800 pages

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229432.The_Pickwick_Papers">The Pickwick Papers by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/239579.Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens

Let me quote you just a taste from The Pickwick Papers (which at the height of its popularity sold 40,000 copies a month and catapulted the 24 year old Dickens to fame):

"Down they sat to breakfast, but it was evident, notwithstanding the
boasting of Mr. Peter Magnus, that he laboured under a very considerable degree
of nervousness [he was about to propose], of which loss of appetite, a
propensity to upset the tea-things, a spectral attempt at drollery, and an
irresistible inclination to look at the clock, every other second, were among
the principal symptoms."

I came to this novel reluctantly – it’s 800 pages and if my calculations are correct I think I only have capacity in my life (all things going well) to read another 1,000 books. Should the first novel of Dickens be one of these? Well, I came to enjoy him very much. It’s a footy trip novel. Four blokes go away on jaunts. They fit into some neat stereotypes that never quite get exploded. There’s the old benign fat guy, the young romantic, the failed hapless sportsman and the poet. About a quarter of the way through, he introduces The Fixer, Sam Weller, who gets the boys out of trouble – in a charming and understated way. The novel is full of quirky incidents and odd encounters, peppered with these strange tales (they are the kind of tall stories or ghost stories that people tell when they are sitting around drinking) that interrupt the main narrative and give it a dark undertone.
The other thing that gives the novel a serious and dark underpinning is Pickwick’s encounters with the legal system. When Dickens was about 12, his father went to debtor’s prison and he, Dickens, had to go out to work to support the family. This gave him a deep cynicism about the justice system as well as direct insights into the prison environment – both of these themes are explored in this novel.
At first glance, it seems a slight affair – if you could say that about a novel of such length, but a couple of reviewers have cast it in an interesting light. One reviewer writes of how marriages are perceived (mostly unhappy or unwanted) – the writing was commenced the year that Dickens married. He writes of how the book is “characterized by a kind of largesse” embodied by the significant number of overweight characters. He describes how the law is accompanied by images of dirt and filth and that the pivotal trial scene prefigures the later work of Kafka, Hitchcock and Camus. I had never thought of Dickens and Kafka in the same space but it’s a very appropriate connection – the absurdist, black machinations of the justice systems in each writer’s work. It’s worth my including this quote from his review:

“The humour aside, the situation takes on the character of a nightmare in which
every insignificant detail of daily life is presented as evidence for a crime
Pickwick doesn’t even know he has committed: not only is the breach of promise
unproved, but the promise itself has never even been made or intended. The
texture of everyday life is on trial, and the innocence of the quotidian is
turned around and made sinister by the law:
…letters that must be
viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended
at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose
hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear
Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.””

You probably need to had read the novel to understand just how absurd and Kafka-esque the words in italics are!
Another keen Dickens man is http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka...G K Chesterton who wrote a biography of Dickens. His chapter on Pickwick is really interesting. I will not be able to stop quoting him:

“In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally it is in the details that the author is creative, it is in the details that he is vast. The power of the book lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning) simply does not exist.”

He describes Dickens as a river, pouring out things in an unstoppable torrent. He goes on to say:

“But as a whole, this should be firmly grasped, that the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters who affect the stories -- or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the stories. This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated and felt, Dickens may be greatly misunderstood and greatly underrated. For not only is his whole machinery directed to facilitating the self-display of certain characters, but something more deep and more unmodern still is also true of him. It is also true that all the moving machinery exists only to display entirely static character. Things in the Dickens story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great characters that do not change at all.”

I haven’t read enough Dickens recently to respond to this claim – I’m now determined to go back and read something else – a much later novel to see if this is true.

Chesterton goes on to say that Dickens is not so much a novelist as a mythologist. He says that the characters live in a “perpetual summer of being themselves’ just as gods do. Of Pickwick himself, he writes:

“Dickens has caught, in a manner at once wild and convincing, this queer innocence of the afternoon of life. The round, moonlike face, the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel Pickwick move through the tale as emblems of a certain spherical simplicity. They are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man. Pickwick's round face is like a round and honourable mirror, in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly existence; for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only kind of reflection” I love the phrase “this queer innocence of the afternoon of life”.

It’s an interesting interpretation because we think of Dickens as a realist, a man anxious to catch the social and political calumnies of the day and bring them to public light but The Pickwick Papers is more of a jaunt despite the chapters that land Pickwick in contact with the legal system. I need to include a long quote to help the argument along:

“As our world advances through history towards its present epoch, it becomes more specialist, less democratic, and folklore turns gradually into fiction. But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common realism. For ages after our characters have dressed up in the clothes of mortals they betray the blood of the gods. Even our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry, or which new religion he believes in, we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of "the hero" -- the name which is the crown of Achilles. The popular preference for a story with "a happy ending" is not, or at least was not, a mere sweet-stuff optimism; it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of heaven.

But there is another and more intangible trace of this fading supernaturalism -- a trace very vivid to the reader, but very elusive to the critic. It is a certain air of endlessness in the episodes, even in the shortest episodes -- a sense that, although we leave them, they still go on. Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people -- arresting people with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have
no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine.”

The last thing I want to discuss is the place of the odd little tales that intersperse the main narrative. Here are some of the titles: ‘A Tale told by a Bagman’, ‘The Story of Goblins who Stole a Sexton’, ‘Version of the legend of Prince Bladud’ and ‘The Bagman’s Uncle’. They touch on the grotesque, violent domestic abuse, the supernatural and wickedness. While I was reading I thought that he’d put them in to spice up the narrative – that because episodes were going out in instalments, they were a way of generating a different kind of interest in the narrative. But reviewer http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/ind...'>Frenkl had another perspective. He aligns it with Freudian thinking (though Dickens was writing ahead of this) and says:

“Rather, "day" is normal life -- the ongoing story, as rendered by CD's comic sensibility. "Night" refers to the interpolated tales which, though they can be humorous, are usually anything but; they feature poverty, disease, murder, horrific deaths....

Why does this "day/night" approach have such a powerful effect? First of all, the tales are wonderful in their own right. And then, these tales give a "rhythm" to the book that heightens interest. (This rhythm is lost in the long Debtor's-Prison section where the tales are suspended.) But most of all, "day/night" is powerful because it captures a vision of life that I think corresponds to how we see things in our present-day, Freud-influenced world. To the "day" belongs rational, ongoing life ... but a life in which we often see people and events in a humorous, shallow, even cartoonish way. The "night" is the world of dreams and nightmares, of irrationality, disconnectedness ... where violence and horror can abound ... where the aspects of life we gloss over in our daytime existence comes back to haunt us.”

I’m not sure what a younger audience would make of this novel or on what grounds I could recommend it. I thoroughly enjoyed it – but also had large swathes of time to lose myself in it. Not for everyone I think. Maybe Jane Smiley, a writer whose work I have enjoyed recently says it better than me:

"The Pickwick Papers is not a book that holds much appeal for the modern reader. Episodic sporting adventures, however, were quite popular at the time, and a large part of their appeal was in the accompanying illustrations. The "novel" has the looseness and digressiveness of many eighteenth-century works like Tom
Jones and Tristram Shandy, both of which Dickens admired. Dickens had not at that point developed his particular social vision, especially the darker, angrier parts of it, and his style, though already distinct, does not have the incandescent and concentrated ironic power that he achieved in later works. What he does have, full grown, and what readers noticed almost at once, is that facility in drawing characters that are not only entertaining but unique."

Taking no prisoners

“Visceral: 1: felt in or as if in the viscera, deep, 2: not intellectual : instinctive , unreasoning, 3: dealing with crude or elemental emotions, 4: earthy."

I seem to use the word “visceral” a lot more lately. If someone had asked me what it meant, I think I would have said “bloody, tangible, of the body” with an edge of violence. But maybe this is because it is often used about violent scenarios. Brainyquote has a number of examples of ways that other people have used the word including Penn Jillette who said “When you're watching Psycho, there's that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.” Then I was kind of surprised when I looked up the Macquarie and their definition related solely to the biological: “soft interior organs in the cavities of the body, eg the brain, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines”.

The word certainly came to mind a lot when I was watching the film Hunger. Seeing this film is like been run over. In a very sophisticated way. It is very, very violent, as you would expect in a film about a prison. It’s about the decision of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands to go on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the fact that IRA prisoners were being treated like the criminal class of prisoners by the prison authorities.

I vaguely remember this in the news but little about the story. It is just one large fragment in the very long and fuzzy set of news clips that form my understanding of Northern Ireland’s politics. A 31 year-old colleague had never heard of the IRA. She’s not uneducated; it‘s just that “the troubles” have been sorted to some extent and Northern Ireland is no longer a key part of daily news bulletins. When Bobby Sands was starving himself to death, I was learning to teach in Swan Hill; I had other things on my mind.

The film opens with a set of images and sounds that take the viewer right into the guts of the prison. (Guts- visceral!!!) You hear rather than see a rattling of pots and pans in a protest rally. The noise becomes deafening, nearly unbearable, even as the close-ups of the items being banged look like pieces in a factory assembly line, then we experience some of the daily rituals through a prison officer who soaks his bloody knuckles in water and checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs before leaving for work. This is the almost the only time we experience events outside the prison except for voice-overs by Maggie Thatcher that contextualise the British Government’s position and one other challenging scene that helps to further unsettle us.

The film is very claustrophobic; the action is both internal to the prison and internal to the body. It’s a film which seeks to explore what happened at one historical point in time, to one person, without providing much surrounding context. This is a very interesting strategy. We learn almost nothing about the larger context except that both the IRA and the British authorities were extremely violent in pursuit of their conflicting goals. I like the fact that it is so concentrated but wonder how it might be interpreted by people who know nothing about the politics. In this case it becomes almost solely a film about the decision to use your body as a tool for political activism. Does a man have the right to kill himself and lead others to their own suicides? Will it accomplish anything? Won't this just play into the hands of Margaret Thatcher? The broader range of questions which we might now apply to suicide bombers or to asylum seekers who sew their lips together etc.

The visceral part? The hunger strikers had tried a “no wash” campaign which included smearing their own shit on the walls of the cells and flooding the hallways with urine. They are forcibly washed by guards. There are maggots. The feeling of being in this with them is intensifies by the lack of dialogue which pervades the first third of the film. There is a lot of silence which heightens the impact for other senses.

This is the first film for director Steve McQueen who is apparently an accomplished and well known visual artist. The visuals are really compelling. He pictures the inmates in one scene as a large group of Jesus like figures – they have long hair, beards and bare chest and their gauntness reminds me of the many, many images of Christ on the cross. This image is reinforced towards the end of the film when Bobby Sands collapses in the bathroom and is carried back to bed by a guard, Pieta style. And towards the end of the film, we begin to occupy Sand’s body, maybe devouring it in the way that some organs might be cannibalising other parts of the body in a kind of hideous and desperate attempt to stay alive. We hear and see the world in a fuzzy disconnected way as Sands is dying. His body is covered with suppurating sores. It’s pretty ghastly and hard to sit through.

Many reviewers have commented on the set-up of the film- in 3 acts with an extraordinary dialogue in the middle between Sands and a priest. It’s not necessary for me to describe that here except that it’s brave to expect an audience to stay the distance. This part enables us to understand why Sands has decided to take this course of action. "Putting my life on the line isn't the only thing I can do—it's the right thing." It tells us a little of Sands’ background; from an early age, he has been able to make tough decisions.

This long scene is characteristic of the whole film in that I felt for Sands but not in a deep emotional way- I was horrified by what happened to him, by the choice that he felt he had to make, horrified by the conditions in the prison, by the brutality of life for everyone in the prison (guards and prisoners) but film style is extremely dispassionate. Because of the sort of person I am, I usually like to connect with the characters – this enables me to feel things deeply and I don’t think the film provides this opportunity to any extent. It doesn’t diminish the film but has made me reflect about how film–makers get into your psyche and what the most effective techniques are.

For me, the film Wendy and Lucy, which I saw at the film festival, does this best. That film forced the viewer to experience the same anxieties and tension as the main character, by moving slowly through her emotional landscape, feeling her vulnerability and the strength of character. Maybe in Hunger, we just experience the strength of character and not the vulnerability and this is why I am not as emotionally connected. WE can see that their bodies are vulnerable but they are so tough in the face of the brutality that it's hard to feel the emotional force of the experience.

Despite this, I admire the film and the director. It’s powerful and interesting. It takes no prisoners. It's worth the difficulty of sitting through.