What the Dickens? Ask Teddy Boy Locsin

Charles Dickens, whose 200th birthday we mark on Feb. 7, started out as a journalist and went on to write novels that described social conditions in 19th-century England. His books have never been out of print, most of them have been adapted for the screen, and he remains one of the best-loved authors in the English language. He created some of the most vivid, unforgettable characters in literature — people who walked right off the page and onto the streets, and not just in London but everywhere. Once dismissed as caricatures, they have turned out to be archetypes.

Dickens is a writer of his time, but also timeless — or is it just that people have not changed much since his novels were written, despite the technological trappings? What is it with Dickens? Why do his novels continue to delight and enlighten? For answers we turned to a Dickens fan, the caustic critic Teddy Boy Locsin.

PHILIPPINE STAR: Why does Dickens still matter?

TEDDY BOY LOCSIN: Dickens matters because he can still tell a good story, almost as good as Walter Scott but in English we can easily absorb (the Scottishisms, there is no such word, are maddening). The thing is that Dickens tells a story by simply pulling out its several threads — not trying to compress the language or be clever, but just telling it with as many particulars as the page will bear, but never losing his or our hold on the narrative. Others try too hard to do other, more artistic things and so fail.

Any author who can still tell a good story matters today, like Tolstoy or Coetzee when he did The Master of Petersburg, but not so much when he did a three-layer-cake-type novel about an aging priapic author, a randy financial consultant, and a hot Filipina. Or Joseph Conrad, whom I keep to myself because one day I shall purchase a vessel, load it with tradable cargo, and sail south to the islands...

What are your favorite Dickenses?

I do not like A Tale of Two Cities because it is the one Dickens novel, aside from A Christmas Carol, that everyone’s read, and I resolved as a young boy to sneer at the popular taste, haughtily confining myself to Nicholas Nickleby (boring) and all the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I openly detested Oliver Twist (though I secretly enjoyed it). I openly liked Great Expectations (also A Tale of Two Cities, to be honest, but incognito) and David Copperfield, which is the model for anyone who has no life but feels compelled to write an autobiography. From “I am born…” it just pulls you along relentlessly. But of that genre, Moby Dick is unequalled.

I forced myself to like, nay, love Pickwick Papers because my father shouted at me that it is a comic masterpiece that only a dolt won’t be in stitches over. (God, I have led a very tense life.)

My favorites are Bleak House because it is unrelievedly bleak (It seemed like it was written by Wilkie Collins) and masterfully so. I remember the bleakness, which I was very much into. You had to read this novel, about the victim-clients of Jarndyce & Jarndyce, the solicitors in charge of an endlessly embattled estate, if you took law at Harvard because exam questions would be framed in the context of its plot (like The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James, whose plot details you should have mastered or you wouldn’t be able to tease out the Corporation Law question).

Then there is the greatest sad novel ever written, Dombey & Son, which is about Dombey whose entrepreneurial ambitions must be dashed ironically on the feeble rock of a too-sensitive and febrile son and heir, so endearing that... Well, I have forgotten the story, but this one I recall not in my mind but in my chest. The book felt from start to finish like my heart was being gently but relentlessly pulled, stretched out of my chest until it popped out at the end and I cried without achieving any sense of completion in my grief.

Twenty years later Alexander Solzhenitsyn just happened to mention that he thought Dombey & Son the greatest novel ever written, an opinion shared by no one else but me, lucky him. Dombey’s son, Paul I think, is somewhat like Hanno Buddenbrook, the sole feeble heir of the Hanseatic business house in Thomas Mann, but about Hanno you couldn’t care less. He was tiresomely tired and would eventually die, as did Dombey’s son.

If Dickens were alive and Pinoy, what would he be writing about today?

Definitely not about the present administration as even Dickens’ comic characters had wit or were witless but in a funny way. Not about the Satanic mills of industry where child labor is exploited, because we have no mills to speak of and our poorest children are sexy-dancing on Willing Willie. Not about heirs and heiresses because, strictly speaking, there are only one or two of those, their lives aren’t the least bit interesting, and if anything they are such (expletive deleted) as people that they should be victimized but are not.

Dickens couldn’t write about fishing suicides or mugged victims out of the Pasig, as in Our Mutual Friend, because even the most destitute and desperate wouldn’t work the Pasig today, the Thames being filthy in its own day notwithstanding. So I think if Dickens were alive today, he would be Vikram Seth writing about India where all that industrial misery exists.

Which Dickens do you recommend for beginners?

Begin at the top of the list, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectorations — oh, wait, that is about the impeachment trial. Notice I do not mention Dombey & Son. That is because that book is only for me and, yeah, Solzhenitsyn.