Desire and the ideology of violence: America in Charles Dickens's 'Martin Chuzzlewit.'

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Robert E. Lougy

2

Mrs. Aquino's Foreign Minister, Raul S. Manglapus, a long-

time nationalist, says Manila "must slay the father image" to

grow up.

The New York Times, 20 October 1989

"The unconscious is that chapter of my history," writes Lacan, "that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter" (Ecrits, 50); but, as he also points out, this censored chapter finds articulation along historical lines as well as in national archives and legends. If, as Margaret Drabble suggests, the "unthought holds us in thrall," then Dickens's America is held in thrall by what it does not know but also knows only too well.(15) Like Nadgett, the novel's English detective and its quintessential voyeur, Martin Chuzzlewit is obsessed with the secret and the censored. "We never know what's hidden in each other's breasts," observes Mrs. Gamp, adding that "if we had glass winders there, we'd need to keep the shutters up, some on us, I do assure you" (400). Nadgett, the novel's English detective, observes at one point that "nothing has an interest in it to me that's not a secret," and in this respect, America would be at once his nightmare and his wet dream, for although it is a country permeated by the hidden or concealed, no secrets, however private or repressed, seem safe within it. Young Martin suggests that American newspapers are "horribly personal" (226), and as their names--The New York Sewer, The New York Family Spy, and the New York Keyhole Reporter--indicate, Martin's assessment seems accurate. These newspapers are not only the objects of Dickens's own satiric or comic impulses, however, but they themselves also participate in those dynamics of the joke that Freud identifies when he observes how the joke "bring[s] forward something that is concealed or hidden."(16)

And that which is hidden but also brought forward by the joke often "possesses strong elements of the excremental or infantile images of the sexual" (Jokes, 97--98). "Words have naughty company among them" (50), Dickens suggests in Martin Chuzzlewit, and the American newspapers, like Dickens's words, keep naughty company, proudly declaring their kinship with the dirty joke. Their task is to disclose, to peep and listen through keyholes and to tell of what they see. They are committed to printing the unprintable, exposing that which should remain hidden or concealed: "Here's this morning's New York Sewer.... Here's this morning's New York Stabber. Here's this morning's New York Private Listener. Here's the New York Peeper. Here's the New York Plunderer. Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter (220), cry the street vendors, promising juicy tales of the "last Alabama gouging case; and the interesting Arkansas dooel with Bowie knives ... the Sewer's own particulars of the private lives of all the ladies that was there" (220).

However offensive such voyeurism might seem, the body politic of America can stand some scrutiny, for it is a diseased and disturbed body, as Mr. Bevan implies, drawing upon appropriate gastro-intestinal imagery in the midst of such flatulent journalism to tell of how the American newspapers enable "the bubbling passions of my country [to] find a vent" (220). Like the laughter and festivals of Bakhtin's folk-culture, these newspapers show us the backside and inside of the body as well as the body politic, voyeuristically participating in and identifying those regions of taboo or the forbidden uncovered by them.(17) For however interested Dickens may have been in the American press, he was even more fascinated by America's unconscious texts and how they find articulation in its history. The unconscious as censored chapter can be found, Lacan tells us, "in traditions ... and legends which, in a heroicized form, bear my history" (Ecrits, 50), and during young Martin's stay in America, he hears of such "heroicized" legends and traditions, as the Americans do America in many voices, but all telling the same story. Freedom in America, celebrated in both public and private voices, is identified with participation in a natural or primeval state, and thus its citizens envision themselves as the children of freedom and the offspring of nature, related to the bears, buffalo, and wolves. As one American, Elijah Pogram, observes (in a speech that was actually given by a San Francisco lawyer in defense of his client, working its way east in time for Dickens to hear about it during his visit):