integration of literature and visual art, and both are Vic- torians. I understand that Jonathan Miller's forthcoming production of Alice in Wonderland is to ignore Tenniel; and yet Tenniel is comple- mentary to Carroll. Similarly, in Dickens the drawings have an authority which could not attach to a mere superadded set of decorations or points of relief for the reading eye. Dickens seems to have proposed to Cruikshank the sub- jects for illustration ('the place which I think will make a good Illustration is at p. 17' or 'you will find a very good subject at page 10'); he was evidently only too willing to fix his characters externally, as visual entities on a kind of stage. His own task, in his auditory medium, is to characterise in auditory terms. Thus, our intro- duction to Fagin in the text is very general: 'a very old shrivelled Jew' with a 'villainous- looking and repulsive face.' It is up to Cruik- shank to show us what his particular lineaments are; Dickens gives us his voice: `Ah, you're a-staring at the pocket-handkerchiefs! eh, my dear? There are a good many of 'em, ain't there? We've just looked 'em out, ready for the wash; that's all, Oliver; that's all. Ha! ha! hal' Dickens's lovers are, if I am right in suggesting that the general approach to him is ambivalent, also his detractors. We accept his greatness with reserve, perhaps finding nothing of his that can compare with Madame Bovary or Le Rouge es le Noir or Crime and Punishment. Eliot's term 'decadent' sticks, along with 'flawed,' grotesque,' `sentimental' and the rest of the qualifiers. It is possible that we are judging him by the wrong standards and lining him into a tradition to which he does not properly belong. Ben Jonson cannot be adjudged inferior to Shakespeare, since their dramaturgical aims were totally opposed: there is no ground for comparison and hence none for judgment. But if we accept that Volpone and The Alchemist are superb works of art and, in their genre, could not be bettered, then we shall be able to say that they stand on the same tread of artistic value as Hamlet or King Lear. There is nothing better than the best. Dickens was practising in a tradition dis- tinct from the current of France—a tradition closer to the stage than to the study. His real predecessors are the Jacobean 'humour' satirists; he has, of course, no successors, except in Russia. If we could go back to the family reading aloud of Dickens, we should understand better what he was trying to do. The way to satisfaction is, in the words of Professor Pritchard, to delight 'in the showman's ability energetically to com- mand a large and various number of acts b) an inexhaustibly creative language.' The satis- faction, needless to say, is very large.
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