'The Inimitable', who also liked to write under the 18th-century moniker 'Boz'

EIC Brad Fruhauff reminisces on his relationship to the great Victorian novelist.

On midnight, February 7th, 200 years ago, Charles John Huffam was born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. He would grow up to become the most famous and best-selling novelist of his day and arguably one of the finest talents for character and wordplay since Shakespeare.

I tell my students that if they don’t like Dickens there’s something wrong with their souls. I’m only half kidding. How, after all, can you not love a man who had such great love for his characters and for his native tongue? One of my favorite examples of his skill at mixing evocative description with the absurd comes from the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

That Megalosaurus is simply unimaginable in a Thackeray or Trollope or even Joyce (in whom much is imaginable).

In high school, I read an abridged version of Great Expectations and hated it. I knew what a novel was like and this wasn’t it. The writing was verbose, the characters exaggerated, and the angst was completely inaccessible. Later, I discovered a small cadre of friends who similarly disliked it, and it became a point of pride among us that we had “found out” the great Dickens to be an over-rated windbag.

It took eight years for me to give Dickens another chance, and that after I had read through most of the rest of the century’s authors: Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy. I began with Hard Times, which is probably now my least favorite, but at the time it was a revelation: Dickens wasn’t trying to write a novel like any of those other folks. He was reimagining what the novel was, and what it was was a playground for his infinitely flexible imagination.

The quintessential Dickens scene is a meal

Dickens gives us a world of characters who are alive because they are larger than life, and if they are not always fully aware of themselves (few, if any, are at all), they are no less lovable for being caught up in the same egotism that affects us all. More than that, his portrayals teach us to love even the grotesque and bizarre, to appreciate the carnival of life in the midst of our strivings.

More still, and most significantly, I think, for the Christian, he insists on a world infused with moral purpose and even clarity. His villains are punished and his heroes rewarded with a self-consciously fairy-tale consistency. Social causes pervade his novels, but he never gets so bogged down in the brokenness of reality that he can’t simultaneously remind us where grace and beauty shine through.

And he does it all in an ebullient prose that reminds us why we love novels in the first place: their ability to wrap us up in words and convince us that some parts of the chaos of our lives are intelligible, if only for a little while. Dickens’s facility with the English language is a joy all its own, and it’s why I tell my students they need to enjoy the ride.

He wasn’t a perfect man, but what man is? We remember him not as a saint but as an artist who left us with a great gift.

If you haven’t read any Dickens, you might start with Great Expectations (unabridged) or David Copperfield. Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend all rank high among his “five or six masterpieces,” but may be harder to get into until you get a feel for him.

Brad Fruhauff is Editor-in-Chief of Relief. He wrote his dissertation on ethics and genre in the work of Dickens and so has a personal investment in this bicentennial year’s celebrations.

Relief intern Jazz Eisinger plays at spinning her own parables.

Okay, so this title might be a stretch, or at least unnecessarily unpleasant. Never fear – whatever images of fiber-induced vomit you may be entertaining will be much worse than what I’m actually talking about.

Yarn barf, in essence, is the coiled and knotted ball of nastiness that comes out of the middle of the yarn ball. A yarnie (or crafter, if you prefer) will pull out the center to find the end of the ball for a project or to wind the yarn into a more manageable size. However, though the strand was wound into the ball of yarn once, it doesn’t come out as easily all the time. There are often knots, tangles, and even the occasional Gordian knot that befuddles one into believing that the continuous string is out to thwart itself.

What to do? There are three main approaches: patience, skill, and force.

Patience involves simply using the yarn, pulling the strand through the mess until it resolves itself. This is by far the slowest but often the preferred method.

Skill requires a good set of eyes and nimble fingers to untangle the knot. This also takes patience, but also a willingness to loosen the yarn from itself and solve the problem one part at a time.

Finally, brute force is sometimes the only answer. A pair of scissors will alleviate the problem quickly, but also causes a break in the line, which will show up in the final product.

So how does this relate to Christianity?

Simple. As Christians, and even as the Church, we often disagree within ourselves or with God. One person fights with another, and soon others are brought into the fray. Someone fights against God’s will, thinking that their own direction looks better – and only succeeds in creating a bigger mess.

And yet, grace prevails. God is creating a product far greater than the knots or tangles, and he’s been forming the pattern since well before you were born and he’ll continue long after you’re gone. Despite our best efforts to thwart him, he is faithful to untangle our messes and create something beautiful.

Question for Thought:

Does thinking in terms of a creative God inspire or change your perception of him?

Jazz Eisinger is an editorial intern with Relief. She will graduate from Trinity International University this spring with a degree in English.

 Relief intern Jacob Slaughter can’t stop thinking about this “filmmaker’s film.”

“There” says the Mother to her three sons, pointing into the sky as the theme from Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava (Moldau) elegantly guides the viewer through the earliest years of a child’s life. “That’s where God lives.”

When Terence Malick’s film The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival last May, I was excited. Somehow the movie had worked its way into my cultural radar, and I was glad to hear positive commentary on the overall quality of the piece. To my mind Malick, like Cormac McCarthy, is one of those recluse creators who makes exactly what he wants and follows no one’s schedule but his own. Since 1973 he has directed and written only five movies, but these movies include Badlands and The Thin Red Line.

It is understandable why he is not a household name. His movies cannot be passively watched and enjoyed; they demand something which many people nowadays are unable or unwilling to give: attention. Malick’s style of filmmaking is like cinematic poetry. He is a filmmaker’s filmmaker.

Reviews of The Tree of Life exemplify this disconnect between critics and audiences perfectly. Websites that rely on content created by critics rank this film as among the best of the year. Websites that have primarily user-created content show that audience’s opinions are more polarized than I have ever seen. We’ve all said it about some piece of art before, but I think The Tree of Life is a modern example of the old cliché at work, “You either love it or hate it. Nothing in-between.”

I think it is a film better experienced than described, so I will avoid giving an intricate summary or an in-depth analysis of specific symbolism. From my own experience I can simply say that this movie has constantly been on my mind since I first saw it last summer, waiting to be watched again, once I get some time away from mountains of homework.

The movie starts with a quote from Job 38: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” We are introduced to a family in pain, a family experiencing the loss of one of their own. We are given insight into the mind of the Mother as she mourns the passing of a child. We hear the thoughts of the oldest son Jack as he tries to come to terms with the death of one of the people closest to him. This particular death is more than just a human tragedy, it is the cause for a religious depression. As they struggle to understand, they ask the inevitable question:

“Why? Where were You?”

The response? A twenty-minute sequence of the creation of the universe that contains some of the most awe-inspiring images in recent cinematic history.

Yet, that is not the whole response. There comes a sudden shift from the large and cosmic to the subtle and deeply personal history of the family. Through one of the better examples of montage, Malik takes us through the experiences before birth until that point of childhood in which we begin to understand the world on our own.

“There are two ways through life,” the three sons are told, “the way of nature or the way of grace.” As Jack and his two brothers grow up they have these two ways exemplified by their Father and Mother, respectively. This conflicting duality will be a part of Jack’s own journey to understanding the faith of his parents in an attempt to make it his own, and the bulk of the film functions as Jack’s bildungsroman.

The film ends with a vision of the afterlife, a moment of reconciliation between loved ones on a beach in which all that can be seen is the never-ending horizon. The scene makes sense, after all, “That’s where God lives,” as Jack was told earlier.

The last words are uttered by the Mother, “I give him to you. I give you my son.” While the meaning is explicitly an acceptance of her son’s death, I think the Biblical framework allows for one to see a secondary implication: a John 3:16 reassurance of the love of God for not only the world, but for the individual. In light of that Son, the Mother is able to trust her own into the hands of God.

As I said, I’ve just skimmed the surface of what is to be realized throughout The Tree of Life. I’ve barely mentioned any of the symbolism at play throughout the film, but hopefully you are intrigued enough to experience it for yourself. I am willing to admit that I may be inserting aspects of my own biases onto the piece, but you can’t watch The Tree of Life without engaging with the Christian faith. While Malick may not have set out to make “Christian Art,” I cannot think of a better work that portrays the tension between God’s unimaginable immensity and his love and interaction with the individual through the world He created and the people placed in one’s life.

Do yourself a favor: see this film.

Jacob Slaughter is an editorial intern with Relief. He will graduate from Trinity International University this spring with a degree in English.

Issue 5.2

Issue 5.2 is officially printed and on its way! We’ve had our setbacks, as seems inevitable in this business, but we’re really proud of the work we have in this issue. Thanks to all the work by our authors, editors, interns, and especially our techie, Ian Philpot.