The Ghost of Christmas Present

Something I noticed while reading Stave III was the difference between the Ghost of Christmas Past and Ghost of Christmas Present. The Ghost of Christmas past was both young and old. As I said, it seemed to be an indication of how the past was once new, but is now old to us. The Ghost of Christmas Present, however, is a young, bearded man, bare-chested and joyful. There is no age mingled into his appearance, indicating that time has not yet had any effect on him. I think he is portrayed as the most jolly of the spirits because he is indicative of how we feel in the present. In the present, there is all the hope that none of the sorrows of the past will effect us again, while at the same time there is the ignorance of anything tragic in the future. The present is about as happy as we can possibly be, which is why this particular ghost is so youthful and why his entourage consists of festive foods, drink, warmth, fire, and greenery. There is also the obvious reflection that Christmas Present is a newborn holiday full of potential and the promise of new life. Christmas Present makes us feel young. Something that is extraordinarily poignant about this spirit, however, is that, with all the pomp and circumstance with which it appears to Scrooge, in reality it is not primarily the reflection of the outward festivity of Christmas. The visions that the spirit shows to Scrooge are not all of the wealthy enjoying the rich food and drink of the holiday. Truly, the spirit shows to Scrooge visions of even the poorest of the poor gorging themselves on the joy and festive spirit of Christmas. Thusly, this spirit is symbolic of how Christmas makes us feel, rather than the gifts, food, drink, singing, and celebration that ensue. The spirit is merely significant of a generosity of soul, and while merely is a far from accurate description of his connotations, it is as simply beautiful as Dickens could have made it.

Upcoming Readings

This is what I see in the future for readings after A Christmas Carol is completed. All these stories are short and written by masters. I think they'll be very enjoyable to read and talk about.

-The Dead - from The Dubliners by James Joyce
-The Hound of the Baskervilles - by Arthur Conan Doyle
-The Man Who Would Be King - by Rudyard Kipling
-The Horla - by Guy de Maupassant
-First Love - by Ivan Turgenev

If possible, I'm looking for etexts for "The Devil" by Leo Tolstoy, "The Eternal Husband" by Dostoyevsky, and Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist.

All these suggestions I found were on a list at http://www.mhpbooks.com/novella.html. Some very nice synopses, teazers, can be found there as well.

A Christmas Carol Reading: Stave II continued...

Something I found myself asking while I read Stave II was as follows: Exactly where did Scrooge go wrong? Dickens takes us from Scrooge as a lonely boy, to Scrooge as a young man working for Mr. Fezziwig. In both these instances, there is no real foreshadowing of the bitter old man he is going to become. The first time that we see the beginnings of the "Scrooge" we all know and avoid is when we first meet Belle. There is a giant gap in between and there is no explanation for why Scrooge has become the way he has. The gap is as such: we have a memory of Scrooge and Dick singing Fezziwig's praises for his generosity at Christmastime and they are both (yes, Scrooge included) having a wonderful time at the Christmas party. No hateful Scrooge here. Then, the memory to follow suddenly presents us with a cold-hearted Scrooge rejecting the love of his former sweetheart, Belle, because he has become greedy and obsessed with his work. Very little transition.

Is this bad writing, or is Dicken's leaving out so much information in order to highlight that mysterious point in Scrooge's life? The Mona Lisa by Da Vinci is considered one of the greatest but also most mysterious works of art. It isn't just the famous smile that makes her so mysterious, there is also a gap between one side of the canvas to the other. To the right of her head there is a towering landcape, well above the viewer's "horizon" line, to the left of her head the landscape becomes flat plains, equal the viewer's horizon. It is behind her head, the one place we can't see, that the transition occurrs. Is there a waterfall? Are they merely cliffs? Is there a chasm in between? We cannot tell, and will never know exactly what Da Vinci saw behind the lady's cryptic face. That is part of the mystery, and we can be sure that it wasn't an accident. I think there is something similar going on in Stave II.

Dickens is a master. We could only hope to learn half of what he knew about the art of story-telling. I do not think it was an accident that he leaves no explanation or giant event that caused Scrooge's transformation.

I think Da Vinci hid the secret of the landscape because he wanted people to think...to imagine or create their own landscape based on the information he gave them, even if the conclusions where not what he himself had imagined. It was his own little literary twist in the painting, because what literature is, first and foremost, is an outlet for the imagination. There are no set interpretations for everything, and in many cases we must imagine or invent exanations for otherwise unexplained events.

In the case of Scrooge, I think the hidden transformation is the arrival of Marley. We do not hear of him at all during Stave II until we see Belle for the second time. This memory follows that of Belle leaving Scrooge. She is settled with children and a husband. Her husband comes in and tells her he's "seen an old friend" of hers, Scrooge, sitting alone at his books on Christmas Eve. He then says, "his partner lies upon the point of death." This is the first mention of Marley. I think the fact that he isn't mentioned up to this point makes his presence more apparent. Scrooge changes because of Marley. He becomes involved in the partnership and inevitably begins to become like Marley. A rotten apple makes the good apple rotten, not vice versa. Belle was the last thing trying to hold onto the young Scrooge before he became Marley completely. We remember in Stave I that Scrooge answer to both Scrooge and Marley. There is nothing but a corporeal difference between the two men. They are both rotten and apathetic to the world and its suffering. I think that transformation of Scrooge is finalized by the death of Marley. As Belle's husband says, on Christmas Eve Scrooge sits at his books, his partner on the verge of death. When Marley dies, we could conclude that Scrooge has finally, completely become Marley. Marley leaves the world, but his legacy continues.

Something I did notice was the so-called "twitch upon the thread"; that small something that reminds a person of what they should be, or of what is right. It is when Scrooge sees the memory of his little sister. She is full of life and joy for Christmas and has died, we do not know how, but only that she was always frail. She dies leaving behind one child, Scrooge's nephew. He feels a pang of guilt for turning away his nephew earlier. The nephew has the same enthusiasm and heart of gold that his mother had. When he sees his sister he remebers how he loved her and regrets that he hasn't loved his nephew in the same way.

I'm all talked out now but I think that's enough for Stave II. I'm going to move on to Stave III today and hopefully I'll have a post by tomorrow.

A Christmas Carol Reading: Stave II

I apologize for having not written earlier this week. I've been overcome and am all-round pooped. I have, however, finished Stave II and I'm very happy I did.

Stave II introduces the first of the Three Ghosts. The first, the Ghost of Christmas Past, pulls Scrooge into the faded Christmases of his childhood, youth, and recent age.

Something I found interesting was the initial description of the Ghost. When Scrooge first sees the Ghost, he thinks it is a child. Then he surmizes that it is also a little old man. I think this portrays an interesting thought, that is, that the "Past" is something that is young in relation to itself and something quite old in relation to us.

Another detail in the description of the Ghost was the cap he holds in his hand. We learn that the Ghost's head is particularly radiant, as though it produces its own light, a light so bright that Scrooge is almost blinded. The Ghost holds a knit cap in its hand that it does not presently wear, and we learn that the cap is woven from the selfishness and greedy acts of men such as Scrooge. I marked this particular device as it seems to be one that Dickens is fond of. It made me remember Madam Defarge and her nefarious knitting beside the guillotine. It is a fine analogy to think of our good deeds and misdeeds as a object that we weave, touching other lives and other lives touching ours.

The first memory that the Ghost reveals to Scrooge is of his childhood. He sees the little boys he once knew romping down a little road and remembers that he had stayed alone in the schoolhouse, abandoned by his friends and dreaming of faraway places and fictional characters. He feels very sorry for the lonely little boy who studies alone. It makes him recall the little caroler from Stave I who had offered to sing for him and whom he had frightened away. Scrooge remarks that he wishes he had given the boy some money, and for the first time in the entire story we see a hint of empathy in the rough and crotchety exterior. By seeing himself as a child, and a pitiable one, Scrooge drudges up in his old un-used heart some ground on which to relate to the shivering caroler-child.

Those are my current thoughts for today...and while I have a lot more to say I'm going to have to finish tomorrow.

Stave 1: A Christmas Carol

Dickens has such a way of writing a first sentence--a first paragraph even. "Marley was dead, to begin with" is just another example. It sucks you in immediately. You think "oo death!" and he's got you. I have to confess I've never read A Christmas Carol before this and I think somewhere it says I should be tarred and feathered for this terrible truth. As I sat reading Stave 1, drinking all-too-strong coffee and feeling the winter chill in my bones, I discovered that I'm absolutely crazy about everything Dickens. I have several examples of why I came to this revelation, among them being comments on the style, tone, and especially some of the barely perceptible little devices Dickens uses to make the story more interesting and even believable.

I think many people criticize Dickens for his style. Not in the way you might think of criticism. Most people will say "I think Dickens is an absolute genius but I simply couldn't make it through A Tale of Two Cities what with all the detours and passages describing things." I believe I've heard it put that way precisely. However, that is exactly why I'm so wild about Dickens. Following is merely one line from his description of Scrooge that I found particularly vivid and effective:

Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire.

Not only is it extraordinarily poetic for prose, the sentiment is wildly meaningful. Dickens takes the coldest, most gritty and unamicable stone you can think of and describes it as a more generous entity than his protagonist. This one phrase alone lets you know exactly what kind of man Scrooge is. But D doesn't stop there. He puts Scrooge outside of time, outside of this world, in a sense, detailing him as though he stands apart from this reality, giving no emotion to the world and accepting none in turn. He carries his cold with him. As D says:

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

He is touched by nothing, even nature itself has no power to move him. And again, comparing Scrooge to rain, snow, hail and sleet, Dickens lets us know that even these are more generous.

Something else I noticed while reading Stave 1 was the way that Christmas is portrayed. In as much as Dickens portrays Scrooge as being outside of this reality in a harsh, ungiving manner, he portrays Christmas as being outside of and unaffected by anything worldly in the most poignant, joyful manner. Comments made throughout the stave indicate that Christmas makes time stop, and instead of being affected by people, people take on the essence of Christmas. We see this most vividly in the case of Scrooge's nephew, whose character, it seems, is primarily meant to be the most sharp, meaningful contrast to Scrooge as hot is to cold and black is to white. As the nephew says of Christmas:

(It is) the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

This childlike love and joy for Christmas recurs frequently. It's all part of illustrating exactly how strange Scrooge is to be untouched by the season. Dickens describes how everyone, from the poorest of the poor to the Lord Mayor himself, celebrate the holy day. The Mayor encourages everyone to celebrate: "Even the little tailor, whom he had fined for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up tomorrow's pudding in his garret." The image presented is humorous. The adjective "little" is amusingly contrasted to "drunk and bloodthirsty" causing us to think more of a misbehaving child than a "criminal." But we might conclude that Christmas has that effect on people. In the case of Bob Cratchett, who has, in Stave 1, remained unnamed, we see this as well. Dickens initially presents him as a shivering, miserable employee, then, the moment that Cratchett is set free for the holiday, he becomes a new man:

The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty-times in honor of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's bluff.

Is this the unhappy clerk, or a child he is describing? Both, which is why it's so moving.

An interesting note: after the nephew's exuberant speech about Christmas, Bob Cratchett (The clerk) applauds out of sheer engrossment. Remembering Scrooge, and "becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever." I think this sentence has a bit more meaning, and I think Dickens intended it to. Does the word "fire" actually mean the fire in the grate, and did Bob Cratchett put it out, or did someone else?
Talk amongst yeh-selves.

Finally, Dickens sets the table for the coming of the three ghosts. Leading up to Marley's appearance, Dickens has made a connection between Scrooge and Marley. They were partners, and over the years seemed to have merged as one. People call Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answers to both. I think this make the fact that Marley is dead quite significant beyond the ghostly apparition factor. It also makes the point that Scrooge is half dead. The dead Marley, to me, appears significant as the dead inside of Scrooge, the chill that moves with him. The appearance of Marley seems to make Scrooge partially aware of this, though it is only the beginning. Marley's dialogue also makes it clear to us that Scrooge isn't even an unbeliever. Were he merely a materialist, or an atheist, or agnostic, he would simply not believe in what he cannot see, touch, taste, and hear. However, when Marley appears, Scrooge argues with the apparition as to whether he is a reality or not. Marley asks him, "Why do you doubt your senses," essentially, "Why do you not believe what you are seeing, hearing, and feeling?" But Scrooge chalks the ghost up to being indigestion. He literally betrays his own senses, and is left with absolutely nothing to believe in. He is as empty as a dry cask. But Marley further illustrates the death within Scrooge: "I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day." Marley is present at all times with Scrooge, as who he is, as a reminder of what he will become, and as a warning to change or suffer the fate of many. When Marley leaves, we get a glimpse of the purgatorial afterlife. Hundreds of ghosts chasing about the world, longing to help those they did not regard in life, yearning for rest and peace but denied it:

The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.

There is no rest for the weary.

A note to any readers: If you disagree or have an interesting comment, shout it out! I love a good conversation.

A Christmas Carol Reading

As I said before, we are reading A Christmas Carol which can be located at the following link:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm

I love project gutenberg :)

For the first three days we'll read "Stave 1" and talk about it. For every three days after that we'll read and discuss the remaining four Staves.

A very good, concise biography of Dickens can be found here: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/dickensbio1.html

Happy reading!

"The Girl"

"Girl" is what I would call a vignette. I think that's the proper term in that it's mainly a "zoom-in" of a complete picture. O. Henry gives the reader very little to go on as to what the meaning of the situation is. It begins with "Hartley" pursuing a young woman, having hired a private detective to discover her location. He approaches her on the stairs of apartment building she lives in, and their conversation leads us to believe that there is a sinister situation between them.

As I said to a friend earlier, O. Henry strikes me as the original, and definitely more light-hearted M. Night Shyamalan. Many, if not most, of his stories end unexpectedly with a surprising, and usually amusing, revelation. "Girl" is an example of this. It's also an example of the beauty of a short story. I used to think it was more difficult to write a novel because novels are so long and detailed. I think I have such a taste for O. Henry because he opened my eyes to the truth about short stories. From the very moment I finished "The Gift of the Magi" years ago, I realized how difficult it is to say something so poignant in such few words comparatively. I think most scholars would agree that a well-written short story is basically poetry written in prose. It's said that when Virgil was writing the Aeneid, he'd spend half the day writing an entire page, and the other half whittling it down to a single line or two. That is the essence of poetry. A page's worth of meaning expressed in a single phrase.

Something that I appreciate about "Girl" is that he saves the surprise for as long as he possibly can. Up until the last few lines of the story you still believe that an unfortunate occurrence is pending. It is only at the last moment that you realize what has happened.

I would also like to point out the following passage as absolutely incredible description. It's truly an example of "painting with words."

Vivienne was about twenty-one. She was of the purest Saxon type. Her hair was a ruddy golden, each filament of the neatly gathered mass shining with its own lustre and delicate graduation of colour. In perfect harmony were her ivory-clear complexion and deep sea-blue eyes that looked upon the world with the ingenuous calmness of a mermaid or the pixie of an undiscovered mountain stream. Her frame was strong and yet possessed the grace of absolute naturalness. And yet with all her North- ern clearness and frankness of line and colouring, there seemed to be something of the tropics in her -- something of languor in the droop of her pose, of love of ease in her ingenious complacency of satisfaction and comfort in the mere act of breathing -- something that seemed to claim for her a right as a perfect work of nature to exist and be admired equally with a rare flower or some beauti- ful, milk-white dove among its sober-hued companions.

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In conclusion, I'd like to interrupt the short story reading, seeing as it's Christmas, to begin a reading of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I was watching Bill Murray's Scrooged last night and, as much as I like the movie, I remembered how wonderful the original is. Merry Christmas!

O. Henry

"O. Henry" was born William Sydney Porter, 1862, in North Carolina. While William Sydney Porter lived a troubled life full of alcoholism, ill health, failed marriages, and was imprisoned for embezzlement, "O. Henry" produced some of the greatest short stories in American fiction, each in turn filled with a quaint, colloquial humor, the triumph of true love and a firm belief in the better part of humanity. In 1910, at age 47, Porter died virtually penniless after publishing 300 stories and having been held as America's most beloved short story writer. We can only hope that, in the end, Henry believed in Porter as much as he did in all the lonely, lovable old sinners he scribbled into existence.

An Explanation

This blog is mainly a reaction to my current fed-upness with not having read anything worthwhile in months. I realized suddenly that if I didn't start reading for pleasure again then all my former "creative genius" would be gone and I'd forget how to write, thereby destroying all my dreams of being the next great american author. I read it in a book once that writers who do not read for their own sheer enjoyment would cease being writers. I don't want it to happen to me. Even if I never publish anything for the rest of my life, at least I can say I remember what words like "epistolary," "bildungsroman," "allegory" mean and what the difference between "alliteration" and "assonance" is. It might seem like a small achievement, but that's that. I discovered a website called americanliterature.com and it seemed like a wonderful place to start reading short stories as a beginning to my new and fabulous blog, which will heretofore be referred to as a "glob," just to be different. It makes the most sense to start at the beginning, so I think I'll go with the alphabetical listing of the stories on the website. Thusly, my first project will be "Girl," by O. Henry. Seeing as it's by O. Henry, I'm sure it'll be marvelous.