The Problem With David Copperfield

It's tied up too neatly. David starts out as an autobiographical character for Dickens, a revolt against his archetypal heroes, but by the end of the book becomes the packaged "everything's okay-I'm happy despite all life's shortcomings" kind of romantic 19th century character. Keep in mind that it took Dickens another ten years to write Great Expectations, a story which ends up not nearly as well tied together, which is arguably why it's better.

We are able to envision characters like Mr. Micawber, the unctious Uriah Heep, and Little Dora all too well, but by the end of the story we hardly feel like we know David. As Shaw noted, we know nothing of his political leanings, his unconscious desires or anything that is not universal. For the particular we must turn to secondary characters.

The masterpiece David Copperfield is imperfect, similar in the imperfections of Great Expectations: how it takes too long to dissuade Pip to leave Estella. But can we fault Dickens for this? I laughed, cried, learned new words, and generally enjoyed David Copperfield. The only faults I find I must try to correct in my own work. That's why I read all these works of classic literature.

Here's to post postmodernism!

How Many Words Are In The English Language?

Uriah Heep, the subject of  Mr. Micawber's bombastic denunciation.

There are over a million words, or lexemes, in the English language. Including scientific nomenclature, that figure could easily be doubled. Shakespeare, master of classic literature, had a vocabulary of about 40,000 words. The average person knows about 10,000.

There are only going to be more, too. Is this a good thing? I like to think so. English is one of the few languages that absorbs words wherever it can get them. We can express whatever we want with our indisposable store of new words. They come into existence all the time, thanks to the Internet, although they also falling out of use just as fast.

Google's word cache project, the Ngram viewer, allows you to track the usage of any word over the past five hundred years, according to about 15% (and growing) of the world's literature.

I'll leave you with a quote from David Copperfield, which may influence your ideas about whether or not it is a good thing that English has such a broad lexicon:

"We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important; and sounds well...And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words."-754

Your JFK Flight Status is: Cancelled

It is snowing in New York. There are 50 m.p.h. winds and an expected foot through tonight. Luckily, I am in the warm confines of my great uncle's house, where we are drinking malbec and eating crab cakes with remoulade and brussels sprouts (the crisp browned leaves and healthy vitamins make it a personal favorite. They grow on stalks, and are not baby cabbages, btw.) It isn't helping much, because I'm getting really fat as you can see.

My baby girl is in L.A. and was supposed to come home today, but when she checked her JFK flight status, her flight was cancelled. Now she's coming home Tuesday or maybe even later. This is actually a southeaster, so if you're thinking about flying to the Philadelphia airport, you're out of luck.

Meanwhile, I'm reading George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman," which is supremely dope. The introduction alone outlined the difference between the men who act as artists by modeling the great writers and studying how to write, but lack the creative passion that separates the artist from the amateur. Shaw goes on to mention that David Copperfield and Hamlet are lesser characters than those allegorical figures in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, because they are mere puppets through which the authors enact their own thoughts and feelings. While these characters are some of their most interesting, they are not representative of a cohesive philosophy or religion, and thus, come up short. These notions sprawl through my mind at present like the clouds that pour the tiny flakes that blanket the tarmac at JFK airport.

David Copperfield is So Post Postmodern

Young Charles Dickens

 So I'm reading David Copperfield, which makes Great Expectations look like chicken feet. Dickens employs certain techniques that are very far ahead of his time, such as switching from the past tense to the present for a rush of immediacy. Take this sentence from chapter XVIII, "A Retrospect:"

"I think continually about my age. Say I am seventeen, and say that seventeen is young for the eldest Miss Larkins, what of that? Besides, I shall be one and twenty in no time almost."

Here, the narrator, a much older man writing his bildungsroman, remembers his youth with great perspicacity. Sorry. But the way he moves to the thought process of his younger self is worthy of emulation and the hinted second person address is similar to what I'm working with.

J.D. Salinger knew it too. He mentions ol' Davy in the first sentence of what is obviously the best bildungsroman of the 20th century:  

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."


Dickens is a boss. 'Nuff said.

What is a Kunstleroman?

I feel like an explanation is due. For those of you who never studied English literature in college, or who might have forgotten, a kunstleroman is the coming of age story of an artist (see "Kunstler-Hustle" below). This is much like a bildungsroman, which is an ordinary coming of age story.  Kunstleroman comes from the German word ‘kunstler’ which means artist, and the French ‘roman’ for novel. It is an artist’s novel, and it is what I am writing when I’m not at work blogging hard away about winch straps and Judaica and discount medical insurance.

Some of the more famous kunstleromans are Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D.H. Lawerence’s Sons and Lovers and David Copperfield by Dickens. I’m reading Goethe’s right now, which is called “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Goethe is a boss:

So that's where all of this German is coming from. For those of you who are further interested in Goethe (1749-1832), I recommend Faust or The Sorrows of Young Werther. The latter is a love story about a young man who, sorry to spoil it, commits suicide because of unrequited love. This novella was so popular in its day that, because Werther wore yellow stockings, hundreds of Romantic Parisians committed suicide in like fashion, yellow stockings.

Anyway, stay tuned for what’s to come. I figure that since I’m blogging all the time, I might as well blog about any questions y'all have. Hope you enjoy the New York Writers stories; comments and critiques are always appreciated.