Tag Archives: literature

Dicken’s Day 2014: Dickens and Conviviality

This post was contributed by Birkbeck alumnus Dr Ben Winyard, who is one of the organisers of Dickens Day. Join Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies as we read Our Mutual Friend month-by-month in its original instalments.

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Charles Dickens

Now in its twenty-eighth year, Dickens Day enjoys a uniquely mixed audience of Dickens enthusiasts, academics, and students at all levels of study. It is perhaps apt then, that this year’s theme was ‘Dickens and Conviviality’, as this one-day conference, jointly run by Birkbeck, the University of Leicester and the Dickens Fellowship, brought together over one hundred Dickens aficionados for a day of genial intellectual exchange.

Dickens was associated with good humour, bonhomie and sociability from the outset of his career. Before his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, had even concluded its run of monthly instalments (1836–1837), its twenty-four-year-old author had been catapulted to fame and was widely lionised, and even mythologised, as the proponent and exemplar of merry-making. Indeed, Pickwick is famously stuffed with eating, drinking and parties, dances, celebrations, picnics and all manner of sociable endeavours. Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens held that laughter possesses a unique ability to harmonise and heal. One of our speakers, Clive Johnson, observed that if Freud understood humour in economic terms as a ‘wasteful’ element in the psychic economy, for Dickens, writing in an era sharply defined by an imaginatively parsimonious political economy, this was actually a great positive.

Dickens went on to consolidate this image of himself as a master of conviviality in his own life: he was notorious for his love of parties, impromptu dinners, jamborees, skits, celebrations, practical jokes, amateur theatrics, and many other forms of high-spirited sociability. He also assiduously cultivated many friendships with some of the leading authors, politicians, artists, thinkers, philanthropists and actors of his age, and he was a notably prolific letter writer in an era famous for its voluminous epistolary correspondence.

It is as the exemplar of Christmas spirit that Dickens is perhaps most firmly lodged in the popular cultural imagination; he is even erroneously praised for ‘inventing’ Christmas in its modern, recognisable form. Even in Sketches by Boz (1836), his first published collection, Christmas is warmly lauded for stoking mutual affection:

‘Christmas time! The man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas. […] Who can be insensible to the outpourings of good feeling, and the honest interchange of affectionate attachment, which abound at this season of the year? […] There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discords are forgotten: social feelings are awakened in bosoms to which they have long been strangers’.

The later image of the joyous Cratchits in A Christmas Carol (1843) remains one of Dickens’s most famous depictions of good feeling, emblazoned on our collective memory from multiple versions of this perennial classic.

However, Dickens was also deeply interested in the flipside of conviviality and it is interesting that another paradigmatic Dickensian vignette is the starving, bedraggled Oliver Twist holding up his empty bowl and asking for more. One of the day’s plenary speakers, Wendy Parkins, reminded us of the ethical injunction to care for the vulnerable, especially children, that Dickens evokes, citing the neglected Jellyby children in Bleak House (1852–53). For Dickens, hospitality, like philanthropy, is a duty of care that we all owe to those in need. Asking for more, like Oliver, is also a rebellious assertion of individual need in a system that conglomerates and marginalises the poor. One of the fascinating threads of the day was the constant slippage in Dickens between needs, desires and wants, and the interconnectedness of physical need with emotional, social and sexual needs and desires. In Dickens, ‘hunger’ operates metaphorically as well as literally. Indeed, Jo Parsons reminded us of Dickens’s own childhood experiences of physical and emotional hunger that echo through his work, in particular David Copperfield (1849–50), and which perhaps explain his wish, shortly before his death, to compose a cookery book.

Indeed, despite his reputation as a sort of literary Father Christmas, Dickens also depicted disastrous and terrifying Christmas scenes: most famously, Pip’s excruciatingly anxious Christmas dinner in Great Expectations (1860–1861), as he endures the moralising insults of the adults and awaits the discovery of his theft of food for the escaped convict Magwitch. Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), reaches a climactic point with the disappearance of the eponymous hero on a particularly fevered and gloomy Christmas Day. Despite this, Pete Orford, creator of the Drood Inquiry revealed how early reviews of Drood foregrounded the novel’s humour and compared it to The Pickwick Papers, despite its gothic themes of drug addiction, madness and murder. As Orford showed, Dickens was a master of alternating light and dark, moving swiftly between humour and more ominous, tragic tones.

Most of our speakers were reluctant to take Dickens’s representations of good-humoured sociability at face-value, with most papers focusing conversely on loneliness, isolation, poverty and want, social aping and pretension, and the feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and exclusion that may actually fuel conviviality. As Nicola Bradbury observed, Pip’s Christmas dinner is made entirely miserable by the appalling company – in Dickens, hell really is other people. Charlotte Boyce considered the hidden class dynamics of Pickwickian sociability; somebody low-paid and low-status prepares, serves and clears up all those extravagant, jolly meals. Harriet Briggs considered how Dickensian laughter may be hearty and boisterous but is rarely anarchic, often operating to dissolve discontent and smother rebellious impulses. As the day’s keynote speaker, Malcolm Andrews, observed, humour in Dickens is both social glue and a social corrective.

Dickens Day is famous for its readings and this year’s – David Copperfield’s hilariously drunken disaster of a dinner party and the sham society wedding of the Lammles in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) – further confirmed that Dickensian conviviality is often at its most hilarious when it is faked, strained, overegged – or otherwise goes horribly wrong. Fortunately, no such disasters befell this year’s event, which is already looking forward to celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2016.

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Fire Walk with Me: Trauma, Catharsis and the Fantasy of Fantastical Kinship

This post was contributed by Louise Smith, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Creative Writing.

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Andrew Asibong and Hannah Eaton outside 43 Gordon Square during the fire alarm.

In a coincidence David Lynch would appreciate, Andrew Asibong and Hannah Eaton’s screening of the director’s seminal 1992 film Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, was interrupted by a fire alarm at 43 Gordon Square. It was an amusing and unpredictable start to a Q and A, which focused on Lynch’s groundbreaking treatment of incest trauma and the influence he’s had on their own creative work.

Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, was inspired by Lynch’s feminist treatment of the female body. Victim, Laura Palmer’s subjectivity, is central to the film’s power, creating a narrative that rejects judgment in favor of an empathy for the incest survivor’s quest; the battle to reform an identity obliterated by abuse trauma. Asibong said his novel, Mameluke Bath, was influenced by the film’s supernatural elements because, “Evil can only be represented in fantasy, the only form that’s possible is quite ridiculous.”

These feminist and genre-bending elements probably account for the film’s hostile reception at Cannes. Audiences booed and American critics were scathing, although The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley, whilst missing the point that artistic truth requires aesthetic vision at least acknowledged the film’s power, describing it as, “a perversely moving, profoundly self-indulgent prequel.”

But the cliché’ that time heals all wounds must ring true for Lynch since his savaging twenty years ago. Fire Walk With Me has a unique surreal vision that portrays the lonely nightmare of incest by merging fantasy and reality, relocating the monsters in the mind to the world outside. His aesthetic which mixes comedy, teen pop-culture and small town American Gothic not only influenced Eaton and Asibong but a whole generation of TV and film makers, from the producers of Northern Exposure and Six Feet Under to the Cohen Brothers.

Lynchian tropes that were considered self-indulgent are now the aesthetic mainstream. However, his many imitators have not achieved the mystical power of Fire Walk With Me, or replayed it’s central disturbing message, that the journey towards truth is a paradox, a horrifying ride where salvation can become merely the epilogue to destruction. As Alfred Hitchcock another genius auteur once said, “Reality is something that none of us can really stand.” Those who care to look can anticipate the re-release on DVD of Fire Walk With Me (with previously deleted footage) later this summer.

A podcast of the event is now available.

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The Future of the Book – Dead or Alive?

This post was contributed by Megan McGill, who will be starting Birkbeck’s MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature this summer. Follow Megan on Twitter

Is the book dead? Is the eBook in decline? These are some of the questions that prompted talk at ‘The Future of the Book’ panel on Wednesday evening, chaired by editor of the Writers’ Hub, Rebecca Rouillard. Speaking were Adam Freudenheim of Pushkin Press, Emma Wright of The Emma Press, and Dan Kieran of Unbound. The talk was both engrossing and informative, making the process of editing down eight pages of handwritten notes incredibly difficult. The topics discussed were wide-ranging, from the competition between physical and digital books, the relationship between a publishing house and its readership, and techniques for broadening your audience, giving an insight into the inner-workings of publishing to an audience who may not be, certainly for me personally, that knowledgeable on the topic. It certainly achieved an important closing of the gap between publishing houses and readers that Wright discusses later.

We must first discuss one of the most common questions asked to publishers: books or eBooks? EBooks have proven a massive success for international audiences recently due to the eradication of a need for postage costs; however it’s hard to translate the illustrations of a physical book into a scrolling-screen format. This is problematic with today’s books, with publishers raising their design game over the past five years, experimenting with design, paper, and illustrations as a way to reinstate the importance of physical books. Wright explained how she designs her publications to look purposely handmade as a way to remind the reader that it’s an object made by people, and therefore straying away from the corporate looks many houses have taken up.

Forming this personal relationship between the reader and publisher is becoming increasingly more important, especially when it comes to the provocative subject of the price of books. There’s been an enormous downward focus on the price of books recently; you only have to look at online marketplaces to see this in action. Books prove a better value for money than seeing a live sports game, or going to the cinema, but this pressure to keep their price low still seems to be imperative for many businesses. This doesn’t have to be the way, however. Unbound prints the names of its pledgers in the back of the books they helped fund as a way to show the direct relation between the book and the reader. Kieran explained how the public no longer want to be passive consumers like we saw in the culture of 1990s, but are seeking more enriching personal experiences.

This connection with readers also helps you to know, and therefore grow, your market. This is incredibly important for Wright specifically as she tries to sell poetry to the vast market of non-poetry readers. As a reaction to the erotica boom sparked by 50 Shades of Grey, the Emma Press published an anthology of mildly erotic verse. It’s all about knowing what’s popular and what people want in order to interest new readers, but still keeping to your own way of doing things to maintain your niche.

Did the speakers have any predictions for the future of the book? The eBook boom is levelling off, said Freudenheim, so both print and digital need to be focused on. The physical book isn’t going anywhere, with the majority of publishers still getting 80-5% of their sales from them. For Kieran the importance lies in the use of networks for both publishing houses and authors. Knowing your audience and getting them excited about your releases is the new way of selling books. People will always read and write, it’s how we sell it that will change.  Professional publishing has so many advantages and the majority of successful self-published authors end up becoming professionally published for their subsequent works because of all of these advantages. Large publishers frequently get bad press, but the good aspects of the way they work are truly beneficial. These are the aspects that need to be kept in any development of the industry if it wants to have a rewarding, and successful, future.

Thank you to all of the speakers who took the time to come and teach us about the industry and how many different forms it can take today. I learned so much and am inspired by the stories they told of their personal experiences taking what they’re passionate about and turning it into something new, and rewarding.

The speakers were:

Adam Freudenheim, Pushkin Press. Formerly Penguin’s Publisher of Classics, Modern Classics, and Reference. Now focuses on his passion, translations, discovering popular works from abroad unknown in the UK.

Emma Wright, Founder of The Emma Press. Previously worked for Orion’s eBook division. Now commissions, illustrates and edits books with her friend Rachel Piercey. Press specialises in poetry anthologies, postcards and pamphlets, soon to be releasing their first non-poetry pamphlets of short stories, essays, and plays.

Dan Kieran, Co-founder of Unbound. Unbound is a platform for authors to have works crowdfunded, but also to communicate with their audience. Inspired by the old ways of selling books in the eighteenth century, where readers subscribed in advance for a book.

Learn more about Unbound by clicking here and The Emma Press by clicking here.

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Soldiers’ homecoming in poetry and prose

This post was written by Bryony Merritt, from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

A soldier relating his exploits in a tavern-1821-John Cawse-Copyright-Ownership of Natinoal Army Museum London

John Cawse ‘A soldier relating his exploits in a tavern’ (1821) Copyright/Ownership: National Army Museum, London

The transition from military service to civilian existence has never been easy, as demonstrated in the accounts presented by Dr Kate McLoughlin on the first day of Birkbeck Arts Week 2014. Despite covering a period of over 2000 years, during which methods of warfare have changed beyond recognition, the emotions and experiences of the homecoming soldiers revealed striking similarities.

After the Battle of Waterloo, all veterans of the Battle were awarded a medal, one of which can be seen on the soldier’s uniform in John Cawse’s A Soldier Relating his Exploits in a Tavern (1821), while he proudly expounds upon his heroic feats. Dr McLoughlin drew our attention, however, to the more ambiguous response of his audience, whose demeanour suggests that they are less than enthralled by the soldier’s storytelling.

This kind of scene may be ambivalence towards the heroic status of the returned soldier is captured also by William Wordsworth in The Discharged Soldier. When pressed for stories from the war, the soldier responds with

A strange half-absence and a tone

Of weakness and indifference, as of one

Remembering the importance of his theme

but feeling it no longer

The discharged soldier’s reluctance (or perhaps inability) to share his story, contrasts to the British Government’s 1915 poster, encouraging men to sign up for the army by appealing to their desire to be able to recount their contribution to a future family. The poster shows a little girl asking “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” However, the father’s pensive gaze, to me, suggested he was not about to launch into tales of bravery and heroics. At first glance it seems to me that the poster aims to evoke a feeling of embarrassment at the idea of not having a heroic tale to tell in future. But the artist has unwittingly captured an expression which could be translated as the reluctance of a discharged soldier to brag of his former actions.

Henry Nelson O'Neil 'Home Again' (1858) Copyright/Ownership: National Army Museum, London

Henry Nelson O’Neil ‘Home Again’ (1858) Copyright/Ownership: National Army Museum, London

The ‘soldier as hero’ can be a difficult role to fill, suggested Dr McLoughlin. On homecoming, soldiers are welcomed as heroes, as depicted in Henry Nelson O’ Neil’s Home Again (1858). However, Henry Metcalfe’s memoirs describe how, following his return from India in 1859, the warm welcome by a “grateful public” was soon forgotten and Thomas Jackson’s memoirs (I missed the date of this publication) describe how he “sees himself as an isolated being”.  The hero of Eric Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) describes how following the reunion with his family he sensed “a veil between us.”

The change which creates this distance between soldiers and the people and places that were previously so familiar to them was so pronounced in some of the accounts that the soldier was not even recognised by his family. Upon Odysseus’ return to Ithaca it is only his dog and his former wet nurse who recognise him (and the latter only because of a scar on his leg). Even the wife who has faithfully seen off suitors during his 20-year absence fails to recognise her husband. John Ryder, who published his memoir in 1853, describes how on his return to Twyford he went first to the pub where he met with lifelong acquaintances, and later his father and mother, none of whom recognised him.

The final returning soldier to whom we were introduced was the captain in Helen Ashton’s novel The Captain Comes Home (1947). On learning that his wife has remarried during his long absence during World War Two, the captain returns to his village and assaults her new husband, for which he is put on trial. Identifying the significance of this literary trial, Dr McLoughlin concluded by noting that the weight of expectation on homecoming soldiers throughout history and today means that they all face trials of their own.

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