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H229 Narrative Fiction 1
Lecture 8 1995
I want to remind you (and perhaps I should say 'again') that this course is not so much about individual novels like Oliver Twist and individual novelists like Charles Dickens so much as about the genre. The largest (in the sense of most overriding) question asked by the course is: What is (in every sense of the word) a novel?
The second largest question in studying the 'classical European novel' (Mishra 1995: 2) is: What is realism? We began attempting to answer this question by considering it as a question about form and technique, in Ian Watt's formulation of 'formal realism,' but there are always larger philosophical and theoretical questions lurking in the background: What is 'reality'? How is 'reality' represented in works of art? Much of what we have to say about a given novel will be in the service of contributing to answers to these questions.
The main technical matters with which I'll be attempting to deal in this lecture are: allegory, melodrama, the Gothic, and suspense.
I'll begin my discussion of Charles Dickens and of his second novel Oliver Twist with this quotation from the Study Guide of a passage from one of the early standard texts on Charles Dickens by K. J. Fielding. The passage begins with a quotation from Oliver Twist , followed by a somewhat rhetorical gloss, perhaps influenced by its subject.
And so Dickens writes, "men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate and need a clearer vision." It is the teaching of Henry Fielding [comments K. J. Fielding], expressed with the power of Dickens, imaginatively concentrated with the intensity of fable in the figure of the child. (38-39)
We should read Dickens's Preface very carefully especially where he defends his choice of subject matter and also when he refers to literary precedents: especially Defoe and Cervantes, and our old friend Fielding. Dickens's main point in the Preface is to do with morality: his authorial intention is to tell the whole TRUTH (in thunder). It is fascinatingly pertinent to this course unit that, although he begins with questions of morality, as we have seen again and again novelists do, in their defensive prefaces, he is really more interested in the difference between the merely plausible and the real (as I interpret it), and he soon turns to questions of representation and realism, shouting at us in capitals of what he has written that 'It is TRUE.' (Dickens: 36) In this section of the Preface, compare Dickens's truth claim with his outrageous rhetoric, the latter tending to undermine the former. This recurs throughout Oliver Twist . Here is Dickens from 1858.
It is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable; or improbable, right or wrong. It is TRUE. Every man who has watched these melancholy shades of life, must know it to be so. Suggested to my mind long ago, by what I often saw and read of, in actual life around me, I have tracked it through many profligate and noisome ways, and found it still the same. From the first introduction of that poor wretch, to her laying her blood-stained head upon the robber's breast, there is not a word exaggerated or over-wrought. It is emphatically God's truth, for it is the truth that He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts; the hope yet lingering there; the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the weed- choked well. It involves the best and worst shades of our nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility; but it is a truth. I am glad to have had it doubted, for in that circumstance I could find sufficient assurance (if I wanted any) that it needed to be told. (36-37)
And indeed Dickens seems most concerned in the Preface with the character of Nancy. As perhaps he should: for although Angus Wilson quotes Wilkie Collins 'asserting in 1890: "The character of Nancy is the finest thing he ever did. He never afterwards saw all sides of a woman's character--saw all around her," Angus Wilson himself finds that: '... for us, [Nancy] must be the weakest character ...' As I see it, the problem is that he cannot tell us enough about her: although he can state in his 1858 Preface, twenty years after the first publication, that 'the girl is a prostitute,' (33) he cannot say so in the novel. On the other hand, he shows her as being devoted to someone that we are permitted to see is perfectly evil, and that is perhaps more shocking than her mere occupation. So we might see this as his lack of ' formal realism,' in leaving out this essential detail, but at the time there's his implausible realism--fiction which seems stranger than truth--in the psychological insight into Nancy's dependent character.
L. J. Fielding suggests that Oliver Twist is a 'fable,' but he is probably not using the term in a precisely technical sense. Oliver Twist is subtitled 'The Parish Boy's Progress' which, as the Study Guide reminds us, 'connects the text with probably the best-known of all modern English allegories, John Bunyan's, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84).' What are some of the features of this genre? Well, here's a definition. 'An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but also to signify a second, correlated order of persons, things, concepts, or events.' (Abrams: 4) Of the two main types of allegories identified by M. H. Abrams, historical and political allegory, and, allegory of ideas, Oliver Twist is of course in the second category, 'in which the characters represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a doctrine or thesis. ... Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress allegorizes the doctrines of Christian salvation by telling how Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City,' meeting on the way characters called Faithful, Hopeful and the Giant Despair, and passing through Vanity Fair (from which of course Thackeray, Dickens's formidable rival, got the title of his novel, which was published ten years after Oliver Twist ), the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and--my favourite--the Slough of Despond. (Abrams: 4-5) Dickens himself makes it quite clear what kind of allegory he has in mind in his 1858 Preface, where he writes that he wished to show, in little Oliver, the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last; and when I considered [he goes on] among what companions I could try him best, having regard to that kind of men into whose hands he would most naturally fall; I bethought myself of those who figure in these volumes. (33)
This 'generic system is consciously deferred to in the subtitle' obviously because Dickens wanted to direct his original readers--who did not have the benefit of the Preface--to read the story of Oliver in this way, as more than just the story of a given individual, in the manner of 'formal realism,' but rather as a story with a moral, with a specific ethical dimension, as an allegory.
The kind of names which Dickens gives to some of his characters tends to support a reading of an allegorical kind. Mr Fang , for example, 'an overbearing police-magistrate,' who features in my first lecture in this unit, represents the pitiless and cruel agency of the repressive state justice apparatus; while the name of Toby Crackit , 'a housebreaker,' represents one of the criminal activities which it seeks to crush. Oliver's mother's name is ' Agnes ,' which suggests she is perhaps a representative of the lambs which the state sacrifices by too little care--as that is what her name means, 'lamb.' Rose Maylie is of course natural beauty, while Mrs Sowerberry , 'a sour, vixenish woman,' according to the list of characters at the front of the book, is a natural phenomenon of quite a different kind. (Dickens: 'CHARACTERS,': 43)
In this list of characters--which presumably comes from the original publication--Oliver Twist is a 'poor, nameless orphan boy.' In what sense is he nameless? After all, we are told in some detail by Mr Beadle how he comes to have a name.
We name our foundlings in alphabetical order [he tells Mrs Mann]. The last was a S,-- Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named him . The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z. (52)
And of course that is the point: his name is chosen through a perfectly arbitrary device: the alphabet. There is no destiny in his naming. Oliver has no father, no filiation, no paternity, no patrimony, no family.) He is therefore perhaps in a sense a 'floating signifier,' as Vijay Mishra characterises Frankenstein's Monster in The Gothic Sublime , (1994) and tends to become an allegorical figure: perhaps that of Innocence, as well as Good. Remember what is said about Oliver when he first enters Fagin's establishment. The Artful Dodger says that he is from 'Greenland,' because he is so 'green,' meaning 'innocent.' (103. Cf. 97, where Oliver seems implicitly to be going to seek anonymity in London.)
Vijay Mishra writes in the Study Guide that '... at the heart of Oliver Twist the novel, at its very centre there is an enormous emptiness because the eponymous hero lacks depth. Like an empty signifier he is a cipher around whom events simply unfold.' That is, however, what I would want to call a spiritual reading, and against this one might bring to bear the more socio-historical view of Raymond Williams, that
Dickens was creating, openly and deliberately, a world in which people had been deprived of any customary identity and yet in which, paradoxically, the deprivation was a kind of liberation, in which the most fantastic and idiosyncratic kinds of growth could come about. People had to define themselves and their position in the world--it is his characteristic mode. (53)
Before I leave this question of allegorical naming (if I haven't left it already): you might also want to note the point Angus Wilson makes in his Introduction, page 23, where he discusses the connexion between Fagin and the Devil, in his appellation as the 'merry old gentleman,' which Wilson says is 'a term commonly used to describe the devil.' (23)
I introduced the term 'melodrama' last week. This refers primarily to a twentieth- century phenomenon: a style of theatre which incorporated musical emotional pointing, rather in the style of the early 'silent' film theatre, which actually had musical accompaniment to make the emotional points. I gather that what happened in the original melodramas was not that the performers would perform songs from time to time, as in the Broadway musical, but that music was used to accompany a play which was principally designed to evoke a specific and powerful emotional response. As I say, if you think of the sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, who were in Orphans of the Storm (1922) and other such films by people like D. W. Griffith [who wrote and directed Intolerance, or Love's Struggle Through the Ages (1916)], and add in your imagination a suitable music track to go with the overdetermined emotional response called for--you might have some idea of the meaning of the word 'melodrama' which we have imported back into the nineteenth century, and which I want to apply to Dickens.
But I think there is an important difference in intention between the actual melodrama and the way in which this emotional effect works in Dickens; and I want to characterise it as having to do with morality . In the degenerate musical theatre and cinema of the 1920s the evocation of emotional response may be seen as being in the service of the economic principle: in this case turning people's feelings into money. But in the Dickensian novel, the response that is intended to be evoked--although primarily emotional--to be truly appropriate, has to be linked with what I guess I can only call the political . Raymond Williams puts it like this: 'An individual moral question has become a social question and then, decisively, a creative intervention. This seems to me the essential pattern of all Dickens's work.' (48)
The key problem from last week I thought was that William Godwin seemed to be wanting to have it both ways with regard to political structures. It seems that one of the main reasons for which the work came into existence--apart from Godwin's desires for fame and fortune--was his belief in the need for political reform. But it also seems that the structure that he would want to change is so fundamental that even he himself implicitly supports it in some of the aspects of the narrative, both major and minor. The key problem of course is the character of Falkland, who is both morally bankrupt (he is a vindictive schemer, a liar, and a murderer) but at the same time admirable--and the latter because of characteristics he has inherited, such as rank and the opportunities brought by wealth.
The key problem this week, as I see it at the moment (that is, before I've had the opportunity to learn from you in tutorials) is that Charles Dickens seems to be wanting to have it both ways with regard to truth-telling. I think I can focus this problem in a technical context if say that there seems to be a dissonance in this novel between the effects of what I'm calling 'melodrama' on the one hand, which is a subset of rhetoric, and on the other Dickens's insistence that he is telling the truth. Another way to focus this might be to consider the second word in the title of our course unit. So far we have placed all the emphasis on the first word, 'narrative,' but there is that other word also: 'fiction.' You might remember that Plato wrote that he would not have poets in his Republic because they told lies. And here we are, at this place of serious learning called a University, studying a bunch of people who write fictions, that is untruths, that is: lies.
The point is that whereas William Godwin is not a very good liar: we can intuitively tell that he is contradicting himself, Dickens, on the other hand, is such a good 'liar' ( = creative writer) that we are swept away by the force of his rhetoric and we do 'believe' him. If we do study his rhetoric, though, bracketing the relevance of the 'content'--in much the way that we might find it easy to study the force of the gestures of Hitler speaking to a Nuremberg rally, because we understand little of what he is talking about it--if we look at these rhetorical figures, these tropes, we see that they have a force of their own, to some extent independent of the 'content.'
And yet, as I consider Dickens's rhetoric, I seem to run into a further problem which I did not expect which is internal to the one I thought I was addressing. And it is this: there are moments, in the range of Dickens's style, where he seems to go too far, to overstep the bounds within which irony is normally reined back, and enter the area that we might prefer to call 'sarcasm.' And precisely because of the excessiveness of the striving after rhetorical effect that we notice, we, as it were, come out of the other side of our 'unwilling suspension of belief,' to coin a phrase, and once again believe in the sincerity of our author.
Perhaps the question I should really be considering is this: by what standards am I judging Dickens, to find fault with him in this way? And perhaps the answer has something to do with the influence of F. R. Leavis. Raymond Williams certainly seems to think so, in writing this (and you might notice E. M. Forster's influence here too).
By the standards of one kind of novel, which in England has been emphasised as the great tradition, Dickens's faults--what are seen as his faults--are so many and so central as to produce embarrassment. Almost every criterion of that other kind of novel--characteristically, the fiction of an educated minority--worked against him. His characters are not "rounded" and developing but "flat" and emphatic. They are not slowly revealed but directly presented. Significance is not enacted in mainly tacit and intricate ways but is often directly presented in moral address and indeed exhortation. Instead of the controlled language of analysis and comprehension he uses, directly, the language of persuasion and display. His plots depend often on arbitrary coincidences, on sudden revelations and changes of heart. He offers not the details of psychological process but the finished articles: the social and psychological products. Yet we get nowhere--critically nowhere--[Williams points out] if we apply the standards of this kind of fiction to another and very different kind. (31)
Because Dickens is unique. His methods are not (to anticipate by a week or two) those of George Eliot, and should not be judged by the same criteria. Here is Williams again (from lectures he gave on 'The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence' at Cambridge in the 1960s--the book with that title is listed in the Secondary Bibliography, by the way).
[Williams writes:] ... we can acknowledge as a fact in itself his marvellous energy. But the energy and the methods are in fact inseparable. It is through his very specific plots and characters and not in spite of them that he makes his intense and involving world. He takes and transforms certain traditional methods: not like George Eliot into more locally observed actions or more particularly known individuals or more carefully charted stages of growth of a relationship; but, in his own way, into a dramatic method which is uniquely capable of expressing the experience of living in cities. (32)
Dickens's had from the first been criticised on stylistic grounds. 'The originality of Dickens's language [as one critic sums it up recently] meant that he had always been criticized for vulgarity and irregularity of style.' ... [and] Later critics continued to regret that Dickens lacked education and had not formed his style on the best models. G. H. Lewes [George Eliot's partner] deplored Dickens's lack of culture.' (Wall: 34) Well, I've used a lot 'wes'--first person plural pronouns--in what I've been saying, which I hope have not been authorial plurals, and it's time to see if I should really have been including you in the subject that I've been speaking of, and of course the way to do is to look at an example or three. And I'm implicitly asking you what you think of what I'm calling Dickens's ' sarcasm' --which is not really irony, is it--I'm implicitly asking you: is it not subtle enough? (Though, 'enough' for what? I leave on one side.)
So here's a moment from early in the novel when Dickens is engaging our sympathy for his eponymous 'hero,' and for people in workhouses generally. After his meeting with the Board, the narrator tells us that Oliver 'sobbed himself to sleep.' And he comments: 'What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favoured country! They let the paupers go to sleep!' (54) Now, whatever else you may think of that statement, I think you might agree that it's not subtle. And whereas with a novelist who tends to use a more subtle kind of rhetoric we might want to use the term 'irony' to describe their procedure, in this case I think the less honorific term 'sarcasm' is the appropriate one.
Here's another moment that I found striking in the same way. See how it strikes you. The Board, in trying to work out how to deal with this villainous boy who dared to ask for more, consider sending him to sea in
... some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port. This suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or would knock his brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentlemen of that class. (68)
I suggest that this is effective precisely because it is so cruelly shocking, and not because of its 'craft or subtle art.' The point is always about Dickens--and we know this from his own background: there is always a profound desire for social change, to bring about which he must create an emotional response in his readers. Some of the most poignant writing Dickens ever produced was in the Autobiographical Sketch, where he tells of the worst period in his life, the months in the blacking factory. Read it and weep! (Forster: 37-43) And yet Dickens is at his most restrained here. As he says: 'It does not seem a tithe of what I might have written, or of what I meant to write.
Melodrama in Dickens often comes at moments of death, and especially the deaths of the young and the innocent. I read the death of Nancy to you in the first week of the semester, and I won't take that risk again. Here instead is the death of Agnes, as the doctor gives her child to her. Dickens is not yet hitting his straps here.
She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead, passed her hands over her face, gazed wildly round, shuddered, fell back--and died. They chafed her breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had frozen for ever. They talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long. (46)
When Oliver imagines the mother he never saw, however, the writing is more effective.
'Perhaps she does see me,' whispered Oliver, folding his hands together; 'perhaps she has sat by me. I almost feel as if she had.'
'That was the fever, my dear,' said the old lady mildly. 'I suppose it was,' replied Oliver, 'because heaven is a long way off; and they are too happy there, to come down to the bedside of a poor boy. but if she knew I was ill, she must have pitied me even there; for she was very ill herself before she died. She can't know anything about me though,' added Oliver after a moment's silence. 'If she had seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always looked sweet and happy, when I have dreamed of her.' (126)
Vijay Mishra reminds us in the Study Guide that the Gothic is 'a ... genre which you should keep in mind. ... In an ungodly, Manichean world [he writes; that is: a world where God and the Devil, good and evil, have an equal place], characters like Fagin and Sikes exist like sombre, almost macabre, possibly satanic figures who go back to Walpole's Manfred, Matthew Gregory Lewis' Ambrosio, Charles Maturin's Melmoth or even Godwin's Falkland and Mary Shelley's Monster.'
The 1948 film of Oliver Twist , with Alec Guiness as Fagin, is remarkable more than anything else for its catching of the Gothic effects of the novel: the darkness of the portrayal of Sikes, the sleazy evil of Fagin, and the power of the hate of the mob that drives Sikes to his death. The most Gothic moments in the David Lean's film, I think, are in the conclusion when the monstrous Sikes is on the roof from which he will plunge to his death. It calls to mind (to my mind, anyway) the monstrous version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame constructed by Charles Laughton, as he cavorts on the parapets of the Cathedral; and also the death of the Monster in the James Whale's 1931 version of Frankenstein, which occurs again atop a building, this time in flames. In each case we have a physical heightening which implies a rhetorical one, an extreme separation of Monster and crowd, and an extreme of difference between the normal and the Other-- with a capital O.
The death of Sikes in the film rather resembles that of the Monster in Frankenstein (1931), in that both are pursued by a large crowd, both die in an elevated position. The monstrous is driven out, upward. But one dies by fire, the other by hanging. In the book Frankenstein , however, the monster will die in an impossible conjunction of opposites-- fire on the ice--a suitable death, perhaps, for an impossibility.
The Study Guide suggests that we 'consider the descriptions of London in terms of Gothic discourse.' The film does well in this regard, giving some of that sense of 'roaring streets' that was so important to Dickens. And for Raymond Williams it is 'not simply [a question of] description--animated description--but ... the power of dramatising a moral world in physical terms.' (40)
I take it that Vijay Mishra is suggesting that perhaps the most Gothic aspect of Oliver Twist is in the representation of its monsters: Charles Dickens was six years old in 1818 when Frankenstein was first published. His own Monsters, Fagin and Bill Sikes (and Charley Bates does call Sikes a 'monster'), (448) only took another nineteen years to be born. Against this view of the Sikes, though, it must be pointed out that Dickens himself sees him as, if not a naturalistic portrait, at least as a possible reality, even while he agrees that he is an unmitigated villain. He writes that 'there are such men as Sikes, who, being closely followed through the same space of time and through the same current of circumstances, would not give, by the action of a moment, the faintest indication of a better nature. Whether every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms, or the proper chord to strike has rusted and is hard to find, I do not pretend to know; but that the fact is as I state it, I am sure.' (36) We, however, can read this and still read Sikes, if we wish, as a Gothic monster.
I suggested last week that suspense was a structural and rhetorical device. It works to some extent quite simply by the introduction of incomplete information ('When Slim turned sideways ...') the completion of which is delayed. And it also works linguistically, by pointing this up, by heightening the expectation by the creation of a desire to know, a curiosity.
Here's an example from page 119.
'There is something in that boy's face,' said the old gentleman to himself as he walked slowly away, tapping his chin with the cover of the book, in a thoughtful manner; 'something that touches and interests me. Can he be innocent? He looked like. -- By the bye,' exclaimed the old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky, 'God bless my soul! Where have I seen something like that look before?' [And he] called up before his mind's eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years. 'No,' said the old gentleman, shaking his head; 'it must be imagination.'
Of course we recognise this unspecific recognition as the mark of suspense. We know that we will be told what is the source of the resemblance. We also know that we will have to wait. But not for all that long. Here's page 132.
As he spoke, he pointed hastily to the picture above Oliver's head, and then to the boy's face. There was its living copy. The eyes, the head, the mouth; every feature was the same. The expression was, for the instant, so precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with an accuracy which was perfectly unearthly. Oliver knew not the cause of this sudden exclamation; for he was not strong enough to bear the start it gave him, and he fainted away.
So does the chapter. And so does this lecture.
Abrams, M. H. 1971, A Glossary of Literary Terms, third edition, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York.
Dickens, Charles 1966 [1858], Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough, Penguin.
Fielding, K. J. 1965 [1958], Charles Dickens, Longmans, London.
Forster, John 1872-4, The Life of Charles Dickens, various editions; excerpted in Wall 1970, Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology : 37-43.
Mishra, Vijay 1994, The Gothic Sublime, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1994.
Mishra, Vijay 1995, H229 Narrative Fiction I Study Guide and Reader, Murdoch University.
Wall, Stephen 1970, 'Introduction,' Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, Penguin.
Williams, Raymond 1970, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Chatto & Windus, London.
Wilson, Angus 1966, 'Introduction,' to Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Penguin.
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