The most famous Dead White Male author since Shakespeare has been in the headlines ever since Oprah Winfrey, host of what is arguably the world’s most influential book club, announced plans for “a date with Dickens” over the Christmas season. Opinions have been sharply divided as to whether the novelist’s innumerable fans should feel slighted or flattered by Oprah’s seal of approval.
Dickens was a writer of such prodigious talent and energy that a library’s worth of literary criticism and biography has yet to provide a comprehensive account of his career. To many critics and devotees he is fondly known by his own self-aggrandizing nickname: The Inimitable. At the height of his success, in addition to taking daily walks of 20 to 30 miles, he wrote and acted for the popular theatre, made hundreds of speeches, travelled obsessively around England and Europe, supported several charities, edited magazines, and conducted voluminous correspondence. Incredibly, amidst all this activity he also wrote a shelf of imperishable novels which held the English reading public spellbound for a generation. The idea of tacking this extraordinary man of letters onto a reading list of contemporary middlebrow writers strikes some of the faithful as a form of sacrilege.
Skeptics have criticized Oprah’s approach to fiction as a form of therapy – during her show she spoke of Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as the literary equivalent of a “cup of hot chocolate.” Some have raised doubts as to whether an audience accustomed to treating fiction as a form of light entertainment will find themselves equal to the challenges of the Inimitable’s style. Hillary Kelly, the assistant editor of a prestigious literary blog, has written that “a TV host whose maxim is to ‘live your best life’ is not an adequate guide through the complicated syntax of Dickens, not because she lacks the intelligence… but because her readings of the texts are so one-dimensional.”
Ms Kelly’s reservation contains an echo of a famous comment by the philosopher George Santayana who once argued that “When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are: they accept them conventionally at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on in the region of discourse, where there are masks only, and no faces; ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces that play from moment to moment on the countenance of the world.” In other words, readers used to depthlessness of modern fiction may not be intellectually capable of dealing with the phantasmagorical force of Dickens’s characters.
Remarkably, another long-dead literary icon has also stormed into the headlines. The first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography – deliberately delayed for a century so as not to offend anyone – became an immediate bestseller when it was published last year. Twain is also in the news because of a controversial re-issue of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which replaces what American broadcasters refer to euphemistically as “the n-word” with the tin-eared monosyllable “slave.” This officious meddling with the original has occasioned a lot of well-deserved ridicule in the American press, and it is another reminder of how difficult it can be for modern readers to come to terms with the complexity of the recent past.
Sadly, many of us think of literary classics as a bunch of harmless old stories. Acrimonious debates over the literary canon have sidetracked the study of literature into the narrow byways of identity politics and the indecipherable pseudo-philosophy of literary theory. We hear a great deal about racism, class prejudice, sexism and imperialism but far too little about the qualities that matter. Joseph Conrad, for example, may have observed evil through the lens of colonialism, but his radical depiction of human evil arising from within us – rather than being imposed from outside – is a far greater challenge to our sanitized modern notions of good and evil than any racial theories which may have tainted his worldview. Likewise, Twain’s portrait of the American South, in which decency and compassion coexist with ignorance and prejudice, also transcends our simpleminded notions of right and wrong.
The truth is that we struggle with Dickens, Twain and other canonical writers because we have become accustomed to carelessly simple views of the world. Dazzled by our technological progress we are now used to leaving great portions of modern life unexamined. We have lost the appetite for intelligent doubts and complex thoughts. From this perspective it is probably more accurate to say that the canon has aged well while the reading public has regressed. Far from moving beyond the wisdom of the past, the modern mind has become infantilized and the classics have outgrown us.
