Advent 12 Canon

At the last canonical entry on this year's calendar (Advent 9), I made so bold as to compare Trollope and Dickens. I made the insolent (not to mention pseudish) comment that I find Dickens a little de trop. Well today I find myself only three days down the line and having to walk back my prejudice. I have actually read A Christmas Carol. It is, of course, nigh on impossible to come fresh to this text, besieged as we are by any number of adaptations and parodies of it. However I find myself able to say that the original is terrific. 

Dickens is a sentimentalist but a master of the cleverly inserted authorial voice. Take this passage for example where he affectingly draws us in so as to be at his very shoulder as the story unfolds itself. If I were to teach on writing (which thank the lord I do not have to do) I would be very tempted to get my students to excavate this passage for technique and meaning:

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow. 

God Bless Us, Every One! 

The Enticing Serendipity Of Satellite Television

I watch a lot of films, more old than new. Sometimes I bore you with reviews. I rarely go to a cinema - as Sartre so aptly put it, 'L'enfer, c'est les autres". Sorry about that. I do however cherish those visits where a rapt silence seems guaranteed. I was on one occasion precisely one half of the audience for an afternoon screening of Hoop Dreams. 

Modern multi-channel televisision is awash with films. Much dross but also plenty of good stuff. I mention serendipity and I will give you an example. I recently watched Went the Day Well?, of which more anon. I have also (along with the Groupie) watched the 1947 adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. The serendipity? Well that comes in the identity of the man who directed both, credited on screen simply as 'Cavalcanti'. This got me intrigued. Who was this exotically titled auteur behind two such arrestingly English films? In full he was Alberto de Almeira Cavalcanti, Brazilian by birth but a citizen of the world, ulitimately blacklisted as an alleged communist. Look him up on the interweb thingy and marvel at a nomadic life of creativity.

Went the Day Well? was made at Ealing Studios in 1942. It is, I suppose, a propaganda film but it is rather more than that in its imagining of an English village invaded by the Nazis and the magnificent and resourceful resistance of the villagers to the Germans. It crops up on Talking Pictures TV, the merits of which I have previously advertised. 72/100. Another factor that recommends the film is that the source story is by Graham Greene. 

From 1947, Nicholas Nickleby is not in the same league but it is highly enjoyable - I have guiltily to confess yet again that I find Dickens easier to enjoy in adaptation than in the original prose. Nickleby perhaps suffers in inevitable comparison with David Lean's masterful translations of Dickens to the screen. Nonetheless very viewable. 66/100.   

Laughter Is Permissible, But Not At The Expense Of Vigilance

In my world-weary way these things make me laugh even as I remember their significance. First some looky-likeys.

Trump

 

 

Mussolini

Silly I know (and not original) but it casts some light in the shade. Consider this, taken from the Afterword to Frank Dikotter's catalogue of twentieth century infamy, Dictators: the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century:

Vigilance, however, is not the same as gloom. Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century. Most of all, dictators who surround themselves with a cult of personality tend to drift into a world of their own, confirmed in their delusions by the followers who surround them. They end up making all major decisions on their own. They see enemies everywhere, at home and abroad. As hubris and paranoia take over, they seek more power to protect the power they already have. But since so much hinges on the judgements they make, even a minor miscalculation can cause the regime to falter, with devastating consequences. In the end, the biggest threat to dictators comes not just from the people, but from themselves.

I buy books new and old and cannot resist a browse along even the dingiest charity shop shelves. In an Alnwick back-street I unearthed a fiftieth anniversay edition of Robert Penn Warren's novel of American politics, All the King's Men. Warren was a wise man and his novel is thick with insight, but I doubt that even a man so sagacious could have conjured up a character to match Trump - he would have found the whole thing too fanciful. We are cursed to live in interesting times. So laugh to scorn but remember that what you laugh at is real. 

More cheery stuff to finish. Almost eight years after it debuted I have finally got around to watching the twenty pacy episodes of Dickensian. Pacy and clever, bloody clever. Derivative, of course, almost by definition, but bloody clever. I really enjoyed it. It is on iPlayer. Just when I'm going all free-market I find something that makes me fall in love with the licence fee all over again. How gleefully annoying.

 

Televisual Excrescence

I gave it a chance for two episodes but I'm sorry, I can't be doing with the BBC's new adaptation of Great Expectations. Even the presence of the sainted Olivia Colman cannot rescue this piece of gratuitous vandalism. Yes, Dickens has a lot of darkness and we can perhaps afford, in these days of artistic licence, to spice it up a bit. But the profanity (they swear like me, that is to say, like a trooper) is unnecessary and feels like dramatic self-indulgence. The final straw was the insertion (Ooh aah Mrs) of a sado-masochistic sub-plot. On the whole, what's the word I'm looking for? Got it - crap.