Did Anyone Else Know that Dickens is Funny?

I was turned off to Dickens early. I read "Great Expectations" in 8th or 9th grade and frankly I didn't get it. I mean, I got it -- class differences, abandonment, unrequited love, old wedding cake...I saw the movie when it came out and I got Ethan Hawke & Gwyneth Paltrow and all those lovely green subway seats...but I didn't get it. I thought it was dull. And besides, I was busy worrying about all kinds of other things, like what exactly I would have said to Kurt Cobain had I met him backstage at a concert and where I could buy black lipstick before Tuesday or whether I could just mix eye shadow and chapstick instead.

Then last year, when I was still waiting to hear back from law schools, two of my best friends bought me "Bleak House" for the holidays. I was apprehensive. It was long. And I feared it would be dull. And that it would lead to a sort of sinking disheartenment with the law -- something I still didn't know very much about -- before I had even started school. So I thanked them and put it on the shelf and went back to reading the New Yorker.

BUT. I finally started it this fall. And it's hysterical. And now I get it -- I get Dickens. He's funny. I mean, and also a great writer, master prose stylist, etc. But just fucking hysterical. And I don't even mind that the butt of the joke is often the British legal system. After all I'm not planning to work in a 19th-century Court of Chancery. If you can't laugh at Chancery, who can you laugh at?

My favorite sections by far are the descriptions of the lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is introduced as follows: "The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences; of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble Mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks, among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school -- a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young -- and wears knee breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes, and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is, that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself."

Just phenomenal. All of which has led me to start making some pretty inane dinner-table conversation with Luke, along the lines of: "Did you know that Dickens was funny?" To which, as a PhD candidate studying the Victorian Novel, he has no choice but to reply: "Yes, literary scholarship has progressed far enough that we can now confirm that Dickens is, in fact, funny." At least, my inanity would deserve such a dry response. Luke is usually too sweet to supply one.

But who cares. I have 800 pages left and I'm excited about it.

Why Didn't Ian McEwan Just Become a Scientist?

Ian McEwan's recent New Yorker story, "The Use of Poetry," is all about a British physics major in the 1960s who seduces his first wife after a week-long crash course in Milton. That it only takes him 7 days of reading before he can seductively quote and converse about the poet fills him with a certain disdain for the humanities. (In case you're wondering, the "use" of poetry is that it helps you meet chicks. That part might be true.)

Of his protagonist, McEwan writes: "His Milton week made him suspect a monstrous bluff. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily in his course...He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thoughts. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superior, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him."

So that was sort of a long quote. But seriously, what is the deal with Ian McEwan's total persistent hang-up about not being a scientist? He is one of the leading fiction writers of his whole generation and he's good and his novels sell and I understand being fascinated by science but his preoccupation seems to go deeper than intellectual curiosity or admiration. Like he has this need to constantly compare the very nature of the humanities and the sciences as if there were some crucial difference or shimmering similarity that, if only he could locate and embody in a character, would set him free forever.

Well, I am tired of this fight. If I had the sciences and the humanities in a room with me right now, I would say exactly what you would say to two-year-old cousins: you are each special in your own way; there is no need to fight over who is more special. No one is more special. Now go play outside.