The Makings of a Timeless Classic

In the short story collection, You’ve Got to Read This, John Irving introduces A Christmas Carol by relating a story from a time he spent living with a circus in northwest India. One afternoon he was having tea in the ringmaster’s tent when he was surprised by an overheard snatch of English dialogue from a nearby TV. He at once recognized the voice as that of Jacob Marley’s Ghost, crying out against Scrooge’s compliment on his business skills: “Business! Mankind was my business.” He wandered over to the television to find a troupe of child acrobats seated on rugs, glued to the TV. He was surprised by their fascination, as he writes, “If the principal point of A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge reforms—that he learns ‘how to keep Christmas well’—these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they never would keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.”

Mistaking Irving’s bemused curiosity for unfamiliarity with the tale, one child attempted to explain who the characters were and what was happening. Irving tried to convey his own understanding when he replied to her, “A Christmas Carol.” But the words didn’t seem to mean anything. Then the ringmaster, also not a man who kept Christmas, explained to him, “The children’s favorite ghost story.”

Indeed, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. It is also a Christmas story. It is both and it is more than either of these things, or how else to explain the popularity the tale has achieved globally, with translations extant in every language group and countless adaptations to stage, opera, film and television. Dickens’ novella has been credited with popularizing the expression, “Merry Christmas,” and of course gave us, “Bah! Humbug!” When Thomas Carlyle, a Calvinistic thinker of the times, read A Christmas Carol, he was, rather out-of-character, “seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality,” according to his wife. Indeed, so wide is the influence of this little ghost story that it has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1843.

How to explain it?

It helped that A Christmas Carol appeared in a perfect storm of conditions. Victorian England was undergoing a rejuvenated interest in old Christmas traditions, as well as introducing new traditions like the Christmas Tree, providing fertile soil for this tale to blossom. Furthermore, Dickens was already a popular writer and had a veritable mob of loyal fans who would insure the work was not overlooked. Yet these factors alone would not be enough to catapult the novella into the status it enjoys today as a Timeless Classic. After all, if it was just about Christmas Irving would not have had that charming experience in the circus tent, and none of Dickens works is nearly so ubiquitous, though equally loved by his fans, past and present.

I think it comes down to the fact that this tale is a warning, as Marley tells us in the very first “stave,” which all humans, regardless of culture or era, cannot help but heed. Scrooge’s adventure shows us clearly and believably that the greatest wealth is derived in equal proportion to our capacity for sympathy and generosity, and the cost of not cultivating these gifts is to die unmourned and unloved. Interestingly, Dickens conveys all of this through use of the prototypical hero’s journey.

Joseph Campbell, philosopher and mythologist, popularized the theory that all myths across time and culture share common elements, and in particular he thought hero myths exemplified this “monomyth” tendency. Campbell summarized the cycle of the hero’s journey in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

The infamous Ebenezer Scrooge—a geriatric and antisocial “old sinner”—may seem like a bizarre choice of hero, but the elements of the hero’s journey play out to the letter! If Campbell is correct that all cultures have such stories, then it is no wonder the Hindu children in the circus tent loved the tale as much as Christian children in the West. Like all of the greatest stories, A Christmas Carol speaks to the most basic human fears and desires, and furthermore, it offers hope that even the nastiest members of our species can change.

More Than Words Can Say

It’s been said that writing a story is the art of trying to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This thing which cannot be put into words is often summed up with the pat phrase, “the human condition,” and capturing this condition is the artist’s constant labor. The big, foggy idea of the experience of humanness, in turn, comprises a number of slippery notions such as mortality, love, confusion, joy and, well, a lot of things that are hard to put into words. In fact, the words I just listed don’t mean a whole lot. Words like “love” and “mortality” feel especially worn thin: flimsy. They don’t hold.

So what is it that takes hold of us when we read a compelling story? What makes a story live? Is it the theme of the story? One way of identifying a story's theme is to look for a pattern of bright images throughout the story, pictures that keep cropping up or changing as the climax mounts. These images work their way into our subconscious and we translate the story using the lexicon of our own life experiences to give meaning to the imagery.

Of course, the theme of a story would not impact us as soundly if we did not get wrapped up in the events of the story itself, and the characters that populate it, so these elements must excite our imagination and sympathy. Also, the way a writer chooses to tell a story may be more effective in some cases than in others, either engaging our senses in the story’s world…or not. Ideally: The poetry of the story’s language plays like sunlight over the waters of our senses, illuminating surprising depths.

Honestly, it’s hard to isolate the various aspects of craft that turn a story from a mere collection of words into a work of art. The easy answer would be to say that all of those things I mentioned above (and more) are necessary if a story is to bash us over the head and grab us by the heart—in a good way, of course. Yet, there is no denying that some stories have a more lasting impression than others, and some stories speak to us more loudly than others. If you are following Story Euphoria, chances are, right now you are carrying around inside you precious stories that have shaped your life and the way you see the world.

We are treading murky waters now. We have entered the realms of dream and myth. There are no concise answers, no literary terminology that explains this mystery. Yet this mystery is perhaps the greatest power that can define a “good story”—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—and to impart such a power is no doubt the ultimate ambition of all who create stories.

In one way or another, this mystery is at the heart of all we explore at Story Euphoria. What makes a story come alive for you? What are some of your favorite stories, and how do they express “that which cannot be put into words?” Fortunately, we live in a world brimming with powerful stories, and one such I share with you today. Katherine Mansfield’s The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a tale that sneaks up on you and strikes when you least expect it—delightful, funny, compelling and surprisingly vast for a story told from such limited perspective: Through Josephine and Constantia, Mansfield speaks to us all, placing her finger on that awkward little something inside us so commonly called “the human condition.”

If you want more Mansfield, read from the text I used at Project Gutenberg, or fetch a collection of her stories for yourself from your local library. You can also buy a copy you’ll be sure to return to time and again over the years: