How the Dickens Should I Read Dickens?

According to the lecture notes of Vladimir Nabokov, who taught European literature at Wellesley and Stanford during the 1950s, many of the social conditions depicted in Bleak House date back to the 1820s and 1830s, and had already been reformed by 1852 when the novel was published. But Nabokov overstates his case. Although parliament passed the Legal Reform Act in 1852, it wasn’t until the legal act of 1875 that the country’s judicial system was truly modernized. And the first Public Health Act of 1848 was not properly carried out in the municipalities until twenty years later. Nevertheless, these nominal pieces of legislation furnish Nabokov with a convenient opportunity to rail against scholars who read literary works for their sociological or political impact. Such readers, Nabokov scoffs, are “immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature” (64) and will never experience the “telltale tingle between the shoulder blades,” for to Nabokov the only way to read literature is “with your back” (70). Thus he counsels us to disregard the anachronisms of Dickens’ novel and celebrate its structure, style, imagery, and “verbal magic” (70).

Nabokov’s sentiments capture the sin qua non of the New Criticism, which was in vogue during the period that he wrote. As rulers of the roost in college English departments, the New Critics had little patience for scholars whose methods foregrounded a leveling approach to literature. But the hermeneutic winds would soon whisk the New Critics away and replace them with Post-Structuralists, Deconstructionists, and New Historicists, among others. The New Historicists pose a particularly interesting challenge to Nabokov’s aesthetics. By maintaining that historical literary texts can function as events, and the converse argument that the influence of historical events can be traced to literary texts, New Historicism privileges an expanded agency for literature as a social force. Thus Jerome McGann argues that readings displaced from their contemporaneous external significance do not even qualify as “critical operations” (McGann’s emphasis). “Rather,” he asserts, “they are vehicles for recapitulating and objectifying the reader's particular ideological commitments” (54-55).

McGann’s stinging rebuke to Nabokov’s stinging assertion deconstructs one of my most treasured moments as an undergraduate. It should come as no surprise to you that I went to college during the heyday of the New Criticism. In an English lit survey course I took, the instructor had just given his interpretation of an Old English poem, the title of which I have long forgotten. I raised my hand and gave a different interpretation. “Why, I never thought of that!” he replied. I was beaming. Okay, he was only a TA but he was smart. I guess if I were smart I’d remember the name of that poem and then determine its contemporaneous external significance.

But McGann also says something else not as controversial but truly memorable. The benefit of the great works, he suggests, is that they present us with ideological perspectives different from our own. This is why we “who are different, can learn from them.” It seems to me that even the “purest” of readers would agree with McGann, with the possible exception of a certain Russian author/critic.

Works Cited 

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. 

McGann, Jerome. "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner."