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  • Dickens's Hyperrealism
  • Jesse Rosenthal (bio)
Dickens's Hyperrealism, by John R. Reed; pp. vii + 132. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010, $39.95, $9.95 CD-ROM.

The Victorian novel, as most students learn, is a predominantly realist affair. And yet the most popular and successful of Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens, seems never to fit squarely into any definition of realism. If Dickens is not a realist, John R. Reed asks in Dickens's Hyperrealism, then what, exactly, is he? Borrowing a phrase from Umberto Eco, Reed offers a "hyperrealist" Dickens, who manages to "convey a sense of the everyday world while at the same time almost magically transforming it" (4). Dickens's novels seem realistic enough, Reed argues, that we are able to hold our awareness of their more fanciful and hallucinatory nature at bay.

The particular contribution of Reed's study is the way it locates this transformation of the everyday strictly within Dickens's formal techniques. Dickens is so strongly associated with his content—his first-name-basis characters, his bluff morals, his London—that it can be hard to discuss his fiction on formal terms alone. Reed's account of "hyperrealism" largely brackets the relationship between Dickens's texts and the world to which they make reference. Instead it focuses on the rhetorical: the linguistic techniques that Dickens uses to exert control over his readers. As he puts it, "What Dickens tried to do from rather early in his career was to give his audience the impression that they were reading readerly texts, while, in fact, he was writing writerly texts" (6); Dickens, while "implicating the reader in the interpretation . . . nonetheless prevents him from taking charge of that interpretation himself" (7). Such characterizations of Dickens's control over his readers trace back to William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote of Oliver Twist (1837-38): "The power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him whithersoever he leads" ("Catherine: A Story," Fraser's Magazine 21.122 [1840], 211). What Reed takes special care to explain is that falling captive to Dickens can seem like a function of our own agency. Dickens strays from the reporting of a realistic world and asserts his meaning and design, but he does so in a way that spares the reader from feeling his overbearing presence.

As befits a book on narrative rhetoric, Reed's study is divided not by works or chronology, but instead by novelistic techniques. Short chapters focus on Dickens's lush narratorial description, use of the present tense, metonymic connection of characters with ideals, personification of the inanimate, and redundancy of detail. The benefit of this approach is that, as even this short list will likely indicate to those familiar with [End Page 376] Dickens, Reed's account of the novels passes the sniff-test—it feels like Dickens. By grouping such distinct formal strategies under the larger umbrella of Dickens's covert exertion of authorial control, Reed captures a large part of what makes Dickens's voice so Dickensian, and gives that voice a driving logic.

This sort of formally motivated organization means that no chapter plumbs the depths of any one Dickens novel; instead, bits and pieces from Dickens's corpus—all of the novels except for Nicholas Nickleby (1837-39)—provide a series of examples. The result is often liberating, as Reed's discussion never gets bogged down by each novel's accumulated commentary and interpretations. There is a downside to this approach as well: it offers a flattened account of Dickens's output. Though Reed suggests that Dickens got better at his hyperrealist manipulation as his career went on, there is no systematic account of the relation between Dickens's technique and time, place, or subject matter. For a relatively short book, this seems like a worthwhile trade-off: sacrificing context and thematics for a firmer grasp of an author's stylistic specificities. But it is a sacrifice all the same, and one that many readers concerned with literary history will find hard to ignore.

Along with the bracketing of Dickens's real-world referents, though, comes the nagging question of...

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