SOURCE: “Writing the Revolution,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 12, edited by Michael Timko, et al., AMS Press, 1983, pp. 161-76.

[In the following essay, Baumgarten examines the significance of writing in A Tale of Two Cities.]

Lives are saved by bits of paper on which a few words have been written in A Tale of Two Cities and they are also doomed by them. Letters of safe passage make it possible for Lucie and her father, Jarvis Lorry and Pross to leave France at the end of the novel; but no passport is available for Charles Darnay in his own name and he must use his double's. Madame Defarge's knitting is a deadly form of writing. Gaspard writes on the walls in wine what he will later inscribe in blood. Despite the intentions of their authors, these written messages are ambiguous, just as the inscriptions of servitude Monseigneur inflicts upon his peasants and servants do not lead to desired effects. Meanings change. Sense turns into non-sense. This world is characterized by contradiction from which writing is not excluded. Writing saves here but it also attaints and is tainted.¹

The inherent difficulties of writing come to a focus in the narrative of Doctor Manette's imprisonment. Serving as the testimony that condemns Evremonde-Darnay, the tale—despite Doctor Manette's later change of heart and acceptance of Darnay into his family—fulfills its original purpose. Recounting the events that brought Manette to his living death in the Bastille, his narrative justifies the absolute judgment, beyond question or qualification, with which it ends. “I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony, denounce” the Evremondes “and their descendants, to the last of their race”—“to the times when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven and to earth”² (III, 10, 361). Like Madame Defarge's knitting, Doctor Manette's writing is a pledge to be redeemed by the future.

The condition of the inexorable purpose that encompasses this tale is that it be inscribed—that is, written—in this instance on paper and thus made objective. Only such reification will remove it from the changeable subjectivity governing human life. A statement of value, Manette's account like Madame Defarge's knitting (and in another mood Monseigneur's privileges) is a desperate vow that attempts to remove words and deeds from their contingent situation and render them unconditional.

Like money, this writing of Doctor Manette's and Madame Defarge's is a promise of future payment. (By contrast the ancien régime functions on the gold standard). Like money in the era of the rise of capitalism, this writing is the promissory note and coin of moral judgment, to be redeemed at the trial and physical execution of all the Evremondes.

When the revolution calls this note in for payment its signator, the author of the testimony, regrets the uses to which his writing has been put, but does not disavow the intention that led him to his writing. Even its intended victim sympathizes with the conditions and feelings that led his father-in-law to frame his tale and oath, and as he is being led away Charles explicitly tells him not to blame himself or feel remorse at the destruction his writing has wrought. Unable to deal with the unbearable contradictions in which he is caught and which he has helped to articulate, Manette breaks down, reverting to the living death of the beginning of the novel.

Unlike the reader of this scene, Manette does not acknowledge that even written words, like the social order of France to which they are connected, are not unchanging and immortal. Neither Ozymandias' statue nor beaten gold stand outside of time that changes everything into its opposite, nothing, as we know from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and makes of sense non-sense. We know that all symbols, be they written or hieroglyphic, as well as the phrases they construct (even repeated and rephrased as Madame Defarge's are in her knitting to ensure the doom of the enemies of the people) cannot help but be ambiguous, despite the fixed intentions of their writers: even dollars signed by Ivy Baker Priest change their value. Madame Defarge finds her death in seeking to call the knitted symbols of her writing in for payment. The Marquis is killed because he believes in the eternal authority of the coin of his privilege. Sydney Carton offers himself as ransom for Manette's promissory note. Reunited with Lucie and Charles, who has been miraculously recalled to life, Manette escapes from the consequences of his writing. All the resources of the plot are needed to help Jarvis Lorry, astute banker and man of business, manage to rescue him a second time.

An account of great power, Manette's testimony has the shape of gothic fiction, functioning as a novel in miniature. As such it provides a model of mis-reading, in which writing is taken absolutely, and becomes an imprisoning code. Set in the novel as the mechanism that brings on the final entanglement of Darnay's personal and public life, of his English and French destinies, it forces us to confront the meaning of writing in this novel.

The moral judgment proclaimed by Manette's written testimony is absolute because of its condition as writing. There is no oral context which would shade its meaning, no human presence to recover the conditions and contingencies that led to its production. We remember that Charles Darnay, the person it condemns, has earned his living in England as a teacher of French—of reading and writing. When his double, Sydney Carton mounts the scaffold, his final vision is an unwritten piece of autobiographical writing, voiced beyond any imprisoning code and opening into the prophetic realm where writing is absolute and true.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe—a woman—had asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given an utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these:

And Carton's vision takes us through the written word to the theatrical spectacle of his self-imagined, self-redeeming execution, concluding with the almost written flourish of his epitaph.³ In this doubling and redoubling of the theme of writing we cannot help but be reminded of the presence of the author of the book in which these characters and their writing figure. Dickens made his living as a writer and producer of the written word and here surely reflects upon—perhaps more than half-consiously—the conditions and meanings of his profession and his livelihood. In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens encounters—along with his readers and so many of his characters—the revolutionary meanings of writing the revolution.

Is there any logic, we ask, to this “Thing called La Revolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins?” Carlyle's phrasing, with which Dickens was familiar, like ours is retrospective and concerned with texts and evidence, in short, with writing. “La Revolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters,” Carlyle says, “a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key: where is it? what is it?” Perhaps, we respond, it is like scrip printed by a private institution, in an economy off the gold standard but not yet governed by a central banking system. Or is it a new kind of writing not yet accepted by the many? A form of value inchoate and inarticulate? It is all of these and as well the impulse underlying the forms of social organization. In Carlyle's powerful phrasing,

It is the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men. Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality.⁴

The sources of this reality we find articulated in the work of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” who himself helped to make revolution, cultural, political, and social—in Yeats, who recalls its meanings to life in some of his greatest poems. We encounter its power of confusion in the charismatic world of “The Second Coming”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.(5)

These lines evoke not only Yeats's personal experience of historical upheaval but as well the events, mood, and much of the feeling not only of Carlyle's history but also of Dickens' novel of revolution and terror. The nightmare of rebellion begins, Yeats wryly notes in an earlier poem, when sexual energy powers revolutionary will, and individuals take on mythic roles. Playing Helen of Troy, Maud Gonne like Madame Defarge, teaches “to ignorant men most violent ways,”—inciting them as a woman, half-myth, half-dream, until with courage equal to desire, they “hurled the little streets upon the great” (“No Second Troy,” p. 89). Here Yeats captures the insurrectionary tenor of the revolutionary century before our own totalitarian one, reminding us that what we hear in Dickens' novel as in Carlyle's great history is the effort to fathom the meanings of a world gone topsy-turvy, and Humpty Dumpty fallen.

Enter Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, who make democracy a theme of life and art, and endow writing with a political edge. That is what Manette the writer, counts on—an emergent social order that will be governed, as Yeats said in setting for himself a literary program, by the “emotion of multitude.” Here, too, Yeats defines the parameters of the inquiry because his enterprise as a writer depends upon its decoding. His phrase helps us to realize how Dickens' novel becomes a form open to the demands of his age. Large enough to encompass democracy and to examine the comedy of its triumph, it is also forceful enough to create the revolutionary emotion of multitude. The novel becomes for Dickens a loose and baggy monster that serves the purposes of the democratic revolution of his era in allowing him to mimic its tumult, dramatize its historical conflicts, and invent the theatre of its personal struggles.

Dickens' interest in the French Revolution was focused by his friendship with Carlyle. A Tale of Two Cities echoes much in Carlyle's great history. Not only is Dickens influenced by Carlyle, as Goldberg points out, but the differences between A Tale of Two Cities and The French Revolution depend upon the priority of the latter. The result is not that the two are in effect the same work; rather Carlyle's historical writing as we shall see makes possible the somewhat different mode of the novel.⁶ It is worth noting that in the 1830s as he worked on his history, Carlyle found the revolution fascinating and personally compelling. He confided to Froude, his friend and biographer, that his spiritual health depended upon plumbing its meanings. Carlyle wrote as well to bring the presence of the Revolution to a troubled England and warn it of impending danger. In 1859, when Dickens wrote and published A Tale of Two Cities, twenty-two years after the publication of The French Revolution, personal and public concerns again came together, as they had for Carlyle.

Remember that 1859—miraculous year—saw among others the publication of Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, not to forget Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the first four parts of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Along with Dickens these writers explored what Asa Briggs calls a “turning point in the late Victorian revolt against authority”—the crisis in the relations between older and younger generations.⁷ Thereby they wrote out the meanings of the revolution which, begun in the last decades of the eighteenth century, yet governed the shape of their lives and art. Brandishing victorious and murderous democracy over their heads, it led them to sort out the contradictory logic of its revolutionary presence.

In A Tale of Two Cities revolution leads inevitably to “Republic one and indivisible.” Following inexorably upon Liberty come Equality and Fraternity. And then Dickens undermines the slogan—“or Death” (III, 2, 287), the narrator adds, collapsing the years of shifting conflict and sporadic uprising into the Terror. If the political content of the novel is complicated by the sardonic addition of death to the revolutionary motto it is further vexed, in this novel of parallels and doubles, by the parallel sarcasm with which the narrator comments on the responses of French aristocracts and “native British orthodoxy.” They “talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it” (II, 24, 267).

As the narrative records this belief, it at the same time dissociates the narrator by means of an ironic distancing from the view that the revolution is senseless. Whatever revolution is, no reader of Dickens will call it nonsense. Rather, this novel charts the meaning and sense animating the sea of emotion and action, confusion, fury, and hatred that is the Revolution. Like Carlyle's remarkable history, A Tale of Two Cities depends upon the organic imagery of horticulture to frame one of its central themes. The last chapter of the novel roots the awful terror of the Revolution in this context and projects it forward as a warning:

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. (II, 15, 399)

This brief chapter as well brings the book to its conclusion with Carton's meditation on the happy harvest made possible by his act of self-sacrifice.

Writing the revolution, Dickens is neither conservative nor radical, but politically multifarious, as the prose of his novel—simultaneously distancing and bringing closer the actions it recounts—sweeps us with him into the shifting historical process. Suspended in the novel's dreamlike ambience, narrator and reader find themselves sympathizing with the revolutionary actors at the same time that they are revolted by their excesses.

Insisting on the organic analogy, neither Carlyle nor Dickens provides us with adequate historical explanations for the Revolution, though they do thereby remind us of the systematic and dynamic qualities of social existence. Novelist and historian share a common rhetoric and a misperception of the crisis that overtook the ancien régime. Hunger did not topple it. Prosperity and the revolution of rising expectations brought forward a new class—paper-using notaries and lawyers, merchants dealing in Wemmick's celebrated portable property—to lead the peasantry and emergent proletariat against an uncertain aristocracy. Of this social process, remarked upon by John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, Dickens and Carlyle remain ignorant. For them France is going downhill, promulgating constitutions and printing paper-money. Certificates of promised sense, like the assignats of the French Revolution, for historian and novelist they turn out to be without value. Intended sense becomes nonsense. The vaguely Christian interests of Dickens and Carlyle as well as their concern to use the revolution in France as a moral touchstone for impending English social convulsion moved both to devise a style that engaged the reader while distancing him into an examination of his own country's situation.

Basing his work on that of his friend, Dickens tells us in the Preface to the First Edition that he yet “hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book.” Dickens' uncharacteristic modesty masks the anxiety of influence and directs us toward an evaluation of the differences between them. Carlyle, the historian, makes it possible for Dickens, the novelist, to represent the revolution in a different form and way. Unlike Carlyle, who brings that time to life by a process of visualization, commentary, and evocation that depends upon our seeing everything through the eyes of the historian who is examining the evidence and questioning the available texts, Dickens engages us through the dreamlike contradictions, split characters, and omniscient narrator—who keeps disappearing into his own apothegms—in the process of decoding the logic of revolution. Carlyle's footnotes remind us of the ontological status of the actions and events he discusses while Dickens implicates us in their unfolding fictional life by means of the gesture of writing repeated throughout the novel.

Carlyle's achievement is the breaking of neoclassic narrative. That accomplishment leads him from the linear order of narrative to a lyric method of portraying the simultaneity of action. Remaining nevertheless just within the bounds of historical writing Carlyle dramatizes a strategy for reading the evidence of the past. Like Michelet he verges on fictional writing, and his hypotactic style refuses to close the meanings of a given event or action into cause and effect. Still, Carlyle does seek the deep structure that determines surface events, locating it in beliefs and moral opinions. In his famous review, John Stuart Mill praised Carlyle's work as a poem and the trust of histories. It brings the conditions, actions, and events which helped bring on the Revolution to life for the reader. By comparison, however, with Dickens' work, Carlyle's remains within the parameters of history. What we are reading is a pointing toward the thing itself, not as in Dickens its evocation as a magic theatrical realm in which we participate as actors as well as spectators.

Carlyle's hero worship is based on the hope of putting Humpty Dumpty together again. He seeks to persuade all the king's horses and all the king's men to their work, thinking perhaps thereby he might recall traditional order to life once more. By contrast Dickens is a democrat who is comfortable with the dissipation of character into role. His narrator is everywhere and nowhere, by contrast with Carlyle's who has a fixed place from which to assay his world. In Dickens' novel the narrator orchestrates the different voices, playing all the parts. The differences between Carlyle's treatment and Dickens' are instructive. Consider how the Carmagnole figures in the two works.

In Carlyle's account we see the origins of this revolutionary dance. It is a ritual that replaces the unthinking Catholicism of the French with another spectacle. Carlyle quotes newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts (including that of Mercier, which Dickens used), in rendering the event:

In such equipage did these profaners advance toward the Convention. They enter there, in an immense train, ranged in two rows; all masked like mummers in fantastic sacerdotal vestments; bearing on hand-barrows their heaped plunder,—ciboriums, suns, candelabras, plates of gold and silver.

The narrator functions as a journalist, recording the progress of the event. “Not untouched with liquor,” they

crave … permission to dance the Carmagnole also on the spot: whereto an exhilarated Convention cannot but accede. Nay “several Members” continues the exaggerative Mercier … “quitting their curule chairs, took the hand of girls flaunting in Priest's vestures, and danced the Carmagnole along with them.” Such old-Hallowtide have they, in this year once named of Grace 1793 (III, Book V, Chapter 4, 226-227).

Having rendered the scene the narrator of this history reflects upon its meaning:

Out of which strange fall of Formulas, tumbling there in confused welter, betrampled by the Patriotic dance, is it not passing strange to see a new Formula arise? For the human tongue is not adequate to speak what “triviality run distracted” there is in human nature.

Sharing the prejudices of his readers, this narrator cannot take the revolutionary ecstasies of the French seriously. To defend himself against them he reverts to his prejudices:

Black Mumbo-Jumbo of the woods, and most Indian Wau-waus, one can understand: but this of Procureur Anaxagoras, whilom John-Peter, Chaumette? We will say only: Man is a born idol-worshipper, sight-worshipper, so sensuous-imaginative is he; and also partakes much of the nature of the ape.

Carlyle's sarcasm colors his account, and while it does not keep him from mentioning the orgiastic details, it does ensure their categorization as animalistic.

Always quick to seize on religious values, Carlyle explores the ways in which the new ritual is an unconscious parody of the old:

For the same day, while this brave Carmagnole-dance has hardly jigged itself out, there arrive Procureur Chaumette and Municipals and Departmentals, and with them the strangest freightage: a New Religion! Demoiselle Candeille, of the Opera; a woman fair to look upon, when well rouged; she, borne on palanquin shoulderhigh; with red woolen nightcap; in azure mantle; garlanded with oak; holding in her hand the Pike of the Jupiter—Peuple, sails in: heralded by white young women girt in tricolor.

The piling up of details renders the scene grotesque. The narrator quickly draws the appropriate moral: “Let the world consider it! This, O National Convention wonder of the universe, is our New Divinity: Goddess of Reason, worthy, and alone worthy of revering. Her henceforth we adore.”

Despite the ironic tone, the description is faithful to the ideological context. The changing situation is caught in terms of the emotions and beliefs that underlie it:

And now, after due pause and flourishes of oratory, the Convention, gathering its limbs, does get under way in the required procession towards Notre-Dame;—Reason, again in her litter, sitting in the van of them, borne, as one judges, by men in the Roman costume; escorted by wind-music, red nightcaps, and the madness of the world.

Enthroned,

Reason sat in azure mantle aloft, in a serene manner. … “And out of doors … were mad multitudes dancing round the bonfire of Chapel-balustrades, of Priests' and Canons' stalls; and the dancers,—I exaggerate nothing,—the dancers nigh bare of breeches, neck and breast naked, stockings down, went whirling and spinning, like those Dust-vortexes, forerunners of Tempest and Destruction.” … Other mysteries, seemingly of a Cabiric or even Paphian character, we leave under the Veil, which appropriately stretches itself “along the pillars of the aisles,”—not to be lifted aside by the hand of History. (III, Book V, Chapter 4, 228-229)

Carlyle upholds the dignity of Clio as he renders her orgiastic undoing. The scene is powerfully described, miming the rush of events in a revolutionary time, expressing the entanglement of politics, religion, and sexuality. Piling up phrases in series, the narrator rushes us from event to event, leaving little time for meditation or even feeling. What we feel and think of all this he is sure to tell us, for the narrative voice is the locus of judgment in this work.

By contrast Dickens' use of the Carmagnole is restrained. Where Carlyle used it as an occasion for an implicit lesson, Dickens makes it an ironic occasion of rejoicing for Darnay that in its very excess prepares us for the ensuing disaster of his arrest and conviction. Having been vindicated, the mob embraces Darnay:

They put him into a great chair they had among them … over which they had thrown a red flag … not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.

The crowd winds its way forward “in wild dreamlike procession.” Bringing Darnay to his wife in triumph

a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the rest fell to dancing, and the court-yard overflowed with the Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman from the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the river's bank, and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away. (III, 6, 314-315)

This narrator, impersonator of all the roles of his world, forces us to take all the events seriously. None of them can be dismissed with a cry of nonsense; unlike Carlyle the novel's narrator does not seek to provide a desperate demonstration of their ultimate unreality.

Echoing Carlyle's account, Dickens compresses it, shaping it to the needs of his fiction. He can do this because Carlyle mediates between him and the historical material. At the same time Dickens has a broader sympathy that allows him to take on the point of view of the participants. Even the terrible aspect of the Carmagnole moves us:

There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was no other music than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. Men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced together, as hazard had brought them together.

They are the multitude caught up in emotion, the moving feeling of their revolutionary frenzy which expresses the camaraderie, the sharing that joins the individual to the mythic life. Instead of Carlyle's noun-heavy prose that heaps adverbial and prepositional clauses upon each other, Dickens' Carmagnole is all movement, all active verbs:

They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another and spun round in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those were down, the rest linked hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring broke, and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the spin, and all spun round another way.

What is the meaning we wonder of all this movement? “Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off.” In their midst, Lucie stands as a point of reference to set off their barbarism:

No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport—a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry—a healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child's head thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time. (III, 5, 307-308)

As a dance turns into an ecstatic orgy, we witness a world convulsed by polar extremes. In an instant, sense becomes nonsense with no ground between. Dickens has devised a form of writing in which contradiction is central. In this world things are simultaneously real and fantastic, distant and close at the same moment, past and future at once.

In Carlyle's work the narrator stands at the crossing point of opposites, and we share his struggle to force them into sensible shape. The fragments of his world are solid and his standpoint is clear, though the meanings and values of his enterprise as historian and prophet are clouded. By contrast the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities disappears into the rendered object, character, or scene. Here where everything must be accounted for, nothing is outside the dream. Narrator and reader experience the disembodied anxiety of the dreamer's stance.

In the dreamer's world events and actions may appear senseless yet are always meaningful. In dreaming, the effort to ascertain the logic of contradictions is fraught with danger. Dream-telling, as Taylor Stoehr points out, is the narrative form that provides access to the dream-work.⁸ The contradictions in the dream are also the opposites tugging at the dream-telling narrator. Here writing is the central gesture of decoding and encoding—the trope of narration enacted as the narrative of dream-telling. For Carlyle writing may be difficult but its meaning is always positive, while for Dickens it is a code that imprisons as well as expresses. As Jarvis Lorry tells Lucie when he meets her at Dover, “I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’ which may mean anything” (I, 4, 58). Writing is a code connected in some way to the social order. Revolution is an effort to undo existing sense and make of existing social relationships non-sense. But in this novel all social experience might as in a dream or revolution be undone: sense teeters on the edge.

Consider how Jarvis Lorry uses the word nonsense, one of his favorite expletives. It serves him as a way of denying to Charles that he is going to France for reasons not of business but of “gallantry and youthfulness,”—those motives that at the end of the same chapter will take Darnay himself on his fateful journey (II, 24, 267). In Jarvis Lorry's tone we hear the opposite meaning of the sense of his words. His tone depends upon a flexible comprehension of the difference between business and non-business, the role of messenger and that of actor, the distinction between order and disorder—something outside the grasp of characters like Stryver, who brands Darnay's actions in renouncing his claims as an Evremonde as “the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that ever was known” (II, 24, 269).

The marriage plot of A Tale of Two Cities engages these issues. When the Defarges discuss what revolutionary revenge on the Evremondes implies, the husband comments: “‘I hope, for her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.’” Defarge pleads with his wife to recognize the senselessness of condemning Darnay and Solomon/Barsad in the same breath:

“But it is very strange—now, at least, is it not very strange”—said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, “that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her husband's name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that infernal dog's who has just left us?”

Madame Defarge brushes aside his plea with a comment that reaffirms her willingness to plunge into logical contradiction for the cause of revenge: “‘Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,’ answered madame. ‘I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for their merits; that is enough’” (II, 16, 215).

Madame Defarge lives for the onset of the charismatic world of revenge—for the second coming of revolution in which the order of the past will be replaced by the disorder of the present. When Charles marries Lucie and is accepted by Doctor Manette into their family, the three create civilization out of the sources of hate. The cost of accepting his persecutor's descendant as his son-in-law is also a purchase for Doctor Manette of the right to experience, confront, and thus release himself from the traumatic past. He does not imprison the events of his history in a secret code, to be read out as judgment of revenge and knitted fate, as does Madame Defarge: he implicitly repudiates then the meaning of the written account that later, despite his wishes, will condemn Darnay. Unlike Manette's, Madame Defarge's is the world of the Capulets and Montagues, not that of Juliet and Romeo. For sublime Defarge the revolution will never be over, whereas for beautiful Lucie the bosom of her family can replace the riving search for revenge. In the ordered world glimpsed by Carton at the moment of his apotheosis, there is a difference between sense and nonsense, whereas in the charismatic state the two meet as the juncture of contradiction.

The dramatic situation and the narrator's ability to play all the roles lead to a confusion of sense and nonsense on the part of the actors of the drama. Stryver himself uses these words to explain away the meaning of what he has done in imagining he might ask for Lucie Manette in marriage. “Having supposed that there was sense where there is no sense,” he assures Jarvis Lorry, “I am well out of my mistake” (II, 12, 178). Stryver's error is to deny the motive that had brought him to his earlier choice. He strives always to define himself on the side of apparent sense—that is, with the winners. Mistakes are something Stryver does not allow himself, for they would hurt his ability to shoulder his way into society and up the ladder of success. His refusal to acknowledge the existence of change and misperception range Stryver with the French aristocrats who cannot see the humanity of those they oppress. Observing Stryver's reversals as he makes himself into a hypocrite, we understand that we are in a world in which instead of the realistic distinction between sense and nonsense, “the strange law of contradiction … obtains” (III, 4, 302). It is of course what the novel has offered us from its beginning sentence. Sense and nonsense are the unending moebius strip of this body politic as contradiction is its literary mode.

What is literature nowadays, Carlyle proclaims in his letters and his published work, but a newspaper. What he objects to, Dickens, the journalist, embraces. The characterization of Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend will also serve for Dickens: “He do the Police in different voices” (III, 43). One of the most “fundamental aspects of comic style” Bakhtin reminds us, is this “varied play with the boundaries of speech types. …” The “comic novel makes available a form for appropriating and organizing heteroglossia that is both externally very vivid and at the same time historically profound.”⁹

Like Carlyle, Yeats too will ultimately turn to classical models for his work, whereas Dickens, availing himself of the democratic cultural forms of his time, will evoke his world as spectacle and carnival rather than epic. Joyce follows his lead, imbedding the traditional forms in Ulysses, while writing it as Bloomsday—one day in the newspaper life of his city and his culture. It is important to note that for Joyce as for Dickens the columns of the newspaper fold over: we are not in linear but in urban time, where mythic encounters may occur at any street corner. Dickens' representation of the conditions of modern life was echoed by Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto, when he called for the writing of “the multi-colored polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.”¹⁰ Dickens begins a process in A Tale of Two Cities that Joyce will carry further.

Following through the analogy with the history of music, I call this method polyphony. (Carlyle, by contrast, tends to be monophonic and rely on the succession of events.) Dickens' scenes and situations do not function spatially, as Stoehr using Joseph Frank's analogy suggests, but musically. It is worth remembering that Bakhtin's analysis, which is based on the novel's links with rhetoric, focuses on the “hybrid discourse” of the “more complex artistic forms for the organization of contradiction … that orchestrate their themes by means of languages—” a method characteristic of “profound models of novelistic prose.”¹¹ The materials Dickens works with are arranged in groups like chords—what counts is not the development of a single melody, as in monophony, but the ordering and progression of the whole. Carlyle's great history has the appearance of a polyphonic work; close reading, nevertheless, reveals the ways in which each thread of the narrative is developed as a separate melodic line in counterpoint with the others. By contrast, Dickens emphasizes his intention when he notes that All the Year Round, which A Tale of Two Cities initiated, is not a magazine he edited but as he comments on the title page “Conducted.” In A Tale of Two Cities, in contrast with Carlyle's work, different sections recall each other; characters reflect each other—“split” apart they echo their double's movement. Each situation has a characteristic key signature which modulates into those that follow, as it grows from those that come before. In one trial we hear all the others, culminating in the final deferred execution of Carton, that to carry the musical analogy forward resolves the previously diminished sevenths into the cadence of his self-sacrifice.

Like Beethoven, Dickens can dispense with monophony because the chordal structures and dynamic possibilities available to him are powerful enough to resolve even the most difficult of his disharmonies. (How different for Carlyle who believes no forms exist any longer that can contain the violent energies of the tool-using barbarians of the nineteenth century.) The wild cacophony of the Terror, like the strange sounds of the Chorus in Beethoven's Ninth, leads to resolutions for Dickens that do not shatter their enclosing form. The reality of urban life and its journalistic chronicle for Dickens is unquestioned. It is the condition of his culture and his tale that hurtles us between its two greatest avatars, London and Paris. Even as they change, their norm as the idea of civilization persists. They authorize for Dickens the minting of the coin of his prose—an economy of the imagination no longer available to those who come after.

Notes

1. See Gilles Deleuze, Logique Du Sens (Paris: Les editions de Minuit, 1969), especially the first ten series.

2. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), III, 10, 361. Subsequent citations from this novel will be to this Penguin edition and will be noted in the text.

3. I owe this insight to Linda Paulson.

4. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Centenary Edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896), Volume III, Book 6, Chapter 1, p. 248. Subsequent citations to The French Revolution will be from this edition and will be noted in the text.

5. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 184-185. Subsequent citations from Yeats will be from this edition and will be noted in the text.

6. See Michael Goldberg's Carlyle and Dickens (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), especially Chapter Seven, pp. 101 and 128.

7. Asa Briggs, Victorian People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 298, quoted by Albert D. Hutter, “Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities,” PMLA, 93 (1978), 448.

8. Taylor Stoehr, Dickens: The Dreamer's Stance, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), especially Chapters Three and Four.

9. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 308 and 301. For a penetrating comment on Bakhtin, see the review by Hayden White in Partisan Review, Fall, 1982.

10. “Manifesto of Futurism,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, edited by R. W. Flint and translated by R. W. Flint and A. A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), p. 42

11. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogical Imagination, op.cit., p. 275.