The Global Novel: a literature podcast
The Global Novel is a podcast that surveys the narratology of world literature and history of translation from antiquity to modernity with a critical lens and aims to make academic education in literature accessible to the world.
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
Great Expectations (1861)
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) stands as a cornerstone of English literature, encapsulating Dickens' unparalleled talent to weave intricate plots with vivid characters against the backdrop of Victorian society. Our guest-speaker today is Prof. Joshua Gooch from D'Youville College in New York. Dr. Gooch's expertise is the intersections of work, power, and aesthetics in literature and film. He is the author of Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity.
Recommended Readings:
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
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Welcome to the Global Novel, where literature comes alive and is made accessible to every corner of the world. I'm your host, Claire Hennessy. Today we explore the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens with our guest Professor Joshua Gooch from D'Youville College in New York. Dr Gooch's expertise is the intersections of work, power and aesthetics in literature and film. He is the author of Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity. Hi, Joshua, welcome to the Global Novel.
Joshua:Hi Claire, it's nice to be here.
Claire:Well, the reason why we choose Great Expectations today is not just that this novel stands as a cornerstone of English literature, but also it encapsulates Dickens' unparalleled talent to weave intricate plots with vivid characters against the backdrop of Victorian society. Perhaps we can start with your journey of studying Dickens what initially sparked your interest and which research experiences have significantly impacted your understanding of his works.
Joshua:I mean everyone, I think feel like if you're in English, you probably read Dickens at some point. I read Dickens in high school and I had this. I was reading it on my own, which I don't I enjoyed, but I was reading it in an English class and the professor, the teacher, walks by and says, hey, you, we should add that to the syllabus. And then the rest of the students around me, I think, wanted to throw books at me. Um, but so that's where it starts. That was great expectations. But in terms of of academics, um, early on as a graduate student, I was taking a Deleuze class and I was taking a course on mediated modernities with Garrett Stewart and we were talking about our mutual friend in both classes. Deleuze has this famous essay on singularity and it's the last piece he writes in his life and he uses this big passage from our mutual friend, and so you know, I started writing about that and it became a chapter in my disc. It's a piece of my first book and I really enjoyed that.
Joshua:And when I was trying to finish that book, I was part of an NEH seminar with Sharon Aronofsky-Weltman at UC Santa Cruz, which does the Dickens universe every year. It's a great thing for people who like Dickens and they often have scholars and scholarly events tied up around with that too. And that was all focused on Dickens and the stage which I really hadn't touched at all and I was trying to figure out how to make that chapter work as a book chapter and so reading about that it was a lot about melodrama. So reading about that, it was a lot about melodrama about affect, about trying to get reactions from audiences and how central that was to Dickens as a person, as a writer. And that sent me back to Dickens for the next project where I was.
Joshua:Just I was reading the old Curiosity Shop and I thought this is the weirdest book I've ever read and it makes me feel weird, right, and I wanted to write about that in terms of of affect, and that's sort of how this project got started Then thinking about, well, what does affect do? How does it work, how's it different than sentimentality? What does it mean to think about literature in affective terms, which is a very weird thing when we think about it conceptually. I mean, I keep saying affect, but affect just means, I take it at the most basic level, to affect something or to be affected by it, at the most ground level sense, and that this is really tied up with for literature scholars. I think of it in terms of rhetorical reading, where we read texts to try to think about how they want to do a thing to a reader. They have a purpose. It's not to say that the purpose is everything that's in there that's explicitly not what I want to do but that when we are reading, we're always reading with that purpose in mind and then thinking about what else it does. And then, when you try to connect that up with affect, really interesting things start to happen. And for me it was very interesting because it took me back.
Joshua:I did a draft of this book and when it went out I got reader comments. First reader comment was do you know Garrett Stewart? Have you looked at his work? I'm like, yeah, I know Garrett. Garrett directed my disc, so realizing like how deep it was in there, and then having to unearth more of it and then make sense of how I wanted to read, how I wanted to think about theory and the relationship of history to cultural production and what that means in a text, whether that's Dickens or anything else, and so I think it's a very fruitful way of thinking, but it's also yeah, dickens is where it all starts, sort of Right.
Claire:Well, there's something very interesting about what you just said regarding the bizarre, the strange nature of Dickens' works, because I do remember a professor in my grad school mentioned great works always weave the strange into the familiar. Well, speaking of Dickens' weave the strange into the familiar, while speaking of Dickens' greatness during his time, he was not only a prolific writer but also a cultural phenomenon. So how was Dickens received in his era and what made him such a pivotal figure in Victorian literature?
Joshua:For the Victorians. I think it's manifold. But maybe the way for people to think about it, if you're coming to Dickens now, would be that he starts off as a popular comic writer. So he writes these sketches. Those are popular, and then he gets this opportunity to write a long-form serial work, pickwick Papers, which is wildly successful. It's got all sorts of cross-marketing. It's a big thing. All sorts of cross-marketing. It's a big thing. But this is. You know, if you think about this in terms of directors or cultural producers, now, well, this could be the little place where he slots into. Oh, he's a comic writer and he just does this stuff.
Joshua:But the very next work he does is Oliver Twist, which is seen at the time as an intervention of social commentary on the new poor laws. You read it now and it seems a lot of high melodrama and weird comedy and lots of things that seem out of keeping with what we would think of now, I think, as realism. But at the time there was a lot of people very surprised at how realistic the characters were in all of her twists and how much that mattered. So Dickens then sort of builds up this persona as someone who is both wildly entertaining and taking up social commentary. The book he writes after Oliver Twist is Nicholas Nickleby, which is both very long so many people don't read it and seems oftentimes when you read it like an 18th century comic novel. But at the heart of it is this commentary on the Yorkshire school system, which was this exploitative system of farming kids out to schools that did not take care of them and often left them to die right. So he becomes this writer about social problems, about in comic form, and then in high melodramatic form. That's one way to sort of think about him, for the sort of style and the reason why I think he's so successful over time is that he builds this out into a unique style.
Joshua:There's, and it's an affective style, I guess is what we would say when people would read Dickens out loud. Right, there are all these stories about. You would laugh and laugh and then suddenly you'd be crying and then suddenly you'd be laughing again and you wouldn't know how you'd get back and forth between the two. There's a famous passage in Oliver Twist where he describes this as the streaky bacon of melodrama. Right, and that's what's happening in there. It's taking you up, it's taking you down in these sort of wild swings, and so I mean, some of the stuff I'm working or building from is really focused on that idea that Dickens carries us along in this way and creates these new kinds of feelings so that they're not just like one kind of feeling, but Dickens is working on sort of spectrums of feelings and trying to draw us across those spectrums.
Joshua:That's sort of what I think is unique and interesting about him specifically, and for Victorians it was that idea that you could read them and just have this wild time and he's always present, right? I mean, he's writing in serial form, so he's coming out all the time. His early work is written. He's writing books simultaneously, so he's finishing one and starting another one and publishing at the same time. So if you put it in terms of watching a television show or some sort of thing that you're used to that can be present in your life most of the time, dickens could be present in your life as a Victorian, pretty much all the time, whether it's in the books that he's writing or in the journals that he's editing. He's just there shaping what people understood literature to look like. So by the time that he dies, victorian literature. I think there's a reason why, when we think about it. We think about it in largely Dickensian terms, even if people will say I mean they're better writers. And there may be right, people have Eliot Dickens arguments, but I won't do that.
Claire:Right. Well, dickens absolutely has this emotional roller coaster effect, right, like you just mentioned, and this kind of emotional affect is traditionally viewed as sentimentality. So I wonder if you could expand more on where sentimentality fits within the context of the Victorian novel and how your affect theory, for example, informs our reading of Dickens' works.
Joshua:Okay, so let's see here the way that we get sentimentality in literature comes to us through sentimental literature. But sentimental literature is playing out philosophical ideas that are being worked on in. The Scottish Enlightenment person that I spend the most time thinking about because I think I don't know if he's the easiest, but he's certainly the clearest is Adam Smith, and so Smith's theory of the moral sentiments is a way of thinking about how do we relate to others or feel with other people, so that think about this in Smithian terms in a market economy, in a place where social connections are not as clear, you don't know somebody. How do you relate to them or understand what they're feeling if you don't know where they came from or you don't recognize them? So Smith's ideas about sentimentality were all very visually focused. You see somebody suffer and you identify with them. This is the place where sentimentality and Smith's word, sympathy, has been really polluted by 21st century usage. We think of empathy right now in the way that Smith thinks about sympathy, but you feel in the place of that person as they're suffering, and you then make a conscious decision about how you feel about it. You make a moral judgment about what's happening and what they've done.
Joshua:And so in sentimental literature there are often scenes where it's built around, scenes where you are encouraged to feel by witnessing the suffering of other people and then making a judgment about why they're suffering and how the world should be, why they're suffering and how the world should be. That's a popular 18th century mode. It's if you read something like is it? Mckenzie's man of Feeling is a classic example of that kind of book. When I've had the brief opportunity to teach that kind of book, students routinely hate it. Like, just just hate these things because they're, because they really are, they're punctual, just these weird scenes. And you're like, well, I feel bad about that. You're like, yeah, that's the point. And then it just goes on to another thing. You're like, yeah, that's what it does.
Joshua:So when Dickens draws on this, he's drawing on these ways of encouraging us to then see, feel with people and make moral judgments. And because he's Dickens, he's got this strong narratorial voice and usually the narrator is going to come in and help you along. In case you weren't sure, right, if you weren't positive about how to feel about that scene, the narrator, nine times out of ten, is going to tell you that can be true in sentimental literature. It doesn't have to be.
Joshua:That would be, I would say, the sort of central piece, and that's because Dickens is deeply influenced by 18th century writers. He's read Smollett, he's definitely read Goldsmith McKenzie. He knows this stuff and he's using it because it is effective. But he's threading it through with these plots and then specifically drawing on the conventions of melodrama and the theater so that it doesn't feel so stilted and weird, like it's just about showing you things and saying how do you feel about it? It's telling you a story and then pulling you into that story by asking you to feel with the characters and make judgments about what's happening to them, and then, because of the social commentary, about the broader social world, so that those two things get connected in some way.
Claire:I wonder if we can view the Dickensian effects as a unique sort of narrative structure, and how does this theoretical framework intersect with broader literary trends such as structuralism?
Joshua:So affect theory draws a lot on structuralism and sort of a post-structuralist line. Central difficulty that I'm trying to deal with here is that when we talk about structures or, I'll say, like you know, rhetorical organizations, there's a temptation to want to say that any kind of problems that are out in the world or any kind of differences throughout the world can only be registered in a text if they are caught in some contrary form. Right, so like these two things, and then they butt up against each other because they don't fit. Well, okay, the place where it doesn't fit must be where the thing happens. And what I really have been trying to move toward and I'm writing about this in other places now is ideas that forms are open and that they have to be open because they're constantly having to re-articulate to different contexts. So when they're produced they're articulated to a particular kind of cultural or conjuncture, one of Santa Marx's sense, and then, as they get adapted in different places, they have to change, they have to remain open to those changes. So where do we find those kinds of places of openness? And I think that what it means is that we look at how the structures are constructed and then we're looking for ways that they're trying to reach out and open up. So they're working outward by creating pressures that want us to go in particular places. But they may not know where they're going and they may have effects that they are not in control of. And one of the ways I was trying to think about this.
Joshua:What's great about structuralism is it can describe how things Enclose and determine right, but it usually then operates on a description of something as being Overdetermined, right, it's there and then it's locked in place. And when I was writing this book I was very much thinking about sort of althusserian overdetermination in that sense, and I've been reading more in that vein and you see that that's actually not what he means at all. He's thinking in these open forms, but literary criticism and the way that we've taken up those ideas has very much predicated. Everything on the text is closed, the social totality is closed and things line up and they get boxed in and whatever is unthought is unthought in the totality and it's unthought in the totality of the text and it's unthought in the totality of the world and you're like well, that doesn't seem right. If that's true, then nothing ever changes and there's no space for anything to arise or emerge. That would be different and there wouldn't be any space for something to even change within a writer, like suddenly everything just kind of like set and it didn't. So you've got to think about, like, how do we get past that?
Joshua:And one way to think about it is how sentimentality is different from affect, right? So sentimentality is all theories of sentiments. It's a subject looking at another subject. So like a person looks at another person and then makes a judgment, right? Affect theory says, well, we have their feelings and you have lots of different ones and they're not always all in charge and you're not subject to one all the time, and they shift and vary And're not a single person. You're the fancy term I get from Massimiliano is an individual. Right, there are individuals and they're made up of lots of them. Well, if that's the case, then there are lots of different possibilities where affect can move or shift or shape, where the determination isn't total and things open up and can bloom in new ways. Right, and the way that I try to describe this with Dickens has to do with this story that I think 99% of the reading public would have no knowledge of, which is that Dickens has other Christmas stories, so he's got a big breakthrough with A Christmas Carol.
Joshua:Right, it's a brilliant story and it creates this punctual myth that people still use. And if you look at the way it's written it's in these short, clipped, ironic sentences Real fun story. Basically, everyone can read it. Well, the problem is it's wildly successful. He doesn't control the copyright. It shows up on the theater stage and he loses a bunch of money. So he's super mad. He's like he hates losing money.
Joshua:The next book he writes is the Chimes, which is his second Christmas tale, and he's going to put it on the stage at the same time that it comes out in written form. So he's not going to lose any money and it's going to be huge. And he's convinced it's the best thing he's ever written. And there are all these letters where he's performed it for people and they're crying and they're sobbing and he's convinced he's like this is better than a Christmas. Nothing's going to beat this. This is the best thing I've ever written and it goes over really well that year and it doesn't last.
Joshua:And when Dickens does his reading tours later in his life, he keeps trying to pull it out, thinking it's going to be a big hit and nobody likes it and the last time he performs it he writes down like I really had to cut it to try to make it work this time and no, it doesn't work. Well, that means something changed and it's like well, did it change in the text? The text didn't line up with the conjuncture, like there's different affects moving in different conjunctures, right, and so how those, how the text as a whole is working alongside whatever that conjuncture looks like, like those things aren't, they're not vibing in the way that they were when the chimes first came out. And that difference is really helpful because we see that Dickens understood it right, like he fully understood it didn't work anymore, and then he starts retooling it. And the way that he's retooling it is to try to make it work for the audience. At that moment he's paying attention to those affects and trying to make them work.
Joshua:So it can point to us, can show us, that this is what a text is doing, and also that Dickens doesn't always know fully why it's doing it. He just knows that it is. So if a text can have these sort of desires to make people feel in this way, well, it also indicates that there's things happening out in the world that Dickens may or may not know about that are helping him build on these feelings, or may not know about that are helping him build on these feelings. And so for me as a scholar, it makes it much more interesting to say, well, what conjuncturally is happening that might tie into this, stuff that we wouldn't think about. Right, that's not the obvious thing where you know, oliver Twist, oh, it's the new poor laws, we're done. There's other things happening in the world at the exact same time that seem disconnected, but if you push on them you say, oh, there's an affective connection.
Claire:If you enjoyed this episode so far and want to catch up with the second half of the episode where Professor Gouge discusses first-person narrative perspective, multiple narratorial voices and characterization in Great Expectations, be sure to subscribe at theglobalnovelcom slash subscribe. Thank you so much for listening.