Charles Dickens

26.10.12
I return from weekend Salons in Paris and a brief retreat in Bourgogne- not restful exactly but the kind of intense physical activity and land-work that brings me back into the shape of my limbs, the needs of my bodily self. The Paris study of “The Wasteland” and some requests from London Salonistas for more poetry has prompted me to offer the work again on November 19th in London—there is so much to be discovered in Eliot’s struggle to negotiate a modern world that dragged at his soul….the Salon released such energy into the poem and into the stance we each take in our lives: how we live with the hard news of modern life, how we find fluidity, art, connection and shards of light to shore up against our ruins. Forgive me: somewhere between Paradise Lost and the Wasteland I have gone all apocalyptic.

But there are other studies coming in London: these require registration and commitment in the coming weeks…each of these studies will offer a rare and vital engagement with a significant work of literature that will lift your perspective out of the daily schedule and give you energy to consider the world with freshened eyes. The Salons are dependant on your participation: please sign up today.

The next series, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is a four week study starting the 7th of November. I still hear from participants in the first S & F study I led six years ago that introduced (or re-introduced) them to fecund, complex and deeply probing poetry of Faulkner. If you are looking for a read to challenge and inspire you, this is an extraordinary study.

In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he pushes to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature- as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury uses the interior world of its narrators to expose a crumbling world, through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique.
–from the Salon description of The Sound and the Fury

There is a short salon intensive on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” on November 5th. This short study is a great way to glimpse the Salon experience in a brief but probing consideration of Carver’s minimalist technique.

Although Carver has been described as a minimalist, his writing evokes layers of feelings reflecting the complexity of human relationships. In this brief story, we are in the hands of a narrator whose world is closed and stifling; as uncomfortable as this is, Carver shows us how even in the hands of this unhappy man, a glimpse of something extraordinary may break through.

–from the Salon description of “Cathedral”

Also coming: Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Four week study starting November 27th ; Howards End by E. M. Forrester, One night Intensive December 2nd ; The Odyssey Four week study starting late November; Ulysses by James Joyce starting in January 2013

Introduction to Poetry – Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I love this description of the possibilities and danger of poetry study….See you in the pages.

What?!? No mention of Hamlet??
“…the rest is silence…” Or Antigonus in Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by bear.”
I have to agree however that Dickens does get the emotions well-aligned in his death scenes. Bathed with pathos…

---

This article titled “The greatest death scenes in literature” was written by Tim Lott, for theguardian.com on Thursday 29th September 2011 15.56 UTC

What makes for a great literary death scene? This is the question I and the other four judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature have been pondering in advance of an event at the Cheltenham festival.

I find many famous death scenes more ludicrous than lachrymose. As with Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Dickens’s Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the passing of the awful Tullivers in Mill on the Floss, dragged down clutching one another as the river deliciously finishes them off. More consciously designed to wring laughter out of tragedy, the suicide of Ronald Nimkin in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint takes some beating, with Nimkins’s magnificent farewell note to his mother: “Mrs Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.”

To write a genuinely moving death scene is a challenge for any author. The temptation to retreat into cliché is powerful. For me, the best and most affecting death is that of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. I remember my wife reading this to me out loud as I drove along a motorway. We were both in tears, as he says his farewell to his errant son, Nelson, and then runs out of words, and life itself – “enough. Maybe. Enough.”

But death is a matter of personal taste. The other judges were eclectic in their choices. Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, admired the scenes in Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm. At the end of the chapter that seals the fate of the six men on board, Junger writes: “The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water.” “The details of death by drowning,” Highfield says, “are so rich and dispassionately drawn that they feel chillingly true.”

Meanwhile, Erica Wagner chose the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. “A typhus epidemic is raging through Lowood school, but Helen actually has consumption, which leads Jane to believe she won’t die (she thinks if you just take it easy your consumption will go away). So the death is an extra shock.”

Chair of the judges, Vivienne Parry, chose Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. While commenting that “Dickens spins out Nell’s decline for many chapters until I’m personally ready to shoot the girl myself”, she also argues that “we are only able to scoff because so few of us have experienced the death of a child, whereas it was a common experience in Victorian families.”

The fifth choice, from Joanna Bourke, is the death of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Who else is in the first rank for last things?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.