When we think of the world in a frozen static way everything is connected through the present moment. Not being active means there is no causal nexus but there is information and the shadows of all the characters in a Dickens novel fall on each other. It is, I would suggest, a gnostic presentism in which the reader is complicit. We know more than they do because we are aware that this being Dickens there will be an impertinent level of coincidence or so we think but rightly considered coincidence is being in the same universe of the novel at the same time.
“Now the order of the manifestation of the universe is being described. At the beginning of the creation, the Supreme Lord, aided by the (past) actions of beings, which are the causes of the variety of the universe that is about to be created, as also by the cosmic illusion which is endowed with an unlimited and inscrutable power, first conceives in His mind the entire universe consisting of names and forms and resolves I shall do this ......” (Vedanta Paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra)
I find in two of his novels that I am rereading ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’ a suggestion of the Sankhya system of the emanation of the elements, air in the one and water in the other: fog and flotsam and jetsam define them. Nothing is palpable and you cannot step into the same Thames twice. In the latter novel the grim, grisly, grotesque, and gruesome flows over us in a torpid slurry. No one is entirely whole, Wegg sans a leg, Eugene Wrayburn is a light man without a centre of moral gravity, Jenny Wren with a twisted back and legs that don’t work, the Eponymous friend is a spy, the Boffins foolish, Bella a sullen beauty, the Veneerings circle a sublime satire of the laissez faire let them drown or swim as the case may be.
Who is fixable? Dickens will do his best but some will have the sad end that we have learned to dread and concur with Oscar Wilde - “Only someone with a heart of stone would fail to laugh at the death of Little Nell”. Unlike Mr. Venus the creator of articulated skeletons Dickens offers ambulant persons, ‘names and forms’, the nama rupa of his world.
2 comments:
Fascinating. Thank you for the excuse to read two of my favourite books again.
‘Our Mutual Friend’ is of course a masterpiece and I am tending towards the notion that it may be his best book. The twist has traces of ‘David Copperfield’ in it and there is the Wrayburn Steerforth type of cad. The comedy is sublime, Mrs. Wilfer as the squelching mother passing the flame to daughter Lavvy and the squelchee George Sampson. Riah as an apology for Fagin but withal the creature of Fledgeby is not credible. A weak point but trifling in a book so long.
Happy Xmas.
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