A Tale of Two Systems: Dickens and Enlightenment Ironies
Charming and lovable, Sydney Carton is more terrifying than the Terror. Mobs, violence, vengeance, and The Vengeance are the morbid symptoms of every social illness. The unique horror flickering in the shadow of Enlightenment triumph is the déraciné. Not the ex-pat, the political refugee or even the prisoner but the individual separated from his self, left with only characteristics, a noun glorified and extolled all the way to becoming a shriveled and shivering adjective. The unattached, disreputable attorney who is literally nothing but brilliant — such is Sydney Carton at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, in a sense already maximally “liberated” even as the percolating French Revolution has not yet erupted.
But it does. And critiques are made, excesses occur, life and history intertwine. Families reunite and people fall in love, but this not Jane Austen and epochal events interfere. Maybe they always should.
Romanticism and the Enlightenment are not opposites, let alone unrelated, and Dickens does not leave them alone. When Sydney Carton falls in love with — is not just inspired but animated by — Lucy Mannette (daughter of a victim of the Monarchy; soon-to-be wife of a victim of the Revolution) he tells her, “you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire — a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.” If before he was all intellect and license, an unsavory Enlightenment apogee, here he is all feeling, all heart no head, Romanticism unlimited, again debauched and useless only this time on account of overwhelming, undirected emotionalism.
“Existentialism,” argued William Barrett, “is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous.” The anti-Enlightenment, or at the very least the anti-Rationalism and anti-Revolutionary, elements of A Tale of Two Cities are well known; so great was Carlyle’s influence on Dickens that it is more accurate to call the former’s writing on the French Revolution the reality upon which Dickens based his novel rather than merely a favored interpretation. A Tale of Two Cities does, in my view, achieve philosophic — and aesthetic — expression of a challenge to the Enlightenment, but it obviously precedes and greatly differs from Existentialism. In part because the book is not counter-Enlightenment. It is inclined less towards assertiveness than synthesis and irony.
The summa of Enlightenment ironies is the decapitation of Sydney Carton beneath the Terror’s infamous guillotine. In the unstable pre-Revolutionary open, Carton is metaphorically unable to put his formidable head to good use. As Salman Rushdie notes, a metaphor is fundamentally a migration — the distance an idea travels to become an image. Enter love and Revolution and madness and a banal metaphor metaphorizes itself into something outrageously literal and direct in a master stroke of literary inversion. Seizing on his convenient resemblance to Lucy’s husband (who has been unjustly sentenced to death), Carton sneaks into prison and, as it were, takes his romantic rival’s place. His head is obliterated and becomes efficacious. In his last moments Sydney Carton does not simply find peace in his imminent death but, finally, is able to attach meaning to a deliberate choice. His conscious actualization is novel and sublime: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,” and it is through this intentionality and exertion — sticking his neck out — that the escape from exhausting idleness is accomplished, “it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
Dickens wages narrative war on Romanticism and the Enlightenment in order to bring them together. Locating his story in a singularly extreme and uncertain moment in history, new possibilities emerge through the most shocking outcome of all, a sort of reconciliation. Writing on British Romanticism, Morris Eaves formulates a magisterial and aspirational demand of art. “What we want are not unplumbable depths or heights but bridges. They acknowledge the abyss, offer views of it, and give us somewhere to go.” This is not Existentialism but the desire for the mid-air connection of the head and the heart, with every impossible ounce of their stubborn weightiness accounted for.
The reductive approach— and reading of A Tale of Two Cities— is that you cannot bring the two together, the binary of history or love requires annihilating the other if you want to be at all serious. But really, the Dickensian instruction and invention is to sacrifice one not to be rid of it but to bring it closer to the other. A different kind of epistemology and emotion then becomes available, one that is simultaneously more fanatically rational and more blindly sentimental than either of their bastardly orthodox antecedents and comes not from refutation but collision and compression, dropping the blade on the liminal locus of head and heart, sneaking into prison for freedom, lighting ideas on fire to cultivate a cool head. Irony is its own Revolution.
