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In chapter 10, our guy Terry is busy accumulating reasons why it's up to him to protect everybody else somehow. In chapter eleven, which will go up within a week, he comes up with "somehow" and it's all pretty well a mess. As usual, if there are any broken links or something, you can tell me about it.
On other fronts, significant parts of the house are sort of clean. And Randy Newman is my hero -- why don't I own any of his albums? And I think I might not hate Bing Crosby anymore.
Well, I have wanted to talk about fecklessness in Bleak House and why I think that my nadir of self-esteem the last two weeks has been intimately connected with Dickens. I know other people think the book is about other things, but I think it's largely about the varieties of fecklessness, bland selfish innocence (whereas The Old Curiosity Shop is about selfless innocence), the destructiveness of misplaced hope, and the redeeming powers ofwork and of relinquishing baseless ambition.
My butt hurts from sitting here for three hours getting the chapter up, but meanwhile, I'll try to say something about it. It'll be shorter than it ought to be.
There's Harold Skimpole. The Child -- who no more knows the value of five pounds than a butterfly does -- who somehow gets everyone else to pay his bills and who accepts a present of money in return for telling the detective where Jo is lying sick (which is pretty much what kills Jo, though for some reason the detective isn't a bad person in the light of the book although he has hounded the child to death -- how did he get away with that?). His innocence is nothing but selfishness, and everyone connected with him suffers heavily for it, although some people seem to love him dearly for his charm.
There's Mrs. Jellyby who I think actually has a form of autism (one thing about Dickens is that his descriptions are so detailed, vivid, and accurate that you can understand his characters in your own modern terms without violating the story, and without relinquishjing Dicken's own filter. Hot stuff). She can't see how she's bankrupted her husband, starved and neglected her many children, and generally made life miserable for all of those around her, while she focusses her energies on writing endless letters about a stupid plan to introduce some ill-considered and inappropriate farming scheme to Africa.
There's Mr. Turveydrop, who be virtue of his superior Deportment naturally assumes pride of place in everything, to the point of breaking his son's health and nearly breaking his daughter-in-law's health, but neitherr of them resent a bit of it, because of course he must go and show himself around to set an example in Deportment while they work hard and deny themselves everything. Since Caddy hated her mother (Mrs. Jellyby) so much for the same thing in a different guise it's painful to see her accepting Mr. Turveydrop's selfishness.
There's the fecklessnes of the innocents caught up in Chancery cases -- Mrs. Flite and Mr. Grainger not being selfish, but being ruined anyway for their misplaced ambitions. The Man from Yorkshire is a specially grievous case -- he's there because there was a very small conflict in the interpretation of the will by which he and his brother, with whom he agreed on almost everything, were to inherit, and taking the thing to Chancery meant that all the inheritance was eaten away, as was the Jarndyce inheritance that beguiles Richard into throwing all his money away to the very respectable and self-effacing vulturous lawyer, and eventually wasting away and dying in that inscrutable Dickens fashion -- I suppose in modern terms we would say that his obsession with the case probably developed because he had a degenerative mental condition anyway, possibly schizophrenia or a brain tumor or something.
The cumulative power of all that fecklessness -- and there are a lot of more minor instances in the book too -- is to inspire much more self-examination than is healthy. Knowing yourself may be a good thing, but there's a point beyond which it's just so much sausage factory, only the meat that's being ground is your self and your good opinion of yourself.
I am not Harold Skimpole. I don't make toher people pay for my money stupidity. I clean upo my own mess, though I don't always do it gracefully.
I am not Ms. Jellyby. I do take care of whoever's in front of me. It's the ones a little farther away that I forget to call and write to and stuff, and I feel bad about it and want to change.
Later on I have to talk about John Drake, who died a couple days ago and was the ex-husband of Nancy Scott who died a couple weeks ago and I wrote about her.
On other fronts, significant parts of the house are sort of clean. And Randy Newman is my hero -- why don't I own any of his albums? And I think I might not hate Bing Crosby anymore.
Well, I have wanted to talk about fecklessness in Bleak House and why I think that my nadir of self-esteem the last two weeks has been intimately connected with Dickens. I know other people think the book is about other things, but I think it's largely about the varieties of fecklessness, bland selfish innocence (whereas The Old Curiosity Shop is about selfless innocence), the destructiveness of misplaced hope, and the redeeming powers ofwork and of relinquishing baseless ambition.
My butt hurts from sitting here for three hours getting the chapter up, but meanwhile, I'll try to say something about it. It'll be shorter than it ought to be.
There's Harold Skimpole. The Child -- who no more knows the value of five pounds than a butterfly does -- who somehow gets everyone else to pay his bills and who accepts a present of money in return for telling the detective where Jo is lying sick (which is pretty much what kills Jo, though for some reason the detective isn't a bad person in the light of the book although he has hounded the child to death -- how did he get away with that?). His innocence is nothing but selfishness, and everyone connected with him suffers heavily for it, although some people seem to love him dearly for his charm.
There's Mrs. Jellyby who I think actually has a form of autism (one thing about Dickens is that his descriptions are so detailed, vivid, and accurate that you can understand his characters in your own modern terms without violating the story, and without relinquishjing Dicken's own filter. Hot stuff). She can't see how she's bankrupted her husband, starved and neglected her many children, and generally made life miserable for all of those around her, while she focusses her energies on writing endless letters about a stupid plan to introduce some ill-considered and inappropriate farming scheme to Africa.
There's Mr. Turveydrop, who be virtue of his superior Deportment naturally assumes pride of place in everything, to the point of breaking his son's health and nearly breaking his daughter-in-law's health, but neitherr of them resent a bit of it, because of course he must go and show himself around to set an example in Deportment while they work hard and deny themselves everything. Since Caddy hated her mother (Mrs. Jellyby) so much for the same thing in a different guise it's painful to see her accepting Mr. Turveydrop's selfishness.
There's the fecklessnes of the innocents caught up in Chancery cases -- Mrs. Flite and Mr. Grainger not being selfish, but being ruined anyway for their misplaced ambitions. The Man from Yorkshire is a specially grievous case -- he's there because there was a very small conflict in the interpretation of the will by which he and his brother, with whom he agreed on almost everything, were to inherit, and taking the thing to Chancery meant that all the inheritance was eaten away, as was the Jarndyce inheritance that beguiles Richard into throwing all his money away to the very respectable and self-effacing vulturous lawyer, and eventually wasting away and dying in that inscrutable Dickens fashion -- I suppose in modern terms we would say that his obsession with the case probably developed because he had a degenerative mental condition anyway, possibly schizophrenia or a brain tumor or something.
The cumulative power of all that fecklessness -- and there are a lot of more minor instances in the book too -- is to inspire much more self-examination than is healthy. Knowing yourself may be a good thing, but there's a point beyond which it's just so much sausage factory, only the meat that's being ground is your self and your good opinion of yourself.
I am not Harold Skimpole. I don't make toher people pay for my money stupidity. I clean upo my own mess, though I don't always do it gracefully.
I am not Ms. Jellyby. I do take care of whoever's in front of me. It's the ones a little farther away that I forget to call and write to and stuff, and I feel bad about it and want to change.
Later on I have to talk about John Drake, who died a couple days ago and was the ex-husband of Nancy Scott who died a couple weeks ago and I wrote about her.
no subject
Dickens's characters have the quality, shared by Shakespeare's, of being so much the real people of his own time, so minutely observed, that we can often diagnose them with conditions the Victorians themselves were unaware of. So Scrooge is clearly a man with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that causes him to exist on gruel even though he has pots of money. Dickens buys into the narrative of his time that misers who lived in inexplicable squalor were Bad People, but even his and his society's own misconceptions don't get in the way of our ability to read the signs, so faithfully has he sketched what he saw.
Miss Havisham is an even clearer case, enough that we can probably name her inspiration: "Dirty Dick", the man whose OCD was triggered by his bride-to-be's death on their wedding day, and who lived alone in the house, wedding feast and all, until his death years later, when a local publican bought the furniture and its decayed spread to exhibit.
[you could have seen it in the pub as recently as the late seventies, though how they escaped health regulations I do not know; perhaps the decay had long proceeded all the way to sterility by that time]