(Also posted at Street Prophets)
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.
Feeling cheery yet? So begins the beloved tale of Christmas. As a child one of my most treasured gifts was a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol from an aunt. It moved me, as it has moved so many others since its immediate success upon publication just before Christmas in 1843. There have been too many movies to quickly count, and countless stage reenactions, even if one wonders how often the original is actually read. But there is something just a little odd about this story, universally proclaimed to reveal the true meaning of Christmas.
That opening contains the first jarring notes. We don't normally associate Christmas with death, but in naming the observers, Dickens pounds the impression home. We begin in desolation, and Scrooge is embedded in it.
Where is the baby Jesus in this story? Where is the Virgin? The bells? The wise men? Even God appears only as a phrase in a carol. There are no churches.
The absence of all things churchy shouldn't surprise us much in itself. When Dickens gets anywhere near a church, he is usually to be found in the graveyard. But where the Dickens is the spiritual aspect of Christmas to be found in the story? One has the feeling it is there, somewhere.
With such thoughts dancing in my head, I stumbled across a classic. The Scrooge Sutra was originally published by Corax on Ow, my Blog on December 18, 2004, and later reprinted at zenunbound.
Corax, who once haunted dailyKos, provides the answer. Properly seen, A Christmas Carol is an allegory about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
Briefly, because everyone needs to read Corax: The ghosts show Scrooge the truth of suffering, including his own. They also show him the cause of suffering in his own life: the attachment to that which is worthless. A Dickensian version of enlightenment is attained; Scrooge's life will be quite different from now on. His salvation lies in the here and now, in Dickens' version of the Eightfold Path:
He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
Corax's explication must not be seen as the kind of expropriation with which we are all familiar, the classic case perhaps being Orwell, claimed by right, left, and all in between as prophet of their causes. It strikes me rather as a seeing to the heart of things, a direct apprehension.
In fact, Orwell himself has observed of Dickens that a great part of his popularity can be ascribed to the absence of a program to remedy the ills he is forever pointing out. It is not this or that policy he decries, but human nature:
The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature".
............
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a "change of heart" -- that, essentially, is what he is always saying.
Ignorance and Want