TRP and Dickens

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:

> We've had several references to Dickens in GRGR so far. Perhaps I'm
> over-sensitive, but I can't help but hear echoes of TRP as I read these
> descriptions (below) of papers to be given at the upcoming Dickens Universe
> conference, part of a post on DICKNS-L today:
>
> John Bowen: "History's Grip: The Event of *Barnaby Rudge*."
>         In this paper I want to talk about time and the historical event in
> *Barnaby Rudge*. The novel is, in many ways, an untimely text - in its
> birth, reception and subsequent history. It is also a deeply repetitive
> novel, both in its own narrative and its depiction of historical and
> psychic processes. It often appears in the book as if consciousness and
> historical agency are simply the prey of strange hauntings and compulsions
> to repeat. History and families alike are crossed by uncanny forces, in
> particular the power of ghosts and dreams, and the forward movement of the
> narrative is constantly arrested or blocked by doublings and repetitions.

Yes, Pynchon, -untimely, repetitive, consciousness and historical agencies as
prey of hauntings and compulsions to repeat. Beautiful!
Even if you don't think you know Dickens you do. If you know Christmas Carol,
you know a good deal. Past reconciled, life in the Present, hope for the
Future.
Families and ghosts and dreams and repetition and doubling, which reminds me of
Dickens' influence on Dostoevsky of course Conrad and back to Pynchon. One
could write an interesting book on Doubles or Family, or Ghosts or  Prison, or
The deadlocked mystery court case and circumlocution and Pynchon's estate in
TCOL49 for example.

>
> These hauntings trouble the boundaries between the human and the inhuman

Pointsman and Thomas Gradgrind. Sorry to repeat this:
Enfetishment is an ironic process because it invests the
inanimate with human characteristics and inanimates humans
subtly, by first divesting them of human characteristics
through reification and then re-investing them with pseudo-
human characteristics, turning them into fetishes.

We know of Pynchon's debt to T.S. Eliot, and Swift on this
account, Conrad, but for me, it is Dickens that really rings
a bell. Some excerpts from Dickens' Hard Times. I think
Pynchon takes this to another level and can use the sexual
as Dicken's could not.

Gradgrind and Pointman.


> and the book is drawn to figures - the living dead, an idiot, a talking
> bird - which are usually at the very margins of historical understanding.

The living dead and dead in life, remember that anyone? Idiots in Dickens are
extremely important they carry his philosophy. Talking, anything can talk in
Dickens, like SH and SH in V. "you don't even have a soul, etc.""
All sorts of gothic and Fantastic things.

> I
> would like to link this, through Dickens^s correspondence, to his wish to
> write a sublime history, one that can transport the reader to a state of
> mind beyond reason and representation; a kind of writing that is adequate
> to the force of historical trauma.

The sublime history, the trauma, How does one tell such a story?

>
>
> Patrick Brantlinger: "Did Dickens have a Philosopy of History?"
>         Ever since R. H. Horne labeled Dickens "an instinctive writer" and
> Walter Bagehot said that he was "utterly deficient in the faculty of
> reasoning," it has been the assumption of most Dickens critics that,
> however marvelous he may have been as a novelist, he was anything but a
> systematic thinker.  So entrenched is this view that even to ask if Dickens
> had a philosophy of history may sound preposterous.    But though Dickens
> wasn't Hegel, Macaulay, Marx, or Mill, perhaps he was the novel-writing
> version of Carlyle?  --Another common assumption is  that, if Dickens did
> hold any systematic ideas about the past, he got them from Carlyle.  After
> all, Dickens acknowledged the influence of Carlyle's history of the French
> Revolution on his second historical novel, *A Tale of Two Cities*, and also
> said toward the end of his career that Carlyle was the thinker "who had
> influenced him most" (qtd. in Ackroyd 301).

I had the fortune or perhaps not if you think it unfortunate not to have some
tangible reward after so many years of study, to have read Dickens with at
least three different scholars. The second one taught Dickens and Carlye
together. Good stuff.

>
>         What about his first historical novel, *Barnaby Rudge*, however,
> which Dickens conceived and wrote very early in his career?  Though it,
> too, may have been influenced by Carlyle, Dickens's historical sources were
> many and various.  Moreover, the fact that he should write a historical
> novel at all, and especially so soon after *Pickwick*, suggests that
> Dickens held some quite definite views about history, historiography, and
> historical fiction.  But if the main influence on *Tale of Two Cities* was
> Carlyle, a key influence on *Barnaby Rudge* was Sir Walter Scott.

I never liked Scott.

>
>         Yet while Dickens may have set out to rival Scott by writing a
> historical novel, and while Dickens's depiction of the Gordon riots partly
> echoes Scott's depiction of the Porteous riot in *Heart of Midlothian*,
> *Barnaby Rudge* is quite different from any of Scott's novels in its
> conceptualization of the past and of the trajectory of history from past to
> present.  Another commonplace about both *Barnaby Rudge* and *Tale of Two
> Cities* is that they are only superficially about the past-that they are
> really "tracts for their times" more than genuinely historical works of
> fiction.  The Gordon Riots equal Chartism, Simon Tappertit's union equals
> "Glasgow Thuggery," the anti-Catholicism of 1780 equals the Protestant
> Association of 1839, and so forth.  It is precisely the habit or pattern of
> anachronism, which involves seeing in the present the threat, at least, of
> a repetition of the past, that is one key difference between Dickens and
> Scott.  Paradoxically, Scott emerges from the comparison as in some sense
> more liberal than Dickens, or anyway as having a firmer faith in progress.

Right, History equals history.  Progress? What type of Progress?

Well anyway, this is great stuff Doug, thank you very much. I would love to be
able to read the entire conference?

Terrance--who learned to read novels by reading Dickens with a mulicolored pen.