LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 35(Bakhtin 301–2). These descriptions name recognizable sentimental inter-
ludes that Dickens apparently wants his readers to believe, while the model
of linguistic flux, moving among parody, representations of the common
language, and direct authorial discourse, captures something essential about
what reading Dickens is like. But Bakhtin does not address the question of
what motivates this kind of narrative, nor does he in this context consider the
relation between narrative discourse and characters’ speech.
When it comes to the motives for parody, Freud’s brief remarks in Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious can be useful. As he puts it, “Carica-
ture, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmask-
ing) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority
and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime’ [exalted]... Parody and travesty
achieve the degradation of something exalted... by destroying the unity that
exists between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches
and actions.” As for unmasking, Freud’s definition is particularly suggestive: it
“only applies where someone has seized dignity and authority by a deception
and these have to be taken from him in reality” (Freud 200–201). Although
Freud’s emphasis on the degradation of the apparently exalted fails to encom-
pass the range of affects—including sheer fun or affection—that can reside
in parody, his notion that parody drives a wedge between a “known” per-
son and his speech or actions is quite resonant in Dickens’s case. Dickens’s
invariable targets are characters that demand respect or homage by insist-
ing that others know their virtues through their self-representations. Freud’s
definition also suggests a kind of Oedipal struggle in the impulse to parody,
which speaks directly to the link between Dickens’s parody and the rhetorical
excesses of John Dickens.
Dickens’s own authorial earnestness (an attitude toward experience that he
claimed to prize) veers dangerously close to the borders of parody, because
we are always aware that some form of rhetoric is being exercised on our
behalf. His tendency to parody at one moment what he asks us to take seri-
ously a few pages later has been repeatedly noticed, but no one has been able
to decide exactly what it means. Is it unintentional self-parody? Conscious
ambiguity? Self-knowledge, or self-critique? Is it a defensive flight from
emotional investment, or a self-protective ironic shield against critical attack?
Is it Dickens’s comedic instinct revenging itself on his Victorian piety? Is it
simply that Dickens believed in whatever he wrote at the moment? The way
a critic formulates the issue generally reveals some unacknowledged attitude
toward the unconscious and its manifestations in art: perhaps a desire to
assume that a writer controls all the colors in his palette; perhaps a slightly
hostile embarrassment in the face of the unintentional; perhaps a glee in