Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot

Abstract

G.K. Chesterton said of Dickens's second book, Pickwick, indeed, is not good novel; but it is not bad novel, for it is not novel at all (109). This is not, appearances aside, pure expression of admiration for work whose power and success continues survive in spite of its readers' demands for cause and effect, unity, continuity, and resolution. Chesterton is also suggesting just how difficult it is avoid using the word novel. The problem is this: if Pickwick Papers is not novel at all, then what is it? Just that: not novel at all. Most critics avoid this problem altogether and simply call Pickwick Papers failed novel, even as they acknowledge that it might never be more than it claims be: series of papers. Like his first outing, Sketches By Boz, Dickens gives us less novel than what Victor Shlovsky called nanizyvanie, or a together of episodes and short stories. This phrase comes from Shlovsky's discussion of the novel in general, whose origins he found in collections of short stories. The earliest literary works (like Don Quixote) gave us strange, paradoxical characters not because of need on the author's part to illustrate philosophical or psychological insight, but as the purely accidental result of inconsistent adventures together (Morson and Emerson 274). Dickens, then, might be considered master of this stringing together. His char-