Introduction. Sara Thornton

Transcription

1 Introduction Sara Thornton Sara Thornton est maître de conférences à l'université de Picardie (Amiens). Elle a enseigné à l'ens d'ulm et à Paris VIII. Elle a travaillé sur le concept de la vanité du texte dans l'œuvre de Thackeray et elle a publié des articles sur Dickens, Thackeray, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, le gothique et le néo-gothique notamment dans la nouvelle contemporaine, et le fonctionnement de la nourriture dans le roman victorien. It has only been recently that David Copperfield, the eighth of Dickens's novels, published in 1850, has attracted critical attention in the field of Dickens studies. Modern criticism first favoured Bleak House as the innovative work produced by J. Hillis Miller and Jeremy Hawthorne testifies, but the complexities of this seemingly coherent Bildungsroman are now being explored in the light of new readings which might be labelled structuralist, post-structuralist, new historicist, feminist and psychoanalytic. Traditional criticism tended to see David Copperfield as autobiographical, a novel of childhood memory and nostalgia and as a novel concerned with the formation of a compassionate, responsible and static personality. The novel tended to be enjoyed but neglected by critics who saw it as a work of lesser structural rigour and lacking in the social criticism found in other novels. Modern criticism, however, finds in this lack of rigid structure in which the text strains towards unity and resolution but is constantly thrown into turmoil by its own forces of dispersion and subversion its meandering quality, fodder for readings against the grain of the text which seek out chinks in the armour of coherence and unity. Tensions, fault lines and aporia are discovered in the place of mimetic truthfulness and what John Peck in his excellent introduction to Contemporary Critical Essays on David Copperfield and Hard Times calls a tendency to rush to extract a moral statement 5

2 Lectures d une œuvre : David Copperfield from, or pass moral judgement on the text 1. The vision of David as a mature responsible individual content to accept containment and control begins, says Peck, to seem a flimsy illusion, a myth to support the moral order of society 2. Thus we might say that modern criticism deals more with aesthetics in the formal or structural sense rather than with ethics, and that dissonance is a more fertile hunting ground than reconciliation and harmony. Middle-class self-making 3 as Vanden Bossche calls it, is seen to be a question of fraught division. There is also another dimension to modern criticism which is apparent in many of the essays in this collection and in other recent work. It is a tendency to see the novel as an organism, a pattern, and to find coherence or conflict of a purely formal or aesthetic nature rather than of a moral or rational nature. We might briefly use an example of a similar mechanism from the visual arts where the painter Frank Auerbach works from some of the Old Masters, repainting them to discover the energies, structures and functioning of the work. He produces from these works pictures where some compositional diagram has been found within the material, some simple geometry, some simple geometrical coherence 4. These serve as catalysts in the completion of his own paintings and are brimming with information on the architecture of each painting, exploring through Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian the opposite poles of human feeling, tussling with a whole set of pictorial problems and finding answers in the unlikeliest places 5. This repainting might be said to be similar to the work of literary critics who attempt, not to rewrite Dickens in a more abstract or intense form (although the experiment would be an interesting one) but to work from the novels, or rework them, by concentrating on particular effects. Standing back, as it were, from the novel to perceive the flows and explosions of energy, the constraints and restrictions, or releases and outpourings, the critic can understand the way the novel displays its workings. This picture can also be gained from delving microscopically into the text to see linguistic plays and pirouettes which are independent of planned or ostensible meaning. If Auerbach grasps better how the Old Masters achieved their effects 6 and understands them more clearly, modern 1. Peck, Introduction to David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, p Ibid., p Vanden Bossche, Cookery, not Rookery: Family and Class in David Copperfield, p Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working After the Masters, p Ibid., p Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working After the Masters, p. 4. 6

3 Introduction critics of Dickens can also grasp the effects that Dickens did not necessarily intend to achieve and still understand him more clearly. We might now consider some of the contributions to this enterprise as a background to the research published in this collection of articles. John Peck sees James Kincaid as operating a change of direction in the criticism of David Copperfield. In Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter Kincaid moves away from an endorsement of David's growing prudence and discipline and considers instead tension between this and the relaxed and comic world which subverts his Murdstonian firmness 1. The march towards conformity and bourgeois identity is criticised and Kincaid opens the way for a more complex appreciation of the conflicts in the text and the problematic concept of self. Lougy's approach is a more poststructuralist one in that it looks at images, such as a lunatic's face at a window (speaking of separation and discontinuity) which are irreconcilable with the novel's attempt to make us see the circle it draws as complete and whole 2. Peck points out that Lougy releases himself from the usual stabilising referents of plot and character and, in doing so, discovers just how much there is in the novel that operates beyond our usual reasoning impulses 3. Many studies concentrate on the notion of the self and frequently insist on its constant disintegration. Discipline and restraint and a self-constructed 4 individualism is shown to be a product of mid- Victorian Britain and a driving force in David Copperfield which is threatened by, among other things, the Byronic legacy and its sexual ambiguity. Language is another means of establishing the self and indeed the only means of acceeding to the Lacanian Symbolic order. Virginia Carmichael considers the odd relationships to language in the persons surrounding David such as Mr. Dick and Micawber and how these question the dominant male discourse which David masters through shorthand. The dispersal and disintegration of the domestic group and the idea of pollution from invaders such as Murdstone, Steerforth and Uriah is seen as part of a power to isolate members of the group. In turn, the intruders are seen to be characterised by their own social and narrative isolation Peck, Introduction to David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, p Lougy, Remembrances of Death Past and Future: A Reading of David Copperfield, p Peck, Introduction to David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, p Edwards, David Copperfield: The Decomposing Self, p Andrade, Pollution of an Honest Home, p

4 Lectures d une œuvre : David Copperfield In terms of the constraints and releases which plot the circulation of energy in David Copperfield, D.A. Miller looks at the oxymoronic notion of advertising secrets and the way in which secrets that will out are shut away so that characters come with their secrets in boxes but are themselves shut in boxes and are boxes. They seal in their passions to become firm, hide their emotions away until they explode like Peggotty, bursting her buttons. The secret is paradoxically the sign of the subject's accomodation to a totalizing system 1. David attempts to avoid being shut in a box but creates another secret refuge which is his own text. Another fault line which threatens to cleave the text in two is the goal of reconciliation of opposites which Janice Carlisle sees as making the Victorian novel an unstable marriage of opposing tendencies forged by will and imagination. Where she sees the possibility of reconciliation, others have seen irreconcilability such as David's position of knowing and not knowing at the same time: he depicts himself as unknowing and innocent which keeps him free of the consequences of knowledge and action yet this posture is often at odds with a more controlling narrator 2. The studies of the text within the text are numerous and often deal with the snares of language. Chaston sees literature and reading as a saving grace in David Copperfield, while Manning considers the limitations and trickery of language which David attempts to combat with his own prose: the turning of language's fluidity from malign to benign marks David's rise from helpless child to confident adult 3. Yet the confident adult is reliant on the containing nature of narrative which is able to protect his present from the sting of the past and its nostalgic undertow 4 by freezing it. The same notion of the static text (rather than dynamic utterance) is considered by Murray Baumgarten who sees writing as yielding the possibility of rescuing the individual from the consequences of familial interaction 5 which is true of both Mr. Dick and David. Writing is also a means of expressing desired social status, is a currency and a means of screening out unwanted knowledge. John Kucich juxtaposes the excessive bloated speech of Micawber and its unrestrained qualities with the repressive qualities of speech seen in David who turns himself through his speech and 1. D. A. Miller, Secret Subjects, Open Secrets, p Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative and the Subject of Omniscience, p Manning, David Copperfield and Scheherezadia: The Necessity of Narrative, p Ibid., p Baumgarten, Writing and David Copperfield, p

5 Introduction prose into a tightly regulated machine to suppress his hostile feelings 1. The articles in this collection deal with many of the concerns considered above and turn their attention to specific motifs and movements. These include the interplay of hermeneutics and, the interdependent of language knowledge and madness, the frailty of the human subject, the sea as a destabilising element entering the urban experience, unstable moral and physical landscape, Byronic Steerforht's invention of self, the presence of Ghosts and the writing of text by Ghost, the magic and mystical potency of object, synchrony and circularity of time, and the conflicts and scissions of the text. Their common attribute is perhaps a seeking out of the fractures and absences which the narrative of David Copperfield often seeks to elide. Bibliography ANDRADE Mary Anne, Pollution of an Honest Home, Dickens Quarterly 5, June 1988, p BAUMGARTEN Murray, Writing and David Copperfield, Dickens Studies Annual 14, 1985, CARLISLE Janice, The Sense of an Audience: Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid-Century, Athens, Georgia University Press, CARMICHAEL Virginia, In Search of Beein': Nom/Non du Père in David Copperfield in John Peck (ed.), David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks, London and New York, St. Martin's Press, CHASTON Joel D., Crusoe, Crocodiles and Cookery Books, David Copperfield and the Affective Power of Reading Fiction, University of Mississippi Studies in English, 9, 1991, p EDWARDS Simon, David Copperfield: The Decomposing Self in John Peck (ed.), David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks, London and New York, St. Martin's Press, EIGNER Edwin, The Lunatic at the Window: Magic casements of David Copperfield, Dickens Quarterly 2, March 1985, p GREENSTEIN Michael, Between Curtain and Caul: David Copperfield's Shining Transparencies, Dickens Quarterly 5, June 1988, p JOHNSON Derek, Pastoral in the Work of Charles Dickens, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Paris, Wien, Peter Lang, JAFFE A.,Vanishing points: Dickens, narrative and the subject of omniscience, University of California Press, Oxford, Kucich, Excess and Restraint in the novels of Charles Dickens, p. 211,

6 Lectures d une œuvre : David Copperfield KINCAID James R., Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, New York and London, Routledge, KINCAID James R., Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Oxford, Oxford University Press, KINCAID James R., Viewing and Blurring in Dickens: The Misrepresentation of Representation, Dickens Studies Annual 16, 1987, p KUCICH John, Excess and Restraint in the novels of Charles Dickens, Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia, LECERCLE Jean-Jacques, The Violence of Language, London and New York, Routledge, LOUGY Robert E., Remembrances of Death Past and Future: A Reading of David Copperfield, Dickens Studies Annual 6, 1977, p MANNING Sylvia, David Copperfield and Scheherezadia: The Necessity of Narrative, Studies in the Novel 14, Winter 1982, p MILLER Andrew, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity, Culture, and Victorian Narrative, Cambridge (England); New York, Cambridge University Press, MILLER D.A., Secret Subjects, Open Secrets, Dickens Studies Annual 14, PECK John (ed.), Introduction to David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, London and New York, St. Martin's Press, REED John Robert, Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness, Athens, Ohio University Press, VANDEN Bossche, CHRIS R., Cookery, not Rookery: Family and Class in David Copperfield in John Peck (ed.), David Copperfield and Hard Times: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks, London and New York, St. Martin's Press, WALKOWITZ Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London, Virago, WALLACE Anne D., Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth-Century, Oxford, Clarendon Press, WIGGINS Colin, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working After the Masters, London, National Gallery Publications,