Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in a Tale of Two Cities Author(S): J

Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in A Tale of Two Cities Author(s): J. M. Rignall Source: ELH, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 575-587 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872938 . Accessed: 01/02/2015 14:44

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DICKENS AND THE CATASTROPHIC CONTINUUM OF HISTORY IN A TALE OF TWO CITIES

BY J. M. RIGNALL

It is not surprisingthat the most rememberedscene in A Tale of Two Cities is the last, forthis novel is dominated,even haunted, by its ending. From the opening chapterin which the "'creatures ofthis chronicle" are set in motion"along the roads thatlay before them,"while the Woodman Fate and the FarmerDeath go silently about theirominous work, those roads lead with sinisterinevita- bilityto the revolutionaryscaffold.' To an unusual extent,espe- ciallygiven the expansiveand centrifugalnature of Dickens's imagination,this is an end-determinednarrative whose individualele- ments are ordered by an ending which is both theirgoal and, in a sense, their source. In a historicalnovel like this there is a transparentrelationship between narrativeform and historicalvi- sion, and the formalfeatures of A Tale-its emphatic linearity, continuity,and negative teleology-define a distinctivevision of history.As Robert Alter has argued in his fine criticalaccount of the novel,2it is not the particularhistorical event thatultimately concernsDickens here, but rathera wider view ofhistory and the historicalprocess. That processis a peculiarlygrim one. As oppression is shown to breed oppression, violence to beget violence, evil to provoke evil, a pattern emerges that is too deterministic to owe much to Carlyle and profoundly at odds with the conventional complacencies of Whig history. Instead of progress there is some- thing more like the catastrophic continuum that is Walter Benja- min's description of the historical process: the single catastrophe, piling wreckage upon wreckage.3 And when, in the sentimental postscript of Carton's prophecy, Dickens finally attempts to en- visage a liberation from this catastrophic process, he can only do so, like Benjamin, in eschatological terms. For Benjamin it was the messianic intervention of a proletarian revolution that would bring time to a standstill and blast open the continuum of history; for Dickens it is the Christ-like intervention of a self-sacrificing individual that is the vehicle for a vision of a better world which seems to lie beyond time and history.The parallel with Benjamin

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions cannot be pressed beyond the common perceptionof a pernicious historicalcontinuum and the common desire to break it, but the coexistence of these two elements in A Tale is, I wish to argue, importantfor an understandingof the novel, lendingit a peculiarly haunted and contradictoryquality as Dickens gives expressionto a vision of historywhich both compels and repels him at the same time. In Carton's finalvision of a world seeminglybeyond time, the paradigm of the apocalypse mediates between what is known of historyand what may be hoped for it.4 That hope is not to be dismissed as mere sentimentality,whatever the manner of its expression.However inadequatelyrealized Carton'sprophecy may be in imaginativeterms, it is significantas a momentof resistance to the grimlyterminal linearity and historicaldeterminism of the precedingnarrative. That resistanceis not confinedto the last page of the novel, for,as I shall show, it manifestsitself in otherplaces and in other ways, creatinga faintbut discerniblecounter-current to the main thrustof the narrative.This is not to say that Dickens presentsa thorough-goingdeconstruction of his own narrativepro- cedures and version of historyin A Tale, forthe process at work here is more ambiguous and tentativethan that. There is a struggle with sombre fears that gives rise to contradictionswhich cannot be reduced to the internal self-contradictionsof language. What the novel presents is, rather,the spectacle of an imaginationboth seized by a compelling vision of historyas a chain of violence, a catastrophiccontinuum, and impelled to resist that vision in the very act of articulation,so that the narrativeseems at the same time to seek and to shun the violent finalityof its ending in the Terror.The nightmarevision is too grimto accept withoutprotest, and too powerfulto be dispelled by simple hopefulness,and the work bears the signs of this unresolved and unresolvable contra- diction. In his preface Dickens maintainsthat the idea of the novel had "complete possession" of him, and the state of imaginativeobses- sion in which A Tale of Two Cities was writtencan be sensed in two ratherdifferent aspects of the work: in the way thatit presses on relentlesslytoward its violent ending, and in the way thatpar- ticularscenes take on a visionaryintensity, seemingly charged with obscure and powerfulemotions that are neither fullycontrolled nor comprehended. The scenes of frenziedcollective violence are the most strikingexamples of this kind of writing,but there are

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions other moments, less obviously related to the main track of the story,when images and ideas erupt into the text with a sponta- neous energy that arrests ratherthan furthersthe momentumof the narrative.The first-personmeditation on the death-likemys- tery of individuality which opens Chapter Three ("The Night Shadows") is just such an intervention:

A wonderfulfact to reflectupon, that every human creatureis constitutedto be thatprofound secret and mysteryto everyother. A solemnconsideration, when I entera greatcity by night,that everyone ofthose darkly clustered houses enclosesits own secret; thatevery room in everyone ofthem encloses its own secret;that everybeating heart in the hundredsof thousands of breasts there, is, in some ofits imaginings,a secretto theheart nearest it! Some- thingof the awfulness,even of Death itself,is referableto this. No more can I turnthe leaves ofthis dear book thatI loved, and vainlyhope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depthsof thisunfathomable water, wherein, as momentarylights glancedinto it, I have had glimpsesof buried treasureand other thingssubmerged. It was appointedthat the bookshould shut with a spring,for ever and forever, when I had read but a page. It was appointedthat the water should be lockedin an eternalfrost, when the lightwas playingon its surface,and I stood in ignoranceon the shore. My friendis dead, myneighbour is dead, mylove, the darlingof my soul, is dead; it is the inexorableconsolidation and perpetuationof the secretthat was alwaysin thatindividuality, and whichI shall carryin mine to my life'send. In any of the burial- places of this citythrough which I pass, is therea sleeper more inscrutablethan its busy inhabitantsare, in theirinnermost per- sonality,to me, or thanI am to them? (44) Both the form and the substance of this meditation set it clearly apart from the surrounding narrative. The brooding first-person voice is never heard again in the novel, even though the same sombre note is struck by the impersonal narrator. The directness and urgency of the first-person utterance invite us to look for a significant relationship between these reflections and the main themes of the novel, but it is not easy to find one. The passage is only awkwardly related to the scene on the Dover road which it punctuates, since its insistence on the essential, metaphysical mys- tery of individuality is out of proportion to the condition of the passengers in the coach. Their mutual suspicion and ignorance are occasioned simply by the hazards of the journey. Nor can it be said to illumine the general condition of life as it appears in this novel.

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Althoughthere is some connection between the separateness of individuals and the characters and fates of Dr. Manette and Carton, Dickens's handling of characteris basically at odds with such an absolute assertion of impenetrable otherness. His impe- rious commandof his charactersis never subject to epistemological uncertainty,and even the mostestranged figures, like Dr. Manette and Carton, are in the end not mysterious but knowable and known. Except in its tone the excursus is altogetherout of place: Dickens here steps out of his own fictionto generalize about character and individualityin life ratherthan in books, while paradox- ically using the metaphorof the book to do so. This reflectionon characterand the metaphorthat it employs cast a significantlight on Dickens's own practice in the novel. By implication,both his presentationof characterand his use of an ending are identifiedas simplymatters of literaryconvention. To see death in terms of the prematureclosing of a book is to raise the possibilityof differentrelationships among death, narrative, and endings fromthose presented by A Tale itself. Discontinuity is a factof life and, implicitly,a narrativepossibility, and to imply as much is to challenge both the conventional structureof this particularnarrative and the vision of historicaldeterminism that it projects. The challenge is only momentaryand implied, but the momentis not entirelyisolated. AlthoughDickens primarilyuses the death of Carton and the ending of the novel to complete a patternof meaning rather than to effecta prematureclosure, there are occasions in the novel when the desire forsuch a closure sur- faces in the textas ifin reactionto the chain of violentevents that leads relentlesslyto the guillotine. The first-personplural dra- matizationof the Darnays' flightfrom Paris (386-7) provides, for instance, a kind of alternativepremature ending for those privi- leged characterswho are allowed to escape the logic of the historical process. The scene is both related and opposed to the "Night Shadows" meditationand Mr. Lorry'sjourney to Dover: this time the charactersin the coach are not suspicious, but united by love and shared apprehension; they are not mysteriousand unfathom- able, but familiarand transparent.Nevertheless, the "awfulness of death" threatensthem fromwithout, and, as the narrativeas- sumes the urgency and immediacy of the first-personplural and the presenttense, the scene comes to suggesta flightof the imag- inationfrom the foredoomedfinality of the guillotineand the novel's preordainedending. It is a flightwhich necessarilycarries the

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions charactersbeyond the boundaries of the novel, which is headed to only one conclusion, and theynever again appear directlyin it. Pursued not by the Revolution but, as it turns out, only by a reflectionof theirown fears,they may be said to be escaping from history:"the wind is rushing afterus, and the clouds are flying afterus, and the moon is plunging afterus, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else" (387). In fleeing the ending of the novel they have fled beyond the process of history. There is a less directand more complex suggestionof flight from the grim logic of the historicalprocess in the scene of the mob around the grindstone,observed by Mr. Lorry and Dr. Manette. What theywitness is an appalling spectacle of bestial violence and moral degradation as Dickens lets his wildest and deepest fears rise to the surface. The chain reaction of violent oppression and violent rebellion has passed beyond human control, and in this mass frenzyall distinctionsof individualityand even sex are sub- merged: The eye couldnot detect one creaturein thegroup free from the smearof blood. Shouldering one anotherto getnext at thesharp- ening-stone,were men strippedto the waist,with the stainall overtheir limbs and bodies; men in all sortsof rags, with the stain uponthose rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace and silkand ribbon,with the staindyeing those trifles through andthrough. Then, as if appalled by the terrorshe has let loose, Dickens, in JohnGross's words, "reaches forhis gun":5 Andas thefrantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from thestream of sparks and toreaway into the streets, the same red huewas red in theirfrenzied eyes; -eyes whichany unbrutalised beholderwould have given twenty years of life, to petrifywith a well-directedgun. Allthis was seenin a moment,as thevision of a drowningman, orof any human creature at anyvery great pass, could see a world ifit were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor lookedfor explanation in hisfriend's ashy face. (291-2) Clearly signalled as the vision of a drowningman, the scene is the productof an imaginationin extremis.It is a bourgeois nightmare of anarchyunleashed by the rebellion of the oppressed.6 Even if it is the logical culmination of the violent oppression that has

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions preceded it, the violence is, when it eventuates,too greatto bear. The "1well-directedgun," with its sudden change of focus from dramaticscene to violent, judgmental reaction, looks like an au- thorialintervention aimed at terminatingthe nightmare.The cu- rious insistenceon the eyes of the frenziedcrowd emphasizes that vision is the vital element, and the urge to "petrify"those eyes can be read as the expression of a desire to put an end to that vision. The action is transposed fromsubject to object: it is not theireyes that Dickens the narratorwishes to close, but his own. For a momenthe seeks to retreatfrom his own vision of the historicalprocess. There is, then, a form of resistance here to the catastrophic continuumof history,but at the same time Dickens reveals some- thingabout the emotional dynamicsof that historicalprocess in a way thatis more penetratingthan the melodramaticsimplifications of Madame Defarge and her desire for vengeance. The violent reactionof the "'well-directedgun," an answeringof violence with violence, implicates the writerhimself in the very process he is presenting.This is characteristicof the open and unguardednature of his procedure in A Tale: violent fearsand violent reactionsare given direct, unmediated expression, so that unwittingparallels emerge between the reflexes of the author/narratorand those of the fictionalcharacters. In this case there is an obvious affinity between the "well-directedgun," withwhat has been aptlytermed its "true ring of outraged rate-payingrespectability, "7 and the response of the blusteringbourgeois Stryverto news of the Revo- lution: Amongthe talkers,was Stryver,of the King's Bench Bar, faron his way to state promotion,and, therefore,loud on the theme: broachingto Monseigneur,his devices forblowing the people up and exterminatingthem fromthe face of the earth, and doing withoutthem: and foraccomplishing many similar objects akin in theirnature to the abolitionof eagles by sprinklingsalt on the tails ofthe race. (267) The reactionof the characteris held firmlyin focus and identified by means of irony as excessive and senseless, while the author/ narratorin the grindstonepassage repeats that reaction without the containingframe of any criticalawareness. And both reactions have the function-the one deliberate, the otherinvoluntary-of revealingthe emotional resources that drive the catastrophiccon-

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions tinuumof history.Dickens thus does more than simplyproject a deterministicvision of history;he shows how that determinismis rooted in commonplace and familiaremotions, how the potential forviolence is not confinedto a savage past and an alien setting, but lies very close to home. The effectis to detach historyfrom the safetyof the past and to suggest that its violent continuum may not have expired with the Revolution. The persistence of that violence is amply demonstrated by Dickens's own susceptibilityto the kindsof powerful emotions that are at work in the novel. As a caricatureof the conquering bourgeois, the figure of Stryverbelongs as much in the nineteenth centuryas the eighteenth,and Dickens himselfcould display dis- tinctlyStryverish leanings in his response to contemporaryevents. In the same letter to Forster in which he outlines his intentions in A Tale of Two Cities and which he must have writtenabout the same time as the grindstonepassage,8 there is a revealingoutburst of verbal violence. The letterbegins with a discussion of the case of the surgeon Thomas Smethurst,found guiltyof poisoning his bigamous "wife." The trialjudge, Sir JonathanFrederick Pollock, stronglysupported the verdictin the face of public unease and of moves to persuade the Home Secretaryto quash or commute the sentence. Dickens gives his ferventsupport to Pollock, and in doing so presentsanother example of an outraged,violent reaction to an act of violence: I followedthe case withso muchinterest, and havefollowed the miserableknaves and asses whohave perverted it since,with so muchindignation, that I haveoften had morethan half a mindto writeand thank the upright judge who tried him. I declareto God thatI believesuch a serviceone of the greatestthat a manof intellectand couragecan renderto society.Of courseI saw the beastof a prisoner(with my mind's eye) deliveringhis cut-and- driedspeech, and read in everyword of it thatno one but the murderercould have delivered or conceivedit. Of courseI have been drivingthe girlsout oftheir wits here, zby incessantly pro- claimingthat there needed no medicalevidence either way, and thatthe case wasplain without it. Lastly,of course (though a mercifulman-because a mercifulman I mean),I wouldhang any Home Secretary(Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise)who should stepin betweenthat black scoundrel and thegallows.'0 The protestationsof his mercifulnessare convincingonly as a re- spectable garmentfor his Stryverishpugnacity, and the emotional patternof the passage recapitulatesthat of the grindstonescene

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions so closely as to provide strikingevidence for taking the "well- directed gun" as an authorial intervention.What is more inter- esting,however, is thatthe violence spills over into his account of his intentionsin writingA Tale: ButI setmyself the little task of making a picturesquestory, rising in everychapter with characters true to nature,but whomthe storyitself should express, more than they should express them- selves,by dialogue. I mean,in otherwords, that I havefancied a storyof incident might be written,in placeof the bestiality that is writtenunder that pretence, pounding the charactersout in its ownmortar, and beatingtheir own interests out ofthem. If you couldhave read the storyall at once,I hope youwouldn't have stoppedhalf way.11 As violent an exception is taken to conventionalforms of story- telling as is taken to an alleged murderer, and when Dickens writes of "pounding" and "beating" his charactersit seems that violence is not only central to his vision of historyin this novel but is also inherent in his means of expressingthat vision. This formalviolence, which could be interpretedin one sense as the forciblesubordination of character to the storyof incident, is as revealinglyrelated to the creation of a narrative and historical continuumas is the earlier emotionalviolence. The expressed in- tentionis to preventthe reader fromstopping halfway, to maintain a compellingmomentum in the narrative,and thismomentum also serves the vision of historicaldeterminism by subjectingindivid- uals to a sequence of violent events that is beyond theirpower to control. What exactlyDickens means by beating his characters'own in- terestout of them is open to question. It mightbe taken to refer to the way in whichthey are forciblyharnessed to allegoricalmean- ings, like Darnay with the '"Everyman"implications of his original familyname, or the sentimentalequation of Lucie Manette with a "golden thread." But the only characterwho has any real interest to be beaten out of him, Carton, is not the object of any direct allegorizing.Indeed, in his case meaning is deliberatelywithheld ratherthan allegoricallyasserted, and no cogent reasons are of- feredfor his alienation.This mystificationhas the effectof directing the search forsignificance away fromthe personal life towardsthe general condition of existence. Lukdcs's contentionthat Carton's fate is the one that least of all "grows organicallyout of the age and its social events"12 is justifiedonly if the wider historicalpro-

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions cess is ignored, for it is as a victim of general social values and forces-and hence, by implication,of the historicalcontinuum that interest and significanceare beaten out of him. As Lukacs sees, he is a marginalfigure, but he can be said to be significant precisely for that reason: he has been marginalized,so to speak, by the energyand values embodied in Stryverwho, more properly than Darnay, is his alter ego. In his gloomyestrangement Carton suggeststhe neuroticprice that may be exacted by the aggressive pursuitof individual success, by the bourgeois ethos of individual endeavor in its most crasslycareerist form. The accusation thathe levels at Stryverevinces a social as much as a personal truth:" 'You were always drivingand rivingand shoulderingand pressing, to that restless degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose' " (120-1). A world dominatedby the energyand purpose of such as Stryverclaims its moral and psychologicalvictims within the dominant class. The triumph of the bourgeois will creates its opposite in the aimless, driftingexistence of a character whose self-image-" 'I should ask . . . that I mightbe regarded as an useless . . . piece of furniture'" (237)-betrays the marksof a reifiedconsciousness. And to the extentthat Stryverpartakes of the violent spiritwhich is at work in the larger historicalevents, Carton comes to stand, too, as the victimof the catastrophiccontinuum of history,a role which he then, at the end, consciously assumes. To define Carton in these terms is to spell out bluntlywhat is only intimatedindirectly, for it is Dickens's refusalto define and explain preciselythat gives Carton a greaterdegree of densityand interestthan the other characters.With Carton, indeed, Dickens comes closest to creatingsomething like the mysteryand opacity of individualitythat he refersto in the "Night Shadows" meditation, but only up to a point, since in the finalscenes of the character's transformationthere is a movementback toward conventional coherence and transparency.If, as Benjamin argues, the meaning of the life of a character in a novel is revealed in his death,13 then Carton could be said to constitutehimself as a character by choosing to die by the guillotine. He gives himselfa goal and a purpose, and in so doing gives shape and meaning to his life. What has been aimless and indefinitebecomes purposive and defined,and continuityis established between beginningand end, between promisingyouth and exemplarydeath. He achieves char- acterin both a formaland a moral sense, and in the process realigns

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions himselfwith the other representativesof English bourgeois life, exhibitingreflexes reminiscent of Stryver'sin sensinga desire to strikethe life out of the wood-sawyer(341) and reflectingon the desirabilityof raising Madame Defarge's arm and strikingunder it sharp and deep (371). Carton's transformationis clearly intended to be read as the redemptionof a wasted life, but such a readinghas to ignorethe qualifyingambiguities that are involvedin it. As he decides on his course of action, resolutionis strangelymixed withfatalism: "Thereis nothingmore to do," said he, glancingupward at the moon,"until tomorrow. I can't sleep." It was nota recklessmanner, the mannerin whichhe said these wordsaloud underthe fast-sailingclouds, nor was it moreexpres- sive of negligencethan defiance.It was the settledmanner of a tiredman, who had wanderedand struggledand gotlost, but who at lengthstruck into his road and saw its end. (342) The term "end">carries a double meaning: in one sense it has to be read as "goal," stressingCarton's new-foundsense of purpose and smugglinginto the novel on the level ofthe individuallife the positiveteleology that is so markedlyabsent on the level ofhistory. But the strongermeaning here is thatof "conclusion," and a conclusion that is approached with a sense of release ratherthan a sense of achievement.The "tired man" is simplyseeking repose, and in his desire foran end he makes explicitthat resistanceto the narrativeand historicalcontinuum which has been intimated elsewhere in the novel and now surfacesas the deepest yearning of a particularcharacter. He wishes to escape but, significantly,the mode of escape he chooses merely confirmshis status as a victimof socio-historical circumstances. The act of self-sacrifice-an idea which haunts Dickens's imaginationin thisnovel as powerfullyand melodramat- ically as images of revolutionaryviolence-cannot be seen as simplythe ultimateexpression of altruism,since it is obscurely rooted in the same values that have significantlycontributed to Carton'sestrangement in the firstplace. The puritanethic of dis- ciplined personal endeavor demands renunciationsuch as Carton has been neuroticallymaking all along, and its final act is the renunciationof life itself.14 Thus the verystep which makes sense

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of his life is as perverse as it is noble, as much a capitulationto the uncontrollableforces that have governedhis lifeas a transcend- ence of them. To seek to escape sacrificeby sacrificingoneself is the expressionof a trulydesperate desire foran ending. These morequestionable implications of Carton's self-chosen end are largelydisguised by Dickens's narrativeand rhetoricalstrategies in the closingchapters. The polarizationand pathos of melodrama are engaged to elicit acceptance of him as an exemplaryaltruist, while the Christianrhetoric of death and resurrectionserves to presenthis self-sacrificeas a positiveact ofredemption rather than an expressionof world-wearyresignation. The characteris, as it were, borne along by an affectiveand rhetoricalcurrent which obscures contradictions,and this same currentis clearlyintended to carrythe reader, unquestioning,from Carton's death under the Terrorto the resurrectionof civilized orderin his propheticvision of the future.This attemptto make the historicalregeneration of France and the domestic happiness of the Darnays seem contin- uous withwhat has preceded themis, however,hardly convincing, as the only element of continuityis the continuingstrain of imag- inative resistance to the destructivehistorical continuum. That the historicalprocess of escalating violence shouldissue in a benign futureis scarcelyconceivable in this context,and Dickens passes perfunctorilyover how it could come about witha casual reference to "evil . . . graduallymaking expiation for itself and wearingout" (404). The suggestionof entropyin thatlast phrase is significant. It is not so much a visionof redeeming historical development that is bestowed on Carton as a vision of the end of time. " 'There is no Time there' " (403), he says to the seamstressof the "better" land to which both are going; and his own vision of a betterland, withits "beautifulcity" and "brilliantpeople" (404) risingfrom the abyss,appears similarlyotherworldly, having a greateraffinity with the New Jerusalemof the Apocalypse than with nineteenth-cen- turyParis. Indeed, the apocalypticnote in thisconclusion stresses finalityrather than resurrection,and death haunts even the conventional pieties of the domestic happy ending: Lorry is seen "passing tranquillyto his reward"and the Darnays, "theircourse done, lyingside by side in theirlast earthlybed" (404). Lives are shown passing to a peaceful end, and all this individualand historical"wearing out" is envisaged by a man who is himselfgrate- fullyembracing death as a welcome release. Even in his famous

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions mawkishlast words it is not the heroic deed but the long-sought repose, the "far,far better rest" (404), that receives the finalem- phasis. Weariness, both of characterand of creative imagination,is the keynoteof this ending, and it betraysthe intellectualand imagi- native impasse in which Dickens findshimself. Since he sees rev- olutionas just anotherlink in the chain ofviolence and oppression, and presents the effortsof individuals, like Darnay's journey to Paris, as powerless to influence the course of historicalevents, he can conceive no possibility,to use Benjamin's phrase, of blasting open the continuumof historyby social and politicalaction. 15 Un- like Benjamin, Dickens can advance no alternativevision of time and history.The claim once made forMiddlemarch that it replaces "the concepts of origin,end and continuity"by "the categoriesof repetition,of difference,of discontinuity,of openness"'6 can cer- tainly not be applied to A Tale of Two Cities. Origin and end, feudal oppression and revolutionaryretribution, are linked by a causal chain which affirmsthe predominance of continuity.Repe- tition,on the other hand, as Dr. Manette's recurrenttrauma il- lustrates,is here simply the mark of a mind imprisoned in the past, not a new, liberatingcategory of temporalexperience. Even the momentsof discontinuitydiscussed earlier only challenge the narrativeand historicalcontinuum by revealing a desire to evade it. Carton's prophecyis simplya finalevasive move, and one that gives itselfaway by its weary insistence on death and its eschatological suggestionof the end of time. Only by turningaway from the course of human historycan Dickens find a refugefor hope, and to express hope in such terms is tantamountto a confession of despair. In this novel of imprisonmentsand burials alive the writerhimself remains imprisonedin a rigorouslylinear, end-de- termined narrativeand the grimlydeterminist vision of history whichit articulates.The resistancehe offersis thatof a mindvainly strugglingto escape and thereby confirmingthe power of that which holds it captive. This vision of historyas a catastrophiccon- tinuumis only made more powerfulby the clear indicationsin the text that Dickens is expressingwhat is deeply repugnantto, yet strongerthan, all that he can hope and wish for. Universityof Warwick

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 1 Feb 2015 14:44:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 37. Further references to this edition are given afterquotations in the text. 2 Robert Alter, "The Demons of History in Dickens' Tale," Novel 2 (1968-9): 135- 142. 3 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), 255-266 (257). See also Gesammelte Schriften,ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhiuser (Frank- furt,1974), 1(3): 1244: "Die Katastrophe als das Kontinuum der Geschichte." 4 Alter, 138, gives an illuminatingaccount of apocalyptic allusions in the novel. 5 John Gross, "A Tale of Two Cities," in Dickens and the TwentiethCentury, ed. JohnGross and Gabriel Pearson (London, 1962), 192. 6 Benjamin, in his opposition to the notion of historical continuity,stresses the importance of isolated moments of vision like this: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memoryas it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialismwishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by historyat a moment of danger" (Illuminations, 257). Whereas Benjamin was thinking of the revolutionaryproletariat as the subject of such a vision, recapturingthe experience of its oppressed forebears,Dickens could be said to be presentingthe bourgeois counterpartof such an experience, where the man singled out by historyat a moment of danger relives the perennial fears of the property-owningclass. 7 Gross, 192. 8 The weekly part containingthe "Grindstone" chapter was published on September 24, 1859. In this letter of August 25, Dickens tells Forster that he has asked the publisher of All The Year Round to send him "fourweeks' proofsbeyond the current number, that are in type." The current number would be that of August 20: the four weeks in proof would cover the numbers up to 17 September, leaving the "Grind- stone" part as not yet in type, and most probably either just completed or still being worked on. For the letter of August 25 see The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 3:117-119. 9 See Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 2nd ed. (London, 1964), 246. 10 Letters, 3:118. 11Although this quotation comes fromthe same letter as the preceding one, I have here cited the text as given by Charles Dickens the Younger in his introductionto A Tale of Two Cities (London: Macmillan, 1902), xx. He points out that Forster, in quoting the letter in his Life, alters "bestiality" to "odious stuff."Dexter, Letters, 3: 118, follows Forster's diluted version. 12 Georg Lukhcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Har- mondsworth:Penguin, 1969), 292. 13 Illuminations, 100-101. 14 The irrationalact of self-sacrificecould thus be said to point to a general irra- tionalismin historyand society at large, as is suggested in a differentcontext by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,trans. John Cum- ming (London, 1973), 55: "The irrationalismof totalitariancapitalism. . . has its pro- totype in the hero who escapes from sacrifice by sacrificinghimself. The historyof civilisationis the historyof the introversionof sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation." 1 Illuminations, 264. 16 J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative and History,"in ELH Essays for Earl R. Wasserman, ed. Ronald Paulson and Arnold Stein (Baltimore and London, 1975), 165-183 (177).

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