Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

read very little, but one of the first books he did read was the translation of
A Thousand and One Nights
; also, the English novelists who were influenced byCervantes—the road novels—in which characters traveling around create the action; adventure jumps out to meet the characters. 4 Pickwick loses a court case, but he believes it to be unfair and refuses to pay damages, so must spend time in jail.
    His servant, Sam Weller, incurs debts he does not pay so he can accompany him in jail. Dickens’s penchant for extravagant names is worth noting: Pickwick, Twist, Chuzzlewit, Copperfield. One could list many more. He ended up making a fortune from literature, and achieving fame. His only rival wasThackeray. But it is said that even Thackeray’s daughter once asked him, “Papa, why don’t you write books like Mr. Dickens?” Thackeray was a cynic, though there are sentimental moments in his works. Dickens was incapable of portraying a gentleman, but they appear in his work. He was intimate with the lower classes and the bourgeoisie, but not the members of the aristocracy, who rarely figure in his work. Thackeray portrays them because he knew them well; Dickens, because he felt plebian. We should keep these different circumstances in mind: they set the two writers apart.
    Dickens traveled around England giving public readings of his work. He would choose dramatic chapters. For example, the scene of Pickwick’s trial. He used a different voice for each of the characters, and he did so with extraordinary dramatic talent. The audience applauded heartily. It is said that he would take out his watch, see that he had an hour and a quarter; delays for applause meant the audience would miss part of the reading. He attempted to repeat this English experience in the United States, but there he was not well received. First, because he declared that he was an abolitionist, and second, because he defended the rights of the author. He felt victimized, offended, considered it outrageous that North American publishers were growing rich printing short excerpts of his work. The North Americans thought, on the contrary, that he was wrong to protest this system. So, when he returned to England he published
American Notes
; he seemed not to realize that England was peopled by ridiculous characters, whereas the North Americans were a new nation. He attacked them bitterly. As I said, Dickens enjoyed enormous popularity and grew rich from his work, and he traveled to France, to Italy, but without trying to understand those countries. He was always looking for humorous episodes to recount. He died in 1870. He was not at all interested in literary theory. He was a brilliant man, interested mostly in pursuing his work.
    The structure of his novels divides his characters into the good and the bad, the absurd and the lovable. He wished to do something like a Final Judgment in his work, hence many of his endings are artificial, because the bad are punished and the good are rewarded.
    There are two features worth pointing out. Dickens discovered two things that were important for subsequent literature: childhood, with its solitude, its fears. (The truth is, we do not know for certain about his childhood.) WhenUnamuno speaks about his mother, we are amazed. 5 AndGroussac said that it is absurd to devote chapters to childhood—the emptiest age—and not to spend more time on youth and adulthood. 6 Dickens is the first novelist who gave importance to his characters’ childhoods. Dickens also discovered the city as a landscape. Landscapes were always the countryside, mountains, jungles, rivers. But Dickens writes about London. He is one of the first to find poetry in sordid, impoverished places.
    Second, we should point out that he was interested in the melodramatic and tragic side of life, along with the caricatured. We know from biographies that this had an influence onDostoyevsky, on his unforgettable murders. In the novel
MartinChuzzlewit
, two characters take a trip in a kind of stagecoach, and one is somehow under the other’s control. 7 Chuzzlewit has made the decision to kill his companion. The coach turns over. Chuzzlewit does everything possible to make the horses kill him, but his companion is saved. When they reach the inn, Chuzzlewit closes the door [to his room and falls asleep], but he dreams that he did kill him. He walks through a forest and when he emerges, he is alone, without regrets: but he is afraid that the [ghost of the]