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A Tale
of Two Extremes: Paradox in Dickens
by
Marilyn Green Faulkner
Marvel
with the "Best Books Club" at the paradoxical classic
that is A Tale of Two Cities.
After the very
famous opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities (best of
times, worst of times, etc.) Dickens sums up the state of two great
nations in two great sentences: "There were a king with a large
jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there
were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the
throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal
to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things
in general were settled for ever."
From the very
start we have a taste of Dickens's blending of the comic and the
tragic; he appreciates the fact that life is never completely funny
or completely serious. Here his emphasis on the faces and jaws of
the monarchs draws our thoughts to the terrible separations of these
appendages (at least the French ones) to come through the guillotine.
When, at last, the reign of terror commences, Dickens connects the
tragic with the comic through one descriptive word, "fair." "Now,
breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner
showed the people the head of the king - and now, it seemed almost
in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight
weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey."
(283) Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, famous for excess and their
exploitation of the poor, are alternately lampooned by Dickens and
then made objects of our pity.
And so it goes
in Dickens, who uses his narrative skill to manipulate our emotional
response. In the opening chapter he describes the atrocities committed
by the French aristocracy in a detached, even cynical voice: "Under
the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself,
besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to
have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his
body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to
do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his
view..." (6) Later Dickens grabs us as it were by the collar and
throws us right into the square as a member of the aristocracy is
murdered by the mob: "Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps
of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his
back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass
and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn,
bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching
for mercy...the women passionately screeching at him all the time...Once
he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking..."
(234) It goes on in graphic detail until the man's severed head
is on a pike, and all comic distance is gone. We suffer with the
sufferer, whether guilty or innocent, and finally watch in horror
as the murderous mob returns home to quietly play with their children
with bloodstained hands.
Dickens's paradoxical
treatment of human suffering is found, not only in his use of narrative
distance, but in his shaping of the plot. The simple melodrama of
A Tale of Two Cities is made infinitely more complex and
interesting by a setting in which the heroes are also the villains.
Darnay is both a fine man and the cursed offspring of the most evil
members of his class. Carton is a drunk and a wastrel, but also
gives his life for another. Manette is the abused prisoner but also
the unwitting executioner of his own son-in-law, against whom he
has such a suppressed rage that it literally drives him back to
insanity to see his daughter married to him. It is here, during
these shifts from the comic to the tragic and from obvious melodrama
to subtle psychological drama, that Dickens shines. We may wince
during a scene where the little son of Lucie and Charles says, "Dear
papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave
my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!" (219) This is
Dickens playing to the crowd, not attempting to place us in a believable
scene. But the same Dickens can take us into a moment like the one
where Mr. Lorry watches over Dr. Manette as he relapses into insanity
after the marriage of his daughter: "With a hope ever darkening,
and with a heart always growing heavier and heavier, Mr Lorry passed
through this anxious time...he could not fail to observe that the
shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first, was growing
dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on his
work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as
in the dusk of the ninth evening." (204)
Life is rarely
made up of grand gestures with accompanying grand speeches. Most
of us will not stand on the scaffold and intone, "it is a far, far
better thing I do, than I have ever done, etc." But most of us have
stood helpless while disease or sin claimed the mind and body of
someone we love, and no one captures these moments with more compassion
than Dickens. We have murderous scenes of terror in our own history,
and have been victims of the mob's rage. Yet we sense our own dark
side when Dickens says, "In seasons of pestilence, some of us will
have a secret attraction to the disease - a terrible passing inclination
to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts,
only needing circumstances to evoke them." (292) These small moments
of insight are the great ones for me in Dickens; they keep me reading.
What did you
like about A Tale of Two Cities? We will have an online chat
about A Tale of Two Cities on Friday, December 15, at 11
a.m. Pacific Standard Time. For further details send an e-mail to
join the book club. I'll be sending a notice to all the members
on Thursday.
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