GLOSSING FREUD'S FAMOUS EXAMPLE of “shine on the nose/glance at the nose” (Glanz auf der Nase), Christopher Pye suggests that the familiar account of the fetish (as a simulacrum standing in for a missing object)

Shifting the emphasis from an alternation or contest for priority between presence and absence to the unsettling, groundless allure of fascination, Pye's account of the subjective disorientation announced by the fetish brings into focus, for me, aspects of David Copperfield's disquieting power. The intractable complexities of its narrative retrospection, together with its presentation of a character-building that proceeds by proxy, brings out an exorbitance within its autobiographical (or perhaps meta-autobiographical) narration, an exorbitance that emerges in the paradoxes of its attempt to tell the story of the development of a narrative voice. The novel, in short, suggests the necessity and impossibility of overcoming the incompatibility between an achieved narrative voice (as author or subject) and the narrative of a development that would lead to its achievement. This incompatibility becomes apparent in the novel through the claimed power to recover the past and to recover lost loved ones; ostensibly the text's goal, this asserted power proves curiously disruptive to its narration.

The difficulty of forming an “I” so that it can then narrate its formation preoccupies David Copperfield in various ways, and critics have correlated this narrator's development with that of the bourgeois subject. Critics, in other words, have noted that David Copperfield is written all over his text, often in the mode of disavowal, marking the open secret of the middle-class attributes that David himself embodies–the disciplinary shackles of class, sex, gender–by inscribing them elsewhere, thereby secreting and making manifest their centrality to the novel's narrative of Bildung. To turn, however, from the disavowed work of repression constitutive of the bourgeois subject to the content of the particular repressions the vanishing of whose traces constitutes that subject as unmarked obscures the peculiarities of the novel's narration and its power to thwart–or to render problematic–any such narrative of the subject. In D. A. Miller's dazzling reading of the novel, therefore, I would emphasize the paradoxes of subjectivity produced “in absentia,” particularly in relation to perplexities of time and voice that emerge when a subjectivity comes to narrate its own development, over the rigor–and even the conclusive persuasiveness–of the Foucauldian frame that links these paradoxes to the technologies of the disciplined subject (215). The peculiar effect of vanishing or subjective eclipse in the novel's autobiographical “I” has the potential to become symptomatic or merely instrumental, an effect of erasure that, for Miller, completes the novel's work of ideological inscription by baiting belief in one's exemption from it. The open secret ensnares the reader, who, by believing him- or herself to be immune from the characterization shackling Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, James Steerforth, and the others in caricatures that leave their motives and actions mysterious only to themselves, thereby insures his or her more complete absorption in the machinations of disciplinary subjectification (Miller 215–16; 219–20). “Secrecy,” Miller writes, “would seem to be a mode whose ultimate meaning lies in the subject's formal insistence that he is radically inaccessible to the culture that would otherwise entirely determine him” (195). When Miller turns, at the end of his essay, to the distinction between the “liberal” and “carceral” subjects that function, on yet another level, as an “open secret,” he gestures toward the way that the Foucauldian frame of his argument–and the social diagnosis it makes possible–is inevitably implicated in the dynamic the essay traces (220). This elusively recursive turn, which evokes the essay's self-reflexive beginning, threatens to be lost when Miller's reading is reduced to summary, to a lesson, to a secret to be unveiled–an essential “self,” for instance, preserved by an inaccessibility that ensures that subject's inscription in the culture he or she would resist. Read as a lesson, the essay makes reading a form of discipline, and the reader is thereby left to mirror the novel itself by pronouncing his or her transcendence over it: “David Copperfield everywhere intimates a dreary pattern in which the subject constitutes himself ‘against’ discipline by assuming that discipline in his own name” (220).

Without too willfully distorting what is, after all, a central argument of The Novel and the Police, I would like to dwell on unsettling possibilities that emerge before, as it were, that persuasive conclusion structures our reception of his reading, on the unsettling intimations, too, in the novel's narrative structure that a culture that could “entirely determine” one might seem, after all, a relatively reassuring prospect. In her reading of knowledge and retrospection in the novel's strategies of narration, Rosemarie Bodenheimer challenges less elegantly nuanced accounts of the novel's closure influenced by Miller (particularly their reliance on the novel's end read as its telos), emphasizing the complexities introduced by the narration and by the novel's canniness about its narrative perplexities. The current consensus on the novel–in Bodenheimer's words, “that the novel celebrates its hero's gradual achievement, through the bourgeois virtues of hard work and self-discipline, of a middle-class identity guaranteed by the rocklike security of his marriage to a paragon of the domestic sphere,” a narrative that depends on the “casting out of several figures on whom are projected the ugly undersides of ambition, illicit sexual desire, class shame, and class contempt that David represses in himself”–this consensus tends to flatten or ignore the complexities of retrospection and knowledge in the novel (222–23). The novel's reflections on autobiography, however, tend rather to liquidate the subject whose narrative it is supposed to tell, and the critical “consensus” takes for granted the very subject thrown into question by the novel's narration.¹

To overemphasize the ideological recuperation of the novel's elusive narration risks hypostatizing the bourgeois subject, risks taking for granted that the formed “subject” whose Bildung is to be narrated by autobiography can be assumed as a given achievement.² The novel's opening announces that achievement as a problem: The opening sentence, writes Bodenheimer, “proclaims a narrative of uncertain identity and anticipates a potential interchangeability between the ‘I’ and an indefinite number of anybody elses” (226–27). This interchangeability takes shape in a number of different posited and interrupted links between identity and its narration. The analogy suggested by the parallel structure ties, in the announced alternatives, the “I” to a desubjectified “station”–a position in life, perhaps, a slot in a narrative, or, in the novel's persistent metaphorics linking writing and journeying, a stopping-place along a path that “meanders” to a greater or lesser degree. To “meander,” for the old woman who, immune to arithmetic and impervious to narratives or explanations, buys David's caul, signifies to leave home, and when the narrator immediately latches onto the word as a figure for a narrative digression, the suggestion is that, insofar as it cannot help but wander from its focus because David's birth (here, specifically, the subject or topic lost) cannot be narrated in the first person, that very narrative–that is, the narrative of one's own birth–is a wandering from home that threatens to leave one “drowndead.” The question of whether “I” shall “be,” then, is given away at the outset as a question of holding a “station,” conceding, before it begins, the “I” that, even if it does prove to be the “hero,” will do so by becoming an “anybody else” holding that station. The sentence further suspends the question by locating its answer in an impossible time: It locates itself in the future tense of a deferred completion of a narrative that must, from the reader's first opening of the book, already have been achieved. Even if they have to assume that David Copperfield will be the hero of David Copperfield, readers, in other words, arrive both too early and too late to witness the first-person narrator coincide with the identity he narrates.

Where, then, does the imperative come from in the assertion that this unanswerable question–“whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”–will be answered by the very existence of the text? The question, on one level, resolves itself by referring David to David Copperfield: My “life” in the opening sentence refers not to a character's empirical existence but to his narrated life– Johnson's Lives of the Poets, for instance, or Boswell's Life of Johnson. Thus, the seeming tautology of the second sentence–“To begin my life with the beginning of my life”–can be resolved by suggesting that “my life” refers to two different and theoretically distinguishable entities: His narrated history and his empirical existence. “My life” must show that I will have been the hero of my life, or else it will not have been my life; if they fail to coincide, David Copperfield will have been a caricature of a naughty and irritating boy in the Life of Miss Murdstone or of a sanctimonious, condescending, and conventionally coiffed friend in the Life of Tommy Traddles. The repetition of the word, however, suggests exactly this possibility: The intervention of writing–the very fact that autobiography has to pass through writing–dictates, in this basic sense, that “my life” has to mean something different than “my life,” that the remembered self will be ineluctably alienated from the narrating self, returning us to the temporal structure of the opening's indeterminate future tense. The repetition of two indistinguishable words that have different meanings thus figures both the reconciliation of existence and narration, “life” and art, and their irremediable disjunction. The effort to equate “my [empirical] life” with “my [written] life” suspends the realization of the empirical life until it can later be written, which means that, just as the narration of the life arrives too late to coincide with the life it narrates, so, too, is the narrated life always belated in relation to itself, experienced only after itself in its retrospective narration.

In Freud's narrative of the anxious little boy confronted by the sight of the little girl, the boy playing hunt-the-penis tells himself both “it was cut off” and “she'll grow one later” (210–13). Freud then turns to the power of this sight to convince the boy of the reality of castration's threat, but the possibility emerges–analogous to the narrative suspension highlighted by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in fetishism's disavowal–of an impossible time, the time, to David Copperfield, of autobiography.³

Thus, David, we learn, is a “posthumous child,” a phrase that links him to writing's power to exceed its context while also marking his belatedness in relation to himself. The novel suggests that David's difficulty inhabiting his name, be he hero or not–he arrives bearing a name not his own, that names a father who died six months before his birth–beyond being a peculiarity of his situation, figures a structural difficulty for the narrative voice in autobiography. Autobiography, then, makes overt the unsettling possibility that one can be posthumous in relation to oneself, precisely because one cannot be until after one has written what one was. “These pages must show”–not what I am, but what, or whether, I shall be (or shall have been)–and the text's “must” further identifies it with later characters whose willful assertions of necessity are thwarted: “I tell you,” remarks Betsey Trotwood in a thematically convenient comment before David's birth, “I have a presentiment that it must be a girl…Don't contradict” (6; ch. 1). This “must be” all but ensures, for the knowing reader (or any reader who has not already forgotten the book's title), that it will not be.

The opening paragraph then highlights the uncertain relation between the two “lives” with David's parenthetical remark about the hour of his birth. “I record,” he records, as if to insist on his priority and stability as a writing agent, but he then instantly qualifies the remark: “I was born (as I have been informed and believe).” The added protestation of belief throws into question the fact asserted, but, more importantly, perhaps, the placement of the parenthetical clause momentarily opens up the possibility that it is not merely the time but the fact of his birth that is in question. The belatedness of autobiography then infects the empirical life it would narrate: The latency of consciousness structural to the prematurity of human parturition makes inevitable a lag separating existence from the consciousness that would comprehend it. In this sense, one cannot truly be “present” at one's own birth, one has to be informed of it by someone else –and one must believe one's informant. This must, then, is the condition of possibility for autobiographical utterance, even as it locates the origin of that utterance not in the narrating subject but in an anybody else who allows that subject to ground itself on nothing firmer than the evidence of hearsay. David Copperfield thus cannily reveals and revels in the peculiar groundlessness of autobiography's conventional grounding gesture. The novel further enacts this intuition in the narrator's grammatical constructions once he arrives. Betsey Trotwood's prognostication hovers uncomfortably between an impersonal construction announcing an event–“it must be a girl”–and the predication of a desubjectifying, neutering pronoun, an “it” that already knows it will not be a “she.” The novel's opening similarly disappears into impersonal constructions–“it was remarked” and “it was declared” –that dissolve the narrating voice at the moment it announces itself, announcing its abdication in favor of a generalized and unlocatable perspective (perhaps that of convention or of fate or of writing itself), ceding to various others its claim to be an authority on itself.

To ward off, or compulsively to reenact, the uncertain suspension of the opening's future tense, the novel then turns to a series of more or less tendentious prognostications:

The wry deflation of the sage women's lively interest–taken “several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted”–seems at the same time to evoke the very anxiety with which the novel begins: Namely, that the first-person narrative has to begin several months prior to the possibility of the narrator's personal acquaintance with himself. Their prognostications are no more ungrounded than a narrative that has to cede its authority to nameless others and impersonal constructions, are no more ungrounded than the narration of a birth that one cannot possibly have witnessed. That he need “say nothing here” because “nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result” then seems to take as resolved the question that the novel's opening poses–shifting the question from existence to the qualities that might describe that existence, thereby (retrospectively) taking that existence as a given. In this assertion, and in its seemingly canny willfulness, the possibility emerges that “nothing can show…whether that prediction was verified”– tout court. “Result” then highlights the gap (and difficulty of adjudicating) between sequence and causality–hesitating between “the effect, consequence, issue, or outcome of some action, process, design” and simple sequence (as a verb, “to turn out or become”) and thus disarticulating the assumption that one can be taken to imply the other (OED 13: 761). Or, even more unsettlingly, in the nachträglich temporality of autobiography, a result gains the power to verify or falsify the prediction from which it results.

The “second branch” of the question raises, in the dismissed prophecy of the superstitious neighborhood women, issues central to the novel's autobiographical project. The uncertainty about whether he has run through his inheritance or whether he has yet to come into it reminds us that David is a “posthumous child”: He cannot, perhaps, avoid having already run through his inheritance because he came into it six months before his own birth, even as his father's death, by anticipating the son's birth, remains for that son as if ever yet to come. The repetition of the “anybody else” who is welcome to his inheritance signals a link between this wry dismissal of a gift he claims not to want and the possibility raised in the novel's first sentence that the “station” of being the “hero” of “my life” will turn out to be held by “anybody else.” That anybody else becomes, in the first instance, the dead, and the question of whether the dead will stay dead turns out to be something of a concern for young David:

This moment of terror interrupts one of those virtuosic assertions, at the beginning of the novel, of the narrator's power to recover a lost past (by means of showing–as he himself is shown the quiet churchyard), passages that assert this recovery in an historic present that yearns toward a simple present indicative. Thus, just after the terror of Lazarus, we are told, “There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard,” where the “there is” hesitates between a present tense statement of a past belief and an assertion of perpetual presence (12; ch. 2). “What else do I remember?” the narrator asks himself before the thought of Lazarus, and that moment is surrounded, before and after, by a quasi-anaphoric series of deictic references, each sentence asserting, in memory, a recovered past: “There is one cock who gets upon a post to crow…Here is a long passage–what an enormous perspective I make of it!…there are two parlors…Here is our pew in the church…. And now I see the outside of our house,…Now I am in the garden at the back…” (11–12; ch. 2). The words here and now appear throughout David Copperfield, sometimes signaling a moment in the past, sometimes signaling the time of the narration, and sometimes hovering uncertainly between the two.⁴ Dickens over and over again capitalizes on the capacity of these words to signify the uncertain temporality of writing, just as “there is” seems to claim the perpetual presence of the vanished past and to announce the fact of writing itself and its power to posit. The very capacity asserted by here and now to recover the past without loss threatens to annihilate that which it recovers by linking that recovery to writing, less because of any intimation of compensatory recovery (necessarily predicated on loss) than because of writing's structural generalizing of absence. “A great wind rises,” we are told just after this passage, “and the summer is gone in a moment” (13; ch. 2).

The novel, in fact, associates its power to recover the past with the very gift that David asserts that, unless he ran through his inheritance as a baby, he has “not come into…yet,” that inheritance that “anybody else” is welcome to keep:

Those “spectres of the dead” body forth the autobiography's power to recover the past, to make it present in a “now” in which the narrated past and the time of writing could, at last, coincide. The passage achieves such a recovery through its negation, through a pathos that reanimates by invoking the impossibility of reanimation: They are “spectres of the dead, that…never never more could be reanimated here.” The pathos and appeal of youth's airy dreams derive, perhaps, from the impossibility of their ever being realized, and the specters of the dead redouble their displacement. The recursivity opened up by the re- in reanimation, in other words, erodes the possibility of recovering a presence that perpetually recedes: It is not the loved one but his or her “spectre” that, already a reanimation, will never (again) be reanimated. Recovery seems synonymous with the rendering permanent of loss, as if to ward off, but also to enact, the potential for the recovered dead to extort an uncanny exchange compensating their reanimation with the deanimation of the animating narrative voice. The terrifying possibility young David glimpses in the story of Lazarus–that the dead might wander back into one's “life”–seems to stand in for the potential terror of the success of the autobiography's backward, recovering glance.⁵

One way to understand the danger of seeing ghosts might be to turn to those characters that the narrative (looking back) remembers as having had, paradoxically, no future–most notably, Em'ly and James Steerforth. In a curious pattern in the novel, the narrator speculates, in queasily self-justifying tones seemingly oblivious to their vindictiveness, about how he would respond if given the power to short-circuit the workings of fate: Since I know now that things turn out badly in the end, why not go back and get the whole mess over with before it can ever take place? He recalls, for example, an incident (“so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I dare say, accurately as it was that day”) of seeing Em'ly running along a “jagged timber” that, overhanging the deep water at a great height, seemed dangerous to his younger eyes (28; ch. 3):

This hypothetical, retrospectively proleptic murder to spare little Em'ly her future of sexual shame, requires, as it were, a David Copperfield and his specialized gifts of self-justification to be managed as a triumph of a child's burgeoning sense of right. The motives here are certainly compromised in various ways: More or less close to the surface are resentment about her sexuality, and perhaps specifically about her having sex with a Steerforth for whose attractions David may or may not have had to console himself with stolen glimpses of noble features bathed in moonlight. But the effect of the curiously complicated syntax–its repetitions, its periodic constructions, its layering of conditional clauses and of modifying phrases, its confusing juxtapositions of multiple prepositions–to make its assertions recede in studied obliquity is perhaps not most usefully to be read in the registers of psychology, excuse, self-deception, or bad faith. Rather, Em'ly's (attributed) desire and the narrator's strangely oblique relation to it (and to his own attribution to her of it) seem bound up with the question of narration and its temporal perspective. Notable in this regard is the passage's emphasis on vision: “Hidden things” and “her wild look so far off” give way to the fantasy of “the life before her…revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it,” a mastered vista comprising her life in a narrative that unfolds in the instant of a glance, where the waters could close above her head “in my sight.” The passage accomplishes such a vision by articulating time in spatial terms (as in the life before her)–hence, perhaps, the all but gear-grinding insistence on spatial alignment that appears in its prepositional pile-ups. An image for the completion or sealing off of a vista, to have the waters close above her head also heals a split–or parting–that appears in the curiously labored “on the part of her dead father,” which, in spite of the effort to align position with perspective and perspective with cause, renders the agency indeterminate: Is the father permitting the attraction, or is he permitted to exert (on his part) an attraction? That uncertainty seems to figure a split in identity, both in the fact of the dead father's attraction–pulling the girl from the present to the past and to death–and in the division marked by desire, rending a being against itself. The attraction exerted by the dead father, permitted or permitting–as a division of attention that might lead to a fatal misstep–is recuperated as “merciful,” seemingly by joining it up with a narrative perspective that could encompass her entire fate “in my sight.” Her “wild look so far off” can then become merciful when it becomes synonymous with “sudden rashness”: “Hasty, impetuous, reckless action without due consideration or regard for consequences” (OED 13: 200). Sudden (and its slight redundancy) seems to mark a proleptic realization of future loss, and Em'ly can be without regard for the consequences because she has already suffered them. Death then becomes merciful insofar as it relieves one of the necessity of considering the future, and if motives here are compromised, that is largely because of the passage's clear-sighted consideration of the compensatory logic, which exchanges Em'ly's blindness for the narrator's sight, her division for the encompassing wholeness of his panoramic gaze: “The waters close above her head in my sight” as the narrator affirms, “yes, it would have been.”

That which the narrator comprises in his sight is thereby inserted into a narrative, a collusion figured, perhaps, by the other main note struck by the passage, namely, one of simple existence: “There have been times since…many times there have been…Is it possible…that…there was?…There has been a time since…There has been a time since–I do not say it lasted long, but it has been.” The sheer redundancy of the claims suggests that the compromised, meandering thought of euthanasia is linked in some way to the narrative's power to say what “has been,” as if to say what has been is to commit a murder. What follows these remarks further confirms a link between this moment and the temporality of the novel's opening: “This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it stand.” The ungrounded “this” and the ambiguous “it,” in other terms, seem to expand their reference without limit, hesitating between the thought that has just been adumbrated and the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and narrative or book in which they are written, set down, always, “too soon.” The assertion that “this has been” merges uncomfortably with the temporality of the text that would make the dilatory homicidal wish already, from the moment the text is written, a fait accompli. The resolution “let it stand” resorts again to one of the novel's privileged formulations (let it be), which condenses its claimed power to make a world exist by fiat, combining fetishistic disavowal with the animating and deanimating effects of its demonstrative “here” and “now” and with the potentially similar effects of the narrative voice's gestures of self-positing.

Later on this page, the narrative attempts to explain away the unsettling effects of its narration by making the lack of a future a psychological attribute of children: “As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty in our way, little Em'ly and I had no such trouble, because we had no future. We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger” (29; ch. 3). In explaining their obliviousness to class difference, the narrator glances at–in a seemingly cavalier deflation of the threat it also aspires to locate elsewhere than in the narrative voice itself–the disquieting possibilities that emerge in the novel's power to evoke the past: These characters, insofar as they are comprised by the backward glance of the remembering narrator, and insofar as they come to be only within the purview of that glance, have no futures. The danger, among other things, is that that lack of a future could extend to the narrative voice itself, to the identity supposedly secured by the novel's Bildung, the danger that his fate will merge with Em'ly's, perhaps less in her particular sexual shame, than in what that future shame makes manifest about the structure of writing. If the passage makes the rigorously counter-intuitive assertion that to have a future is synonymous with making provision for it, to be untroubled by inequality and to be absolved of a future puts both of them–each making no more provision–in the position of Em'ly as the waters close above her head in the narrator's sight. And the passage thereby makes manifest the potential overlap between Em'ly, who has no future because the narrator sees it already, and the narrator himself, whose comprising perspective is made synonymous with death. Making no provision merges uncomfortably with having, as it were, pre-vision, and Em'ly's blindness becomes discomfitingly interchangeable with the narrator's sight.

To my mind, this disquieting possibility is partly what is at stake in the cryptic close to David's rapturous panegyric to the glory of sleeping Steerforth's moonlit boyflesh:

The “no veiled future” that “dimly glanced” makes manifest, among other things, that there is no future because his being is, at this moment, already completely determined by his future. The passage's play of veils and glances links the moment's eroticism to this lack of a future. If what “dimly glanced” is “no veiled future,” the formulation, which combines a gaze's momentary absorption in an exquisite form (to glance at) and a touch's thrilling rebound from a taut surface (to glance off), links the moment's temporality to the erotic allure of imagining moonlight, a gaze, even a wayward touch, glancing at and off the surface of Steerforth's exposed skin. His erotic allure is not so much justified as constituted by its formulation as elegy. The rhapsodic tone gains its pathos and power from the knowledge that Steerforth's beatific pose proleptically encrypts that in which David will remember him when, drowned, he has been washed up, Shelley-like, from the sea. If, as Bodenheimer persuasively suggests, David's later recovery of a “prebetrayal memory” of Steerforth “lying easily with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school…let me think of him so again” marks a repression that, allowing David to avoid condemning Steerforth for his sexual betrayal, seems fully aware of its willfulness, the invocation of Steerforth's angelic pose in the very same terms when David sees his corpse (“among the ruins of the home he had wronged–I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school”) also encrypts his death in the first moonlit moment, making it the proleptic achievement of the later loss and linking, therefore, the death of Steerforth with the temporal structure of the narrative, which threatens to annihilate David in turn (Bodenheimer 223; 355–56: ch. 29; 650: ch. 55). If the future's “glance” seems briefer than the narrator's “look,” as if to mark Steerforth's vanishing almost before he is seen, the elegiac eroticism locates Steerforth's power in that vanishing's recurrence in this encrypted beatific pose.

Steerforth's hold is often couched in terms that link it with the pathos of writing and of the retrospective glance of the narrative. Explaining why he read to Steerforth even when he was exhausted, David asserts that his motives were neither mean nor self-interested: “I admired and loved him, and his approval was return enough. It was so precious to me that I look back on these trifles, now, with an aching heart” (74; ch. 7). The ache seems caused less by the treasured feeling than by the proleptic knowledge of its loss. Steerforth often appears in the novel, then, in passionate figures of apostrophe: “Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive hand in love and friendship. Never, never more!”; “No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when we last spoke together, in that hour which I so little deemed to be our parting-hour–no need to have said, ‘Think of me at my best!’ I had done that ever; and could I change now, looking on this sight!” (356: ch. 29; 650: ch. 56). Apostrophe, overfreighted with redundant yearning, is an apt figure for David's desire for Steerforth and for its more or less compromised intertwining with questions of narrative in the novel. Giving speech, it thereby absolves its object of the need to speak, or relinquishes speech on its object's behalf (“No need, O Steerforth, to have said…”). Apostrophe, that is, makes evident its ambivalences and its compromising motives; it asserts the power of a narrative voice to reanimate the dead while making manifest that the invoked person's death makes possible the later reanimation. It is therefore the perfect figure for the temporality of autobiography in David Copperfield and its proleptic retrospection; looking back at a dead friend allows the pleasureable pathos of imagining while he is yet alive the pathos of what will have been his death. In so doing, its structure of address also underscores the danger that the narrating presence to which the animating voice bears witness might (and will, from the moment of writing) go the way of the mourned friend of anticipatory eulogy.⁷

The novel seems to resolve the various paradoxes of its narration by exacerbating them, to resolve them by seeing ghosts; it insists on the achieved immediacy of its recoveries. Perhaps most striking is David's assertion that his mother's face is not lost:

The self-canceling redundancy of the asserted power–she is not gone because he has brought her back to life –brings out what Bodenheimer might highlight as the knowingness of the repression. It underscores, too, the potentially compromising need for her to be gone that he might bring her back (or rather that his “remembrance” might, which makes the narrative itself–“as I have elsewhere said, this narrative is my written memory”–curiously interchangeable with reanimated ghosts, and literalizes “remembrance” as a personifying figure) (667; ch. 58). Moreover, the rhetorical question through which the passage makes its assertion turns precisely on the question of narration: “Can I say?” As de Man suggests of their appearance in Yeats and All in the Family, rhetorical questions ask to be read at once in two opposed ways (“Semiology” 9–13). Here, the text simultaneously asserts that he cannot say she is gone because she has never been lost and asks with some urgency (to use a deManian cadence) whether he can say that she has been lost in order thereby to be able to say anything at all. Among other things, then, the passage makes manifest that, paradoxically, the two opposed readings of the question are mutually dependent: He must be able to say that her face is gone, that her innocent and girlish beauty faded, in order to recover them as beyond loss in his narrative, to assert that they were never lost. (A similar dynamic is at work in the contrast between the simile [“when its breath falls on my cheek now, as it fell that night”] and the assertion it seems to make: The first asserts the minimal difference [and hence the loss] that would make possible a comparison between then and now, and the second denies that there is such a difference and such a loss.) “Here it comes before me at this instant…”: Here and this yoke her recovered presence to the always already vanished time of writing (“this instant”). The ambivalent effects of asserting her perpetual presence by linking it to writing's power of recovery and its paradoxical temporalities are registered, too, in the conspicuously depersonalizing pronoun “it,” which introduces a dissonance between the personifying effects of an invoked face and the “she” personified by that face. “It”– marking the return of contingent requirements of grammar to disrupt the personifying figures–makes her presence uncanny in part by making visible the effort of personification, thereby foregrounding the slide from metaphorical animation (achieved by invoking the face's privileged relation to soul) to a mere synecdochal, even disarticulable, accretion of inanimate parts, where “it” would mark a collectivity of parts that fails to achieve human animation.⁸

Arriving as if out of nowhere, all but unmotivated, its extravagantly unearned pathos overpowering narrative explanations of its appearance, the passage's power to swamp its context in the novel seems to index its crucial relation to the possibility of the narration as such–substantiating, too, the Kristevan drama of matricide we might also be tempted to suspect. The presence that comes “before me at this instant” hesitates between an assertion of spatial location (and presence) and an uncanny temporal precedence: His mother, by coming before him, is certain to have witnessed the birth for which his narrative has to console itself with the evidence of hearsay. The narrator's asserted power of recovery therefore calls up, too, this uncanny precedence, threatening the narrator with dissolution, again, in the very gesture of his self-assertion. Such a suspicion might be confirmed by the register of voluntarity that suddenly emerges in the narrator's asserted power of recovery: Her face appears to him “as distinct as any face that I may choose to look at in a crowded street.” This seemingly weird assertion makes one suspect her unmediated recovery is almost less important than the asserted power of choice; the implicit flattening of the difference between her face and “any face I may choose to look at on a crowded street,” furthermore, is a striking disavowal even for someone without David's maternal issues and without his capacity for captivation by various spectacles, rarely “chosen” by him. The consequence, in the strangely tortured (and, to me, slightly baffling) syntax of the final sentence, is to separate “my remembrance” from “I,” insofar as the remembrance, unlike “I” or man in general, “only…still holds fast what it cherished then.” The agent that “still holds fast” initially seems to be “she,” or perhaps “I,” until the “it” links the holding to “remembrance,” suggesting, again, not just the separation of, but also an unsettling interchangeability among, these three terms: The narrating “I,” its remembrance, and the cherished (because vanished) remembered object.

“I write of her just as she was when I had gone to bed after this talk,” he writes, but a few lines later this power of recovery is thrown into question: “It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if it were the next day when Peggotty broached the…proposition I am about to mention; but it was probably about two months afterwards” (20; ch. 2). The text thus seems both to assert its power of unmediated recovery (bringing back his mother's face exactly as it was) and–immediately afterwards, in its concession to memory's vagueness–to cordon off this power of recovery from the business of the retrospective narration of the text. It seems to me that this double gesture intimates that to assert an achieved recovery– ostensibly the very goal of the text–is to install or perpetuate the very alienation it would overcome. Just as David's renounced necromantic bequest threatens to make the narrative itself a ghostly visitation, the recovery of lost days through the pathos of their loss (“the contented days with Agnes…arose before me, like spectres of the dead, that might have some renewal in another world, but never never more could be reanimated here”) installs loss at its very heart (568; ch. 48). “‘David Copperfield all over!’ cried Miss Betsey. ‘David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery where there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!”’ (5; ch. 1). She is talking about David Copperfield the elder, but, when David the younger later thinks of the days of his youth “as a dream I could never dream again,” we are reminded, as he returns to The Rookery, “where the bare old elm-trees wrung their many hands in the bleak wintry air, and shreds of the old rooks'-nests drifted away upon the wind” that the home for which David yearns was never there to be lost (86; ch. 8). David has, in this sense, never done anything but “meander,” which threatens to leave caul-sold him, like Steerforth, drowned–giving his name to the text as the rooks give theirs to The Rookery, giving a name, in other words, by showing himself, in advance, as long ago having vanished.

David's last sighting of his mother thus combines an assertion of her presence and a making permanent of her loss:

The parallel assertions–“So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards”– assert a seamless movement from loss to recovery, but they also make manifest a link between visible presence and loss, a link intimated by a sense that there is something knowingly ghostlike about her intent gaze, something spooky about her unruffledness, something dead about the stillness of her unstirred hair and dress and its merging with the cold, still weather. Stillness moves metonymically from the weather to her hair and dress to her, an effect emphasized, too, in the shift from a verb (“stirred”) to a predicate adjective (“was stirred”), which, beyond embodying a mannered stillness in the prose itself, links her stillness, then and to come, to the weather (“was…still…was stirred”). His mother's unruffled stare embodies her prescient knowledge that she is already a ghost, and “So I lost her” takes on the finality that the narrative will show it to have been destined all along, marking a merger in this formulation between narrative unfolding–“so I lost her” as “in this way I lost her” or “in this order, her loss came to pass”–and causality–“so I lost her” as “therefore I lost her.”

The passage about David's mother's face explicitly frames itself as a disavowal, admitting but denying that his mother's face is “altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is.” The passage also disavows knowledge that she changed during her lifetime–denying, in other words, exactly what the novel tells us happens. We are explicitly returned, therefore, to the fetish and to its relation to loss. In another suggestive footnote to The Vanishing, Christopher Pye writes:

It was cut off, and she'll grow one later: The fetish, like autobiography, allows a narrator to remain suspended in that hiatus, in the impossible overlap between a deferred prolepsis and a belated retrospection. David Copperfield might thus be said to strive not to recover the past but to recover its loss; it shores itself against loss's loss, positing, “Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth!…Never, never more!” or “so I lost her” as the end result of asserting “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life…these pages must show,” as the preservation of that initial moment's potential to body forth the narrator's dehiscence at the moment of his emergence. David Copperfield might therefore be said to disrupt the genre of Bildungsroman it simultaneously exemplifies; its teleology oriented toward an explanatory portrait of the artist is disrupted by a melancholy insistence on an unassimilable past emerging from the asserted immediacy of the artist's later recollection. The exorbitance of the novel's yearning suggests, among other things, that the narration of the aesthetic education and the aesthetic powers of recovery to which it gives rise might be at odds with a totalizing narrative of the subject they claim to recover; these aesthetic powers seem paradoxically to throw into question the possibility of telling the story of an aesthetic education. That narrative is shown by David Copperfield to be at odds with itself, oriented toward a teleology that simultaneously completes it and makes it impossible. The structures of narration I have explored in the novel thus engage what Paul de Man suggests is at stake in the genre (or non-genre) of autobiography: “Not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history” (“Autobiography” 67). The assumption that this convergence can be taken as a given is one way to put the assumption underlying Schiller's “aesthetic education of man,” which proceeds by taking as given–by naturalizing–a perceptible aesthetic totality (positing it and then effacing its work of positing): The aesthetic education proceeds by the coerced forgetting of its own impossibility.⁹ David Copperfield refuses to let us forget. David Copperfield suggests that, when narrated, character-building, to return to the terms with which I began, can proceed only by proxy, less because of the particular sins and desires the bourgeois subject must disavow than because of the structure of narration in the novel that makes its narrative of Bildung simultaneously the narrative of its failure and the recovery of a narrated past simultaneously the rendering permanent of its loss.