6 KNOWING DICKENS
consistently interested in what his characters know and do not know, what
they tell and do not tell. As the Victorian novelist most deeply intrigued by
nineteenth-century ideas about the unconscious mind, he found ways to
dramatize through his invented figures both subconscious processes and acts
of self-projection—the very processes and acts that we so often define as
characteristic of Dickens’s own modes of creation. We are right to do so, but
probably wrong when we assume that his left hand did not know what his
right hand was doing. As with all complex human beings, his states of self-
knowledge were fluid, inconsistent, and subject to the influence of strong
emotions. The same fluidity is evident in his writing: states of “knowing but
not knowing” are—knowingly—represented in Dickens’s characters, but the
reader can often discern a similar hovering on the edge of self-recognition
in the projected fantasies of the author himself.
Dickens was a magpie of literary and conversational styles, and parody is
central to his apprehension of the world. As a way of knowing, parody sits
in the realm between self-conscious knowledge and the distancing verbal
play that is so characteristic of Dickens’s world. Parody implies a kind of
knowingness that never quite speaks its name. Character splitting, in which
different characters display extreme versions of qualities that more realisti-
cally belong to the mixed nature of one character, is also a well-recognized
Dickens strategy. Critics have treated it as melodrama, analyzed it as a child’s
black-and-white vision, or placed it in the tradition of the Doppelgänger.
But character splitting has something more to tell us about how Dickens
knew himself through others, and how he thought about the human capacity
for self-knowledge. Oddly like parody, splitting manages to know without
displaying the connective tissue that would advertise the writer’s acknowl-
edgment that he knows.
While he displayed them himself, Dickens was deeply interested in just
such in-between states of consciousness. He dramatizes them in fiction when
he puts characters in a condition between sleeping and waking. Oliver Twist
is in that state when he sees Fagin gloat over his secret box of jewels, as is
David Copperfield when he hears Mr. Mell play the flute for his old mother
in the almshouse, as is Esther Summerson when she falls into twilight moods,
her unknown parentage hovering in ghostly shadow. Such knowledge is
problematic, enmeshed with the child’s shame of knowing what it shouldn’t;
the dream state allows that knowledge to be disavowed and put away from
the self. Dickens knows that, as he demonstrates in Little Dorrit when Jere-
miah Flintwinch squelches his wife’s knowledge by redefining it as dream, or
in David Copperfield when David experiences Uriah Heep’s expressed designs
on Agnes Wickfield as an intrusion of the uncanny in the form of déjà vu.