Prompt of the Day #
It is the late 1800s and the world around you is a strange, cold place. Manners dictate your interactions with men and women. The lull of the country and the lure of the city compete for your affection. Industry is overwhelming traditional ways of life. The middle classes are entrenched into society but a 'self-made man' is still an object of scorn. Utilitarianism and Religion compete over societal morals. Everyone and everything is moulded to fit the figure of a newly mechanised world.
Write about a day in the life of the19th Century.
Happy 200th Birthday Mr Dickens
Many of you will have noticed the Google image of the day: all in honour of one of the greatest writers than Britain has ever seen.
Prolific, passionate, political - Dickens' novels remain some of the most influential works of fiction in the English canon. From Hard Times' clinical consideration of the effects of extreme Utilitarianism and the import of imagination, to the the heart-wrenching stories we find within a Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickelby or Oliver Twist, Dickens was a master of character and plot. His ability to write serials, a term referring to the presentation of chapters published one at a time either days or weeks apart in magazines and newspapers, was crucial to his success. Even if he was boring you to tears at the beginning of a 'chapter', he could have you coming back for more by the end of it. Part of this is through suspense, other times it's through the introduction of sideplots and mysteries that you feel the urge to unravel.
Many critics, including James Wood of 'How Fiction Works' laud his ability to create characters. In Hard Times, the plot is driven by our understanding of the 'metallurgical Louisa' and her relationship with her 'mathematical' brother, her 'eminently practical father' and the 'brazen' Mr Bounderby. Epithet-type motifs such as these recur through the novel (in fact 'eminently practical' appears no less than 7times - mostly in one chapter!) and act as signs for the characters. Similarly, the voice of the narrator will often bleed into the voice of characters - for example with the heavy repetition of the word 'facts', this is firstly the voice of McChoakumchild but later is adopted by the narrative voice to describe the city - this creates a sense of how man shapes a society, how philosophy can change language, thought and appearance.
For me, I see the conflict of the novel as a dialectic between the social and the personal - where the social dictates that Louisa marry Bounderby or that Coke Town work its weary way into the ground; but also where the personal suggests Louisa wants to 'burst out' of the fire, that Coke Town still glows with 'faery palaces'. Dickens' art is thus in the way that he sets up characters as caricatures, embodiments of the problems at large, whilst maintaining the reader's sympathy.
Character is certainly an art and its well-worth figuring out if you have that Dickensian grasp on characterisation. Not everyone does, Iris Murdoch still claims that though the mark of a great novelist is to be able to create a plethora of characters that are unlike oneself, she has not achieved this. James Wood even cites her as saying:
"How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense 'interested in other people', this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure."
Whilst you could be as melodramatic as Murdoch, you could also realise that Dickens had a talent - he was a daily rag writer, surrounded by the great age of satire and the caricature was a natural tool in his belt of brilliance. You don't have to be disheartened. You can think about which of these sorts of writers you are. Try you hand at creating character upon character, think about their voices and their mannerisms. Is there a particular word or phrase that summarises their situation or personality? Have they 'freedom' from the inky dictatorial pen? Try thinking about how you introduce them - Dickens has an amazing way of describing everything about a person, except their appearance. And why not play with their situation - what world are they born in? Are they white or blue collar? What's the political situation of the time?
Let Dickens' influence continue and wish him a very happy second century.
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