34 KNOWING DICKENS
are occasionally duped, of course, by the big secrets and withholdings of the
overarching plot. But it’s the little plots, the ones created by the characters,
that display the everyday fabric of Dickens’s imagination. He demands of
virtue a kind of innocence, yet he dramatizes a world in which one can’t
be suspicious enough; his most virtuous characters often manage to appear
innocent while disguising their knowingness as something else. In the last
200 pages of many a Dickens novel the innocents are finally clued in, con-
nected, and ready to do battle fueled by the force of their indignation. How
do the virtuous take charge? They become pretenders and schemers.
The coinage of this realm is parodic language. Theorists of parody tend
to focus on literary parody, the way that one text incorporates the structure
or language of an earlier text so as to mock or ridicule it, or to mock itself
by displaying the difference between an earlier ethos and a contemporary
decline. Dickens drew heavily on plots and conventions of melodrama and
sentiment from the Elizabethan stage through the eighteenth-century novels
that he loved, sometimes apparently straight and sometimes in parodic forms.
His linguistic parody reaches, however, for every kind of language, not just
the literary but every domestic and political piety, every dialect, of his pre-
Victorian and Victorian worlds. His point is not a literary one; it is always
the way high language conceals low feeling. The lowness may be calculat-
ing manipulation or merely an absurd application of inflated language to
mundane circumstances. Both Dickens’s narrators and his language villains
exercise this art of parody. Is there a difference between them?
It is a difficult question. Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” offers the
most fluid description of this “comic-parodic re-processing” of language
in the comic novel, whose English practitioners Bakhtin identifies as Field-
ing, Smollett, Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray. The style of such novels, in
Bakhtin’s view, is the “usually parodic stylization of generic, professional
and other strata of language,” along with a more-or-less distanced use of
what he calls the “common language,” or the “going point of view” in the
society depicted. The constant, sentence-by-sentence variations in the narra-
tive perspective represent the author’s movement in relation to the common
language: sometimes he exaggerates one or another aspect of it to expose its
inadequacy; sometimes he merges with it, “sometimes even directly forcing it
to reverberate with his own ‘truth’... The comic style demands of the author
a lively to-and-fro movement in his relation to language, it demands a con-
tinual shifting of the distance between the author and language, so that first
some, then other aspects of the language are thrown into relief.” Along with
the comic-parodic style, Bakhtin notices as well sections of “direct autho-
rial discourse—pathos-filled, moral-didactic, sentimental-elegiac or idyllic”