MEMORY 69sprinkled through his work, such moments suggest his private amusement
in little games of telling and not telling. John Drew, however, concludes in a
Guardian Review piece that Dickens’s willingness to write for Warren’s “threat-
ens to undermine the legend” of his traumatic servitude there. His comment
lines up neatly with the question raised by Alexander Welsh: at what point did
Dickens decide that the blacking warehouse was traumatic?
I’m not at all sure these are the right questions. There is no point at
which Dickens made a change from comic parody to pathos in his repeated
fictional projections of the feelings connected with the blacking period. He
practiced both modes, usually in the same text, throughout his career. Some
years after writing the autobiographical fragment, he was more than ready
to make savage fun of it in Hard Times, which features Bounderby’s boastful
and deluded retrospective tales of childhood abandonment. (Bounderby’s
memories include the claim that he saw only one picture: “engravings of a
man shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles that I was overjoyed to
use in cleaning boots with” [HT 2.7]). This exuberant self-parody does not
mean that Dickens had come to disavow his own story, only that the story
simply refused to go away. Writing the fragment, writing David Copperfield,
did not exorcise the pain or settle it down with a cup of tea in a comfortable
corner of memory. That, finally, is why the blacking period might be called
traumatic, at least in the light of recent attempts to discuss the intersection
of literature and psychoanalysis. As Daniel Albright points out, we remem-
ber memories, not events (Albright 34). And, as Cathy Caruth reads Freud,
trauma is a “wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of
time, self, and the world” that is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to
be fully known.” Trauma is not locatable in the past event, “but rather in the
way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in
the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 4). Trauma
is recognizable, then, in the repetitive returns of memory fragments. There
is no way to count the variety of metaphors, moods, or tones through which
such fragments could be evoked by a writer like Dickens.
What Dickens wrote for Forster is just one of many stages in his attempt
to take rhetorical command of those memories and the feelings that had
attached to them over the course of twenty-four years. It is composed of
three prominent kinds of writing: first, highly detailed memories of places,
food, and people; second, moments of specular drama when the narrator in
the present watches the child being watched by others in the past; and, finally,
the interpolated passages of anger and outrage in which the present narrator
heats up the emotional temperature of the piece. The three kinds of writing
sometimes blend into one another, of course. And any interpretation has to