Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove Gillian Piggott (bio) Alexander Bove. Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization. Manchester UP, 2021. Pp. iv + 242. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-5261-4793-6 (hb). This is an exciting read for those of us long troubled by the old adage that Dickens is a "failed realist" who does not create convincing characters. For George Eliot, Dickens failed to create interiority, while many a student has complained that Dickens's characters are sketchy distortions or caricatures, stagey, melodramatic, externally observed, unnatural. For the author of Spectral Dickens, this apparent failure in Dickens's characterization is more to do with limited critical horizons than with Dickens: the problem lies in the framing of the critical debate as to what character is. Dickens meanwhile escapes all coordinates; his haunting characters "inspire imaginative and nuanced critical responses and yet elude systemization" (2). Bove argues that there are two leading critical camps on "character": structuralist/poststructuralist theories which view characters as representations, an effect of a signifying system, and mimetic theories that see characters as "reflections of 'real-world' persons or selves" (2). Both of these critical camps miss the central problem of subjectivity and ontology. Harnessing a number of critical theories that debunk the idea of "the stable, whole Subject"–the Freudian "Uncanny," Derridean "specters" and "hauntology," and most importantly, the Lacanian "Real"–Bove argues that character stages our own existential/ontological lack. Indeed, character enacts a distinct kind of encounter with otherness/instability which expresses "the stumbling block" of being (Zupančič 43; qtd. in Bove 10)–the Subject's inability to be fully self-present to itself and to the world, our inability to access "the Real." To explain, and alas to simplify hugely: mimesis involves the idea that a character is a simulacrum of a "real" person, while a "real" person itself involves the concept of a self–present conscious "subjectivity." Yet this subject's self-present fullness is itself fatally problematic–it is plagued by the problem of the relations between the subject, language and "the Real." Lacan says our access to the "the Real" is obstructed by a dilemma: "reality itself is always already constituted for the subject by language, and the [End Page 532] Real is ultimately precisely the … element of nonrelation between reality and itself."1 As a result, according to Lacan, there is something originally wounded in the human relation to the world, in our entering into the social world of the Symbolic. Character for Bove, then, "can be said to stage not an encounter with a simulacrum of a 'real person,' but an encounter with the Real" (23). And he continues: "Character is specter … not limited to subjectivity or interiority, in a mimetic sense, nor to clusters of words. It is frequently ... made of various forces, some subjectivizing, some de-subjectivizing." Bove's view is that character enacts "an-other mode of the non-relation, the uncanny" (24). It's a wonderful idea–one could go as far as suggesting the reason characters are so important to us in life and often live with us beyond their literary or filmic context is because they enact the central problematic of our existence–they repeatedly return to and, as it were, pull at the scab of "the cut of the Real" (61). Staging our vulnerability, and foregrounding the incompleteness and instability of our subjectivity, characters continually gesture to a point in a meaningful universe where meaning breaks down, where there is a gap. "We … sometimes perceive character as uncanny forms–not as safely confined to the order of representation, but as haunting us with our own lack of presence from within that safely defined 'order of the real'" (11). Characters are "uncanny" because something familiar (a character) converts into its other, as its lack of presence in representation resembles our own. Bove uses the notion of "hauntology" interchangeably with "ontology," as if he sees "ontology" as framed by the process of the repetitive return of the repressed lack of self-presence, of wholeness, and the attempt to bury it again. It follows that "identification," a central tenet of mimetic theories, is...