The One, Other, and Only Dickens

Garrett Stewart

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501730122
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.

To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens's fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens's fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene's famous passing mention of Dickens's "secret prose."

1

Shorthand Speech/Longhand Sounds

To begin this reading of Dickens with a long-ago reading of Dickens, not by me but to me, I record that his words were borne in upon me for the first time, unforgettably, from the mouth of a rather ambitious babysitter late in my first decade of existence. “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born.” I didn’t know “life” in the biographical rather than biological sense back then, but I could surely sense that something at the beginning of David Copperfield was swallowing its own tale. I got immediately caught up in such a loop of words answering to each other, sounding each other out. My mother took over the task of recitation when time permitted. And in intervals of withdrawal from this addictive listening, I sometimes tried—and surely failed, myself and Dickens both—to negotiate some of the more daunting syntactic hurdles of the print on my own, a prose that I found not just clearer but so much more powerful when intoned. As in fact, when really read, it always is intoned.

In any event, alone in spurts or avidly leaning in to another’s voice, I was certainly hooked. Even when drifting off to sleep over (or, better, under) the words, the words of my mother’s or the sitter’s, I could well have felt I was all the more invested in the contours of the tale. I probably identified with both Steerforth and David at once when the hero’s charismatic school friend gets a sleepy David, night after night, to reproduce certain fictional tales as Steerforth’s own bedtime stories in the school dorm—reproduce them not from page but from memory, based on David’s own earlier escapist reading—and before him, Dickens’s. (I wouldn’t discover Martin Chuzzlewit’s fondness for passing out—and then into consciousness again—under the spell of oral reading, Shakespeare included, as discussed in chapter 3, until many years later. Nor did I know then how Victorian a thing it was, even at hearthside as well as at bedside, to take one’s Dickens by oral installments.) At the time, there was just listening—and perhaps identification. For Steerforth, as well as for me. In any case, summoned in an extreme form of narrative voice only, no print in sight, such was the fabled and animating fiction from a previous century (for David and Steerforth, Smollett, Fielding, and the rest) that David Copperfield constituted then for me. More than half of another century later, the present book is anything, as you might have noticed by now, but the “matured” result of this early fascination. One of its main points, rather, is that Dickens always sends you back to your first half-dreamy sensitivity to language, unguarded and a bit childlike, vulnerable to every undulation. This strange regressive force, this verbal reversion, is often the direct effect of what I am calling the Other Dickens, operating a bit askew to the same story lines that Boz so confidently unrolls.

Not by me, then, that first reading of Dickens—but very much through as well as to me, with the sentences coursing along the veins of a nascent verbal imagination: an eventual reader born on the spot from the sound of writing. Indeed, it is just that fundamental distinction between hearing and reading, between the receipt and the coproduction of meaning, that is often rescinded when taking in such prose. In: where, through an almost uncanny process, it seems not just to belong but to originate. Even in listening, language arrives as if from within—registered on the sounding board of recognition. The very phrase “in listening” queries what one might call the situation of response. This isn’t the special quality of Dickens only, of course. It is the truth of reading maximized, fulfilled, in his prose—yet made unmistakable at times by the obtrusions of the Other Dickens, as if wording could offer up the unprecedented pure voice of language per se. At his most sentimental and unironic, in David Copperfield not least, what is infantilizing about reading Dickens is only that we find ourselves learning to read all over again, pupils apt because rapt, initiated each time out into—ah, one of those telltale two-way prepositional phrases the Other Dickens so delights in manipulating—the mysteries of the reading ear. As a child of David’s age when first being read to from his saga of dawning fictional investment, I certainly had no sense of the Other as distinct from the writer’s name on the title page. Their very commingling, as I would now want to put it in retrospect, was what thickened the listening for me, made it hard—and hard to resist—at once.

But not too hard, which is worth noting: both as the special quality of David Copperfield and as providing a glance aside to delights of phrasal extravagance this one novel typically denies to the Other Dickens on grounds of dramatic tact. It was of course in so many ways the perfect text to begin with for a young boy, like me, first encountering the pleasures of expressive language. Partly, this is because David as narrator never goes too far. But there is a more compelling reason for beginning a study like this with Copperfield. First chapters should put first things first, and this is the novel that details, in autobiographical retrospect, what I’m proposing as the earliest (if unspoken) training ground for the syllabic sleights and subterfuges of the Other Dickens. I refer, again, to that arduous phonetic compression in the stenographic regimen that launched David’s career, like Dickens’s before him, as a reporter—and in whose aftermath one then hears all the floodgates of enunciation thrown back open in the flow of word sounds. One might thus want to characterize the fictional prose of the novels as being released in this way to a lavish phonetic decompression.

“Listened To While It Is Being Written”

Indeed, some of the rare commentary inclined to audit the prose of the Other Dickens comes from a novelist himself remarking on the phonetic rhythms of Copperfield. “Between Shakespeare and Joyce,” writes William H. Gass in an essay called “The Sentence Seeks Its Form,” from his collection A Temple of Texts, there is “no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language”—and he means by this to stress, as it turns out, the aural dimension of the novelist’s effects. “Language is born in the lungs and is shaped by the lips, palate, teeth, and tongue out of spent breath… . It therefore must be listened to while it is being written.”¹ At attention’s trained remove, Gass the novelist hears this overhearing, in a signal instance, as functioning to solemnize—or potentially to assuage in retrospect—David’s emphatic sense of abandonment in early life. This occurs in a compensatory music of remembered distress conveyed by a run of mournful hammering negations: “From Monday morning until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from any one.” When the increased phonic concentration of “no counsel” returns by way of parallel exclusion in “no consolation,” Gass’s ear is drawn in particular to the internalized inversion of the long (and long-drawn-out—as well as lamentory) o and its virtual phonetic ingestion by what we might term the dispersed sound-script of “no consolation.” No solace, that is, except in the sounded precision of this bitter memory and its self-counseled lugubrious sonority. David, the Dickensian persona, drives the point home with the most rhetorically self-conscious of mournful iterations. At the same time, the Other Dickens (the one coming to later fruition, we might say, in David’s writerly tongue) effects that extra congestion of negativity within the longer periodic arc of a sentence strung (unmentioned by Gass) between “From Mon …” to the shifted prepositional sense of “from any one.” All told, Gass’s example is perfectly chosen to catch the double valence of Dickensian retrospect at this emotional nadir: a monotony of former desolation alleviated only in the fulfilled tonality of report.

A related effect from the same novel, this time in the throes of David’s melancholy rather than depression, is remarked in the recent anthology Dickens’s Style, offering rare good company for the current proceedings in its fresh attachment to the topic. Gass himself has a tacit interlocutor there as well, since an essay by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst entitled “Dickens’s Rhythms” cites David’s threefold lexical refrain (breaking cadence with one variant elongation) as his thoughts revert sadly to the deserted family home: “I imagined how the winds of winter would howl round it, how the cold rain would beat upon the window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the walls of the empty rooms.”² As with the interlaced patterns in the Gass example, one senses further, beyond the essay’s own treatment of the passage, how the first slant rhyme of howl against how (graphically even more than phonically nudged from behind by the alliterating w in “winds of winter”) also reverberates—more as a murmur or moan than a howl—across the rest of the passage, tainting each of the remaining “how” adverbs with an ambient lament. And then insinuates itself again, across a wider phrasal span, when “how … walls” spells out in plural form that same wailing if waning “howl” one last ghostly time. Such verbal bliss—what else to call it?—is certainly subliminal, but if it constitutes something like the guilty pleasure of indulgent hyperattention in any immersive reading of Dickens, it is entirely quilted in, nonetheless, to the general fabric of Dickensian phonetics and its blanketing euphonies.

So it is in David Copperfield, as elsewhere—but reflexively motivated there by the fiction of a writer’s memoir—that the sentence sometimes “seeks its form” by folding back on its own aspiration to eventual writerly prowess: an aspiring in just that breath-borne sense stressed by Gass. In our reading of such moments, as channeled by the subnarrative rhythms of the Other Dickens, the recovery in prose of a former desolate tedium (or of an evacuated and forlorn dwelling place) is, we might say, in some measure recovered from by the levitations of sound play alone. As implicit in another and later tedium in the novel, there may well be a partly biographical explanation for this, as already suggested—one that I’ve never seen explored in commentary—according to which a writing necessarily “born” of breathed sound, once choked back too often by unnatural phonetic constriction in stenography, can come back to haunt a literary discourse. For the grueling shorthand reporting to which David later turned for livelihood would have served to choke back by its own discipline, and thus render stillborn, exactly such an echoic effect as Gass calls out. This is the case because the sixteen soft and long o’s that burrow beneath the semantic surface of the passage Gass brings forward would (many of them) have disappeared in the stenographic deaf spots (all internal vowels suppressed) at the center of each consonant frame. Under investigation, this shorthand constraint emerges not merely as an anecdotal exception that proves the later and full-throated rule of Dickensian euphony, but as a partial graphological clue to it all. For to overstate only slightly, it was there—in that phonetically ascetic regimen of the stenographic code—that the very timbre of Dickens’s apprentice literary phrasing would have sustained a certain trauma of balked aurality for which a career of indulged sound play was to become the inspired therapy. The vowels that only Dickens, rather than an ordinary reader of prose, could once have “heard” (by reinsertion) in scanning his cryptic script are those the Other Dickens sows so profusely across the palpable phonic turf of the novels.

Gass again: for it is the vowels, not the consonants, that most immediately evoke (when silently vocalized) the “spent breath” of originary utterance shadowing the graphemes (alphabetic marks) on a written page. As it happens, no novel could be more explicit about this expenditure, in the act of speech itself rather than its vestige in writing, than David Copperfield—in an episode whose passing comedy produces a short circuit in the airwaves by which utterance is ordinarily propelled from mouth to ear. Earlier in that despondent slough of David’s unsupported, uncounseled misery under the Murdstone reign of alternating abuse and neglect, trapped in his room for punishment, he is given hope only by a secret conversation with his nurse Peggotty through the locked door. When she answers his question about what will be done with him, however, he doesn’t at first hear that he is to be sent away to school for the education he so craves. “I was obliged to get her to repeat it, for she spoke it the first time quite down my throat, in consequence of my having forgotten to take my mouth away from the keyhole and put my ear there; and though her words tickled me a good deal, I didn’t hear them.” Slapstick turns to stylistic parable. So, too, are we regularly tickled by Dickens’s words in the absence of audition (though not of course recognition): the open page our version of David’s porous closed door. For a moment, that is, the hero is submitted to the source of his own presence to us: the partly engaged tendons of speech production under conditions of silent excitation and muted articulation—what neurolinguistics, in the parallel case of silent reading, terms “inhibited” speech. Call it that tickle or tremor in our throat that generates meaning from the silent sounds of all script.

Elsewhere in this novel, the impact of a writing silently “born in the lungs” and “shaped” by muted mouth can serve David in any number of capacities. And no letting the reader forget it. This is the work not only of Dickens—as the ghost-writing narrator of David’s life—but of his silent partnering by the Other Dickens. The collaboration can result in the disclosure of the telling itself, including certain digressive echoes and excrescences less closely orchestrated than in passages like the one cited by Gass, with its almost masochistic verbal scratching at an unforgotten wound. Which is to say that the Other Dickens is readily recruited for the prankish as well as the plangent in this novel. One can get high on a certain dizziness of diction—and not least when the subject is drunken overindulgence. In one of fiction’s funniest hangovers, our inadvertently debauched hero wakes to “feel as if my outer covering of skin were a hard board; my tongue the bottom of an empty kettle, furred with long service, and burning up over a slow fire.” The queasy prepositional levitation of “up over” is a further strain in the prose itself, derived as if from the scorched tongue’s implied but unsaid “s-urf-ac-e” stretched only fuzzily across the echoic run of “furred/service/burn.” In the very furnace of assonant invention, the tongue of the Other Dickens is on fire here too—or at least heartily warming to the novel’s local topic. If the organ of last night’s slurred speech is the theme, let it do the work of repentance as well.

There is nothing quite like this syllabic ur-gency until, a decade later in A Tale of Two Cities, such syllabic smelting is deployed in the unique phonemic turmoil of that novel’s frenetic revolutionary setting. And again, it is part of the prose of the Other Dickens’s surreptitious poetry that such alphabetic byplay would not be exhausted solely by graphic matches, but further sounded out in silent enunciation. Note how the diagnosed “furnace of suffering” that fosters mass violence concentrates itself—in its “averaging” of more soft vowel sounds than meet the eye—into the near anagram of a shorthand-haunted frns/sfrn(g). This trope of oven-level heat in the repeated mention of “boiling” blood among the French populace, together with its further incendiary result, is still on the mind of the prose a chapter later in the syllabic chiasm of the title “Fire Rises,” and then at the start of the subsequent twenty-fourth chapter, with its “risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean.” Not only does “firm earth” enunciate and cancel at once the “firm-er” ground thus washed and burnt away, but the metaphor “risings of fire” all but spells out, when countersigned by the Other Dickens, those upheavals of retribution that put the literal “ire” back in the metaphor “fire” by the self-consuming cross-word flicker at “of fire.”

Even in the fever heat of ...