74 KNOWING DICKENS
touch which graces that novel. He had been writing about painful memory
since his birth as a novelist. The interpolated tales in The Pickwick Papers are
Gothic family melodramas that sit in the main body of comic text like unin-
tegrated pieces of traumatic memory. Mr. Pickwick sleeps through them,
and wakes up to newly sunny days with no disturbing traces in his conscious-
ness. When Pickwick goes to the Fleet Prison, he does so by principled
choice, while his money, his benevolence, and his curiosity shield him from
the prison taint that transforms the other characters within the prison walls.
Yet, for two chapters, Pickwick’s sunny character is jolted into shock, depres-
sion, and anger. He is “alone in the coarse vulgar crowd, and felt the depres-
sion of spirit and sinking of heart, naturally consequent on the reflection
that he was cooped and caged up without a prospect of liberation” (PP 41).
The word “coffee-room” floats everywhere in the narrative like a signpost
pointing to suppressed memory. Momentarily transformed into Dickens the
journalist, Pickwick “gradually worked himself to the boiling-over point”
as he reflects on the poor side of the prison; Dickens connects his state with
memory when Pickwick is said to enter the room “before he had any dis-
tinct recollection either of the place in which he was, or of the object of his
visit” (PP 42). This odd, not-quite-integrated clause may signal Dickens’s
own confusion about writing himself into memory-land in the course of a
picaresque comedy.
Oliver Twist, the first of many traumatized children, also seems to have
been endowed with a Teflon-covered soul that allows him to bounce back
and forth between the thieves and the genteel world without incurring per-
manent damage. For the most part memory in Oliver Twist is treated as a
cranked-up Wordsworthian pastoral automatically associated with nature,
escape from trouble, and the yearning for peaceful death. As in Pickwick,
however, traumatic memory briefly invades the very heart of the pastoral
when Fagin and Monks appear at the window of Oliver’s pastoral retreat.
The narrator sets up the scene as if he were an expert in the relations between
the conscious and the unconscious mind: “There is a kind of sleep that steals
upon us sometimes which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free
the mind from a sense of things about it.” It sounds like mesmeric slumber,
in which “words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at
the moment” merge with internal visions, “until reality and imagination
become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impos-
sibility to separate the two.” Having put his subject into a trance, Dickens
represents what happens as an instance of traumatic return: suddenly Oliver
is back “in the Jew’s house again,” listening to Monks make threats on his
life (O T 2.11).