Chesterton and Dickens: the Theatricalised "Drama" of Modernity Explored

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Chesterton and Dickens: The Theatricalised "Drama" of Modernity Explored

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Download date:30. Sep. 2021 Chesterton and Dickens: The Theatricalised “Drama” of Modernity Explored

Peter McMylor

Abstract

This article addresses a central theme in the recent work of Arpad Szakolczai, particularly prominent in his two books about novels, the increasing theatricalisation of modern life. Complementing the discussion on Dickens in Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, it extends aspects of this analysis by looking at the work of the English “Orthodox” Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton, both as a journalist, novelist and literary scholar, but also as participant and analyst of the theatricalised world in which he was forced to operate.

Keywords: novels, theatricalisation, imitation, Voegelin, Girard, Bakhtin

This tendency (caricaturing one-self) is, of course, the result of the self- consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a dramatis personæ and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great deal too like himself. G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning [1903]

Melodrama involves dramatising the sense of a whole, because only by doing so can one realise it, bring it about. It thereby includes “rationalisation”, the drive to make the whole intelligible, the search for “the hidden principal”, the key to unlock the secret that reveals the whole as whole, as totality beyond the world of apparent dispersion and distraction. It is not, however, restricted to this it is not a “merely” intellectual grasp; it “realizes” the world as a battleground of good and evil in which we are inherently involved as agents; it displays the cosmos as a field of forces, with humans playing the parts of heroes villains and suffering victims. John Jervis, Sensational Subject (2015: 168-169)

The detective story as Chesterton creates it gives one a picture with all the necessary evidence. It is an allegory of the life in which man has to realise and act upon the significance of the clues he has been given. L. Hunter, G.K.Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory (1979: 157)

The allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; therefore, in every allegory there is something of the novel. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937-52 (1964: 157)

The publication of the work Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary (2016) [hereafter Novels] is a significant event in Arpad Szakolczai’s extended scholarly analysis of the nature of the contemporary world. Readers of this journal need little reminding of the range of his scholarly work on social theory and reflexive historical sociology over more than two decades that this latest volume contributes to along with its companion volume (Szakolczai, 2017). Indeed this particular book is designed to be independently accessible and can, in some respects, stand on its International Political Anthropology Vol. 11 (2018) No. 2 own as a pioneering attempt to transcend the limitations of the sociology of literature1 into a much broader form of sociological analysis via an appreciation of the analytic insights and reflexive practice of some of the most significant novelists of the European tradition. At the centre of the claims made in Novels is that the key novelists discussed pose the question of what, in effect, has come of “reality” with the advent of the modern world. The widely accepted modernity of the novel form and the emergence of the realist novel in particular, is seen as problematising what it is that in the distinctive “now” of modernity, is meant by reality.2 The answer is complex but it is placed in this work as being linked to the relation of art to everyday life, but premised on two key conceptualisations of social relations, namely those of recognition and imitation. Recognition is understood in the ancient Aristotelian sense that Pizzorno articulates in his rejection of the Hobbesian self-interpretations of modernity based on individualistic rationalist terms, “The original resource that a human can offer to another is the capacity to recognize the worth of the other to exist- a resource that cannot be produced if it is not shared” (Pizzorno, 1991: 218). Crucially, Pizzorno adds that identity must also be capable of reproduction over time and that this is what institutions do and, we might add, that in a sense gives them a narrative quality. The second conceptualisation is that of imitation and in our time its key theorist, in regard to the novel, is Girard, who along with Bakhtin, is a crucial resource in Novels as he is in much of Szakolczai’s work.3 Girard crucially understood the vital significance of novels for exploring and revealing the links between fiction and reality as modes for disclosing dimensions of societal illusion and reality in what he terms “novels of truth” (as in Szakolczai, 2016: 226) The significance of imitation and its relationship with parody as partly inspired by Bakhtin’s work I shall suggest is particularly significant for understanding how Chesterton’s work can be understood in relation to the Novels project and perhaps in particular to the Szakolczai’s Girardian and Bakhtinian inspired reading of Dickens. At the heart of these considerations is the particular significance of the English social context for the emergence of the so-called “realist” novel and the particular types of theatricalisation which Szakolczai seeks to understand. Of central importance is the social and historical context for the emergence of what Habermas has famously described as the “public sphere”.4 In particular here, it is suggested that it is in the emergence of a concern for the everyday processes of change and their documentation, which is made possible by the rise of the circulating journals and the emergence of the profession of journalism and, of course, a reading public. Here Daniel Defoe is, in the British context, widely recognised as a key figure not only in the rise of the realist novel but, also, as one of the first journalists not only writing but also acting as an innovator in the form that journalism took: inventing “almost all the main features in modern journalism, including the leading article, investigative reporting, foreign news analysis the ‘agony aunt’, the gossip and the obituary” (Szakolczai, 2015: 230). The sensationalist content of both his novels and his journalism marks a profound cross –fertilisation in these forms that Richardson will pick up in his development of the English novel as an established entity. It is worth noting that this intimate link between journalism and the novelist in Defoe is a pattern that is highly significant in our consideration of Chesterton, who it can be argued, develops a self –conscious, personal reformulation of the interrelationship between his publically performed roles as a journalist and as a novelist and, also, as a “public speaker” (a public intellectual across “all formats” as it would be put today!). In a more general sense, and picking up the argument about the nature and impact of the “the English chronotope” of the theatricalised novel (Novels, Chapter 3) striking confirmation of the significance of this theatrical and novelistic forms of self interpretation has recently emerged with the publication of a remarkable and previously unknown autobiographical work from the 18th century, by Thomas Hammond (Boulukos, 2017), a highly literate English stable boy who produced a personal diary, apparently not for publication, but in the form of an autobiographical novelisation complete with an embossed cover.5

24 Peter McMylor Chesterton and Dickens: Theatricalised Modernity

In what follows I want to explore and extend aspects of Szakolczai’s analysis by looking at the work of the writer, G.K. Chesterton, both on his own terms as a journalist, novelist and literary scholar, but also, as a powerful contemporary participant and analyst of the theatricalised world in which he was forced to operate. However, I would like to say a little about his relationship to Dickens, whom he admired more than any other novelist, (Chesterton, 1906) as well as something of the of the parallels between them both and some of the similar sources of inspiration in their cultural formation.

Chesterton and Dickens: London, Pantomime and Father Brown

There is no doubt that one of the most powerful similarities between Chesterton and Dickens is that they are both Londoners, who in their different ways remained deeply attached to and, in key respects, inspired by this urban environment. Both in their different ways believed there was much wrong with the urban modernity they were born into but neither would be able to relinquish the city that helped shape their imaginations. Indeed almost all who think of Dickens think of a London scene and similarly Matthew Ingleby has noted, “so consistently was Chesterton defined by the capital city, that his friends’ memories of him often place him there with great precision…. (and that the ) roar of the modern city certainly seems to have provided the impetus of much of his … writing” (in Beaumont and Ingleby, 2016: 3-4). Ingleby goes on to point out significantly that in Chesterton’s literary fiction he takes up the most “apparently anodyne parts of London for his most outlandish tales, playing with the apparently banality of the city in order to reveal its poetry or allegorical significance” (Ibid.). However one of the most striking points of connection between Dickens and Chesterton comes in the, rather unexpected, links between their jointly acute sensitivity to the power and significance of pantomime. This apparently trivial element takes on considerable significance when placed within the analysis of theatre and pantomime that Szakolczai puts forward in Novels, not least in regard to Dickens. As Szakolczai argues, Dickens later in life reflected upon the effects his early exposure to pantomime had upon him, in an essay published in 1837, “The Pantomime of Life”, in which simply put, “pantomime is a mirror of life” (Novels, 252) Dickens provides examples from the world of business (fraudsters and conmen) and politics especially the world of party-politics, “particularly strong in clowns” (ibid.). Szakolczai suggests that what is being argued here is not some simple idea of society copying theatre, but, rather that “Dickens is well aware of the irresistible power of unconscious imitativity, closely connected with the position of spectatorship” (253). The great novels of Dickens are then to read as diagnostic tools to explore this situation, in a way that enables Dickens to go beyond reproducing a spectatorialised imitativity, so that an evil figure like Quilp, in The Old Curiosity Shop, is one who transcends the imagery of the circus clown, to which he is frequently compared, so that he extends and spreads chaos in everyday life and becomes, “an archetypal demonic clown” (261) within the modern world and not securely contained within the dramatic enactment of any traditional circus or pantomime or theatre. However, the significance of pantomime goes further than in some sense presenting contemporary reality for Dickens, because, crucially, English pantomime itself transcends some of the limitations of the dominant realist theatre of the age. The heart of this aspect of English pantomime is the famous “transformation scene” developing from the Harlequinade style of English theatre and extended by Grimaldi with dramatic effects that creates an apparent new world with a dramatic, “fairy” quality. Szakolczai argues that “the pantomime was important for Dickens not due to its affinities with reality, but it also helped him to model a change in real life that was of utmost importance for him: a change of heart, or conversion” (263). Now in what might seem a quite extraordinary parallel we can see that, as the crucially important work of Michael Shallcross (2018) shows, Chesterton had frequent recourse to the

25 International Political Anthropology Vol. 11 (2018) No. 2 motif of the pantomime “transformation scene”, in which he quotes Chesterton as noting at one point the significance of the motif, “the front scene is still there but the back scene seems to glow through it” (76). In Chesterton’s highly metaphysical, yet materially grounded fiction, perhaps especially in the surprisingly complex Father Brown stories, the themes from pantomime are present. In one of the key early Father Brown stories, “The Queer Feet” the thief Flambeau, a clear Harlequin figure, and Father Brown both penetrate an utterly dreary elite dinning club for the very rich- the setting is clearly informed by the pantomime schema in which Father Brown represents the clown to Flambeau’s harlequin (92). Shallcross goes on to argue, in a manner crucially informed by a highly persuasive Bakhtinian reading that when the pair infiltrate the club in the guises of wise fool and elemental trickster, the unofficial carnival becomes implanted within the official construct of the dinner, sowing a disruption that serves to destabilise the “eternal” truth of this “phantasmal and yet fixed society”, as the narrator refers to the club, and, beyond it, the class system of his day (Ibid.). In the story Flambeau impersonates both a servant and a rich guest in order to steal silver spoons, but is exposed by Father Brown in a manner that both “forgives” Flambeau, but also transforms the completely inward looking “official” meal so as to awaken some sense of connection from these privileged figures to those around them who also serve them. However in the same early collection of Brown stories there is also one story, not explored by Shallcross, in which the dynamic of the theatre/ pantomime mechanism is presented in a completely direct manner that powerfully echoes the reading of Dickens’ work that Szakolczai presents. This is “The Flying Stars”, where Flambeau in disguise gets himself invited to an upper class town house where he knew a rich guest would arrive with diamonds. He persuades all the guests and the owner’s family to take part in a proper “old English pantomime—clown, columbine, and so on” and goes on to say with a clear grasp of the old tradition, “I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it’s blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country only last year, and I find the thing’s extinct.” (Chesterton, 1911: 54) Flambeau is of course the Harlequin and steals the diamonds and is able to use the setting of pantomime itself to ambush and beat a real police officer, to wild audience applause, who appears on stage via a real front door around which the pantomime takes place. The border between reality and theatre is clearly breeched in the story- the imitative mechanism made fully transparent. Yet the power of this traditional pantomime, which is emphatically not “a lot of snivelling fairy plays” (ibid), is realised when Father Brown, again the wise clown, catches up with him in the leafy garden and effects a “transformation scene”, in which Harlequin, who is high in a moon lit tree, is persuaded not only to give back the diamonds but also to change to reform before his final corruption will set in. It is impossible in the light of Szakolczai’s analysis not to sense that Chesterton has intuited the whole process and, perhaps, the clue is given at the beginning of the story when, startlingly, Flambeau begins the narrative via a retrospective confession in which “Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens …” (50). The question then emerges, in respect of Chesterton, as to what are the conditions that allow for this remarkable capacity for grasping these potent cultural dynamics. To get at this difficult and inevitably controversial issue it is helpful to deploy something of the life-work analysis which has been an important innovative aspect of Szakolczai’s approach to understanding the conditions of insight (see McMylor, 2005).

The Shaping of Chesterton: Sensibility and Insight

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in May 1874, in London, the eldest son of a middle class family. His father was an Estate Agent. He seems to have had a happy and rather sheltered childhood in a comfortable middle-class family home. The religious culture of the family was that of a mildly secularized form of Christianity namely Unitarianism. It seems that Chesterton’s

26 Peter McMylor Chesterton and Dickens: Theatricalised Modernity home environment was especially crucial in his formation in a manner that was, perhaps, rather unusual in his time and within his social class, for the simple fact that he was not sent away from home to a public school as would often happen from the age of eight. Oddie (2008: 52) is surely correct that if Chesterton had been sent away to school it would have potentially “undermined forever his essentially warm and secure personality”. It is also worth noting that Chesterton’s home environment provided him with what, in Szakolczai’s terms, can be seen as, perhaps, one of his most crucial and formative “reading experience” in the form of a book his father wrote with his son’s in mind. This was a children’s book that Edward Chesterton (his father) both wrote and illustrated, called The Wonderful Story of Dunder van Hadeden. The book is a gentle moral fairy tale of a Dutch family filled with beautiful pen and ink illustrations of street scenes and interiors that Chesterton seemed to have loved all his life. This along with the fairy tales of George MacDonald, especially The Princess and the Goblin (33-39), gave a distinctive quality to Chesterton’s attitude to the mundane world of modernity in which he had an essential sense “that made all experience a fairy tale” (37). In practice and quite remarkably for the time, Chesterton’s father had limited connection with the Estate Agency that was his profession, but, instead devoted himself to a range of imaginative and creative “hobbies”, including the famous large toy theatres, that seemed to have had a particularly strong effect on the young Gilbert and fed the deep sense of wonder that seems to have been at the centre of his life. Gilbert was then quite clearly insulated from the realm of utilitarian necessity both in a material sense but also, more significantly, in a cultural one as well, for play and imagination were viewed by Edward Chesterton as central to life- a home world in which Homo Ludens dominated rather than the Puritan/ Trickster, Szakolczai detects in Dickens diagnosis of much that is wrong with the middle and upper class world of his time (see especially Novels, 276-80). Chesterton attended St Paul’s School although not successful academically he was an enthusiastic and brilliant member of the School debating society. The fact he was not sent away to a public school seems to have been a crucial factor in granting him a childhood in which home was as important as school and the sense of happiness he seems to have had was a fertile source of his future creativity. On leaving school and because of his love of drawing he attended the Slade School of Fine Art. It seems that whilst at the Slade he had some kind of breakdown and seems to have had very little success in a formal academic setting. The Slade was part of University College and although he only studied fine art for a year in the second year he continued to go to lectures on English and French literature that he seems to have greatly appreciated and, of course, it is as a writer and a journalist and that he was to make his name. It is generally agreed that this period at the Slade, including his mental breakdown, were crucial formative experiences (see Ker, 2011; Chesterton, 1936) It now seems clear that Chesterton’s encounter with the cultural movement of “Decadence” in this period was profoundly linked to his personal difficulties. He was to say in his Autobiography that “when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the decadents and pessimists who ruled the culture of the age” (Chesterton, 1936: 95). After leaving university college in 1895 he got a job as the publishers reader for Fisher Unwin where he remained until 1901 before embarking on the career of journalist and writer, when he began his regular writing for the broadly progressive Daily News and also for the weekly The Speaker. He soon discovered that he had a natural flair for journalism, and was able to write on a wide variety of subjects in an entertaining and readable manner. In politics Chesterton has been described as a populist (Canovan, 1977), and he spent a good deal of his life working out his intellectual differences with the liberalism he inherited from his family. He always regarded himself as a liberal but one who became increasingly critical of what he saw as the anti-liberal features of early 20th-century liberalism. This is partly reflected a concern about the statist paternalistic policies of the Liberal party, but was also motivated by his deep dislike of imperialism, as he says in his autobiography, “something happened in the outer world which not

27 International Political Anthropology Vol. 11 (2018) No. 2 only waked me from my dreams like a thunderclap but like a lightning flash reveal me to myself. In 1895 came the Jameson Raid” (Chesterton, 1936: 102). Chesterton was an outspoken critic of the Boer War and this along with the later Marconi scandal, (essentially a scandal about the insider trading of shares in the Marconi company by British Government ministers), which broke in 1912, marked his deep alienation from contemporary party politics. His reputation as a journalist and essayist grew rapidly and he began to publish books that were collections of his journalism. It is a mark of his growing literary reputation that he was asked, while still in his 20s, to contribute a study on the poet Robert Browning in the prestigious English Men of Letters series (1903). In 1906 he produced his extremely significant and enduringly important study of Dickens, at a time in his life in which he most closely identified with the author (Hollis, 1964: 11), In 1901 he married Frances Blogg and their marriage was to be a long and generally happy one. On the strength of the Browning study he was asked to apply, in 1904, for the Chair in English at the University of Birmingham. He refused and was clearly committed to being a practicing journalist in the sense of taking part on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis in the passionate debates of the age, frequently of a very broad metaphysical kind about God, the meaning of life, justice etc., all presented in a lively popular style and often debating directly in these columns with opponents such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw – as he also did frequently in public meetings. He clearly understood that the newspapers were providing him with the direct equivalent of a pulpit capable of reaching a growing audience. He was surely correct for the whole period of Chesterton’s writing career from the 1890s until his death, is one of substantial newspaper expansion, in terms of both numbers of readers but also in the range and variety of publications that appeared (Curran and Seaton 2003). These papers reached the middle, lower middle and increasingly in his life time the working class. This prodigious output of writings: books, journalism, essays and public speaking that he achieved needs to be grasped in its broader social context. This enormous body of work is the product of a very public figure or rather a, “personality”, who existed in a complex set of performances, connections, disputes by turns paradoxical and parodying, in relations to both the notable figures of his day and the ideological positions of his time (Coates, 1984; Shallcross, 2018). In some respect his chief artistic, and, crucially, diagnostic, creation is himself. He rallied against elitist high modernism in art, against reductive rationalism in culture and philosophy with its po-faced “seriousness” and against capitalist corruption and its injustice toward the ordinary person, especially the poor. His impact is perhaps best captured by a generous but perceptive – in its sensitivity to the performative nature of Chesterton – profile, written by his editor at The Daily News, Alfred George Gardiner:

A cloak that might be a legacy of Porthos floats about his colossal frame. [...] He is like a visitor out of some fairy tale, a legend in the flesh, a survival of the childhood of the world [whereas] most of us are creatures of our time, thinking its thoughts, wearing its clothes, rejoicing in its chains. [...] Time and place are accidents; he is elemental and primitive. He is not of one time, but of all times. One imagines him [...] exchanging jests with Falstaff at the Boar’s head in Eastcheap, or joining in the intellectual revels at the Mermaid Tavern, or meeting Johnson foot to foot and dealing blow for mighty blow. With Rabelais he rioted and Don Quixote and Sancho were his “vera brithers” (as quoted in Shallcross, 2018: 79).

In 1908 he published the novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, a work he regarded as his most significant fictional achievement. This is a complex work, both personal and “metaphysical” (Boltanski, 2014), as we discuss it below. In the same year as this novel, he published his most significant and long-lasting non-fiction works, Orthodoxy, which sets out his own understanding of Christianity as a contemporary philosophy and faith. In 1910, Chesterton produced the first of the enduringly popular Father Brown stories, which, as we have noted

28 Peter McMylor Chesterton and Dickens: Theatricalised Modernity above, are more complex than they at first seem, in which the Priest’s insightful knowledge of human nature provides the resources that solve the crimes, but, at the same time, have broader cultural significance. These works are only now gaining the critical attention they deserve (see Shallcross, 2018), for any serious life-works approach must sense that their emergence at the same time as his most important literary and philosophical works is hardly insignificant. In all Chesterton produced five volumes of the Father Brown stories, the last of which appeared in 1935, the year before his death. Throughout the period up to 1914 Chesterton was in tremendous demand as a lecturer and public speaker. His wife became his secretary and diary keeper and organized his numerous travelling obligations, as he went up and down the country speaking to all manner of groups. It was clearly a very exhausting time and with the added pressure of the Marconi Scandal and the involvement of his brother Cecil, which nearly resulted in Cecil’s imprisonment, Chesterton eventually became ill. He suffered a major collapse at Christmas 1914 and went into a coma and only recovered by Easter 1915. In addition to his books and essay writing for newspapers, Chesterton was also heavily involved in some areas of editorial work and eventually after the death of his brother he re- launched the old paper the New Witness – which he edited from 1916 to 1923 – as GK’s Weekly, which he also edited himself from 1925 to 1930. Despite these commitments from 1918 till 1920, Chesterton travelled extensively visiting Ireland, the United States and Palestine- the latter apparently a very important experience and one that encouraged his final conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922. In the 1920s, with his great friend Hilaire Belloc, he was active in the Distributist Movement, in its attempt to find an alternative (non-Statist) response to the plu- tocratic capitalism of his time, which they saw as the root cause of so many social evils, including the corruption of the political party system in Parliament. This took the form of the radical redis- tribution of property.6 GK’s Weekly became its chief organ of communication and it eventually acquired a circulation of around 8000. Its influence was far more extensive than these numbers make it appear and it has been plausibly suggested but it had an impact on the debates among socialists, including one of the sources for the emergence of the Guild Socialist movement. In 1923 shortly after his conversion he published an important work that seems to have had a deep significance for him, the biography of St Francis of Assisi – clearly he felt a strong personal identity with the Saint whose name he took at his Confirmation (see Ker, 2011: 500- 508, for important details of his deep life long attachment to the Saint). Two years later, in 1925, he produced his crucial follow-up to Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man. Whilst in Orthodoxy he defended a general theistic approach, in the latter work he focuses on the significance of Christ and in this he has been seen by many as having produced one of the most significant works of Christian apologetics of the 20th century. He remained a very significant public figure up until his death in 1936, of heart failure. Indeed in his last years he had become an accomplished radio broadcaster for the BBC, which again points to the significance of his personal affect, in his relationship with his society.

The Man Who Was Thursday: The Diagnosis in Retrospect

There can be little doubt that Chesterton’s most important and enduringly significant novel is the The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The full title needs to be noted as without it the work cannot be understood in its full historical and cultural specificity for it is not a piece of “realism” but an attempted diagnosis of the cultural crisis of the fin de siècle. Boltanski (2014: 18) is surely right to suggest that Chesterton “may be considered the first to have intuited this properly meta-physical dimension of detective fiction”. If Szakolczai is correct to see in Dickens a powerful diagnosis of the theatricalised nature of Victorian society, then Chesterton is writing, more than a generation later, when the cultural and intellectual crisis has deepened. We cannot be entirely certain but it seems very likely that Chesterton knew at least of some of Dostoevsky’s

29 International Political Anthropology Vol. 11 (2018) No. 2 work and declared him to be “one of the two or three greatest writers of the nineteenth century” (as in Knight, 2000: 38). Despite the difference in tone it is not difficult to see that The Man Who Was Thursday inhabits a related context to some of the Russian novelist work. It was published in 1908, a year after Joseph Conrad published his The Secret Agent, and clearly the general atmosphere in which secret violent opponents of the social order are a significant presence. In summary, in a book that in a sense defies summary, it is about a young poet Gabriel Syme who we learn is acting as a police spy when he meets another young poet and anarchist Lucian Gregory. They attend a secret anarchist council meeting of seven, named after the days of the week, in which Syme is elected to the vacant position of Thursday. After a variety of schemes and problems it eventually emerges that Syme is not the only police agent but the five other named anarchists are also police agents – the conspiracy, is in this sense, manufactured by the state. Eventually even the extraordinary figure of Sunday also turns out not to be a real anarchist or indeed the apparent source of evil that they had each imagined he was. Instead in the final chaotic pages in the fantasy/ carnival part of the book, Sunday emerges as an almost transcendent and mysterious figure who might be mistaken for God but is probably intended to embody Nature. It is clear, as we noted above, that the fundamental source for the work lies in the personal crisis Chesterton experience as a young man at the Slade. The book begins with a long poem of retrospective dedication and self-analysis to his friend E.C. Bentley in which the nihilistic culture that he found in the 1890s at the Slade and he had succumbed too, has been transcended. The novel is a journey, one that begins and ends with the two poets discussing together, but ends finally in the dawn of a restored world- after the nightmare of the title. The “realist” novels of diagnosis will, it seems, not be enough at this cultural stage. It has, it seems, been necessary to end the novel in what can be a read as a Bakhtinian manner, with a particular kind of carnival – a carnival of creation. The novel begins and ends with different elements of the grotesque in play and these move between two versions of carnival, as Shallcross (2016) notes, in a manner that foreshadows Bakhtin’s insights. The first is the internalised subjective and romantic genre version of carnival, the carnival of the poets of Saffron Park and their playing with literally the masks of anarchism. Whilst the second marks the final restorative carnival of “an externalised emblem of the act of creation, a movement of transfiguration which reestablishes coherent individuality: Syme ‘seemed to be for the first time himself and no-one else’ ” (as in Shallcross, 2016: 325). This re-established a link with the coherent folk tradition which rejects solipsism. Just as in the Father Brown stories he had started to write at this time, Chesterton found solace in returning to a world in which learning and change are a shared “dialogical” process in which modernity is rebalanced and transfigured into something more than the projection of a theatricalized ego. Chesterton famously said in his study of Dickens, that he (Dickens) had the key to the street. Chesterton believed that in his time it was necessary to search for the key to the street, for that by doing so, and taking from the street the popular genres of detective stories and mysteries, they could be brought into relation with the “modernist” high culture, but in doing so they would bring with them something that would transform this modernity so that the light “might glow through it”.

Notes

1 However it has to be said that to grasp the theoretical/ historical framework being deployed in this book it will help the reader greatly to have at least read part 1 of Szakolczai’s previous volume, Comedy and the Public Sphere (2013). 2 In reading the opening chapter of Novels with its posing of the question of “reality” it is impossible not to be reminded of Voegelin’s efforts in the volume Anamnesis to understand what it was that constitutes “political reality” (see Voegelin, 2002).

30 Peter McMylor Chesterton and Dickens: Theatricalised Modernity

3 For an elaboration on Girard’s significance for the whole project, including his link to Tarde, see Szakolczai and Thomassen (2019, Chapter 2). 4 See Szakolczai (2013) for a very critical account of Habermas’ rationalist understanding. 5 Interestingly and adding to this work’s significance is that he provides an account of a humorous and violent incidents in his life in the form of a theatrical performance in which Boulukos (2017: 491) explains as a form of “dissociation” to cope with the threat of violence but which he describes in the contents page of the novelisation as a “droll affair”. 6 See Alasdair MacIntyre’s (2016) discussion, in which he compares this movement’s idea with those the Marxist tradition.

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