Going on with my reflections on A Christmas Carol. 

Marley’s Ghost. In the beginning, when the narrator was making sure we understood – and making sure we knew that Scrooge understood – that Marley was dead, he invokes the comparison with Hamlet’s father. (I think it was great how much Dickens could assume his readers knew both of Shakespeare and the Bible – literature as a bond of culture. The debunkers hated this culture and thus sought to destroy the bonds that kept it together. If they had limited themselves to destroying what blinded men to its dark side, I would have been fine with that. But they threw the baby out with the dirty bath water.) Both spirits return from some dark place of the soul. But Hamlet’s father returns to demand revenge following primitive honor codes; thus, he may have returned from Hell. Marley returns to do Scrooge good, after somehow – makes no sense in a way – intervening on Scrooge’s behalf. No good can exist in Hell; if a soul cares for another soul, then that soul is not damned. Therefore, wherever Marley’s spirit is – Purgatory, I assume, though not Dante’s – it is not Hell.

    But the most interesting connection with this scene in Hamlet is metaphysical. After seeing the ghost of his father, Hamlet exclaims to the more worldly Horatio – who studies philosophy, I think: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy [science].” This is just as basic as the question – formulated by Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” How one stands to Hamlet’s exclamatory assertion determines one’s life. Or if you are not reflective, your life determines how you stand to this assertion. Obviously, our intellects are not infinite. We are vastly more aware of what is on the TV screen than a dog, for example, but the dog probably can’t even express the idea of a difference. If angels exist, we would be to them a bit like the dogs are to us. We can’t access what is beyond our intellects, senses, and emotional life, so if there is anything beyond it, we can’t know it. Perhaps we can hope, dream, or make myths about it through our imagination and our hearts. I sometimes wonder whether some music connects us with something higher. I even fantasize that Bach was a fallen angel.

    If you believe like Hamlet, then your world is big. You can’t know it all. The narrator of A Christmas Carol puts us directly in touch with this bigger world – which is unseen except in sublime moments. While in the grip of the story, we don’t question its reality. The characters that live in this real, bigger world, the one we can’t really know, are the ones who understand Christmas and love it. Scrooge’s nephew Fred is a perfect example. There could, of course, be a bigger world beyond our senses and intellects that was demonic. Perhaps the world was fabricated by demons to enjoy our sufferings and evil. In such a world it would have been better never to have been born. Shakespeare’s Gloucester, in King Lear, gives expression to such a world when he says: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Gloucester speaks these words as he wanders on the heath after being blinded (4.1. 37–38). But Fred’s bigger world is one of hope – a particular version of a Christian world. This is the source of his good cheer. This is the source of his radically different accounting from Scrooge, of his different conceptions of what does him “good,” and of his life in the light in which the things so important to Scrooge are revealed to be of no intrinsic value. His happiness and his love have their source in this bigger world.

   Scrooge, however, is a reductionist. He will not trust even his senses. Marley’s ghost must be a figment of his imagination. Why must? Because in his world version – stipulated by the form his life has assumed – leaves no conceptual space for the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than we dream of. In fact, his money-grubbing life demands that there be fewer. Thus Christmas cheer and love are reduced to the delusions of fools who are too weak to look “reality” in the face, as Scrooge does. Marley’s ghost – hilariously – is reduced to an undigested big of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. He says – hilariously – there is more of gravy than grave to Marley’s ghost. His belief system, the belief system required by his self-sufficient, calculated, cold life devoid of human sympathy, rules out the possibility of ghosts and an afterlife in advance. Thus he was even able to explain away the fact right in front of him – he, who prides himself on being a man of facts.

    And indeed, even we after the three spirits have ended their haunting, wonder whether it was all a dream. This is all the novel concedes to our real situation in which we have no rational ground to make a judgment on Hamlet’s exclamation. But it is clear: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (Wittgenstein).” The world of the unhappy man – Scrooge here – is a world in which every experience is reduced to a preconceived procrustean bed made by the “fat, relentless ego” (Murdoch). The world of the happy man is a big world in which we are part of a bigger story we cannot see the end of but which we – in trust – believe in the goodness of the story and the happy end. Of course, the novel gives us the superhuman experience of glimpsing this invisible bigger world and being a part of it without the pains of doubt.