At first, the hourglass decants liquid-fine grain: “Dear family and friends, Our new precious angel Michael was born Thursday night at 8:55pm.” Minutes become days, weeks, and then it holds at months for a while, until the mother is passive-aggressively shamed into converting “twenty-seven months” into “he’s two.”
I will turn 50 years old in 2021. For a few years now I’ve been telling people that I’m “about 50” because that seems easier for everyone involved. Maybe at this stage it makes sense to start counting in decades. This seems right. I can feel myself passing into a new stage; I seem to enjoy greater lucidity, and there is a new urgency as I sense the dwindling potential of time.
So I’m 50-ish and I’ve just finished my first reading of A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, by Charles Dickens. I never read much literature before 2020. Apropos of the text, this seems like an improbably late spring in which to bloom into a bibliophile. For now, here are my relatively unstructured thoughts and impressions on A Christmas Carol.
It was strange to finally read the original novella after being familiar with the story for as long as I can remember. I played Scrooge in a [middle?] school production of god-knows-what adaptation of the story; my memory of it is so dim, it could have been something like Dickens’ Rockin’ Sock Hop Christmas. My most crystalline memory of the experience is from after the performance, when a classmate gave me a mug that said BAH HUMBUG, shaped to look wilted/melted/spoiled. I suppose the mug stays in my memory because of its simple, mute presence reinforcing itself over the years. I saw that mug neglected at the back of the cupboard every day until I left home like a paleolithic hunter-gatherer, carelessly abandoning the ephemera of my childhood without a clue that I would ever think of it as such.
Of course, I would have known the general outlines of Carol before I was called upon to enact it, though I don’t know how. I spent years’ worth of the good hours just after school watching syndicated reruns of grim-awful sitcoms at my friend’s house. There’s no telling how much I was affected by the ubiquity of very special episodes of late-20th-century television. Was Mr. Drummond ever Scrooge? Did Natalie, Blair, Tootie, and Jo enact the Stations of the Carol? Les Nessman could have made a good Cratchit – did he? The world of Laverne & Shirley would have made an ideal setting for a poignant treatment of capitalism and class conflict.
Whatever I ingested from garbage sitcoms, I certainly knew and cherished How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And It’s a Wonderful Life would have been buzzing along noisily in the corner during my first Christmas, and the second, and the third…
It may not be possible to avoid familiarity with Carol, not because it is the most famous book by the most famous English novelist, but because the story has so permeated the culture as to become a bonafide folktale. I was maybe five minutes into an innocent Google Scholar search when I started to understand the extent to which the deep, dark dye of A Christmas Carol has tinged the Western world, going back to Dickens’ own lifetime.
Yesterday I got a phone call from an old musician friend I haven’t seen or talked to since March. We were catching up – how’s your family etcetera – he was talking about buying presents for his kid, and he mentioned “…but I’m a Scrooge anyway.” I hadn’t mentioned a word about Dickens or Carol.
So It was strange to read a definitive, original source of something that I always knew as an important myth in my culture. Carol is like any folktale or myth or fairytale: always/never, anywhere/nowehere, ancient/vivacious, protean/stable.
Maybe it is something like discovering the first flood myth as a dreamy novel by Cormac McCarthy. Or maybe you come across an Alfred Hitchcock movie from 1943 and it’s the definitive, original version of the cop who gets taken off the case when he’s the only one who can detect the villain’s chicanery. (The elusive, apt simile would be somewhere between those two). How about this: you’re one of the Grimm Brothers. You knock on the door of a little cabin – deep in the woods after getting lost LOL. You ask the little old lady in the cabin to tell you her version of Beauty and the Beast, and she proceeds to pull down a codex with the original, set in Bodoni. It’s by a famous author and it’s good. Except that Beauty and the Beast isn’t a worldwide holiday almost worthy of its own specialty in cultural anthropolgy. (Siiigh… Dickens would have a suitable, illustrative image for this feeling).
Maybe there is a better, obvious analogy and I just don’t know enough history to think of one. All this is to say, it was uncanny to read the definitive original version of a folktale – from a famous author who lived recently enough to be photographed throughout his career. It reminds me of the feeling of surprise I felt when I learned how new is the invention of the modern alphabet on the timeline of anatomically modern humans.
When I read David Copperfield just weeks before my first lap through A Christmas Carol, I was agog at Dickens’ effortless brilliance at all things literary: plot, characters, themes and symbols, imagery, place, psychology, and the thing I’m presently too ignorant to name with any confidence – maybe it’s something like a metaphysical endoskeleton? Or maybe the is-ness of things? Maybe in future years I will revisit Carol and by then I will have learned the word for this.
Curiously – incongruously – this phenomenally talented author also hits you over the head with some real clunkers. The two types that snag me are belabored metaphors and the kind of excessive verbosity that must have grown out of Dickens’ publishing arrangements (he had previously worked as a reporter, and his novels were published serially).
If you’ve never read Dickens, lace your shoes up tight and tighten the chinstrap on your helmet. In general and specific to Carol, Dickens is brimming with strange paradoxes. Improbable contrasts. Crackling dialectics. If you dislike morons, brace yourself for the oxymorons!
How about an example. In David Copperfield, I damned near fell out of the book when one character (Aunt Betsy? I don’t remember who) called out the already-obvious allusion/suggestion in the name Murdstone. There is a lot of that kind of uncomfortable surfacing of barely-submarine identifiers, connections, themes, etc. I got used to this aspect of Dickens while still in the world of David Copperfield, so it wasn’t as jarring when I got to Carol. I was prepared for the jolting appearance of the children named Ignorance and Want, who do not want for superfluous explanation. What starts as an on-the-nose metaphor becomes paragraphs. Even without the exposition, the label-as-symbolism is on the level of political cartoons or the Distracted Boyfriend meme.
At the same time, the story is as spooky as Tireseas in the underworld. For example, the vision in which Fan comes to take Ebeneezer back to some Edenic home, in which father is… what were the words? … looking it up… “Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!” And then they are served a queer snack in the frosty cold parlour full of maps and globes. It’s the most riveting, haunting, evocative scene ever. I don’t grok the symbols/allusions. I assume I will discover connections as my education progresses. For now I just savor the mystery.
Here’s another paradox: Carol is maddeningly verbose and also very short. You could read it on Chirstmas Eve in three hours with a few Christmas cocktails weighing you down. Or I could – and I’m a slow reader. Maybe you could do it in 90 minutes?
How about a dialectic within a paradox: this simultaneously long/short book is both an intergenerational literary saga and covers only the space of 24 hours. And there’s another contradiction within that. Scrooge is a magnificent hero, unseasonably returning to kind, supple innocence late in his life. At the same time, he is a Walter Mitty type character, going on elaborate flights of… imagination? subconscious? I assumed the individual Spirits were meant to explicitly stand for dreams – their sequence even follows the pattern of REM sleep that you can trace on a modern EEG.
“‘It’s Christmas Day!’ said Scrooge to himself. ‘I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can.’ ”
When the Spirit of Christmas Past parting Scrooge’s bed curtains, it seems to encourage this spirits-as-dreams interpretation. It fits with everything else that happens with the curtains. Then, on Christmas morning, Scrooge himself has another take that points in a different direction:
‘There’s the saucepan that the gruel was in!’ cried Scrooge, starting off again, and frisking round the fireplace. ‘There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat! There’s the window where I saw the wandering Spirits! It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!’
Also, Scrooge started seeing Marley the moment he reached his own front door – that is, if we can 100% trust the account of when Scrooge actually fell asleep, according to the very strangely voiced narrator. That’s another thing – that narrator jumps from 1st person, limited omniscience, to other voices and back – all over the place. The whole Carol is like a conversation between amalgamated subconscious personalities in a dream landscape.
Every little bit of this book is like that – embarrassingly straightforward while also impossibly, mysteriously opaque – not unpleasantly so. Carol is both unified and irresolvable.
It seems that Carol is both anti-rationalist and humanistic. Pre-transformation Scrooge is a product of the post-enlightenment age, the early days of industrial revolutions. He is a zealous proponent of rationalistic enterprises, e.g. capitalism itself. With uncomplicated faith he supports inhumane prisons as a logical conclusion to willfully transgressive lives. He cites workhouses as a rational solution for the poor, who only do not eat because they refuse to work. Most tellingly, Scrooge seems to be in conversation with empericism when he argued with Marley about the veracity of his own senses. Scrooge’s scrupulous rationalist philosophy is the source of his problems. Scrooge’s arc moves from this vilified position to the outlook proposed by his nephew.
Fred calls Christmas, “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.”
Maybe the strangest tension is Carol’s psychologically improbability set against its irresistible psychological truth. On one hand, Scrooge turns around the behavioral momentum of his entire life in a single night. On the other hand, he has returned from a special world with a boon sufficient for this transformation. In the words of Dickens scholar Elliot Gilbert, he has circled back to “metaphysical innocence.” Some psychologists reviewing Carol focus on the unlikely case study of Scrooge’s behavioral problems, while Jungian analysts seem to recognize the not-too-unusual, fast turnaround that can come with an intense experience / revelation.
I was surprised at the number of interesting subjects that Carol treats – especially considering its brevity. This sentimental little book seems so big and impressive that it makes me wonder whether I’m inflating my appraisal for some unseen reason. It’s like being halfway through a great meal and wondering, “Is it really is as good as it seems – or am I just extra hungry?”
For example, there is the subject of the subconscious mind. When I started reading 19th century literature very recently, I was surprised to learn that Freud did not invent the idea of the subconscious. Apparently the idea of constituent personalities or consciousnesses goes back at least as far as Shakespeare. I’m interested to read more about that.
When I read David Copperfield, I was surprised how deftly Dickens made use of dreams and the subconscious. Themes in that book sometimes emerge first simply as innocent associations, for example the subject of Agnes Wickfield’s suitability as a match for David. Additionally, there are explicitly recorded dreams, for example the early dream in which David hazily foretells much of the subsequent book after one conversation with Uriah Heep:
“Being, at last, ready to leave the office for the night, he asked me if it would suit my convenience to have the light put out; and on my answering “Yes,” instantly extinguished it. After shaking hands with me—his hand felt like a fish, in the dark—he opened the door into the street a very little, and crept out, and shut it, leaving me to grope my way back into the house: which cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool. This was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty’s house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the mast-head, bearing the inscription ‘Tidd’s Practice,’ under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little Em’ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.”
In Carol, The subconscious and the mysteries of memory are much more prominent. First of all, within the bedcurtain symbol/theme, the Narrator makes a strange, fuzzy equation:
“The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
The bed serves as a conveyance to the special world of Scrooge’s subconscious for the remainder of the story. At the end of his journeys, the boundary of Scrooge’s bed is reestablished. Scrooge, desperate to entreat the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, grasps at the retreating spirit as it dissolves into the post of Scrooge’s bedframe:
“‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!’
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.”
It seems that Scrooge has arrived back at wakefulness with answer in hand – one of those dreams in which you solve a difficult problem and understand what to do. Before Freud and many decades before the rigors of contemporary neuroscience, it seems that Dickens understood very well the benefits of solving problems in your sleep.
I have lost my notes on it – somewhere I read about Dickens’ famous one-man-show-type performances of his best-loved stories. When Dickens’ started performing Carol he used a printed prompt, outlining important beats and dialog for an approximately three-hour show. After performing it for a while, instead of becoming slightly tighter, it boiled all the way down to about 90 minutes.
The most amazing thing, though, is that instead of becoming settled, the performance became ever more plastic, with Carol serving as a cantus firmus – or a kind of simple jazz standard – on which Dickens went on flights that surprised even himself. It seems that even to the author, Carol remained an examination of – and a conduit to – the subconscious. To hear Dickens talk about his development of ideas, it seems he could have walked in on Salvador Dali and Andre Breton playing a game of Exquisite corpse in 1925, and Dickens could have joined the game without needing any explanation or instruction.
A Christmas Carol famously treats the subject of human ties. While this theme almost always survives the hyperspace jump to cinematic adaptation, this is an area where moving pictures struggle. I imagine this has something to do with the limitations of cinema, in which the medium is relatively impotent to give you access to another mind. Relying on a Renaissance-eyeball-perspective box, showing what people say and do, it might be more realistic for movies to aim for a vibe rather than a complete mindset that unifies all the constituent personalities of the hero. Scenes with Jupiter-level gravity in literature become dreamy moonwalks on the screen. Maybe this helps account for the great number of flaccid literary-cinematic adaptations; in a novel you are traveling in the narrator’s mind, while onscreen it is less like being someone and more like surveilling someone.
In Carol, there is a thought that is something like home is with your family, which equates mysteriously with the archetypal Adamic unity in the garden and restoration through justification. Consider the scene I already mentioned in which Fan comes to Ebeneer’s school to call him to a heavenly home. It dovetails with the scene in which Fan’s only progeny – the only remnant of Fan’s blood – Fred – invites Scrooge to a warm, happy, family home for Christmas. Here’s what happens when Scrooge shows up on Christmas day:
“‘Why bless my soul!’ cried Fred, ‘who’s that?’
‘It’s I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?’
Let him in! It is a mercy he didn’t shake his arm off. He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier. His niece looked just the same [as in Scrooge’s vision/dream]. So did Topper when he came. So did the plump sister, when she came. So did every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness! “
Home in five minutes and unanimity are the only suggestions we get in this passage. It is Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope, the New City of Jerusalem, Hazel being subsumed into the kleos of El-ahrairah.
Carol also deals with the 21st-century evergreen subject of life satisfaction / sense of meaning. Dickens’ range of possibility in this very short book goes from ideal fulfillment all the way to what Marley’s ghost calls the “incessant torture of remorse” – for a single character. The whole thing hinges on connection to other people, with primacy given to the mysterious bonds of family.
There is one thing about this theme that puzzles me. Fire is linked with some kind of idea of general wholesome connectedness. It is warm and glowing and cozy in the home that Belle made with someone else after she gave up on Ebeneezer, and the fire at Fezziwig’s Christmas party has fuel heaped on. Fire also leaps up in Scrooge’s room the moment that Marley’s ghost appears. I think this is a ghost story trope – I just wonder how it interacts or intersects with the main use of fire in the story.
Carol deals directly with social justice. I really don’t know what is the traditional relationship of social justice to literature; and I don’t know how the urgency of real Victorian problems compares with the the bewildering roster of causes espoused by the surprisingly aggrieved middle class of 2020 USA.
Whatever his ambitions to promote social reform, Dickens did tinker directly with the fabric of society by proposing/promoting the concept of Christmas that prevails to this day. In Victorian England, Christmas had been in disorder and decline. Migration from farms and small farm towns into cities left most people without means or reasons to enact the Christmas traditions they had known a generation before. In the opening lines of Carol, there is a hint as to Dickens’ thoughts on lost or dying culture in general.
“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
Transmission of culture seems especially troubled today. Some factors are probably similar to those of Dickens’ day. For example, migration to cities is still a worldwide, contemporary phenomenon.
On the other hand, culture is also under pressure from new phenomena. For example, I suspect that ~1950-present will be remembered for the progressively more sophisticated video screens that seem to overthrow old-fashioned reality with more exciting, centrally-manufactured surreality / unreality.
I wonder how much has been lost in the last 100 years alone, with the synthesis and manufacture of folk arts for profit, narrative collapse, and ever-more-effective technology for the subjugation of my attention. I wonder if an especially good book – a contemporary Christmas Carol – could synthesize some dying traditions into something that might serve as a conveyance for “the wisdom of our ancestors.”
It’s Christmas morning as I write this, and I just heard my wife starting to move in the bedroom. So I’m out of time. In a few minutes I’ll be putting on music, mustering my collection of Fuji Instax products, making breakfast, opening gifts. I am so glad that I read A Christmas Carol – I wasn’t sure it would be worthwhile, having just finished a long Dickens novel – plus I thought I already knew the story. Now I can easily imagine returning to Carol every December, the way a folklorist might stay permanently fascinated with Beauty and the Beast, with all its many tellings. I actually already ordered a couple books about Carol – and I imagine the lusty enthusiasm for all things Christmas will have waned considerably by the time the books arrive, so I suppose I’ve got a good start already on next year.
For now, I pledge to live in the past, the present, and the future. God bless us, every one.