'Be More Alice!' the Guardian's culture section implores us today, explaining how literary characters from novels such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway can (presumably retroactively at this point) help us navigate our way through lockdown.
Yeeeah, that's not a bad idea - but how many people will find the fortitude of Charlotte Brontë's heroine, who accepts an emotional void because previous experience has taught her the value of love? Or that of the eponymous character in Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, who resigns herself to a future she never imagined because the wisdom that comes with age has allowed her to cast off the expectations of youth and embrace new possibilities? And as for the little girl who followed a rabbit down a hole, we're already living in a world where we're expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast and words are constantly changing their meaning at the behest of whoever's using them at any given moment, so I'm not sure there's a great deal she can teach us, either.
Let's face it, in a world where most of us are under virtual house arrest, mental health is on the wane and the only people out protesting are more interested in tilting at windmills than addressing actual problems, the only literary characters any of us can associate with right now are Lady Deadlock in Dickens' Bleak House, staring out of the rain-streaked window of her country house and reflecting on the callousness of a society founded on stifling behavioural mores; Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, whose intellect and compassion are at odds with a world where neither of those virtues apply, isolating him in madness and despair; and, last but not least, the narrator of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, whose entire existence revolves around going to bed early and conjuring up remembrances of people and places from a past life that now exist purely in the extratemporal realm of memory. These may be tragic characters, but through them we can see parallels to our current physical circumstances and socio-cultural mindset. Unlike the Guardian's choices, which essentially encourage us to be good little girls and boys, Myshkin and co. get us to ask the sort of questions lockdown enthusiasts and people who refuse to read Dr. Seuss to their kids anymore would rather not hear.
'Course, I could be barking up the wrong trouser leg entirely, but it's something to think about next time you're stood at the checkout with a soggy cloth on your face.
