Dear Serial Readers,
You'll notice I've spruced up this blog a bit, including the pale green background to echo the color of the original wrappers to each part-issue number. I'm trying to install a counter too, since I suspect there are lurkers out there, but I have no clue if anyone other than those who post are checking in.
I'm continuing to train my reading ear or eye for the Dickens part-issue unit; these three chapters seem to fit together with a rhyme and reason I've grown accustomed to noticing. Where the previous #7 only glanced at Florence toward the end, #8 lingers on our favorite neglected daughter for two luxurious chapters. I appreciate that despite the growing cast of characters and networking plots, there are these delicious portions that do dwell on one beloved character. I also found a few references to spring flowers and warm weather, details that reminded me of the real time of May 1847 when readers first encountered these pages. In this number too we have the possibility of new characters, Jack Bunsby (chap 23), Kate and her aunt (and the poor loving father John and his ragged and ill daughter Martha) in chap. 24. Who knows if these are only fleeting presences, or if they'll grow in importance? And then there's the suspense of Sol Gillis's disappearance, a plot device that creates a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the number, one that piggy-backs the "agony of suspense" ( 344) of Walter at sea, that very suspense that Capt Cuttle believes prompted Sol to suicide.
Last time, we commented on those curious narrative interventions, like the one at the end of #7 when the narrator addresses Diogenes, the dog. This installment opens with some very choice Dickensian prose: the use of fairy tale rhetoric to shore up realism. In those first passages that seem to reject fairy tale narrative conventions ("No magic dwelling-place...", "There were not two dragon sentries....", "There were no talismanic characters..." etc etc) Dickens brilliantly wields fairy tale language to insist on a bleaker realism for Florence at home alone in London. Yet his use of common objects in the Dombey house (Mirrors, boards, keys, fungus, dust, spiders) paints a very gothic setting, along with other details. I also noted the reference to temporality, not ordinary time, but one with "clocks that never told the time" or "told it wrong, and struck unearthly numbers" (338). Finally, that refrain: "For Florence lived alone" (with its variations), these repetitions that participate in Dickens's own hybrid formulation of fairy-tale (or romantic) realism.
This number concludes with a temporal reference similar to the confused or stalled time of Dombey House in the opening of chap 23, here at the very end of #8 where Capt Cuttle, installed in Sol's shop with its many chronometers, is "losing count of time" (384). Is serial time similar, both stalled and moving forward and backward too? Does this novel seem to stress the vagaries of time more than other Dickens novels, or is it just that we're reading this in a serially serious way?
For next week July 21: #9, chaps 26-28.
Sincerely serial,
Susan
2 comments:
I think this installment nicely demonstrates two of the major -- and opposing -- possibilities open to serial fiction. The first, plot development and suspense, is one that we seem to talk about more in relation to serialized novels. And that's certainly legitimate, especially considering how the issue closes. With the mysterious disappearance of Solomon Gills and the following, equally mysterious departure of Captain Cuttle, the novel serves up two intriguing developments before concluding for a month (well, a week in our case).
But I'd also like to consider the way the issue opens, with the long and detailed chapter devoted to Florence. There's an extended comparison to fairy tales, the "refrain" paragraph, and lavish description, none of which advances the plot at all. It may let us know more about Florence's state of mind, but it also seems content to play with its own lyrical voice. Roland Barthes in "The Reality Effect" called attention to the idea of "narrative luxury," the presence of detail with no structural function, and it seems like a lot of chapter 23 would fall into that category.
Not that I'm complaining -- I'd read Dickens write about almost anything. (And not that Barthes was opposed to this narrative luxury either.) I wonder, though, if the serial form encourages the narrative to slow down for rich reflective moments like this in addition to setting up plot developments. If you're committed to twenty months' worth of text, there's no need to rush things, right?
And a question about context: does anybody know how dangerous long voyages like Walter's actually were back then? I'm assuming that the risk of not coming back was sizable, but I don't have any real information to back that up. I guess that's an aspect of these plots we're growing more distant from, thankfully -- we usually assume that friends and family leaving on long-distance trips are going to come back safely.
This week was a particularly interesting serial read for me. I've been on vacation (and so distracted with lots of activity) and for the first time I found myself actually struggling to remember exactly what happened at the end of the prior installment! I suspect that this tendency to forget would have been typical for Dickens's original monthly readers.
For me, the opening chapter of the installment exacerbated this sense of disorientation. Dombey's house has deteriorated so significantly that it seems a lot of time had passed. (The description of the Dombey house reminded me of Miss Haversham's cobweb-filled dining room, which took years to get into its gothic state.) Here, we have rust, mildew, fugus, dust, cracking plaster, etc. One would think that you need time for all of this to happen to a house that at least one person (Florence) is still living in. The atemporal fairy-tale language ("day succeeded day," etc.) seemed to bolster this temporal disorientation, too, along with the references to clocks that Susan mentioned. I think the "narrative luxury" that Josh mentioned also contributed to my inability to pinpoint the exact passage of time between the end of the last installment and this installment. I, too, found myself caught up in the detail and description for its own sake.
We do get some sense of a timeline when we learn that there has been no word about Walter's boat, but there is still some hope. Presumably this suggests a number of months, not years, has passed. The end of the installment seems to retreat from this timeline again, however, as Captain Cuttle's thoughts drift and he finds himself "losing count of time" (304).
I definitely think that this novel is deeply interested in qustions of time, and for me the serial reading experience brings this strand of the novel into the foreground. The passage of time between readings seems to add a layer of complexity to the erratic flow of time within the novel.
As a final comment, I have to say I am loving the way that Carker's character is developing. His teeth continue to communicate on their own, and Dickens's choice to have Florence involuntarily shiver in his presence is keeping me in suspense!
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