{"id":70563,"date":"2014-04-30T14:51:07","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T18:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70563"},"modified":"2018-12-04T14:58:40","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T19:58:40","slug":"ditching-dickensian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/30\/ditching-dickensian\/","title":{"rendered":"Ditching Dickensian<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giving the lie to a critical crutch.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copies of Donna Tartt\u2019s The Goldfinch <\/em>now bear an impressive gold foil sticker declaring it the \u201cWINNER<\/small> of the<\/em> PULITZER PRIZE<\/small>.\u201d Before that accolade, though, critics had already branded the novel by using and abusing the adjective that\u2019s launched a thousand blurbs\u2014Dickensian<\/em>. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ubiquity of the word in appraisals of the novel, such assessments are rarely issued without caveats. NPR\u2019s Maureen Corrigan apologetically notes that the term \u201cis one of those literary modifiers that\u2019s overused<\/a>\u201d; in the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, Stephen King somewhat ruefully acknowledged<\/a> that he wouldn\u2019t be the last to employ Dickensian<\/em> to describe Tartt\u2019s novel. He was right.<\/p>\n

For all this critical concurrence, it\u2019s less than clear what we mean by Dickensian<\/em>, or, for that matter, by any adjective with a particular author at its root. Francine Prose leads her review of The Goldfinch<\/em> with this very question: \u201cWhat do people mean when they call a novel \u2018Dickensian\u2019<\/a>?\u201d As Prose notes, a number of answers present themselves\u2014Dickensian<\/em> can signify sentimentality, an attentiveness to the social conditions, a cast of comically hyperbolic characters, a reliance on plot contrivances, or even simply a book\u2019s sheer length<\/em>. (I suspect one rarely means the relatively slim A Tale of Two Cities <\/em>or Hard Times <\/em>when one labels a novel Dickensian.) In other words, the proliferation of the senses of Dickensian<\/em> makes one wonder if it, or other such words, are critically useful at all. As Cynthia Ozick has recently complained with regard to Kafkaesque<\/em><\/a>\u2014another perennial\u2014the word \u201chas by now escaped the body of work it is meant to evoke.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dickensian<\/em> and its variations have been with us since at least 1856, when the OED identified the Saturday Review <\/em>as referring to a \u201cDickensian description of an execution.\u201d Variants of the term blossomed throughout the nineteenth century: Dickenesque<\/em>, Dickensy<\/em>, Dickensish<\/em>, Dickeny<\/em>. And their uses, unsurprisingly, run the gamut. Sometimes they indicate a certain comic sensibility; sometimes they refer to sordid working conditions, or to grotesque characterizations, or to acuity of social observation. And the implications of such words were not always positive or even value-neutral: the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell laments that a story of hers is to be published in a \u201cnew Dickensy periodical.\u201d But if these senses of the Dickensian<\/em> often ran counter to one another, they came, at least, at a time before Dickens had been fully packaged into an available cultural touchstone, when his reputation had yet to be established critically and <\/em>in language itself.<\/p>\n

Of course, we confer a special kind of canonical status when we adjectivize an author\u2019s name. It\u2019s an acknowledgment that his or her work has broadened the collective cultural imagination to the point where a new way of seeing or describing the world needs to be monumentalized in language. But in time, these coinages inevitably obscure or diminish a writer\u2019s achievement. Regardless of how sophisticated one\u2019s sense of Dickens\u2019s oeuvre might be, the popular use of Dickensian<\/em> conjures, whether we like it or not, shivering orphans, cloying sentimentality, fortuitous coincidence, and virtue rewarded.<\/p>\n

At the same time, and more interestingly, it delimits and cheapens the work of the alleged Dickensian<\/em>. Donna Tartt does salt The Goldfinch<\/em> with references to very specific Dickens novels, at which moments she might as well be proleptically writing the headlines of The Goldfinch<\/em>\u2019s reviews. But to lean on Dickensian<\/em> is to deflect attention from, for instance, the horrific realism with which Tartt treats the central violent trauma of The Goldfinch<\/em>, and the fallout of its psychic afterlife. In this specifically, she departs from Dickensian models, which more often than not promise recoveries and prosperity for his formerly unlucky protagonists. Dickensian<\/em> denies, then, as it must, a certain amount of Tarttness<\/em>. And isn\u2019t it in part the critic\u2019s job to suss out what that Tarttness <\/em>might be?<\/p>\n

This is not to say there\u2019s no place for comparative claims in reviews. But to title a review \u201cDonna Tartt\u2019s twenty-first-century Dickens\u201d runs the risk of overdetermining a reader\u2019s expectations. When we conflate Tartt\u2019s playful Dickens references with imitative artistic ambition, the so-called \u201cDickensian\u201d aspects of the novel might command our attention, or weigh on us more heavily than the text wants.<\/p>\n

Even if we grant that Dickensian<\/em> isn\u2019t a particularly productive word\u2014even if we admit it be inimical at some level\u2014what can explain the sense of joy or relief that accompanies many of these reviews, charting Tartt\u2019s Dickensian affinities? Reading over my own cursory list of Dickensian attributes, I\u2019m struck by how directly some of them respond to contemporary questions of both reading and culture more broadly. To those fretting over the supposedly stultifying effects of digital media, a Dickensian<\/em> novel promises to repay sustained, readerly attention\u2014promises to help us rediscover the joys inherent in narrative, the joys supposedly known to nineteenth-century readers. To those concerned with the insularity of literary culture, anything Dickensian<\/em> is an invitation to a broader, more demotic readership. To those irritated by the preponderance of detached, ironic, sensibilities, Dickensian<\/em> works augur the return of unabashed sentiment, or at least of sincerity. And to those alarmed at American socioeconomic conditions, so often compared to those of the Industrial Revolution, Dickensian<\/em> gestures toward a more socially alert, inclusive fiction\u2014witness The Wire<\/em>, which was so often saddled with the descriptor that the show ran an episode called \u201cThe Dickensian Aspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the Dickensian has recently gained currency among New Yorkers in particular, as Mayor Bill de Blasio repurposed the notion of \u201ca tale of two cities\u201d to describe socioeconomic disparity. (The willful slipperiness of this appropriation speaks to the vagueness of Dickensian<\/em> in and of itself\u2014what were those \u201ctwo cities\u201d again?) De Blasio\u2019s office doubled down on Dickens at the recent mayoral inauguration, where Harry Belafonte decried New York\u2019s \u201cDickensian justice system\u201d\u2014and de Blasio, in keeping with his \u201ctwo cities\u201d theme, chose Lorde\u2019s \u201cRoyals\u201d as his campaign anthem, a song the New York Times<\/em> was quick to label\u2014guess?\u2014a \u201cDickensian anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the adjective\u2019s life as a social lament is distinct from its ebullient employment by critics. Even if we don\u2019t want a Dickensian New York or a Dickensian America, it seems there\u2019s still a hunger for Dickensian fiction: an unvoiced or unrealized yearning for the literary Dickensian<\/em>. We\u2019re delighted at the opportunity to bestow the word on any fat new novel that bears even trace elements of Dickens\u2019s heritage. Maybe Dickensian<\/em> speaks more about a longing in our literary culture, in other words, than about the aesthetic qualities of a particular novel. But why do this at the expense of the very novels fulfilling that longing? The best way to liberate the Dickensian\u2014and the truest way to see it in other works\u2014is to disavow the word entirely.<\/p>\n

Matthew Sherrill is a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Rutgers University, where he is completing a dissertation on British poetry and the history of evolution. He studiously avoids <\/em>Byronic and <\/em>Keatsian, even as he sometimes lets slip a <\/em>Wordsworthian.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giving the lie to a critical crutch. Copies of Donna Tartt\u2019s The Goldfinch now bear an impressive gold foil sticker declaring it the \u201cWINNER of the PULITZER PRIZE.\u201d Before that accolade, though, critics had already branded the novel by using and abusing the adjective that\u2019s launched a thousand blurbs\u2014Dickensian. Despite, or perhaps because of, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":688,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[6763,13741,13743,1203,13742,7993,1267,12453],"class_list":["post-70563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-a-tale-of-two-cities","tag-adjectives","tag-bill-deblasio","tag-charles-dickens","tag-dickensian","tag-donna-tartt","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-the-goldfinch"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Does \u201cDickensian\u201c Really Mean, Anyway?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Matthew Sherrill on Donna Tartt and giving the lie to a critical crutch.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/30\/ditching-dickensian\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ditching Dickensian by Matthew Sherrill\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 30, 2014 \u2013 Giving the lie to a critical crutch. 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