Lady Dedlock Research Articles

The Illuminating Distortion

Distortion that illuminates! The formula may cause distress, if only because we are so grateful to the distorting writers and artists of the last half-century for their repudiation of deceptive clarities. And for their delvings and disruptions, their comic penetrations of the darkest places! Yet it is illumination we do incorrigibly seek, of some kind and in some sense, in the middle of the tunnel if not at its end. Not mimesis but the ancient tradition of the grotesque, all the distortions of the liberated imagination, now seem centrally human. And how much unsuspected imaginative and verbal power has been discovered, been released, in dozens of writers, since the escapes from inhibition of the 1950's, and from censorship both outward and inward. There is much beauty in a Flaubert's or Chekov's or Hemingway's control, and think shall always revere it. But how much, under so much repression, is lost! A banality, that the strange or surreal may seem most faithful to our inward lives: a truism easily tested by turning without pause from a page of Nighttown or even Finnegans Wake to a sculpted reportorial page of Dubliners. Which one seems factitious? But my present concern is less large than a general defense of liberated distortion in art. By illuminating distortion refer to the oddity, the anomaly, the moment of strangeness which (if understood at last) may reveal a scene's or even a book's larger meaning, and the source of its creative energy and dynamic power over us. Incorrigibly long to know what a book really says and why it excites us as it does: a passion for lucidity, as one of my readers put it. It is a lucidity to be achieved only by traversing dark passage-ways, and by attending not only to paradox but to conflicting authorial impulses. The more familiar mode, in the classic novels (or in classic criticism, at least) is of the precise explanation that illuminates: the scene or even single sentence, literally a moment of truth, that brings matters into focus and clarifies all that went before. The sudden reversal of fortune or understanding, so far from distorting things, dissolves ambiguities: even a deus ex machina may be rational. The revelation of Lady Dedlock's secret relieves a tension sustained over hundreds of pages of Bleak House and clarifies retrospectively a number of odd responses. Suddenly dispelled mysteries of identity supply Dickens with great scenes-a-faire and thudding ends of monthly parts. I passed on to the gate and stooped down. lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother cold and dead. Doesn't Lady Dedlock's death