The Old Story with a Difference: Pickwick's Vision (review)

Julian Wolfreys says so many true things, is so generous to many of the critics I most admire, and is so often right in his sense of what it is important for readers of literature to do, that I wish I could find more to praise in his book. For Wolfreys, literature has a "singularity" towards which we must be simultaneously responsible and inventive. The critic is (or ought to be) obliged to be open to the event of the literary, to its strangeness and consequent resistance to discourses or modes of understanding anchored elsewhere. Reading a literary text is not like running a programme through it, nor can the processes of interpretation be guided, in however complex or mediated a way, by those of historical understanding. These are the guiding assumptions of his study and seem to me admirable, if demanding, ideals. It also seems an excellent idea to devote a whole book to The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), one of the most important, pleasurable, and inventive novels in the language.

Yet the argument of Wolfreys's book, and the analysis of Pickwick on which it rests, seem both strained and inert. He is clear about his intent: his study is "not about text and context . . . [n]or . . . about Pickwick's relation to 'history' in any simple manner . . . [N]o sustained effort is made . . . either to historicize or contextualize Pickwick" (2). Instead, he argues that "the literary, in its modes of envisioning and representation might enable us to see the other of history . . . to articulate the past, but not as it was" (3) to see "more than one past at work in Pickwick that comes momentarily into view" (5). It is not entirely clear what exactly is meant here by the "other of history" but there seem to be considerable theoretical difficulties with the idea, not least because its splicing together of Benjaminian and Derridean themes appears to introduce exactly the kind of metaphysics of presence—of "the past" that "comes into view"—that is impossible for deconstruction.

More damaging in a local sense is the quality of the reading of Pickwick that underpins the book's more general case. A reading by Jacques Derrida or by J. Hillis Miller (to whom this book is dedicated) makes the reader see the text it discusses anew, convinced that one must have been at best half-awake the first time round; yet, there is a strange lack of curiosity in Wolfrey's readings, an unwillingness to be puzzled or unmastered by the encounter with the text. Indeed, there is surprisingly little—fatally little—quotation or analysis of the novel itself: in the first two chapters, for example, a mere fourteen, usually brief, quotations from the book have to fight for attention with more than seven times as many from critical and theoretical texts. The novel, rather than being treated as a singular other to which the reader is ethically responsible and open, increasingly looks like grist to a theoretical mill, always and already determined elsewhere.

When Wolfreys does read the text closely, it is not as convincing as one would hope. The title of chapter 8 of the novel—"Strongly illustrative of the Position, that the course of true love is not a Railway"—is interesting for his purposes because "while the novel is published in 1836-37, its events take place a decade earlier . . . Mr Pickwick cannot know of railways, at least not as a form of commercial public transport" and so in the novel "the absence of the train . . . causes" a "temporal displacement that is . . . quite startling" (29). There are a number of problems with this argument, not least the fact that the novel opens in 1827 and the Stockton and Darlington railway had, famously, began service in 1825. More damningly, as the OED helpfully informs us, "railway," far from being an invention of the 1820s or 1830s, existed both in fact and as a term since the later...