Flaubert's 'A Simple Heart' and Chekhov's 'The Darling'

Tolstoy recognised Chekhov’s particular genius with a modesty and insight that does not always characterise his literary judgements: for example, Shakespeare he considered ‘ordinary’ and Maupassant, at his worst, was no more ‘moral filth’ but:

…as an artist Chekhov cannot even be compared with the old Russian writers— Turgenev, Dostoevsky, or myself. Chekhov has his own manner, like the Impressionists. You see a man daubing on whatever paint happens to be near at hand, apparently without selection, and it seems as though these paints bear no relation to one another. But if you step back a certain distance and look again, you will get a complete, over-all impression. Before you there is a vivid, unchallengeable picture of nature.[1]

Tolstoy characterises Chekhov as a writer who saw differently from his peers, his work only appearing to be a series of glances, but, in truth, the product of a sustained and original gaze.

Chekhov's ‘The Darling’ was a particular favourite among Chekhov’s stories and Maxim Gorky recalls Tolstoy speaking of it with rapture to a group of listeners, one of whom was Chekhov:

‘It is like lace,’ he said, ‘made by a chaste young girl. There were such lace makers in olden times who used to depict all their lives, all their dreams of happiness in the pattern. They dreamed in designs of all that was dear to them, wove all their pure, uncertain love into their lace.’[2]

It is a tender evocation of a story that is not, in itself, wholly tender. Tolstoy even wrote an essay[3] on ‘The Darling’ in which he claimed that Chekhov may have written the story with the intention of satirising Olenka and all such women who unthinkingly devote their lives to men, but, Tolstoy asserted, Chekhov achieved, instead, a story that was a riposte to all who proposed women should be the equal or independent of men:

(Chekhov) intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless. And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her.

This, he claimed, was the effect of the story and, proving that ‘what makes the story so excellent is that the effect is unintentional’ Tolstoy recalled how.

I learnt to ride a bicycle in a hall large enough to drill a division of soldiers. At the other end of the hall a lady was learning. I thought I must be careful to avoid getting into her way, and began looking at her. And as I looked at her I began unconsciously getting nearer and nearer to her, and in spite of the fact that, noticing the danger, she hastened to retreat, I rode down upon her and knocked her down -- that is, I did the very opposite of what I wanted to do, simply because I concentrated my attention upon her. The same thing has happened to Chekhov, but in an inverse sense: he wanted to knock the Darling down, and, concentrating upon her the close attention of the poet, he raised her up.[4]

Tolstoy is misguided in believing that, despite himself, Chekhov wrote a hymn to the submissive woman, but right in considering that creating her was an act of attention by Chekhov, a sustained and rigorous gaze, but it strives neither to be judgmental nor definitive. Tolstoy, most especially in his latter days, felt art should have a moral thrust. Its business was to answer the question of how one should live, and the art he admired was an art that shared and expressed his own moral certainty.[5] For Chekhov, famously, there were no answers: one’s efforts went into framing the question, and not supplying the answer. In Tolstoy’s later work the moralist intrudes, but never in Chekhov’s. Chekhov, in this regard, is like Flaubert, who declared:

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Maupassant, for Chekhov, was an inspiration – the first modern writer, one who seemed to Maupassant without a moral agenda, a writer intent on looking and not judging. Maupassant, too, equated good writing with skilled observation.

There is an unexpected side to everything; the smallest thing has something unknown in it; we must find it.[6]

Maupassant took lessons in looking, and he took them from Flaubert. Maupassant was well placed enough in his associations as a younger writer to come under the tutelage of Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert. Bouilhet was a poet and head librarian in Rouen and Flaubert had been a close friend of Maupassant’s late uncle. The two men put the youthful Maupassant through what was something of a Creative Writing course.

For seven years, the young Maupassant did not attempt to publish his work but sent everything he wrote to Flaubert, and, the following Sunday over lunch, Flaubert

…little by little, hammered into me two or three precepts that summed up his long and patient teachings. One of these precepts was to be original: 'If you have any originality, you must first dig it out. If you don’t have any, you must get some.[7]

Originality, for Flaubert, was a question of attention. He regularly set Maupassant the task of describing something ordinary and familiar – ‘a blazing fire or a tree in a plain' – but, to describe it successfully, Maupassant had to search for the ‘unexplored’ element in it because, Flaubert believed,

we are accustomed to seeing things only through the memory of what others have said about them.

Next, Maupassant recalled:

…he forced me to describe, in a few phrases, a creature or an object so that it was clearly distinguishable from all other creatures or objects of the same race or species.

The creature or object might be a grocer on his doorstep, a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cab-horse in a row of cabs. The challenge was, ‘with a single word,’ to show how that particular grocer, concierge, or cab-horse resembled no other.[8] This was the search for le mot juste: the exact word, the precise word – verb, noun, adjective – that would recreate the creature or object for the reader:

One should never be content with approximation; one should never try to avoid the difficulty by resorting to subterfuge - even if it fools the reader—or to linguistic trickery.[9]

This is how Maupassant described his writing course in ‘The Novel’, one of the few texts in which he discussed his own techniques, but it has been suggested that some of the other lessons he was given can be deduced from Flaubert’s introduction to Bouilhet’s Dernières Chansons (1872). Here, Flaubert declared, art should neither:

…teach, correct, nor moralise…dénouements are not conclusions; no general inferences can be drawn from a particular case…Prose, like verse, must be written so that it can be read out loud. Poorly written sentences never pass the test: they tighten the chest and impede the beating of the heart…style goes straight to the point and leaves no impression of the author himself: the word disappears in the clarity of the thought, or rather, by sticking so closely to the thought, leaves it entirely unhampered.[10]

In Flaubert’s work, in Maupassant’s and in Chekhov’s, we witness the result of such principles in the clarity and specificity of the prose, the seamless and fluent style, and the complicated symbolism of the Felicité’s parrot – is Flaubert mocking piety or celebrating it as a human need? If Olenka is a fool, where do we find Chekhov saying this outright – if at all?

The tutoring came to an end when Maupassant wrote his first great short story, ‘Boule de Suif.’[11] Flaubert edited the story, considered the completed tale ‘a masterpiece’ and died three weeks later. Maupassant helped prepare his body for burial,

…bathing it in eau de Cologne, dressing it in silk underwear and a suit, complete with waistcoat, cravat and skin gloves, and brushing the famous moustache.[12]

In this description of preparing the body, it is the number of details - the careful accounting of them – the attention to detail - the 'silk' underwear, the 'skin gloves' and, especially, the brushing of the ‘famous moustache’ that evoke Flaubert's lingering presence, Maupassant's tenderness and the debt to be honoured. These are the details that make a funereal moment blush into life.

Maupassant learned his lessons well.[13]

Three years before this – and while those lessons were in progress – Flaubert wrote Three Tales, of which ‘A Simple Heart’ is the first. ‘A Simple Heart’ exemplifies the writerly craft he so effectively instilled in Maupassant.

There is much to say about Three Tales and the sense in which the small book is the culmination of all his pre-occupations as a writer, but the focus here is ‘A Simple Heart’ and its relation to Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’.

Both are accounts of women. Both deny themselves complicated plots. Both, in short forms, take the long view of a life, and both concern themselves with love, love both with and without an object.

‘A Simple Heart’ opens with a cameo of Felicité and the context in which she exists. From the start there is a wonderful and noticeable specificity:

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress--although the latter was by no means an agreeable person…Summer and winter she wore a dimity kerchief fastened in the back with a pin, a cap which concealed her hair, a red skirt, grey stockings, and an apron with a bib like those worn by hospital nurses. Her face was thin and her voice shrill. When she was twenty-five, she looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her age; erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working automatically.[14]

It is a detailed summary of the character, but it seems to end with a dismissal: is this our heroine? What will animate this wooden figure?

Abused and unregarded since birth, Felicité is presented as a victim, one with a tendency, that later becomes a habit, for reverence: this, in itself, might be the definition of a martyr, but Felicité is no simple victim. After being abandoned by Theodore, her first love, she is in great distress but quickly recovers her equanimity

The poor girl's sorrow was frightful. She threw herself on the ground, she cried and called on the Lord, and wandered around desolately until sunrise. Then she went back to the farm, declared her intention of leaving, and at the end of the month, after she had received her wages, she packed all her belongings in a handkerchief and started for Pont-l'Eveque.

This is the first of several instances when she shows a vigour and resourcefulness that surprises others, but of which she seems unaware such as the episode when she fends off the bull, or the incredible long walk overnight taken to see her nephew leave port, or the way she chases and catches up with the carriage taking Mme Aubain to the dying Virginie.

In both the protagonists of ‘The Darling’ and ‘A Simple Heart’, there is a lack of awareness, a lack of self-image. In ‘The Darling’, when Olenka is left bereft by two dead husbands and an unreliable lover, she vanishes even to herself. Olenka is made human, is made purposeful, by her love. She is nothing unless he loves. In love, she parrots her lover’s words. Felicité, too, is nothing to herself. She, too, is a parrot:

And Felicité worshipped devoutly, while enjoying the coolness and the stillness of the church. As for the dogma, she could not understand it and did not even try. The priest discoursed, the children recited, and she went to sleep, only to awaken with a start when they were leaving the church and their wooden shoes clattered on the stone pavement. In this way, she learned her catechism, her religious education having been neglected in her youth; and thenceforth she imitated all Virginia's religious practices, fasted when she did, and went to confession with her. At the Corpus-Christi Day they both decorated an
altar…

When Virginia's turn came, Felicité leaned forward to watch her, and through that imagination which springs from true affection, she at once became the child, whose face and dress became hers, whose heart beat in her bosom, and when Virginia opened her mouth and closed her lids, she did likewise and came very near fainting.

The following day, she presented herself early at the church so as to receive communion from the cure. She took it with the proper feeling, but did not experience the same delight as on the previous day.

There is always the temptation to go inward when investigating character, to ignore the externals of a life and dig up the secret within. In both texts, the inner lives of the characters are narrow. There is, seemingly, little booty to be had. Not every character is a Hamlet or a Mrs Dalloway. They seem to offer less, but it is a matter of looking and not of judging.

Flaubert’s story covers the long arc of Felicité’s outwardly undramatic and unremarkable life and one of the signs of Flaubert’s immense skill as a fiction writer is the way in which he conveys the passing of time. He does not plod in his account of the passing years or appear to skip from incident to incident.

His ability to create a scene is evident – Virginie’s first communion, the horses in the sky, the procession that coincides with Felicité’s death are just a few examples of when the writer lingers and carefully showcases a significant moment, event or exchange, but the technique most vital to Flaubert’s handling of time is the rendering of a habitual action as if it, too, were a dramatic scene.

Take the ‘Horses in the Sky’ passage in ‘A Simple Heart’

When she reached the Calvary, instead of turning to the right, she turned to the left and lost herself in coal-yards; she had to retrace her steps; some people she spoke to advised her to hasten. She walked helplessly around the harbour filled with vessels, and knocked against hawsers. Presently the ground sloped abruptly, lights flittered to and fro, and she thought all at once that she had gone mad when she saw some horses in the sky.

Others, on the edge of the dock, neighed at the sight of the ocean. A derrick pulled them up in the air and dumped them into a boat, where passengers were bustling about among barrels of cider, baskets of cheese and bags of meal; chickens cackled, the captain swore and a cabin boy rested on the railing, apparently indifferent to his surroundings. Felicité, who did not recognise him, kept shouting: "Victor!" He suddenly raised his eyes, but while she was preparing to rush up to him, they withdrew the gangplank.

The packet, towed by singing women, glided out of the harbour. Her hull squeaked and the heavy waves beat up against her sides. The sail had turned and nobody was visible; —and on the ocean, silvered by the light of the moon, the vessel formed a black spot that grew dimmer and dimmer, and finally disappeared.

This is a scene. It is rendered with the simplicity and visual clarity one might expect of a film script: one could, with only slightest changes, turn it into one, and, remember, a film can only be made of scenes, not summary:

1.EXT. OUTSKIRTS OF HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ reaches the Calvary outside the town, looks right and left, turns right.

2. EXT. STREET IN HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in the empty street, looks left and right, turns left.

3.EXT. STREET. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in another empty street, looks left and right, and then walks on.

4. EXT. COALYARDS. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ surrounded by the black slack heaps of the coal yard, dwarfed by them.

5. EXT. THE HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: moonlit, a harbour filled with vessels.

6. EXT. HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Close up: a boat knock against hawsers.

Pull back to midshot and Felicité’s feet as she walks past and we follow her as the path slopes abruptly and then, from behind her, we pan round to see the harbour, its lights flittering to and fro. Close up of FELICITÉ, searching the skyline. Offscreen, the sudden scream and braying of several horses. FELICITÉ, terrified, looks up. Silhouetted against the moon, several horses suspended against the sky, manes flaring, legs galloping on air, the screams increased etc…

This is a scene that Flaubert presents in detail. We are ‘in the moment’, so to speak. A scene is where the writer attends to the actual moment, dramatises it.

Summary is an account of more than one moment – or when the moment described is given only cursory attention. Summary is where in your stories patient tutors scrawl in angry capital letters: Show, don’t tell.

Summary (or telling) accelerates a narrative – events are being compressed. Summary, by its very nature, condenses time. One can summarise a novel in a sentence or even a title – War and Peace? But with this speed comes distance and detachment. It is much harder to make summary as vivid or immediate to a reader.

Making a scene or dramatising an event (showing) decelerates a narrative. The narrative slows down for dialogue, for the description of a room or a gesture. Detail gives weight, and suggests to the reader that this moment or this exchange is significant.

Too much scene-making, however, and the pace can be meandering or static. The story eventually stalls. This is why most fiction shifts between these two modes.

In Flaubert and Chekhov, however, telling is a showing; they render summary as if it were a scene, as here, from ‘The Darling.’

Now she was completely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic covered with dust and minus one leg. She got thin and homely, and the people who met her on the street no longer looked at her as they had used to, nor smiled at her. Evidently her best years were over, past and gone, and a new, dubious life was to begin which it were better not to think about.

In the evening Olenka sat on the steps and heard the music playing and the rockets bursting in the Tivoli; but it no longer aroused any response in her. She looked listlessly into the yard, thought of nothing, wanted nothing, and when night came on, she went to bed and dreamed of nothing but the empty yard. She ate and drank as though by compulsion.

…Gradually the town grew up all around. The Gypsy Road had become a street, and where the Tivoli and the lumber-yard had been, there were now houses and a row of side streets. How quickly time flies! Olenka's house turned gloomy, the roof rusty, the shed slanting. Dock and thistles overgrew the yard. Olenka herself had aged and grown homely. In the summer she sat on the steps, and her soul was empty and dreary and bitter. When she caught the breath of spring, or when the wind wafted the chime of the cathedral bells, a sudden flood of memories would pour over her, her heart would expand with a tender warmth, and the tears would stream down her cheeks. But that lasted only a moment. Then would come emptiness again, and the feeling, What is the use of living? The black kitten Bryska rubbed up against her and purred softly, but the little creature's caresses left Olenka untouched. That was not what she needed. What she needed was a love that would absorb her whole being, her reason, her whole soul, that would give her ideas, an object in life, that would warm her aging blood. And she shook the black kitten off her skirt angrily, saying:

‘Go away! What are you doing here?’

And so day after day, year after year not a single joy, not a single opinion.[15]

Notice how seamlessly that summary of actions and events – the passage of time - melted into the scene with the cat: a moment in that passage of time. Flaubert covers the months and years in the same way – with the specificity of detail a writer often only gives a scene:

Each morning, out of habit, Felicité entered Virginia's room and gazed at the walls. She missed combing her hair, lacing her shoes, tucking her in her bed, and the bright face and little hand when they used to go out for a walk. In order to occupy herself she tried to make lace. But her clumsy fingers broke the threads; she had no heart for anything, lost her sleep and ‘wasted away,’ as she put it.

In order to have some distraction, she asked leave to receive the visits of her nephew Victor.

He would come on Sunday, after church, with ruddy cheeks and bared chest, bringing with him the scent of the country. She would set the table and they would sit down opposite each other, and eat their dinner; she ate as little as possible, herself, to avoid any extra expense, but would stuff him so with food that he would finally go to sleep. At the first stroke of vespers, she would wake him up, brush his trousers, tie his cravat and walk to church with him, leaning on his arm with maternal pride.

His parents always told him to get something out of her, either a package of brown sugar, or soap, or brandy, and sometimes even money. He brought her his clothes to mend, and she accepted the task gladly, because it meant another visit from him.

We have a habit of thinking the short story is about a moment, intensely observed, a moment of change, of the chance for change or revelation. Here are two stories that take account of years with characters that decay with time but do not, in essence, change although one is granted what seems, to her at least a revelation.

But whether a story covers an hour or a century, a short story writer always handling time and Chekhov and Flaubert more vividly exemplify this.

The passage of time is there in the way Flaubert and Chekhov depicts its effects. In her youth, the sight of Olenka’s plumply naked shoulder reduces her first husband to a sigh. By the story’s end, she is old and stout, embarrassingly chasing the callow youth she has elected to love, a youth who even in his dreams shouts at her and fends her off. And there is a falling off in the quality of objects of her love: the theatre owner and then the timber merchant who marry her, the Vet who does not, the vet’s son who repulses her as he grows older, curses her in his dreams.

Time in both stories is a record of decline.

The sturdy Felicité who can outpace a horse and carriage in her prime and outface an angry bull grows deaf, lame and blind. Her mistress loses her daughter, her money, and her status. Even the minor characters that thread the story are marked by time, such as Bourais

Monsieur Bourais, a retired lawyer. His bald head and white cravat, the ruffling of his shirt, his flowing brown coat, the special way he bent his elbows when taking snuff, his whole person, in fact, produced in her the kind of awe one feels in the presence of a great man

A counsellor to Mme Aubain, a respected authority, there comes a point in the story when he seems suddenly to slip from his prestigious position when Loulou enters the story

Bourais' face must have appeared very funny to Loulou. As soon as he saw him he would begin to roar. His voice re-echoed in the yard, and the neighbours would come to the windows and begin to laugh, too; and in order that the parrot might not see him, Monsieur Bourais edged along the wall, pushed his hat over his eyes to hide his profile, and entered by the garden door, and the looks he gave the bird lacked affection.

The slip in respectability is not sudden. It has simply been unnoticed, unattended, by the characters, except the parrot.[16] The parrot sees before anyone else – because the parrot truly sees him, having no investment in Bourais, no agenda: in this Loulou is an artist – that Bourais is sham. Towards the story’s close, they and we learn:

…of Monsieur Bourais' death in an inn. There were rumours of suicide, which were confirmed; doubts concerning his integrity arose. Madame Aubain looked over her accounts and soon discovered his numerous embezzlements; sales of wood which had been concealed from her, false receipts, etc. Furthermore, he had an illegitimate child, and entertained a friendship for ‘a person in Dozule.’

In Flaubert, the body withers, reputations crumble, and so do objects

Virginie's frocks were hung under a shelf where there were three dolls, some hoops, a doll-house, and a basin which she had made. Felicité and Madame Aubain also took out the skirts, the handkerchiefs, and the stockings and spread them on the beds, before putting them away again. The sun fell on the piteous things, disclosing their spots and the creases formed by the motions of the body. The atmosphere was warm and blue, and a blackbird trilled in the garden; everything seemed to live in happiness. They found a little hat of soft brown plush, but it was entirely moth-eaten. Felicité asked for it. Their eyes met and filled with tears; at last the mistress opened her arms and the servant threw herself against her breast and they hugged each other and giving vent to their grief in a kiss that equalised them for a moment.

Think, too, of Mme Aubain’s house, so lovingly itemised in the story’s first page and monitor how it changes throughout the story, how the furniture is moved from room to room, then sold off, how the house empties and falls asunder, the roof rots, the shutters no longer open.

And, of course, there is Loulou, the parrot. At first sight:

His body was green, his head blue, the tips of his wings were pink and his breast was golden.

After death, he is stuffed

…screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on one side, and in his beak a nut, which the naturalist, from love of the sumptuous, had gilded.

And then

Although he was not a corpse, he was eaten up by worms; one of his wings was broken and the wadding was coming out of his body…Sometimes the sun fell through the window on his glass eye, and lighted a spark in it which sent Felicité into ecstasy.

The parrot an object of veneration not just to Felicité but also it becomes one in the service that ends the story when it stands upon an altar - although only its skull is visible on the altar:

…hidden beneath roses, showed nothing but his blue head, which looked like a piece of lapis lazuli.

In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Three Tales, Geoffrey wall comments on the tales:

…each portray a certain religious experience, but they do so in (a) contemporary idiom…the sacred survives, oddly disguised, even in the century of wide-awake bourgeois techno-miracles.[17]

Wall goes on to quote from one of Flaubert’s letters in which he writes:

I do not know (nobody knows) the meaning of body and soul, where one begins and the other begins. We feel the play of energy and that is all.

It is this play of energy that complicates the details that Flaubert deploys in ‘A Simple Heart.’ Loulou is a parrot, a dead parrot, a stuffed parrot, but not to Felicité: it is the object of her love; it is the Holy Spirit. Trace the references in the story to birds, to the sky, to those horses hoisted into the air, to the Loulou, living and resurrected only to rot again.

One of the markers of time in ‘A Simple Heart’ is the Feats of Corpus Christi, a Catholic celebration of the Eucharist in which a wafer of bread becomes the body of Christ while remaining a wafer of bread. In such a way, Loulou is both parrot and Holy Spirit because that is how Felicité attends to it.

As Felicité ages, as her eyesight fails, as her hearing diminishes, her world narrows. Everything passes her by. The parrot is all she sees and even seems to hear. Like a saint intent on decreation, her attention on the world concentrates upon the parrot and she sees through it, through its reality, to some supernatural dimension,

Pay enough attention to a thing – to anything- and even the tooth of a dog will glow, and a parrot will not only partakes of God’s grace, but also become it – and still be a parrot.

---

[1] http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm. Tolstoy’s opinions seem dismissive when given in such a summary, but, at length, they reveal a great deal about his own purposes as an artist. One of the best reflections on Tolstoy’s literary judgements is George Orwell’s ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf This site also carries Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/ and the highly influential ‘Politics and the English Language’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/ . For those of you whose experience of Orwell includes ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ the breadth, incisiveness and accessibility of Orwell’s essays will be a particular pleasure.

[2] ibid

[3] http://www.submissivewife.org/publicresources/tolstoy_darling.html

[4]http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm

[5] That said, in the work of his prime, what distinguishes Tolstoy is his almost complete understanding of what it is to be human and contradictory. The anecdote about the bicycle might more especially apply to his own original intentions in writing of adultery in Anna Karenina, a novel that may have began as a critique of an adulterous woman but that resulted in a work with a rich, generous and varied presentation of what family and marriage involve as well as a comprehensive understanding of the question of ‘how one should live’; in that novel and in War and Peace, he arrives at ‘a complete, overall impression.’ As a critic and thinker, he was a dogmatic: as an artist, he was incapable of being so, which is why, perhaps, he came to disown the novel as a means of pursuing his philosophy.

[6] See ‘The Novel’, G. de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean, Penguin, 2006.

[7] As well as de Maupassant’s essay, the relationship is also covered in Graham Robb’s review of Maupassant’s Afloat: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius

[8] Quite simply, to see this in practice, note how each of the characters in ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Darling’ is introduced, not just the main characters, but also especially those who pass by, appear for just a sentence. Each could set off to become the protagonist in a story of his or her own.

[9] Ibid

[10] ibid

[11] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0003

[12] Ibid

[13] Tolstoy, who was repelled by Maupassant’s tales of lesbians and prostitutes, came to admire the ‘moral relation’ of the author to his subject, and (no doubt remembering Maupassant’s account of Flaubert’s lesson in the introduction to Pierre et Jean) ‘that peculiar, strained attention, directed upon an object, in consequence of which the author sees entirely new features in the life which he is describing.’ Robb: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius/?page=2

[14] Quotations from ‘A Simple Heart’ are taken from http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Simple-Soul.html. Roger Waterhouse’s translation, Three Tales, Penguin, 2005, offers a more eloquent version as well as introduction by Flaubert biographer, Geoffrey Wall.

[15] Quotations from ‘The Darling’ are from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Darling. The translation is by Constance Garnett, among the very first to translate Chekhov and other great Russian writers into English, and, while others are said to be more accurate, it is in Garnett’s translations that Chekhov is most widely known by English readers.

[16] If one were to look for a crucial difference between Chekhov and Flaubert – possibly Chekhov and any writer before him – it might lie in VS Pritchett’s remark that in Chekhov the ‘sights and sounds are heard’ as if by the characters.

[17] p. Xiii, Flaubert, G. Three Tales, translated by Roger Whitehouse and, with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall, Penguin, 2005

The Animator: Adam Thirlwell on Charles Dickens

This review of Michael Slater's biographical study of Charles Dickens is by Adam Thirlwell - a critic more wayward than James Woods or Wyatt Mason, perhaps because, as a fiction writer, his approach is more idiosyncratic, with less laying down of laws and more of a search for a personal method.

He is a critic who hits and misses with his insights - somehow that's part of the narrative tension in his generously cerebral and wide-ranging novel, Miss Herbert - but he is more than capable of enthusing a reader to visit or revisit a text with a new perspective.

This review, from The New Republic led me to read The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel everyone thinks they know even without reading it, but its many surprises are indicated in Thirlwell's piece, which looks at Dickens' output as a whole, and is, in its way, as good a overview of Dickens than the ones given by George Orwell or GK Chesterton.

I.

For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner Henry Mayhew, there were 300,000 dustbins, 300,000 cesspools, and three million chimneys. It was there that the truly modern was invented: industrial, overpopulated dirt. Its symbol was the slum. London was managed by a majority of minority trades, all in the business of garbage: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers. And London’s greatest describer, who converted the ghostly industrial city into a new world of words, was a novelist who could taxonomically and poetically enumerate, say, the varieties of polluted fog: “Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black.”

And yet, in public, this same writer could also put on an act like this:

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful,--to my death-in the principles which have won your approval. [Loud applause.]

Charles Dickens gave this sincere speech in Sheffield, the city of steel factories, in December 1855, on being presented by the mayor with a service of cutlery. It is unbelievable, perhaps, but it is true: that, too, is the voice of the most avant-garde European novelist of the nineteenth century.

Of all his impersonations, Dickens’s greatest was his fluent mimicry of what the bourgeois public imagined that a novelist should be--through prefaces to his novels, which offered doctored accounts of their geneses as serial sketches in magazines; through his efforts on behalf of the Guild of Literature and Art, or his work with the Royal Literary Fund; through his collected editions (he supervised the following editions: the Charles Dickens, the Cheap, the Library, the Diamond, the People’s, and the Hachette). He had a mania for canonization, for the public paraphernalia of authorship.

And this extended, most importantly, to his biography. Dickens died in June 1870. Seventeen months later, in November 1871, the first Life of Dickens was published by his friend John Forster--an eminent man of letters, the biographer of Goldsmith, Swift, and Landor--who had been appointed Dickens’s biographer by Dickens himself. Dickens gave Forster autobiographical fragments, manuscripts, letters--which were all to be kept secret until the posthumous biography. On its publication, it revealed how autobiographical much of his writing had been--“watered,” as one critic wrote, “with tears of self-compassion.” The pain in Dickens, it turned out, was less a moral philosophy than a natural identification with the marginalized, the defenseless, the lost. And yet such autobiographical pain did nothing to change the essential idea of Dickens as a moralist, and of his novels as didactic agents of social comment.

But the era of psychology, and of social reform, were not alive to the energy in Dickens’s art. His real greatness, I think, lay elsewhere: in his savage, magical style. With the appearance of Michael Slater’s extraordinary biography, which exuberantly tracks the mercurial energy of Dickens’s publication history--as well as his editing and his public readings--it is possible to be accurate to Dickens’s wild originality, the career of his career.

The premise of this new biography is very simple, and wholly admirable. “Mindful of Dickens’s words in his will about resting his claims to the remembrance of his country upon his published work,” Slater declares, “I have focused primarily upon his career as a writer and professional author.” The salacious reader will find the occasional brothel, the passing prostitute. But Nelly Ternan, the actress implicated in Dickens’s separation from his wife around 1857 or 1858, is only a background figure: partly because Slater scrupulously refuses to speculate on unavailable evidence, but also because of his emphasis on that adjective “professional.” The furious energy of Dickens’s production in this biography is astonishing. As well as his novels, Slater gorgeously includes also “the context of the truly prodigious amount of otherwriting that he was constantly producing alongside the serial writing of those books”--the “short stories, sketches, topical journalism, essays, travel writing and writings for children, polemical pieces in verse as well as prose.”

This is a biography of a writer as writer. It is therefore quite unique. “Overfamiliar metaphor,” writes Kundera in The Art of the Novel: “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid.” This is not true of Slater. “All their labor cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel,” adds Kundera. I have always agreed with him; but this great book allows one to imagine a more delicate biographical form--a heuristic instrument for the analysis of spectral themes.

For Dickens’s life--like one of his novels, with its parallel plot--was ghosted by two central motifs. He is the connoisseur of characters acquiring, in the words of the old cliché, a life of their own--like Dr. Marigold, who “came flashing up in the most cheerful manner, and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it.” But he is also the connoisseur of corpses. In Paris, the hidden twin to Dickens’s London, his favorite destination was the morgue. Dickens digested the dead with gusto. He was drawn to the morgue--“dragged by invisible force,” by “the attraction of repulsion.” And this is Dickens’s subject, the invention of his style: the uneasy, queasy hinterland where it is alluringly unclear what is alive and what is not.

One day, in 1911, Kafka finished reading a biography of Dickens and then turned to his diary:

Is it so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotives of steel, coal, and steam, and you don’t abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.

In this marvelous sentence, where the subject writing and the subject written sinuously swap places, Kafka identifies the mobile essence of Dickens’s lesson for fiction. His great subject is the force that gives anything animation at all. His work constitutes a sustained examination of the conditions for lifelikeness.

Dickens can animate anything. Even an oyster opener: for what happens to oyster openers, wonders Dickens, in an improvised moment in a letter from Montreal in 1842, when oysters are out of season? “Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster season. Who knows?” Dickens’s animating style discovers the uncanny energy of the commonplace. For Dickens is the great novelist of junk: the décor of hotel restaurants, the clutter of secondhand shops, the wallpaper in pretentious dance schools. London was supremely the city of the industrial, and the industrial was so savagely modern that it was impossible to keep up: everyone lived among the outmoded, among cherished objects which had lost their use value. This was Dickens’s discovery--the surreal poetry of what is obsolete, or seems to be obsolete. His life was spent observing how much a life became a collection of useless, loved objects.

London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and Dickens was its greatest flaneur. In London he walked and walked--making sure of his “fifteen miles a day”: “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” He was the great ambulatory writer. In particular, he liked to walk at night. Slater’s biography records how much he was the genie of gaslight--able to compare, for instance, the quality of gaslight in London and in Paris: “London is shabby by daylight, and shabbier by gaslight. No Englishman knows what gaslight is, until he sees the Rue de Rivoli and the Palais Royal after dark.” In Paris, illuminated, Dickens could therefore be found “wandering into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert Rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces, and Wine shops”--which all became a private “rapid Panorama.” In 1855, he mentions “some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes.” The idea of gliding is wonderful; but then Dickens has a whole vocabulary of flaneuring. In London, he asks a friend to come with him on one of his “great, London, back-slums kind of walk[s].”

It was on these walks that Dickens discovered the everyday--his profane illuminations. When his sketches, which first appeared in magazines, were collected in book form, Dickens added a new term, with its hesitant hyphen: “Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.” But the border between his early sketches and his serial fiction is distinctly porous. His style swarms everywhere. And the everyday was “lumber,” it was junk:

The walls were garnished with one or two large maps; and several weather-beaten rough great coats, with complicated capes, dangled from a long row of pegs in one corner. The mantel-shelf was ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer, a road-book and directory, a county history minus the cover, and the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin.

The style of this flaneuring novelist was, then, founded on the observation of the city. Like all great novelists, of course, he tried to occlude the sources of his style. In one of his earliest sketches, “The Prisoner’s Van,” he included a brief manifesto (which he cut when the piece was collected into a book):

We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about in the streets. Whenever we have an hour to spare, there is nothing that we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy--walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about us as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house in Holborn, the Strand, Fleet-street and Cheapside, the whole were an unknown region to our wondering mind.

Dickens had the talent not to be averse to the shameful emotions--prurience, or curiosity, or self-deception, or hypocrisy: the shameful emotions without which no noble knowledge would ever be acquired. His style was formed in the voyeuristic city--London, with “that great heavy canopy,” as he wrote to Bulwer Lytton in 1851, “lowering over the housetops.” The walker alive to the smoggy city of junk: this was Dickens. And the usefulness of the city was very simple. London was a laboratory where the human was transformed into surface in as concentrated a form as possible. Or, as one of his best critics, John Carey, puts it, Dickens’s territory was “the border country between people and things, where Dickens’s imagination is mostly engaged.” And so it was where everything was always on the point of transforming from the animate into the inanimate, or vice versa. For anything, and anyone, can undergo a metamorphosis: it just depends on the strength of someone else’s will, desire, fetish--or belief.

II.

In his novels of reanimation, Dickens went for ghosts, for guilt, for bottled fetuses and effigies: for murder. His necromantic imagination needed corpses. Dead bodies are his constant prop. What else could he do? His subject was how strange the transition was between the live and the dead. But the motifs are all subject to the mechanics of his sentences. A sentence, for Dickens, was the medium in which he could investigate how reversible lifelikeness was. The effect of Slater’s book--so lavishly truffled with quotations from the vast range of his prose--is to emphasize how thoroughly Dickens was inhabited by this process of style. His life was itself a constant experiment of writing, of quickening by form. And so we must take the time to enumerate the elements of Dickens’s sentences. They constitute the true events, after all, of any novelist’s biography.

In 1869, in his inaugural address as president of the Birmingham & Midland Institute, Dickens confessed something to his audience: “My own invention or imagination, such as it is, I can most truthfully assure you, would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.” Drudgery is the ritual of Dickensian transformation. It enabled inspired detailing, such as a slum with its “starved white horse who was making a meal of oyster-shells.” And it also produced exuberant squiggles: a child reading the newspapers, “which are so very large in proportion to himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up The Times to run his eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night, and to have disappeared under the bedclothes.” And it emerged in the full dense complexity of a sentence like this: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” The sentence describes a comic apocalypse--but then Dickens’s style itself may be called a comic apocalypse, energized by the twin engines of personification and metaphor, where everything and everyone can be transformed into the uncannily alive or the uncannily dead. So it becomes impossible to say how far a metaphor is ornament, or instead a precise description of what is seen.

Dickens’s techniques are constant experiments with what we accept to be real. And so, alongside the metaphoric transformation of the everyday, he loved inversely to transform everyday metaphoric activity into literal sentences. The revolutionary Russian critic Shklovsky once suggested that literary style was there to increase our knowledge of reality: “to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition.’” His example was Tolstoy’s baroquely literal description of an opera: “In the middle of the stage sat young girls in red bodices and white skirts. One young girl, very fat, and attired in white silk, was sitting separately on a low bench to which a green cardboard was attached from behind. They were all singing something.” But Dickens had been there already--more intensely, poetically literal than Tolstoy--watching Macbeth at the Theatre Royal in Chatham, confused by the ontology of double casting: “Many wondrous secrets had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.”

His sentences are festivals of the flickering, the passing, the dying, the obsolete. He inherits the use of junk allusion invented by the English poets: by Pope, and Swift, and Dryden--the geniuses of mock epic. (Henry Fielding’s description of what he was up to in his novels was, significantly, this doubly oxymoronic definition: a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose.”) In The Pickwick Papers, the everyday kitsch allusion is duly incorporated: “‘Mrs. Leo Hunter has many of these breakfasts, sir,’ resumed the new acquaintance--‘“feasts of reason, sir, and flows of soul,” as somebody who wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Leo Hunter on her breakfasts, feelingly and originally observed.’” For what is more junk than unwittingly plagiarizing Pope, the greatest ironist of the glibly serious? But Dickens’s true innovation is to incorporate this kitsch appropriation of the classics into his own mobile narrative voice, as in his Hamletian description of

the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol’s Arms; where the sound of the piano through the partly-opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted piece, and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to Listen, listen, listen, Tew the wa-ter-Fall!

(The Sol’s Arms, I should add, whose tables are hyper-realistically “ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses.”)

The profound innovation of Dickens’s style is in this way of describing the human as endless superficiality, infinitely bathetic: a bricolage of bric-a-brac. His profundity is precisely in the refusal of depth. He is often attacked for the creation of caricatures, not characters. As a binary opposition, this seems as uselessly simplistic as Forster’s division of characters into the flat and the round. It fails to honor the way his vision of what is real, what is alive, is tense with what is dead. His characters, therefore, are necessarily collections of repetitions. When describing the character of Skimpole in Bleak House, Dickens described him as “a delightful manner reproducing itself under my hand.” A character, for Dickens, is a self-reproducing entity; as artificial as a self--another system of repetition.

Famously, Dickens’s daughter Mamie recorded interrupting her father at composition--when he was, she said, performing a “facial pantomime” in front of the mirror. Dickens did not invent: he imitated, he mimicked. “I don’t invent it--really do not, but see it, and write it down.” Instead of the novel as psychology, he copied out his hallucinations: the repetitive gestures of his characters’ bodies, the repetitive jingles of their speech. With these gestures and jingles, he constructed the collages of his scenes:

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general principle.

“So we are,” said the beadle.

Nothing was said, on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney’s chair, where it had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney’s apron-string, round which it gradually became entwined.

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mr. Bumble.

Every novel by Dickens is already an illustrated novel. The actual illustrations are just confirmations, tautologies.

III.

But it is not just the sentences. Dickens’s form is the novel, after all. His plots, like his sentences, are forms of resurrection. All Dickens’s great novels--from Dombey and Son, through Bleak House and Little Dorrit, toOur Mutual Friend--use multiple plots that resolve themselves, gradually, into one: characters are reborn under new names, or discover their true bloodline. Each individual plotline seems unrelated. But every novel turns out, in the end, to be a family romance. And this formal property possesses its artisanal double; the resurrections of Dickens’s style--from Dombey and Son onward--were facilitated by his new way of working: to use folded sheets of paper, divided into sections, to plan out his novels in their serial parts and chapters. With this, he planned the ballet of his characters, the choreography of his plots.

Early in his career, in Oliver Twist, Dickens defended the novel as a place for steep transitions--like “all good murderous melodramas” where the comic and the tragic alternate, “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Some readers thought that this was overly dramatic, but for Dickens it was the structure of “real life.” The difference was that in real life we did not notice the transitions “from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments,” because “there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on.” This principle of transition was the central method by which Dickens constructed a fiction. Like a morgue, it was a system that produced the irony of transition: the abrupt juxtaposition of the living and the dead.

It was a lesson, the reader discovers, that he would learn himself. (Life is so philistine in its exaggerated care for form!) On April 14, 1851, Dickens gave a speech to the General Theatrical Fund dinner, praising the resilience of the actor who came “from scenes of affliction and misfortune--even from death itself--to play his part before us.” And then Dickens left the dinner--and was told that his infant daughter, “with whom he had been happily playing just before leaving home,” had died.

Life, as always, had a double plot. Later, when he was writing Little Dorrit, Dickens wrote a note to himself, wanting to intensify this way in which a plot could enact deaths and resurrections--a plot would be a structure to produce the parallels that would unify the vast city: “People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be now shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in real life. Try this uncertainty and this not-putting of them together, as a new means of interest.”

In his essay “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” written in 1944, Sergei Eisenstein hailed Dickens and his use of the intercut double-plot as the ancestor of cinema--the inventor, in prose narrative, of montage. Montage, after all, depended on parallel action. “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel action by--Dickens.” Eisenstein went on to describe both “Griffith’s montage exposition” and also “a montage progression of parallel scenes, intercut into each other.” I admire this invocation of Dickens, alongside the early art of cinema; but it is important to see how Dickens’s art of montage was more advanced than Eisenstein’s. The idea of the parallel is everywhere in Dickens’s notes. In August 1862, about to begin work on Our Mutual Friend, he remarked to Forster about his germinating idea of a structure: “bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly contrasted sets of people with which and with whom the story is to rest, through the agency of an electric message.”

An electric message! This is Dickens’s description of a parallel, and its importance, I think, is this. The parallel allows a novel to become a whole force field, a living and expanding universe--an animating network of motifs--or, in his terms, a network of “shadowings.” As he told Wilkie Collins--that other master of melodrama--a plot was an impersonation of fate: “I think the business of Art is to lay all that ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself--to shew by a backward light, what everything has been working to--but only to SUGGEST, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence--of which ways, all Art is but a little imitation.”

Dickens, the novelist, impersonated Providence. This is another way of saying that he impersonated the city. It is the city, after all, where such fateful parallels happen with the densest rhythm. The city, as Eisenstein knew, is where montage was invented: “that head-spinning tempo of changing impressions with which Dickens sketches the city in the form of a dynamic (montage) picture.” London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and its form was montage.

Dickens, it is true, used the montage form to prove that the rich could not separate themselves from the poor, to prove the “connexion” that existed “between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” He was hysterically exercised by the way in which civilization could ignore the fact that it was barbaric. Before Walter Benjamin’s famous late thesis on history--“there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”--Dickens had already noted the inanimate animation. The urban graveyard at the center of the city, “with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life”: “a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.”

But this does not imply that Dickens had a coherent politics. In his essay, Eisenstein criticized the implications of Griffith’s montage: “the structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith’s montage is the structure of bourgeois society.... And this society, perceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between two parallel lines.” Eisenstein, I assume, would have been similarly infuriated by Dickens. Dickens, after all, annoyed Brecht, and he dismayed Lukács, who lamented “the limitations of Dickens’s social criticism, his sometimes abstract-moral attitude towards concrete social-moral phenomena.” But why must Dickens have a politics? He was a novelist. He had a style instead.

Dickens’s politics was just a mode of feeling. He had been marked, after all, by one particular experience of living death--when he worked at a blacking factory off the Strand in 1824, when he had just turned twelve, and his family was almost bankrupt. Slater records the humiliating everyday detail: along with his partner, Bob Fagin (Fagin!), Dickens worked, with remarkable speed and dexterity, at the window--so remarkably, writes Slater, that passersby “used to stop to stare admiringly in at the window by which they worked.” Dickens was transformed into a spectacle. And this experience comprehensively haunted him. Every time Dickens let his imagination become frivolous, the Blacking returned. At Christmas, the Dickens family played a parlor game in which everyone had to remember a sentence made up by the family, and add another phrase. According to his son Henry, “My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’”

A theory of the political in literature needs a theory of feeling: this is a conclusion that may be drawn from the life, and the biography, of Dickens. A theory of junk needs a corresponding theory of the sentimental. The sentimental, after all, is just the junk of feeling, its hollow repetition. Dickens often described himself having “a real good cry” when he wrote. Such outbursts were constant. On April 21, 1849, writing in The Examiner, Dickens quoted from an inquiry into a recent scandalous case of children who had died of cholera in a baby farm. When the scandal was uncovered, the surviving children had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital--where the nurses fed them milk and bread. And, Dickens reported, there was a child who could not eat: “No; he held up his hand, and said, ‘Oh, nurse, what a big bit of bread this is!’”--“a little touch,” added the writer, “of a peculiarly affecting kind, such as the masters of pathos have rarely excelled in fiction.”

The masters of pathos: there is real admiration in that phrase. Dickens was not at all embarrassed by the sentimental. And yet he was also an expert in compassion, which was not fake. He institutes the modernist examination of fake and true feeling: what is live and what is not. “I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through Bleak House,” observed Nabokov rightly, at his lectern, in his Lectures on Literature. “I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.” And he added: “Dickens’s great art should not be mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion--it is the real thing, keen, subtle, specialized compassion.”

The compassion is there most decisively in Dickens’s generous precision to minor characters. Like, say, Mrs. Piper, who comes to the Sol’s Arms in order to present her minor evidence at an inquest:

Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the Plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was reported to have sold himself.

Mrs. Piper is just a flicker in that vast electric network that Dickens called Bleak House--and she is permanent. With Mrs. Piper, the reader comes upon the center of Dickens’s life-giving style, in the care lavished so quickly on lesser figures. For there is also truth in cliché, in the way a self freezes into its gestures. In the end, the self can be content with very little--like a cabman who is given twopence, which he receives “with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.” Nabokov commented: “this gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet ‘over-handed’--a trifle--but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.” And then he added: “A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character ... has the right to live and breed.” This, in the end, is the flimsy, ethereal, convincing politics of Dickens’s prose: not in his speeches, or his newspaper campaigns, but in the democracy of his fiction, in its massive crowd of animate extras.

IV.

The medium in which these minor characters lived was the mixing and refining solution of Dickens’s voice. Among all the Dickensian system of repetitions, the most repeated element is Dickens himself: his prose style. At his audience with Queen Victoria in 1870, he may have commiserated sedately over “the price of butchers’ meat, and bread,” but he was really a revolution of one. And the key to this revolution, to this style, may be found in his performances.

Around 1843, when he was writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens changed the way he wrote. He developed a more performative system of punctuation: a musical notation of semicolons. And it was also in A Christmas Carol that Dickens allowed his prose to become an electric message between the novelist and the absent reader: “Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.” When he came to give his famous performed readings, he chose to begin with A Christmas Carol--but he cut that passage, because at last there was no need to remind the absent reader of the absent novelist’s presence.

Before he became a novelist, Dickens had considered becoming an actor. With his assiduous precision, he had practiced “even such things as walking in and out, and sitting down in a chair.” His hero was Charles Matthews, who would come on stage as himself, in evening dress--and then play all the parts, culminating in a final bravura “monopolylogue.” It was an early form of stand-up. And this solo performance of multiple imitations formed the nucleus of Dickens’s style: a new form of prose, based on mimicry.

Mimicry, of course, is based on an idea of the human as repetition. “How easily peculiarities may be acquired by negligence,” observed Matthews, “and how difficult they are to eradicate when strengthened by habit.” Dickens made this offhand observation central to the art of the novel: a sustained analysis of how far the repetitive is the essence of a character, or the appropriation of a self by the other. Dickens is the great comic impersonator. In the vocabulary of the nineteenth century, he is the great assumer. He impersonated other people, and he impersonated himself. This is why his biography is of such prickly and absorbing interest. He performed his own multiple imagination.

He wanted to be ghostly. He liked the idea of the novelist as ghost--as in his idea of an editing persona for his magazine, Household Words: “I want to suppose a certain SHADOW ... a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature” which would “loom as a fanciful thing all over London ... a sort of previously unthought of Power going about.” But this was simply a way of describing his infinite vampiric style. And the main subject he haunted was himself. This was the secret he imparted to a Russian admirer, another genius of “good murderous melodramas,” who came to interview him in the summer of 1862. Dostoevsky, who was not yet the author of Crime and Punishment or Demons or any of his major novels, later recounted Dickens’s theory:

There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.

Toward the end of his life, Dickens decided to add to his repertory of readings the murder of Nancy by her lover Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. In performance, he continued to create the tale, to embellish the novel, adding extra detail--such as Sikes’s dog, his paws bloodstained, “crawling as if those stains had poisoned him!!” Famously, his enactment of the guilty murderer made Dickens feel like a murderer: he wrote to the painter Frith in November 1868 that his acting was “horribly like, I am afraid”--“I have a vague sense of being ‘wanted’ as I walk about the streets.” A short while earlier, in April 1867, Dickens had written to his friend Robert Lytton that with his performed readings, with “this interpretation of myself (then quite strange in the public ear),” he had hoped to hint at “some new expression of the meaning of my books.” The new meaning, I think, was simple. It was the living proof that Dickens--with gas jets rigged up to shine brightly on his face, because he was, after all, the flaneur of gaslight--had invented the narrator as impersonator.

From Paris, on May 16, 1863, Dickens published an essay in his magazine Household Words. His essay featured the Paris morgue. In particular, it noted the variety of expressions adopted by the tourists when looking at the corpses (adopted by the flaneur, looking at the world):

there was a wolfish stare at the object.... And there was a much more general, purposeless, vacant staring at it--like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all these expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying expression of looking at something that could not return a look.

The Paris morgue was the hidden, concentrated form of London--of life. In the horrified italics of this asymmetrical looking, where the world is observed in the form of a waxwork, the disturbed energy of Dickens’s art and life may be found. So horrified by the inanimate, by the world’s junk, Dickens gave himself the infinite task of quickening everything, of impersonating everything--a demiurgic task of animation, through the precarious immortality of art.