ferguson_frances - georg lukacs

7/28/2019 Ferguson_Frances - Georg Lukacs

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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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ferguson_frances - georg lukacs

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