After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance (review)

After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance, by John Glavin; pp. xiii + 226. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, £39.19, $54.95.

John Glavin's challenging and rewarding After Dickens is a highly personal work; so, in the spirit of mimetic criticism, I should preface this review with a personal confession: I am not a Victorianist but rather a theatre historian, and what I am after in After Dickens is not Dickens, or reading Dickens, but what comes after: adaptation and performance. Thus I embark immediately on the project most sanctioned by Glavin, reading as "un-doing" (10), as adaptation. Which is not to say that you shouldn't read After Dickens for its readings of Dickens because I didn't; you should. Glavin offers several compelling and, as best I can tell, fresh (although to this amateur occasionally elliptical) exegeses of cardinal texts such as Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), Little Dorrit (1855-57), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). But they are always in the service of the book's chief conceit, namely that Dickens's work, for all its apparent theatricality, repudiates adaptation as much as it invites it, and that in this gesture of self-enclosure the texts mirror their architect's labile psychic economy with its dialectic of narcissistic self-assertion and shame (Glavin's term for this hermetic tendency in Dickens and his prose is "cameral" [64]).

There are of course many worthy recent considerations of Dickens and theatricality, including Paul Schlicke's Dickens and Popular Entertainment (1985) and Deborah Vlock's Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre (1998)--this is a well- harrowed, if fertile, field. Where Glavin differs is in the surprising observation that Dickens was, in fact, "no friend to performance" (48) at all and that Dickens's texts (or rather, Dickens's audience) is generally ill-served by lushly obsequious adaptations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nickleby (1980). What's needed to recuperate these texts, Glavin boldly asserts, is a purgative dose of Jerzy Grotowski, the (recently deceased) Polish performance guru of the 1960s whose concepts of the "Poor Theatre," the "holy actor," and the via negativa revolutionized the theatrical avant-garde thirty-five years ago.

The book is structured (deliberately) like a drama, in three acts: Set Up, Flashback, and Resolution. "Set Up" sets up not only the argument--or rather puts its components into play--but indeed sets up Dickens himself, only to put him down. Glavin assaults the author with considerable Oedipal energy: Dickens appears as "a kind of idiot savant" (14), given to a "childish rejection of thought" (16) and to the pursuit of the "agamous" (a key term here, meaning, approximately: infantile, pleasure-seeking, reckless, unbound). The tension of his inability to live out pure agamy and his concomitant unwillingness to surrender to the demands of the Victorian psycho-social order produces shame, and that generates Dickens's own specific set of adaptive strategies in his texts. Lest one takes offense at this unflattering portrait, it helps to understand Glavin's Dickens as "Dickens," a character in the book's drama, and some of Glavin's writing as purposefully histrionic hyperbole. It's in this slightly hyperbolic sense that Glavin declares adaptation a "profoundly revolutionary" (27) act and so introduces his antidote to Dickens's adaptation-evading narcissism: Grotowski's radically transformative theatre through which "a genuinely critical process of adaptation, perfidious not faithful, transgressive rather than imitative" (37) becomes possible. Thus the book's program. The next chapters of this expository part take Our Mutual Friend as the exemplary text to demonstrate Dickens's resistance to adaptation, residing in the text itself (its insistence on its own literal inviolability) as well as its mode of diffusing meaning: "Dickens refuses to commit himself to, or be trapped within, any logic beyond the wish-fulfillment of the fictions he's devising" (61). Exploring Dickens's antagonism to theatre further, Glavin concludes...