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eBook details

• Title: Alfred Jingle and the Pleasure of Incompleteness (Notes) (Essay)
• Author : Dickens Quarterly
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 174 KB

Description

It is a critical commonplace to fault The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) for their lack of continuity and casual construction. Focusing on Alfred Jingle, I will argue how narrative desire, like sexual desire, manifests itself as a series of fragmented acts of flirtation that resist completion. In language and in narration, no less than in erotic interaction, the appeal of flirtation lies in its ability to maintain a convenient vagueness of purpose and in its lack of commitment. As a fragmentary mode of contact, flirtation is a pleasurable play of inconsistency that makes it possible to renounce commitment not only to others but to one's own self, one's own moral consistency, social identity, or even authorial control. Borrowing a phrase from Mrs. Gradgrind, I shall term the underlying principle of this formal and thematic motif "never hearing the last of it" and examine the motif in order to focus on the pleasure of failing to commit oneself to acting or speaking "fully." How and why do Dickens's characters fail to bring their love affairs, sentences and narratives to completion? What are the ethical and aesthetic implications of this avoidance? And how is the pattern of incompletion manifested aesthetically, as one of the characteristics of Dickens's early narrative technique? Once we view it as an aesthetic principle, the pleasure of avoidance clarifies a trait Dickens put to good use in his first novel.

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