A Proleptic view of 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens

I think I suffer from Post Delusion Syndrome. This is when you know that a position long held by you is objectively false but its patination remains.  You see I know that I have never read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens but I somehow feel that I have.  I am rectifying that idee fixe  by actually being now in the process of reading and the depthless sheen of my rereading it is due to be corrected.  Is it this that emboldens me as I pause at a 60% reading of it to offer a proleptic review?  These are the sorts of reviews that are never written and yet are frequently excogitated.  We often think as we draw back from immersion whither this is going and is the unfolding of the plot, not logical, but under the dominion of the active imagination.  Ordinary rational epideictic novels make sense under the canon of common sense however they fail in living verisimilitude which brings life through what Hindu ritualists call‘apurva’. A poesis in the work leaps forward to create connections which are real across the gap of facticity.  Thus they say that this is how ritual fructifies without the billiard ball causality of the Humean sort.

The theme of counterparts is well established.  Good Darnay against the functional alcoholic depressive Carton, the one rising the other in free fall.  The theme of imprisonment: Manette of course but also the fell hand of the bank and the sans cullotes languishing under the ancien regime.  Shoemaking lapsed into as the father is thrown back into the dungeon. Tingles and sparrowbills, the knife, the curiously shaped French hammer and the awl; items of self harm probably allowed for that hoped for end.

“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on these street stones?”

The doctor speaks of his daughter:

“—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved—the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should all be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to me—Well! This is idle talk.”

Carton’s vow:

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you.

We know our Dickens and the intertwining of all fates in a congeries of karma will be expected.  So far so very good. It is claimed to be the most read novel in English literature.  It is first in the rank of popularity on gutenberg.org which must stand as a confirmation of a sort in the digital annals.

 

G.K. Chesterton on the American Episode in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'.

G.K. Chesterton’s notes on the novels of Dickens were collected introductions to the Everyman editions. He claims against the general critical judgment that the American section of ‘Chuzzlewit’ was a satiric triumph. That would be his reaching after paradox tic I think. My feeling is that we had reportage with extra added acerbity and quite close to the maundering cant that is a continuing tradition. Even the intelligentsia's call to repentance has a note of triumph these days. See how we beat our breasts and rend our garments! It doesn’t fit, it’s out of tune with the sublime comedy of the rest of the book - the ‘gravy’ that has added 20 years to Mrs. Todgers life, the imperturbable recoveries of Pecksniff, Mark Tapley’s seeking creditable jolliness. The quality of invention is not there in the American episode. �

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (1844)

There’s that time for a prolific writer when he’s moving from the utter facility of his juvenalia to the deeper levels of his art that are more difficult to attain. Martin Chuzzlewit has that early abounding vitality as well as intimations of the more profound themes to come. How can we change our characters and revise our prejudices? Must we suffer in order to grow in wisdom? It might be that his blacking factory abandonment fixed a permanent insecurity that did not allow Dickens to settle into a state of being Charles Dickens writing Charles Dickens’s novels. Of course there are plot devices that recur. In episodic publication there have to be doors to other rooms. Simulation and dissimulation are features, comic drunkards, transparent machinations of the addlepated and chuckleheaded and the flagrant coincidences that hardly micro mesh the plot. That’s Dickens but and you will come to love and expect the sudden emergence of a character that you presumed had served his purpose. As I was getting on in the book some several hundred pages had passed and Chivy Slyme had vanished even though Montague Tigg his confederate has put on the gaudy plumage of a nabob. You’ll be back for sure I thought. Hello again Chivy, I expect you were in the neighbourhood and thought it rude to pass. And in a surprising role. What can you say about a novel that has Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Young Bailey, the frightful daughters Pecksniff, Charity and Mercy, Mark Tapley, Mrs. Todgers, Montague Tigg and The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company. All characters whatever are given the full Dickens to the distress of American readers who objected to the satirical treatment of their great democracy. Dickens said that it was mere reportage. The book is full of crooks but there’s only one psychopath, Jonas Chuzzlewit. This is an unsettling portrait of a wicked man whose delight in his ruthlessness leaves him subject to manipulation by arch scoundrel Tigg. Jonas’s tracking of him by coach and foot has a macabre inevitability because we are told beforehand how it will culminate. It’s a comic masterpiece with an undercurrent of dread. Insipid females do no impinge on the story in a significant way which rushes along, by coach generally.

The Real David Copperfield

Whoever said Charles Dickens was grossly sentimental has never read David Copperfield as an adult. Everybody in the book is brutalised without exception. The evil doers swim in their own vile gravy and David, trusting, opening to the sun of benign fortune like a daisy introduces Steerforth to the Peggottys. Don’t imagine that I will let out more of the story than this because if you will not read it consider yourself lost to literature.