MEMORY 71comments, “What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition,
coming in all alone, I don’t know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate
my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look” (Forster 26–27). When
the child goes into a pub and demands a glass of “your very best—the VERY
best—ale,” the landlord calls his wife, who “joined him in surveying me. Here
we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire-terrace.” When
the staring adults ask questions, the child fictionalizes: “that I might com-
mit nobody, I invented appropriate answers” (Forster 32). The child’s sense of
incongruity is acute: he is not what he appears to be, or—far worse—perhaps
he is. The uncertainty creates the necessity for fiction, a way of substituting
something else for what he secretly knows and what he secretly fears.
In little scenes reminiscent of his own fiction, Dickens shows us the lonely,
canny child along with the curiosity and pity of his observers, all contained
within the wider gaze of the present-day narrator. He attests again to the
immediate presence of the past, but in these cases the child becomes less a
subject than an object of memory. The narrator dramatizes pathos in terms
of the child’s helpless visibility, and flaunts his adult power to protect the child
by controlling and staging the visual field of the narration. Here the implicit
split between retrospective narrator and child-character becomes explicit as a
kind of dissociation: the adult inhabits the stable perspective from his study at
the cost of eliding the emotional continuity between child and adult.
Both kinds of memory writing are concrete and persuasive. The anger
and resentment that play leading roles in most biographical interpretations are
largely cordoned off in four or five hyper-rhetorical, present-tense passages
that reveal an internal split between memory writing and trauma writing.
They are the ones most often quoted, the ones that begin: “It is wonderful to
me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” or “No words
can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship,” or
“I know that I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scant-
iness of my resources and the difficulties of my life” (Forster 25, 26, 28). The
writing is characterized by the mantra-like repetition of sentence beginnings
and the buildup of clause on clause that Dickens uses when he is going for a
direct assault on his reader’s emotions. It sounds exaggerated and defensive, as
Dickens sounds elsewhere in his letters when he is justifying his sensitivity to
a remembered slight or defending his exemplary motives when he believes he
has been cheated of his due. In the fragment, these moments suggest a specific
anxiety: someone doesn’t believe me, and I must convince him—or her—that
my suffering was overwhelming and endless. Present and past merge into
the same time zone: Dickens is just as concerned to defend his feelings now
as then. “The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected