Over at The New Republic, Hillary Kelly lashes out at Oprah for choosing Dickens as her next book club reading. While obviously I share some of the shock and awe at Oprah's power, Kelly lets it cloud her judgment, ranting that the average reader will have trouble unpacking "Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms." Huh? Dickens's euphemisms and ironies are often painfully straightforward, and "dialectical stylings" is a phrase that confuses me, even though I just came back from a lunch spent reading Fredric Jameson. My best guess at what she's referencing here is the doubleness of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," but honestly, it's Kelly's thoughts on Dickens, not Dickens's own writings, that are difficult to understand.
It's sad, because Kelly's sense of Oprah's ridiculousness is right, but her reasoning is actually backwards. In her fervor to protect the classics from Oprah's rapacious grasp, she perversely bashes Winfrey for "her sentimentalized view of Dickens," who was, in case anyone forgot, an author of sentimental fiction. His books are chock full of dying orphans, for Pete's--or should I say Little Nell's?--sake. Then Kelly worries about Winfrey's "ignorance of Dickens’s authorial intentions," as though those should be the cornerstone of any reading experience.
Weirdest of all, though, is when Kelly says that Dickens wrote "some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century." In addition to being false by any standard, this claim contributes to the sense that these old books can't be read without some kind of literary guide. On this point, at least, Kelly and Oprah seem to be united: Oprah offers extensive character guides and other paraphernalia for the reading through her website, as though the literature itself is so alien that it can only be approached through some kind of spacesuit-like extra-textual apparatus. In one of the funnier parts of Kelly's piece, she quotes from the Dickens conversation going on at O's website:
A glance at the discussion boards on Oprah’s website confirms my worst fears. “I have read all the print-outs and character materials and the first two pages,” said one reader, referring to supplementary reading guides produced by the Book Club. “The first two pages are laden with political snips and I am trying to grasp what it is saying. I was able to look up cock-lane and figure that out, but where do I go to figure out the innuendos?”If only this person would read the novel, rather than spending time trying to diagram the meaning of its every word. In a weird way, the problem with Oprah's selection is not her decision to approach a canonical classic from a popular standpoint, but her decision to approach a canonical classic as A Canonical Classic. Sentimentalizing Dickens is only appropriate, and finding your "self" in a Victorian novel, while sort of silly, isn't really at odds with what many critics claim (rightly or wrongly) was one of the functions of the novel in the first place--the creation of the reader as a "unique" "individual" subject, etc., etc.
Book clubs, whether Oprah's or not, often plunge into books with minimal context, and that's fine. It's the idea that readers need to tiptoe around the big boys, and approach them with a semblance of historical or scholarly understanding that they can't possibly attain in the time allotted, that makes this whole thing so painful. Oprah and her followers are foreigners to this particular cultural soil, but they have an embarrassingly sincere desire to show that they know how lucky they are to tread on sacred ground, so they work too hard to behave with what they conceive of as humility and cultural respect, nodding knowingly to show that they understand why This Stuff Is Important. A more candidly naive approach, one less fraught with the sense that there's some mystery Oprah & co. need to show they understand, would make the whole affair a lot less ridiculous.
