But Am I Amusing?

You probably won’t read past this sentence if said sentence does not amuse you.

Maybe that’s too presumptuous, but it’s a thought I had while reading about Dickens World, one of the more surprising attempts at making education entertaining I’ve seen in a while. The place is just what it sounds like - a theme park based on the life and stories of Charles Dickens. While there is nothing wrong with making literature more interesting, a full theme park is too much.

If this all seems trivial, consider this. First, if Dickens cannot stand on his own, then there’s no reason for him to stand at all. When a piece of literature becomes so dull and irrelevant that it requires a theme park to maintain interest, then the theme park is too late. The work does not matter anymore. While the general public is far from discerning in its tastes (the fact that The DaVinci Code sold any copies at all is proof enough of this) Dickens appears to have done well on his own without such gimmicks, both in popular and academic circles, and such an attraction only cheapens his work to just another object to amuse us, like a monkey with a squeeze box.

Second, on a larger scale, I see this as another symptom of the scourge of entertainment value. If something is not entertaining, it does not register in the popular mind. How many news sources reported on Paris Hilton going to jail? Why does anyone oustide the Hilton family even care? I think this attitude is well summed up in this post from the Literature Compass Blog:

Yet the museum comes across confidently, its intention of ‘art for entertainment’s sake’ appearing in a quote from Hard Times that encircles the four walls of the entrance: “People must be amused, squire, somehow. They can’t be always a-working, nor yet they can’t be always a-learning.”

Dickens World has clearly been planned with the emphasis on amusement combined with a smattering of learning.

Art does not need to be entertaining. As with any form of communication, it sometimes is far from amusing. By emphasizing “amusement” with just a “smattering of learning,” one teaches that the former is the more important of the two.