Empowering Readers:
Contents
Ten Approaches to Narrative
Garry Gillard
Chapter 5
Oliver Twist and Myth
Dickens' novel is usually read in the contexts of its period in history and the life of the author. It's possible no-one has ever tried to read it in the light of the structuralist approach to myth pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1972 orig. 1955), so it will be an interesting exercise: both the utility and limitations of the approach should be clearly shown. And it will be particularly interesting to see if the approach is capable of actually throwing new light on Dickens' life and period in history.
The 'mythic' approach to literature, as used by leading myth critics like Northrop Frye, is actually not unrelated to Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, as employed in his Oedipus paper of 1955. This is in line with the general assumption made in several chapters in this book that any science, or human science: sociology, anthropology, etc., may (and probably will) have its correlative approach to literature; but that it may not be simple: there may be an ideological excursion. Thus one could argue that sociology was hijacked by Marxism in the service of an ideological critique of literature, but that the repressed science has returned through a kind of economic rationalist approach, as when a Jane Austen novel is analysed in terms of capitalist modes of exchange. And that even the biographical approach, perhaps the most utilised approach of all, was hijacked by the pseudo-science of psychoanalysis.
In the present case, in anthropological and mythic studies of literature, the 'hijacking' is perhaps not so severe, as in the case of Maud Bodkin and others who use theories of the quest theme in literature, but that anthropological science returns, to some extent with Northrop Frye, but also with structuralist and post-structuralist approaches.
The Oedipus myth, as discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 'The structural study of myth' (1976 [1955]), deals with the question of where we came from, and the problem created by the fact that the original tellers held two incompatible beliefs about human origin at the same time: that it was a result of human sexual procreation, and also by non-human creation.
To create myths, the human mind -- or ' pensée sauvage ', to use Lévi- Strauss's term for the unsophisticated modes of thought studied by the anthropologist -- uses any materials which are readily to hand and 'tinkers' with them ('tinkering' is about as close as a translation can get to the everyday French word used in the original: ' bricolage ') until their structure is appropriate to the message to be conveyed. Thus mythical stories seem, as Lévi-Strauss says, 'arbitrary, meaningless, absurd' (1978: 12) - as dreams often do. Dreams too, as Freud pointed out, are made of any handy mental material: memories, the day's residues - and they are also made, by the dreamwork, to correspond to the latent dream-thoughts, so that the message is unconsciously available, and can be recovered by analysis. The dreamwork is a tinkerer, a bricoleur ; la pensée sauvage is unconscious. The 'savage mind' is the myth-making poetic wisdom which animates the response to the world of so-called primitive peoples. (Hawkes: 32)
As a convenient way of approaching Lévi-Strauss's method of myth analysis I'll identify these four principles in the method of Lévi-Strauss as applied to the kind of narratives he deals with: myths.
The basic principle of his approach is that 'myths think themselves in [people], unbeknown to them.' (1964: 20 ) By this he means that myths are not stories which are made up voluntarily and arbitrarily but that they have a compulsive hold on the human mind and manifest themselves in the mind. They are some of the fundamental forms in which the human mind thinks.
The second principle is that myths must be interpreted serially and that they cannot reveal their meaning when considered as single stories. Lévi- Strauss thinks that each myth must be broken up into its constituent phases and that these phases or episodes must be considered as a series. Furthermore, he suggests that these episodes exhibit a similarity in structure and that the episodes must be taken to be a series of message with the same meaning - the sum total of episodes being a series of repetitive signals which hammer in the same message, in case people do not get the message the first time.
The third principle is that when these episodes are considered serially, one will find that they can be arranged in two columns. The first column will contain episodes which overstress or overrate something; and the second column will contain episodes which underrate or de-value the same thing. In this sense he believes that myth are collections of episodes in which the opposites of institutions or phenomena or judgements are alternately overvalued and undervalued. The fourth and last general principle is the contention that by such alternate undervaluation and overvaluation, the conflict or tension or incompatibility between the two institutions or phenomena is 'resolved'. If, for example, life and death, nature and culture, incest and exogamy, autochthony and bisexual procreation, are persistently undervalued and overvalued, people will eventually resign themselves to the fact that their own customs and conventions are half way between the two extremes or are a compromise between the two extremes. (Munz: 5-6)
Dickens' novel announces its principal problem in its title and its list of CHARACTERS which comes between the annotated contents and the first chapter and which looks like the cast list for a play. The title suggests that the book will be the history of someone whose name is 'Oliver Twist,' but the character list identifies him as 'a poor, nameless orphan boy.' (43) So, clearly, from the beginning, one of the tasks required of the plot is to discover Oliver's origins: what is his family, who was his father. Not 'who was his mother' because we are informed of her situation and Oliver's birth and her death in the first chapter. And because Oliver seems to have a sense of her nature, although he course he never knew her. It can be argued, and especially when employing this approach to the narrative, that Oliver Twist deals overtly and specifically with the problem of fatherhood, of paternity - as the Oedipus story does. Paternity was perhaps a more significant source of personal identity for the society of Dickens' time than at present, and the search for such origins recurs in novels of the period, including others by this author. (Witness the action of the surgeon who attends at the death of Oliver's mother, who, when told 'where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows,' looks immediately at her ring finger to see if it bears the conventional sign of possession by the patriarchy. He concludes that it is 'The old story ... no wedding-ring.' 47) And whereas a psychoanalytical approach to this novel might speculate as to the author's sense of the absence of a father in the story of his own life, a 'mythical' approach will prefer to look at the structures erected by the narrative, and in this case at family structures.
Why is Lévi-Straussian theory so concerned with binary oppositions and with their mediation? This is partly due to its origin in Saussurean linguistics, which sees linguistic signs as arbitrary and inherently meaningless. Their meaning is only derived from their placement in a system. A word achieves its meaning by convention, by the fact that it is not any other word. (A tree is a not-flower, a not-cactus, and so on.) Any concept is in potential opposition to any other.
Another reason for Lévi-Strauss's interest in oppositions stems from the intellectual tradition in which he was educated. In the following passage from 'The making of an anthropologist' from his autobiographical work Tristes Tropiques , he mentions not only this tradition as basing argument on the opposition of concepts, but also how he felt himself obliged to seek new categories. He also mentions here his indebtedness to Freud.
It was during the decade from 1920 to 1930 that psychoanalytical theories became known in France. They taught me that the static oppositions around which we were advised to construct our philosophical essays and later our teaching - the rational and the irrational, the intellectual and the emotional, the logical and the illogical - amounted to no more than a gratuitous intellectual game. In the first place, beyond the rational there exists a more important and valid category - that of the meaningful, which is the highest mode of being of the rational, but which our teachers never so much as mentioned, no doubt because they were more intent on Bergson ... than on F. de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale . Next, Freud's work showed me that the oppositions did not really exist in this form, since it is precisely the most apparently emotional behaviour, the least rational procedures and so-called pre-logical manifestations which are at the same time the most meaningful. (67)In the same way that the linguistic sign (the word) is arbitrary, creating meaning by virtue of being the sign that it is and not any other, so all cultural phenomena, when seen as signs, operate by differentiation and opposition. Let us take the very simple example that Edmund Leach proposes in his book on Lévi-Strauss (1970): the traffic light, which has three signs: red, amber and green. Red and green form a naturally opposed pair because they are clearly separated in the colour spectrum, and so easily become assimilated to 'stop' and 'go'. The opposition of red and green in the traffic light system communicates the difference between the ideas of moving and of not moving. (Although you might want to note that the human brain has arbitrarily selected these 'colours' from a continuous spectrum.)
But why the amber light? Leach writes: 'Having set up this polar opposition the human brain is dissatisfied with the resulting discontinuity, and spectrum between 'red' and 'green'. The assumption in the theory is that it is in the nature of the mind to seek mediation in this way.
A more sophisticated example, the opposition between the categories of the raw and the cooked, became the basis of the first of the four volumes of Lévi-Strauss's magnum opus , Mythologiques , in which he writes:
I propose to show that the key myth belongs to a set of myths that explain the origin of the cooking of food (although this theme is, to all intents and purposes, absent from it); that cooking is conceived of in native thought as a form of mediation between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society. (64-5)This central notion had already been exposed in a paper written some years earlier, called 'The culinary triangle' (1966) The basic triangle has, at two of its vertices, the raw and the cooked, categories which represent for Lévi- Strauss what he sees as the fundamental opposition between nature and culture. To mediate them, he finds a category which has aspects of both the natural and cultural: the rotted. Both cooked and rotted foods in order to become edible, have undergone a change from the raw, therefore both belong in this sense to the cultural; but whereas cooked foods have undergone a cultural change, requiring the use of implements, rotted foods have undergone a natural change. Partaking of aspects of both categories, they therefore mediate between the raw and the cooked and between nature and culture. Lévi-Strauss goes on to explain how such items, seen as elements in a cultural 'language', may be interpreted by the student of society to reveal part of the nature of a given society. He concludes:
After elaborating our diagram so as to integrate all the characteristics of a given culinary system (and no doubt there are other factors of a diachronic rather than a synchronic nature: those concerning the order, the presentation and the gestures of the meal), it will be necessary to seek the most economical manner of orientating it as a [grid], so that it can be superimposed on other contrasts of a sociological, economic, aesthetic or religious nature: men and women, family and society, village and bush, economy and prodigality, nobility and commonalty, sacred and profane, etc. Thus we can hope to discover for each specific case how the cooking of society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure - or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions. (340: 'Grid' is 'grille' in the translation.)Edmund Leach concurs.
Lévi-Strauss's contribution has been to suggest that such binary oppositions as raw/cooked, cooked/rotten, roast/boiled, boiled/smoked constitute distinctive features in a code, and that they are used as such in ritual performance and in mythology.Although, with Anglo-Saxon caution, he does qualify his agreement, as he goes on to say.
It remains a moot point whether this is always so, but Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated convincingly that it is certainly sometimes so. (1976: 60- 1)One way of applying this linguistic structural anthropological method of Lévi-Strauss's to a text like Dickens' novel would be to carry out this apparently rather mechanical exercise of seizing upon some significant feature of the narrative to see if is subject to stresses of different kind, thus indicating that it is something that is problematical for its environment (in this case, the novel). and if there is not also some mediating term which performs the apparently impossible function of bridging the gap thus created.
Angus Wilson (1966) is very far from being a structural anthropologist of the kind that Claude Lévi-Strauss represents, but even he feels confident in carrying out something like the kind of procedure that the Frenchman uses - although he manages without mathematical equations! He sees the genteel characters as being in one group which is opposed to the group of criminal characters: Fagin, Sikes and the rest. The genteel group of course represent not only respectability but also, more generally, the Good: this is obvious. But they also represent something which I suggest is overstressed in as many as three different ways: Family. Mr Brownlow acts as a Father to Oliver although there is nothing to tie them together until they meet: the power and security of paternity is emphasised in his role in relation to the eponymous hero. In this way, Family is overstressed through characterisation. Secondly, the Maylies, as Wilson puts it, are 'miraculously and improbably found to be attached to Oliver and to each other by ties of blood or ties of former romance.' (19) Here, Family is overstressed through plot. And thirdly, Family (as Home) is overstressed at moments stylistically, as in this passage describing the near-death experience of Rose - which may have been inspired by the recent death of the novelist's seventeen-year-old sister-in-law. ... the changing expression of sweetness and good humour, the thousand lights that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all, the smile, the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness. (20)
The evil group is represented as such in action: Sikes's brutal murder of Nancy being the outstanding example; and also in characterisation and style, as in this passage describing Fagin's progress through the night.
As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal. (168)With regard to the question of Family, members of this evil group do represent something of an understressing, partly through behaving in some respects like a 'family' - but as a parody. When Oliver first meets the Jew and his boys, it looks as thought the homeless waif has found a family of which he can be a member: his new 'father' looks after him politely and with solicitude, and his new 'brothers' also attend on him and care for him personally.
The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance. Upon this, the young gentlemen with the pipes came round him, and shook both his hands very hard especially the one in which he held his little bundle. One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed. These civilities would probably have been extended much farther, but for a liberal exercise of the Jew's toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the affectionate youths who offered them. 'We are very glad to see you, Oliver, very,' said the Jew. (105)So when Oliver is first introduced to the ''spectable old genelman' (102) by the Dodger, the scene is simultaneously utterly degraded but at the same time there appears to be a strong sense of solidarity and camaraderie. It is clear that the 'the hopeful pupils of the merry old gentleman' (106) are trainee criminals at best and perhaps Fagin's catamites at worst. (Fagin himself suggests at one point: 'It's a poor trade, Nancy, and no thanks; but I'm fond of seeing the young people about me; and I bear it all, I bear it all.' [353]) There is, however, an appearance of parental and brotherly care - although it is of course undercut by the double meaning of most of the actions: the boys concern for Oliver's person and belongings derives more from a desire to know what he is worth than out of concern for his health and wellbeing. And Fagin's apparently paternal care of Oliver is actually more like that of a craftsman for one of his tools.
Another potential family group is that of Mr and 'Mrs' Bill Sikes, but again their relationship is a parody of a loving one. Nancy shows herself at her most loving when she kisses Bill, in this passage.
She hastily dressed herself in her bonnet and shawl; looking fearfully round, from time to time, as if, despite the sleeping draught, she expected every moment to feel the pressure of Sikes's heavy hand upon her shoulder; then, stooping softly over the bed, she kissed the robber's lips; and then opening and closing the room-door with noiseless touch, hurried from the house. (358)But she has had to drug him with opium before she has felt safe to do it; and yet even as she does, she remembers his all too familiar violence. This tender moment comes shortly after Bill's recovery from illness, during which Nancy has nursed him, as she says, 'as if you had been a child.' (346) In the earlier passage it is the relationship of mother and child that is parodied.
'Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even to her voice: 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you, nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you? Come, come; say you wouldn't.' (346)It is a parody in that we know that the real relationship is not that of a loving man and wife, not mother and child, but that of a prostitute (Dickens' own word, from his Preface) and her fancy man.
And then Sikes's violence reaches its peak: 'Of all bad deeds that, under cover of the darkness, had been committed within wide London's bounds since night hung over it, that was the worst.' (423) As in the Oedipus story, the height of the 'understressing' of family relations is reached in an act of murder: there the murder of an (unknown) father by a son; here the wilful and cruel murder (Sikes strikes her five times) of a common law wife and metaphorical 'mother' by her husband and 'son.'
For a mediating term we need look no farther than Mr Bumble, bumbling between caring for such as Oliver on the one hand and self-interest and cruelty on the other. And whereas Mr Brownlow is a thoroughly good 'father' to Oliver and self-assigned to the position, and whereas Fagin is a travesty and a thoroughly bad 'father' who would have been quite happy to have had Oliver killed, Mr Bumble is assigned in loco parentis by the state, and represents its indifferent and careless paternalism. Mr Gamfield the sweep and the Sowerberrys are also in this neutral group and tend, in either character or plot function - or both, toward a central position between the extremes of beneficent and malicious parenthood. Gamfield's motives are of course not benevolent towards Oliver. (Consider his strictures regarding the 'humane' use of dry as opposed to damp straw: 'there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with a run. ... It's humane too, gen'lmen, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em stuggle to hextricate theirselves.' (61) In the event, however, the plot (the inkstand is 'missing' 65) prevents him from applying his policies in Oliver's case.
In the case of the Sowerberrys, there is an internal division in the category, in that, for example, Sowerberry is 'kindly disposed towards the boy; perhaps, because it was his interest to be so; perhaps, because his wife disliked him.' (95) So, although the man does perhaps go a little out of his way to be kind, the wife, on the other hand, is certainly nothing like 'liberal': 'The liberality of Mrs Sowerberry to Oliver, had consisted in a profuse bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else would eat.' (93-4) But at least she feeds him meat, despite the 'appalling' outcome. ('You've over-fed him, ma'am. You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma'am, unbecoming a person of his condition,' adjures the beadle. 93) Another 'bad mother,' and one also underfeeds Oliver to a scandalous extent, is of course Mrs Mann, whom name perhaps suggests her lack of femininity and therefore maternal instincts.
The other extreme on the scale of parenting is represented by Oliver's real mother. She having conveniently died in the first chapter, her place can be taken by Oliver's fantasy mother, as in his long speech to Mrs Bedwin, one of his surrogate mothers, immediately on regaining consciousness after his 'fever.'
'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)So far I have used the basic Lévi-Straussian binary approach, arranging significant elements into two opposing categories, and I also the triangulation technique, identifying a mediating term which has the function of creating a relationship between the opposed categories. Finally, I want to attempt to identify a second pair of opposed terms, to carry out the full structuralist analysis of the 1955 paper. And I begin by addressing one of the great 'problems' of Oliver Twist : that of the Jew.
I mean by 'problem' that people have often wondered in print why Dickens wrote about a Jew in this way, and how we are supposed to read and understand this characterisation. Dickens' Londoners, like Shakespeare's, had to come to terms with the fact they thought that Jews were in some ways not human, in being fundamentally not like 'them'; while at the same time they were perfectly aware that Jews were human too. This can be seen to be the source of Shylock's noted speech in The Merchant of Venice in which he asks the people in the Italian court, who are standing in for Shakespeare's English audience, as to Jews: 'If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?' Is not a Jew, he asks: 'fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?' (3:1) On the other hand, Shylock is given only prose to speak, unlike most others, who speak in iambic pentameter. And the Jew not only lends money at a rate of interest, but in this case is capable of concluding the most monstrous contract and then expecting it to be honoured: to take one pound of the flesh of a human being and so kill him. So while on the one hand Shakespeare allows the character to speak like a sensitive man in making a most moving case for his acceptance as part of humanity, on the other he allows him to act like a monster.
Now when we turn to Dickens' Jew, do we find the same extremes of characterisation? Being beginning to answer the question, let us look again at how Claude Lévi-Strauss deals with extremes. I have already noted that the characters are divided into two (or three) groups, along the lines of Good and Bad, with some who may be seen as mediating between these extremes. And I have also suggested that the characters are polarised with regard to the question of Family. But I think it's possible to perceive an even more basic kind of opposition. Consider again the portrait of Fagin already quoted above.
As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal. (186)This is a description more of a monster than of a man. Or, in more literary terms, it belongs to the genre of the Gothic.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 OtherÑwith a capital O.
The death of Sikes in the film recalls 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 oppositesÑfire on the iceÑa suitable death, perhaps, for an impossibility. As Raymond Williams puts it, it is 'not simply [a question of] descriptionÑanimated descriptionÑbut É the power of dramatising a moral world in physical terms.' (40)
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.
The fourth column, then, of this structural analysis in 1955 style, contains - opposed to the Human, the category that contains all the other characters - the Monstrous, which is seen not only in the descriptions of Monks, Fagin and Sikes, but also in the acts they perpetrate: the various attempts to destroy Oliver, the training of children into a criminal way of life, and above all the brutal murder of Nancy.
The underlying mythic structure is finally revealed to be dealing with the fundamental problem of human nature, representing the question in the form of the problem of evil. The myth asks: 'How can such evil deeds be done by human beings?' And the answer is: 'They can only be done by monsters.' It is for this reason that Monks, Fagin and Sikes are described in a Gothic manner, for this reason that Sikes commits this worst of crimes and is brought to poetic justice - and it is for this reason that Fagin is a Jew.
I quoted Edmund Leach above to the effect that 'Lévi-Strauss's contribution has been to suggest that such binary oppositions ... constitute distinctive features in a code,' and that 'it remains a moot point whether this is always so, but Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated convincingly that it is certainly sometimes so.' (1976: 60-1) I have tried to show that binary oppositions constitute distinctive features in a code of the novel Oliver Twist - without attempting to demonstrate that it is always the case that the identification of such oppositions is always productive. Nor do I do claim that the insights achieved by using this approach are unique and could not have noticed without this framework; indeed the conclusions to which I have come seem to be rather obvious ones that any competent reader would be capable of reaching. Perhaps that is the point: that the conclusions in a sense are the very thing that validate the method: the end justifies the means. But perhaps there is an additional point which is worth making at the end of this process of reading Oliver Twist as myth: that narrative is a more global category than either myth or the novel, and therefore that through the medium of narrative analysis, insights gained from the study of one may lead to fresh ways of looking at the other.
Other approaches to Oliver Twist
Finally, some notes about other ways of coming to read Dickens' novel. I noted above that a psychoanalytical approach to Oliver Twist - and to others of his novels - might speculate as to the author's sense of the absence of a father in the story of his own life. Young Charles knew his father, of course, but some of their time together was spent in debtors prison. And John Dickens was not able to prevent his son having to work in a blacking factory, the worst experience of his life, before he was even twelve years old. In the light (or darkness) of these shocking experiences, such a sensitive child must have felt the lack of paternal protection, which could return as a figure of the absence of the father himself.Marxist analysts have much of their work already done for them. Dickens himself was obviously concerned with the economic conditions under which his characters have to try to survive. Much of the early material in the book is a quite explicit attack on the poor law Amendment Act of 1834; and the criminal school run by Fagin is as much a product of socio-economic circumstances as it is of the Principle of Evil. A marxian might want to look at Oliver himself as a token in terms of his exchange value. At several points in the novel, his value can be said to be measured in pieces of gold: as symbolised by the golden articles left by his mother which will be the key to his identity. He is the valuable site of contestation of the various forces in the novel, which strive to possess him. And one of the matters tidied up in the last chapter is the question of Oliver's inheritance and its dispensation: some goes to Monks in a doomed attempt to bourgeoisify him; some goes to reward Oliver for his virtue. The division is superficially on a moral basis, but may be read as revealing a deeper social difference, along class lines.
A deconstructive reading of Oliver Twist might take up the question of naming, as I have done. But whereas in this chapter I have taken the position that the story of the novel is one of success in the search for a name and an identity, such another reading might turn this on its head and suggest that the novel shows the pointlessness of attempting to ultimately name anything or anyone, that naming is a self-contradictory exercise, given that we are always already nameless. This is of course indicated before the novel even begins with the identification of 'a poor, nameless orphan boy.' (43) And from that non-point on, the story is one of a floating signifier ('Oliver') which takes up various different names and roles according to the different systems within which it finds itself positioned. The ending of the book also makes this problem explicit. The last paragraph of Dickens' narrative begins thus.
Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble table, which bears as yet but one word: 'AGNES.' There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is placed above it.Here we are told of a name with no body, and another name, which is however not named, and not known. (It could, for example, be Oliver, or Oliver Twist, or Leeford, or Brownlow.) In another part of the narrative we are told of Rose, another adoped child, whose 'real' name is never revealed - though it is often said that there is a 'stain' on it. It might be suggested that this novel, which seems to be about identity and the power of the name, in fact deconstructs itself, here and elsewhere, showing the inutility of its own procedures, and the impossibility of ever getting a name 'right.'And so on. In the next chapter we'll take up yet another approach which I've actually used in connexion with Oliver Twist, without naming it as such: that of biography.
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Wilson, Angus 1966, 'Introduction' to Charles Dickens [1837-9], Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough, Penguin: 11-27.
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