Little Dorrit, Part Nine, chaps 30-32 (August 1856)

Dear Serial Readers,

I invite someone to skip (as in DNR, Do Not Read) an installment, and then comment on your reading experience of the next. I know from reading letters Victorian readers sent to newspapers, that sometimes people did skip installments, sometimes more than one or two or three, and then picked up the serial later on (like watching serial dramas on TV). With Dickens especially, perhaps there's something satisfying about each number, quite apart from the diligent reader who is always trying to keep all the plot lines and characters, major and minor, in order. But does that seem outrageous, this suggestion, for discontinuous reading? Let us know if you try the experiment!

Kari mentioned the way the narrative seems to set up expectations and then disappoint, or turn in an entirely different direction. We're prompted toward constant speculations, like hers, about what might happen--interesting idea that Tattycoram and Miss Wade may be victims of the Clennams' past transgressions. But with this #9 installment we're promised via Plancks at the end of chap 32 (and the installment) some kind of resolution--SOON. What is his discovery and what will he "break" to Little D? I would guess that the FATHER of the Marshalsea is about to be released, and then we'll get to see what happens to him and his "little" daughter when they experience this new freedom of mobility. Rigaud is a cosmopolitan man "of no country," he tells us (as Blandois), from "half a dozen countries." And yet his character is not a model we're encouraged to adopt.

This number also plays up Arthur as a limited reader--he just cannot fathom that Amy is in love with him. I'm amused by the blindness given his emotional contortions about even entertaining romantic notions toward Pet who is half his number of years (something he says to LD). Okay, so we get the "Princess" tale about the "little" woman's secret (as if "little" and Amy's nickname weren't enough), and we see that Arthur's blindness is contrasted by Maggy's insight here. Still, Arthur remains clueless. But, like Kari's precaution, I wonder if this is a reading lesson for us too, that we may think we know where this novel is headed, we may think we see clearly, but we'll learn differently.

To me, one of the most remarkable passages in this installment is the metaleptic moment, where the future breaks into the perpetual present of the narrator's storytelling as if it is in the past ("metalepsis" as collision of (a) time within the story and (b) the time of the narration of that story). This is after Amy delivers a string of "no"s when Arthur suggests maybe one day she will have a different interest for her heart than her father. "The time came when he remembered it well, long afterwards, within those prison walls; within that very room." The verb tense--"the time came"--makes this a confusing comment--since that past tense is actually a future point. But this odd remark by the narrator does portend the falling of the scales of misreading (or confusion) from Arthur's eyes. Still, we don't know what that illumination on his part will mean.

As if the curious verb tense isn't enough to alert us to the emphasis on temporalities in this novel, the segment begins (chap 30) with Rigaud's interest in Mr Clennam's watch, a family heirloom with "DNF" engraved on it as a motto for not a person's initials, but for the motto DO NOT FORGET. But how can we help but forget, given all the myriad details and all the passage of time that erodes memory? Yes, this odd engraving on the watch is linked to the "secrets in all families" (or here, the Clennams), but I also took this as part of the long reading lesson of the narrative itself--here, the warning not to forget what we've read, when perhaps some forgetting, especially if we're misreading or led astray in our reading (like Arthur's reading of Amy), might be more helpful than remembering.

Next time, chaps 33-36.

Serially sober,
Susan