I bet you never realized A Christmas Carol was in danger, did you? And it's not from people supposedly trying to take "Christ" out of Christmas.
No, the real danger is poor, dead Dickens himself. Journalist Jesse Kornbluth has published a version of Dickens' novella that's been cut by half. Why? He claims Dickens' writing is dated, clotted, overwrought. That last label is the funniest of the three because a story about a notorious miser visited by four ghosts who scare the hell out of him to make him change his life is by definition overwrought.
Kornbluth thinks classics like this Dickens tale won't survive in our short attention span age, and that his version is an improvement. Well, the proof is in the Christmas pudding, right? Let's compare part of the bravura description of Scrooge's cheapness and lack of humanity from the opening pages to what Kornbluth has boiled it down to.
Here's the original:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
And now the rewrite:
For Scrooge was the cheapest of the cheap, so tight-fisted that if the coins in his hand could talk, they would scream. His cheapness was cold and hard and it froze him from the inside out; it shriveled his cheek, made his eyes red and his thin lips blue. He seemed to carry winter around with him.
The updated version reduces forceful description to basic information without any of Dickens' pizazz. The colorful details have been stripped away, and the wonderful rhythms of Dickens' prose have become something leaden and dull. The new version does nothing to make it clear that Scrooge was an epic miser, a historic miser, the Mother of all Misers.
So what led Kornbluth to "rescue" A Christmas Carol? His 8-year-old daughter found the book boring when he read it to her. As a parent myself, I would have waited till my kid was ready, and tried another book. It's not that I think Dickens' story is sacrosanct, it's that it's so wonderfully entertaining as it is. Why chop up a glorious greatcoat to turn it into a scarf?
Kornbluth says that after his edit, "[n]othing important is gone." Really? His version cuts the Dickens out of Dickens.
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Not a huge Dickens fan. Read two of his books in a Victorian Novel course: Great Expectations (good). Bleak House (OK). I have not read acclaimed works like Nicholas Nickelby or Little Dorrit. A couple of summers back I decided I'd read A Tale of Two Cities. Apart from the opening and closing, it seemed a tad tedious. Well, I was wee bit disappointed.
A Christmas Carol is wonderful (but an adult story). Scrooge is not just a character representing moral rehabilitation, but a political one that would resonate today. The new Scrooge would be called a socialist who favored "Obamacare". The old Scrooge...well, dear reader, you can apply your own theories.
Having participated in online communities for the past 27 years, I can say with conviction that increased access to the Internet has increased the need for the precise use of descriptive prose, not decreased it as you suggest. The Internet has done far more to contribute to rapid miscommunication because it is too often treated as a medium for the spoken rather than the written word.
If you are looking for literature measured in tweets, then yes, perhaps Dickens is overwrought. But for those who enjoy the experience of words on a page conjuring whole worlds in the space between your ears, I invite you to join me as I embark on my annual reading of Dickens' little ghost story.
I should disclose that I have not read Mr. Kornbluth's abridgement ("adaptation"? "re-imagining"?) beyond the excerpts posted here and in his own blog.
That said, from the excerpts it appears that the Mr. Magoo adaptation displays more insight into the tale than this abridgement. What's more, there are already several excellent versions geared towards a younger audience, many with illustrations that capture what was cut from the prose, which do a better job retaining the Dickens flair.
Looking at a single sentence, first from Dickens:
He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
and from Kornbluth:
He seemed to carry winter around with him.
How is it that any writer - particularly a journalist - can fail to grasp the vast difference implicit in choosing "He seemed to carry winter" over "He carried his own low temperature..."
The word "winter" all on it's own carries a raft of implications completely different from "low temperature". And where Dickens led the reader to an understanding via a circuitous yet scenic path, Kornbluth offers a concise lecture in a Ben Stein monotone.
Ask any teacher. You can't lecture at today's kids and hold their attention. I'm guessing the 8-year-old didn't sit still for the chopped version any more than the original. And I'm guessing Dickens knew this. Just take a drama class, and give the kid a proper reading...
But I thank Jesse for one of the more provocative posts ever in this site's book section. It's generated some excellent comments on this page and at Jesse's page. By taking such sweeping liberties with the text, he compelled us to articulate what we love about Dickens, and why he still matters. That can only be a good thing.
1)There's the not so subtle implication that literary style doesn't matter, or at the very least that Dickens wasn't a major stylist, which is nonsense. Check out the full version of his most famous opening:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
In full, it loses its cliche quality and becomes a mini-essay on how we view both the past and the present.
2) A Christmas Carol is one of Dickens' SHORTER works. That's what really troubles me.
Maybe we need to start a movement to actually READ the great books. Since it's in vogue, how about Occupy Classics.
The, uh, "abridged" version breaks the time-tested rule of writing - "show, don't tell." Dickens shows. The new one just tells. To me, it says "clunk. clunk. clunk."
Good grief. As Scrooge himself said, "show me some depth of feeling!"