What's Killing Literature

In A Tale of Two Cities a dissipated young English lawyer named Sidney Carton sacrifices his life by switching places with the French aristocrat husband of the woman he loves, thereby losing his head to Madame Guillotine.

You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the movie, you know the line:

“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far greater rest I go to then I have ever known.”

Or so you would have thought. A participant in the online Dickens reading group I belong to proposes the following:

“Since Charles Dickens’ day, psychology has made some progress…

...Isn't it strange that a man could not give up or overcome a destructive habit because of the pleasure he takes in it and yet give up his life for some higher ideal?...

...Of course, allowance must be made for the possibility of true sublimation taking place i.e. in the case at hand substituting physical self-sacrifice for oral pleasurable self-destruction through drinking…"

Huh?

In other words, there was nothing very noble about Carton’s sacrifice. He was simply a masochistic, self-destructive individual who traded long-term self-destruction (booze) for the quick dirty thrill of having his head lopped off. Yes, that is the latest word (evidently) from the hallowed halls of enlightened academia, neo-deconstructionist anti-literature division.

Scratch Sidney Carton from the list of literary heroes.

Too bad, but if he has to go, he has to go. But it does lead me to ask…

Why bother to read the book?

You can find more accurate histories of the French Revolution, Robespierre, and the Terror. Why bother with Dickens’ melodramatic twaddle?

Well, here’s why:

For the past 150 years, readers have found Sidney Carton’s death inspiring, ennobling, and somehow redemptive for both the character and the reader. Dickens somehow leads us to believe that we, too, might be capable of such self-sacrifice for something we believe in or love. A bit naïve, perhaps, but this is what millions of readers since 1859 have always found in A Tale of Two Cities. This is what lifts the spirit when the last page of the novel is finally turned.

It certainly lifted my spirit when I was eleven and stayed awake all night reading the book. Then the unlikely duo of Sidney Carton and Cyrano de Bergerac rose in the heavens as twin constellations in my private childhood galaxy, defining for me the upper reaches of human heroism. Trust me that I have fallen far, far short of that ideal. But these days it seems even children are too wised-up and fashionably cynical to believe in the reality of heroism and self-sacrifice in the first place.

Put another way…what kid is going to sit up all night reading about a sublimating drunk who, in the words of my learned correspondent,

{allows} himself to be trampled upon and humiliated {before} he gives himself up to the punishment he has craved for all his life…” ?

Not this eleven year old.