Reading the Long Way round: Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair'

Abstract

When Vanity Fair 'finds itself' among the 'famous events' of Waterloo, 'hanging', that is, 'on to the [very] skirts of history' (p. 2I3), it declines, like Becky, to march straight ahead and narrate the battle, opting instead to circumvent it altogether: 'We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. [...] When the decks are cleared for action we go below and wait meekly' (p. 346). The novel, it seems, chooses not only the 'skirts of history' but also to skirt the historical; to put it another way, the novel's European sortie proves to be not so much a Grand Tour (such as Thackeray himself went on)2 as a grand detour. Not, of course, that this surprises the reader for by this point s/he is well used to the novel's digressions, circumlocutions, and narrative refusals. Vanity Fair has more than just one 'Roundabout Chapter' (p. 516); in fact, the whole novel, we might say, is another of Thackeray's Roundabout Papers.3 It is long, therefore, not only in a conventional linear sense but also in the sense that it often goes the long way round. Despite, that is, Carlyle's declaration that 'narrative is linear', Vanity Fair disrupts what Derrida calls the 'the time [. . .] of the line or the line of time'.4 Time and again, 'we are [left] wandering' (pp. 453, 557) as this history 'go[es] backwards and forwards' (p. 293) reflecting our narrator's 'amiable object' which is simply 'to walk' with us 'through the Fair', and then to 'come home' (p. 229). As a 'novel without a hero', without a centre, there is (as at Queen's Crawley) a conspicuous absence to circumvent.