Jerome Meckier

Bio: Jerome Meckier is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 13 citations.

Why the Man Who Liked Dickens Reads Dickens Instead of Conrad: Waugh's a Handful of Dust

Abstract: Toasting the Immortal Memory at the Dickens Birthday Dinner (1977), Barbara Hardy spoke for many Dickensians and some moderns when she referred to Waugh's use of Dickens in A Handful of Dust as "the strangest invocation of Dickens in modern literature." Tony Last's deplorable fate-having to read the works of Dickens over and over to a madman in the Brazilian jungle-cannot be "a joke against Dickens," Hardy decided, for a complete set of few other novelists "would turn up . .. in a mud hut on the Amazon." 1 In 1934, however, seven years before Edmund Wilson's restorative essay, Dickens was not the household word he once had been or has again become. Dickensians will quickly discern that Waugh caricatures Dickens outrageously and, in places, unfairly. But the joke, hilarious and effective, is definitely against Dickens. Waugh's reaction, like Aldous Huxley's, indicates that the response of modern satirical novelists to Dickens has been mixed. At other times an imitator of Dickens, Waugh puts the works of Boz in Mr. Todd's hut for a very satirical reason: he considers the Inimitable largely responsible for the breakdown of social restraints. This collapse, a consequence of the secularization of life, has resulted in the prevalence of savagery in the modern wasteland. To explicate the joke against Dickens from Waugh's perspective, one must discover why Mr. Todd reads Dickens instead of Conrad. Begun "at the end," A Handful of Dust originates from "The Man Who Liked Dickens," a short story "about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud." Inspiration for the story came during Waugh's visit with "a lonely settler" in Boa Vista, who could easily have taken him prisoner at that stage of his trek through Brazil. After publishing, Waugh "wanted to discover how the prisoner got there." So he re-used the tale as Chapter Six in a novel that contrapuntally compares the civilized man's plight among the primitives of Brazil with prior disservices done to him by "other sorts of savages at home." 2 Absurd events at Chez Todd are based on an autobiographical incident in which Dickens originally played no part. The isolated settler was a half-mad religious enthusiast, aptly named Mr. Christie, not a Dickens fanatic. As Waugh's

The Cloud of Unknowing

Abstract: This chapter reads Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) as efforts to convey masculine identity through meditation on the absence, destruction, or deferral of the masculine call to action. Central male figures in all of these texts have been physically or metaphorically unmanned, leaving within the text a gap of signification and literal elision of plot or expression. Masculine identity in the years following the First World War, this chapter argues, became defined by what is lacking and the certain assault on the sequences implied by procreation, reproduction, and new life that the war engendered.

Modernism, Satire and the Novel

Abstract: In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

Abstract: Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars.Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's.Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view.For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his.Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as "Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, " and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."

Katherine mansfield among the moderns: her impact on virginia woolf, d. h. lawrence, and aldous huxley

Abstract: OF DISSERTATION KATHERINE MANSFIELD AMONG THE MODERNS: HER IMPACT ON VIRGINIA WOOLF, D.H. LAWRENCE AND ALDOUS HUXLEY Katherine Mansfield among the Moderns examines Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with three fellow writers: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, and appraises her impact on their writing. Drawing on the literary and the personal relationships between the aforementioned, and on letters, diaries, and journals, this project traces Mansfield’s interactions with her contemporaries, providing a richer and more dynamic portrait of Mansfield’s place within modernism than usually recognized. Hitherto, critical work has not scrutinized Mansfield in the manner I suggest: attending to representations of her as a character in other’s work, while analyzing the degree to which her influence on the aforementioned authors affected their writing and success. Albeit, her influence extends in vastly different ways, and is affected by gender and nationality. While Woolf’s early foray into Modernism is accelerated by Mansfield’s criticism of her work, several of Woolf’s texts – “Kew Gardens,” Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway – are similar in certain respects to Mansfield’s work – “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.” A repudiation of Mansfield, personally, and a retelling of her work are seen in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl and Women in Love. Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point, contain characterizations of Mansfield that undermine her writing, and her person: both are affected by the mythical misrepresentation of Mansfield, created by Murry after her death, known as the “Cult of Mansfield.” Using Life Writing, this study asserts that Mansfield had impact on the writing of Woolf, Lawrence, and Huxley. Taking into account the many issues that surround the recognition of this, among them: gender politics, colonialism, marginality by genre, and personal relations – these all, to varying degrees, prevented critics from acknowledging that a minor modernist author played a role in the undisputed success of three major authors of the twentieth century.

Color and Light: Huxley's Pathway to Spiritual Reality

Abstract: Unlike modern British writers such as T. S. Eliot and Evelyn, Waugh, Aldous Huxley did not convert to a specific religious community indigenous to Western culture; however, his entire life embraced a consciousness-expanding search for ultimate reality revealed to him through the mystical qualities of color and light. Like Eliot and Waugh, Huxley found himself regarded by many critics as unfaithful to his earlier writing after his conversion to a spiritual faith. Huxley's friend Christopher Isherwood states that Huxley's developing beliefs were "widely represented as the selling-out of a once-brilliant intellect" (Clark 303), and Donald Watt concurs that "in the minds of a majority of critics Huxley was fixed as an entertaining recorder of the frenetic 1920s who later recoiled into an aesthetically suicidal mysticism" (AH 31).(1) More recent critics still tend to divide Huxley's canon into two halves in which Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is sometimes referred to as his "conversion" novel (Bowering 114, Watt AH 19). Although the assumption has been weakening, what many critics mistakenly took to be an abrupt change of direction and attitude in Huxley's writing actually represents a continuation of his search for theological idealism. The writer's steps on the pathway to spiritual reality can be charted -- from his first book of poetry in 1916 to his last novel in 1962 -- through his distinctive use of the imagery of color and light. By 1936 Huxley had already started his troubled spiritual journey from despair toward mystical union with the "pure light of the void." Despite elements of wishful thinking and open doubt in Huxley's life and work, his conscious commitment to the struggle to believe in the Divine Light can be traced as early as 1922 in his first novel, Crome Yellow. Confirmation of Huxley's intentional use of color is summarized in his "Natural History of Visions," a 1959 lecture posing the question, "Why are precious stones precious?" (Human 216). These brightly colored pebbles, says Huxley, are not beautifully harmonized like a work of art or a piece of music; they are single objects which the human mind responds to in an unaccountable way. He states that one reason for our interest can be found in the Phaedo where Socrates speaks about the ideal world of which our world is in a sense a rather bad copy. Socrates says: "In this other earth the colors are much purer and more brilliant than they are down here. The mountains and stones have a richer gloss, a livelier transparency and intensity of hue" (217). Plato writes not merely about a metaphysical idea but also about another inner world which has landscape and beautiful regions of memory, fantasy, imagination, dreams, and-most remote -- "the world of visions" (218). Huxley explains the importance of light and color in this world of visions: This experience of the pure light of the void is a visionary experience of what may be called the highest, the most mystical kind. On a rather lower level the lights seem to be broken up and become, so to speak, incorporated in different objects and persons and figures. It is as though this tremendous white light were somehow refracted through a prism and broken up into different coloured lights. In this lower form of vision we have the intensification of light in some way associated with the story-telling faculty, so that there are visions of great complexity and elaboration in which light plays a tremendous part, but it is not the pure white light of the great theophanies. (228-29) Huxley deduces, therefore, that precious stones are precious because they are objects in the external world -- along with fire, stained glass, fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle, Christmas-tree lights, rainbows, and sunlight -- which most nearly resemble the things that people see in the visionary world (232-35). …