Dickens between the shoulder blades

We have started our journey through Bleak House; through the fog and detritus of Dickens’s London, into the depths of Chancery…we may even have a field trip to the newly opened Dickens Museum and enjoy a performance of A Christmas Carol and a Dickensian Christmas Walk. If one is to be in chilly London with the pond becoming jellid towards freezing and the winds blowing through to your bones, you might as well celebrate the season.

Nabokov on Bleak House

For nearly twenty years, Vladimir Nabokov delivered a series of very popular lectures first at Wellesley and later at Cornell introducing undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.
Below is an excerpt from his lectures on Bleak House (following on his studies of Jane Austen)

With Dickens we are ready to expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen’s fiction had been a charming rearrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. Here there is no problem of approach as with Jane Austen, no courtship, no dillydallying. We just surrender ourselves to Dickens’s voice—that is all…All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos (our Facebook and Youtube, VN would have added), our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove the stronger.
V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (1982 First Harvest/ HBJ NY ) Pg 63-4.

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