Wednesday, June 8, 2011

David Copperfield (and Pater) in the Uffizi

The titles of my posts to this blog, in which I force together a work of Victorian literature and an Italian tourist landmark which have nothing in common besides the coincidence that I read one and visited the other on the same day, are really starting to feel like those Pride and Prejudice and Zombies books. Perhaps I should be making up amusing stories about what if David Copperfield were wandering around in the Uffizi and ran into Walter Pater in front of Botticelli's Venus? WOULD THEY KISS? Time for some Victorian inter-genre inter-reality slash, my friends. I think I already speculated about a Pater/Twilight mashup on facebook, so maybe Pater slash is my thing. Surely it is somebody's thing already. Maybe Morrissey's? Incidentally, how amusing are those Pride & Prejudice & Zombies books? Are they as amusing as Pater slash fiction? I gave up on them when they went with the alliterative Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters over the thematic Persuasion and  the Kraken. Or maybe they could have had the best of both world with Persuasion and Poseidon's Wrath. Think about it, Quirk Books editors from 2008!

Not to meander myself at present, I will go back to my book. (That was a quote from David Copperfield, you guys! Except I changed birth to book. Wit!) I decided to read David Copperfield next because I felt like it was too soon after Vanity Fair to read another book whose plot would be entirely familiar to me from BBC miniseries, and while I watched the entire Gillian Anderson Bleak House and even read some of my grandfather's creaky gilt-bound 1888 copy as bedtime reading for a few days, I have only seen like the first episode of the Daniel Radcliffe David Copperfield, and I think I wasn't really paying attention. That miniseries did have the effect, however, of making me picture David as a younger, more adorable Harry Potter. And actually they have a lot in common: as I read this novel, I'm having one of those experiences where you realize you're reading the source material for a lot of things you loved as a child, like when I read Lord of the Rings at 21 and suddenly understood all those YA fantasy novels I read when I was 9, or when I went to that Pavement concert at 30 and suddenly understood all those 90s bands I listened to when I was 15. Is David Copperfield the original adorable put-upon orphaned child, on whom both appalling injustice and  heartwarming loving-kindness is administered by a steadily-growing and rotating cast of Quirky Characters? I mean, all Dickens children are, I suppose, but David's adventures remind me so much of Emily of New Moon and Harry Potter and any number of extremely cozy school stories and gentle Künstlerroman(s?)(e?) that something is starting to click.


Other than that, I'm not sure I have anything intelligent to say so far about David Copperfield. Mostly it's just super cozy and delightful. In his preface, Dickens is like, "This is my favorite book; I was sad when I had to let go of these characters" and that seems to be about the size of it. The characters are just delightful--many of them are "flat" characters, as E.M. Forster puts it, and I think I get what he means now when he says that all there is to Mrs Micawber is "I shall never desert Mr Micawber," although a lot of other characters who have catchphrases ("that wise and wonderful woman"; the guy who is obsessed with people's motives; Uriah Heep's claims to be an "umble person") seem to have more going on than just their catchphrase. But you do see that Dickensian delight in accumulating characters, "types" who are weird enough that I wonder how much they conformed to any types his audience was used to, and how much the audience just learned to expect these Dickensian "types." There's definitely some of that love of just making up a new character that Paul always notices in Mervyn Peake (which I've mentioned before in this blog, re Vanity Fair & plot.) 


Speaking of plot: I'm pathetically underread in Dickens for a person who basically just committed to being a Victorianist, so I've barely read two Dickens novels in their entirety--Our Mutual Friend and A Christmas Carol--but I'm noticing the way plot works in Dickens isn't so different from the way it works in Thackeray. Characters and incidents pile up, and it seems very picaresque and cumulative and excessive rather than developmental, but then the characters and incidents start circling back, and linking up, and by the end everyone has met everyone else and affected their lives and every significant action has been accounted for. I know Dickens created elaborate plot-diagrams for his novels. But it still feels like a kind of barely-organized accumulation--it certainly lacks unity of action in a classical sense! Which no one expects from a Victorian novel. But it's interesting to feel this accumulation happening around yourself as the reader; you can see how naturally it fits with serial composition and publication (in his preface to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens was like, "oh you guys the mystery was obvious but you didn't notice because it's hard to remember details from like six months ago," so the serial can make mysteries more exciting, but it also might encourage you to be like, "Remember THIS GUY? Let's look at him again for a week") and how it's a form that really lends itself to TV (like how David Simon kept going on about how The Wire was Dickensian. But he was right it was! down to the catchphrases. but not so cozy.)


Also: the coziness! I think David Copperfield is going to be on my domestic literature list as well, because it is full of these domestic scenes, and different weird kinds of families, and all the rooms that David likes (the one in the house that was made from a boat!) and doesn't like (the one he has to sleep in when his bad stepfather kicks him out of his room in his own childhood home.) Also the wealth of material details: what kind of furniture, what kind of books, what color and texture people's clothes are, what they eat. Dickens accounts for this by talking about what an observant child he was, and he points out that children are naturally observant, and observant adults retained this gift from their childhoods rather than developing it in adulthood. This both explains why the narrator remembers so much stuff, and gives the novel this kind of Künstlerroman thrust (DC, like Scrooge, is always reading Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random and Arabian Nights, and also he likes to make up stories). But it also reminds me (again!) of how annoyingly wrong Joyce Carol Oates was in that NYT article about what should be edited out of classic books, when she said Jane Austen should be edited to remove all the descriptions of ballgowns. There are almost no descriptions of ballgowns in Jane Austen, but by the time you get to the Victorians you get a ton! We constantly know what everybody's wearing in Dickens, and we got a pretty good sense of what people were wearing in (duh) The Woman in White. Thackeray told us, too, but usually more judiciously, to illustrate character. But in Dickens we're really starting to get that reality effect, saucepans and green fans and cherry-colored ribbons and all.


Also related to DC being a kid: it's interesting to see how Dickens manages the discrepancy between what the kid sees and thinks and what the adult narrator sees and thinks. Lots of meditations about perception and memory that are pretty fun. But it's also both soothing and maybe a little (pleasantly) boring to have this one consistent mild-mannered nice narrator. In Our Mutual Friend we get the Dickens omniscient narrator, going from being hilariously fast-paced and sarcastic and insane to being all creepy to being super-sentimental; in Bleak House there's the unsettling see-saw between mild-mannered Esther's narrative voice and the really bizarre "London" omniscient narrator. But here it's just one nice, friendly guy.


As for the Uffizi: how can I relate it to David? Not very well; I read the part about his mom's funeral in the Botticelli room, and felt pretty solemn. Also, my back hurt because whenever I am in a museum something starts to ache. You can walk for like four miles outdoors and everything will feel good and healthy and strong, but you spend like half an hour strolling around a museum looking at paintings and you instantly become an invalid. After I read about the funeral I downloaded Pater's The Renaissance on my Kindle & read his description of Botticelli's Madonna & of the Birth of Venus while standing in front of those paintings. Pater has this thing about how the Botticelli Madonna is sad that she has this baby who is not really a baby but God, and he says that Botticelli's people are always kind of freaked out by and uncomfortable with divine or supernatural power. They just want to be regular people! She just wants to be a nice mom, but instead she has this baby who looks up at God and makes her write the Magnificat in a book. I was thinking about how right my professor for the Ruskin/Pater class was when he pointed out how shocking and blasphemous a claim that was for Pater to make, one that was much more shocking than the controversial afterword that Pater suppressed from later editions of The Renaissance. I am definitely finding myself haunted by that Ruskin/Pater/Wilde class as I wander around Italy reading Victorian novels: Ruskin & Pater are definitely the place where these Gothic & Renaissance artworks are coming together with this Victorian prose! And of course there's Henry James, and George Eliot, and EBB, and E.M. Forster. I'm thinking about them too! But they don't write quite as insane and amazing explications of cathedrals and Madonnas as these insane & amazing aesthetes.

2 comments:

  1. I don't have much to say as I haven't read David Copperfield but I wanted to say I agree with you 100%, I was JUST THINKING yesterday that sea monsters DEFINITELY belong in Persuasion, MAYBE Northanger Abbey, but they have no place in Sense & Sensibility. They are not even by the sea. Sense & Sensibility could EASILY have werewolves though.

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  2. >That was a quote from David Copperfield, you guys!

    How interesting, I was just thinking "That is an unusually clumsy sentence for this blog." extry! blogofholding revealed to have bad literary taste!

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