Realism at the edge : Dickens' ex/centric writing
Date
1984
Authors
Rydygier, Monika Antonina
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Abstract
An awareness of the need t o move language beyond its own infrastructure of semantics and grammar--to move meaning through language and into the world--comprises, I argue, the central premise of Dickens' fictional realism. The thesis examines his last three novels as works initiating a movement outward from the text; writing "at the edge" Dickens moves his fiction not only to the edge of conventional discourse (and certainly conventional realism), but to the edge of textuality itself, that i s, into what may variously be characterized as "the real."
The thesis discusses realism not as an historically delimiting concept but as a mode of discourse which, situated within structures of hi story and society, can be made intelligible only through them.
Chapters one and two offer the rationale and justification of reading language--and specifically Dickens' texts--essentially as a medium of exchange, of relation, and chapter three illustrates the interpretive possibilities afforded by such reading.
Thus the first chapter examines the way in which Bleak House, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend each expresses the need for community through language, and shows that the failure to reach across boundaries--whether linguistic or social--entails not only the failure of human relations but of life itself.
Chapter two discusses the specific nature of Dickens' realism as a function of relation: a means of breaking through barriers-the barriers between language and life, between the text and the world. In this respect, Dickens' novels are examined as the real/ization of what lies beyond language and the boundaries of the text; as texts in which is contained the text of the world. The chapter draws on both contemporary and modern sources for its argument and reveals Dickens' profound insight into social, moral and spiritual corruption.
Chapter three, finally, discusses a particular thread of images rarely examined by critics in any depth and often regarded as an example of Dickens' eccentric ('unreal') vision. The argument rests on a discussion of Dickens' image of the human parasite-the cannibal and vampire-and with support from fictional and non- fictional material describes how the images trace out fundamental social and economic activities. The chapter reveals the way in which Dickens de/scribes metaphor as a condition of existential truth and breaks down the symbolic into the actual.
In conclusion, the thesis argues that Dickens' realism offers an entree into conditions of the real. It proposes that only through an examination of text and reality can Dickens be revealed as one of the (unacknowledged) masters of a fundamentally realistic discourse.