Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

murdered man will be waiting for him when he reaches home. Dickens describes Chuzzlewit emerging alone from the forest. He has no regrets about what we has done, but he has fear, an absurd fear, that when he reaches home, the man he murdered will be waiting for him.
    Then, in
Oliver Twist
, we have a poor girl, Nancy, who is strangled by Bill Sikes, a ruffian. We have the pursuit of Bill Sikes. Bill Sikes has a dog who loves him very much, and Bill kills it because he is afraid he will be found because the dog is with him. Dickens was very good friends with WilkieCollins. I don’t know if any of you have read
TheMoonstone
or
The Woman in White
. 8 Eliot says his are the longest detective novels, and the best. (Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on a play that was staged at Dickens’s house. And Eliot says that Dickens—because he was an excellent actor—must have given the roles much more individuality than they had in the work.) Wilkie Collins was a master in the art of weaving complicated, but never confusing, storylines. That is, his plots have many threads, but the reader holds them in his hand. On the contrary, Dickens, in all his novels, arbitrarily wove the storylines together.Andrew Lang said that if he had to recount the plot of
Oliver Twist
and they were threatening him with the death penalty, he, who so admired
Oliver Twist
, would certainly be hung. 9
    In his last novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, Dickens set out to write a well-constructed detective novel, like his friend Wilkie Collins, the master of the genre. 10 The novel was left incomplete. But for the first installment—because Dickens was always loyal to the system of serializing his work; Dickens usually published his novels in one volume after they had appeared in installments—he gave a series of instructions to his illustrator. And we see in one of the illustrations one of the characters in a chapter Dickens did not manage to write, and that character does not have a shadow. Some have conjectured that he has no shadow because he is a ghost. In the first chapter, one of the characters smokes opium and has visions, so maybe these visions are being portrayed.
    Chesterton says that God was generous to Dickens, for he gave him the dramatic end. In none of Dickens’s novels, Chesterton says, does the plot matter: what mattered were his characters, with their phobias, their clothes that were always the same, and their special vocabulary. But finally Dickens decides to write a novel with an important plot, and at almost the very moment when Dickens is about to announce the murderer, God orders his death, and so—Chesterton says—we will never know the real secret, the hidden plot of Edwin Drood, until we meet Dickens in heaven. And then—says Chesterton—most likely Dickens will no longer remember and will be as perplexed as we are. 11
    In conclusion, I would like to tell you that Dickens is one of the great benefactors of humanity. Not because of the reforms he advocated without any success but rather because he created a series of characters. One can now pick up any of Dickens’s novels, open it to any page, and be certain to keep reading it and enjoying it.
    Perhaps the best novel to read to become familiar with Dickens—the kind of familiarity that can be worth so much in our lives—is his autobiographical novel,
DavidCopperfield
, which contains so many scenes from Dickens’s childhood. Then,
ThePickwick Papers
. And then, I would say,
MartinChuzzlewit
, with its deliberately unfair descriptions of America and the murder of Jonas Chuzzlewit. But the truth is that once one has read some of Dickens’s pages, once one has resigned oneself to some of his bad habits, to his sentimentalism, to his melodramatic characters, one has found a friend for life.

CLASS 19

    ROBERT BROWNING'S POEMS. A CHAT WITH ALFONSO REYES.
THE RING AND THE BOOK.

    WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1966
    We will now continue our discussion of the work of Robert Browning. I recall that they once asked him the meaning of one of his poems, and he answered: “I wrote it long ago. When I wrote it, only God and I knew what it meant; now, only God knows,” in order to avoid answering.
    I spoke about some of his minor poems, and there is a poem I would like to recommend to you, but I cannot explain it, not even vaguely. It is perhaps the strangest of all, and it is called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” 1 “Childe” does not mean “child” here. It is