MEMORY 75Then, Dickens makes his most interesting move: Oliver wakes up in terror,
and “actually” sees the two dark figures staring at him through the window.
“It was but an instant, a glance, a flash before his eyes, and they were gone.”
It might be a textbook case of flashback, especially when it appears that the
two figures could not have been there; they have not bent down a single
blade of grass in their passage. In fact, Dickens suggests that the new vision
has always already been there: “But they had recognized him, and he them,
and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory as if it had been
deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth” (O T 2.11). It is an
astonishing passage, attesting to Dickens’s almost uncanny ability to imagine
the terror of a memory-hallucination of events that take place before the
conscious activity of memory begins to function in the young child.
Little Nell also inhabits a novel in which, most of the time, memory, pas-
toral, and death blend into a single stylistic activity. She too gets one brief
moment of traumatic experience as she lies powerless to move, watching as a
dark figure enters her bedroom and steals her money. When she follows the
figure and discovers that it is her beloved grandfather, the terror is “immeasur-
ably worse” and turns into traumatic haunting: she is forced to re-experience
the dread in a state that blends imagination and reality: “it was worse, for the
reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it
was always coming, and never went away.” Instantly, as if to protect herself,
the child dissociates her grandfather from the haunting phantom, which
becomes “another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image,
a something to recoil from, and be all the more afraid of, because it bore a
likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did” (OCS 31). From the
moment this Shadow descends, Nell becomes a dissembler with a secret she
can neither voice nor escape; she acts to nurture and protect her grandfather,
but begins to fade in health until she dies, as if inevitably, from the burden of
her split consciousness. Both Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop display
radical and unacknowledged divisions between the idea of memory and the
damaging potential of traumatic experience.
Nicholas Nickleby treats the aftermath of painful experience in a more
sustained way that includes Smike’s permanently damaged memory, the
distorted personality of Newman Noggs, and the associative ramblings of
Mrs. Nickleby. Noggs, whose dreary lodging displays broken blacking bot-
tles, expresses through a set of physical contortions the agony of an enforced
silence about his past; his only relief lies in pugilistic encounters with the
empty air. “Once nobody was ashamed—never mind that. It’s all over,”
he observes “in cramped and crippled writing” as he offers Nicholas aid in
time of need (NN 7). Becoming “somebody” who can write freely in his