Bah to more classics!

GAH TO MORE CLASSICS
Michael S. Collins

Gah to more classics! Down with the Transcendentalist movement! Sod off to Emerson and his rights of write. Why is that for every decent book or piece of prose or whatnot I am expected to read for the university, there are always ten equally dreary tombs to plod through? In recent weeks, this has manifested itself in the form of Hawthorne, Woolf and now Melville. What price a good book to critique?

Nathanial Hawthorne, the anthologists’ wet dream: Be it the Bumper Book of Hostile Ghosts or The American Literati in its Operative Form: the 1800s, there he is. It’s like stock taking. If you edit an anthology, you must contain one Hawthorne and one Poe. It is just common courtesy. Failure to do so will ensue in being laughed away from the table of your peers, along with many a chuckle and snigger at your faults. Omitting Hawthorne is just not the done thing. You would have hoped then, in his case that this would have been reason enough for him to write something interesting.

Alas, we get bogged down in the Puritanical. The Scarlet Letter is more a sermon on the mount than a ripping good reading, thus making it perfect for an English Literature course. It has interesting morals at heart which should surely have shocked the contemporary Puritans. The ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ determiner is put to good use as Dimmesdale the reverend (and therefore respected authority of the community) is but as equal of sin as the woman forced to wear the eponymous Scarlet letter or the child Pearl who is the living embodiment of that sin. And yet, nobody cares. The leaders and the religious and the deeply sacred and spiritual people are too blinkered, too entrenched in their own way of life, that they cannot see anything remote to the possibility that the wanted father of Pearl is Dimmesdale himself. Even at death, with Dimmesdale’s own scarlet letter open to the world, they remain in denial.

Unfortunately, whilst such a heavy packed morality would make for interesting soul searching, time has caught up in a bad way for Hawthorne. An ardent student of the ways of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne was fully submersed in how The Good Scholar should write; that it should be appropriately different from the British text, since that was from the Old World and now they were enlightened in the New World. And that is what is wrong with most of the American texts from this time period of 1820/40. In attempting too much to differentiate themselves from the English novel, they’ve become too bloody dry! Hawthorne, far from classic, is hideously overrated – His work is like getting a computer to write Charles Dickens!

This is seen far more clearly in Herman Melville, forgotten in his own lifespan but now recognised as one of America’s greatest writers. He once wrote about a whale, you may have heard of that. Melville writes in long, luxurious prose pieces about the everything of a situation and its peculiarities. Reading him, one is reminded continuously of Dickens. There is but one problem. This is a far drier version of Dickens. It is as if, and honestly, someone fed the primary motives and creative details of a novel into a computer and asked for it in the Dickensian format, and out popped Bartleby the Scrivener or Benito Cirreno. The result is that both contain the same reels and reels of writing that a Bleak House or David Copperfield has, and both have the same paragraph and descriptive flows that the aforementioned classics have. However, some of the magic has clearly died out in Bartleby and Benito. The paragraphs are manufactured rather than created out of the mind; they lack that certain something that turns dry page into classic utterance. Melville tries his dandiest, but his words are too dry.

And nothing bloody ever happens. Three pages into Bartleby, we’re being given the tour of the office and the life history of our narrator. Bartleby has been mentioned, as one would expect of someone whom the prose is named after, albeit fleetingly. Five pages in, and we’re now been told about the others who work in the lawyers office, the differing clerks. Nine pages in, and Bartleby is introduced. It does not as much drag as the plot is comatose. Nothing happens, and by the end of the forty odd pages the only thing if anything that appears to have brought forward the plot is Bartleby forever saying “I would prefer not”. Let’s get this straight. In Bartleby the Scrivener, there is no plot. Everything is driven by character. For this to work, our characters need to be interesting. There is little interest developed in either the narrator or Bartleby. Thus, the text fails.

On a brighter note, Melville’s humour is most evident and on form in this tale, and the humour works in the story’s aid. Certainly, one shudders to think of a version of Bartleby the Scrivener without the terrible twosome of Turkey and Nippers.

There is little humour in the longer and weaker Benito Cirreno, so naturally it is the more popular of the two. Sometimes I despair. It was massively popular in its day, dealing as it did with slavery, the appearance of the Abolitionist Delano as a Capitalist out to gain his own riches from the plight of others (the ‘property’ he aims in the end to protect, the Negros slaves) whilst maintaining the masque of naivety, and the appearance of the slave Bamo, the smartest and most cunning creature in the story. And yet, despite its surprising portrayal of racism, Benito is much worse. It has all the failures of Bartleby and none of the humour or even charm of the former to save it. Melville, it seems, is hideously overrated also.

Woolf on the other hand, I have nothing against. Her novels I have nothing bad to say about. They just disturb me. Clearly they were written by a disturbed mind that lost its battle in the end. All that Septimus is me and stuff just adds to the problem. Better than her American counterparts, easily. But for someone suffering from similar problems, possibly cutting a little bit too close to home for comfort.

But last week, we were doing old Edgar Allan Poe, so that should have be much better. Except I became ill and had to miss it. Now, that's life!