Recycled Dickens - never perfect, never finished

The commercialized dust heaps of Our Mutual Friend (1865) make the novel a classic of the Literature of Recycling, if there is such a thing.  Dickens was himself a master recycler.  A good part of the fun of reading so much Dickens is watching the author return to characters, images, and problems – problems of how to write fiction, I mean.

See how the grave robber of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the one whose alibi each night is that he is “fishing,” returns in Our Mutual Friend as Jesse Hexam, who fishes corpses out of the Thames.  Both men make their living by recycling the dead, as does Mr. Venus in his bone shop.

A new strain appears in Our Mutual Friend, in the subplot of the dual obsessions of Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone for Lizzie Hexam.  Wrayburn’s nihilism is paralyzing; the unassuming Headstone turns out to be something of a sociopath (“as I was saying – undergoing grinding torments,” from III.10, where one might wonder if both men are maniacs).  This is Dostoevskian Dickens; The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) takes up the theme again and builds the novel around it, reflecting Dickens’s deepening ideas about the nature of evil.  But different shades  of the characters, of Wrayburn at least, had been appearing in Dickens novels for a decade, in the Sydney Carton of Two Cities and Arthur Clennam of Little Dorrit (1857), and now I wonder about Pip, and have something new to look for when I reread Great Expectations (1861).

Dickens was always working on the problems of past novels, and had little interest in perfecting the novel at hand.  One might blame serialization, where the published chapters constrain the unwritten ones – too late to scrap a character or plot and start over – but the issue is one of artistic temperament.  Dickens was a master of serialization because of the way he wrote, not the other way round.  He was an exploratory writer, one who had to write to know what he was going to write, wholly unlike Gustave Flaubert or other conceptual perfectionists.  Flaubert would stop everything else to fix a word in the wrong place; Dickens, recognizing the artistic error, would try to do better next time.

The cleanest example of Dickens recycling is A Christmas Carol (1843), his first Christmas book.  It was written and published in the middle of the ongoing Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44).  Ebenezer Scrooge is a reworking of Jonas Chuzzlewit, one of Martin Chuzzlewit’s villains.  They are similar in appearance, behavior, and attitude, but one is redeemed by the Spirit of Christmas while the other inevitably destroys himself.  I do not know of another example quite like this, where an author retells a story that he is currently publishing.  Today one would have to look at genres where serialization has survived, to television and comic books.

Roberto Bolaño had the Dickens “write first” temperament.  He came close to the Christmas Carol experiment twice.  After Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), Bolaño published Distant Star (1996), a reworking and expansion of the last episode of the earlier book.  The next book after The Savage Detectives (1998) was Amulet (1999), a Savage Detectives episode blown up into its own novel.

I wish I had a conclusion, a grand summing up, although that is not in the Dickensian spirit.  There is no summing up, there is no conclusion, until the inevitable one, death ending the exploration halfway through the new novel which has already suggested the next one that we will never know about.