Dombey and Son: the good, the bad, the ugly

Yesterday, coincidentally on the anniversary of Dickens’s death (9/6), I was finishing Dombey and Son. That took a while! But now I have finished.

This is in many ways a very good novel. The centre of Dombey and Son is the Dombey family: the coldness of Mr Dombey, the relationship between him and his daughter Florence, the character of little Paul, the pride of Edith. That’s where the interest lies. 

At this point, Dickens is trying a new kind of novel (so I have been told), perhaps unsure of himself, and his supporting characters—his supposedly comic characters—generally lack vitality: Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle are not particularly funny; Walter Gay is bland, especially since his return from seas; Dr Blimber and his pupils don’t leave a strong impression, except Mr Toots; Mrs Pipchin is interesting in the first half of the novel, when little Paul stays at her boarding house, but loses vividness when she becomes Mr Dombey’s housekeeper; James Carker has some excellent scenes and the potential to be a great villain, but pales in comparison with Uriah Heep; Mrs Brown and Alice mirror the relationship between Mrs Skewton and Edith and move the plot forward, but they aren’t interesting characters on their own; even Major Jo Bagstock, who has a distinct manner of speaking, becomes tiresome after a while; etc. Parts of the novel drag because the supporting characters are not very funny or memorable, because Dickens seems bored with them, because he seems to focus his interest on the Dombey family. 

When Dickens returns to the Dombeys however, it is magnificent. Who says Dickens can’t do psychology? Who says Dickens can’t write women? Edith is a great character, full of pride, full of resentment and self-loathing, but also full of affection for Florence. When I wrote about In Search of Lost Time before, I pointed out that Proust’s method of characterisation—his way of conveying the depth and complexity of his characters—was depicting the different facets of a character, at different periods, in different environments, before different characters. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky does something else to convey and explore complexity, but that is what Proust does, and that is also what Dickens does with Edith in Dombey and Son. 

“Florence had a dread of him, which made his presence in the room a nightmare to her. She could not avoid the recollection of it, for her eyes were drawn towards him every now and then, by an attraction of dislike and distrust that she could not resist. Yet her thoughts were busy with other things; for as she sat apart—not unadmired or unsought, but in the gentleness of her quiet spirit—she felt how little part her father had in what was going on, and saw, with pain, how ill at ease he seemed to be, and how little regarded he was as he lingered about near the door, for those visitors whom he wished to distinguish with particular attention, and took them up to introduce them to his wife, who received them with proud coldness, but showed no interest or wish to please, and never, after the bare ceremony of reception, in consultation of his wishes, or in welcome of his friends, opened her lips. It was not the less perplexing or painful to Florence, that she who acted thus, treated her so kindly and with such loving consideration, that it almost seemed an ungrateful return on her part even to know of what was passing before her eyes.” (Ch.36) 

Edith is full of life because she’s different towards her mother Mrs Skewton, towards Mr Dombey, towards Florence, and others; she’s different towards Mrs Skewton in public and in private; she’s different towards Mr Dombey before and after the wedding; she’s different towards Florence alone and in the presence of Mr Dombey. She’s alive. She’s flesh and blood. 

The confrontations between Edith and her mother, and between Edith and her husband, are some of the greatest scenes I have read in fiction. 

“If his handsome wife had reproached him, or even changed countenance, or broken the silence in which she remained, by one word, now that they were alone (for Cleopatra made off with all speed), Mr Dombey would have been equal to some assertion of his case against her. But the intense, unutterable, withering scorn, with which, after looking upon him, she dropped her eyes, as if he were too worthless and indifferent to her to be challenged with a syllable—the ineffable disdain and haughtiness in which she sat before him—the cold inflexible resolve with which her every feature seemed to bear him down, and put him by—these, he had no resource against; and he left her, with her whole overbearing beauty concentrated on despising him.” (ibid.) 

The battle of the minds here is one of the best aspects of the novel. Mr Dombey is also a great character—a fascinating study of a cold, proud man. 

“Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance, had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself to be. He had been “Mr Dombey” with her when she first saw him, and he was “Mr Dombey” when she died. He had asserted his greatness during their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own—would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured himself haughtier than ever, with Edith’s haughtiness subservient to his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself against him. And now, when he found it rising in his path at every step and turn of his daily life, fixing its cold, defiant, and contemptuous face upon him, this pride of his, instead of withering, or hanging down its head beneath the shock, put forth new shoots, became more concentrated and intense, more gloomy, sullen, irksome, and unyielding, than it had ever been before.” (ch.40)

A cold, proud man, inflexible, unmovable. And yet with Edith, he is baffled, he is conflicted, he feels stuck. Mr Dombey is a great counter-example to the popular claim that Dickens only writes caricatures: he’s complex, he develops, he changes. 

The best part of the first half is little Paul. The best part of the second half is Edith. I have complained about Florence—a spotless heroine is dull—but I think she does improve towards the end, when she leaves, and when she marries Walter Gay, knowing her father would disapprove. It’s fascinating to read Dickens and watch him improve over time: here he was having trouble with the gentle and forgiving Florence, but he figured it out by the time he got to Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson.

A very good book. 

PS: 11/6 is my birthday. If you’d like to send a gift or support the blog, I’m on Ko-fi. Thanks to Harmon and Shruti for your support. 

Visiting Jane Austen’s House Museum

A few days ago, I finally managed to visit Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire. It was great. 

This is where Jane Austen revised her first three novels, and wrote her last three novels Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. The table’s much smaller than I thought! 

I don’t know what flowers Austen had in her garden back then, but here are a few photos of mine of the flowers now. 

Also wandered around Chawton. Tiny, charming village. 

In case anyone wonders if I have visited Shakespeare’s Birthplace Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon, here are a few photos from 2023. 

On translation and anachronism

The other day, I tweeted about Tom Payne’s translation of The Art of Love: “Picked up this copy of “The Art of Love” but I had to quit after several pages. The translator used phrases like “girlfriend”, “safe sex”, “one-night stand”, etc. This is Ovid!” 

The tweet went semi-viral, attracting some obnoxious people who seem to think that nobody’s allowed to say a single word about a translation from Latin unless they know the language—a phenomenon that never occurred when I discussed translations of Russian, French, Japanese novels over the years—this strangely seems to only happen with Latin and ancient Greek. 

However, I also got many good comments from both people who agreed and disagreed with my complaint and knew Latin. And it led me to think more about this subject: how traditional or modern should a translation be? When is it too modern? When does it appear anachronistic? Because these things seem to be arbitrary, and most of the time, just come down to personal preference. 

When we want to read 19th century Russian novels, for example, we can go for a translation into 19th century English, as the Maudes and Constance Garnett were alive around the same time, or we can go for a modern translation. With Don Quixote, we can read Thomas Shelton if we want 17th century English (it’s also the version that Shakespeare read). But we do not have contemporary English translations—in the sense of “from the same period”—of Homer or Sophocles or Ovid—so all translations are modern—various levels of modernity. I can see the argument that a Victorian translation of Ovid is not any less anachronistic than a new translation—it may even impose Victorian sensibilities on the poems. I however do not buy the argument that because Ovid was modern for his time, he should be translated into today’s English, into the latest slang and colloquial terms (of course Ovid was contemporary to his contemporaries—what kind of argument is that?). However open and modern Ovid appears to us, he’s still a writer from ancient Rome and his works inevitably reflect the lifestyles and customs and values and beliefs of ancient Rome; it’s jarring to come across modern concepts in Ovid. Even if a word accurately conveys the meaning (which some people say “one-night stand” and “safe sex” here do), words don’t only have meanings—words also have connotations and associations—words have baggage. 

It might be arbitrary, and personal, that I prefer “Isn’t she exquisite?” (Aylmer and Louise Maude, revised by Amy Mandelker) to “She is gorgeous, isn’t she?” (Anthony Briggs) in War and Peace, but is it entirely arbitrary and personal when I say that “my ex” sticks out like a sore thumb in The Brothers Karamazov (Ignat Avsey)? Does it not take you out of the story when you read Don Quixote and come across “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, or “a certain delicious je ne sais quoi” (Tom Lathrop)? Does it not make you stumble when you see “one-night stand” in a Roman poem? The entire translation may be in modern English, but some phrases stick out. Some phrases draw attention to themselves. 

Where we draw the line is the art of translation. Slang, I think, appears more obviously, distractingly anachronistic. 

Another thing to consider as well is that Homeric Greek or Shakespearean English for example wasn’t the way normal people talked. It’s one thing to modernise the language; why do some translators go for something colloquial and mundane when the original is highly literary? Is it not a fair point when readers—whether or not they know the original language—complain that Emily Wilson opts for phrases such as “a complicated man”, “tote bag”, “pep talk”, “playtime is over”, etc. in her translation of the Odyssey? Defenders of Emily Wilson have said “polytropos” means “complicated”, but “poly” means “many” and “tropos” means “turn”—surely Robert Fagles’s “the man of twists and turns” or Robert Fitzgerald’s “that man skilled in many ways of contending” is more interesting and evocative than Emily Wilson’s commonplace “a complicated man”? Those of us who do not know the original language and have to rely on translations may not be able to judge accuracy, but we can comment on other aspects of a translation: how it sounds in the target language, whether it’s good prose/ poetry, whether some choices appear anachronistic, whether we want to read it or switch to a different translation… And yet some people want to shut down the conversation, saying we’re not qualified to say anything if we don’t know the original. 

Let’s have a discussion.  

The Rape of Lucrece—I have now read everything in the Shakespearean canon

1/ Published in 1594 (apparently written during a plague), The Rape of Lucrece was around the same time as Henry VI Part 1 (if we assume, as many scholars do, that it’s written after Part 2 and Part 3), Richard III, and The Comedy of Errors. Early Shakespeare. 

I can’t help wondering what a narrative poem, or epic poem, by Late Shakespeare would have been like.

One thing that fascinates me, now that I’ve read the Phaedra plays by Euripides and Racine, is that Shakespeare depicts sexual assault a few times (rape in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, attempted rape in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest, sexual coercion in Measure for Measure); he depicts women getting falsely accused of cheating a few times (Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale); he even depicts women sexually assaulting men a few times (Venus and Adonis, All’s Well that Ends Well and arguably Measure for Measure—the bed trick); but he doesn’t seem to have much interest in the subject of women making false rape allegations. If only! A Phaedra play written by Shakespeare would have been fascinating. 

2/ I don’t have a lot to say about The Rape of Lucrece, so I’m just gonna poke at it from different angles.

The word “black” appears a lot through the poem: “so black a deed”, “blackest sin”, “black payment”, “black lust”, “Night’s black bosom”, etc. Contrasted with that is white—the colour of chastity and innocence. 

“When at Collatium this false lord arrived,

Well was he welcomed by the Roman dame,

Within whose face beauty and virtue strived

Which of them both should underprop her fame.

When virtue bragged, beauty would blush for shame;

    When beauty boasted blushes, in despite

    Virtue would stain that o’er with silver white.

But beauty, in that white intituled

From Venus’ doves, doth challenge that fair field.

Then virtue claims from beauty beauty’s red,

Which virtue gave the golden age to gild

Their silver cheeks, and called it then their shield;

    Teaching them thus to use it in the fight,

    When shame assailed, the red should fence the white.

This heraldry in Lucrece’ face was seen,

Argued by beauty’s red and virtue’s white.

Of either’s colour was the other queen,

Proving from world’s minority their right.

Yet their ambition makes them still to fight;

    The sovereignty of either being so great,

    That oft they interchange each other’s seat.”

The odd thing—odd to me—is the coupling of the colours white and red throughout the poem. 

“O how her fear did make her colour rise!

    First red as roses that on lawn we lay,

    Then white as lawn, the roses took away.” 

Again, white and red together: 

“Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.” 

Again: 

“… But she with vehement prayers urgeth still

    Under what colour he commits this ill.

Thus he replies: ‘The colour in thy face,

That even for anger makes the lily pale,

And the red rose blush at her own disgrace,

Shall plead for me and tell my loving tale.

Under that colour am I come to scale

    Thy never-conquered fort; the fault is thine,

    For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine…’” 

 

3/ The poem is thick with comparisons to animals and birds, which we see in Homer, in Ovid, in other poets, so I’d like to draw attention instead to other metaphors and similes that I find more interesting. 

“Far from the purpose of his coming thither,

He makes excuses for his being there.

No cloudy show of stormy blust’ring weather

Doth yet in his fair welkin once appear,

Till sable Night, mother of dread and fear,

    Upon the world dim darkness doth display,

    And in her vaulty prison stows the day.”

I like this: 

“… And extreme fear can neither fight nor fly,

    But coward-like with trembling terror die.”

Lots of interesting lines in the poem: 

“Tears harden lust, though marble wear with raining.” 

This is Lucrece after the rape: 

“‘.. O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night,

Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime,

Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light,

Make war against proportioned course of time;

Or if thou wilt permit the sun to climb

    His wonted height, yet ere he go to bed,

    Knit poisonous clouds about his golden head.

‘With rotten damps ravish the morning air;

Let their exhaled unwholesome breaths make sick

The life of purity, the supreme fair,

Ere he arrive his weary noontide prick.

And let thy misty vapours march so thick,

    That in their smoky ranks his smothered light

    May set at noon and make perpetual night…’” 

All these metaphors are brilliant. The problem with Shakespeare’s depiction of Lucrece’s mind after the rape is that for some time he seems to get carried away by rhetoric, by metaphor, by language—Lucrece rails at Night, at Opportunity, at Time—that many stanzas are devoid of emotional depth and feel hollow, compared to numerous tragic passages in his plays. It gets better in the passages where Lucrece decides to kill herself: 

“My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife

That wounds my body so dishonoured.

’Tis honour to deprive dishonoured life;

The one will live, the other being dead.

So of shame’s ashes shall my fame be bred,

    For in my death I murder shameful scorn;

    My shame so dead, mine honour is new born.”

That’s moving. But then Shakespeare gets bogged down in rhetorical digressions again when Lucrece looks at a painting of Troy—clearly inspired by the scene in the Aeneid—and compares herself to Troy and Tarquin to the brutal, treacherous Greeks (especially Sinon). It’s over-long, it’s mannered, it delays the climax. 

I like this passage though: 

“‘… Why should the private pleasure of some one

Become the public plague of many moe?

Let sin, alone committed, light alone

Upon his head that hath transgressed so;

Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe.

    For one’s offence why should so many fall,

    To plague a private sin in general?” 

But I shouldn’t be so negative. Colin Burrow’s introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems offers a thought-provoking analysis of The Rape of Lucrece, particularly the idea about reading (Tarquin reading/ interpreting the signs, Lucrece “reading” the painting, Lucrece imagining that strangers can read the guilt on her face, and so on) and the extent of Lucrece’s guilt (as Tarquin gives her a simulacrum of choice—either yield her body to him, or get raped, killed, placed next to the dead body of a slave, and forever defamed). The poem raises interesting questions about rape, choice, consent, and about Lucrece’s feeling of guilt and sense of inner taint. It’s also interesting because Lucrece is a victim of rape, but in choosing to name her rapist and then kill herself, she shapes the way her story will be told. 

4/ Having finished The Rape of Lucrece means I have now read everything in the Shakespearean canon. It was a good idea to save it—I understood the references to the Trojan War, and the allusions to the Aeneid. 

If I am to rank Shakespeare’s works, at the top would be most of the plays (the tragedies, then the Roman plays, then the history plays, then the comedies and romances), then the sonnets, then the narrative poems. The Rape of Lucrece I don’t like as much as Venus and Adonis—a lighter, sexier poem—but it’s definitely more sophisticated than Shakespeare’s early plays and the collaborations at the end of his career. 

PS: Please spare some thoughts and prayers, as we in the UK are experiencing an infernal heatwave. No air con and it’s especially bad in my room as I live in a literal little white attic. I’m getting baptised in hell-fire. I’m seeing demons. 

On my test of ChatGPT’s rewriting

Recently my friend Himadri got ChatGPT to “improve” his sentences (as a joke), which turned out to be shite, so I tested ChatGPT with my blog post “What makes a good screen adaptation?”.

This is the comment from ChatGPT: 

“Your piece already has strong ideas and a clear critical voice. The main improvements needed are concision, rhythm, and sentence structure—many of the original sentences are overly long and repetitive. I’ve rewritten it to keep your tone and arguments while making the prose sharper, more fluid, and more polished.” 

Hello? The repetition is the point! 

Here is one paragraph from my blog post: 

“The 2022 Persuasion also seems to be an odd thing that is neither approach: perhaps I shouldn’t comment as I haven’t seen the whole film, but from what I have seen, it is neither a faithful adaptation, depicting the Regency era, nor an independent film with the story moved to the modern era; instead, Carrie Cracknell has characters of different skin colours wearing Regency costumes but speaking modern slang, and changes the character of Anne Elliot beyond recognition (it is perhaps aimed at the audience of Bridgerton).”

ChatGPT’s version: 

“The 2022 adaptation of Persuasion seems caught in a similarly awkward middle ground. I should admit that I have not seen the entire film, but from what I have seen, it appears undecided about what it wants to be. It is neither a faithful Regency adaptation nor a complete modern reimagining. Instead, Carrie Cracknell presents characters in Regency dress speaking contemporary slang, while Anne Elliot is altered almost beyond recognition. The film perhaps aims for the audience of Bridgerton, but the result feels conceptually muddled.”

The parenthesis is part of my style! I don’t even think I have a particularly strong authorial voice, but the new version is bland. 

Here’s my final paragraph: 

“And this is something lots of people don’t seem to understand: whenever someone criticises a film adaptation for misrepresenting or betraying the text, some people just say fidelity is unimportant and the film is its own work of art, but most of the time it isn’t—most of the time it doesn’t have enough strengths and originality, most of the time it doesn’t transcend its source material—all we’ve got is just a poor film that doesn’t quite transfer a great work of art onto the screen.”

This is ChatGPT’s version: 

“And this is what many people fail to understand when discussions about adaptations arise. Whenever someone criticises a film for betraying or misrepresenting its source, others immediately respond that fidelity does not matter because a film should stand as its own work of art. But most adaptations do not succeed as independent works either. Most lack the originality, vision, or artistic strength necessary to transcend their source material. Too often, what remains is simply an inferior film that fails to bring a great work of art convincingly to the screen.”

Where is the individual voice? The repetition is the point. The repetition is part of my style.  

I also fed ChatGPT my blog post “Jane Austen’s 250”. 

“In her four masterpieces—Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion—Jane Austen explores different kinds of love, different aspects, different angles. She adopts different tones. She uses different techniques. Pride and Prejudice for example is light, bright, and sparkling, with lots of dialogue. Mansfield Park is sombre, and she uses more layers and metaphors. Emma is where she masters the free indirect speech, blending the voice of the third-person narrator with the voice of the protagonist, colouring your perspective of the scene. Persuasion is autumnal, her warmest and most romantic novel. I say Austen is narrow—and in some sense, she is—but these four novels are all quite different. She is wonderful.”

What ChatGPT spat out: 

“In her four masterpieces—Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion—Austen explores different forms and dimensions of love. Each novel has its own tone, techniques, and emotional texture. Pride and Prejudice is light, sparkling, and full of lively dialogue. Mansfield Park is sombre, layered, and rich in symbolism. In Emma, Austen perfects free indirect discourse, blending the narrator’s voice with Emma’s own and subtly shaping the reader’s perception of events. Persuasion feels autumnal: her warmest, most wistful, and perhaps most romantic novel.

I sometimes say Austen is narrow—and in one sense, perhaps she is. Yet these four novels are remarkably different from one another in mood, structure, and vision. She is extraordinary.” 

Again, ChatGPT removes the repetition, removes the thing that makes me me. 

Over the past few months, I’ve been seeing more and more tweets that reek of ChatGPT (or whatever AI that people are using). The same blandness. The same soullessness. AI junkies don’t seem to understand that delegating writing to AI not only produces writings stripped of any individuality but also turns their brains to mush—for writing is thinking—and makes them gradually adopt that blandness and sound like an automaton even when they sit down and write something themselves. 

If anything, this experiment makes me want to spend more time and effort cultivating my own voice.  

The Guardian’s new list of 100 greatest novels of all time

I’m currently taking a break from the hellsite still known as Twitter, though I’m aware people have been arguing about this list. I don’t care all that much, to be honest. The list is mainly useful for tracking what I have and haven’t read: here the strikethrough is for the books I have read; the tick is for when I have seen a screen adaptation. 

100 My Ántonia

99 The Go-Between

98 The Road ✔

97 Catch-22

96 Pedro Páramo

95 The Return of the Native

94 The Known World

93 Invisible Cities

92 Sentimental Education

91 Life and Fate

90 Jacob's Room

89 The Left Hand of Darkness

88 Ragtime

87 The Line of Beauty

86 The Turn of the Screw ✔

85 The Vegetarian

84 The Talented Mr Ripley

83 A Farewell to Arms

82 The End of the Affair ✔

81 Buddenbrooks

80 Rebecca ✔

79 Go Tell It on the Mountain

78 A House for Mr Biswas

77 The Rainbow

76 Dracula ✔

75 The Bluest Eye

74 Nervous Conditions

73 Austerlitz

72 Our Mutual Friend

71 Kindred

70 Jude the Obscure ✔

69 Crime and Punishment

68 Blood Meridian

67 The Man Without Qualities

66 The Master and Margarita

65 The Color Purple ✔

64 The Good Soldier

63 White Teeth

62 Half of a Yellow Sun

61 The Rings of Saturn

60 Howards End ✔

59 Never Let Me Go ✔

58 Disgrace

57 The Sound and the Fury

56 Mansfield Park ✔

55 The Waves

54 Orlando ✔

53 The Transit of Venus

52 The Golden Bowl

51 My Brilliant Friend

50 Wide Sargasso Sea

49 A Fine Balance

48 The Metamorphosis

47 Vanity Fair

46 The Leopard

45 The Golden Notebook

44 Giovanni's Room

43 Housekeeping

42 The Magic Mountain

41 Heart of Darkness

40 Song of Solomon

39 Their Eyes Were Watching God

38 The Age of Innocence ✔

37 Invisible Man

36 The Handmaid's Tale

35 Great Expectations ✔

34 Wolf Hall

33 David Copperfield ✔

32 The God of Small Things

31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ✔

30 Frankenstein ✔

29 Pale Fire

28 The Brothers Karamazov ✔

27 The Trial ✔

26 Don Quixote

25 Lolita ✔

24 The Remains of the Day

23 Midnight's Children

22 Things Fall Apart

21 The Portrait of a Lady ✔

20 Wuthering Heights ✔

19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

18 Persuasion ✔

17 One Hundred Years of Solitude

16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

15 Moby-Dick ✔

14 Mrs Dalloway

13 Emma ✔

12 Bleak House 

11 The Great Gatsby ✔

10 Madame Bovary 

9 Pride and Prejudice ✔

8 Jane Eyre ✔

7 War and Peace ✔

6 Anna Karenina ✔

5 In Search of Lost Time

4 To the Lighthouse

3 Ulysses

2 Beloved ✔

1 Middlemarch ✔

You know how I feel about Middlemarch. It is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but in the English language alone, there are 3 novels I’m placing above it: Moby-Dick, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights. In terms of greatness, I mean. On a personal level, I also have more love for Mansfield Park, David Copperfield, Tom Jones, the Alice books, and a few others. Beyond the English language, we also have Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Don Quixote. 

My list—if I’m ever shameless enough to make such a list—would be very different. But who cares. This is a reminder that there are lots of novels out there I need to read (once I’m done exploring the ancient Greece and ancient Rome).  

Dombey and Son: “I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself”

I almost quit on Dombey and Son, around page 425 or so. It is a transitional novel (according to my friend Himadri, the Dickens expert): Florence Dombey is insipid (Dickens clearly learnt and improved himself when he later created Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson); Walter Gay is a blank; the supporting characters are forgettable, lacking the vitality of the ones in Bleak House or David Copperfield; there are some deeply moving passages but some passages drag; and the highlight (up till that point of the novel) is little Paul.  

But I’m glad I read on, because Dickens gives us some magnificent scenes, such as the scenes between Edith and her mother Mrs Skewton, between Mrs Chick and Miss Lucretia Tox, between Edith and Florence before the wedding—who says Dickens can’t write women? For those of you who have not read the novel, or read it long ago and don’t remember, here’s a quick summary: Mr Paul Dombey is a rich man, a cold man, who doesn’t care for his first wife and doesn’t notice his daughter Florence, as he only wants a son; his first wife dies after giving birth to little Paul; Miss Tox takes advantage of her close friendship with Mr Dombey’s sister, Mrs Chick, and tries to insert herself into his circle, trying to ensnare him; but on a trip after the death of his little son, Mr Dombey is ensnared by someone else, and marries the beautiful but penniless Edith. 

The confrontation between Edith and Mrs Skewton is one of the greatest scenes in the novel. We have seen them for some time, but now we see them for what they truly are: a mercenary, calculating mother who has raised her daughter for the sole purpose of catching a rich man, and a proud daughter, full of self-loathing and painful awareness of the sordid transaction now taking place. 

““You might have been well married,” said her mother, “twenty times at least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.”

“No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,” she answered, raising her head, and trembling in her energy of shame and stormy pride, “shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me—perhaps to bid—he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He makes the purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain; neither have you, so far as I have been able to prevent you.”” (ch.27) 

What a scene. The quote from the headline comes from the same conversation. Dickens is extremely good at depicting resentful and broken women—we see it in Great Expectations, in Little Dorrit—we see it here. Compared to Mrs Skewton, Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet is much more likeable.  

The second confrontation is even better, when Edith tells Mrs Skewton not to corrupt Florence. When Dickens first introduces Edith, she’s a proud, genteel woman, weary of it all. Slowly he removes the layers: she has been taught and forced to catch a rich man to lift herself and her mother out of destitution; she has been degraded and corrupted, “fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course”; but she’s aware, and has the conscience not to let her wicked mother destroy an innocent soul. In Florence, she sees a pure girl she could have been. 

The depiction of Edith during the “courtship”, during the preparation for the wedding, and at the wedding is magnificent: she doesn’t love Mr Dombey but doesn’t care; this is what she’s made for; she’s so full of self-loathing and contempt that she’s indifferent to it all. Next to her, Austen’s Charlotte Lucas is tame.  

I also love the scene where Mrs Chick tells her friend Miss Tox about her brother’s upcoming marriage. 

“Miss Tox left her seat in a hurry, and returned to her plants; clipping among the stems and leaves, with as little favour as a barber working at so many pauper heads of hair.” (ch.29) 

Who says Dickens cannot write women? This is one of those things I keep coming across over and over again on the internet, but people seem to repeat it without examining it, without thinking much about it. 

Look at Miss Tox at the wedding: 

“Miss Tox emerges from behind the cherubim’s leg, when all is quiet, and comes slowly down from the gallery. Miss Tox’s eyes are red, and her pocket-handkerchief is damp. She is wounded, but not exasperated, and she hopes they may be happy. She quite admits to herself the beauty of the bride, and her own comparatively feeble and faded attractions; but the stately image of Mr Dombey in his lilac waistcoat, and his fawn-coloured pantaloons, is present to her mind, and Miss Tox weeps afresh, behind her veil, on her way home to Princess’s Place.” (ch.31) 

Miss Tox previously didn’t create a strong impression—here, just a few lines give her life, get us to feel compassion and pity for her. 

This is masterful. 

My 10 favourite literary works

A list of the 10 literary works I think about, or revisit, most often: 

• The Iliad 
• The Odyssey 
• King Lear 
• Othello 
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
• Don Quixote 
• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina 
• Moby-Dick 
• Mansfield Park

This looks quite basic, does it? But the central figures of my personal canon do happen to be Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, so I can’t pretend they’re not, just to avoid being called pretentious. 

I refuse to choose between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the same way I refuse to choose between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 

2 epic poems, 2 plays, 1 sonnet sequence, 5 novels (4 of which are over 700 pages). 2 in ancient Greek, 5 in the English language (4 English and 1 American), 1 in Spanish, 2 in Russian. 2 from the 8th century BC, 4 from the 17th century, 4 from the 19th century. All Western. 9 written by men.

If you have been reading my blog and/or my tweets, I’m sure I’ve been annoying enough about these works for any choices to be a surprise. Maybe the Sonnets, as I don’t blog about them, but I do revisit them often—there’s a Shakespeare sonnet for every mood (I went out yesterday and on the way home thought of Sonnet 34—guess what happened). The only surprises, I guess, are the exclusions of Greek tragedies (couldn’t pick one) and Chekhov’s stories (what do you do with short stories on such a list?)—a longer list of my personal canon would include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, The Tale of Genji, all of Shakespeare, Molière, the (dirty) poems of Hồ Xuân Hương, Tom Jones, Hong lou meng (better known as Dream of the Red Chamber or Story of the Stone), Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, the plays of Henrik Ibsen (especially The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm), the short stories of Akutagawa, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Metamorphosis (Kafka), Invisible Man, Lolita, Pnin, the poems of Hàn Mặc Tử (especially Đau thương), etc. 

The only thing that bothers me, which is perhaps irrational, is that my literary tastes are strongly Western. I am Vietnamese, I can read well two languages (my Norwegian isn’t on the same level), I spent years promoting East Asian classics, but in the end, my favourite 18th century novel is still Tom Jones, not Hong lou meng; my favourite female writer is still Jane Austen, not Murasaki Shikibu; the central figures of my personal canon are still Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, not Nguyễn Du… Japanese cinema may be the one I know and love the best after English-language cinema, but in literature, my tastes are markedly Western. 

Does this mean I have lost my roots? Mất gốc? (The Vietnamese phrase carries much harsher overtones). 

I suppose the main thing is that I’m most fascinated by human nature and the human mind, and most interested in characters, which is probably also why I much prefer the Greeks to the Romans (you probably have noticed, with horror, the absence of Virgil and Ovid on my personal canon). Generally, Japanese writers—at least the ones I have read—don’t seem to explore the complexities and contradictions and irrationalities of people as we see in Western literature. Their characters are more opaque, even impressionistic; on the one hand, Japanese novels convey that sense of human mystery, the sense that we can never truly know another human being, which I like; but on the other hand, the characters also feel less alive, and don’t leave deep impressions on my mind like Akhilleus, Cleopatra, or Andrei Bolkonsky. The characters in Hong lou meng in comparison are alive, especially Shi Xiangyun (Sử Tương Vân) and Weng Xifeng (Vương Hy Phượng), but they don’t have the depth and complexity of Elektra, Hamlet, or Anna Karenina, and frankly I think Cao Xueqin takes a lot more pages to give life to a character (which Shakespeare can do in five words: “I was adored once too”). 

I’m also not much of a poetry person, despite liking the little I have read of Donne, Keats, Bùi Giáng, etc. I have The Oxford Book of English Verse, and lately have been slowly getting through The Oxford Book of Sonnets, trying to be less of a philistine, but unfortunately still have a strong taste for narratives and characters. My favourite poet (restricting to only those I can read in the original) is therefore a dramatic poet (and before you ask, I read Shakespeare’s sonnets as dramatic monologues, not autobiographical pieces). 

(If I were pretentious, as some people might call me, I would pretend to love poetry, but I acknowledge my failing).  

My tastes are also predominantly classic. When I first got into literature properly, I was mostly reading the 20th century, then slowly went further back, and further back. Over the years, those 20th century novels for some reason haven’t had a lasting impression, haven’t been part of my mental furniture—I barely remember much of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Toni Morrison. But it’s not just because I read them in my late teens and early 20s, not just because I read them before finding my favourite writers—since my discovery of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and others, I have read and enjoyed modern books only for them to have caused nothing but a few ripples in my mind—I haven’t found myself thinking about Muriel Spark, R. K. Narayan, or Soseki, for example. Even Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I read only last September and considered highly, has left no imprints. Shouldn’t they resonate more, being more recent? But they don’t, and I don’t know why. My favourite 20th century writer right now is possibly Primo Levi, but that’s non-fiction. 

It’s curious which works of literature speak to us and haunt our minds. 

Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides

1/ Ah, the beginning of it all! Menelaus and Agamemnon are on the way to Troy to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, but their ships are stuck, due to lack of winds. A prophet says Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis (which to me doesn’t make sense, because Helen is Menelaus’s wife and they have a daughter, hello?). The whole play is about the characters struggling with themselves and arguing with each other, and in the end, Iphigenia willingly goes to the altar, doing it for Greece. 

I wish I could claim to have come up with it myself, but I’m stealing the idea from Tom (Wuthering Expectations) that this is the trolley problem: save Iphigenia, or kill her and save many? The irony of course is that Iphigenia is sacrificed, Agamemnon is later killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is then killed in revenge by Orestes (and in Euripides’s play, Electra); perhaps we can also argue that the sacrifice of Iphigenia allows the Akhaians to travel to Troy and leads to all the deaths in the 10-year war.

But this is why I have a problem with the ending. In the Introduction of my copy, Philip Vellacott says that Euripides died before finishing the play and the ending was written by someone else. I know Euripides himself had written a play called Iphigenia in Tauris, but the irony is that Iphigenia chooses to sacrifice herself to help Greece only for her death to lead to so much suffering and deaths—where is the tragedy, and the irony, if she is replaced with a deer and just whisked off to Tauris? On a personal level, I don’t want young and innocent Iphigenia to die; but for the purpose of the drama—with the way things have been built up—she has to die, so the rescue at the end just feels farcical.    

2/ As I wrote in the previous blog post, I may complain about the beginnings and/ or the endings in the plays of Euripides—this man is odd—but his middles are generally brilliant. The struggle in Agamemnon, the argument between him and Menelaus, the scene between Clytemnestra and Achilles (Akhilleus), Clytemnestra’s confrontation of her husband, the resolution of Iphigenia, etc—all these conflicts make for great drama—we just have one brilliant scene after another (until that farcical ending). 

(I usually write Akhilleus, but I’m using the spellings in Philip Vellacott’s translation). 

“MENELAUS […] Besides, compassion moves me for the unhappy girl, 

Remembering she is of one blood with me, and faces 

Death at an altar for the sake of my false wife. 

What, after all, is Helen to her?” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

The whole thing of course is ridiculous, just like the war(s) going on as Euripides was writing the play. I suppose Euripides is simply fascinated by all the reasoning—and sophistry—that leads to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the Trojan War. 

“CHORUS […] Where now can the clear face of goodness, 

Where can virtue itself live by its own strength?—

When ruthless disregard holds power, 

When men, forgetting they are mortal, 

Tread down goodness and ignore it, 

When lawlessness overrules law, 

When the terror of God no longer draws men together 

Trembling at the reward of wickedness?” 

Euripides is clearly in a dark, bitter mood. 

This is funny though: 

“ACHILLES […] I’ve said all this, not out of eagerness to marry 

Your daughter—thousands of girls pursue me all the time; 

But King Agamemnon has insulted me.” 

Duh.

3/ Let’s look at the moment Iphigenia decides to accept her face and sacrifice herself. 

“IPHIGENIA […] The power of all Hellas now looks to me; 

All lies in my hand—the sailing of the fleet, capture of Troy, 

And the future safety of Greek wives from barbarous attacks; 

No more forcible abductions from our happy homes, when once 

Paris has been made to pay the price of death for Helen’s rape. 

All this great deliverance I shall win by dying, and my name 

Will be blessed and celebrated as one who set Hellas free…” 

How selfless and noble for a young girl to sacrifice herself for Greece.

“IPHIGENIA […] And if Artemis has laid a claim 

On my body, who am I, a mortal, to oppose a god? 

This I cannot do. To Hellas, then, I dedicate myself. 

Sacrifice me; take and plunder Troy. For me, your victory 

Shall be children, marriage—for all time my glorious monument. 

Greeks were born to rule barbarians, mother, not barbarians 

To rule Greeks. They are slaves by nature; we have freedom in our blood.” 

This is quite disturbing, yes? I don’t think this is me looking at it with modern eyes—Euripides has depicted the perspective, the suffering of the Trojans—he would find this problematic. 

Having now read 13 of his plays, I still find Euripides strange and hard to grasp—I prefer Sophocles—but Euripides is always fascinating and thought-provoking, and often makes me feel uneasy. 

Orestes by Euripides

1/ It would have been quite interesting, I suppose, to read Orestes immediately after the Oresteia and the two Electra plays—I just couldn’t get hold of a copy at the time. Oh well. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that Euripides may create plays about the same people, but the plays are not necessarily related. His Electra and Orestes are fairly consistent, though in Orestes there’s no reference to the fact that Electra has got married (per Aegisthus’s order), but Euripides has a play called Helen in which Helen never goes to Troy—it’s just a phantom. The Helen and Menelaus in Orestes, and the Helen and Menelaus in Helen are completely different characters. 

2/ Euripides’s Orestes is very different from Eumenides, the last part of the Oresteia. At the risk of being reductive, I think we can say the central idea of Aeschylus’s trilogy is that violence begets violence and at some point the cycle of violence has to get cut—the plot of Eumenides is about whether Orestes can be forgiven or forever haunted by the Furies, and the debate boils down to whether a son owes more to the father or to the mother, whether the duty and desire to avenge his father can outweigh the crime of killing his mother. I’m not entirely sure what the central idea of Euripides’s play is—perhaps there isn’t one—what we have is a rather bitter, nihilist, and messy play in which violence piles upon violence, the characters turn increasingly monstrous, and then Apollo appears to provide a resolution that doesn’t resolve anything. I often feel Euripides is best in the middle: his beginnings often have some long and awkward exposition and his endings often have some awkward deus ex machina, but the middles are (usually) brilliant. 

What is wrong with Pylades? And Electra?  

And what kind of sick joke is it that Apollo makes Orestes marry Hermione? 

3/ There are many great passages in the play: 

“CHORUS […] O Zeus, listen! 

What mercy is there? 

Pitiful son, what is this agony, 

This blood-hunt, this persecution? 

There is a fiend of vengeance 

That drowns your life in tears, 

Sinks your house in your mother’s blood, 

Destroys your mind with madness. 

I mourn, I groan, I grieve. 

The greatest happiness is not permanent

In the world of men; 

But the storms of God rise against it, 

Like a light sailing-ship they shatter it, 

Terrors and disasters roll around it, 

Till crashing waves close over death…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott)

4/ I can see why people say Euripides is more realistic and modern than the other ancient Greeks. 

“MENELAUS Ye gods! What am I looking at? Some ghost from hell? 

ORESTES You are right; terror and pain make me a living corpse.

MENELAUS This savage look, this mattered hair—I’m sorry for you. 

ORESTES What you describe is outward; my torments are real.

MENELAUS Your eyes are glazed with horror; your look frightens me. 

ORESTES I no longer exist; only my name is left.” 

Unlike Eumenides, in Orestes, we don’t see the Furies onstage—we only see Orestes’s madness. 

Euripides depicts Orestes committing the worst of sins—matricide—but gets us to understand him. He writes the scene of Orestes and Menelaus and gets us to empathise with Orestes’s anger and sense of betrayal, but at the same time we also understand why, after 10 years of war, Menelaus doesn’t want more conflict and bloodshed. 

Compared to the Oresteia, the plays of Euripides are less mythic: the human beings are more active, the gods are less involved. 

In Electra, it’s almost as though there’s no oracle from Apollo: we see Orestes and Electra talk about killing Clytemnestra; we see Electra urge her brother to carry on with the plan when he hesitates, like Lady Macbeth taunts and urges Macbeth; Electra also takes part in the killing, unlike the Electra of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In Orestes, the gods don’t appear till the very end; the whole play is driven by humans; Orestes and Electra first turn to others, asking for help or intervention, as they’re facing punishment; then Pylades comes up with the idea of killing Helen and becoming heroes, celebrated for killing the woman everyone hates, rather than just known as the murderers of Clytemnestra; and Electra comes up with the plan to hold Hermione hostage as a way of bargaining with Orestes; there doesn’t seem to be any hint of the existence of the gods till the very last scene. 

And when Apollo does appear, Euripides makes one think why the gods haven’t intervened earlier and prevented all the bloodshed.