Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• REM, TORE

Titel

CHARLES DICKENS AND VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY: AN E(N)STRANGED COUPLE

Ist Teil von

• Dickens quarterly, 1999-12, Vol.16 (4), p.230-242

Ort / Verlag

Louisville, Ky: The Dickens Society

Erscheinungsjahr

1999

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• (Christ Church, Oxford University) I In “Art as Device,” the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky refers to Alexander Pogodin's example (in his Language as Art) of a boy “who represented the sentence ‘Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles’ in the following sequence of initial letters: L, m, d, l, S, s, b.” To Shklovsky, this represents what he terms “the process of algebrizing;” it is an example of how the freshness of human perception is blunted through “automatization” (Shklovsky, 5).1 To critics wary of the struggle to master and order, it may equally look like an illustration of a Russian Formalist approach to literature. [...]I will argue that some of Shklovsky's ideas seem peculiarly congenial to Dickens's mode of writing. II Shklovsky applied his particular form of criticism to Dickens both in a study of “the classical English novel,” and in an essay devoted to Little Dorrit and the mystery novel.3 The present essay will concentrate on the particular aspect of Little Dorrit which caught Shklovsky's attention (it is related to an interest in riddles which will be returned to), and analyse it in the light of a somewhat modified version of his own concept of parody. The list of melodramatic features in Little Dorrit is so long as to be, on the foggiest of days, uneasily veiled from the conscious mind of the novelist: the potent melodramatic sign D.N.F. on Mrs Clennam's watch, the gothic appearance and abode of Mrs Clennam, Arthur's hidden identity, Rigaud's purely evil character, the punishment of the villain in the spectacular fall of the house (a great stage effect this), the last-minute escape of the good and the needed (for the plot), the sudden fortune of the Dorrits, eavesdropping, the prolepses provided through Affery's truthful dreams, the missing will in the iron box, and the many highly charged confrontations.