The London Menagerie (Novel synthesis)

The books we read for class appear to be, at first, four remarkably different novels, sharing only longitude and latitude. Dickens’s novel is half journalistic expose, half soap opera. It deals with…well, a billion things – poverty in London, the emotional and financial damage wreaked by bumbling bureaucracy in Chancery Lane, orphans of the court and skeletons in the closet – but it is reasonable to assume that Dickens probably never thought that “all art is quite useless,” as Oscar Wilde would have us believe. Or maybe he wouldn’t – dive under the surface at your own peril. Like him, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway deals with the upper class. But not really. Whereas the plot structure of The Picture of Dorian Gray is subjugated by Wilde’s own aesthetic philosophies, and is stylized to the point that it unravels like a Gothic theatrical parable, Mrs. Dalloway’s plot structure is the medium for Woolf’s own meanderings on existence, closeness, trauma, and is stylized to the point that her stream-of-consciousness, ruminating form becomes an accessory of her aim, a continuum of sensory impressions and thought bubbles. Like Woolf, Zadie Smith is innovative in her use of form, but her novel deals with people on the opposite side of the tracks as Clarissa Dalloway.

What do they all have in common? London.

It is interesting to consider such disparate novels as products and records of the same city. What can they teach us? I’ve given up trying to learn about “London,” because that’s simply a term applied to a plot of land. So I think the correlation between the four novels is rather broad and simple, but it has to be that way, because it all rises to that. They are documents, records, of a place where the world congregates for afternoon tea. Each one is a cabinet into which are placed a few representatives plucked from the vast menagerie that is known as London. The problems of Jo and Esther are not the problems of Clarissa; and yet, are they not both problems of London? The realism of Dickens, the satire of Oscar Wilde, the meditative prose of Virginia Woolf, the irreverent humor and self-reflection of Zadie Smith are the same elementally. They all add to that menagerie.

Paul Tillich said that "God does not exist. He is…beyond essence and existence.” In a way, you can substitute the word for London for God. And maybe go to Hell…anyway, the issue is timelessness (or being outside of time) and the irreducibility of the inconceivable. A spiritual presence may exist in one way for you, but never the same way to anybody else. Same with London. It is the personal experience of each character, the goals of each author, the forms applied, the modes of publication – everything went into the writing and publication of the novels, and everything that happened in London between then and now.

Which is where we come in. Our reading of these documents (historical, literary) helps define London for each of us, just as the reading of Dickens informed Smith about a London that is impossible to encounter. We can’t know Smith’s London, though she’s implanted somewhere in that plot of land, but reading her – and Dickens, Woolf, and Wilde – informs us of that London, of a point of view and set of circumstances that are entirely unique. Pieces of the menagerie – we picked them up, arranged them, and then walked through them.