My mom and I went on a two-day road trip to San Gimignano and Volterra that was, for some reason, an exact replica of a trip she'd made with my brother two weeks before, so I guess that was like David Copperfield because David is always revisiting scenes of former happiness or misery and thinking about them, and because the plot, as I observed in an earlier post, is very circular and circuitous and keeps gently bringing back characters and incidents that you may have forgotten but certainly have not forgotten as if they were currants you were gently folding into dough. This is different, as I may also have observed, from the way characters seem to cycle back in Our Mutual Friend, because in Our Mutual Friend Dickens is keeping like fifteen storylines with all millions of zany characters in them in play, and he wants to make sure you know what's going on with Jenny Wren before you forget she exists, but that he stops the Jenny Wren narrative right where it's getting interesting so you'll come back and buy the next issue of the magazine. This is a technique that is very common in our own contemporary fiction: it is practiced to lousy effect in The Da Vinci Code and to OK effect in the other novel I am reading right now, the famous Clash of Kings, or rather Game of Thrones (TM) 2 (TM copywright Laura.) But David Copperfield is weird because all the subplots have to be filtered through David's consciousness, which can sometimes make this device seem more natural ("Oh, well, David just happens to have met Mr Micawber again, interesting") and can sometimes make it seem super awkward ("Really? David meets Mr Micawber with the same regularity with which Arya chapters appear in Game of Thrones? OK.") Also it means that sometimes the narrative, which normally seems to be a pretty straightforward chronicle of David's life, is forced into weird temporal convolutions because it's time for a "what's up at Yarmouth" chapter, but we just had an exciting Mr Micawber chapter, so the Yarmouth chapter is like "Well, this part happened a week before I saw Mr Micawber. And this part happened about two days after Mr Micawber made the exciting announcement he made in the last chapter, and we were all filled with suspense." The result of this is that it's hard to reconcile the fact that the David Copperfield who is filled with suspense about Mr Micawber, and worried about his wife's illness, is the same David Copperfield who, in this chapter, seems entirely consumed by everyone's problems at Yarmouth. Not to harp on the idea of the picaresque, because I feel like ever since Paul read that Zak Smith article about D&D and the picaresque it's all we talk about, but: the effect is kind of picaresque! Or at least episodic, since David Copperfield is not a jaunty rogue. When you're reading a Künstlerroman you expect to be constantly aware of the development of the main character's consciousness, and you are, but--I don't know. It's not a smooth development, like Jane Eyre, or even a modernist jerky-but-clear progression like Portrait of the Artist or Mary Olivier. It's like a bunch of linked short stories, maybe? But they are extremely linked; just as in Our Mutual Friend it all comes together in the end, in David Copperfield everyone knows everyone else and significantly influences everyone's life.
Related, I suppose, are the pretty interesting narrative techniques Dickens uses to slow down & speed up time; now I sound like an exercise from the creative writing class I used to teach, but oh well. There are several chapters where he's like, "Nothing important happened here: I finished school" or "I worked at my job" or "I courted my girlfriend" or "I traveled." The effect is kind of like those sped-up clouds in movies, or the montages that show the same scene in winter and spring and summer and fall. Actually, a lot of the weird narrative moves Dickens makes in David Copperfield are pretty cinematic. I particularly enjoyed the extremely accurate description of the first time David gets super drunk: somebody's yelling something annoying, oh it turns out to be him, everything is very misty and wavery (like Kurtz), oh turns out he's in bed, interesting. Similar experiential descriptions indicate grief, love, etc. I'm also always interested in first-person narratives that are supposed to have been written from a specific point in the future (or the present, I guess); I'm especially interested in the clues that get dropped. In David Copperfield these are often kind of heavy-handed foreshadowing ("It would have been better for her to have died that day," etc.) but sometimes they're these kind of naturalistic, domestic details ("my daughter was wearing a similar ring the other day"). Are these examples of heavy-handed foreshadowing? Or do they make the narrative more believable as autobiography, as a text by a real person who knows what's going to happen and can't always keep that out of the story?
I stayed up late tonight trying to finish the novel, and failed--I have 7% left, but it's a long 7%, my friends! so I will close with some very brief observations:
- You guys, the last like 15% of the book really drags! A lot of exciting plot and character things are brought to an exciting crisis and you can basically see how they will be resolved, and then it takes FOREVER to resolve them, and there are a lot of boring speeches and extremely boring descriptions of things that I think are supposed to be exciting or moving, but turn out to be boring. It COULD BE that all the descriptions in the book are boring, except that the majority of the descriptions are of DELIGHTFUL DOMESTIC SITUATIONS which I love, and so I just got bored the two times there were descriptions of NATURE, which I abhor (being a vacuum, the feeling is mutual. HA HA I am kind of tired.) But still! It is going ON and ON. It does not help that a significant source of comedy in the novel is the fact that Mr Micawber always writes long, boring, wordy letters to everyone, so we all have to sit through these long, boring, wordy letters at which we are supposed to laugh and laugh.
- Said domestic situations are DELIGHTFUL and FASCINATING. The coziest and most delightful domestic situations in David Copperfield are the quirkiest and least conventional ones, like the house made of a boat or the dinner David & his friends get up when the dinner his housekeeper makes is bad: Mr Micawber makes punch, and everyone takes turns roasting slices of something on the fire, and it is very charming. Also charming is the chapter I just read about how one character, who has been engaged to his fiancee for about half the book, has finally gotten married and moved his fiancee and all eight of her sisters into the chambers he occupies as a lawyer, which consist of three rooms. The descriptions of DC's terrible domestic life with his terrible wife are also extremely charming, even though you are frustrated with the terrible wife. In all these scenes there are amazing details about weird Victorian housekeeping stuff, like cookery books and how you can wash teacups at the table and how you can have teaspoons made of Britannia metal. Also it was very hard to be a wife in those days because I think you had to know double-entry bookkeeping or whatever, and I do sympathize with the terrible wife because that seems hard. Also! very interesting part where DC tells his wife, "Our bad housekeeping doesn't just hurt us, it also hurts our servants by giving them opportunities to become dishonest people. It's like an infection!" (all quotes are paraphrases!!) Noblesse oblige, right? Trickling down from the dad to the mom to the servants.
- But David is pretty good about saying "Neither of us know about housekeeping; we both need to learn how to do this." You get the sense that if he were married to a less ridiculous wife they would figure it out together and it would be very cozy. Because his wife is pretty useless a lot of their domestic scenes read kind of like those John Brooke/Meg scenes from Little Women, but slightly more from the Brooke perspective (although Alcott is super sympathetic to Brooke.) Imagine if you married a lady and she started crying every time you suggested she help out with the house! So DC doesn't want to be paternal about it, but then he has to be, and then he feels bad. Actually, this book has a lot of very sensitive, realistic portrayals of less-than-perfect marriages.
- SPOILER ALERT IN THIS BULLET POINT (NOT A COMPLETE SPOILER)
David's marriage is so obviously terrible, and such a bad idea from pretty early on in their courtship, that you're praying for something bad to happen, and when it does happen, the pathos is really reduced by you being like, "Thank goodness!" But on the other hand he obviously loves his wife, and she's a good person, and you understand and believe that he loves her, so you're also like, "How is David Copperfield possibly going to get out of this and marry someone else and produce the daughter he saw wearing the ring?" Because it doesn't seem like the rules of honor and the sanctity of marriage would allow someone who was married to a pretty nice person, about whom he had the misgivings DC has, to get married to someone else.
END SPOILER ALERT - Fallen women! They are not allowed to talk after they have been saved. You can catch a glimpse of them but someone usually puts a handkerchief over their faces. I know it is because the last thing they would ever want would be more exposure and blame from the cruel world to which they were deluded into inappropriately exposing themselves or whatever, but it seems rough. I think I read somewhere that when you entered into one of those reformatories for fallen women--the Magdalen houses--you told your tale of woe to the board of directors or something and then you never spoke of it to any of the other women in the house. It is possible I read this in a fantasy novel or something and not in a book about Magdalen houses, but whatever. I was reminded of it when a fallen woman's male relative tells DC her story, almost verbatim, and DC is like "Now when I think of that story I feel like I was there, the memory is so vivid" and you're like, "Why is this story being told third-hand? Why can't she tell her own story?" And it is puzzling!
- Women in general, Charles Dickens. Young women. I don't know. They are not your greatest work. They are usually either pretty terrible and need a lot of male correction or they are these annoying saints. The older women can be great. Betsy Trotwood is the best! Oh man speaking of young women, Miss Dartle is crazy!
- Finally: what's with the Victorians thinking it is GREAT to trick people for their own good? I was extremely upset by an entire major plot point of Our Mutual Friend, which turned out to be an elaborate, well-meaning trick to improve or test or develop the morals of one of the characters. I was reminded of this, and pretty upset indeed, in The Woman in White when two of the characters trick a third character into thinking she's a good artist and that she's earning money for the family with her drawings. Granted, this last example was an attempt to slowly bring her back from a traumatized state into acting like her old self--a self who maybe could support herself through drawings, although it seems unlikely. It just seemed creepy. Why not give her something actually useful to do, like doing the laundry or something? Maybe that would have made her coarse. Anyway, people are constantly doing stuff like this in David Copperfield: pretending people are doing useful work when they're not; concealing crucial information from people for their own good; telling people that their relatives are sick when they're really dead (and bizarrely not waiting a day or two to reveal that the person is dead, but just going smoothly on one minute later from "sick" to "dead"); hiding newspapers from people who are going to Australia so they will NEVER KNOW a loved one is dead. SO WEIRD. Obviously all these concealments are well-meaning, and the Victorians obviously thought the shock of finding out certain things could be really damaging to your health, but I don't like it. Whenever anyone has put off telling me something to save my feelings, or to allow me to enjoy one last careless hurrah, I'm always super upset when I do find out, and the memory of the careless hurrah gets tainted anyway. I think. Who knows! What's more important: experiences or memories of those experiences? I think David Copperfield is interested in that question--as are most facsimiles of life writing, where the narrator often tries to separate an event from the associations it's accumulated over time, and can't. Count no man happy etc etc until she is in bed.
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