Dickens’s third novel, the much-dramatized Nicholas Nickleby, suggests itself as a chief exhibit in any case for the buoyant and prodigious—one might even say carnivalesque—theatricality of Dickens’s early work. “Dickens’s fascination with the world of the theatre,” Michael Slater observes, “is manifest everywhere in his writings, but nowhere given such joyous scope as in Nicholas Nickleby.”^[9] And yet, for the reasons that even Schlicke has to register, both the joyousness and the scope of the novel’s protheatricality may be somewhat restricted. For the hero’s evident misgivings about his involvement with the Crummles troupe, and the ultimate removal of that troupe from the novel, betoken a larger pattern of segregation within the novel. “In the final analysis,” Schlicke admits, “the rejection of Crummles is consonant with his isolation from the rest of the book.”^[10] It is as though, well before the narrative dispatches Crummles and company to America, it had already set up a sort of internal colony within which to contain them. That the account of Nicholas’s experiences as a member of the troupe merely constitutes a more or less discrete textual interlude is of course attributable to the novel’s loose, episodic structure. But generic or formal considerations alone cannot explain the persistent effect of a rigorous separation between the theatricality of Crummles and his players, on the one hand, and the main interest of the novel—the violent, persecutory relations between Nicholas and Ralph Nickleby—on the other. What makes this separation so peculiar, moreover, is that it is hard to tell whether the “utopia” of the theatrical world is thereby being protected from the more extensive, conspicuously dystopian realm presided over by Ralph, or vice versa.

Nor does it help to call the latter space “antitheatrical.” For though Ralph is indeed something of a killjoy, he is not only a highly theatrical character in his own right—we can identify him easily enough with the stereotypical villain of Victorian melodrama—but one who is himself fascinated, if not by the world of the theater, then by the theater of the world. Confronted with a great financial loss, and with the frustration of one of his nefarious schemes, the usurer regrets most painfully—and most theatrically—the consequent loss of opportunities for sadistic capitalization on the theatricality of others:

Ten thousand pounds! How many proud painted dames would have fawned and smiled, and how many spendthrift blockheads done me lip-service to my face and cursed me in their hearts, while I turned that ten thousand pounds into twenty! While I ground, and pinched, and used these needy borrowers for my pleasure and profit, what smooth-tongued speeches, and courteous looks, and civil letters they would have given me! The cant of the lying world is, that men like me compass our riches by dissimulation and treachery, by fawning, cringing, and stooping. Why, how many lies, what mean and abject evasions, what humbled behaviour from upstarts who, but for my money, would spurn me aside as they do their betters every day, would that ten thousand pounds have brought me in!

At once relishing and assailing “the cant of the lying world”—relishing it because it is so eminently assailable—Ralph shifts the charge of “dissimulation and treachery” onto his victims, imaging the world they inhabit as a veritable theater of duplicity. If this ruthlessly excited critique of worldliness makes Ralph sound like Charlotte Brontë on a particularly bad day, it also voices the specifically male, and male-volent, theatrical ethos that occupies much of the novel. For the dog-eat-dog world view that Ralph implies here gets enacted most recurrently and spectacularly in his relationship with his nephew. Borrowing from recent Foucault-inspired readings of Dickens, we could call the theatricality inherent in that relationship “panoptic” or “paranoid.”^[11] “Across my path, at every turn, go where I will, do what I may, he comes!” (p. 813). Ralph is speaking here, but it could just as easily be Nicholas, since one of the features of this specular scenario is precisely the interchangeability of hunter and hunted.

To be sure, Ralph and Nicholas are not completely interchangeable: one could hardly overlook the Manichean distribution of roles in this family drama. Yet it is telling that, within the all-too-comprehensive framework of the panoptic or paranoid plot, one opposition that does not come into play, as it were, is that between the grinding theatricality of surveillance and one-upmanship associated with Ralph and the supposedly life-enhancing theatricality of “joy” and extravagance associated with Crummles. Certainly, the vitality and generosity of the players stand in sharp contrast to the meannesses relentlessly perpetrated by Ralph. But the point is that those virtues merely stand—that they have no more than a static relation to the novel’s more compelling and more consuming theatrical agenda.

Insofar as the collision fails to take place, any argument for the “carnivalesque” effect of Crummles and his players must remain merely wishful. Unlike, say, Villette, Nicholas Nickleby keeps its “Bakhtinian” theatricality at more than arm’s length from its “Foucauldian” theatricality, so that to call the former “Bakhtinian” or “carnivalesque” at all is itself misleading. Since the “utopianism” of that theatricality consists mainly in its relegation to a rather inconsequential place apart—apart from the much larger theater in which the novel’s central conflict unfolds—it would be more accurate, if less politically stimulating, to call the distant and oddly abstract site thus constituted “ludic.”^[12] For while the players are indeed incessantly playful, there is relatively little at stake in their play. Working to limit their theatricality to what may be imagined as precisely a more manageable (because spatially and temporally fixed) “stage,” the circumscription of their textual existence—the narrowness and the literally provincial remoteness of the scope allotted for their performances—guarantees that their subversions will subvert nothing.

In the previous chapter, of course, I attempted to gesture beyond, or perhaps beneath, the dichotomy of subversion versus authority, indicating the need for more plural and discriminate ways of analyzing theatrical (and literary) politics. What I am arguing here is not that the theatricality represented by the Crummles troupe fails to be “genuinely” subversive, but rather that, like the authority-subversion dualism itself, at least as it is often deployed, it fails to be very useful, not to say very interesting. In a general sense, for example, it is possible to read as “subversive” the much-quoted passage in which Crummles bids Nicholas farewell:

Mr. Crummles, who could never lose any opportunity for professional display, had turned out for the express purpose of taking a public farewell of Nicholas; and to render it the more imposing, he was now, to that young gentleman’s most profound annoyance, inflicting upon him a rapid succession of stage embraces, which, as everybody knows, are performed by the embracer’s laying his or her chin on the shoulder of the object of affection, and looking over it. This Mr. Crummles did in the highest style of melodrama, pouring forth at the same time all the most dismal forms of farewell he could think of, out of the stock pieces.

Crummles’s flagrant offstage hamminess in some sense deconstructs the opposition between the “psychological” inside and the “social” outside (“how many spendthrift blockheads [would have] done me lip-service to my face and cursed me in their hearts”) presupposed by Ralph Nickleby’s theatricality of “dissimulation and treachery.” Yet, although this passage might scandalize a reader like Robert Garis, it seems far less corrosive, given its Dickensian context, than such otherwise similar acts as Henry Crawford’s reading aloud and Jane Eyre’s soliloquizing. In Dickens’s text, in other words, the contradiction between Crummles’s “deconstructive” theatricality and Ralph’s more “conservative” theatricality, however disturbing that contradiction may appear from a certain ideological perspective, simply does not amount to much, thematically or otherwise.

There is one other way, however, in which the passage quoted above might seem to signify. For when Crummles’s flamboyant farewell occasions in Nicholas “profound annoyance,” we sense the possibility of productive contact between the Nicholas-Ralph plot and the Nicholas-Crummles plot—between, that is, a tortuously oedipalized relationship and what would seem to be its sweetly uncomplicated antithesis. And yet, despite the encouragement offered to this view by Nicholas’s rather ill-timed tirade against the “literary gentleman” at the farewell supper for the Crummles family in chapter 48—a not-so-veiled attack by Dickens on playwrights who had plagiarized his works, including the present one—the would-be deidealizing critic is hard put to generate much friction from the contiguity between Nicholas’s earlier annoyance and his later indignation, since, as a moderately close reading of the novel will show, it is not about to stage a relativizing dialogue between its paranoid theatricality and its joyously (and asexually) ludic theatricality. At best, one can use the evidence at hand to cast further doubt on too unqualified a view of Dickens as an enthusiastic partisan of popular entertainment. Writing for (or about) at least two distinct and incommensurable stages—the one so isolated as to risk the inertia of literality, the other so insidiously generalized as to resemble a pervasive and almost invisible malignancy rather than a determinate textual locus—Dickens “in effect” prevents them from overlapping with, and consequently from having much of an effect upon, each other.

Thus, while it may still be true that, as Gillian Beer says, Dickens’s “style is spectacle,” the disjunctive representation of theatricality in Nicholas Nickleby, at any rate, presents a challenge to the homogenizing tendency of many accounts of the Dickens theater. In place of a total theatrical system which offers itself up for either celebration or condemnation, we discover in that text a set of discontinuous theatricalities: the nonrelation between theatrical themes or topoi raises questions about the supposedly organic linkage between those topoi on the one hand and theatricality as a “style” or discursive mode on the other hand. Such questions loom large in a novel from Dickens’s middle period like Hard Times (1854). As Catherine Gallagher has shown, “the book has an excessively metaphoric style, as well as a metaphoric structure, and its style becomes one of its themes.”^[13] Far from signaling the happy synthesis of stylistic and thematic levels, however, that thematization ends up intensifying the sense of fracture within the Dickens theater. For if, in Gallagher’s words, Hard Times “simultaneously flaunts and discredits its metaphoricality,”^[14] which we might specify as a ludic theatricality at the level of style, that self-criticism points to the possibility of a nonthematized theatrical style—a style held in reserve, exempt from the discreditation visited upon the overtly interrogated ludic theatricality; a style that corresponds, not surprisingly, to the panoptic theatrical theme so crucial both here and in Nicholas Nickleby. In Hard Times, that is, a disjunctiveness of stylistic theatricalities may replicate the earlier novel’s disjunctiveness of thematic theatricalities.

It will of course seem perverse to suggest that this novel, so explicitly and programmatically directed against the culture of panopticism, is in fact secretly complicit with it. One might object that, though the novel may undermine the ludic values it means to uphold, it certainly has no intention of upholding panoptic ones. As is well known, Hard Times constitutes an attack on utilitarianism, the very doctrine that, in the writings of Bentham, provides the precise model for Foucault’s elaboration of “an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’ ” within post-Enlightenment Western culture.^[15] The novel would thus lend itself not only to a Foucauldian reading but also, more interestingly, to a reading of Foucault. My aim here is not to conduct either of those readings, but merely to point out some of the ways in which Dickens’s text (perhaps like Foucault’s) surreptitiously allows for and depends upon a certain panoptic remainder after the critique of panopticism has been performed.^[16] For where Nicholas Nickleby erects a barrier between its panoptic and ludic theatricalities, Hard Times, more intricately, at once stages a sort of “dialectical” interplay between them and withholds from that interplay the cognitive power and organizational privilege that may hence redound upon the narration itself. From a perspective like Gallagher’s, this leftover panopticism might look like another incriminating trace of a failed (because self-contradictory) ideological project; but in the diachronic context of the technological development to which the novel contributes, this “failure” may constitute a step on the road to “success.”

What makes the relationship between Gradgrind’s panopticism and the ludic sphere of the circus appear “dialectical” is that, instead of merely substituting the latter for the former, the novel appropriates ludic values so as to humanize the mechanisms of control and surveillance. This strategy is exemplified synecdochally in the sequence of the plot, whereby Sissy Jupe, the clown’s daughter, is first taken into the Gradgrind family and then permitted to exercise her mitigating influence upon Gradgrind and his daughter Louisa. In the last paragraph of the novel, the narrator recapitulates the strategy: we are left with an image of Sissy “thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will be Writing on the Wall.”^[17] As this passage makes clear, the novel does not call for the triumph of “fancy” over “machinery and reality”; rather, it calls upon “fancy” to “beautify” “machinery and reality.” Despite the intensity of its antiutilitarian rhetoric, Hard Times recommends not so much an end to panoptic culture as the consolidation of a kinder, gentler panopticism. It is as though Ralph Nickleby had adopted one of the Crummles children, so that the joy thus enlisted, gradually turning the villain into a nice guy after all, might ultimately improve the image of the power he deploys.

Even in a fairly obvious thematic way, then, Hard Times is not quite as hard on its times as one might think. Yet, as is often the case with such liberal concessions, the “dialectic” that makes the book so accommodating tends to break down—to borrow Bakhtin’s distinction—into something less harmoniously “dialogic.”^[18] In other words, instead of, or in addition to, the compromise formation that the novel seems to intend, it produces collisions like those that failed to occur in Nicholas Nickleby; the standoff between panoptic and ludic theatricalities that we noted in the earlier novel is here replaced by certain kinds of pile-up that are all the more interesting for appearing not to be what the author has in mind.

Other critics have observed some of these collisions, analyzing, for instance, the grotesque displacement of circus imagery into the description of industrial Coketown (p. 65), the odd similarity between the obnoxious and spuriously “self-made” Bounderby and the lovable and fancifully “made-up” circus folk, and the way the innocence and fun of Sleary’s horse-riding get repeated, in the climactic scene of the Gradgrind family reunion, in the mode of “grim farce.”^[19] If such effects suggest that the theatricality of Sleary’s troupe, unlike the otherwise comparable theatricality of Crummles’s, may legitimately be called “carnivalesque,” the disruptive contact that they attest works both ways: the panoptic can relativize the ludic as much as the ludic can relativize the panoptic. That is, while contact with Sleary can make the sober discourse of “fact” sound a little slurred and silly, contact with the Gradgrinds and Bounderby can make Sleary seem a little sleazy. These collisions are also collusions, where the connotations of “playing together” are no longer merely “innocent and pretty.” As participants in actual carnivals might confirm, there is something sinister as well as liberating about the carnivalesque.

If the novel does not quite succeed in bringing off its “dialectic” without a hitch, however, it is not content to settle for the symmetrical unsettling whereby, for instance, the world of the schoolroom (and of the factory) and the world of show penetrate and parody each other. In Villette (which was published the year before Hard Times), Brontë does not settle for such a consoling structure either: as we saw at the end of the previous chapter, the play of “authority” and “subversion” in Brontë’s text inscribes not a neutralizing specularity but a risky micropolitics of sexual overdetermination. In Hard Times, Dickens confounds symmetry by inscribing a rather different sexual politics, in which the ludic parody of panopticism gets gendered as female, so that, unlike its converse, it can more easily be made a spectacle of and then ejected from the novel. I am referring to the narrator’s treatment of Mrs. Sparsit, Bounderby’s déclassée housekeeper. A somewhat marginal character, Mrs. Sparsit is subjected to curiously intense and elaborate narrative framing. The narrative sets her up, that is, in ways and for reasons that demand consideration, for the excessively gleeful framing and abjection of this character go a long way toward securing the unproblematized panopticism that Dickens reserves for his own use.

As with all the evildoers in his novels, Dickens provides us with abundant reasons for wanting to see Mrs. Sparsit humiliated and banished: we have no trouble convicting her of being malicious, self-serving, snobbish, reactionary, sexually manipulative, and so on. But what indicts her most decisively, if not most palpably, is the way in which she combines all of these vices in her self-appointed project of spying on Louisa Gradgrind and Louisa’s would-be seducer, James Harthouse. For in thus playing detective—and the word “play” is crucial here—Mrs. Sparsit unbecomingly, indeed illicitly, arrogates to herself—and thereby mocks—the privilege of surveillance that should ultimately accrue not so much to the operators of the “beautified” or rehabilitated social “machinery” as to the author who prescribes its reform. Insofar as she would assume a position of empowered spectatorship, Mrs. Sparsit must herself be exposed as “an interesting spectacle” (p. 258) instead:

Now, Mrs. Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea, in the nature of an allegorical fancy, into her head. Much watching of Louisa, and much consequent observation of her impenetrable demeanour, which keenly whetted and sharpened Mrs. Sparsit’s edge, must have given her as it were a lift, in the way of inspiration. She erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming.

It became the business of Mrs. Sparsit’s life, to look up at her staircase, and to watch Louisa coming down. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes several steps at one bout, sometimes stopping, never turning back. If she had once turned back, it might have been the death of Mrs. Sparsit in spleen and grief.

Taking this “allegorical fancy…into her head,” Mrs. Sparsit embodies—one might say with a vengeance—what Mark Seltzer has called “the fantasy of surveillance.”^[20] Yet vengeance therefore finally belongs to Dickens, who, in staging her detective work as a Gothic “erection” “inspired” self-damningly by projective wish-fulfillment, effectively pulls the rug out from underneath it. Though ungrounded in the “innocent and pretty” impulses informing the kind of “fancy” that the novel affirms, Mrs. Sparsit’s “fancy” is not quite as epistemologically shaky as Dickens would have us believe: her staircase does have some foundation in “fact.” As we might expect, however, Louisa does “turn back,” and just in the nick of time, with the welcome result that the nosy Mrs. Sparsit’s fondly and presumptuously contrived structure comes tumbling down all around her. In previous chapters, we have seen how the positions of spectator and spectacle may be reversed, but the present reversal has a particular punitive force. When Louisa flees from Harthouse’s advances and seeks her father’s protection, a disappointed Mrs. Sparsit gets shown up by the only “detective” this text will authorize, and shown off by that author as proof of his superior power of surveillance:

But, Mrs. Sparsit was wrong in her calculation. Louisa got into no coach, and was already gone. The black eyes kept upon the railroad-carriage in which she had travelled, settled upon it a moment too late. The door not being opened after several minutes, Mrs. Sparsit passed it and repassed it, saw nothing, looked in, and found it empty. Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage; with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore, printed off upon her highly-connected back; with a stagnant verdure on her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of bitterness and say, “I have lost her!”

That final lament not only caps this account of Mrs. Sparsit’s defeat but also hints at another, perhaps especially arousing, reason why she must be defeated in the first place. As Gallagher observes, “to fancy” has a sexual as well as an epistemological meaning.^[21] Mrs. Sparsit’s hatred of Louisa, whom she at one point apostrophizes, with uncertain sarcasm, as “my dearest love” (p. 235), may not be entirely separable from the love that dare not speak its name. The authorial law that requires her abjection—to complete her punishment, Bounderby ultimately fires her—does so, in any case, to fend off precisely the kind of overdetermined sexual politics that we signaled in Villette and that, as we will see, looms so large in the sensation novel. Like Lucy Snowe and her rival, Madame Beck, Mrs. Sparsit threatens to inscribe—or, worse, to disclose—elements of fantasy, motives of desire, in any surveillance whatsoever, including its more discreet, respectable, and male-sponsored versions. Denying such overdetermination by making a mockery of her mockery, Dickens at the same time asserts the prerogatives of inscription as exclusively and unproblematically his own. “With damp impressions…printed off upon her highly-connected back,” Mrs. Sparsit, who would have become an “author” in her own right, becomes instead a mere text, testifying to the sovereignty of her creator. Like the prisoner in Kafka’s penal colony, she must bear upon her body the lesson she has failed to learn otherwise. By ignoring the “Writing on the Wall,” she in effect sentences herself to being written on and written off.

As we know from Freud, of course, denial (Verneinung) “is a way of taking account of what is repressed.”^[22] One might thus argue in Dickens’s defense (as though he needed defending) that his punishment of Mrs. Sparsit is itself an instance of the transgression it would both censure and forestall. It would follow from such an argument that, while (or because) Hard Times underwrites a covert authorial panopticism, it equally maintains a covert ludic, even an authentically subversive, theatricality. Although this might be an appealing proposition, I would resist its implicit symmetry by pointing to the redundancy of the process whereby Dickens spectacularizes Mrs. Sparsit: as we have seen, the ludic parody of panopticism that she enacts is already inscribed in the collisions that take place elsewhere in the text, and that get framed much less hysterically. If Freud suggests that denial has its ambivalent ironies, he also concludes, less reassuringly, that it “belongs to the instinct of destruction.”^[23] To claim, moreover, that Mrs. Sparsit’s offense consists not in mobilizing the carnivalesque, but in mobilizing it in the wrong way, would be to miss the point of the carnivalesque itself, which, unlike, say, the hermeneutic circle, presumably refuses to be adjudicated in terms of “right” and “wrong” modalities. Where Nicholas Nickleby gives us pause to the extent that, permitting Ralph and associates to upstage Crummles and company, it simply seems more interested in the former than in the latter, Hard Times, though more politically interesting, suggests that the political interests invested in the Dickens theater may not be quite the same as those it purports to serve.

Of course, what makes a text like Hard Times more “interesting,” at least for late-twentieth-century critics, is precisely the suspicion that it engenders in us. Rather like Mrs. Sparsit, we may enjoy a somewhat wishful relation to the objects of our surveillance, getting “as it were a lift” from the very ideological complicities that would seem to mark a fall. This explains why a late novel such as Great Expectations, with its even more advanced system of representational discipline, can be seen as at once disturbingly “pessimistic” and gratifyingly “successful” as a work of art. I am by no means proposing that Great Expectations implicitly constitutes a sort of belated tribute or apology to the spirit of Mrs. Sparsit. Indeed, although much of the novel’s “comedy” might appear to be aimed at the fanciful character of social machinery—one thinks, for example, of the description in chapter 20 of the cult-like adoration that makes the lawyer Jaggers look like a contemporary rock star—the novel both demonstrates and exemplifies the way in which that machinery harnesses the irony and playfulness that supposedly elude it.

For in the thoroughly mechanized world that the novel portrays, the ludic can neither stand outside (or on the margins of) social constraint nor disrupt it from within. Where Crummles’s troupe, however ineffectual, at least has its own well-defined textual purview, and where Sleary’s horse-riding, however compromised, at least seems to occupy a symbolic “neutral ground” (p. 55), Great Expectations offers no equivalent focus or site of putatively nonpanoptic theatricality. Though Mr. Wopsle’s career as an actor—especially as it achieves a climax of sorts in the famous scene of his performance as Hamlet—might seem to suggest itself for this purpose, Wopsle’s theatrics are absorbed by the paranoid or crime plot that they thereby fail to oppose. For example, one of the more impressive ways in which the young Pip’s fear of authority is reinforced is through Wopsle’s reading of George Barnwell; a few chapters later, Wopsle may be seen regaling his fellow villagers, a little too self-delightingly, with his dramatic reading of a report of a murder; and as if to clinch the point that his antic disposition subserves rather than subverts the book’s paranoid plot, it is in the course of one of his later, even more ludicrous performances that Wopsle spots the archvillain, Compeyson, sitting in the audience behind Pip.^[24] That scene of recognition, ominously playing up the by-now-familiar ambiguity whereby spectators become spectacles and vice versa, makes clear what has been implicit in the novel all along: namely, that the various comic turns executed by Wopsle, as well as by numerous other characters, never really demarcate a significant oppositional stage, but stay firmly within the confines of the theater of surveillance and suspicion. As in Hamlet, a pre-text upon which, as Edward Said has shown, Dickens tropes elaborately in this novel,^[25] the embedded entertainment functions mainly as a pretext for entrapment, thus showing itself to be trapped within a larger, oppressively male-centered scenario of competition, persecution, and revenge.

The plotter at the center of the novel’s mysterious plots, Compeyson is of course punished himself when he drowns in attempting (successfully, as it turns out) to persecute Magwitch. Yet, unlike Mrs. Sparsit, who would also usurp certain authorial prerogatives, Compeyson, whom Peter Brooks calls “the novel’s hidden arch-plotter,”^[26] enjoys the privilege of inconspicuousness, instead of being held up drippingly as a cautionary figure of fun: even when, as in the recognition scene, Compeyson actually makes an appearance, he looks distinctly “like a ghost.”^[27] Though Compeyson pays for his transgressions with his life, so that Mrs. Sparsit’s humiliation and dismissal appear mild in comparison, Dickens seems oddly deferential toward this potential rival. This apparent inconsistency can easily be explained in terms of “male bonding,” in all the figurative and literal senses in which the book allows us to imagine that term; what is somewhat less self-evident (though, even so, not much of a secret in this frankly “pessimistic” work) is that the textual network in which Dickens pulls so many strings coincides to a remarkable degree with the criminal system over which Compeyson reigns. When Brooks argues that “the criminally deviant, transgressive plot…[has] priority over all the others”^[28] in the novel, he points to the connection between the supposedly legitimate machinery of social control—instantiated here by the machinery of narration—and the supposedly illegitimate practices of coercion and constraint that in fact relate to the former not as parody but as paradigm. It is as though the “world” of reformed panopticism that we encountered in Hard Times turned out to have modeled itself not upon the humanized Gradgrind family, but upon the “world” of Ralph Nickleby—a figure whose insidiously diffusive power and influence Dickens indeed seemed to admire a bit too much.^[29]

Thus, the paranoia that Compeyson activates in Pip (it “was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow,” [p. 399]) gets generalized throughout the narrative, virtually structuring Pip’s (and almost everyone else’s) entire social experience. So widespread is this paranoia, so nearly does it attain to the status of universality, that it has the ironic effect of erasing the boundary line between the social and the psychological. Indeed, as the veritable lingua franca of this paranoid world, irony supplies paranoia with a certain cognitive credibility even as it drains paranoia of its affective coloring. When Estella speaks to Pip in her usual deflationary tone, he reacts with a pathos that would disguise the obviousness, not to say the banality, of the news she brings: “Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our intercourse did give me pain” (p. 288). What is “painful” here is how routine, how automatic, this “pain” has become. And just as that sensation or affect seems to have been emptied of its individuating potential, so the ludic reference, which might at least appear to intimate a compensatory public or collective dimension, instead conveys the very irony that flattens it out as “mere” puppetry.

Here and throughout the novel, irony, far from introducing a saving levity, has all the heaviness of the convict’s leg-iron with which Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe. Describing his childhood, Pip rationalizes his paranoid projections, even as he appears to make light of them:

I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.

To the extent that it becomes a structural or “stylistic” feature of the narrative itself, the rhetorical technique that would seem comically to put such discipline at a distance underlies a whole technology of discipline, where law and order are now maintained at the level of textual self-regulation. The self-conscious obliquity that in this passage signifies facetiousness pervades the narrative, displaying a quasi-mechanical insistence, and culminating in the double bind of the novel’s second, “happier” ending. That “happiness” is questionable, of course, because the irony that has been systematizing the text from the beginning now leaves its distinctive mark in the notorious undecidability of Pip’s fate: not only is it impossible to know what it means that he “saw no shadow of a future parting from” Estella (p. 492), but even if we could know, it would be impossible to determine whether the result—either union or separation—were desirable or not. Instead of opening up alternatives to or within the strictures of social organization, irony—sometimes imagined, in its defensive character, as salutary, even life-giving—has become one of those strictures, the rhetorical equivalent of the Accoucheur Policeman.

Yet, if the Dickens theater thus finally appears to achieve the coherence of a totalizing system, the potentially depressing implications of that triumph may nonetheless be mitigated by a recognition of the precariousness implicit in its genealogy. As a textual machine, Great Expectations indeed seems more efficient than Hard Times, but that efficiency may well have something to do with the later novel’s adoption of a first-person narrative mode, in which the author’s own self-betraying power-plays—such as that which we inferred from his treatment of Mrs. Sparsit—are not so much transcended as merely camouflaged by his identification with the protagonist. More ambiguously, the efficiency of Great Expectations also depends, as we have seen, upon its persistent collapsing of the ludic into the panoptic. Although the result of this procedure here is the assimilation of playful or even contestatory energies, such collapsing, as Dickens’s counterparts in sensation fiction show, can have unpredictable consequences.^[30] While it can flatten out and thereby vitiate certain forces of possible resistance, it can also reinscribe them in a context that hence becomes all the more vulnerable to them. As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, the flatness of conventionalized theatricality may facilitate a promiscuous slippage or play of signifiers, which may in turn trace within the text a provocatively unconventional micropolitics of sexuality. Though, even in sensation fiction, collapse by no means guarantees such effects, it can certainly help to produce them, shaking up the kind of novelistic “stage” that a writer like Dickens manages ever more stringently.