I've been reading Bleak House at intervals for twenty years now. The first time it was for a college course on Victorian literature--every intervening time it was for work--and now, with great pleasure, I am finally reading it, bit by bit, along with other things, for myself. It's a great book and can sustain lots of readings, and it grows with you over time. That's if you can stomach Dickens -- which I know a great many people cannot. If you can't stomach Dickens but you want a novel that will sustain many readings over the years and will grow with you all the while, try Middlemarch. And if you are lucky enough to like both Dickens and Eliot--more power to you. Read them both, over and over again.

One of the pleasures of Dickens, for me, is how he captures patterns of human behavior--especially the absurd ones--so definitively, and often with such a combination of sympathy and satire, that he continually pops up in one's mind as one goes about the day, studying human behavior (I don't know about you, but I often feel as though the real thing I am doing all day long, whether I am working or watching TV or reading or running errands, is studying human behavior; this was a habit I developed in earnest during my year teaching boarding school, where there were a full seven faculty meetings per week. Such was the assault on one's sense of the rational that there was no way to cope but to begin to study, scrutinize, wonder, and learn. The habit has stayed with me ever since). Dickens often gets slammed for his poor characterization. But such criticisms tend to arise from the mistaken assumption that he is a realist and should be held to the standards of psychological realism that his contemporaries--Eliot, Trollope, the Brontes--were devising. Dickens was not a realist. He was fabulist whose subject was everyday London reality--and his style of characterization follows from that. He drew caricatures, quite deliberately, and with moralistic intent; sometimes they drip with sentiment and sometimes they reek of snideness, but they all tend to work toward a message he wants to send, and they all have at their heart a point he wants to make about the various types of human frailty, cruelty, weakness, and goodness. The key word there is "types." And the trick to his brilliance is that he renders his types in an utterly memorable, entirely idiosyncratic and unique way. If his characters are not individuals, his characterization of their typicality is a virtuoso performance (Dickens knew this--it's why he liked to sign himself "The Inimitable").

Anyway. This morning, I happened across this story about a college debate coach who lost it so completely at a competition last spring that he not only got into a cursing match with a judge, but jumped around while yelling shrilly and then, when words failed him, actually mooned his interlocutor (perhaps because the hostile display of one's buttocks makes a statement beyond debate?).

Don't miss the video:

Fort Hays State University is considering canning the mooner (no word on whether anyone is defending his academic freedom); the judge who got in the cursing match with him, who did not drop her pants but who did match him expletive for expletive and decibel for decibel, does not seem to be up for similar punishment. I guess Pittsburgh State, where she teaches, has a more expansive concept of academic freedom than Fort Hays. Or, perhaps, there is some fine print somewhere in the AAUP documents on academic freedom stipulating that professorial freedom of expression ends where the panty line begins.

Be that as it may, while the debates about punishment rage, I find myself thinking of Bleak House--specifically of Mr. Turveydrop, the novel's resident "model of deportment." Mr. Turveydrop is so perfect in his manners, so pristine in his grooming, and so cultivated in his taste that he has no time for anything but maintaining the perfection of his deportment. He is thus one of the novel's many leechlike characters who make their names--and evade their responsibilities--by cultivating an image of perfection so profound that they are somehow exempted from the rules that apply to others (Mr. Skimpole and Mrs. Jellyby are other examples).

Dickens devotes an entire chapter to Deportment, and it is a treat to revisit it in the context of our lunar debater. Meet Mr. Turveydrop, a "gentleman" who is "celebrated almost everywhere for his deportment," who is the owner of a dancing academy, but who leaves the actual work to his submissive son, Prince:

I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at the corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows. In the same house there were also established, as I gathered from the plates on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there was, certainly, no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist. On the plate which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, last night, for a concert.

We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once, when it was anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's business to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great room, which was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a skylight. It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms along the walls, and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with painted lyres and little cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed to be shedding their old-fashioned drops as other branches might shed autumn leaves. Several young lady pupils, ranging from thirteen or fourteen years of age to two or three and twenty, were assembled; and I was looking among them for their instructor when Caddy, pinching my arm, repeated the ceremony of introduction. "Miss Summerson, Mr. Prince Turveydrop!"

I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance with flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends all round his head. He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at school a kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same hand. His little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a little innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed to me in an amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me, that I received the impression that he was like his mother and that his mother had not been much considered or well used.

"I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low to me. "I began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past the usual time, that Miss Jellyby was not coming."

"I beg you will have the goodness to attribute that to me, who have detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I.

"Oh, dear!" said he.

"And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause of any more delay."

With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who, being well used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an old lady of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the class and who was very indignant with Peepy's boots. Prince Turveydrop then tinkled the strings of his kit with his fingers, and the young ladies stood up to dance. Just then there appeared from a side-door old Mr. Turveydrop, in the full lustre of his deportment.

He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though be must inevitably double up if it were cast loose. He had under his arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves with which he flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered, round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment.

"Father! A visitor. Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson."

"Distinguished," said Mr. Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's presence." As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes.