Charles Dickens's Networks by Grossman Jonathan H.;

Author:Grossman, Jonathan H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 15. The deluded grandfather ready to keep on walking, with Nell dead but ‘here’. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA.

III. Clock Strikes

The denouement of The Old Curiosity Shop extends past Nell’s and the grandfather’s deaths back into the Clock frame. This denouement begins to come into focus on the single gentleman’s coach ride with the surprise revelation en route that he is the grandfather’s brother. This revelation is then followed by a further thunderclap in Clock that the single gentleman is also Master Humphrey. As he explains, he has fabricated the tale’s first-person opening and then narrated it omnisciently. Narratologically, these twists make for a complex conclusion, to say the least. Far, however, from an absurdity best ignored—as it is generally deemed and dismissed—Dickens is continuing to relate a straightforward road story, one which the author might well be expected to tell.

Its own omniscient narration has just become the story’s subject. Cutting through all the usual critical hang-ups, Audrey Jaffe forged ahead in grasping this. Rightly insisting on reading omniscience as ‘the subject of narrative as well as a description of its form’, Jaffe splendidly sets out to analyze how revealing that the character called the single gentleman is also the omniscient narrator of Shop illuminates ‘omniscience … located … between a narratorial configuration that refuses character and the characters that it requires to define itself’.33 Jaffe’s intelligent discussion winds up sidetracked, however, by a too-narrow focus on omniscience as knowledge. Her discussion revolves around the keyword ‘curiosity’ and reflexive scenes of narration; she reads the story as about knowing about knowing about the story. Jaffe’s own sharp observation that omniscient narration combines a fantasy of mobility with knowledge thus wholly subsides into the latter. In reality, this novel stunningly puts those two together.

As I will argue, the ending leading back into Clock shows (amending that of the tale) that individuals in their networked community indispensably project the omniscient-like perspective—call it the view of an aeronautical historian—of their networking together. In its bare essentials, my contention is that Master Humphrey breaks out from the tale’s (diegetic) story-world to reveal that he both exists within it and supplies a semi-omniscient viewpoint upon it. Moreover, this final, surprising plot turn makes complete sense in terms of his telling a tale about tragically broken relations of mobility. This argument brings into focus that this novel has two different endings: not only the familiar one in Shop, but also one in Clock, in which Master Humphrey directly invokes an omniscient perspective that unifies people through the (standardized) clocking of their simultaneous, separate, disparate activity. As suggested by the powerful sweep of this finale, in which an individual imagines an omniscient perspective emanating from a clock chiming, the tragic road tale with its hybrid first-person and omniscient telling belongs not just to Master Humphrey, but, as he announces, to everyone.

Shop is a road novel, and it introduces the message delivered through the postal network that prompts the final coach pursuit only to mow right over it.

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