DICKENS

Fed up with Dickens

 

Weihnachten is over; today is Christmas’s day, tomorrow Boxing Day, hieri or yesterday Christmas’s eve. I am greying, getting old, dear friend, but young is my spirit, the spirit of Christmas present the spirit of Christmas past… What future ahead’?

 Nationalism is the last refuge of the rascal, according to Dr. Johnson. Now vagrants, impostors, scoundrels are at large and eat and drink everywhere. Like Arturo Mas and his cronies. They are snatching from us Spaniards the dinning table. Nos estan quitando el comedero, chiquitos. ¿Tú cómo lo ves?

At that respect all Dickens proclaimed Englishness with round vowels, pinkness and pettiness, a chip on the shoulder, certain mistrust for foreigners. But his books as solid as the rock of Gibraltar, solace of many, become a kind of feast of British patriotism, but in a commercial version. His genius converted the old roman Saturnalia, the feats of the undefeated sun into profit. Money, money, money. The sweet smell of currency matters. Look after the tanner’s cause the pounds look after themselves. Money, money, money. The rest is humbug.

I remember one chilly and brief – sunset very early afternoon- entering onto a church in Chelsea on Christmas Eve for vespers. A parson in the altar with garments like the Roman Catholic since it was an Anglican High Church recited hymns reading from the Prayer Book with a voice monotonous, allaying pain and fatigue. One old lady dressed in a hat and me were the only members of the congregation.  Mr Dickens also was, I figured, there lying in state at that funeral Mass of Xmas with his long frock, his hirsute chin beard his deep and supercilious regard and the wave like a coronet of his receding hair. He gave us a Christmas lesson and carols full of sentimentality and moralina.

 We heard the knoll for a civilization. Time past Outside Santa Klaus en passant sitting in his sledge singing jingle bells. Regent Street appeared full of last minute Xmas shoppers but they were locals. I saw yesterday the same Rush hour via Sky News.

The same frenzy than forty years ago but among them there were hardly any Whites. All of them were aliens from overseas, Asian, Chinese, Negroes, a real multitude since England is as overcrowded as ever but the UK is going to have an ethnical problem. And that is out of the reach for the famous English writer. Charles Dickens dealt on many a book of the ethical problems caused by the industrial revolution.

Baodicea has ceased to be blond and nacre. The mother-of –pearls of nations is pearl no more. What happened to my English roses?

My Xmas present has little to do with my Christmas past…Scrooge, usurer. Money lending, today as in the old day and there is Bolin and Guido’s crooking noses, baldness, tax inspectors. Calvinism because life is profit humbug… little tiny Tim… money lender Ebenezer, The Griper. A Jack the Ripper of the underdog… no time for soppiness.

Dickens is a faded old portrait of those old London days with his goat beard and his rising pen to make a point… great expectations and nothing happened in those imperial days. Dickens like Christmas is a bit on an anticlimax.

 You just jumped to the double decked bus in Holborn you hear the voice of the woman ticket collector wearing trousers the bonnet of London transport big smile and a voice thin as a lark fresh her face as a cucumber… tickets please, where are you gong love?… Highgate cemetery. I think you tool the wrong bus. You don’t want to visit the tomb of Marx do you?

But I looked at the lady conductor: her trousers seemed worn out too many ups and down the snail staircase of the omnibus, her lips a perennial smile on a haggard face, and a constant Woodbine… those days you could smoke in the public transport and all of us were chained smokers an here we are keeping cancer at bay.

 Some of them were friendly other looked inimical like the back if bus. Tickets collectors moved through the streets of London over the hood of the double decked bus chirping as larks. They remainder me of the battle of Britain and a world at war widows and girl friends of the soldiers and sailors at sea… Trümmer frauen und Trimmer Literature because II W.W brought many casualties too many men died in the trenches.

Europe not America was the big scenario of the confrontation. A new era sprang and Baodicea took the axe and speeded her chart. Put a spike in Baodicea´s wheel. Women job the labour market. England became suffragist as they ceased as cooks in the kitchen, no children no church. Three big C and three big questions. They started to have a room of their own. Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? I do not want to breed like a rabbit they said. Free love precompiled had a stumbling block in the old morals. A room of my own a body of my own.  I am my own boss of myself. Do as you please. Abortion? When I feel like it.

The motto this is a mens world evolved upside down. Nos hemos puesto la camisa del revés. It was the other way round. Inverted cross-subverted values upturned todo está patas arriba. Subversive attitudes. Men developed a complex and it was the complex of the eunuch. No patriarchs any more just mere drones of the beehive. Sluggard and idle cuckolds, the wife of Bath laughed ant the gay midwives of Windsor gossiped… we are women and we are burrows taking good husbandry to the gallows. Riñen las comadres y dicen las verdades. Más va en la comadre que en lo que pare. Life became a bit unbearable in a continuous Gossip’s Thursday (jueves de comadres) or the constant eve of Shrove Tuesday. Todos los dias es carnaval and every Wednesday mere ash. Memento homo quia pulvis es. De un polvo viniste y a un polvo vendrás. Ellas tomaron la delantera. Ahora tienen la sartén por el mango. But Dickens was a great big bore. I could not stand his copious and voluminous books redundant in periphrasis. A periphrastic author prone to rhetoric and understatements he was. That is what the British like: to be clever with words. Masters of the double meaning.

He was the herald of the industrial revolution. As such he does not write. He preaches. The delegate of the shopping centre, the penny novel, children working 16 hours down the pit for meagre wages, the malls, the Noel Tree, a pretext to banal and Saturnalia.

 Stuff yourself with turkey and pudding and put your sweet memories in the oven, his Christmas spirit presents a programme of the capitalist idea in triumph. Money, money. Life is business. He deprived the 25^th December of its authenticity projecting Xmas as big commerce tinted with a soft and lubricous sentimentality. The Christ mass became a mess, then. I did not digest ever a book like a Tale of two cities, nearly thousand pages of thick prose

 A shoddy writer somewhat declamatory and lachrymatory he killed the golden eggs hen and he died exhausted. He is unpalatable and indigestive novelist nowadays. Yes, I am fed up with Dickens, Es un poco pavisoso como esos críticos que escriben en el Cultural del País o del ABC. ¿Qué pretenden demostrarnos con tanto incienso. Que saben inglés y orgullosos de su grado en anglística lo pasean por la habitación pero estos majaderos saben poco inglés y se expresan en un mal español. I am fed up with Dickens whatever you say.

28/12/2012