Putting the Boot back into ‘What the Dickens’…

I doubt it is really an oddity of just the BBC that we regularly, and with apparently avid passion, destroy our greatest literature under the veneer of a costume drama. We watch a novel rather than read it. Or even worse, we only read with an eye on what we have watched. Speaking with my Jane Austen purist hat on, I can always tell whether someone has watched the ’Austen’ adaptations, and then read (or re-read) her books or whether they have remained content with what Jane Austen actually wrote. But behind the purist point there is a real concern here.  It is very clear that an anathema lies right at the heart of the costume drama.  The skill of the great novelist is that they present the reader with a shifting gauze of descriptions, be they of people or places, which constantly flow into each other. Miss Haversham is caught up in her room, or Mrs Defarge in her wine shop - a relationship which is effectively impossible to capture on film. Instead of rich (and challenging) descriptions in which people and places merge, one is left with the mere ‘eye candy’ of a lavish, and distinctly ‘retro’ set. Moreover the very mechanics of a good novel, where much of the characterization is tied up with this free exchange with place is lost. Thence the adapter has to develop other, invariably (given the context) less subtle ways to establish personality, and much of the actual character of the novel, gently slips away.

  However it is of great importance that one is clear about what is lost here. If it was merely the relatively obscure matter of the difference between visual and written mediums then no doubt these changes would not matter much. So one would have a few things like me screaming from the sideline, but we could (and perhaps should) be safely ignored by everyone else. And yet this ‘theological’ debate is not all what is at stake, for something else far greater is at stake in the leaching out of a novel’s identity. What is lost is an entire way of thinking, which perhaps uniquely, the novel allows one to at once define and explore. I mean here that it is perhaps the essence of the novel, where people, places and times, emerge and then merge, - that no act or thought is ever simple, or straight forward. A novel, like almost nothing else, allows one to grasp at the sheer complexity of being human; a complexity that defies most other characterizations, which are rooted (in some way or other) upon reason and the faith that if humans are not simple, or even logical, they are at least stable. No such inhibition faces the novelist, for whom the sole restriction is that the characters, and places they portray remain not so much of interest to the reader, as sweep them up in new strange thoughts. To read a novel properly is to enter a whirlwind, and therefore to be whisked away to God knows where. 

   Dickens (much like Jane Austen) is very poorly served by both the costume drama, or by any ‘orthodoxy’ that attempts to grasp their writing either within the constriction of genre (be it ‘comedy’ or history) or as an exploration of psychological type (to say that Dickens or Austen ‘anticipated ‘ Freud, is to confuse cause with its consequence – Freud is the consequence of the complexities opened up by the novelists who pre-date him, not the discoverer of their ‘causes’). This point explains the real challenge of reading a novel, a challenge so much more difficult than almost any other form of reading. The challenge is to allow the complexities and difficulties which it conjures, to at once remain unresolved and yet to still be productive in that very lack of straight forward resolution. Or to put it otherwise, it is the novel’s peculiar challenge that it forces us to confront in thought the very stuff of our life itself.

  But then what might such thinking feel like, and why would one need to insist that such thoughts are almost always of a highly  political nature? In the rest of this Rant, one great theme from one of the best known of Dickens’ novels (that is, one of those that is classic costume drama fodder), ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, will be briefly articulated.

  The central motif of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is clearly redemption. The novel presents four complex, and highly interrelated means of being redeemed. The first, and by far the most simple, revolves around a redemption through the passage of time. The very first chapter talks of a resurrection of a man buried in prison for eighteen years: It asks the profound question, of whether such a man would want redemption at all, and what that redemption might look like if they got it. One subsequently meets the redeemed man, Dr Manet, and discovers indeed that he is ignorant or rather terrified of his freedom. Dr Manet’s prison, and the ‘profession’ of cobbler which he developed within that prison, have become who and what he is, and the world beyond it, merely as death to him. Thence he reveals that to be a prisoner is never a matter of simple physical or even mental confinement (there are no straight forward ‘prisoners of the mind’) so much as a peculiar constellation of the two. To be a prisoner is to be caught up in a profession, which in other circumstances could have positive properties of its own, and yet which remains a deep prison none the less. Nor is what redeems in such cases simply a matter of time, for three reasons.

   Firstly redemption comes from the articulation of the passage of time (rather than the simple passage itself). The Doctor recovers his sanity though the slow and careful mediation of his daughter, who manages, through great patience to reach into the past and a life beyond the Doctor’s madness. The Doctor is then redeemed through a past, which is allowed to matter once again to his present. Secondly this redemption is only partial. The full transformation can only be effected when the material tools upon which it was built were destroyed. The Doctor’s prison was never purely mental, and he could only be freed when those other prison warders, that is - the desk and tools of his cobblers trade, were destroyed. Finally all such redemptions are partial. One might be redeemed across (and through time), and yet remain haunted by that ‘other past’; When disaster strikes, the Doctor reverts to where and what he was.

  In this way Dickens shows that it is no simple thing to be a professional. On the one hand, the professional can be the master of his fate, and yet that fate is always stalked by other quiet madnesses. A madness whose origin perhaps is the very self reliance of the professional, a reliance which sets them up against the rest of the world, and constructs a prison, of possessions and of persons, quite as secure as the Bastille itself.

  The second theme of redemption, also rests around resurrection, around the theme of resurrection in this world or the next. The resurrection man (that is, the grave robber) Jerry Cruncher, is portrayed within the novel as a wife-beating impious  idiot, while his wife by contrast is seen to be a veritable Christian martyr, who is beaten for praying for another soul. However beyond that apparently vulgar characterization of Cruncher (which if misread is the stuff of ‘costume drama’), is a very subtle problem. Cruncher is the epitome of a man who acts  according to his self interest. He is a human divorced from all empathy or any other feeling. Such a man, Dickens suggests can duplicate himself (he has a son who is his very image). And yet he can only be what he is, because of the actions of others who in differing ways allow him to be as he is. He is therefore kept in his state by Tellson’s bank, which finds it very convenient to have a ‘jobber’, who requires no formal salary, but is paid only for the odd jobs he might (or might not) do. Likewise the doctors who employ his services as a resurrection man, demand that he is no different from who or what he is. More darkly, his home life is only possible as it is because he has a pliant wife, who attempts to make his life as comfortable as possible. The irony of his existence is that his self-obsession is itself the product of what other allow him. His redemption comes when caught in the Terror (and by the immanent execution of Charles Darnay) he is forced for once to see beyond his own identity, and jarred into necessarily thinking of others. From this position, he sees also himself, from the eyes of another, and understands that he was never quite the creature that he understood himself to be. A thought that turns him inside out, and leads to his avowed transformation. Whence one could say, Cruncher is the ultimate piece of flotsam thrown up by society. He is that monster which society itself creates to reflect its own callousness, a callousness that then haunts the notion of identity itself.

  The third great theme of redemption is the most famous, and tragic in the novel, - the fate of Sidney Carton. Carton is no simple ‘alcoholic’ or ‘manic depressive’, but a man caught up in a mixture of history, location, and the corruption of people who do rather well out of his despondency. One might say that he has in this respect, an affinity with and an opposition to Cruncher. Like Cruncher he caught up in being the product of others (although unlike Cruncher he is not simply so); but unlike him, he is always on the side of others: he is then one of the impersonal forces which allow things such as Cruncher (or Carton’s own bete noir Stryder) to be at all. Thence he is a man whose very intuition, and ability to understand what another thinks and feels, prevents from ever having a personality of his own, beyond that of the bottle.

  It is then into such an existence that love falls. And yet there is a very deep problem here – for how can a life whose reality revolves around being caught within another, ever fall in love? What can intuition’s itself love look like? How can it ever love if to love is to be caught up in a particular intuitive exchange – an exchange whose very particularity appears to threaten the peculiarity of love itself? The answer as given in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is that such a love can only be carried out in the name of another. Carton might lack an identity of his own, but his double Darnay is very much the ‘hero’, and so very secure in what he is (and might be). Carton, initially at least, then finds love in merely being as a ghost in the family. A shade who can turn up from time to time, and be greeted as a friend: a man whose very intuition for others can then be woven into the stuff of another’s marriage. A yet that weave is partial and episodic: his double Darnay, forgets frequently of his double’s existence. Intuition only becomes truly a part of the hero’s life, and therefore only fully redeemed in love, if it sacrifices its own actual existence. In death Carton, the man of intuition is redeemed and reborn, both in the vision of the history to follow, but also within the very hearts of others – that is within their feeling for one another.

  Here then lies the central enigma of all intuition – that it must always grasp at others, and so cannot hold what it itself is, down. Any attempt to do so is stalked by madness, or can only be partial; Intuition can only safely exist within an individual (and so can only be redeemed) as it is wrapped up in an emotion quite distinct from it (love); in which it exists as it were, as an extra dimension – an extra point of union, that carries that love beyond simple adoration. The answer to that deep question of how intuition can fall in love, and how it might be redeemed is that to do so, it needs to become an extra dimension, to love itself. A problem that perhaps only Sidney Carton faces in its purest form, and yet which surely stalks all humans (apart from the unredeemed Crunchers of the world) as they always ‘also’ feel the emotion of others.

  The final act of redemption is the most overtly political, and yet least present. Right at the end of the novel, Carton, is his dying glance, understands that his death, and death of so many others are actually caught up in a great drama of sacrifice and redemption. To oppress an entire people is to create a world which is unredeemable in itself (the Defarges live and die without mercy), and yet in which other themes, other ways to think what might be, can be born up by the storms of retribution. Redemption, is then the othering of history itself: it is where it also leads, while it was so busily doing something else. An ‘also’ that is neither process or reason, or final goal (there is no real end in Carton’s vision); but rather works by pulling out of the past another future, from that which it appeared to possess; and thereby lies in recasting the very nature of history itself. An act, whose full effect is very much the provenance of the dying visionary. Politics from such an angle is neither the science of the possible nor yet the power of the historical so much as the urgency to reuse what was, in the name of what might be.

  To really read novels is neither to simply relax (the province of costume drama) nor to go on some simple scientific bag hunt for ‘character types’ (be the Oedipal or neurotic). On the contrary, novels in blending personality and politics, individuality and community, the world we see with the world in which we are also seen, present one with perhaps the richest material for allowing one to navigate the complex byways of existence. To read is thence to uncover other things that one also is, or might be (and what might follow from them). It is then to be caught up in the very spirit of revolution itself, or at least it ought to be, if only those certain mongers of costume drama or psychology would allow it to be!