These authors seem to purposely settle in what we will define as a kind of literary neutrality, escaping structures and paradigms, and exploiting the literary possibilities of transition, inbetweenness, textual instability and imminence. Dickens’s novels thus seem to celebrate both the coherence of the literary system they build, and the constant necessity to jam that system from within.ģ In this respect, Dickens’s strange case seems to be shared by many unsuspected literary twins at the turn of the century, and it reads as if, just like his many orphaned heroes, Dickens had found a family after all: my proposal is that Dickens, Stevenson, Doyle, Conrad, Stoker build a common, still furtive but very valid, literary space, and share the same essential literary preoccupation, despite their striking individualities. In between the lines of his novels that are celebrated as the prototypes of English Realism, however loose and questionable that definition might be, Dickens introduces textual dissidence, modern minority voices that efficiently dislocate the official and seemingly solid text, and divert it along alternative formal lines. Ģ I will thus try to tackle the strange case of Charles Dickens’s omnipresence, and prove that Dickens’s novels actually generate such multiplicity: they deliberately breed, within the efficient and authoritative textual machine they build, the dissident ferments for textual proliferation, their own intimate contradiction. A browse in the comics section of a bookshop will amply prove the point: an umpteenth parody of Treasure Island will colonise the front shelves, only to be contested pre-eminence by the fourth volume in a best-selling adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, or by a graphic-novel version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now what is quite arresting and what I would like to develop and try to interpret today is that Dickens shares this characteristic with other famous and canonical writers of the Victorian period like Stevenson, Doyle and Stoker, whose mythical texts- Treasure Island or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Sherlock Holmes Adventures, Dracula -seem likewise to be infinitely adaptable and eminently multiple, thus becoming both liminal and prototypical. Film adaptations, 1 conferences, comics, new editions all confirm that there is literally no escaping that literary matrix, be it in popular culture, or in academic work. Dickens, who stopped writing in 1870, still is everywhere to be read, parodied, re-written, re-published, commented upon, symposiumed. 1 The latest avatar of that Dickensmania is Robert Zemeckis ’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol in Nove (.)ġ Asking the question of Dickens’s pertinence comes close to denying a glaring truth: the fact is that there is a blatancy of Dickens’s presence, and even an unaccounted for and improbable proliferation of that presence.In this respect, Dickens, like his famous fellow literary adventurers, situates himself in a very intense literary period and contributes to creating it by writing ‘in the middle,’ in a still undefined theoretical space, away from Realism, but not yet caught in the Modernist system: they settle in the unstable state of imminence they historically find themselves in, and methodically explore its literary possibilities. I will of course concentrate on the ‘strange case’ of Charles Dickens, a case of ‘impure,’ or ‘self-dissolving’ Realism: in his fundamentally dual, self-contradicting novels, Dickens manages to build the most solid, coherent, incontestable texts, while he also develops, within the novels themselves, a dissident counterproposal, an intimate deconstruction. I would like to show that Dickens’s novels resemble in many crucial respects those of these writers of Adventure, that they share the same crucial preoccupations with finding a way out of Realism, and experiment on different technical ways to dismiss the Realist system.
Despite their seemingly widely different styles and literary aims, they all contribute to build, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a coherent and autonomous, though still quite furtive, literary movement, in between Realism and Modernism, a movement that I will attempt to define and circumscribe. In this paper I try to reassess Dickens by confronting his late novels to those of some eminent Adventure writers, Doyle, Stevenson, but also Conrad.
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