English Literature The Holly-Tree Inn, "The Guest" Charles Dickens
Bayan Al Momani
The best book to read is the one that makes us think, it is the idea that Harper Lee put about choosing the right books. The best book is also the one that can make us think of its ability to adjust and adapt to different times and places and even different cultures. Language is the tool that makes such thing possible, despite different languages which suggest different cultures, understanding the elements provided in a book can circulate this book worldwide. As readers we are to think of the books we read in two ways: first, see the ideas that the writer is trying to present and understand his point of view. Second, to think of these ideas more thoroughly and then to decide if there are more ideas that are there waiting for us to discover. Each reader is going to tackle the book he is reading from his own perspectives and see if its theme is flexible and can be presented to his own culture and if not so, it is then to understand the writer's culture. Symbolism can be a perfect tool to present and understand ideas; Charles Dickins' The Holly-Tree Inn "The Guest" is the most appropriate example. The purpose of language is to communicate, whether with others by talking and writing or with ourselves by thinking. The relationship of language to thought has generated a great deal of speculation. At one extreme are those who believe language is merely clothing for thought, which is quiet independent of form we use to express it. At the other extreme are those who believe that thought is merely suppressed language and that when we are thinking we are just talking under our breath. The truth is probably somewhere between those two extremes. Some, though not all, of the mental activities we identify as "thought" are linguistic in nature. It is certainly true that until we put our ideas into words they are likely to remain vague, inchoate, and uncertain. If we think- some of the time- in language, then presumably the language we speak must influence the way we think about the world and perhaps even the way we perceive it.1
1. the origins and Development of The English Language. Thomas Pyle, John Algeo, 3rd Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanvich, Publishe rs. P.21
Language has infected us with a kind of cerebral schizophrenia. We constantly deal with the world on two levels: the level of actual objects, thoughts, and perceptions and the level of names of objects, thoughts, and perceptions. That is, we perceive reality on the one hand and talk about it on the other.2 Most successful stories are characterized by compression. The writer's aim is to say as much as possible as briefly as possible. This means that nothing is wasted and that each word and detail are chosen for maximum effectiveness. Good writers achieve compression by exercising a rigid selectivity. They choose the details and incidents that contribute most the meaning they are after; they omit those whose usefulness is minimal. One contributory character resource of the writer for gaining compression is symbol. It may increase the explosive force of a story, but demands awareness and maturity on the part of the reader. A literary symbol is something that means more than what it is. It is an object, a person, a situation, an action, or some other item that has a literal meaning in the story but suggests or represents other meanings as well. A very simple illustration is to be found in name symbolism. More important than name symbolism is the symbolic use of objects and actions. In some stories these symbols will fit so naturally into the literal context that their symbolic value will not at first be apparent except to the most perceptive reader. In other stories with less realistic surface, they will be so central and so obvious that they will demand symbolical interpretation. In the first kind of story the symbols reinforce and add to the meaning. In the second kind of story they carry the meaning.3 The ability to recognize and identify symbols requires perception and tact. To be called a symbol, an item must suggest a meaning different in kind from its literal meaning: a symbol is something more than the representative of a class or type. Also a symbol may have more than one meaning. It may suggest a cluster of meanings. The area of possible meanings is always controlled by the context.4 So, what about the Holly-Tree Inn and symbolism, with all its elements of time and setting the story does carry more than it implies, and for me as a reader I can think of more as long as my observations are derived from the story itself. Melissa Klimaszewski says in the story's introduction that the thematic resonances between frame and the inset stories make the Holly-Tree Inn a place full of symbolic value in the narrator's individual family but also in the broader national vision of mid-nineteenth- century Englishness, which insisted upon and 2. An Introduction to Language, Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman. 3rd Edition holt-Saunders International Editions. 3. Literature Structure, Sound, and Sense, Laurence Perrine, 4th Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. P. 196-7 4. Literature Structure. P. 200-1
celebrated the capacity of an English Holly-Tree to be spread 'all over the world'. The Guest in his final remarks, the landlord, and the Poor Pensioner demonstrate the difficulty of balancing the rewards and the perils of the colonial endeavors whose existence testified to the hubris of the colonial project itself.5 The Holly-Tree Inn, has a name that it is Holly which contradicts the fact that it is an Inn, it was clever to have the name written in such way. The narrator who was travelling during the Christmas season when he heard the name of the Inn "upon my word, I believe," said I apologetically to the guard and coachman, "that I must stop here.'' He was attracted to the name with its spiritual connotation along with the purity of the setting. He kept mentioning the snow," and it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing‌ in the morning I found that it was snowing still." He mentioned this almost three times, and gave us the impression that he was annoyed by it but going through the story one understands that he was referring to the spiritual symbolic nature represented by the snow, and its excessive fall suggested his feelings towards himself as he said at the beginning of the story, " I have kept a secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose it. But, I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I have never breathed until now." The heavily falling snow was telling his secret of innocence that he felt that it was a burden, a point of weakness in this world, a naturally bashful man and the nature of the snow. In the Holly-Tree Inn he goes back in memory to his early childhood and his first acknowledgement of Inns or rather the real world and the first attempts to change the color of the snow. "My first impression of an Inn, dated from the Nursery," Dickens considered early childhood as a starting point of everything. "A sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline face, and a green gown, whose specialty was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years,‌when the visitor had fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a lamp in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and would make him into pies. He is not insensible to the stings of conscience, for he never went to sleep without being heard to mutter, "Too much pepper!" His bed time stories were about crime mostly in Inns rather than the usual fairytales. Dickens is referring to the kind of education that one gets in his childhood from the people around him that would have certain impact on one's personality.
5. The Holly-Tree Inn, Charles Dickens. Hesperus Classics. Introduction.
The second story was about house breaking, "in the pursuit of which art he had had his right ear chopped off one night as he was burglariously getting in at a window, by a brave and a lovely servant maid." The aquiline-nosed woman was always mysteriously implied that this maid is to be herself. The reader sometimes gets the impression that these observations, about his storyteller, were made by Charlie the narrator at that time when he was a little child, as his kind of character as someone, who took things deep down than accepting what was on the surface would shed some light on such conclusion. He came to realize "that this same narrator, who had Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own experience." A Ghoulish storyteller, a Ghoulish appearance-to a child-, Ghoulish stories, but again is it not a Ghoulish world? I would not say that such description fits the world at that time, now it is Ghoulish by all means. Ghoulish pleasure is a terrifying thought to feel, the narrator felt it when he was being taught how to face the world, taught to be afraid, taught what to do and what not to do, and where to go. Ghouls are humans; they are not only those ugly creatures in fairytales. But what he found ironic was "within her own experience", although such ridiculous idea of "her experience" was one sound teaching her, and that knowledge is not gained by spoon feeding it is always by applying it into practice that would enable one to check and double check everything, then one can use the term "one's own experience." Inns are symbolic they have reference to everything we are to face in the real world. Another terrifying story and again it took place in an Inn. All her stories were about Inns. So when he grew up he had his own stories, but this time some of these stories were authentic from his own experience. He made Inns his own concern to see and check whether things he learned about them were real or not. He had his own stories about Inns, for instance Roadside Inn and the Landlord who was accused for killing travelers and was hanged for it, and years later the ostler owned the deed. Also a story of another Inn in the Cathedral town where he went to school, "it was in this Inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight." Things that he was encountering were almost close to the Ghoulish background from his childhood. "To return to the Holly-Tree Inn ‌I resumed my Inn remembrances," this time the stories are different. He was like a tourist who did travel to the Inns he was talking about, this time it was his "own experience." There was a good Inn down in Wiltshire and a little Inn in Switzerland with a story of a young man belonging to this Inn, who had disappeared eight weeks before, and was supposed to have had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone
for a solider. Also he passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where he was haunted by a ghost of a tremendous pie. All these memories came back to him because "the Holly-Tree Inn was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness." Once he passed a night at an Inn, in a picturesque old town on the Welch border, then to the Highland Inn and the Anglers' Inns of England. The sense of a person who was enjoying his travels and observations of these Inns, despite all the Ghoulish background he had about them, became quite obvious. "I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs‌ next, to the provincial Inns of France, with the great church tower rising above the courtyard." "Away I went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all dirty clothes in the house are always lying in your ante-room; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter." "So, to the close little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants, and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air, so, to the immense fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he skims the corner; the grip of the watery odors on one particular little bit of the bridge of your nose; and the great bell of St Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight." The restless Inns upon the Rhine, and other German Inns, to the Inns of America with their four hundred beds a piece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every day." Dickens in the Holly-Tree Inn, "The Guest" stated the basic elements to overcome inherent bashfulness, or even acquired from the kind of early childhood Ghoulish teaching although sometimes it is justified. Sometimes they are Ghoulish incidents, or experiences or even people, Melisa Klimaszewski wrote in the Introduction that "Charlie, or The Guest experiences the challenges of narrative compilation in a manner that resembles the ordeals his creator, Charles Dickens, faced." The world is changing and most of the time there is a kind of imprisonment imposed on us, but we can keep moving and still keep a sense of innocence along with us, such innocence can sometimes be a burden just like the snow "that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all night, and that I was snowed up."
The world is on guard to make one
feel that this part of innocence or purity is definitely a point of weakness that can be considered for attack. Dickens provided the armor to face the world and shield oneself through considering the following elements are, first of all by seeking out, then by listening to, then by remembering and writing down. "Could I, I asked myself, so far overcome my retiring nature as to do so? I could. I would. I did." I believe that he will always stay bashful, but he managed to control it and deal with it. He did it right from the beginning when he decided to have his own experience, it is not just
Inns things are more than that. Inns symbolize everything in life that might make us prisoners that can panic us to the edge of questioning ourselves, "what was I to do? What was to become of me?" just like Charlie. So when to think of the perfect short story with a writer that excelled in saying as much as possible as briefly as possible, then it is "The Holly-Tree Inn," "The Guest" and Charles Dickens.
References: •
Dickens, Charles. The Holly-Tree Inn. Hesperus Press Limited.
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Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language. Third Edition, Holt-Saunders International Editions.
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Perrine, Laurence. Literature Structure, Sound, and Sense. Fourth Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers.
•
Pyle, Thomas, John Algeo.
The Origins and Development of The English
Language. Third Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers.