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Georg Lukacs
By Frances Ferguson
A Tale of Two Cities has many admirers. It was for years the Dickens novel
most likely to be assigned to high school students, and W.B. Matz noted in 1922 that
it had recently tied (with David Copperfield) as the favorite work of fiction of women
freshmen at Radcliffe.Yet for all the admiration the novel has inspired, it has
prompted an almost equal measure of criticism. Lukacs, in The Historical Novel,
mentions A Tale of Two Cities only to object that the weaknesses of Dickenss petty
bourgeois humanism and idealism are more obvious and obtrusive in this novel than
in those that Lukacs admires and categorizes as the truly social novels. For Lukacs, it
is a limitation of the novel that Dickens, by giving pre-eminence to the purely moral
aspects of causes and effects, weakens the connection between the problems of thecharacters lives and the events of the French Revolution. In the novel, he continues,
the Revolution becomes romantic background and the turbulence of the times is used
as a pretext for revealing human-moral qualities (243). And John P. Williams, Jr.
extends Lukacss general view in arguing that Dickens eviscerated politics to defend
individual morality, writing that Dickens attempted to control the monster of
revolution by devising a tale in which no political issue is finally pertinent either to
the assumed certainty of social progress or to the conduct of the truly virtuous man.
From one perspective the criticism is surprising, because Dickens continually
speaks of revolution as an inevitable response to abusive social arrangements and
vividly shows the French Revolution and its animating motives at work in the lives ofotherwise ordinary individuals. Yet at least two features of the novel make the
criticism telling. The first is that Dickenss reliance on Cartons love for Lucie
Manette can make his self-sacrifice look like a celebration of the merely personal and
generally domestic affections. (I say generally here to take into account Hilary
Schors argument that these happen to be adulterously domestic affections, in that
Carton manages to intrude himself into the lives of the Darnay family as much as if he
had actually had an affair with Lucie.) The second is that Dickenss insistence on
Cartons disguising himself as Darnay deprives him of a public and political voice.
Carton cannot utter any statement aloud, lest he reveal that he is not Darnay. And he
thus both appears to see the future and remains sphinx-like as he goes to his death,
offering personal comfort to the touchingly unprotected young seamstress rather thandenouncing either the Terrorists or those who had so oppressed the French people that
Revolution came to seem the only imaginable response.
Indeed, the most compelling feature of Lukacss objections is that they
ultimately call attention to the ending of the novel and the way in which it does not so
much deliver historical events as pass judgment on them. Dickens, ventriloquizing
Cartons thoughts, accords them the authority of last words. And indeed, Cartons
prophecy seems all the stronger for having gone unuttered. In the far-seeing
conditional in which Carton enjoys the endorsement of never having spoken and thus
never having opened himself to possible contradiction, he seems to become the
spokesperson for History how things will ultimately have turned out. If you thinkparticularly of Dickenss long view of the evil of this time and of the previous time of
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which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out, it
is easy to hear a biblical sonorousness about the passing of generations and regimes
that treats politics as mere skirmishing (366). And its not surprising to learn that
many have heard those words harmonizing with the kind of shibboleths in which
people clucked with smug self-satisfaction as they spoke of the ultimate failure of
the French Revolution and opined that it had been doomed from the outset by its ownextremism. In that light, it resonates unfortunately with recent claims that history has
delivered up a definitive report of the collapse of communism with a footnote on the
inevitability of this result. Such statements always combine two claims1) that a
political approach was internally and fatally flawed (brought down by its own hand)
and 2) that I told you so. Insofar as the novels ending sounds like those statements, it
arguably feels like a betrayal of the opening chapter with its connections between the
past Dickens is describing and the present, and between France just prior to the
Revolution and the England of the same moment--and especially of its sardonic
assertion that In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lord of the State
preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever (13). And
we might think of that betrayal as having already begun with the second chapter whenDickens drops his accounts of the likeness of England and France and begins to treat
London and Paris principally as two locations in which the story of his characters
personal lives unfold. We certainly might think of that betrayal as fully achieved
when Dickens next speaks of the Two Cities, only to treat the connection in terms of
the affectionate grandiosity of family life; the young Lucie Darnay, he says, blended
the tongues of the Two Cities in her life by growing up speaking both French and
English.
Lukacs confines his remarks on A Tale of Two Cities to one paragraph with a
brief continuation in another, but his observations on how the fate of the characters
does not grow organically out of the age and its social events may help us to mount adefense of the novel that extends past simply insisting that the novel is, too, great. For
if Lukacs expresses reservations about Dickenss abstract-moral attitude toward
concrete social-moral phenomena (243-244) , I think he also helps us to identify
various key features of the novel that allow us to argue that Dickens was not failing a
political project but was trying to come to terms with changes in politics even more
revolutionary than those Lukacs imagined. He was not, I think, sacrificing the
political to the domestic but was instead wrestling with his newly discovered sense of
their extraordinary interconnections. Indeed, I want to maintain that he was trying to
come to terms with the very ideas of terror and terrorism in the political world. For
while Lukacs particularly values the ways in which class-consciousness can come to
be a resource for novelistic characters and has an extraordinary ear for moments inwhich characters speak of how they will never be able to take us for granted again,
Dickens seems to me to be addressing a different issue. His question, briefly stated, is
How do we conceive of our own actions if we cannot think of our actions as
expressing either our individual wishes or the interests and wishes of a group with
whom we identify? And how do we come to terms with the instability of the
relationships between individuals and the groups in which those individuals
sometimes have membership?
In the discussion that follows, I shall be arguing that in A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens develops an account of how abstractions come to occupy concrete social-
moral phenomena in modern morality. Lukacs takes Dickens to separate out what hecalls the purely human and the purely moral from their social basis and laments that
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this tendency is not corrected by reality itself, by its impact upon the writers
openness and receptivity as he see it to be in his best novels on the present. (244). Yet
while Lukacs plausibly values social concreteness, Dickens is, I think, concerned to
make the novel tackle the abstractness that a host of writers most notably Burke in the
Reflections on the Revolution in France had associated with French thought generally
and with French revolutionary thought in particular. The more I have ponderedLukacss list of all thats missing from the novel--full characterization of key figures
under social pressure, dialogue that would continually yield the sense of characters in
confrontation the more I have thought that hes right to think that theyre missing but
wrong to think that the novel would have been improved if it had had them. For if
Lukacs is interested in depicting persons aware of their own social agency, Dickens is,
I think, committed to examining how all our notions of both political and moral
agency must be recast. The French Revolution and the Terror of September 1793
through July of 1794 thus come to look less like events than like an intensification of
a logic of agency that pre-existed them and post-dates them. For if it is easy to believe
that the Columbia Encyclopedia is correct in saying that Terrorism reaches back to
ancient Greece and has occurred throughout history and that it is a tactic and not anideology, it seems to me that Dickens was grappling in A Tale of Two Cities with the
extent to which the modern deployment of the political tactic of terrorism escaped
individuals and ideologies in a way that couldnt be addressed merely by invoking the
standard rules of moral and political engagement.
Ive already used the words terror and terrorism, but I must now begin to say
something about what they entail that does not rely on you to supply the notions with
content.
We know all too much about terrorism. We know that it combines actual
attacks and the threat of attacks. We know that it is often directed against the civilian
population--people at work in office towers, people riding the commuter train to theirjobs. We know that it distributes fear very widely as people go from checking to be
sure their own limbs are still intact, to congratulating themselves on not having been
at the wrong place at the wrong time, to thinking of how they or a friend or relative
might well have been at that wrong place at that wrong time, to feeling that all places
and times suddenly harbor the possibility of being at that wrong place and that wrong
time. The aspect of terrorism that would particularly have interested Dickens that I
believe particularly did interest Dickens is that terrorism alters the world we tend to
think of as a moral world. Even as world leaders and journalists denounce terrorism as
pure evil and speak of the cowardliness and thuggishness of terrorists, it is hard not to
hear their words as just so much preaching to the choir about how bad actions areauthored by bad people.
That understanding of morality to put the best face on it--continues to find its
most powerful expression in Kants categorical imperative, with its statement of the
principle that humans must seek to avoid harming other people as a simple reflex of
their respect for themselves (and its implicit claim that they can and often do behave
well on the basis of this self-respect when extraindividual reasons go wanting).. That
version of morality finds a corollary in the notion that people should not seek to keep
their consciences clean either by doing nothing or by casuistically controlling their
knowledge of the effects of their actions. (Think of Miltons denunciations of
cloistered virtue or George Eliots depiction of drunkenness not merely as oblivion
but as obliviousness to ones own actions and their consequences.) It is a conceptionthat is persuasive both positively and negatively positively, in that our most basic
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ideas of conscience involve imagining that we accuse ourselves even when other
people dont know that we should be accused; and, negatively, in that it is easy to see
that no amount of force or eloquent reasonableness can make anyone behave better
than they are willing to behave. Yet these quite plausible accounts of the centrality of
individuality to moral action begin to take on a more sinister tinge if we recast them
only slightly and bring out the element of self-policing that Foucault (and Schillerbefore him) found in the Kantian moral view, if we move from George Eliots sense
that moral concerns are the greatest spur to knowledge to a question about the
desirability of our trying to be the most scrupulous of moral accountants, continually
developing ever more exacting standards and employing our so-called autonomy in
the service of our own enslavement.
Yet the critique of the Kantian account of the autonomy of individual moral
action did not wait for Foucault. It was, I think, already present in work that had been
written before Kants moral writings and that had an honored place among the French
revolutionaries that of Rousseau. Robespierre, as Gregory Dart has told us, carried
Rousseaus writings at his breast. And if that information accords with things we longthought we knew about Rousseaus influence on the French Revolutionaries, the
surprising element is that Robespierre always carried and read Rousseaus
Confessions rather than the writings with overtly political titles. That choice was,
moreover, part and parcel of a new account of the interpenetration of the personal and
the political. The Revolutionaries may have developed legislation that erased the
distinction between public and private life, but Rousseau had made the distinction
appear untenable.
Rousseaus contribution to moral thought, I want to suggest, was to have
discredited individual moral authority and to have shown the difficulties of seeing
individual conscience as the ultimate arbiter of moral conduct. Thus, he was
constantly able to portray himself as a good man indeed, a very good man-- who hadhappened to do things that might look evil. Indeed, the Confessions insists upon some
version of this formulation almost to the point of monotony. If for some two
centuries, commentators have denounced Rousseaus hypocrisy in the Confessions
and have charged him with particular moral fecklessness, they have been right about
the information he gave them and prematurely judgmental in their assessment. It was,
indeed, strange of Rousseau to describe giving up all of the children his mistress
Therese Levasseur bore him as if that action were reasonable especially when
admission to a foundling hospital very nearly amounted to a death sentence. Indeed, it
could be said to be deceptive or self-deceptive of Rousseau to have imagined that he
was really confessing anything at all, since he so regularly ended every confessionalepisode by explaining that he had been misinformed. His intentions were good, he
regularly said, but his friends had misled him; he had acted on mistaken information.
Yet if we stop with the observation of Rousseaus hypocrisy, we blind
ourselves to the question of whether we usually know enough to make moral
decisions. Rousseau makes us reconsider our failures of knowledge and the gaps in
our information and enables us to see the extent to which we constitute ourselves as
moral agents not just by having an impact for good or ill upon other people but also
by being constituted by the perceptions of other people. This process obviously and
inevitably operated with a double logicor, at least, a double standard. Thus, he
notoriously insisted that women needed to be extremely modest, because they were, in
his view, responsible not only for their actions but for their reputations. Women, thatis, deserved even their reputations, and were responsible for them even when they
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bore no relation to the actions that those women had actually performed. On the one
hand, Rousseaus self-castigation always ended in self-exoneration (on Rousseaus
part); on the other hand, women were said to be accountable for anything that might
be thought of them so that it was hard to imagine that they could ever be exonerated
of anything. It may be that Rousseau was merely making a shrewd empirical
observation about the way in which blame travels towards servants, towards women.But I think that we can take the measure of this second peculiar account of misaligned
accusation only by compounding the offense and seeing how far Rousseau was
casting moral action into the orbit of what might seem like social and political
considerations outside the control of individuals conceived as individuals. He saw the
importance, that is, of conceiving of moral action not merely as transcendental in
relation to its objects but as reflexively transcendental in relation to its authors. Thus,
while Todorov stresses Rousseaus perception that moral agents must see their
obligations as determined generally rather than particularly by which he means that
you must want to do right by strangers and not just by the significant others in your
life-- I think Rousseau lays out that aspect of a transcendental view and then
supplements it with an understanding of how our capacities to deliver on that sense ofobligation are themselves been transcendentally constructed (in a view that accords
with Bernard Williamss account of moral luck). While we often conceive of morality
as individual and indeed conceive of it as solitary in our accounts of individuals who
held their moral course despite opposition, Rousseau saw that morality in modernity
was no longer a matter of individual decision. All of his whining about the goodness
of his motives and the faultiness of his execution of them amounted to a recognition
that our capacities to form those motives and to execute them are fundamentally
affected by our social existence.
To put the matter this way is to begin to understand how fully socialized we
are even as moral agents. By comparison even with a view like Bernard Williamssthat pleads the case of particular individual circumstances against abstract moral
transcendentalism and wonders what sort of people we would have to be to decide
that we couldnt save members of our families before we saved strangers or
acquaintances, Rousseau concerns himself with what strangers can do to our moral
capacities. His contribution to moral philosophy was, as I see it, to have come to
recognize that our dilemma is to try to achieve particular moral effects as agents who
are only virtual actors, composites of the persons they really are and the persons
whom others treat them as being. (Think of the difference in degrees of legal and,
implicitly, moral--obligation that tort law imposes on the deep-pocketed and the
indigent.) From Rousseaus perspective, even Williamss position retains too
individualistic a focus, in that it begins with a moral individual and extrapolates setsof commitments. Rousseaus position, instead, includes a reciprocal concern with the
ways in which we are known by and to other people.
This is as much as to say that both Rousseau and the French Revolutionaries
saw that the personal was the political and the political the personal in ways that
extended well past the passage of particular laws governing families and education.
For if Rousseau took the realist position that we would have no individual examples
without benefit of concepts that precede them and made them recognizable (no
individual oaks without the concept of the oak, as he puts it in the Essay on the
Origins of Inequality), he took a similarly realist view of moral action.
In other words, instead of simply insisting that each man must treat other menas an example of man in the most extensive and abstract sense, Rousseau also tracked
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the importance of the fact that we are each treated as men or women or white or black
or rich or poor. Our very ability to treat other people as man is affected by the degree
to which we are ourselves treated as man.
Rousseaus philosophical realism his emphasis on the priority of the general
concept over the particular instance did not itself cause the Revolution and the Terror,
but it did create an opening for defining virtue as the capacity to be undistracted by
particular examples. Thus, Robespierre could tell the National Convention in 1794
that Terror is nought but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation
of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of
democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland. It was justice that did
not simply confine itself to acts that persons had committed. Rather, it addressed the
distribution of the very ability to act. The notion of the people required stripping away
the category of aristocrat and that of peasant, those whose words had been taken as
commands and those whose words had been essentially unutterable even when
voiced. For actions to be just, Robespierre thought, they should get past the project of
being just to individuals and should treat justice as a fully transcendental principle.The capacity for individual action should be redistributed by and through society, not
situated and explained by multiplying descriptions of individual circumstances. For
Robespierre, that is, the individual aspect of morality should be stripped away,
rescuing Rousseaus solitary from the contradiction between his conscience and the
way his actions must look to other people. Robespierre carried the Confessions at his
breast because he took it to resolve the individual into the transcendental, to make it
possible for individuals to make claims that did not rest on their individuality.
In claiming this particular line of influence for Rousseau, I mean to call
attention to the restrictive effect that his account and that of figures like Robespierre
had on the conception of character. For if Lukacs stresses the importance of the
historical novel with its representation of dialogue, its understanding of classconsciousness, and its ability to introduce historical personages while saying and you
are there, Dickenss novel understands historical consciousness differently. Against a
history that hurts, he sets a history that causes pain by rendering its principal
characters ineffectual. The pattern is apparent in what can seem the most bourgeois
aspects of the novel its attention to the wastefulness of having a trained physician like
Alexandre Manette compulsively make shoes to no apparent purpose, its registration
that Darnays repudiation of his fathers and uncles deeds counts for nothing. Most
interestingly, Dickens shows that understanding action under the sign of futility is by
no means an exclusively Revolutionary propensity. The depiction of ostentatiously
ineffectual action developed in Manettes imprisonment under the old regime, and itwas launched in rather milder circumstances in the original trial scene in England, in
which Dickens brings out a basic feature of the legal systemthat the law elicits from
witnesses statements that they do not intend to make. In the cases of Cly and Barsad,
spies and witnesses for hire, poetic justice so closely approximates the description of
the mechanics of justice that we scarcely notice this feature of the law. It seems
entirely right that they should not be able to deliver on their intention to frame Darnay
as a spy against England. But Dickens also captures the negative side of the process in
which individual speech is subjected to the transcendentalizing pressure of the law,
with its constant directives that one speak its language and put the words the prisoner
in the mouth of someone wanting to identify Darnay as the gentleman. Lucie Manette,
with her forehead ... strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion thatsaw nothing but the peril of the accused (72) gives every evidence of wishing to
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crucial for helping to explain the difference between Lukacss understanding of the
historical novel and Dickenss. It is central to Lukacss understanding of the historical
novel that it developed alongside modern armies that specifically designated certain
individuals to do the fighting and absorb the blows on behalf of their societies (and
also that the members of those armies continually had to come into contact with alien
societies because of the armies need for constant provisioning). Indeed, Lukacssunderstanding of the social and political participates in the Enlightenment rationalism
of Marxist thought, which imagines that the conception of classes can continually
ground its immateriality in economic justification. For Dickens, on the other hand,
terrorism involves eroding the distinction between soldier and civilian, seeing that
individuals are continually being absorbed into classes and class-based families that
are not just families but races.
Moreover, the relation between individuals and their virtual existences need
never be any more exact or accurate than that between women and their reputations in
Rousseau. In our own nearly present moment, we can see the workings of randomly
assigned group identities in the bombings in New York on September 11, 2001, and inMadrid on March 11 ,2004. People at work, people going to work become targets not
because they are policy makers but because it does not matter that they are not. People
at work, people going to work become targets as Americans or as Spaniards whether
or not they are Americans or Spaniards. (And in the process those who had remained
foreigners effectively do become Americans or Spaniards, awarded a kind of non-
native and non-naturalized citizenship by the place of their death or injury. As many
people around the world briefly said after September 11, 2001, we are all Americans.
As one foreign-born woman who had lived in Spain for years put it to a reporter for
Madrids El Pais, she and her family were finally virtually naturalized; the rescue
workers treated us just like Spaniards.)
The process that I am identifying as terrorism is no respecter of persons andtheir specializations and particular capacities and beliefs. Moreover, I think that
Dickenss insight into terrorism was at stake when he reported to Forster that he was
writing A Tale of Two Cities so as to reveal character by the story itself rather than by
dialogue. For Dickens imagines that the story itself does not just constitute a backdrop
against which to show what McWilliams calls the truly virtuous man. Rather, he
shows the story itself radically altering character. Nowhere is this process more
apparent than in the case of Sydney Carton, who remains a stealth hero for an
extraordinarily long time, because nothing in his past behavior leads anyone to
imagine that he will be a force for good. His virtue is awarded to him by the plot--and
this is true to such an extent that it does not seem a failing in Charles Darnay that hedoesnt often think of Carton or think much of him when he does. If Lucie hears
Darnays speaking of Sydney Carton as a problem of carelessness and recklessness
(207)and beseeches him to give Carton more consideration and respect (208),
Dickens has already underscored the plausibility of thinking of Cartons as a wasted
life: He spoke of him, in short, not bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as
anybody might who saw him as he showed himself (207). And if Darnay accedes to
Lucies request and still does not think of Carton during his feverish reflections in the
hours when he thinks of himself as a dedicated sacrifice to the Guillotine, Dickens
announces that fact only to explain that his mind was so full of the others, that he
never once thought of him (341).
Indeed, were it not for the insistence of the plot, Dickenss readers would havescarcely any reason to expect much from Carton. For while Dickens deploys the
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language of Christian sacrifice to describe Cartons action, so little has Carton
reformed his general behavior that it would be laughable to describe him as a male
Mary Magdalen. Dickens goes to great lengths to characterize Cartons drinking as
past anything that we can imagine in modern times, and he underscores Cartons
alcoholism by noting how exceptional it was for him to be sober in his last hours of
freedom (For the first time in many years, he had no strong drink, 331.) Moreover,Dickens makes sure that we dont think of Cartons drinking as an expression of
charming sociability. He may be hard-working (laboring mightily in his water-soaked
turban in Stryvers legal chambers), but hes also a nasty drunk, one who insists on
dining and drinking with the man hes just helped to acquit only to announce to his
face that he doesnt like him.
I shall have more to say about Sydney Carton later, but for now I would
merely like to insist on the aptness of Dickenss announcement that the characters of
A Tale of Two Cities are developed by the story itself rather than by dialogue. For I
take Dickens here to be insisting on a new way of understanding actions and their
agents relation to them in the moral universe that he is discovering. If Franco Morettihas argued that attending to more literature and more globally defined literature will
help us see that the psychological novel is less important than the novel of action, A
Tale of Two Cities almost makes us want to identify a third sort of novel one with
precious little psychology or action. Darnay cannot do what he means to do that is,
fully to renounce his patrimony and to distance himself from both his ancestral
holdings and his fathers and uncles deeds. Lucie cannot do what she clearly means
to do to testify in favor of Darnay. And their inability to deliver on their own wishes
finds extreme expression in Dr. Manettes fugue states. For if Lucie repeatedly faints
(when Darnays fate is being debated in his English trial and when he is arrested after
his earlier release from the Bastille), her father is more often and more seriously
overborne by the world.In Dr. Manettes fugue states, we see the triumph of Dickenss story itself,
which has deprived Manette of a great deal of meaningful dialogue and set him to
work with only occasional effectiveness. Lucie may seem to reprise the swoons of
sentimentalism, but I take Manettes inability to apprehend his circumstances to
represent something more than just an intensification of sentimentalism that makes
trauma look like the only available response of a good man to massively evil times.
For Manette is the only one in the novel who seems ever to approach an
understanding of the way in which his circumstances really cannot be described as
local. Lucie Manette fille may speak the languages of the two cities that the novel
features, but only Alexandre Manette seems almost to perceive the experiences of onecity in terms of the other. He hears Darnays story of writings found hidden in the
Tower of London and seems almost to connect them with the writings that he had left
in 105 North Tower of the Bastille. He sees the young Charles Darnays face and
chooses not to know his name, because he seems almost to connect this young man in
London with a face or faces he has seen in France.
In putting things this way, I have called attention to matters that we might
explain away as Dickenss effort to foreshadow the complications that he intends to
unfold later in the novel. To look more carefully at these episodes is to see that our
sense that Manette heard of the writings discovered in the London prison and thought
of his own writings in the Paris prison and that Manette saw Darnay and thought of
the twin brothers dEvremonde is our own back-formation from the outcome of theplot. In our back-formation, Manette can seem to have known all along how the
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distantly separated elements of his experience fit together, can seem to have actively
colluded in suppressing his own knowledge. And Charles Darnay himself certainly
fosters that impression in crediting Manette with having known all along that his
daughter was marrying the scion of a family whose actions he has completely
condemned.. Yet the limitations of that eminently plausible line of thought become
apparent when we encounter Manettes indignant objection to the idea that he has,along with the Defarges, provided testimony against his son-in-law. If we explain the
problem away by treating Manettes traumatic disconnection as just another instance
of the insanity ploy in literature, I think, we miss something rather more important
that Manette is put in the position of being a kind of idiot savant who can register
certain connections in much the same way that geiger counters, children, and animals
are said to identify otherwise imperceptible things. Even as we wonder if Manette
really knew that Charles Darnay was an Evremonde on the basis of his recollection of
how Charless father and uncle looked two decades earlier, we can see that the
brilliance of Dickenss decision to make Darnay and Carton resemble one another lies
here in the depiction of the difficulty of linking morality with claims about accuracy
of ones perceptions of the world.
Indeed, though the plot often encourages us to think of Darnay and Carton as
dead-ringers for one another, Dickens also undercuts the force of that resemblance.
Carton, drunkenly reporting to Darnay that he doesnt like him, says that he begin[s]
to think [they] are not much alike in any particular (90) and thus raises the possibility
that even the observed resemblance is a lawyers ploy. Stryver, as you recall,
congratulates Carton after Darnays acquittal and particularly asks how in the world
Carton came up with the idea that he and Darnay resembled one another. (That was a
rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the identification. How did you
come by it? When did it strike you? 94) Carton, in calling attention to the resemblance
between himself and Darnay, had sought to smash this witness {John Barsad] like acrockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless lumber (82) and to secure his
and Stryvers clients acquittal by impugning the reliability of the witnesss
identification. Moreover, Dickens is careful to avoid treating the resemblance as a
simple perceptual fact. For though not only the witness but everybody present was
surprised by the likeness when they were thus brought into comparison (81), Dickens
almost immediately takes pains to blur the resemblance and to suggest that it partially
resulted from Cartons abilities as an actor. Thus, Carton removes his wig so the
likeness [becomes] much more remarkable (82). He then resumes expressions more
characteristic of himself, and the spectators question the resemblance: Something
especially reckless in his demeanour not only gave him a disreputable look, but so
diminished the strong resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which hismomentary earnestness, when they were compared together, had strengthened), that
many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one another they would
hardly have thought the two were so alike (83). And even in Cartons final hours of
freedom, the likeness between him and Evremonde remains a subject of debate.
Although Madame Defarge starts at the sight of him, taking him for Evremonde, other
people in the wine shop minimize the resemblance and chalk her perception up to her
intense anticipation of seeing Evremondes face at the Guillotine.
Now I obviously dont mean to say that Darnay and Carton dont bear any
physical resemblance to one another. I mean, instead, to suggest that Dickens treats
this resemblance as one that waxes and wanes and is more available to some peoplethan to others. And I mean as well to call attention to a certain improbability of
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Cartons having noticed the resemblance and having commented on it. Its improbable
for Carton to make the identification because it tends to run counter to ways in which
people recognize themselves; most people, I think, tend to marvel at the various
likenesses that other people see between them and others. But even if you leave my
law of experience to the side, the distinctiveness and improbability of Cartons
perception of himself in another emerges in the fact that other characters arentregularly looking at other people and thinking that they resemble them. (While we
hear that Lucies mother and Lucie and Lucie fille all merge in a blur of blonde hair,
we dont encounter a moment in which either Lucie or her daughter talks about their
resemblance to one another.) Indeed, as I pointed out earlier, most characters in the
novel even and especially those who have replicated themselves by means of
pseudonyms and new identities spend a great deal of time trying to separate
themselves from the people they are said to resemble. Thus, Darnays insistence that
he is not an emigrant, however much he might be said to resemble one, and that he is
no longer an Evremonde, however much he might be said to resemble one.
Virtual resemblance, in other words, overrides actual resemblance. WhatDarnay comes to learn is that it doesnt matter to his executioners that he doesnt
subscribe to his fathers and his uncles views and doesnt endorse their behavior. He
finally fully comprehended that no personal influence [even from his father in-law,
whom the Revolutionaries revered] could possibly save him, that he was virtually
sentenced by the millions, and that units could avail him nothing (339) He has been
condemned on account of what other characters in the novel refer to as the work of a
bad race. Moreover, if we think back to Evremondes final encounter with his uncle
(130), we realize that he himself had spoken as if he were implicated in his forebears
crimes. We [emphasis mine], he says, did a world of wrong (128). The point that I
would like to emphasize here is that it is not merely Revolutionary Terror and Therese
Defarge that racialize families and treat them virtually and by the millions. Instead,that tendency has been present from very early in the story in the curse of the young
man who was, or would have been, Therese Defarges uncle to the last of [that] bad
race (320) through Darnays use of the plural when he would like to use the singular
and through his acceptance of the notion of the curse: There is a curse on [this
property], and on all this land (129).
What Dickens brings out with this language is that individuals are no longer
members of families conceived as domestic units. Rather, families are races. And the
practical consequence of a situation in which individuals are their families and their
races is that individual identity and individual responsibility are rendered effectively
indeterminable and irrelevant. If the Jacquerie recognize that it is a political gesture toshow that they are as indistinguishable from one another as the aristocrats have treated
them to be, the racialization of identity pervades A Tale of Two Cities and makes it
difficult for individuals to recognize both others and themselves. Anyone who has
read even a few of Dickenss novels might take this pattern to be merely another
instance of Dickenss interest in disguised identities yet one more case of someone
hiding his fortune or having his origins hidden from him. Yet I cannot think of
another Dickens novel in which individual identities are so frequently and insistently
obscured. Dr.Manette is discovered under another name ; Darnays identity as
Evremonde is concealed from most of the characters during most of the action of the
novel. And these are just two of the many cases that we might instance in support of
Dickenss early observation in the novel of the wonderful fact to reflect upon, that
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every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every
other (21).
The moral challenge of what I earlier identified as the logic of terror and what
I am now describing as the racialization of action is that individuals are continually in
the position of wondering Did I do it? Am I responsible for the wrongs I see around
me? Lukacss reading suggests that Dickens idealizes the bourgeois family as a way
of establishing a restricted domestic world in which people can know one another and
themselves and can know that they are doing well by them. And, indeed, Darnays
uncle advanced his own version of that view when he taunted Darnay with his
knowledge of his nephews new connections: A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
commences the new philosophy! (130). If the Marquis all but says that substituting
new families for old ones doesnt sound much like a philosophic innovation, I think
that Dickens for all his sentiment and sentimentality about families actually agrees
with that view in A Tale of Two Cities.
Indeed, I think that we have scarcely begun to take the measure of Dickenss
effort to come to terms with a new philosophy of moral action in modernity. For asDickens disables family members of families old and new, bad and good and prevents
them from taking effectual action, he registers the difficulties that individuals have in
being moral agents in the modern world. Moreover and this is where Lukacs would
particularly differ from him he appears to reject the idea that recognizing ones
solidarity with ones class enables one to see ones class as a plausible author of
actions. Instead, Dickens has recourse to an entirely archaic plot and to an entirely
modern solution.
The entirely archaic plot that I think Dickens had in mind is that of Oedipus
Tyrranos, in which a baby is transported from Thebes to Corinth and then as a man
transports himself back to Thebes, in which he learns that there is a curse on the landbecause of an unpunished murder, in which he curses the killer, and in which he
learns that he himself is the polluter of Thebes whom he has cursed because he had
killed a man whom he now recognizes to be his father. I dont mean to claim that
Dickens builds the story of Oedipus into his novel in the same way that Fielding
builds it into Tom Jones, but I want to suggest that key elements of Dickenss novel
powerfully echoand then adapt--the moral conundra that Sophocless play poses. In
both Sophocless hands and Dickenss, there is one tale for two cities, and characters
cannot outrun their actions by changing their locations. In both works, characters only
understand their own actions and situations after the fact, and, indeed, it seems
necessary in both to have oracles to alert characters to their personal connection with
a general problem. (Think of the spiritual revelations and prophecies that Dickensmentions in the third paragraph of the novel.)
The story of Oedipus, dispersed over two cities and over the time from
Oedipuss birth to his adulthood, finally returns to him as his individual story. His
actions have had widespread consequences; he has saved Thebes from the Sphinx,
after all, by solving a notorious riddle (What has one voice and moves on four legs,
then two, then three). He has also inadvertently brought on a widespread miasma by
having killed Laius. Yet the breathtaking quality of the tragedy lies in the sudden
recognition that he was himself the author of all the results that he curses, that he who
had thought himself a virtuous man now thinks of himself as evil. In that sense,
Oedipuss story may seem to rehearse and endorse the idea that moral action issupremely individual. The miasma of the city, in other words, comes to look like a
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mistakenly general effect that punishes everyone who seems like a man as we
recognize men from the Sphinxs various different descriptions. The drama can
conclude when moral responsibility is properly localized in an individual, and he who
has recognized man in general is able to recognize his own situation as an individual
one. Indeed, that reading of the play has regularly funded the psychoanalytic use of
the Oedipus story that treats it as a matter of individual disavowal and recognition.
A Dickensian reading of the Oedipus story would, I think, share the tragedys
account of the generality of miasma, but would offer a strikingly different route to its
dissipation. Whereas Sophocles hangs the entire play on imagining that all the diffuse
consequences of Oedipuss actions can be localized in Oedipuss finally recognizing
himself as the unique author of his and his citys sufferings, Dickens produces a
remarkably unindividual indeed, almost impersonal account of moral action. The
crucial moment of recognition for Oedipus comes when he realizes that Jocasta was
mistaken in comforting him when she had tried to reassure him that he couldnt
possibly have killed Laius because Laius had been killed by robbers, and one cannot
be many. But Carton sees that the solution to at least a portion of the curse on the landis to take advantage of a confusion between the individual and the many that has
become ineluctable. Sidney Carton may be, like Oedipus, a man who solves riddles,
but it is crucial to A Tale of Two Cities that they should remain other peoples riddles.
If the Terror treats individuals as families and the past of ones father and uncle as
ones own present, if Alexandre Manette and Lucie Manette Darnay seem to try to
reclaim individuals for their current and chosen families, the plot awards its prize
neither to the generalized terroristic approach nor to the retreat into bourgeois
domesticity. Rather, Sidney Carton ends the novel heroically because he manages to
solve the same riddle twice, first in the courtroom in which he recognizes himself in
another man, then in France when he again recognizes himself in another man and
chooses that other man over himself.If we might be inclined to describe Cartons willingness to die as a gesture of
supreme altruism, however, we would leave ourselves very hard pressed to explain his
and the novels final words: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;
it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known (367). These lines, among
the most frequently quoted in all of English literature, have been disparaged as
sentimental. Yet sentimental is, I think, precisely what they are not. Sidney Carton
here speaks the language of what we have come to know as that of the personal best,
the language in which you can monitor your own performance at running or jumping
or taking standardized tests and think less about whether you are good or evil than
about whether you have done better than you did before. It is the language not ofvirtuous character but of reason as befits a man who does not know how to live his
life well but does know how to reason, calculate, and solve riddles.
To put the matter in this way is to see the extent to which Sidney Carton
represents the very type of a character that Dickens had frequently disparaged the
Benthamite man. He makes choices by calculating the general utility of his actions,
and morals are for him, as Bentham insisted they should be, a science. He can choose
against himself because he sees that a life that Lucie loves is more valuable than his.
He can perform an extraordinarily virtuous action without being a virtuous man
because his moral project does not involve trying to recover a past to be recognized.
Rather, his virtue is the virtue of the professional, the man who can help others more
easily than he can help himself and who is able to unriddle the miasma of historicalwrong not by retracing and redressing it but by developing a course of action where
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no other character can. The terror of A Tale of Two Cities is the terror of mass society
in which virtuous individuals seem deprived of the possibility of action because they
do not know how to make their individual goodness count for anything. The response
of Sydney Carton is to give himself and other people reasons for goodness and to see
that virtuous action can take its impetus from reconceiving peoples just deserts
outside of their own pasts and an infinite project of self-examination and self-discovery.
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