Max Vega-Ritter

Charles Darnay

a secret double of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities

To this day, most Boulogne people treasure the memory of Charles Dickens, gratefully remembering how much he grew to like his -French watering-place‖, where he and his family spent many a leisurely holiday in the mid-1850s, often entertaining visitors from England. Because the venue is more precisely Condette, the village south-west of Boulogne with a distinct whiff of the illicit about it -whether it did offer an ideal -love nest‖ to the Dickens-Ternan couple does not seem to matterthis leg of the conference will interrogate the explanatory power of the adjective -Dickensian‖ when it is related to such concepts as movement, travel, and a (possibly transgressive) yearning to cross thresholds -a major characteristic of Dickens's characters as much as of the writer himself, from a very early stage of his career. With this in mind, papers are invited that address the conference theme, including, but not exclusively, the following topics:

Cross-Channel adventures: "Le citoyen Dickens" in Northern France& Belgium; holidaymaking; guilty secrets, transgressiveness and secrecy; spiritual quest; the restless self: wandering, meandering, separateness; paralysis and entrapment; echoing footsteps; negotiating the Other: the defamiliarized self; Dickens as a leading exponent of Victorian culture across the Channel

Critics have noticed that Charles Darnay and Charles Dickens share more than their Christian name or their initials. Like Charles Dickens Charles Darnay keeps going and coming between England and France on -secret business of which he could give no honest account. A Tale of Two Cities1 p68‖ -on business of a delicate and difficult nature‖p.74.Moreover, his double or hybrid identity as an Anglicised Frenchman and other indications might be looked upon as clues to probing fictional appearances further. Beyond the influence of Coleridge's views of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens's relationship to that major historical event may be related to his own favourite obsessions as they surface in Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield or Edwin Drood. Charles Darnay can be seen as delineating a slightly more hidden or deeply repressed Dickens.

The ambivalent way the character relates to some of the master signifiers of the French revolution--its violent transgressiveness in regard to a despotic Law--and -the unseen force that was drawing him fast to itself like the influence of the Load-stone Rock‖ may reveal identity features the author not only shared with his character but may have unconsciously or less consciously wished to conceal from himself or from his readers. These items might show the author to be more concerned and have more in common with his character and the core events in which he is involved than perhaps Charles Dickens thought or wished to think. Is Charles Darnay ci-devant Marquis de St-Evremonde the double of le citoyen Dickens?

Charles Darnay as a secret double of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities Critics have noticed that Charles Darnay and Charles Dickens share more than their Christian name or their initials. Like Charles Dickens Charles Darnay keeps going and coming between England and France on -secret business of which he could give no honest account." A Tale of Two Cities p68 -on business of a delicate and difficult nature‖p.74.Moreover, his double or hybrid identity as an Anglicised Frenchman and other indications might be looked upon as clues to probing fictional appearances further.

Beyond the influence of Coleridge's views of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens's relationship to that major historical event may be related to his own recurrent obsessions as they surface in Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield or Edwin Drood. Charles Darnay can be seen as delineating a slightly more hidden or deeply repressed Dickens.

The ambivalent way the character relates to some of the master signifiers of the French revolution--its violent transgressiveness in regard to a despotic Law and Regicide--and -the unseen force that was drawing him fast to itself like the influence of the Load-stone Rock‖ may reveal identity features the author not only shared with his character but may have unconsciously or less consciously wished to conceal from himself or from his readers.

These items might show the author to be more concerned and have more in common with, his character and the core events in which he is involved than perhaps Charles Dickens thought or wished to think. Is Charles Darnay ci-devant Marquis de St-Evremonde the double and mask of le citoyen Dickens? A Tale of Two Cities. Penguin classics. 1859/2000

Charles Darnay --an Anglo-French interloper or a French Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities?

That Charles Darnay and Dickens have in common the same initials has often been noticed. The likeness between their initials seems to point to some sort of identification of CD with Charles Darnay or some implication of the writer in the character. If Charles Darnay can be seen as a kind of Charles Dickens' fictional counterpart, it is in reverse. For Charles Darnay was born a Frenchman unlike Charles Dickens who was born His Majesty's subject. Though Charles Dickens made a point of writing and speaking French when in France and occasionally in his letters, he never got immersed in French culture as much as Darnay who has been described as an Anglicized Frenchman and moreover, was the son of an English mother.

How far Charles Darnay is a Frenchman or an Englishman has not often been debated. Charles Dickens himself does not seem to show much concern about that point either; neither about whether being a Frenchman and being Anglicized or English educated were compatible and how far, which is another issue. He does not either seem to devote much thought to the effects of CD's siding with his English mother against a French father who is a murderer and a rapist. Though Charles Darnayacknowledges being French by birth and by his father's descent, he disowns them and shifts his allegiance to his mother and his mother's country.

This trait defines him as a kind of potentially bipolar personality which is structured around his identifying with his English mother and her native language as much as against his French aristocratic father. Symbolically, he accomplishes a -4 th August Night‖ Abolition of all aristocratic privileges by renouncing his noble title and name and family properties. He severs all links to his father and his father's ancestry by adopting his mother's name. By English 19 th century standards he reduces himself below gentlemanly status and rank by earning a living on teaching French in London. That rupture from all inherited pattern of noble behaviour marks him socially and morally as an opponent to the values and ways by which his father and forefathers used to live. He appears to have made his the gospel of self-help and hard work which came to define the 19 th century English middleclass to which his mother seems to belong.

However one point that seems to set him off and apart is that he is described by the author as reading -with young men who could find interest for the study of a living language that was spoken all over the world and he cultivated a taste for its store of knowledge and fancy‖. P.135 In that respect he can be said to firmly stay French-minded or French cultured and to entertain a kind of deep attachment and a strong link to his native country and to its native folks. -A Frenchman-born‖ he is as Mr Lorry reminds him and he himself acknowledges himself to be p.242

That bond may be viewed as entering into his resolution to go back to France in order to answer Gabelle's call to succour him in his jail. Other factors may have played a part in urging him toward that fateful step. Charles Dickens describes -the unseen force that was drawing him fast to itself‖ like the influence of the Load-stone Rock, so that -Everything that arose before his mind, drifted him on, faster and faster... to the terrible attraction.‖ Part of it rises from a guilty bond to -his own unhappy land‖ for which he should try to assert the claims of mercy and humanity.‖p.252

The masochistic link riveting him to his birth country may derive from Darnay's sympathy with some of the revolutionaries ideals. He himself does mention -his renunciation of his social place‖of his own accord, by which he achieved his own 4thAugust Night of abolition of all Aristocratic privileges. He even goes so far as reproaching himself with not making his renunciation of his social rank complete enough, not working it out systematically enough, as though he had not cleansed himself enough of the sin of being an Aristocrat. Yet, he has now shed all references to an aristocratic identity and inheritance. Ironically, that is the very thing Stryver and Lorry strongly rebuked him for, being unaware they are addressing the very St-Evremonde they revile 'for being infected by the most pestilent code of devilry --and‖ abandoning his property to the vilest scum of the earth‖. P.249 Stryver even wonders the nephew of the Marquis is not at the head of the butcherly mob.

Wondering whether he sufficiently broke away from his aristocratic origins is by itself an indication. True or not, it reveals a self-questioning, an interesting uncertainty or oscillation about Charles Darnay. Moreover, he is described by the narrator as being divided. He cannot help -thinking, having had some sympathy for the miserable people, having abandoned something to them,..., that one might be listened to, and might have the power to persuade to some restraint;‖p245 Indeed he does dream of being at their head but in order to restrain them, not to urge them onto more abuse or more power.

True, he does not seem to exhibit any manifest republican leanings. His rejection of aristocracy does not go as far as making a political clean sweep of the Ancienrégime, or raising the issue of the origins of the legitimacy of power. By opting for his mother's English side Charles Darney both breaks away from his father and turns towards the English king as an authority who all in all has dealt with him fairly and benignly . Charles Darnay does not allow himself or is not allowed by Charles Dickens to go down to the bottom of the political issue of sovereignty -who of the King or the people is sovereign? . He remains in an in-between area.

On the whole, one could say it is the Frenchman in him who returns to France, as though the force of belonging there was overwhelmingly drawing him to his native country and to the political tragedy taking place there. That sense of belonging springs from his linguistic or cultural roots which his taste for their store of knowledge and fancy testifies to.

As a Frenchman Darnay-St-Evremonde seems to be far more deeply involved in the ongoing historical drama than is manifest. There is the whole knot of violent emotions tying the young man to his French native scene. As Richard Maxwell points out in a note, p.459, Book 2, Ch.5 note 1, CD makes an explicit reference to the doubling between Darnay and Gaspard as parricides. -Both of them arrive at the château on the same day, both have reason to hate Monsieur, but Gaspard does the deed which Darnay cannot or will not.‖The critic might have added that looming large in the background was the regicide/parricide of Louis XVI. The murdering of the marquis is equated to a parricide by French justice. The Load-stone Rock that irresistibly draws Charles Darnay to Paris is parricidal guilt, guilt for the impulse to commit the murder of the father, its prohibition/inhibition as well as the attendant compulsive need for self-punishment. The latter -self-punishment-is particularly prominent here.

That murder is almost overshadowed or occulted by the terrible rape and murder of Mme Defarge's sister and her husband. They constitute a primitive scene which is uncovered and disclosed by an eye witness not of the actual raping and murder but of the traces they left on their racked bodies and through Dr Manette's written testimony. They will be laid to Charles Darnay's charge. He is denounced and indicted as -one of a family of tyrants, one of a race proscribed‖, as an oppressor of the people, p.328. So he is held to account for his father and uncle's crimes at the revolutionary tribunal, is convicted and sentenced to death.

In the eyes of the Revolutionary tribunal, the raping and the ensuing murder are viewed as a pretext, motive and justification for the execution of Charles Darnay which is a redoubling and re-enactment of Louis XVI guillotining. The whole institution of monarchical tyranny and its oppression of the people are being identified with Darnay just as they were embodied into the King of France, and destroyed through his being put to death. The Marquis of St-Evremonde is being executed through his son being put to his death. Father and son are joined together and made one through their common ascent and the son's execution.

The Oedipal dimension is made manifest by the son's rebellion against and throwoff of, the father's rule, name and lineage altogether. The sexual stake and meaning of the oedipal relationship to the father is covertly symbolised by the raping and the murdering which have been shifted onto the two brothers/uncle/father. Revolutionary Law does not discriminate between brothers/uncle/father and nephew, confounding them into one persona, the Aristocracy being one with the monarchical institution as archetypal of patriarchy. In conformity to ancienrégime Law, regicide is equated to parricide. The principle can work both ways to good effect.

As a Frenchman Darnay-St-Evremonde seems to shoulder the heavy burden of multidimensional irrational violence. He bears the brunt of the guilt for the original murder/raping scene, as well as for the Parricidal/regicidal murder in which he has an unconscious share, but above all he is an expiatory victim for his father's crimes. Such is Charles Darnay's ambiguous identity. Both heir to his forefathers' guilt and their hidden murderer he is part and parcel of the Revolutionary oedipal parricidal gesture, despite what he can do and say to the contrary.

By choosing to side with his English mother against his French sires, Charles Darnay virtually but through no conscious choice of his opted out of the Revolutionary adventure and prevented himself from being an actor in his native country's political destiny, though remaining tied to it through many unseen unconscious links. As he advances on his way to Paris the protective escort he mustered looks more and more like guards watching over a prisoner.

It seems to lie in him to be viewed in equivocal position as a spy or as a gobetween, as an interloper, a double-agent or double-crosser, an equivocator regarding to his Majesty the King or the French Republic, ultimately to all established authority. During his trial he is presented as a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having on divers occasions, and by divers means, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene… (65) by coming and going between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene…had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. ( 66)

The accused never ceased to shuttle back and forth from France to England "on secret business of which he could give no honest account".(68) Moreover, he travels "under an assumed name" "on business of a delicate and difficult nature, which might get people into trouble"(74). Charles Darnay is not safe either from suspicion of wrong-doing from the English Law. His loyalty and faithfulness to the King have been called into doubt by the Judge at the Old Bailey, who summoned him to appear in court under the charge of spying and betraying his Majesty.. His belonging to both cultures and nations seems to lay him open to suspicion of falsehood and treachery to the English King.

Sydney Carton substituting himself for Charles Darnay stands in line with that logic. In the triangular oedipal relationship with father and son standing at one apex and the mother at the third, with Sydney Carton occupying one position-the father or the son'sand Charles Darnay the other.

Until his self-immolation Sydney Carton has been presented through a sadomasochistic relationship with his boss Stryver. One is a Lion the other a Jackal. SC feeds his boss's pleading from his own substance. He can sit up through night and day working at the most desperate causes, he has the knack for assimilating, digesting the hardest cases. Whereas Stryver is fond of displaying his oratorical powers in courting prides himself on being a lion in pleading, being self-complacent and vain Carton wallows in self-contempt and ruminates his failures: -I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man cares for me -p.89 He He humiliates himself and lets his boss humiliate him. He trundles to him and lets him trample on his dignity in a self-destructive process which seems to provide him with a perverse kind of enjoyment‖ Offering a striking physical likeness to Darnay SC is morally his opposite, being as cynical and bitter as VD is idealistic and generous, just as callously scrupleless as CD is racked or moved by conscience. Quite logically, Darnay is an object of Carton's hatred. Doubly so as Darnay is his successful rival for Lucy's love. Carton confesses to himself -you hate the fellow‖89. Nevertheless SC will protest his friendly feelings for CD. -I wish we might be friends‖214.He makes that statement at the very time when he recalls Darnay forced him to acknowledge he drank. It is an evident of case of anger or hatred being reversed to its opposite or turned inward against the self. He'll later beg to be accepted in CD's household as kind of disaffected piece of furniture one forgets about being there. Jealousy and frustration are being reversed to self-hatred and self-contempt, trampling upon one's pride and self-esteem. Sydney Carton's self-immolation completes the reversal of the hatred-murder relationship to its opposite. In a way he definitely imposes himself as an ideal figure the young couple beholden to for existing. He sublimises himself into a tutelary figure, a protective aegis ever invisibly present at his side;

The oddity is that though his Anglicized Frenchness brings him into trouble with the King's authority but it does not with the revolutionaries who will lay against him the charge of being a French aristocrat and the son and heir of a hated representative of the French nobility, but not of being the English King's agent. They will not suspect him of plotting against the Republic in the King of England's interest.

For most of the novel, and even eventually, the reader does not know whether Charles Darnay is an English subject or a French citizen, being probably neither. Isn't that where he stands closest to Charles Dickens's heart and mind?

Where does that leave us? By choice, of name, of moral, social and political allegiance or filiation, Charles Darney is more than Anglicised, he is definitely an Englishman. Yet fate and a mysterious attraction within him seem to draw him back to France and to get him involved in a relentless conflict with a sadistic Law. He is held to account for the wrongs that his sires committed, unknown to him. An English mother's son, an arch rebel to his French aristocratic father, he is in love with an English-bred French girl whose French father both saves him and causes him to be convicted and sentenced to death.

That leaves us with a character who could be described as one of the few major -hybrid‖ characters in 19 th century English novel (the Cooper brothers being the first in line in Ch.Brontë Shirley.) in terms of national identity. Though on surface Charles Darnay looks a thoroughly anglicised personality, in depth we saw that the character was structured around a core of conflicting tendencies and relationships to various master signifiers: the oedipal father figure, the primal scene, parricide and rape, repression. These master signifiers are identifiable with some traits of the French historical Revolutionary scene: the Revolutionary tribunal as social over-self, the Aristocratic father figures, Sex and Violence , Law and the Transgression of Law, Forbidden Desire. They make up his French identity.

That deeper hidden dimension of Charles Darnay as a character is at loggerheads with its anglicised smoother surface. Paradoxically that French identity of the character is what lies closest to Charles Dickens's heart and mind, what moved him with greatest strength and violence. It is part and parcel of the pattern of violent obsessions that run throughout his fiction and keep intruding again and again like Charles the first 's head in Mr Dick's mind in David Copperfield. In a way Charles Darnay's French identity is more Charles Dickens' than the anglicized side can be.

Penguin classics,1859Penguin classics, -2000


Max Vega-Ritter

ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

As Virginia Swain reminds us, "the history of the grotesque is usually described as falling rather neatly unto two distinct moments. The trauma of the French Revolution […] can be seen as a watershed between the two" (Swain, 3). "The early grotesque has a carefree, utopian flavour" (Swain, 3), whereas 19 thcentury grotesque becomes the expression of "the artist's struggle to overcome feelings of 'helplessness and horror'" (Swain, 4, quotes 2 words from Kayser) This historical distinction may be too "neat"1 , but it appealingly points to the traditional distinction between two modes of the grotesque: "the comic and the burlesque" on the one hand, "the abnormal and the horrible" on the other, to use Hugo's terminology (Hugo 347). Each mode famously has its 20 th -century champion: Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser.

In 1957, starting from the observation that in the grotesque "the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and humans" (Kayser2 , 21), Wolfgang Kayser describes the grotesque as the inscription of familiar elements in a context in which they cease to be recognizable and become menacing. In emphatic terms Kayser describes the grotesque world as radically and frighteningly alien, "nocturnal and inhuman" (157), destroying our faith in our world, "instill[ing] fear of life rather than fear of death" (185), rendering us "unable to orient ourselves in the alienated world" (185). Grotesque art, a source of terror, is finally described as an "attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world" (188), though Kayser fails to clearly identify the "dark" or "ominous forces" (188) exorcised by grotesque art.

If Kayser insists so much on disharmony and alienation/ disorientation, it is, according to Bakhtin, because he is incapable of seeing the bigger picture, because he "offers the theory of the Romantic and modernist forms only" (Bakhtin,46). In 1965 Bakhtin thus goes further back in time to argue that the grotesque is not a post-Renaissance category. He shows in his study of the popular sources of Rabelais' fiction how 'grotesque realism', as he defines it in his introduction, is rooted in medieval carnival culture and fed by festive, universal and ambivalent laughter. Just as medieval carnivals stage political or social inversion through humorous parodies of serious rituals, grotesque realism is based on "degradation […], the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract, […] a transfer to the material level" (19). Such degradation is seen by folk culture in cyclical terms, i.e. as part of a movement of cyclical and universal regeneration celebrating "moments of death and revival, of change and renewal" (9). The emphasis of grotesque realism is placed on materiality and corporeality, "the body and the bodily life hav (19). In folk culture, the grotesque body is "a principle of growth" (26), its "lower stratum" (21) a zone of sheer regenerative force. Geoffrey Harpham's 1982 comprehensive study of the grotesque concerns itself both with the grottesche of the Renaissance and more archaic grotesque forms like the grotto-esque or cave-art. His ground-breaking analysis sees beyond grotesque themes and styles to put to the fore the temporal dimension of the grotesque, which ignores temporal process to create "images of instantaneous process", "narrative compressed into image" (mettre une note: see article, note 2). The grotesque ignores time.

[ing] […] a cosmic […] character"

[The 19th century]

As we will see now however, time does not ignore the grotesque: "Each age redefines the grotesque in terms of what threatens its sense of essential humanity." (Harpham article 463). The diversity of the sub-genres and aesthetic categories which 19 th -century grotesque fed on (like caricature, the macabre, drama or tragicomedy) bears witness to the century's passion for the grotesque, not only as an aesthetic category but also as a mode of investigation of reality, a contribution to the questioning of society in 19 th -century Europe, its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress (note: Baudelaire, Hugo et articles).

[HUGO] French art-critic André Chastel explains that the hybridity of Renaissance grotesque, "the antithesis of representation" could only appeal to Romantic writers aspiring to creative freedom. (check ref with Rosen). In 1827, Victor Hugo's Preface to Cromwell turns into a passionate defence of the grotesque as an artistic category: "And so, let addle-pated pedants […] claim that the deformed, the ugly, the grotesque should never be imitated in art; one replies that the grotesque is comedy, and that comedy apparently makes a part of art" (Hugo,356). For Hugo, the grotesque is a necessary ingredient of comedy, seen as a combination of the sublime and the grotesque, because the grotesque is an essential element of reality, of "all creation" (350): "everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, […] the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light." (345).

If, for Hugo, the grotesque is the sign of man's imperfect nature, of "the human beast" (350), it is not, as in Ruskin, a sign of man's unfortunately imperfect vision, which if done away with would leave only the sublime. Hugo's grotesque exists next to the sublime and is necessary to man's apprehension of the sublime, as "a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception" (349). Hugo may describe the grotesque as inferior to the beautiful or the sublime, it remains, from an artistic point of view, "the richest source that nature can offer art" (348).

[RUSKIN] In Part III of Stones of Venice, Ruskin "examine[s] into the nature and essence of the Grotesque" (Ruskin, 114) and establishes two important distinctions. The first one is between "sportive" (or "playful") grotesque and "terrible grotesque3 ": "The grotesque is, in almost all cases, composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful; […] as one or other of these elements prevails, the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive grotesque and terrible grotesque." ( § XXIII,127).

Both modes of the grotesque can be "noble" or "ignoble", and that is the second distinction established by Ruskin. Ignoble grotesque is an illegitimate act of artistic creation, "work as false as it is monstrous, a mass of blunt malice and obscene ignorance" ( § 55). The inventive license provided by the grotesque is rejected by Ruskin, who proves indignant at the apparent pointlessness characteristic of Renaissance ornamental grotesque in which he can discern no moral or spiritual truths. Ruskin thus logically sees Raphael's work as "the fruit of [a] great [mind] degraded to base objects" ( §49). For Ruskin, ornamentation must be "rational" ( §50).

His insistence on noble grotesque shows however that Ruskin has a positive vision of many forms of the grotesque. Even sportive grotesque, the product of "the minds of inferior workmen" ( § 32), can be noble as "the fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds" ( § 34). Terrible grotesque, "this […] more interesting branch of imaginative work" (137), rises out of fear, "the fear which arises out of the contemplation of great powers in destructive operation, and generally from the perception of the presence of death" (137, check). Fear of the divine is experienced by the producer of noble grotesque, and terrible grotesque, when noble, is therefore contiguous to the sublime. If Ruskin agrees with Hugo that grotesque art remains the sign of man's imperfect vision and fallen nature, he doesn't share Hugo's conception of the grotesque as necessary to man's perception of the sublime. For Ruskin, the grotesque is always an imperfect artistic expression susceptible, as "the mind of the workman becomes informed with better knowledge, and capable of more earnest exertion" ( §51), of "pass[ing] into perfect sublime" ( §51)

[BAUDELAIRE] In "The Essence of Laughter" (1856), like Hugo, Baudelaire has a deeply romantic approach of the grotesque4 . Like Hugo and Ruskin, he too sees the grotesque as the sign of man's fallen condition, since laughter is always the expression of "the Satanic in man" (137). One of the novelties brought by Baudelaire's analysis is that he sees man's fallen nature in religious, but also mythical terms. The grotesque is here also the primitive expression of an archaic past: "the laughter caused by the grotesque has about it something profound, primitive and axiomatic, […] [close] to the innocent life and to absolute joy" (144). From that, Baudelaire distinguishes between absolute comic -the grotesque -and significative comic. " [Significative] comic is an imitation mixed with a certain creative faculty" (143), whereas the grotesque, that "intoxication of laughter […] both terrible and irresistible" (148), is "a creation mixed with a certain imitative faculty-imitative, that is, of elements pre-existing in nature" (143), the expression of the superiority "of man over nature" (143).

The grotesque, Baudelaire seems to lament, is not produced by French artists because it does not correspond to French minds: "In France, the land of lucid thought and demonstration, where the natural and direct aim of art is utility, we generally find the significative type" (145-6). The grotesque is however a true European production "Germany, sunk in her dreams, will afford us excellent specimens of the absolute comic. There all is weighty, profound and excessive. To find true comic savagery, however, you have to cross the Channel and visit the foggy realms of spleen. Happy, noisy, carefree Italy abounds in the innocent variety. […] The Spaniards […] are quick to arrive at the cruel stage, and their most grotesque fantasies often contain a dark element" (146).

Dickens

It is time to visit "the foggy realms of spleen" and to say a few words about the grotesque of Dickens's fiction5 . If Dickens was wary of high romanticism (note: Juliet John), be it English or European, he famously wished to explore "the Romantic side of familiar things" (preface Bleak House) and there he found the grotesque. His "streaky bacon" conception of fiction, as expressed in Oliver Twist (note ref) has uncanny common points with Hugo's definition of the Romantic drama: "[…] the romantic drama […] would lead the audience constantly from sobriety to laughter, from mirthful excitement to heartbreaking emotion […]. For the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the sublime, the soul within the body; it is tragedy beneath comedy" (Hugo, 383). Apart from Hugo's definition of drama, Dickens's art strikes us in that it includes or offers examples of all the facets of the grotesque mentioned by theorists. Dickens's grotesque is alternately delightful and violent, carefree and sinister. On the sunny side, and because "energy and joy are the father and mother of the grotesque 6 ", Dickens shares Baudelaire's love of pantomime, and indulges in sheer farce. On the sombre side, he also shares Baudelaire's fascination with the dislocation, incongruity or ugliness of human bodies and constantly displays his awareness of the corporeality of the grotesque. If Bakhtin saw the grotesque body as a source of regeneration but failed to perceive its horror, fragmentation and dismemberment are put to the fore by Dickens, in whose fiction the hybrid, fragmented grotesque body is obsessively represented, as a source of fascination, not untinged with repulsion or horror (Carker's teeth) and also as a source of fun (the leg).

As Steig has shown, Dickens's grotesque owes a great deal to his choice of perspective, from the combination of a child's and an adult's visions, the child-like vision bringing a deformity which serves the "expression [of] infantile fears", example of Uriah Heep. Not far from the primitive evoked by Baudelaire and analysed by Harpham. (ceci doit être soit développé et explicité, soit enlevé) If Dickens's grotesque is rooted in the exploration of "the romantic side of familiar things", it also serves the depiction of a new reality, bearing witness to Dickens's conviction that in the wake of the disruptions brought about by the advent of an industrial society, "'real life' is more grotesque and fantastical than anything the artistic imagination can produce7 ". The incongruous distortion which characterizes the grotesque becomes an essential element of Dickens's faithful representation of reality, and the contradiction is only apparent. As Harpham reminds us, "by the end of the nineteenth century, it was more common than not to speak of the "naturalness" of the grotesque" (Harpham, preface à edition 2006, xxv). The grotesque is no longer pure fantasy but serves for example to denounce the devastation brought about by the industrial revolution (example: OCS: the industrial landscape and its "writhing" machines -find ref). In Dickens's fiction, 19 th century reality becomes "grotesque and wild but not impossible" (preface of The Old Curiosity Shop) 8 .

The Grotesque as a symptom of madness and its cure Grotesque and the Freudian Phantasm Many of the writers this study focuses on, as well as Charles Dickens's own use of the grotesque often consist in tying together a cluster of polar opposites, oxymorons, in the form of contradictory images, similes or metaphors or character traits. A characteristic instance of such oxymorons is (see Victor Sage's comment on their comicality 1' )Venus's taxidermist shop in Our Mutual Friend. It exhibits Silas Wegg's own leg bone with which Silas so closely identifies he strongly objects to its being sold and thereby « dispersed » by Venus for « he wants to collect himself like a genteel person »(Book1 ch.7). Venus selling it would be felt by Wegg like an amputation/castration of himself, of his own power and identity.

At Silas Wegg's departure, the whole taxidermist shop is said to be « paralytically animated »--a comic oxymoron aptly descriptive not only of Wegg's personality in the novel but more fundamentally, of the main hero's situation and conduct. John Harmon is symbolically or imaginarily in fetters, "paralysed", as a result of his father's attitude and his will codicil-inheriting his father 's fortune is conditioned to marrying Bella Wilfer. John Harmon, being caught in the double bind set by his father: --either marry a girl for mercenary reasons or lose his father's huge fortune--.is obliged to take refuge under an assumed identity. The false name is at once a subterfuge, an evasion and a constraint. It is an imposture John Harmon/Roskesmith/Julius Handford labours under humiliatingly but will doggedly carry on with for most of the novel. He even seems to find it hard to shed it off ,for he marries Bella under his false name-a circumstance he even hides from her until after the birth of his first child. .John Harmon's unexpected violent fit of anger at Wegg seems to be indicative of a resemblance, as if Webb were John Harmon's despised and grotesque double, carrying the latter's denied resentment, sense of frustration and impotence to .extremes. He can be viewed as Harmon's dark, socially inferior double in many ways, and both being united in being the living embodiment of .a castration phantasm lurking in the depths of the text.

In fact, such binary opposites are very similar or actually akin to a Freudian « Phantasm » 2 --an unconscious scenario representing a deep-seated emotional conflict... It is said by Freud to play an important role in bridging instinctual life and thought, or wishes and purposes. Characteristically, moreover, grotesque writers often exacerbate one of the binary opposites and push it to an extremity. Martin Chuzzlewit is first a shrewd suspicious old man; eventually a senile dotard who suddenly drops his mask, tearing off Pecksniff's, exposing his hypocritically humble avidity. Paul Dombey is a firm owner whose thirst for power and domination brings about his own son's death. Paradoxically he tries to turn his son into an extension or a reflection of his own power. Little Paul dies as if he was drawn to death by a secret attraction to passiveness. He prefigures Dome's own final collapse into helpless powerlessness. Nicodemus Boffin in Our Mutual Friend is successively the epitome of generosity and of miserliness, holding under his thumb his former boss's son, humiliating him all the more ruthlessly in proportion to his former kindliness to him. The enigma of Edwin Drood mainly lies in Jasper, the loving-dearly loved uncle who is presented as suspect of murdering his own nephew... the more loving he looks the more heavily suspicions lie on him.

The Monster and the Norm In many ways the monster and its monstrousness stem from norm-itself -as if the latter gave rise to its opposite underside --family love and intra family links being undermined and fatefully destroyed by terrible undercurrents of hatred and anger. Hortense, Lady Dedlock's dedicated chambermaid, in Bleak House hates her mistress out of sheer jealousy and wounded pride. She murders Tulkinghorn, Lord Dedlock's private attorney-at -law, as if she identified with Lady Dedlock as a victim of his relentless pursuit of the secret she is trying to hide from the world. Tulkinghorn is the incarnation of Law as a punitive Power, the pitiless upholder of a cold law or norm. Hortense's cold destructiveness is the sheer reflection of Tulkinghorn's own ruthlessness.

Charles Dickens exposes the cruelty of Law or the Norm as it was being built up by Victorian society and turns against it the very violence they bore within just as storm clouds carry thunder in their own depths... Charles Dickens is just as ferocious in his exposures as Victorian superegos could be in repressing emotional and sexual drives and urges. Nevertheless, he could be just as watchful and mistrustful of the latter and did not endorse nor advocate revolutionary uprisings, though he could sympathies with the deep sufferings in which popular uprisings originated. He clung to Order and Norms just as desperately as he lashed at their sadistic edge... The meaning of Social Superegos For a long time, in his fictional work until David Copperfield 3, Charles Dickens seems to have held on to the hope that some sort of kindly powerful figure might rise and extend its rightful loving rule over the world in the end. He may have been helped and confirmed in that belief by a strong defensive love attitude against guilty/aggressive identification/fixation to women. Little Em'ly, Dora and Agnes are telling examples of how David/Dickens could focus on a woman, let himself be enthralled to her while making her suffer keenly and silently by erecting himself as her stern almost lethal master. Unlike in Oliver Twist where Rose Mailie nearly dies, or Cathy in Nicholas Nickleby or Little Nell in Old Curiosity Shop or Dora in David Copperield who actually die, gradually Charles Dickens's women will no longer as a rule come to their end, despite sometimes deep suffering.

Feminine Grotesques There is a large collection of feminine grotesques in Charles Dickens fiction. They exhibit strong propensities to conventionally masculine attitudes. From Mrs. Mann in Oliver Twist to Mrs. Clennam in Litle Dorrit or Mme Farge in ATOTC many women have nothing gentle about them. They show more ruthless determination than most men in Charles Dickens's. Fictional world. Here the feminine pole in them is reduced to very little whereas the masculine one grows to be overpowering. Our Mutual Friend marks a dramatic turning in this regard, with the grotesque sublimity of Betty Higden. Betty Higden is one of the very finest women characters in all CD's fiction, one of the most dickensian, too. Her grotesque sublimity -if these two most antagonistic words could ever be coupled together as they have been by CD's creation--has no like in all Dickens 's fiction. She is as generous as Aunt Betsey and even more if that were possible, since she dies in order to free Slopper from all ties to her that could fetter him in his progress to adulthood. She is more preposterous and eccentric than Betsey because of the utter desperate social destitution she lives in. One hardly, imagines a finer recognition of woman's capacity for love. for understanding, for courage and determination in the teeth of hostile human circumstances. She is sublime and grotesque. Just as Sloppy is grotesque, too, his howls and bellows along with his huge capital of legs and knees and elbows and his innumerable buttons make him a grotesque creature in which crude physical reality materializes into absurd or senseless shape.--yet, like Mr. Dick in DC. He is both insane and sensible, thereby demonstrating that madness can be close to wisdom and generosity.

CD's deepest insight--the same could be said of Victor Hugo's monsters-perhaps lies therein: sublimity can be found--is often to be found--beneath the most unlikely, most unprepossessing or insane appearances and clothings. grotesque -i.e. being preposterous and repellent--creatures can be sublime. Positive Sublimity which is Truth and Beauty is visibly present in them Grotesque is a weapon, a means to expose and lash at, greed, hypocrisy, ruthless power, overtowering pride by highlighting their excess and preposterousness. Yet it can hardly be denied that it also arises from more specific or perhaps deeper more ambivalent sources : indignant anger at the wrong of the great institutions that make up the fabric of Victorian or Nineteenth Century society : law and justice, the power of money, class hierarchy and domination, poor school education..

An enigmatic meaning of Grotesque

More generally speaking, as the reader will notice when reading the ensuing chapters, most grotesque characters give probably; too, body to an insight into undercurrents of violent irrationality, excess and death urges, coming into sight in the shape of violently transgress gestures or contradictory signals. Yet, one should not be mistaken: repressed unlawful or potentially lawful urges are intrinsic to grotesque, giving it an enigmatic edge, an inscrutable dimension and an almost intractable or rebellious energy. The grotesque monster figures what law and norms cannot subdue, curb nor tame into « civilized » creatures. That is the very mystery Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, Nicholas Gogol were fascinatingly drawn to and sought to grapple with or tellingly gave expression to.

[Présentation ouvrage]

As Michael Hollington explains in the introduction to his 1984 book, "to think of Dickens in relation to the grotesque is almost inevitably to stray freely and frequently across national boundaries" (p.7). This book therefore proposes to address Dickens's use of this complex aesthetic category in relation with other 19 th -century European writers of the grotesque. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are used here to shed new light on Dickens's influences (given and received) as well as to compare and contrast his use of the aesthetic category with that of other key European writers of the grotesque like Hugo and Baudelaire, but also Nikolai Gogol, Thomas Hardy and a few others.

The first section is centred on the first half of the century and looks at the fundamental texts, techniques and experiences which shaped Dickens's conception of the grotesque. French specialist of the literary grotesque Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne9 notably insists on the visual dimension of the grotesque and on the technical developments of the early 19 th century which made possible the emergence of the 'iconotext', the grotesque combination of text and image. COMPLETER

The second section explores the grotesque as a strategy of representation of 19 th -century reality. This section focuses on the grotesque as verbalizing and controlling change, as yoking together antagonistic emotional, social and even political drives and aspirations. Key 19 th -century grotesque motifs are here considered such as the birth of the modern metropolis. COMPLETER

The third section explores darker facets of the Romantic and Victorian grotesque, the grotesque as an expression of resistance to change. The analysis ranges from the difficult confrontation with scientific discoveries -mainly Darwin's theory of evolution -to the question of gender and the social resistance conveyed in the depiction of either femininity or masculinity as grotesque. As a conclusion to this overview the last chapter considers the renewed interest in the grotesque -this distinctive feature of Dickens's work -in today's adaptations of the novels of the canon.

  1See further: Victor Sage (University of East Anglia) « Arts of Dismemberment, Anatomy, Articulation, and the gGotesque body in Our Mutual Friend » Ch.11 2The language of psycho-analysis J.Laplanche JB Pontalis Karnac Books, 1973

The Dance of Death, an important grotesque motif, dates back to long before the French Revolution, and seems to have little "carefree flavour".

Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature[1957], New-York:McGraw-Hill 1966.

A distinction which up to a certain point corresponds to that established by Hugo (see supra).

Baudelaire also expresses his love for European masters of the grotesque like Hogarth, Cruikshank or Goya in "Some Foreign Caricaturists" (DATE).

For a detailed and comprehensive analysis, see Michael Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque, Totowa (New Jersey):Barnes & Noble, 1984.

Chesterton on Browning, an epigram which perfectly corresponds to Dickens's expenditure of sheer creative force through the grotesque. (ref in Harpham, page 8).

Michael Hollington, Preface to Dickens and the Grotesque, p.2

Author of Grotesques et arabesques dans le récit romantique. De Jean Paul à Victor Hugo, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2012.