Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel

3. Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character

3. Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character The upshot of the theory movement, contrary to what many have understood , pointed toward finding what it will take to forge a new literary history . From Fredric Jameson’s slogan, ‘‘always historicize,’’ to Michel Foucault’s genealogies, to the critiques of traditional (teleological, periodizing , objectifying) historiography by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Hayden White, to British historical materialism and American New Historicism , this is the message.1 The conjunction of Shakespeare and Dickens is propitious for taking another step into this project, for Shakespeare has been the object of intense attention by theorists concerned with history.2 In the United States, the Berkeley journal Representations, widely acknowledged as most brilliantly instantiating New Historicism, counted among its founding editorial group two powerfully learned and innovative Shakespeareans, Stephen Jay Greenblatt and the late Joel Fineman. In order to reach my topic, I will emphasize one respect in which the work of Fineman and Greenblatt still follows an old historicism. Both continue a massive nineteenth-century line of belief, broadly epitomized by Jakob Burckhardt on Renaissance individualism, in holding that Shakespeare inaugurated what Fineman calls ‘‘a recognizably modern literature of individuated, motivated character’’; or as Greenblatt puts it, ‘‘Shakespearean theater virtually defines in our literary tradition the representation of individuals .’’3 This is true enough in one sense, but my claim (not uniquely mine) is that the sense of character, and of literature, that they find in Shakespeare became available only in the nineteenth century. Recall that Samuel Johnson in the 1765 preface to his edition differed from us: Johnson praised Shakespeare for providing the typical and general, not the individual or particular . This nineteenth-century sense of individuality is still considerably ours, but it is also no longer ours, at least enough that it becomes possible to put that sense of character and literature to historical examination, and to find that it is part of our romantic and Victorian rather than Elizabethan heritage. 34 Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character 35 Dickens provides a focus for thinking about the process by which the modern sense of character was brought into existence through—not by— Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is our contemporary—as Jan Kott memorably titled his book in the 1960s—it is only because of a continual process of reworking that has continued to produce him in successive cultural formations since his own. My exploration thus furthers the project of new literary history by paying attention to the reception history of works after their time of initial production, by concern with their cultural afterlives.4 It also involves two other areas crucial for recent work: the historical study of the production of the subject and the process of intertextuality.5 My procedure involves some characterization of Little Dorrit that moves to establish a precise philological connection between Hamlet and Little Dorrit, with a focus on Arthur Clennam. This connection sustains the larger set of intertextual claims and connections that I then wish to develop. With the leading string of Hamlet, I relate the construction of Arthur Clennam as a character—in the larger sense of one who is conceived of as a character, not just characterization but also metacharacterization—to three distinct discursive strands that come together: one line from the inward-turned practices of Bildung fiction, one line from the highly externalized theatrical practices that feed into the projective and expressionistic atmospheric effects of gothic fiction, and an intellectual line from the new literary criticism of Shakespeare that began in the romantic period, as discussed in the previous two chapters. The project that brings me to this conjunction is the attempt to elaborate a full historical poetics of the novel in the nineteenth century. Although obviously crucial in any such attempt, character has not been an effective concern of current criticism.6 Indeed, ‘‘character’’ in our times may be a critical concept useful only for thinking about popular fiction and biography . It thus marks the historical specificity of a particular period within high culture. In reading the nineteenth-century novel (as for some other purposes ), the notion of character has two major valences, predictive and interpretive . These correspond roughly to what E. M. Forster designated flat and round (a better word might be deep) characters.7 Of flat characters, one feels safe in predicting what they will do in a situation; round characters are more appropriately subject to interpretation after the fact: Of them we say, ‘‘That...