The Problems of Fictional Theater

The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment Of The Novels by Robert Garis. Oxford University Press, $5.60.

What Mr. Garis has to say about Dickens in this remarkable book is comparatively easy to report. Though he offers detailed comments on, “readings” of, five novels in particular, he is mostly concerned with the more general problem of how we are to swallow Dickens’ whole approach to his reader and his subject matter. We resist and distrust that approach, Mr. Garis argues, for unconscious and deeply moral reasons: because it differs so sharply from the approach of Dickens’ great contemporaries in the novel (Mr. Garis takes his examples from George Eliot and Tolstoy most often)—an approach which expresses, even in its technical devices, some of the deepest values of our society: disinterestedness, generosity of mind, moral intelligence, the granting of freedom to those we love. Dickens’ methods of characterization and plot-management, his bravura of style, his insistent interposition of himself between his audience and his story, his lack of interest in the inner life of his characters: all this we instinctively judge to be incompatible with seriousness in art. We may enjoy his writing as humor, which we instinctively exempt from the usual laws of critical response—but we can’t take it as seriously as we do even comedy of the traditional kind (for instance, The Way of the World). At the same time, we are bound to acknowledge in Dickens an extraordinary range and purity of verbal talent—a genius for verbal expression, as Dr. Leavis puts it—at the service of an extraordinary vitality, generosity, and keenness of mind.