Herfst 2007 no. 61
Burdett-Couts: As to my art, I have as great a
delight in it as the most enthusiastic of my
readers; and the sense of my trust and res
ponsibility in that wise, is always upon me
when I take pen in hand. If I were soured, I
should still try to sweeten the lives and fan
cies of others, but I am not -not at all'.
De wat zwaardere, soms melancholieke toon
in de late werken valt mijns inziens te wijten
aan het natuurlijke proces van veroudering en
de desillusies die dit met zich meebrengt.
Maar tot het eind bleef hij trouw aan zijn
motto: 'to teach and delight'.
Boffen wij even
CHARLES DICKENS ALS PSYCHOLOOG AVANT LA LETTRE
door Jan den Breejen
Perfectionist Dickens staat bekend om
de medogenloos exacte wijze waarop hij
ziektebeelden van mensen beschrijft.
Een aantal voorbeelden: zwakzinnige
Maggie in Little Dorrit, 'Fat Boy' de
Pickwick Papers (slaapziekte) en
Flint winch met zijn kromgegroeide nek
in Little Dorrit. De beschrijvingen van
Dickens zijn zo compleet dat we met de
moderne klinische symptomenlijst in
de hand probleemloos het betreffende
ziektebeeld kunnen 'afvinken'.
Om er achter te komen of Dickens ook karak
terstijlen beschrijft volgens de criteria van de
DSM-IV, de 'bijbel' van de moderne psycholo
gie, heb ik een onderzoekje gedaan, waaraan 3
Dickensians hebben meegewerkt.
Onderzoeksobject is Arthur Clennam. Maria
Cristina Paganoni schrijft in haar artikel
Doubles, Dreams and Deaths in Little Dorrit
over Arthur:
17
ickensian Volume XXVII
Melancholy, on the other hand, is a self-reflexive
feeling, nurtured by loss and longing, whose main
object of analysis is, in the first place, the same
self and its contradicting emotions. The melan
cholic mood, therefore, tends to produce an inti
mate kind of writing, reactive to the ways the
world is taken in by subjectivity. A self-centred
feeling, melancholy is different from mourning, as
Freud argued, in that it is not related to a specific
loss but rather expresses the general fear felt by
the self when facing existential instability and his
torical change. Since death is the most powerful
among the agents that frustrate man's doomed
attempt to gratify desire permanently, melan
choly relates indeed to the apprehension of death,
but does so only indirectly, anaesthetising the
impasse of grief by means of compensating activi
ties like fantasisingin "a state of passivity in
which the awareness of changes, decay, and end
is filtered through a specific bittersweet reverie"
(Balus: 1998, 414). In Little Dorrit, in particular,
it is Arthur Clennam, the hypersensitive middle-
aged hero, who is evidently prone to depression
and melancholy. Clennam is a "dreamer" (LD, Bk.
I, Ch. 3, 80; Bk. I, Ch. 13, 206) whose recurrent
death wish is manifest in the several references he
makes to himself as a perfect "nobody"t and in his
self-defeating dreams about impossible happiness.
Why should he be vexed or sore at heart? It was
not his weakness that he had imagined. It was
nobodv's, nobody's within his knowledge; why
shoula it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him.
And he thought &endash; who has not thought for
a moment sometimes &endash; that it might be
better to flow away monotonously, like the river,
and to compound for its insensibility to happiness
with its insensibility to pain (LD, Bk. I, Ch. 16,
244)-
In the Victorian period, when the perception of
living in a time of decline is a widespread feeling
melancholy becomes a social malady. A combina
tion of overlapping and mutually influencing dis
courses, both philosophical and scientific, rein
forces the pessimistic view of a declining world,
marching towards death because of its irretriev
able waste of energy. Significantly Kristeva's defi
nition of melancholy as the black sun of the soul,
though it belongs to psychoanalytic discourse,
recalls at the same time the typical Victorian
obsession with the death of the sun and a world
getting irredeemably cold, inside and outside,
thus suggesting an interplay of fascinating corre
spondences between microcosm and macrocosm
within the symbolism of modernity 2.
As for the gloomy notes of Dickens's fiction that
coexist with unbound comicality in the same texts
