"The Dead Secret" Wilkie Collins

“What have we been stopping for? I had so much to say; and we seem to have been stopping just when we ought to have been going on. I am in grief and terror, Uncle Joseph, in grief and terror again about the Secret-”

Chavenet used to maintain that the 19th century novel’s main characteristic was the presence of a secret; indeed that the novel could even be defined as a fictional work which contains a narrative secret. In this regard, Pickwick for instance is not strictly speaking a novel, because there is no secret, while Bleak House is an exemplary novel in the secret of the relationship between Esther and Lady Deadlock. This of course rules out the whole genre of the picaresque, but nonetheless Chavenet did have a point. Even the bildungsroman has a narrative secret: the greater wisdom or knowledge of later events withheld from the reader in the early parts of the novel.

Barthes in S/Z writes about the hermeneutic code: a unit whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events, which can either formulate the question or delay its answer, or even constitute an enigma and lead to its solution. It’s through the hermeneutic code, then, that the novel holds out and yet at the same time holds back its secret: the text exists always in a kind of tension between revealing information and concealing it. This tension is vital, indeed, mortal for the novel. The text knows that once its secret has been revealed, it will die in a final expiration: The End. The main weapon in this war of survival is of course the lie, the fiction. Unreliable narrators, events which are red herrings, digressions which superficially appear to have relevance or to be irrelevant, subsidiary characters who only ostensibly have a role in the plot, the discourse itself with its descriptions, its mimesis, its rhetorical devices of momentarily arresting and distracting beauty; all these are species of novelistic lies by which the text seeks to preserve its life; thereby creating a kind of artifice, a game of hide and seek with the reader, what Barthes called a civilisation of enigma, truth and decipherment.

Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret, published in 1857 was the first of Collin’s great sensation novels. It provides an excellent exemplar of the hermeneutic code in the hands of a writer who had not yet reached his apotheosis of skill in employing it. The plot concerns a Secret committed to paper and hidden in room in a deserted crumbling wing of a huge rambling house in Cornwall. The revelation of the secret threatens to bring down the innocent descendents of the families –the Franklands and Trevertons- who own the estate (as well as bring the novel to its close).

The plot is characterised by an uncontrollable proliferation of secrets which spiral out, breeding incontinently from the original secret, in the way that small species procreate endlessly to ensure their survival through weight of numbers.
Here is a list in no particular order of secrets spun by the narrative:
➢ The original secret hidden from the reader and from the Franklands and Trevertons but not from Sarah Leeson, the transcriber and hider of the secret
➢ The existence of the secret, hidden from the Franklands and Trevertons, but not from the reader or Sarah Leeson
➢ The location of the secret, hidden from the Franklands and Trevertons, but not from the reader or Sarah Leeson
➢ The name of the room –the Myrtle Room- in which the secret is located, hidden from the inhabitants of the house and lost in the mists of time, but not from Sarah Leeson (this represents a signifier detached from its signified and taking on mythical dimensions of its own)
➢ The past trauma of Sarah Leeson, hidden from all the characters and the reader, but not from Sarah Leeson
➢ The relevance of the past trauma of Sarah Leeson, hidden from all the characters and the reader, but not from Sarah Leeson
➢ The previous relationship between Sarah Lawson and Mrs Frankland, hidden from the Franklands and their doctor but not from the reader or Sarah Leeson
➢ The connection between and relevance of Treverton and Shrowl to the Franklands, and to Sarah Leeson, hidden from the reader, and perhaps from the other characters as well (this may be a plot device allowing a deus ex machina, or a red herring)
➢ The request from Mrs Frankland to the housekeeper to allow Sarah Leeson to view the house, hidden from Sarah Leeson but not from the housekeeper or the reader
➢ The reason for the request from Mrs Frankland to the housekeeper to allow Sarah Leeson to view the house, hidden from Sarah Leeson and from the housekeeper but not from the reader
➢ The connection between and relevance of the young man in the grave to Sarah Leeson and the rest of the story, hidden from everyone except Sarah Leeson
➢ The real identity of the servant who disappeared on the night of Mrs Treverton’s death, hidden from everyone except Sarah Leeson and the reader
➢ The real identity of Mrs Jazeph, hidden from everyone except Sarah Leeson and the reader

What labyrinth are we getting into now! remarks one of the characters as these secrets accumulate, and it can be seen that together, these secrets embody a very complex labyrinth of ironies: Who is in the know? Who isn’t? There is a slight sense of vertigo, possibly even nausea, of the author not quite being in control.

To staunch the haemorrhage of all these secrets the discourse employs an extreme precision of language, especially in the descriptions of space and spatial relationships within rooms, and in descriptions of behaviour. The bed projected from the wall into the middle of the room, in such a situation as to keep the door on the right hand of the person occupying it, the window on the left, and the fire place opposite the foot of the bed. Barthes writes on the symbolic meaning of the door: a whole complex of death, pleasure, limit, secret is bound up in it and of course doors and the keys which unlock them in this novel play a pivotal role in what they withhold and reveal. The behaviour and actions of the characters do not originate from the characters themselves, but happen because of the discourse’s instinct for preservation (Barthes again). Mrs Jazeph turned around with a start, and looked at the doctor. Apparently forgetting that her right hand was on the table, she moved it so suddenly that it struck against a bronze statuette […which] fell to the ground, and Mrs Jazeph stooped to pick it up with a cry of alarm which seemed strangely exaggerated by comparison with the trifling nature of the accident. Such events are the classic hermeneutic unit. Sarah Leeson faints at the top of the staircase in the North Wing just as she is about to unlock the door to the Myrtle Room not through fear or dread but because the text needs to preserve this particular secret for longer: we are only just half way through the novel. The fear and dread of the character are provided as realistic motivations for the delay. (Incidentally, according to Chavenet, this is why Freudian literary criticism is so laughably redundant: the characters are not real people, and the hermeneutic code accounts for more in their motivation than does their subconscious.)

The discourse, then, is straitlaced, pedantic, restricted, controlled, in contrast to the fecund plethora of secrets thrown out by the plot. To compensate for the lack of control over the secrets, the author asserts his power over the discourse by employing an objective, clinical, precision of language, the reference code referencing criminal and psychological casebooks, to use another idea of Barthes. This has the effect of holding up the story by filling it with (unnecessary?) detail, in effect padding it out. In his four mature masterpieces The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale and No Name, Collins achieved a more felicitous balance between a greater fecundity in the discourse and a tighter control of the plot.

" The Pickwick Papers" Charles Dickens

Pickwick begins with a ray of light illuminating the gloom, and ends in the blaze of the sunshine of the world. Throughout, this sunniest of Dickens’s works balances light and darkness, like the dappled shade of an English wood on a summer’s day. It is a trope in Dickens criticism to see a steady darkening of his mood throughout his career, and there is no doubt that Drood for example is darker than Pickwick. However, the darkness of his later works is foreshadowed in scenes and episodes in Pickwick. The climax of the book sees Pickwick and his faithful servant Sam Weller incarcerated in the Fleet prison, giving Dickens the first of his career-long opportunities to highlight the injustices of the legal system; a system which, in Dickens’s worldview, stands in metonymic relationship to all systems which dehumanize. The first of the inset stories features alcoholism, poverty, domestic abuse, squalor and death; and the other inset narratives all focus on the dark underbelly of life.

These dark episodes notwithstanding, the book is hilariously enchanting and a source of continual delight in its depiction of innocence at large. Pickwick and his chums are in fact children lost in an adult world. The adventures they have are often the result of misreading the world, in the way that children do. They are taken in by the worldly Jingles; Pickwick is unaware of the reason why Mrs Bardell is behaving so strangely. In their relations with women, they exist in a pre-sexual innocence. Although he is retired, we never know what line of business Pickwick was in, or anything of his former life: he exists in a perpetually unfolding present, without a personal history, in the way that children do. The same is true of Snodgrass, Winkle and Tupman. The function of Sam Weller is to follow behind like a patient adult or a long suffering guardian angel, and get Mr Pickwick out of scrapes. In a key scene when Mr Pickwick has been wandering lost in the dark midnight corridors of the great White Horse Inn, he is found by Sam and taken back to bed and tucked in.

'But of this I am determined, Sam,' said Mr. Pickwick; 'that if I were to stop in this house for six months, I would never trust myself about it, alone, again.'
'That's the wery prudentest resolution as you could come to, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller. 'You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin'.'
'What do you mean by that, Sam?' said Mr. Pickwick. He raised himself in bed, and extended his hand, as if he were about to say something more; but suddenly checking himself, turned round, and bade his valet 'Good-night.'
'Good-night, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller. He paused when he got outside the door--shook his head--walked on--stopped-- snuffed the candle--shook his head again--and finally proceeded slowly to his chamber, apparently buried in the profoundest meditation.

The main threats to the Pickwickians’ innocence are the loss of a childhood independence through marriage, and the guile and adult unscrupulousness of the law. It’s significant that the grounds for the action of Bardell versus Pickwick are laid in the same chapter that Sam Weller is hired as Pickwick’s servant: the main threat to Pickwick, and his chief protection against it arrive in the story at the same time. The situation of Tony Weller structurally foreshadows the threat to Pickwick: both of them under threat from a widow, a threat that has been put into motion by the machinations of the law. Notwithstanding the happy wedding celebrations, and the hilarious wooings of Winkle, Snodgrass and Tupman, the text is full of anxieties about marriage. 'Ven you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now'. and most of the marriages portrayed are unhappy or unwanted. ‘Mr Vinkle stops at home now’, rejoined Sam. ‘He’s married.’ ‘Married!’ exclaimed Pott, with frightful vehemence. He stopped, smiled darkly, and added in a low, vindictive tone, “It serves him right!’ It’s all too easy to read into this Dickens’s anxieties over his own perhaps too hastily enjoined marriage to Catherine Hogarth, in the year Pickwick was started, especially in view of his later desertion of her. The law is accompanied by images of dirt and filth whenever it makes an appearance, like the mud symbolism in the famous opening paragraph of Bleak House, another sustained attack on the legal system.

The book is characterised by a kind of largesse. Images of largeness abound, with a host of fat characters: Tupman, the fat boy, Wardle, and of course Pickwick himself, who threatens often to burst from his waistcoat when he is indignant or angry. This fatness is not restricted to the characters, but also infects the language and even the structure of the book. The second chapter was overwritten and the justly famous Christmas chapters had to be renumbered for the same reason. The main plot of the novel is fattened with subsidiary narratives: inset stories and manuscripts, anecdotes told by the characters to each other. Part of this largeness resides in Dickens’ peculiar metonymic imagination, in which parts stand for the whole, in which the whole picture, the whole emotion is often unreachable, beyond language: [Mr Pickwick] smiling on his partner all the while with a blandness of demeanour that baffles all description.

This metonymic strategy is nowhere more apparent in Dickens’s creation of character, in which the line, the gesture, the external description of body, clothing, action and speech stands for psychological motivation, for descriptions of the internal working of the mind. In two characters in particular in this early novel, the metonymic use of language is especially pronounced and hilarious. Mr Jingles speaks a kind of telegraphese, in which most of the subsidiary language is stripped away leaving the key word partnerships to stand for the whole sentence in the mind of the reader, and also in the mind of Jingles’s listener: Here, No. 924, take your fare, and take yourself off—respectable gentleman—know him well—none of your nonsense—this way, sir—where’s your friends?—all a mistake, I see—never mind—accidents will happen—best regulated families—never say die—down upon your luck—Pull him up—Put that in his pipe—like the flavour—damned rascals.’
Sam Weller, on the other hand, is in the habit of facetiously adding little set-phrases: …as the X said when… to the most innocuous of replies. Severe weather, Sam,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.‘Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,’ replied Mr. Weller.
‘What do I mean,’ retorted Sam; ‘come, Sir, this is rayther too rich, as the young lady said when she remonstrated with the pastry–cook, arter he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside. These, rather like Feneon’s Three Line Novels, create little eddies, little vortexes of narratives, in which the set-phrase stands for a larger narrative known only to Sam. They are usually ignored by the other characters, and seem to please only Sam (and the reader) himself. A collection of these set-phrases of Sam’s would make a nice little anthology of miniatures, and would reveal Sam’s gallows sense of humour.

The pivotal trial scene prefigures the later trails of Kafka, Hitchcock and Camus. The humour aside, the situation takes on the character of a nightmare in which every insignificant detail of daily life is presented as evidence for a crime Pickwick doesn’t even know he has committed: not only is the breach of promise unproved, but the promise itself has never even been made or intended. The texture of everyday life is on trial, and the innocence of the quotidian is turned around and made sinister by the law:
…letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.”

Fragment 1611

The Collected Sayings of Mr Samuel Weller

1. Reg’lar rotation’, as Jack Ketch said, ven he tied the men up.
2. What the devil do you want with me’, as the man said, wen he see the ghost?
3. Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.
4. No one else ‘ll do, as the devil’s private secretary said ven he fetched avay Doctor Faustus.
5. There’s nothin’ so refreshen’ as sleep, sir, as the servant girl said afore she drank the egg–cupful of laudanum.
6. If you walley my precious life don’t upset me, as the gen’l’m’n said to the driver when they was a–carryin’ him to Tyburn.
7. I think he’s the wictim o’ connubiality, as Blue Beard’s domestic chaplain said, vith a tear of pity, ven he buried him.
8. It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.
9. Hope our acquaintance may be a long ’un, as the gen’l’m’n said to the fi’ pun’ note.
10. Wery sorry to ‘casion any personal inconwenience, ma’am, as the housebreaker said to the old lady when he put her on the fire.
11. There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.
12. Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,
13. Oh, quite enough to get, Sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes.
14. Hooroar for the principle, as the money–lender said ven he vouldn’t renew the bill.
15. Come, Sir, this is rayther too rich, as the young lady said when she remonstrated with the pastry–cook, arter he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside.
16. Allow me to express a hope as you won’t reduce me to extremities; in saying wich, I merely quote wot the nobleman said to the fractious pennywinkle, ven he vouldn’t come out of his shell by means of a pin, and he conseqvently began to be afeered that he should be obliged to crack him in the parlour door.
17. Nothin’ less than a nat’ral conwulsion, as the young gen’l’m’n observed ven he wos took with fits.
18. If this don’t beat cock–fightin’ nothin’ never vill, as the lord mayor said, ven the chief secretary o’ state proposed his missis’s health arter dinner.
19. I leave all that ‘ere to you. It’s a great deal more in your way than mine, as the gen’l’m’n on the right side o’ the garden vall said to the man on the wrong un, ven the mad bull vos a–comin’ up the lane.
20. P’raps if vun of us wos to brush, without troubling the man, it ’ud be more agreeable for all parties, as the schoolmaster said when the young gentleman objected to being flogged by the butler
21. Anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.
22. He’s a malicious, bad–disposed, vorldly–minded, spiteful, windictive creetur, with a hard heart as there ain’t no soft’nin’, as the wirtuous clergyman remarked of the old gen’l’m’n with the dropsy, ven he said, that upon the whole he thought he’d rayther leave his property to his vife than build a chapel vith it.
23. Avay vith melincholly, as the little boy said ven his schoolmissus died.
24. This is rayther a change for the worse, Mr. Trotter, as the gen’l’m’n said, wen he got two doubtful shillin’s and sixpenn’orth o’ pocket–pieces for a good half–crown.
25. If you know’d who was near, sir, I rayther think you’d change your note; as the hawk remarked to himself vith a cheerful laugh, ven he heerd the robin–redbreast a–singin’ round the corner.
26. I only assisted natur, ma’am; as the doctor said to the boy’s mother, after he’d bled him to death.
27. Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sveetly remarked ven they put him down in the pension list ‘cos his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a portable tinder box.

And two from his father, Mr Tony Weller
1. Vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter of taste.
2. It’s all for my own good; vich is the reflection vith which the penitent schoolboy comforted his feelin’s ven they flogged him.

"Persian Letters" Montesquieu

This is one of the great humanist texts, in the tradition of Montaigne (another son of Bordeux) and Voltaire. Uzbec and Rica are two Persian noblemen who are living in France ‘to pursue the laborious search for wisdom’. They write letters to their friends and servants back home in Persia on topics of interest to them as travelers and aliens. This device allows Montesquieu to hold a mirror up to his society. At the same time, by faking the stance of a bemused but respectful outsider who sees things through the veil of an alien culture, Montesquieu is able to criticize and satirize aspects of his own culture.

Here is a list of some of the topics covered in the letters:

the nature of justice
reading and libraries
government
the risks of money and high finance
coffee houses
journalism
gender relations
the meaning of spectacles and moustaches
suicide
religious disputes
does virtue lead to happiness?
how can men have free will if God foresees their actions?
the theatre
tales and legends from Islam and Persian cultures
the rights of women
the misuse of scripture
the impossibility of proving a woman’s virginity
fashion
cures for constipation (a good dose of metaphysical philosophy)
the French Academy
critics
academic controversies
the decline of the art of conversation
the burden of being more intelligent than those around you

While most topics are treated in a very general way, relevant for all times, other letters deal with issues specific to Montesquieu’s own time and give a fascinating insider’s (outsider’s) view of 18th century French society in the last gasp of the ancient regime: the collapse of John Law’s system, the regency of the young King Louis XV, the ideological struggle between the Jansenists and the Jesuits for example.

At the same time as critiquing European culture, the letters give us glimpses and meditations on Persian culture, as their experiences in Europe lead the Persians to reflect on their own society, as all travel naturally does. However, of course, it has to be remembered that these descriptions of Persian culture are written by a European. Although Montesquieu never traveled outside Europe, he researched his book thoroughly, reading widely in the major orientalists of his day. In this regard the letters represent a summa of contemporary European knowledge of the East.

Throughout, the tone is gently ironical rather than bitterly satirical. By defamiliarising certain of our customs and institutions, the Persians allow us to see their absurdity for ourselves. Here is Rica on the theatre:
At each side [of the stage] you can see in little compartments called ‘boxes’ men and women acting out scenes together.
Here he is on the Spanish Inquisition: I have heard that in Spain and Portugal there are certain dervishes who cannot see a joke and who burn a man as they would a straw.

The letters vary in length and are arranged randomly in no discernable sequence of topic, except for some longer sequences covering depopulation (a contemporary concern no longer shared, alas, in our own time), the relationship between virtue and happiness, the state of contemporary literature. A semblance of a storyline is given by the sequence of letters from Persia concerning the goings-on in the seraglios of our two Persian travelers. It was this aspect of the work more than any other perhaps that accounted for the success de scandal of the Letters during Montesquieu’s life, appealing to the prurient interest of his audience for things erotic and exotic.

It is this aspect, also, which complicates the genre boundaries of the work. ‘Letters’ to his contemporaries usually meant non-fictional pensees, character studies, travelogues, essais, and Montesquieu surely intended his work to be read as non-fiction. However, in 1751, Montesquieu’s later, major, work Of the Spirit of Laws was placed on the Index of Banned Books by the Vatican. Fearing perhaps that his earlier work would also suffer the same fate, after a pamphlet appeared attacking it and accusing him of irreligion, Montesquieu put out some Reflections on the Persian Letters. In this he (disingenuously?) calls the Letters an epistolary novel (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela appeared in French in 1742) and repeatedly emphasizes the fictional aspects. The reader is asked to remember always that passages considered to be audacious (for which read: critical of church and state) are in fact due to the perpetual contrast between the reality of things and the odd, naïve or strange way in which they are perceived by the Persians. Wily old lawyer that he was, he then ironically remarks in closing:
Certainly the nature and intention of the Persian Letters are so manifest that they will deceive only those who wish to deceive themselves.

Critics never fail to make remarks of this sort, because it is no great strain on the intellect to make them.

I should like to see funerals banned. There should be weeping at a man’s birth, not at his death.

Scripture is a country where men of every sect make raids as if in order to pillage it; it is a battleground where hostile nations meet frequently in combat, attacking and skirmishing in numerous ways.

Victor Hugo on the benefits of monarchy

The learned and judicious King James I had women of this kind [old spinsters] boiled alive: then he tasted the stock, and from its taste was able to say whether the woman was a witch or not. It is regrettable that in our day kings have lost any talent of this kind, which showed the usefulness of the institution of monarchy.

Fragment 112

In the 1520s, Jakob Fugger, one of the great figures of pre-industrial capitalism, the man who introduced double entry bookkeeping to central Europe, financier to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and one of the founders of the huge and fantastically rich Fugger empire summoned Johann Eck, Papal Emissary and Grand Inquisitor, the great adversary of the Reformation, in order to discuss the state of his soul imperilled by usury.

In this event we see in microcosm the struggle in the Western mind and culture between the modernity of international systems of credit and the material benefits it brought, and the medievalism of the Church’s age-old strictures against it. Fugger paid for his confessor’s journey. The Capitalist called, the Church came.