The One, Other, and Only Dickens

By Garrett Stewart

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."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501730122

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Introduction

Some Reagions for Reading

In biographical terms: preparations laid, ways paved. Yet in going forward, as noted, we are involved with only a depersonified sense of reading Dickens. Even so, the vernacular way of putting this yields an extra advantage, an unexpected leverage. It pries from idiom an oblique insight into what it might mean to read the Other Dickens as well: that wholly impersonal prose one finds fitfully legible—and only legible at that, as Writing itself, dependent of course on its phonological basis—across the print-busy page of the novels. This isn’t just another Dickens, therefore: any other Dickens, yours or hers or mine, one among the many coming down to us—the blockbuster mass entertainer at the dawn of a media epoch, the quintessentially insecure Victorian male, the residual Christian, the scrupulous urban ethnographer, the female idealizer and misogynist alike, the much-biographized rags-to-riches careerist, the aspirant middle class personified, the complacent imperialist, nor even the studied rhetorician. This is the Other Dickens, the one there always, if only in abeyance, never entirely withdrawn or at rest: an otherness latent in the slant of narrative’s every phrasing, waiting to break out in unexpected coruscations of syllables and syntax.

Such is the Dickens destined to puncture whatever Dickensian signature effects, even those of the Master Stylist, that a given reader, academic or avocational, already tends to recognize and feast on. Regarding this introduction’s anomalous title, such are the reagions for reading to be isolated by example (borrowing from Martin Chuzzlewit, quite out of context, Mrs. Gamp’s tipsy pronunciation—and accidental portmanteau term): namely, loci and motives alike. By this reagioning, our sensing where to look can help us in knowing how to listen—and ultimately why. And in doing so, the backstory continued here from the foreword, and pursued in detail via the first chapter’s turn to David Copperfield and its texture of internal evidence, is not biographical either, but linguistic. It concerns the comically elaborated traumas of shorthand code as they may, more seriously, have warped the formative phonetic unconscious of the writerly imagination, springing a hypersensitized Other from the pressure cooker of a mercilessly crimped inscription.

One may say that this Other Dickens is simply the prose one reads at a certain pitch of response—where Writing speaks up, and for, itself from within the pockets of ideology, the energy of polemic, the blind spots of gender or race, even the confident machinations of Style itself. Gone public as Boz, Charles the tireless verbal and narrative craftsman was a phenomenon, a troubled man, a moody superstar, a working journalist, a resourceful magazine editor, an inspired caricaturist, and a seasoned if unschooled maestro of plot and descriptive art alike. The Other Dickens isolates itself (not Himself) as the intransigent genius of verbalism per se, the agitated underside of just such art. This coterminous rather than alternate Dickens has no personality traits to speak of, to read of. Emptied into the flow of its own ink, such an Other Dickens maneuvers the straits and rapids of a fluent, coursing aurality of prose thus Other to narrative’s own purport at times: not actively counter to it, but syncopated, impulsive, and only implicitly bidden.

This Other Dickens isn’t an author at all, then. Dickens is in this sense the effect, not the cause, of anything associated with this verbal percolation beneath the lid of semantic and narrative sense. When reading Dickens in the everyday sense, you are likely to be reading one of his novelistic products. In a rather dated Victorianism still casually flourished in journalistic (and student) prose, he penned fourteen of them, with one left unfinished at his death. Yet it is not enough just to say that he left his stories in writing. When taken up for reading, we may still sense their being written, rather than simply having been. The inventive pen is still evident in prose action. For if only in the right mode of attention, not mood of response, one reads in a way that deciphers something at the springs not so much of the writer’s narrative oeuvre as of his immanent linguistic verve. The Other Dickens is simply a way of christening this disposition. One responds, when prompted, to exactly the upsurge and onrush, the catch and drag, the bends and rents, of a language not quite gelled (yet, ever) into the print that transmits it. Or say, prose in the process of its own getting done and setting down, a Writing often still sounded on the inner ear before being entirely penned in by the rectangular page. And thus it is that the Other Dickens has little or no critical bibliography for consultation. I honor this fact by writing for once with a bare minimum of notes—and with uncited quotations from passages now most easily searched in the Project Gutenberg e-texts (with the two provisos that all italics are my own unless otherwise specified, and that any very rare errors in the e-text are noted alongside the verified quotation). As to the thin critical trail brought to light in the notes, I’m not out to tabulate all the incisive things said here and there in the scholarly backlog about Dickens’s style, by way of either generalization or local perception. The purpose, instead, is to gather up for consideration some limited but convincing evidence of all that has regularly gone uncommented on.

Dickens the Eminent Victorian Author portrays, narrates, pontificates, raises hackles, wrings tears. Beneath all possible mastery or authority or suspect ameliorative politics, wholly given over to language in motion, the Other Dickens scribes. In reading this Dickens, we audit along imprinted lines the formative waver and vibration of words in emergence, sometimes half out of sync with sense, veering slantwise on the ear. This Other Dickens, as we will see, and hear, isn’t exactly a secret Dickens, though such a localizable effect—derived from the introversions of a somehow occulted style—has been proposed in admiration, as we’ll explore, by the novelist Graham Greene. Rather than esoteric or encrypted, this Other Dickens is more steadily scriptive, writerly: his prose creased and pleated in a way that never permits us to ignore the phonetic alphabet and its clustering syllables out of which all the novels’ lustrous as well as sardonic phrases are made.

Concerning the dual but coordinated aspect of such prose, can we say that Dickens is alone among great novelists in this dimension—or stratum—of his style, at least before Joyce, even as it might seem to articulate the deep fact of all writing? Maybe. Where else do we find so clear a case of sheer lingual impulse coming now under, now out from under, the imposed continuities of discursive control? Language on the loose and the run: that is the Other Dickens. From moment to moment, Boz the nicknamed superhero of serial fiction, as of Victorian three-decker publication, reins in this Other manifestation, rallies it to the narrative call, trades its drastic liberties for a stabilized if still volatile phrasing. But sometimes, in the intermittent counterpoint set in play by the irrepressible Other, reading may seem to audit a barter and compromise still at work in an unstable fillip of phrase. With meaning only provisionally setting in, settling down, these word-sounds are caught just a bit reluctantly succumbing to syntax—and thus taxing its logic with a momentary ludic back draft.

I’ve more than once, in print, called Dickens the great syntactician of English fiction. True enough, when need arises. But such praise can seem too narrowing, too much an emphasis on strategy rather than spontaneous acrobatics. Reason not the need. Analysis can easily betray the energetics of the sentence in Dickens when thinking too much, too soon, or too exclusively of its instrumentality, without giving full slippery weight to those mellifluous or quizzical ripples hedging a given phrasing from within—or edging it from without. One certainly understands, however, why Dickensian style in scholarly discussions tends to be subordinated to the themes it manifests and coordinates. To be sure, the commanding embrace of his syntactic frameworks and lexical arsenals serves quite directly a satirist’s broad canvas in a panoptic urban vision, as elsewhere the roving details of a flaneur’s avid gaze. But in all this and more, a flexed capaciousness of report comes through, because only through, the theatrically maximized capacities of just that syntax itself and the diction it marshals—which thus come first, foremost, and even at times in the absence of plotted utility. Even when all else fails, or when little else seems at stake or in play, the show of verbal bravura is in its own right the motive force, the vital drive, the very trajectory, of the Dickens experience. In this way Writing alone, primed for action even in its absence, charged and indefatigable, can seem the true hero of page after