University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 1971 Vertiginous worlds| the baroque in Dickens and Proust Rebecca Lee Yates The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Yates, Rebecca Lee, "Vertiginous worlds| the baroque in Dickens and Proust" (1971). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 4009. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/4009 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VERTIGINOUS WDRLDS: THE BAROQUE IN DICKENS AND PROUST By Rebecca Lee Yates B.A., Connecticut College, 1964 Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA 1971 Approved by: LoLo Chairman, Board of Examiners an, Grad#.t@/School Date ûy.. UMI Number: EP34669 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMT UMI EP34669 Copyright 2012 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 TABLE OF CONTENTS 225* INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. Lineal Descendancy 10 II. The Philosophic Punch and Judy Show 27 III. Impossible Concatenations 41 IV. Techniques of Exhaustion 55 V. Poetry of the Incomprehensible 74 VI. Vertigo 87 Vn. The Music of Memory 100 VIII. The Symbol of Resurrection Ill CONCLUSION 121 BIBLIOGRAPHY 127 Of those elements which compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are most essential. In nyself, when ill health has succeeded in uprooting them one after another, there will still remain two or three- endowed with a hardier constitution than the rest, notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discov­ ered in two works of art, in two sensations, a common element. —parcel Proust INTRODUCTION During a visit to Venice in 1844 Charles Dickens wrote his friend John Forster: "The wildest visions of the Arabian Nights are nothing to the Piazza of Saint Mark, and the first impression of the inside of the ohwoh."! When Marcel Proust's narrator of Remembrance of Things Past finally voyages to Venice he also writes: "After dinner, I went out by ryself, into the heart of the enchanted city where I found uyself wandering in strange regions like a character in the Arabian Nights,"2 That Venice's iridescent, sun-washed colors and maze of canals should recall the scenes of eastern tales is not surprising, however, for Dickens and Proust the Arabian Nights held greater imagina­ tive importance than the casual analogy of real and fictional scenery. The book of oriental tales was one of the works that Dickens and Proust most loved as children. Their fictional characters also express 1 Quoted in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens; His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), I, 526, 2 "The Sweet Cheat Gone," Remembrance of Things Past, trans, by C,K, Scott Honcrieff and Frederick A, Blossom (Hew York: Random House, 1934), II, 836, All references are to this edition. Here­ after this book will be referred to as SCG; volume and page numbers will appear in parentheses following quotations. 2 this love, David Copperfield's memories of his childhood include "a little room" where his father had left a small collection of books,..From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and Robison Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive nçr fancy and ray hope of something beyond that place and time—they and the Arabian Nights..,3 During his second visit to Balbec Marcel tells his mother "that, to surround myself with memories of Combray,,,I should like to read again the Thousand and One Nights.^s Marcel suggests, not only do these tales bear with them remembrances of childhood, they also keep alive the childhood sense of wonder so important to both novelists. Thus Sissy Jupe, one of the few characters in Hard Times.to retain her childhood fancy, reads to her father "about the fairies...and the Dwarf and the Hunchback, and the Genie,.."5 The Arabian Nights re­ mained a favorite with Dickens and Proust throughout their lives and a major source of literary allusion in their works, Furthennore, the book furnished a model for the ways they structured their novels. They 3 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: The New American Library, 1962), p. 65. All references are to this edition. Hereafter this book will be referred to as DC; page numbers will appear in parentheses following quotations, ^ Marcel Proust, "Cities of the Plain," Remembrance of Things Past. II, 169. Hereafter this book will be referred to as CP; volume and page numbers will appear in parentheses following quotations. 5 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, «i. by George Ford and Sylvere Monod (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.), p. 37# All references are to this edition. Hereafter this book will be referred to as HT; page numbers will appear in parentheses following quotations. 3 were enamored of the organic form of the Arabian Nights, in vMch the seed of an image produces an infinite number of others and in which the movement of the narrative is always cyclical. Dickens rehearsed the same movement in David Copperfield when David and Steerforth "make some regular Arabian Nights of it? (p. 101): "It was a tiresome thing to be roused, like the Sultana Scheherazade, and forced into a long story before the getting-up bell rang..." (DC, p. 102), As Angus Wilson points out: The Arabian Nights Entertainments are constructed on the basis of Sultana Scheherazade's nocturnal narrations which are, in the most literal sense, compulsive, for by leaving the Sultan each dawn in suspense she postpones the carrying out of his death sentence upon her. David Copperfield's dormitory stories are told under fear of losing the patronage of his hero, Steerforth,^ Marcel feels the same pressure. As he imagines the creation of his masterpiece he muses: If I worked, it would be only at night. But I should need many nights, possibly a hundred, possibly a thousand. And I would live in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of rny destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Sheriar, •vrtien I interrupted wy story in the morning, would permit me to take up the continuation of it the following morning, 7 Most importantly, however, perhaps no book exemplifies the baroque vision more completely than the Arabian Nights; and this dizzying 6 The World of Charles Dickens (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), p, zïï: 7 Marcel Proust, "The Past Recaptured," Remembrance of Things Past, n, 1120, Hereafter this book will be referred to as PR; volume and page numbers will appear in parentheses following quo­ tations. 4 fictional perspective is the ingredient which most closely binds two authors so dissimilar in other ways, Dickens and Proust re-create a vertiginous world. Following the Dickensian hero through the black labyrinths of London or Proustian characters along the decadent ways of Paris, the reader is reminded of anfractuous eastern passages, just as Marcel, following Charlus, thinks of the old Orient of the Arabian Nights that I had been so fond of; and, little by little losing n^rself in the net­ work of dark streets, I thought of the Caliph Haroun-al- Raschid, seelcing adventure in the remote quarters of Bagdad. (PR, II, 951). Jorge Luis Borges defines the baroque as "that style idiich de­ liberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders upon its oim caricature,.,"® The parenthetical phrase here is important, because the baroque world is one of impossibilities: space is infinite, but must be filled (thus Scheherazade's stories jump from real to imaginary places in an effort to cover all space); This attempt to populate space involves a maximum of detail, a char­ acteristic baroque narrative device. A sumptuous dinner in Our Mutual Friend hints at the myriad of objects spanning the baroque universe: Specimens of all the fishes that swim in the sea surely had swum their way to it, and if samples of the fishes of divers colours that made a speech in the Arabian Nights and then jumped out of the frying-pan, were not to be recognized, it was only because they had all become ® Quoted by John Earth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," The Atlantic, 22, No 2(196?), 34. 5 of one hue by being cooked in batter among the lAiitebait.^ Marcel, hearing Vinteuil's sonata played by a quintet, says that "like a ray of summer sunlight which the prism of the window disintegrates before it enters a dark dining room, (it] revealed like an unsus­ pected, xnyriad-hued treasure all the jewels of the Arabian Nights."10 Like salmon swimming en masse to the spawning ground, these objects filling baroque atmosphere duplicate themselves, multiply into more objects in a further attempt to occupy space.