Strange Names

[Mark Kohut]

And i just want to add to Monte's untoppable obs this, recently relearned,
(which Monte adumbrates):

Dickens' popularity led him to be viewed as too popular to be 'great", kept him from being 'canon'ized by those who mostly defined great literature until well into the 20th Century. 

Dr. Leavis, perhaps the James Wood of his time (but probably even more influential within Academe), so to speak, pronounced him 
not for mature readers when he wrote The Great Tradition. (Let's see: juvenile satire, sound Wooden to you?)

One can imagine the James Wood-like reviewers of Dickens time writing of his 'hyperbolic realism" or 'sentimental' failures----Oh, the death of Little Nell, so... 'sob','sob'......

I do know many of the most influential hardly took him seriously, compared to such as George Eliot or others who have deservedly faded.(Eliot has not faded, rightly)

To Leavis's credit he did reread and reconsider Dickens for 'the tradition' in a 1970 book. When I wrote Wood about AtD, I suggested he would come to the same conclusion about Pynchon if he would reread him in full intelligent openness, but all, all is vanity, mine, I'm sure as much as Wood's.  



--- On Sat, 11/14/09, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
> Subject: RE: Strange Names
> To: "'Henry Musikar'" <scuffling at gmail.com>, "'Pynchon Liste'" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 9:51 AM
> 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
> 
>