Strange Names

[Monte Davis]

Henry Musikar asks:

> Has there been much consideration of Dickensian influence evidenced in
P-works?

Not as much as there ought to be in the [small slice of] critical literature
[known to me]. I've been ruminating this one since reading/re-reading most
of Dickens a few years ago. Dickens is, of course, "a very traditional
novelist" only as seen through 150+ years of *a tradition he reshaped*.

That's the hardest lesson to re-learn over and over from any sort of
history: what we instantly label (and stop thinking about) as "Victorian"
arrived on the scene as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as any Romantic or
Modernist cutting edge. There's abundant evidence that contemporaries' view
changed as Dickens evolved during the 1840s from the gemutlich olde-Englande
comfort of the Pickwick Papers to a "problem[atic] novelist," all the more
disturbing because he was so wildly popular with newly literate blue-collar
readers.  

Check out some of Dickens' most hallucinatory crowd scenes, especially those
of revolutionary Paris in A Tale of Two Cities and of the 1780 Gordon Riots
in Barnaby Rudge.  See if you can't plot a Visto, perhaps by way of _The Day
of The Locust_, that leads to many of the busiest Streets in Pynchon.

-Monte