Tyler 2013

Tyler, Daniel, ed. Dickens's Style. Cambridge: UP, 2013. Print.

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. "Dickens's Rhythms."

• 73: Wonderful temporal complexity of a passage from Adam Bede: "But Adam's thoughts of Hetty...as no other form of worship would have done."
• 74: Hardy, "The Impercipient: At a Cathedral Service" - playing with hymn common metre to show doubt
• 75: In prose, similarly, the timing of a line on the page can show the pressures of historical circumstance coming up against those of custom, routine, habit. To borrow Gertrude Stein's distinction, prose rhythm can reveal significant overlaps and slippages between 'the time of the composition' and 'the time in the composition.'
• Dickens was as ambivalent about the past as he was about most of the present, and his skill at combining a tone of sturdy common sense with an unpredictable flexibility of attitude makes it hard to characterize him as 'purely' anything [resp. to Ruskin calling him "a pure modernist"].
• 76 [Dickens writing] "my composition is peculiar; I can never write with effect - especially in the serious way - until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off." [Letters, I, 97] ...At such moments, Dickens's writing can again sound oddly like a declaration of loyalty to an age of mechanical reproduction, as if he were not content merely to take advantage of the newly mechanized world of printing and distribution but wanted to incorporate it into his prose, to make every part of a book's life beat in time together.
• 77: [Narratological rhythm] ...although Mieke Bal points out that 'Rhythm is as striking as it is elusive', when she wants to demonstrate what she means by the term, namely the relationship between what a narrative dwells on and what it elides or arrests, she turns to the opening of Oliver Twist, which devotes three pages to Oliver's birth, just over a page to his childhood up to the age of nine and then several pages ot the moment he announces, "Please, sir, I want some more." It is an imaginative double helix of generosity and restraint that is sunk into every level of Dickens's writing, from his syntax to his methods of serialization.
  • Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Study of Narrative
• 79: In his 'Essay on Style' (1888), Walter Pater argued that prose was especially well attuned to the 'chaotic variety and complexity' of the modern world, capable of recalibrating itself from moment to moment as 'an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid,' which would 'exert in due measure all the varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm.'
• 81 [methodological argument] ...While attempts to find underlying patterns in Dickens's writing usually latch on to repeated motifs and metaphors - dust heaps, the river, and so on - there is a good case for thinking that the most important connection tissue in his fiction is to be found at an even more fundamental level than his language. ...I propose that this is the leve at which Dickens's rhythms operate: they are the contours of style over which narrative currents of desire and memory flow.
• [Passage in Copperfield, "It pained me to think...all connected with my mother and father were faded away."] In his essay on 'The Young Dickens', Graham Greene has a lovely phrase for D's 'delicate and exact poetic cadences, the music of memory': 'secret prose'. No novel deploys this secret prose better than DC, where one key question that remains unresolved is how far the narrator is trying to relive the past or relieve himself from it. ...Adam Piette has helpfully drawn attention to the connective tissue of this passage, which he describes as 'prose rhymes': the little verbal self echoes that show what the speaker hangs onto from his past and what then hangs on in his voice. But rhythm is an equally important device for recreating the acoustic textures of memory, producing an extra set of chains that couple the narrator to his past: "weeds growing tall...winter would howl...ghosts on the walls...grave in the churchyard."
• 82: When dickens wants to articulate this nagging sense of a pattern establishing itself in a character's life, he sometimes deploys little rhythmical phrases - shards of cultural memory - that are already lodged in his reader's head. As a writer who switches unpredictably between prose and verse, Shakespeare was especially vulnerable to this sort of piecemeal appropriation, and Dickens enjoyed borrowing the cadences of his writing as much as the words themselves. [Comparison to use of "now" in "Alas, poor Yorick"]
• 84 use of blank verse rhythms in the "Dead" passage of Bleak House , "when Dickens is most concerned with putting things historically and ethically in perspective": "The LIGHT is COME upON the DARK beNIGHTed WAY."