dickens and virginia woolf

In the twenties, according to V.S. Pritchett, it was fashionable to disparage Charles Dickens, at least among the modernist set. Two disparate writers from that period, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf, seem to bear Pritchett out. Waugh, famously, employed Dickens work as a tool of torture in Handful of Dust, when the hapless Tony Last is captured by an Amazonian eccentric and forced to read to him from Dickens’ collected works, an unhappy end if there ever was one. In Waugh’s one extended essay on Dickens, a review of the large Life of Dickens published by Edgar Johnson, he had a lot of fun shooting spitballs at the “disgusting hypocrite”. Dickens wishy washy liberalism and complete absense of a sense of original sin put him outside Waugh’s ultramontane disposition. No man is a hero to his letter readers – especially Dickens, whose hypocrisies can be tracked with cruel accuracy. Even in the 1870s, when the first collection of Dickens letters were published, an anonymous writer at the Spectator commented that Dickens’ vaunted radicalism never amounted to much, and certainly didn’t prevent him from supporting the South over the North in the American Civil war, nor from sympathizing ardently with Governer Eyre, the crown’s ruler in Jamaica, who put down a rebellion by randomly hanging black people. For his methods, John Stuart Mill tried ardently to have him imprisoned. He not only failed, but his outraged white constituents voted him out of office.

However, this is Dickens the public figure – and private man. Even Waugh admits that Dickens is a “mesmerist” as a writer – which had become, by the time,  a great cliché of Dickens criticism. It is rooted in some fact: Dickens fancied himself a mesmerist, and even attempted a mesmeric cure on one Madame de la Rue, an acquaintance from Genoa. After Dickens took to spending the night with her, giving her the benefit of his “visual ray”, Dickens’ wife made him break off his ‘cure’ – which Dickens held forever against her. He was a miserable husband. The list of things Dickens held against his wife could fill a three decker novel. Their domestic scene is not a pretty picture.

Virginia Woolf, who is, in most ways, a much more intelligent critic than Evelyn Waugh, was also uneasy with Dickens. Her family had extensive acquaintance with Thackeray, and this may have made set her tribally against Dickens – there was no love lost between the two Victorian novelists. However, one of the best essays about Dickens, Virginia Woolf’s reflections on David Copperfield, is a critical lodestone for me – it so exactly describes my own varied reaction to Dickens writing. She begins the essay with references to seasonal occurences, to the ripening of fruit and to sunshine, as if Dickens were not a writer but a phenomenon of the same sort – which is just what he seems to be, Woolf implies, when read in childhood. But can a Dickens novel survive a second reading? Or are his characters – for Woolf’s idea, ultimately, is that Dickens novels are crowds of characters, that he keeps going in his novels by “throwing another character on the pyre”  – “been attacked by the parching wind which blows about books and, without our reading them, remodelsm them and changes their features while we sleep?” Again, we note the confusion of culture and nature – the kind of thing Roland Barthes loved to disentangle. That parching wind and our sleep are definitely social phenomena, although they do take on the authoritative, irresistable shape of natural forces at play. The closed book does seem to sleep – or we seem to close ourselves up like a book when we sleep.  The parallel is inexhaustible, and rediscoveries aspects of both sleeping and books – or trivializes them.

The next two lines of the essay are often quoted as though they reflected Woolf’s opinion, rather than the opinion of the fashion of her time, to which she is responding: “The rumor about Dickens is to the effect that his sentiment is disgusting and his style commonplace; that in reading him every refinement must be hidden and every sensibility kept under glass; but that with these precaustions and reservations, he is of course Shakespearean; like Scott a born creator; like Balzac prodigious in his fecundity; but, rumor adds, it is strange that while one reads Shakespeare and one reads Scott, the precise moment for reading Dickens seldom comes our way.”

I think we would substitute Austin for Scott now, but with this qualification, what rumor has whispered into Woolf’s ear does not seem far fetched to me. It is against that rumor that Woolf makes – in an act of culture over nature – the choice to take up Dickens, to make this the precise moment for re-reading David Copperfield.

Woolf provides an interesting reading of the ‘rumor’ – Dickens, in her version, has pre-eminently the virtues of the male writer, and also the vices. He has humor, but curiously fumbles the emotional; he has description, but is curiously unable or unwilling to plumb the interior. He is, Woolf thinks, a genius when it comes to movement, but a failure when we need to slow down and reflect. She puts her finger on something that exactly reproduces my experience of Dickens: “Then, indeed, he fails grotesquely, and the pages in which he describes what, to our convention, are the peaks and pinnacles of human life, the explanation of Mrs. Strong, the despair of Mrs. Steerforth, or the anguish of Ham, are of an indescribable unreality – of that uncompfortable complexion which, if we heard Dickens talking so in real life, would either make us blush to the roots of our hair, or dash out of the room to conceal our laughter.”

I think that one can be embarrassed by Dickens in exactly this way. It is why one resists the re-reading. Remembering the almost sickly sweetness of Esther Summerson in Bleak House makes me wary of reading the novel one more time. And Esther is probably his most developed female figure. There are, of course, self suppressing, virtuous women in Balzac, but they show themselves capable of robbery and murder if their passions are lit. They have a sexual life, even if it is on hold, and one feels that they like to have it.

However, what is strange, to me, about Woolf’s assessment of Dickens is that she never comments on what must surely have struck her, especially in David Copperfield: the theme of extreme cruelty to children.

I’m re-reading David Copperfield. It is a striking novel. Like those bridges that are supposedly alluded to in London Bridge is falling down, at the beginning of it we find a sacrificed child. Dickens was a master of the story of cruelty to children, but I think David Copperfield’s betrayal by his mother and his beating and expulsion by the Murdstones is the culminating episode in the series. The equation of the family and the cult is seen all too often in the news. Cults often seem to develop around an initial separation of the child from the family and his or her subjection to extreme violence of one type or another. These are not separate moments, or need not be. In Copperfield’s case, Mr. Murdstone’s control and humiliation of the child, leading up to the scene of David being beaten with a cane and retaliating by biting Murdstone’s hand, is doublesided: it is also a process in which Mrs. Copperfield, now Murdstone’s bride, is completely dominated. Mrs. Copperfield is one of those unfortunate Dickens women. In a conversation with Steerforth – Copperfield’s schoolmate and hero, with whom he accepts a relationship much like that of his mother to Murdstone – there’s a perfect expression of all that is wrong, genderwise, with Dickens:  

 'Good night, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth. 'I'll take care of you.' 'You're very kind,' I gratefully returned. 'I am very much obliged to you.'

'You haven't got a sister, have you?' said Steerforth, yawning.

'No,' I answered.

'That's a pity,' said Steerforth. 'If you had had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.'           

Although Dickens is warning us about Steerforth’s character, through his mouth we get Dickens own compulsively presented heroine. Unlike, say, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens could never conceive of a woman with a real intellectual life,

Dickens is an artist of exaggeration, and this spirit even visits his restraint. The key to the first part of the book is David Copperfield’s feeling of betrayal by his mother – and the hatred that it generates. That hatred is not expressed in words, but instead, in a strained attempt to continue to love this woman.

But to continue with the cultic undertext: it is interesting that Copperfield’s expulsion from his house is accompanied by a comically treated fasting as the boy makes his way to London. Though he begins with a meal, he doesn’t eat it – the waiter does, keeping up a standard kind of Dickens waiter patter. In fact, he doesn’t eat until he reaches London, right before he is taken to Salem, the deserted school – which, as we will learn, is presided over by the sadistic Creakle – and fitted with a banner: TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES. This is the end of the initiatory period in Copperfield’s life.

This violence and its suppression create such a profound disequilibrium in the story that it becomes political – Copperfield’s sense of Murdstone and Creakle as tyrants tells us something very dirty about the formation of the political father, or the boss. The child and the “timid, bright woman” are brought together as exemplary victims – their vulnerability is their attraction. But, of course, children are not women – in that neurotic equation, the chance to overthrow the political father is lost.

It is this, I think, which makes Dickens sentimentality so disheartening. He comes so far, and then he falls so short. 

Tamir Rice and a justice that only knows victims

When I was four or five, my dad took some spare lumber and lathed me a toy rifle. I look back and can’t quite fix memory’s eye on the thing, but my hand remembers that the stock was comfortable and I do remember looking down the wooden barrel and shooting imaginary bullets. The bullets hit people, dogs, the house, passing cars, trees, birds. I went pow.

Later, my parents did not buy us kids lots of toy guns. They were noisy. We did get water pistols, and I remember a pistol cap gun with a holster. But in comparison with our friends in the suburbs of Atlanta, we were not well stocked with toy arms. We played with theirs.

And then stopped. At no point did my parents talk with us about the real possibility that, with a toy pistol in our toy holster, we might be mistaken by the cops for a real killa and given a split second to prove that wasn’t the case before we were beaded with pistol shot – the real stuff this time. No, that didn’t come up.

What does that show? It shows that the I is white who is telling you this stuff.

We are told, by a prosecutor who did his best to defend the policeman who, in a well run police department, would have flunked out of the force before he entered it – Officer Loehmann, the killer, scored a 46 out of 100 on the exam that was supposed to test his police potential – that Tamir Rice died due to a perfect storm. The radio dispatcher forgot to mention that he was a juvenile and the gun he brandished was most likely a toy. Or, at least, the officers on the scene did not know this. This is the foundation for the prosecutor’s non-prosecutorial case. And he was so big! Indeed, criminal growth spurts are the justification for shooting black teens in so many of the headline cases. Tamir was 5 foot 8, which is almost a crime in itself, him being black. Michael Brown was a giant, who was so powerful that the policeman shooting him in Ferguson decided that, as in a movie, he was getting more powerful with each bullet he received. And Trayvon Martin was not only criminally big, but was wearing a hoodie. I was wearing a hoodie yesterday, too, but luckily all my growth spurts have been in a white body, so I am innocent, on the I is white principle.

The perfect storm is a better metaphor than the non-prosecuting prosecutor, a gentleman named Timothy McGinty, knew. He was part of that storm, the storm we are within, the storm that allows 12 year olds to be shot in a split second when they reach for their toy weapons.

The Police Union is happy, of course. In actuality, the police union just put its members in further danger. I can read the stats. I know the number of policemen being killed each year is rising. And I know that the number the police are killing have friends, relatives, and spectators, who can get guns. If we don’t get justice in the courts – and the prosecutor made sure that the case would never come to court, a little favor for the boys – justice will be enacted in the streets, a mathematical, leveling justice that only knows victims.

How long have we been here? 

from ignorant aggression to aggressive ignorance

The latest political joke is that 30 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats in a recent survey by Public Policy Polling agreed that they would like to see Agrabah bombed. Agrabah, it turns out, is the capital city in Disney’s Aladdin. Nicely done, PPP – what better way to show how blind is the American imperial use of power, and how easily accepted. Dems are making mock of Republicans, but I’m sure that if the question had asked if they supported Obama droning Jafar of Agrabah, there would have been close to thirty percent, maybe more. Jafar was Aladdin’s nemesis in the movie.

There is the politics of ignorant aggression, and then there is the politics of aggressive ignorance. The latter is being pursued by the Governor and Legislator of Florida. Having staked out positions that climate change is a fraud, the governing principles of Florida are having a hard time coping with the fact that the sea level is indeed rising and South Florida has every chance of being the 21^st century Atlantis, as Elizabeth Kolbert reports in the current New Yorker. Florida, unlikely Louisiana, can’t really turn to the traditional levee and dike system, because under the swamps and cities and beaches of Southern Florida, there is limestone. Limestone is porous. You can put a levee on top of it, but the water will just flow under the levee, through the limestone. Kolbert reports that Miami Beach is becoming more and more like Venice, Italy, save for the fact that the inhabitants have cars, and wait for the periodic flood waters to abate to get around.

As for what the press laughingly calls the “adults”, the political elite in Florida”

“Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport. Appearing this past spring on “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to explain a statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.”

Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration, according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea-level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer [Kolbert’s interviewee, an environmental-studies researcher who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists]who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ‘climate change’ in the title.”

We are in the hands of the kind of bozos who used to populate the cartoon The Far Side. It isn’t pretty.

the subculture of those who could care less about Star Wars

This month, I have felt very much my sub-culture status. Or, to put it another way, the media is making me feel as lonely as Eleanor Rigby.

 I am one of the members of a group that is completely and absolutely and infinitely indifferent to Star Wars.

When the series first arrived on the scene, I did not hurry out to see it. In fact, I have only once had the pleasure of viewing one of the infinite sequels or prequels – someone dragged me to it. My memory is not at all of the movie, but of the headache that I felt as I watched amateurish muppet like creatures cavort across the screen, and heard much dialogic bombast.  If only it had really been a Muppets movie!

Of course, where I heard bombast, others, millions of them, heard the siren’s song. Such is life.

I am not hostile to the franchise, as I am to, say, the James Bond franchise, which I consider a pernicious machine for spreading racism, imperialism, sexism and all the rest of the rotten isms that are like facets of our national psychosis. It’s the James Bond cancer, and its coming our way in your local multiplex plus as American foreign policy, dudes!

It is almost impossible to be a fully subscribed member of the American media hookup without absorbing mucho Star Wars lore. Darth Vader is perhaps the most famous fictional devil figure in modern culture. But I don’t know whether the Empire is good or bad, or exactly what it is. And the details of George Lucas’s creation, which are debated with connoisseurial froth on twitter, facebook, Slate, Salon, etc. make my eyes glaze over. A non-fan in a world of fans is in a curiously embarrassing position, like a non-involved person witnessing a domestic squabble: one has the sense of being de trop, of  being put, by sheer accident, in the position of a voyeur.

I wonder if Adam will someday want to see these movies? And I wonder if they will seem less irrating to me as an old man than they seemed to me as a young sprout? I’m prepared, I think. Adam, like Andy Warhol, is a proponent of the school that says that the essence of art is not uniqueness but repetition. Thus, there is a version of the GingerBread man (“I want the one with the old woman in it”) that I have now heard a good twenty times. So if I am forced to actually watch Star Wars, so be it. I plan, though, to enjoy to the full my subculture until then.

The outsider candidate

"I’d have to work at learning the job every hour of the day,” he said. “It would not be easy for me to learn, because I hacve a head that is bombed out by marijuana. I cannot remember names. I cannot remember numbers.  I don’t have a particularly good reputation in this city. I don’t have a political machine. So if I get elected it seems people want my ideas.  And if I get elected, this town will be more alive thanit has been in fifty years.”

This was Norman Mailer in 1969, running for mayor, and explaining himself to a bunch of no doubt puzzled high schoolers.

Mailer’s big idea in that campaign was to make NYC the fifty first state. It is still an ace idea.  It would bring a little more democracy to the Senate, and shake up the House. It would make politics on the national level – which leans to the Dems – mirror politics on the off year, state level – when a lesser percent of the voters lean strongly GOP.

In the sixties, there were a number of outsider candidates. Most of them were on the left – although Mailer called himself a left conservative. Some were on the right – Buckley, in the election cycle of 1965, had also run for mayor.

In 1969, the traditional political machines had broken down, and the new media based political technologies were in their infancy. Joe McGuinness wrote a book about how Richard Nixon was packaged and sold like cigarettes or pop, and this was considered some kind of indictment. Today, this is what the elites expect and want. The odd tone of melancholy around the failure of Jeb Bush’s campaign, for instance, has to do, primarily, with how beautifully machined it all was. The money! The advertisements! The meaningless endorsements! It is the rocket that gets the awe – the astronaut inside, in this case Bush, is a sort of afterthought.

Mailer’s idea were fruity, and yet rather nice. For instance, Sweet Sunday – once a month all vehicular traffic, including planes, would be banned, and New Yorkers would experience the city’s birdlife. On crime, Mailer leaned to a solution grounded in Renaissance Florence – the creation of autonomous neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, urban anonymity – which Mailer thought was at the root of crime – would be dispelled. Of course, he presented it more floridly than that, claiming that some neighborhoods might allow fucking on car hoods and some might keep fucking private.

The outsider candidate is now in a sad state. From Mailer to Trump is not the arc that leads to greater enlightenment. This is what I truly find depressing about Trump, for in terms of form – dispensing with the pr technology, getting on the news constantly, becoming an issue of conversation – is what I would like to see. I wanted it to be Bernie Sander’s gig. I think, in a way, Sanders will last longer, but Trump has put a very ugly cast into this election, and into a national mood that is characterized by the self-evidence of the slogan, Black Lives Matter, in a society where the powers that be show – that old Jim Crow state - this isn’t true every day.

There’s a long, submerged connnection between the two vocational types: artist and politician. Both began to take shape in the 14^th and 15^th century, within a system of patronage generated by the court and Church. Both have followed a historical logic in which the struggle for autonomy has defined the language and inner experience of both types. And both are exhausted.  Just as the Party has drained out its differentiating substance at the same time that it is the defining reference for the politician, so, too, the various schools and trends that define the artist seem, at the moment, both pointless and indispensable – we can’t talk about the artist except by way of that grid. We, or at least I, long for the outsider, the disrupter, the amateur, as a way of kicking to the curb this dead form. But the dead form seems to be overwhelming, it seems to be everywhere, and the outside that, at least, I long for, has no footing, no note it can seize and join the chorus.

why trump is going to be a problem for the GOP even if he loses

I  don't think the GOP will nominate Trump. But in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump on the sidelines is not going to be like other GOP losers, who gracefully make way for the winner and fall in line. Trump represents ideas - genuinely idiotic ideas. And whoever wins will either have to gingerly embrace them while denying them or simply deny them. In that case, Trump will be drumming for his ideas right there on the sidelines. So this man is a genuine problem for the GOP whether he wins or doesn't.

bogus numbers in the press: swallow your propaganda like a good liberal, children!

Trump has been commendably criticized for citing bogus figures on everything from Moslem terrorists to the number of crimes committed by african americans.  This criticism has been performed by the press, which takes great bride in shooting down certain false figures.

But there are other false figures, or dubious ones, that the liberal press revel in. One that I have seen reported a lot, as though it settled the case, is the figure, coming, vaguely, from the “non-partisan” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that Assad’s regime is responsible for an amazing 95 percent of civilian Syrian deaths.  We have it on the word of Glen Newby, for instance, writing for London Review of Books, who is an otherwise sensible man:

“After meeting Hollande, Sarkozy, with an eye on returning to the Elysée in 2017, called for a tilt (‘une inflexion’) in French foreign policy towards Syria and Russia in order to smash Isis, even though Assad has caused around 95 per cent of civilian deaths in the civil war. Putin has run rings round occidental policy-makers in Syria, but a bilateral French tilt to Damascus is never going to fly, not least because French foreign policy needs to keep on the right side of the US and Turkey.”

The obvious reply is that Daech has been responsible for 100 percent of French casualties. Which of course might be of concern to the president of France. But the idea that Assad’s forces, in a civil war involving multiple paramilitaries, including an outfit of Al Qaeda and Daech, are responsible for 95 percent of civilian deaths, should be subjected to a smell test. Because it seems incompatible with everything we know about the war.

Now, the first thing that is of importance is the link that Newby uses to support his figures. It is to a supposedly  “non-partisan” outfit, the SNHR, led by a man named Fahdi Abdul Ghani. How non-partisan is Ghani? Well, in 2013, he was calling for the US to bomb Assad. This seems like less than non-partisan behavior. He also seemed less than worried about the civilian casualties that would result from bombing Damascus.

In fact, the SNHR regularly sends out notices that are, let us say, a bit fantastic. For  instance, they have noted that 65 some churches have been attacked in Syria, attributing 64 of those attacks to the regime, and one to al Nusra. So we are meant to believe that the secularist regime of Assad, whose supporters are alawi and christians, went on a church attack rampage, while the paramilitary jihadists ignored the churches entirely in the spirit of ecumenism. Counter evidence is easy to find. Apparently, for instance, the Christians of Idlib have no idea that Assad is a big enemy of Christianity – in fact, some are “praying” for Assad to liberate them from al-Nusra. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/culture/2015/04/syria-idlib-christians-jabhat-alnusra-.html. In Tel Nasri, Daech blew up the Assyrian Church. http://www.albawaba.com/news/daesh-bombs-assyrian-church-northeastern-syria-678594. I could casualy google and find other instances, but I won’t. The point is that announcements like this one about who is damaging churches are evidently conceived in the spirit of propaganda.

However, the main reason one has to question the figure that 95 percent of the civilian casualties in Syria are caused by Assad’s forces is to look at the casualty rate that the Syrian groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, attribute to Assad’s forces. The estimated figure, in spring of this year, was 78, 186. If the SNHR are to be believed, in a war that is basically an insurgency, in fighting that is taking place in various towns and cities, these soldiers are struck down with barely any collateral civilian casualties, whereas every battle in which Assad’s soldiers are involved creates vast collateral casualties. If the figure of 39,848 casualties on the rebel side, which is claimed by the Observatory, is true, and only 5 percent of the civilian casualties can be blamed on the rebels, that would mean that of the 104,629 civilian casualties,  99397 can be attributed to the side which has taken twice the casualties.  If this is true, it would make Syria a remarkable exception to what we know about civil war, or war in general.

I think it isn’t true.

Assad is a secular tyrant who is up to his neck in blood. But undoubtedly, the most basic civil liberties of different ethnic and religious groups, and women, are better secured by Assad than by any plausible successor among the Saudi led rebel groups. It is for this reason that Kurdish groups in the North have made their peace with Assad and have rolled back Daech – the only regional militias to do so. Newby’s endorsement of  a fairy tale of numbers is a bad sign, since if the LRB, which prides itself on going outside of the mainstream media narrative, can produce such nonsense, we can only expect worse from the media in the mainstream. Those who continue to maintain a fragile memory capability – memory is the last resistor – will recall the propaganda about Saddam Hussein leading into the first Gulf war. That propaganda was successful in that it too, with Gulf funding, set up “non-partisan” groups to rubberstamp its figures. In a more sceptical atmosphere, the 95 percent figure would be a step too far – but anything is now believed once we have identified this year’s Hitler.