Dear Serial Readers,
Ah, but it's nice to be in the familiar realm of a Dickens serial once again, after the detours of the short fiction of Collins and Gaskell (thanks, Julia, for those illuminating comments about Gaskell's linked stories). And yet this first installment is so disorienting--with the theme of travelers subject to imprisonment and quarantine in this border crossing into Dickens' shadowy world. I can't recall another Dickens novel with such an engrossing yet perturbing opening! The first chapter seems the stuff of melodrama and penny numbers (cheap crime fiction) with this tale of Rigaud (who calls himself "a citizen of the world"--a modern cosmopolitan unanchored to any place) imprisoned for murdering his wife whom he claims committed suicide (if accidentally) in her fury. She, in his account, sounds like a familiar Dickens familiar--the angry, vengeful woman--shades of Hortense from his previous serial. But this crime is ambiguous, based on Rigaud's account which is muddy enough.
Then we move to quarantine quarters in Marseille where assorted English characters are halted en route, including two more angy females--Tattycoram and Miss Wade. The travails of travel certainly don't encourage transnational journeys, but there is also so much emphasis on not moving, on the wretchedness of being indoors (or outdoors for that matter) in the last chapters in London. Arthur Clennam's story is the one anchor that keeps this early narrative afloat--and a familiar type too, the unhappy child of abusive, cruel parents.
Lots of doubles too, just to insure our disorienting plunge into this Dickensian world: Pet's dead sister, Mrs. Flintwich's dream where she sees her husband in stereo, both asleep and awake, and the odd doubling of the dream--is it hers, or Mr. F's? The installment ends with this unsettling vision where the outside and inside of dream, of visionary experience, is difficult to access. Is this the climate of Dickens's fictional world, one that blurs dreams and reality? And finally the mysterious girl in the shadows, Little Dorrit. Who is she? To be continued.....
I'm writing from London now, although not the hallucinatory and stifling quarters of the Clennam Cheapside home, but from the British Library, Euston Road. I'm hoping to be able to take some photos of locales in the novel and upload them.
Next week, chapters 5-8.
Serially stimulated,
Susan
3 comments:
So it begins in Marseilles, where “the stare” indicts the scene and seemingly the circumstances that created it. We meet this character, Rigaud, ironic down to his nose and mustache, which move in opposition, as if we needed a sign that he can’t be trusted. We see Amy Dorrit’s beginnings, “where even the echoes were the weaker for imprisonment.” Before long, I've given myself over to Dickens, not the least for his ability to tell me all I need to know about Cavalletto in one stroke: the little man who sat down “with the negligent ease of one who was thoroughly accustomed to pavements…”
In chapter two, the bit of an exchange between the Meagles instantly tells that Pet is adored, if we missed the hint in her name:
“Did you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in quarantine?” Mr. M.
“It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.” Mrs. M.
That's all I need to empathize with Little Dorrit’s explosion later.
I love the watch in chapter 3. I learned in reading “Great Expectations” to pay attention to objects in a Dickens' tale. A watch is not just a watch, especially, and obviously, I guess, when it appears at a deathbed with the phrase “your mother.”
What to make of Mrs. Flintwinch’s dream, Flintwinch sleeping and awake, in profile and face front, the original and the double? When he said, “I forgot where I was,” there was a strange echo back to Calavetto, in chapter one, who said, “I know where I am.”
Miss Wade intrigues, on first meeting, and she might have more than a little Miss Havisham in her.
I have a theory about Dickens. You know that passage at the beginning of Chapter Three describing the gloomy environment of the Clennam household's neighborhood -- the one where the narrator says that it has "no pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world -- all taboo with that enlightened strictness ..."? I think Dickens' project is to create the exact opposite of this stern and austere world. His novels always feel full of "natural or artificial wonders" -- strange and cartoonishly flat minor characters, symbolic objects or plot devices (as in the watch), florid description, identities dissolving and reshaping (Tallycoram, and the wonderfully bizarre dream at the end of this installment), and so on. Every time I read a Dickens novel, it always feels so gloriously excessive, as though the novel is overflowing with all the tricks and techniques that Dickens could muster. For me, Dickens at his best is about as good as novels get.
On a different note, it strikes me that reading one of these novels in serial publication requires something of a blind leap of faith. Think of how much this novel could feel like an unsatisfying jumble of different plots and characters if it weren't welded together as well as it is.
This is a first-time read for me, and I'd agree with all of the comments about how disorienting the opening of Little Dorrit is. As Josh asserted, we believe based on other experiences of Dickens' novels that everything (or most everything) will come together eventually, but it is difficult in this first installment to see how this might happen. As I was "getting into" this new novel--and preparing myself for a long and extended reading experience--I found myself noting similarities with other Dickens characters. Arthur Clennam's childhood will be resurrected in Dickens's later novel, Our Mutual Friend, through the sad boy John Harmon. Miss Wade's coldness reminded me of Edith Dombey. Arthur's mother's 15 years in her bedroom seemed reminiscent of Miss Haversham's faded bridal banquet room (and as I recall, it had a prominent clock, too?). Perhaps this familiar cast of characters helps to reassure readers that we really are entering Dickens world--with its own logic that might not yet be clear--in this new novel. I for one am excited to keep reading to see how the individual fragments of the first installment eventually match up (or should I say "double" up)!
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