Sideshadow views : narrative possibilities in Charles Dickens's late novels

This essay discusses the role of the hypothetical – that which can be proposed only as a hypothesis -- in Charles Dickens’s last eight novels and the variety of literary means used to invoke it. In any language-based communication, words are uttered (and heard) or written (and read), one after the other, in the order that grammar demands. The linearity and order of such sequences seem to reflect naturally a temporality and a causality governing the represented events. In fact, this can only account for their necessity and their chronology. I argue that the novels under consideration make use of hypothetical and counterfactual actions, thoughts, events, perspectives, voices, etc., in order to overcome the limits imposed by the determinism apparently inherent to narrative structures. In Dickens’s fictional worlds, the present is not the simple consequence of the past and what happens is not only the necessary consequence of a sufficient cause. What happens is often without necessity and could as well not have happened. Such an event, when it was still only a possibility, competed with other unnecessary possibilities until chance decided its actualization. This contingent reality -- with its ethical, epistemological and ontological “payload” -- cannot be represented by the linear discourse of teleology. The representation of contingency demands the insertion of the real and the speculative in a narrative fabric woven out of virtual and actual developments and events. That is why, in Dickens’s novels, the unseen can be shown, silence can be eloquent, and what is in plain view can remain secret. Other possible stories always contribute to the plot. At various forks in the narrative, paths not taken could have led elsewhere. Hypothetical directions and indistinct emplotments define the narrative as powerfully as the developments that are pursued. iv To produce such a complex world of possibilities, Dickens not only refuses to rely upon a supposed mimetic quality of language, but he also contemplates the reality that he represents as a natural literary fact. He does not conceal his art. On the contrary, with an amazing fertility and inventiveness, he makes a lavish display of his capacity to play with language, with rhetorical flourish and with potential lines of emplotment. Everything that constitutes Dickens’s wild narrative economy is always on permanent display and is an inherent part of the pleasure procured for his readership. In the introduction, I discuss Dickens’s recourse to the hypothetical in its interaction with an important ideological conflict of his time -- the confrontation of the creationist teleology with the existential indeterminism of broadly Darwinian evolution theory. In the next three chapters, I address the function of the hypothetical in the incipits of David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I then examine how, by sustaining the epistemic anxiety generated in the incipit, the hypothetical propagates across the novel, raising questions without often answering them. I conclude that in Dickens’s last eight novels -- and, I suggest that this may also be the case in the modern novel in general -- the recourse to the hypothetical participates in the acquisition of a literary truth, because, after all, literature -- like science and philosophy -- is just another way to experiment with reality.

Keyphrases: Dickens, Discours, Narration, Novel, Literature, Realism, Contingency, Necessity, Hypothetical, Teleology, Narrative discourse