A Double Lie
There’s not much one can do when somebody just won’t or can’t understand and goes on repeating old errors. The Stop the War march in London today was criticised by one woman-in-the-street for being “pro-Saddam”. That the people on the march have consistently spoken out against the tyrant, and were ignored when those now demanding his removal armed him at the peak of his powers in the 80s, is not even an issue to her. And so too with most of the electorate, trained as they are through lack of training to be concerned only with the latest scapegoat in the arena. While this could be seen as a failure of humanity to use its intelligence, AN Wilson sees it as the basis of civilisation.
In his new book The Victorians, Wilson defines high civilisation as that which can live with contradiction without being destroyed by it. The Victorians created a vast empire, an industrial revolution and a rich culture whilst containing irreconcilable opposites: “faith and doubt, heroic will and melancholy fear, Promethean materialism and sentimental charm” are among those listed by the TLS reviewer Hywel Williams. (If this is the case, then the Soviet Union could be called a great civilisation - just “balance out” the Gulag with the lack of crime during those years perhaps). The Victorians were also obsessed with biography despite the buttoned-up fa�ade of public life. Well, not despite of course, because. People wanted to see more than the fa�ade of a public life even as they paraded themselves beneath the same Proscenium Arch.
It’s not much different now. Public life is still about display, not truth; exhibitionism is also a form of retreat. A star has no private life not because of press intrusion but because a star is an emptiness filled from the outside. Perhaps, therefore, we are still in time of high civilisation, and AN Wilson is disingenuous in his disdain for modernity. We like to believe repression is in the past. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, particularly if the evidence of the reception of Michel Faber’s fantasy novel The Crimson Petal and the White is anything to go by. Uncritical critics are swooning to the bouquet of Dickens’ decaying flesh newly exhumed for the seven hundredth time. Reading reviews of this 800+ page novel is like being in slow-motion car crash. You know it’s a disaster but there’s nothing you can do except prepare for the worst (or Tony Parsons).
Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian writes: “Michel Faber has produced the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely.” Was Dickens fettered do you think? No, of course he wasn’t. Literature is always already a public space; one can hide nothing (but who wants to hide “nothing”?). The “crude fact and dirty detail” Hughes says is packed into Faber’s book is just the current way of leaving the “decorous gaps and tactful silences” she sees as constitutive of the Dickensian novel. If, through literature, we are to see behind the mask, then how do we deal with the mask that is “literature”? This is the question faced down by the Modernists and repressed with glee by their descendants. So it’s no coincidence when Hywel Williams says “AN Wilson’s Victorians are postmodernists.”
Dickens is still considered a great Realist, though in my experience his realism is little more than grotesquery; the excessive and uncritical use of words to screen off a deeper wound. Kafka said that in Dickens “there is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style”, full of “rude characterisations which are artificially stamped on everyone and without which Dickens would not be able to get on with his story”. Dickens was, then, the supreme literary novelist; a craftsman concerned only for one thing - his story. Such is the contradiction at the heart of this craving for a new Dickens. Kathryn Hughes says Faber’s product “is a supremely literary novel”. Enough said.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- Dickens the journalist
- Bleak Job, Well Done
- Mr Wilson. He Dead.
- File under: Journalists who don�t understand literature, vol 94
- Reading in 2007 - Tenuous Intent
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