Lists, take a break. We've got some head-rollin', Bastille-stormin' action to discuss. It's A Tale of Two Cities! And it's awesome!
For a long time, A Tale of Two Cities in particular, and perhaps Dickens in general, has represented, in curricular battles across the country, the sort of novel that should be replaced by something more contemporary, more diverse, more timely for the lives of students today. Every time I saw it I immediately thought "boring." It just represented boring - something you maybe had to read in 8th or 9th grade, or you missed it because your school decided that it was just too boring and old white man-ish. I didn't have to read it. No one ever made me read Dickens.
And I'm not going to say that it's a damn shame and enter the politically charged battles over what classroom literature should include and exclude...but it's a damn shame. Because Dickens is not an erudite, distracted, or aristocratic writer. He is a masterful social satirist, ingenious at character, and satisfying and exciting at plot in a manner that is hard to find today.
I literally stumbled upon it, coming home very late from a party. I had my 3am pizza and I wanted something to read. Normally I would choose an US magazine at a time like this so I could ogle the lives of those accursed slaves to fame and sort of get interested by what is in their shopping carts....I digress. Dickens was sitting on my bedroom floor. So I started to read and realized - this book is good. When I started again the next morning, I realized it was great.
A Tale of Two Cities deals with the time before the French Revolution in Paris and London, switching back and forth between sets of interconnected characters - connected, in that delightfully Dickensian way, by fateful ties that unfold as chapters progress, giving us new insight into what is going to happen. There's a little bit of a love story, sure, but the love story is perfunctory. It goes to the sweetest, purest characters in the novel, but our interest, like Dickens, lies with the scallywags, the unfortunate, the flawed.
Dickens is the consummate observer of our human behaviors and patterns and reserves no scorn for our bloodthirsty impulses. Part of the genuis of the novel is how he shifts between sympathies for the French underclass, yet slowly turns on them when their tyranny proves to be no more enlightend than that of the Bourbons. Here his the ironic summation of a prosecutor's closing argument, "that they, being a responsible jury, must positively find the prisoner guilty and make an end of him, whether they liked it or not. That they could never lay their heads upon their pillows; they they never could toleratre the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short that there never could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner's head was taken off."
Great!
Finishing A Tale of Two Cities also led me to crack open my old European History textbook and try to remember something about the mess that was the French Revolution. Reading that chapter (along with struggling past marginal notes and some really committed underlining) made me realize that this is also a fairly radical, committed and populist take on events. The book, as textbooks are, was dry and full of sentences like "the position of the French underclass is understated compared to the influence the bourgeoise brought to bear on events."
A Tale of Two Cities is full of anger, venom, and a barely sustained passion in the face of change. It is redemptive and terrifying, Hobbesian and hopeful.
2 comments:
I love that you picked this up for some drunken post-party reading. I did the same thing with Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.
In my youth (much longer ago than yours), "Silas Marner" was the novel assigned to all hgh school sophomores--in part because it's short. And it became the novel that was the symbol of all the dreary past, to be replaced by somethng more sprightly, modern, & relevant. And then one day I re-read it and realized, "Wow, that George Eliot sure can write!" What happens, I think, is that over time, books written about the past become less accessible when we're young. "Little Women" was easy for my mother to read as a girl, a little harder but still easy for me, and harder yet for my daughter. So as time passes, later generations can still come to these books, but later in time than than previous generations did. Unless they're read aloud, in which case the "strange" diction, longer & more convoluted sentences, etc., are easier to process.
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