72 KNOWING DICKENS
and hopeless,” he writes, “cannot be written” (emphasis added). In dreams, he
writes, he becomes the child again, forgets that he has an adult existence and
“wander[s] desolately back to that time of my life” (Forster 26).
The sudden loudness of Dickens’s voice in these passages might suggest
that he fears not being heard, or perhaps that he labors against some uncer-
tainty or doubt about the significance of his early experience. The internal
audiences he wants to convince inhabit both present and past. They include
the parents who were blind enough to “throw away” so sensitive and talented
a child; the unforgiven mother who wanted him to return to work after
his release, the friend—Forster—who could be skeptical about Dickens’s
intensities; perhaps even the Factory Commission reports that cast his indi-
vidual suffering in a stern social perspective. Of course it is exactly the loud-
ness of voice that creates doubt—or its counterpart, the urge to diagnose and
interpret—in Dickens’s biographers.
But let’s take it another way. This writing is not just about being unseen
or unheard by others. It is also about the impossibility of speaking about
something that eludes the knowledge and control conferred by the narra-
tion of specific memories. “How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already,
utterly beyond my power to tell,” Dickens writes, calling attention to futile
but necessary repetitions of attempts to speak the unspeakable (Forster 29).
As he approaches the end of his reminiscences, he feels that the writing has
been a failure: “It does not seem a tithe of what I might have written, or of
what I meant to write” (Forster 35). Such utterances call up the aspect of
trauma that Cathy Caruth calls “a wound that cries out, that addresses us
in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.
This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked
only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions
and our language” (Caruth 4). In the act of writing, for once, directly about
himself, Dickens discovered the critical disconnect between trauma and
language. The silencing enforced by autobiography may well have turned
him toward the fiction of David Copperfield, where he could re-bury—and in
effect forget—his story within a context he invented and controlled.
The quality of Dickens’s unknown knowledge comes through especially
well in a series of sentences that start with the phrase “I know.” The paragraph
begins with an effort to claim mastery over unknown parts of the mind:
“I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scanti-
ness of my existence and the difficulties of my life.” It ends with the greatest
exaggeration of them all: “I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might
easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little
vagabond” (Forster 28). There’s plenty of evidence within the fragment itself