Iconic Moments In Literature

A little while ago now I wrote about the single footprint in the sand in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and called it an iconic moment in literature. That’s to say it’s a fictional event that the majority of people, young or old, in the English-speaking world would recognise, whether or not they had read the book. I began to wonder about such moments and idly make a list of them (or at least the ones that occurred to me). What follows is a few of those moments with my own random thoughts about why they should be so lastingly powerful. Please do remind me of others – particularly your favourite others – that I have forgotten.

Oliver Twist Asking for More

If you’ve ever seen a small child having a tantrum it gives you some idea of the immense rage, fear and frustration that children have to curtail in order to be acceptable social beings. There’s a tendency to think of children as small-scale adults whereas in fact their world is highly specific and scarily intense. They’re also designed for survival, and thus strongly motivated to get their needs met. It’s paradoxical, then, that they should have to wait so long before they gain autonomy, their lengthy formative years being spent in total submission to a disproportionately strong parental authority. The experience can leave us, as adults, most in touch with ourselves only when we are being oppressed – hence the success of petty dictators, and the reason why so many of us fall in love with people who treat us badly. But Oliver is precocious and precariously situated. He has no rights, and no loving parents to negotiate for him, but he is very hungry. It’s an act where (as is so often the case in childhood) desperation becomes bravery, and the mismatch between his vulnerability and the aggressive force of authority is acute and painful. Of course Dickens always knew how to seize hold of heartstrings and twist them tight.

The Rape of Clarissa

The thing about letters is that they hold two people apart. To be writing to someone means to be separated from them, and the distance between is full not only of geographical space, but of dreaming space, in which events occur at a spiritual, pure level. The abstract, bodyless love expressed in letters is a very different creature indeed to that lived out in the flesh in close proximity. Small wonder, then, that the rape of Clarissa should collapse so violently the space between the protagonists, should rip through all those polite and carefully written sentiments, should offer itself as an unbearably violent reminder of why life is so dangerous and letter writing so safe. Rape is bad enough in any circumstance, but here it occurs as a multiple catastrophe: not just the violation of a young girl’s innocence, but also the failure of the word’s implicit promise to keep the material world at a distance.

Faust Selling His Soul to the Devil

Well, we all love a good bargain, don’t we? And bargaining is all about procuring the right transaction, negotiating the most mutually satisfactory exchange of goods and services. Anyone who has ever lived with a partner knows all about transaction, in which the outward exchange – I’ll do the washing up if you put out the bins – masks a deeper more significant promise – I’ll trade my hard work for your good will. Now Faust takes this little principle to an extreme that nevertheless underlies all simple surface transactions. I’ll give you my soul if you will make me spectacular. What else is a love relationship? But Faust is more concerned about his career here, and that most elusive, most desirable, most aspirational of all talents – creativity. How far would you go to get the things you long for, and at what point will desire overcome reason? That’s the trajectory we watch Faust follow, in the same way that we track the process of B-list celebrities. And for the seasoned bargain hunters among us, there’s the ultimate concern: does this transaction come with a refund clause?

Madame Bovary’s Suicide

I could equally well be talking about Anna Karenina at this point. It’s all about the death of women who have fallen into the clutches of adultery and the excessive punishment that Western culture has felt it absolutely necessary to inflict upon them for such a transgression. When Flaubert kills off Madame B., he really means it. No more simpering about whether realism is or isn’t a job-lot of shop-soiled clichés, no more tricksy irony; he recounts her death in all its gory, medically correct detail, and trust me, nobody does level-headed violence quite like Flaubert. But why is adultery so costly to women? Particularly given the fact that male adulterers are so often released scot-free into the wilds of married life again. For instance, the movie Fatal Attraction, when it was first screened to test audiences, had Glenn Close commit suicide at the end. This was comprehensively rejected as insufficiently cathartic. So the ending was changed to the slasher-fest we all know so well (can anyone not have seen that scene in the bath?). The studio was delighted with the response this time – men leapt up from their seats screaming at Michael Douglas to kill to bitch. What is going on here? Why does no one consider the man a little bit responsible in all this? One day I will write on the cultural metamorphosis of the sexualised female body, suffice it to say it has always been a repository for projected fantasies and fears, and its representation tells us a lot about the state of the battle between the sexes.

Molly Bloom says Yes in Ulysses

Ok, I have to hold my hands up here – I have never read Ulysses, nor in fact any James Joyce novel. Whenever I look at them my life suddenly seems very short. But I do know Molly says yes, quite a lot, at the end, and perhaps it’s simply an echo of the reader’s ‘yes’ at having finally reached the climax of the narrative, or perhaps it’s just the fact that after 500 pages of scribbledy-hobbeldy-hoying it’s a relief to come across some recognisable English. Poor Joyce, I shouldn’t be mean to him. I’ve often toyed with the thought of getting the book on audio tape, as I imagine it might be much easier to listen to than to read. I love to listen to stories on tape before going to sleep at night, and I do wonder what extraordinary dreams Joyce’s prose might provoke.

The Ghost of Cathy in Wuthering Heights

Talking of fantastic ways to start a novel, I remember quite clearly my hair almost standing on end at the thought of those scrabbling, ghostly hands disturbing the sleep of the narrator. The apparition alone would be enough, in Emily Bronte’s powerfully emotional prose style, to make this incident remarkable. But the ghost of the dead lover is a loaded trope in itself. The presence of ghosts always indicates a remainder, something left over, unresolved. Mothers return to children to impart love and learning that they failed to pass on in life. The ghosts of Christmas past return to Scrooge as an accumulation of the charity he has left undone. And lovers return to try to assuage some of that terrible unfulfilled desire whose object took the shape of one person, and one person alone. But the return of the lover can be threateningly ambivalent. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin – the opposite of love should really be indifference. When the lover returns, is it anger and bitterness and resentment that drives her, as much as benevolence and desire? There is always something left unsaid at the end of a love affair, always confusion and uncertainty and enigmatic pain, and this is further exaggerated if death rather than mortal decision is the cause. The ghost represents all the awful emotions that need to be processed before life can move on again, and the frightened stasis that results when those emotions remain lumpenly indigestible, suspended in time like crystals in saturated solutions.