The Mystery of Charles Dickens
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My parents were not educated people, so that was the first time I knew there was "high art" in addition to "low art." I didn't need to have a formal humanities education or literary parents to know what the difference was exactly, it was just on a whole different level than anything else that was in popular media.
~35 years later I do have a formal humanities education, which I suppose started on that day and never really ends.
Thanks, Charles Dickens.
No, as a writer he would be very aware of where his inspiration came from and would be good at creating imaginary characters for dramatic effect. Without the villain the hero could never overcome adversity and achieve redemption. Is this yet another example of judging a historical text by current standards. Will Dickens have to be rewritten to remove the bad bits. What'll be left. I can remember that scene in Oliver Twist where he asked for more soup. Completely unlikely to occur in real life. I mean they actually got soup before eating.
Better to never do anything worthwhile whatsoever.
on edit: I'm probably in a bad mood right now so the negative message hit me harder than it should.
After his death, he fairly rapidly fell out of fashion.
We put these people on pedestals for the oddest of reasons. Dickens is revered as a result of a wartime (WW2) nostalgia for seemingly saner times, which has self-perpetuated to this day.
So it's true that he had a variable reputation until the 1940s, but I'm not sure if it was due to a longing for saner times and not just the typical time for reappraisal some generations after a popular writer's death. If you think about it he died in 1870, so 70 years before his becoming more critically revered. Quite reasonable.
So was Tolstoy.
And not all in that reflects badly Dickens himself. I mean, this is not exactly something that I would see as tearing down Dickens, that is just having screwed childhood in way we like to pretend did not happened:
> He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. [...] In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”.
The way Dickens treated his wife and kids (preventing them access to her) indeed sounds abusive, but to me, it is also indeed the way horrible treatment in childhood can end up being reproduced in adult hood in real life.
Even contemporary great artists/scientists can be abusers and what not. And we collectively seem to have problem to accept that, we seem to want to think that greatness in one area must imply greatness in other area.
what is the truth about those people, exactly? Is it this:
"The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. "
This does more than say Dickens was a jerk who had an affair with a younger woman and was probably abusive. It ties his abilities as a writer to a yen for sexual violence and theorizes his ability to write cruel characters was due to them being projections of his own cruelty.
With this Dickens' ability becomes an indictment of his character - he can do these great things because he is a monster, which I'm sure you can see is quite a bit different than he did great things and also monstrous things. The prior reasoning means that in the end every great thing has its wellspring in something monstrous, as I said therefore - better to never achieve anything at all.
on edit: for the record I didn't downvote you, I will upvote because, although we disagree in manner outlined here I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for a simple disagreement.
Wilson may be right or wrong or stretching (I did not cared enough to double check that claim). The actual seeming abuse of wife would might theoretically might make me more suspectfull of his female characters had his books been different, but there is enough ugly in his books about everyone that it is moot anyway.
So I kind of passed over that point as not all in all affecting. My impression from art tend to change when it is tied to real world acts (helping or harming real people), not merely wishes. For example, "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" is different knowing it was written by very much adult R.Kelly for his 15 years old wife. But it is tie to real people suffering in the process that make it different.
John Ruskin, John Berger, and Walter Benjamin instantly came to my mind. And I could go on. I think that fewer people would be able to name many music critics, but because visual art is, well, a visual medium, many people learn about it through books, and those books are often written by critics.
I think about the only "art" critic of any kind that comes to mind quickly is, um... I'm embarrassed to admit it... Roger Ebert :P
Seriously though: I'll bet money most people who know names of painters or writers don't remember the name of any critic from those fields.
In the end, I don't think it's that people don't remember the names of critics, it's that they never bother to learn them in the first place. Most people don't care, and that's perfectly fine - you have to be pretty deep into a field to care about its criticism in the first place. However, it also doesn't discredit the critics' work or criticism in general. Being famous doesn't make you right nor does it make your work more correct, after all.
In American society you could point at Edgar Allen Poe as someone who is only known for his fiction and poems, but who was a prolific critic in his day. He likely made more money as a lecturer than as a fiction writer in his later years. This has been researched a bit but sadly there are few texts that survive of those lectures, just newspaper opinions and advertisements about the lectures.
This one is one my personal favorites from the ones that weren't lost...
I'm not nitpicking, by the way, just enjoying the piece you shared.
I should add (it doesn't make me look great, but does bolster the case I'm agreeing with here) that more precisely my first two names were John Ruskin and John, oh damn it, what's his name, the "Ways of Seeing" guy -- and that I hadn't thought of a third name. (Perhaps with effort I could dredge one more out of my memory, but it wouldn't be Walter Benjamin because I confess I don't recall hearing of him.)
There just are a lot more famous artists than famous art critics. (And, as you say, the same for music.)
If you watch ESPN's new 10 part documentary on Michael Jordan, you can see the same deconstruction.
My interpretation of the thesis was, that despite Jordan's greatness, his success was derived from a competitive drive and massive ego that it really should qualify as some type of mental disorder. And his method for success would not result in a happy life for most people, and didn't really for him either. We should pity Jordan.
All that is kind of typical, but what is really shocking is that this documentary was essentially produced BY HIM. So the desire to deconstruct our hero mythology is even present in our "heroes" themselves.