Abstract
At the end of Book I, chapter 5 of A Tale of Two Cities, there is an apparently trivial exchange between Jarvis Lorry and Ernest Defarge, which occurs just before Lucie Manette and Lorry see her father for the first time since his release from eighteen years’ imprisonment in the Bastille. Lorry speaks first:
‘Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?’
‘I show him … to a chosen few.’
‘Is that well?’
‘I think it is well.’
‘Who are the few? How do you choose them?’
‘I choose them as real men, of my name — Jacques is my name.’
(TTC, I, v, 40)
Defarge then strikes ‘twice or thrice upon the door’, drawing ‘the key across it, three or four times’ (I, v, 40) before they enter the room. In this threshold scene, wrapped in enigma, it is striking how often we are asked to register countable numbers: two, three and four times, as well as the uncounted ‘few’ who are privileged to witness the still-suffering Manette, and who are both named and unnamed by the generic ‘Jacques’. But this is of a piece with the novel as a whole, which is full of counting, and troubled by its relationship with naming. I want to argue that we should be more aware of this distinctive and insistent quality of the book, and should particularly note the ways in which such counting and uncountability represent (or figure, or account for) kinds of political being and obligation in relation to other kinds of more familiarly novelistic action and duty.
If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, ‘What are you doing there?’ I should reply at once, ‘I am counting.’
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
It calculates so as not to have to speak, for fear of falling back into nothingness.
Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969)
— In small numbers, but what is a small number? Where does it begin and end? At one? At one plus one? One plus one man? One plus one woman? Or none whatsoever? Do you mean to say that it begins with all men and all women, with anyone? And does democracy count?
— Democracy counts, it counts votes and subjects, but it does not count, should not count, ordinary singularities: there is no numerus clauses for arrivants.
— It is perhaps still necessary to calculate, but differently, differently with one and with the other.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1994)
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
John Berryman, from ‘Dream Song 29’
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997); The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Alex Woloch, The One versus the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1880), p. 27.
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: AHistory(London: Chapman&Hall, 1880), vol. 3, p. 28.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 59, 62; Considerations on Representative Government (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991).
John R. Greenfield in his Dictionary of British Literary Characters ‘counts some 11,663 figures invented by novelists writing between the later 17th century and 1890, 989 (approximately8per cent)ofwhom are Dickens’s, asumwhich puts him ahead of Scott (872), and gives him a commanding lead over all other Victorian novelists save Trollope’. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 76. More ambitiously, George Newlin, in the most comprehensive examination of Dickens’s naming practice, has identified 13,143 people mentioned by Dickens, of whom there are ‘2,640 “serious” surname usages, 410 named characters without surname (plus 65 surname or animal names), and 565 figures who bear sobriquets or names of parody’.
George Newlin, Everyone in Dickens: Volume I: Plots, People and Publishing Particulars in the Complete Works, 1833–1849 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), front matter.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 20.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities’, DSA, 12 (1983), 125–45.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1982); Oxford Reader’s Companion, p. 339.
See, for example, Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Mathew, Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 64.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1989), p. 75.
The countings of the novel to which we are bound as readers do not end with the boundaries of the text or with the explicit enumeration within it. It was published, for example, in 31 weekly parts, from 30 April to 26 November 1859, in eight monthly numbers (the final one being, as was Dickens’s customary practice, a double one) from June to December 1859 and in one volume in the same year. For a sense of the need to mark dates in the novel’s ‘complex time-scheme’, see Andrew Sanders, The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 24–9.
For the enumeration necessary to understand its publication history, see Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 276–8 and 456–7.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Gallagher, ‘Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities’. More generally, on the ‘compulsive and repetitious domination’ of critical judgements on Dickens by ‘an essentially uncritical mechanism of doubling and division’, see John Bowen and Robert L. Patten, ‘Introduction’ to Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 6.
Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’ in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), p. 66.
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 2.
For John Lucas, it is Dickens’s ‘worst’ novel. John Lucas, The Melancholy Man (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 287.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 81–2.
Derrida, Gift, p. 9. See also Jan Patoɩcka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996).
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 257.
SeeAndrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), and Lukács, Historical Novel.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 424–55;
Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 181–98;
and Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 76–7, 114–15. On the idea of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) in Heidegger, see Being and Time, pp. 135, 219–24;
and Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 218–20.
‘Carton enacts on that scaffold… the most archaic, the most grandiose of all nar-cissistic fantasies.’ John Glavin, After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 137.
Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts, ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey’, The Lancet, 368, no. 9545, 21–27 October 2006, pp. 1421–8.
‘Most of the characteristics falsely attributed to introjection in fact apply to the fantasmatic mechanism of incorporation.’ Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis Volume 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 113.
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© 2009 John Bowen
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Bowen, J. (2009). Counting On: A Tale of Two Cities. In: Jones, C., McDonagh, J., Mee, J. (eds) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230273894_7
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