Ah! Master Dickens.
"He looked almost like a man inspired, as he said it. I waited for a few moments, until he could give me his undivided attention...
As we went along, partly to hold him in conversation, and partly to satisfy myself, I asked him about Ham."
David Copperfield was Charles Dickens and these are just two short passages where we see what Dickens really was: a keen observer who took in even the most subtle.
This is an important conversation Copperfield has with Mr. Pegotty, it is emotional and intense, a setting where subtlety is often blasted away. Dickens-as-Copperfield sees delicacy and calibrates his participation. When he waits "a few moments" he is playing a canon and calibrates himself to Mr. Pegotty's receptiveness to avoid the blast. When, four paragraphs later, Copperfield says to Mr. Pegotty, "Think of your great object!" it is Dickens saying to himself "Think of your great object!," the story.
Copperfield controls the conversation, its tempo and its pace. When they walk and Mr. Pegotty is thinking and silent Copperfield perceives that he is losing control and deliberately engages in related conversation to "hold" Mr. Pegotty.
Dickens was a court reporter. He was paid to observe and to listen keenly and his descriptive powers are unsurpassed. Fancy then that in his fiction he described what he had not seen nor heard. His observations of British aristocratic life in Bleak House were made up, observed only in his imagination. No Hemingway, Dickens. Yet David Copperfield's life was real, the general outlines anyway, for Copperfield was Dickens. Dickens was in real life as Copperfield is in the canon with Mr. Pegotty, a subtle participant in intricate human interaction.
Do not look to Dickens for realism, Victor Nabokov told us,-Look to Hemingway he might have said.- rather, revel in Dickens the story-teller. It is the story that is his great object and his powers of description employed in pursuit.
David Copperfield, the story, got away from Dickens. The canons merged and became a great fugue whose intricacies Dickens did not master, whose complexity overwhelmed the great object of the story. Dickens did not "hold" all of the parts together, Dora Spenlow is a cul de sac; the later Mr. Dick a different character than the earlier Mr. Dick. Dickens could not play the Dora sequence of notes and it is as if he forgot what notes he hit earlier with Mr. Dick and hit those he reckoned nearby later on.
Curiously, David Copperfield falls short as a story by this master story-teller and excels, in parts, in realism.
"He looked almost like a man inspired, as he said it. I waited for a few moments, until he could give me his undivided attention...
As we went along, partly to hold him in conversation, and partly to satisfy myself, I asked him about Ham."
David Copperfield was Charles Dickens and these are just two short passages where we see what Dickens really was: a keen observer who took in even the most subtle.
This is an important conversation Copperfield has with Mr. Pegotty, it is emotional and intense, a setting where subtlety is often blasted away. Dickens-as-Copperfield sees delicacy and calibrates his participation. When he waits "a few moments" he is playing a canon and calibrates himself to Mr. Pegotty's receptiveness to avoid the blast. When, four paragraphs later, Copperfield says to Mr. Pegotty, "Think of your great object!" it is Dickens saying to himself "Think of your great object!," the story.
Copperfield controls the conversation, its tempo and its pace. When they walk and Mr. Pegotty is thinking and silent Copperfield perceives that he is losing control and deliberately engages in related conversation to "hold" Mr. Pegotty.
Dickens was a court reporter. He was paid to observe and to listen keenly and his descriptive powers are unsurpassed. Fancy then that in his fiction he described what he had not seen nor heard. His observations of British aristocratic life in Bleak House were made up, observed only in his imagination. No Hemingway, Dickens. Yet David Copperfield's life was real, the general outlines anyway, for Copperfield was Dickens. Dickens was in real life as Copperfield is in the canon with Mr. Pegotty, a subtle participant in intricate human interaction.
Do not look to Dickens for realism, Victor Nabokov told us,-Look to Hemingway he might have said.- rather, revel in Dickens the story-teller. It is the story that is his great object and his powers of description employed in pursuit.
David Copperfield, the story, got away from Dickens. The canons merged and became a great fugue whose intricacies Dickens did not master, whose complexity overwhelmed the great object of the story. Dickens did not "hold" all of the parts together, Dora Spenlow is a cul de sac; the later Mr. Dick a different character than the earlier Mr. Dick. Dickens could not play the Dora sequence of notes and it is as if he forgot what notes he hit earlier with Mr. Dick and hit those he reckoned nearby later on.
Curiously, David Copperfield falls short as a story by this master story-teller and excels, in parts, in realism.
