Dickens and novel that never ends

[Terrance]

Agree or disagree with James Wood, I can't imagine too many
here agreeing with his asseessment of Pynchon, he says a lot
in support of his critical and political arguments that make
good sense. He is correct to name Dickens as the Master
influence on the so called big postmodern novel. 


A genre is hardening. It is becoming easy to describe the
contemporary idea of the "big, ambitious novel." Familial
resemblances are
asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: he is
Dickens. Such recent novels
as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Mason & Dixon, Underworld,
Infinite Jest, and
now White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas
expire into each
other at their edges...

Dickens, of course, is the great master of the leitmotif.
Many of Dickens's
characters are, as Forster rightly put it, flat but
vibrating very fast. They are vivid blots of essence. They
are souls seen only through
thick, gnarled casings. Their vitality is a histrionic one.
Dickens has been the
overwelming influence on postwar fiction, especially postwar
British fiction.
There is hardly a writer who has not been touched by him:
Angus Wilson and Muriel
Spark, Martin Amis's robust gargoyles, Rushdie's outsize
chararacters, the
intensely theatrical Angela Carter, the Naipaul of A House
for Mr. Biswas, V.S.
Pritchett' s cocky salesmen, and now Zadie Smith. In
America, Bellow's
genius for grotesquerie and for vivid external description
owes something to
Dickens. And what is Underworld but an old-fashioned
Dickensian novel like
Bleak House, with an ambition to describe all of society on
its different
levels?

    One obvious reason for the popularity of Dickens among
contemporary novelists is that his way of creating and
propelling theatrically
alive characters offers an easy model for writers unable, or
unwilling, to create
characters who are fully human. Dickens's world seems to be
populated by vital
simplicities. He shows a  novelist how to get a character
launched, if not how to
keep him afloat, and this glittering liveliness is simply
easier to copy, easier
to figure out...  Put bluntly, Dickens makes caricature
respectable for an age in
which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create
character. Dickens licenses
the cartoonish, coats it in the surreal, or even the
Kafkaesque (the Circumlocution
Office). Indeed, to be fair to contemporary novelists,
Dickens shows that a
large part of characterization is merely the management of
caricature.

    Yet that is not all there is in Dickens, which is why
most contemporary novelists are only his morganatic heirs.
There is in Dickens also
an immediate access to strong feeling, which rips the
puppetry of his people,
breaks their casings, and lets us enter them. Mr. Micawber
may be a caricature, a
simple, univocal essence, but he feels, and he makes us
feel. One recalls
that very passionate and  simple sentence, in which David
Copperfield tells us:
"Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we
went up to his
room, and cried very much." It is difficult to find a single
moment like that
in all the many thousands of pages of the big, ambitious,
contemporary
books--difficult to imagine the possibility of such a
sentence ever occurring amid the
coils of knowingness and the latest information.


   See James Wood, The smallness of the "big" novel.. , The
New
Republic, 07-24-2000.