• 1 “Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every (...)
• 2 See for example Robert L. Patten, “Autobiography into Autobiography: The Evolution of David Copperf (...)

2In order to respond to this question I will turn to Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, long considered Dickens’s fictionalized account of his own passage from traumatic early childhood to a master of English letters. This is the story of an orphan, named David Copperfield, who overcomes his traumatic past and eventually comes to write the story of his autobiography, the book David Copperfield. As a text that presents itself as both the fictional autobiography of the main character (David Copperfield), and the autobiographical fiction of its author (Charles Dickens), the novel David Copperfield (which Dickens called his “favorite child”)1 can be said to dramatize, and enact, the story of self-grounding at the heart of a catastrophic personal history2.

• 3 The structure of this argument is illustrated clearly by Patten; often it is implicit. See for exam (...)
• 4 The problem of “trauma” emerges precisely here, when we can no longer speak of a self that can tell (...)

3The story of the orphan is, also, of course, the story of an uprooted self at the origins of an autobiography. On the one hand, by representing David Copperfield in his own orphaned childhood, and by showing how he comes to write the autobiography that is this very text, Dickens’s novel can be seen as representing, and overcoming, a childhood trauma through the linguistic mastery of the adult. This is David Copperfield's most common critical interpretation3. Yet if the novel thus dramatizes how traumatic origins can be represented in writing, it also asks, I would suggest, what it means for autobiographical language to originate in a trauma. In this sense the novel is not only about the orphan who becomes an autobiographer, but about the emergence of a literary language when the self can no longer tell its own story4. What would it mean to read the novel, I will ask today, as both the story of an orphan and as a literary, and traumatic, orphaned story?

• 5 The chiastic reversal and mirroring of initials assimilates the figure (chiasmus) to the plot (reve (...)

6Likewise, the novel itself turns, as a figure, from the language of the orphan to the language of the “favorite child.” The orphan here thus figures the relation between figure (David Copperfield) and referent (Charles Dickens), and moreover appears to bear witness to what is referred to as the “trauma” of Dickens’s life—his abandonment in the blacking factory at the age of 12—as it is precisely turned into the source of the master of English letters. From the referent Charles Dickens (the one who suffers early trauma) to the letters DC, or from the letters of an orphan (DC) to the man of letters (DC), the text appears to situate and contain—to adopt—the figure of the orphan at the heart of the literary through the figural transformation of a traumatic referent into the pleasurable wandering of its protagonist. The reversal of letters, as the initials of the protagonist and author, thus tells the story of the reversal of fortune that constitutes the story of both David and Dickens. The orphan, here, appears to be the figure of the literary writer par excellence, and of a literature that would adopt the figure and thus recognize itself—and the history of its author--in its own, uniquely English, linguistic play5.

• 6 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Norton Critical Edition), ed. By Jerome H. Buckley (New York an (...)
• 7 Aunt Betsey has been beaten by her husband; she divorces him and takes her “maiden name” back (Trot (...)

7If the figure of the author thus emerges, successfully, through this play of letters, the author’s name nonetheless reappears, in the story, in another, less recognizable figure. There is in fact a second orphan in the story, not usually treated at length in critical readings of the text, who is also an autobiographer and whom David meets when he escapes from the blacking factory and finds his way to his Aunt Betsey’s home. This is the eccentric and affable Mr. Dick, presumed mad by all who meet him except Aunt Betsey, who has also taken in this “distant connexion”6 and saved him from an abusive past just as she has David Copperfield7. When David appeals to Aunt Betsey to let him live in her home, it is Mr. Dick who convinces Aunt Betsey to do it, and the two orphan writers seem, in many ways, to provide a staging of the transformative relationship between Dickens and his own character, through which he represents the triumph over his past. Yet Mr. Dick, unlike David, is defined not by his transformation into an autobiographical writer but by his failure to complete the “Memorial” of his life at which he is always at work; and unlike David, for whom their meeting constitutes “another beginning,” Mr. Dick’s madness takes the form of a repetitive breaking off of his narrative that is an apparent repetition of his own abusive past.

• 8 David Copperfield, 176-177.

‘How does the world go? I’ll tell you what,’ he added, in a lower tone, ‘I shouldn’t wish it to be mentioned, but it’s a’—here he beckoned to me, and put his lips close to my ear—‘it’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam, boy!”8

• 9 See Charles Dickens, Dickens, Charles. A Child’s History of England. London: Chapman and Hall, 1929 (...)
• 10 The pun is thus the sight of a repetition. The theory of repetition that emerged in Freud’s Beyond (...)

10Mr. Dick’s inability to write is connected—as we learn here and later—with the intrusion of the head of Charles the First—the king executed in 1649 for his authoritarian rule and his belief in the divine right of kings—which invades Mr. Dick’s text whenever he begins his story. Just as the historical Charles the First lost his head, as Dickens tells us in his account of the execution in A Child’s History of England, after uttering the word “Remember!”, Mr. Dick’s attempt to remember, through his Memorial, would appear to cause him to “lose his head.”9 While the cutting-off of King Charles the First’s head might seem to be a figurative displacement of a repressed referent in Mr. Dick’s past story, then, it actually operates, in the scene of Mr. Dick’s writing, as a strangely literal repetition of the cutting-off of both memory and word. The loss of the head, that is, is a pun that does not represent, but rather reenacts, an event that undoes memory, the repetition of a word that cuts off its own referential ground10.

• 11 On the posthumous (ghost-written) text of Charles I and Milton’s response see, for example, Steven (...)

11Mr. Dick’s “madness” does not consist in the loss of reality, therefore, but in the repetition of a reality that is not precisely his own. Indeed King Charles the First’s execution was itself more than a violent act that could be represented in language, since it was also a violence to the name that constituted it as historical event. In cutting off Charles the First’s head, the people also uprooted the divine ground on which he had based the authority of his name, thus cutting a gap in the story of “Charles” that forever entangled the story of the Divine King with the execution of the man. The history of the King thus took the form of competing stories bound around this cut: Charles’s own posthumous self-glorifying hagiography entitled Eikon Basilike, for example, and Milton’s Eikonoclastes as a belittling of the divinity, precisely, of this story11. We can understand why Dickens thus described the event as a cutting off of the word “Remember,” an event that is memorialized doubly in his own “Child’s History” and in the fictional (impossible) history of Mr. Dick. Cut off from its divine authority, the name “Charles” thus splits around the doubleness of its own significance, which itself appears to be best represented by its landing in—and de-authorizing—the text of Mr. Dick.

• 12 On names and fathers see Lynn Cain, “David Copperfield,” in Dickens, Family, Authorship. Cain argue (...)

13The “allegorical” use of the “figure” or “simile” of the cutting off of Charles the First’s head—Aunt Betsey has trouble finding a name for the figure itself—can only be “proper” to Mr. Dick’s story if it is also a story about the loss of the proper name12. Indeed, as David goes on to tell us:

• 13 The historical and linguistic events are thus inseparable; the language of Mr. Dick introduces (as (...)
• 14 The Hebrew word may mean “Gates of God” but “babble” apparently comes from a middle low German or o (...)

14In losing his connection to his paternal roots, Mr. Dick loses the “Babley” of paternal authority, becoming the author, as it were, only of the “babble” of his own “improper” name. In this other allegory of a loss of divine authority, Mr. Dick’s name, and its uprooting, retells the Biblical story of the tower reaching up to heaven that is also the story of a catastrophe to language performed by God. In the story of Babel God does not ground the language of man but makes of one many languages in order to punish man for his divine pretensions13. The catastrophe, here too, is thus a kind of trauma of language as it is split off into fragments from its unified comprehensibility and authority. The proper name “Babel,” ironically enough, itself becomes a kind of improper pun, in linguistic tradition, since the proper name (from a Hebrew word) sounds like, but is not the etymological root of, the word “babble” that describes the result that the catastrophe produces14. Doubly cut off from authority—both in his “proper” name Babley, and replacement by “Dick” — Mr. Dick thus seems to have no proper story. Or rather his proper story is, precisely, the story of the loss of the name by which he can author his own history. This is why Mr. Dick’s trauma can be named only through the story of another’s loss of historical authority.

• 15 On Richard Dadd see Nicholas Tromans, Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, D.A.P./Tate (August (...)

15It is precisely at this moment, however, that the story of Mr. Dick’s inability to author his own story is reconnected with the real authorship of Charles Dickens, by means of the joining of the cut-off name of the king, Charles, joined with another non-paternal nomination, Dick (“Charles Dick”). While the story of David thus seems to represent the trauma of Dickens through the figurative retelling of a proper referent, the punning of Mr. Dick’s failed story connects with the real author through the uprooting and disfiguration of the paternal, or authoritative, name. (It is interesting, in this context, that the character on which Mr. Dick is supposed to have been based, the mad poet Richard Dadd, was imprisoned in an insane asylum for the killing of none other than his own dad)15.

• 16 Two worthwhile essays devoted to Mr. Dick (there are not many) include Stanley Tick, “Memorializing (...)

16The pun of Mr. Dick’s mad symptom, we might say, rather than turning the referent into a recognizable figure, conveys the reality of a trauma constituted by the uprooted and de-authorized (and indeed forgotten) figure of Mr. Dick.16 The history of a trauma, that is, seems to lie only in the uprooting of its own history: in the passage from the man who “makes his name” to the unfortunate name of the one who is barely recognizable as a man. This crossing of reality and fiction in the disfiguring pun emerges, as well, through another problem of “memorialization” at the heart of Mr. Dick’s Memorial:

• 17 See James A. Davies John Forster: A Literary Life. On the “autobiographical fragment,” see Philip C (...)

17In being unable to memorialize—to write the Memorial of--his life, Mr. Dick is also unable to memorialize—to address—his story to the Lord Chancellor, that is, the proper authority. Charles Dickens, for his part, ultimately revealed the non-literary version of his “real” story in a no longer recoverable, and only partially written, “autobiographical fragment” that he conveyed to his biographer John Forster, who also, it turns out, became the Commissioner in Lunacy, assigned to report on lunatic asylums to none other than the Lord Chancellor17.

• 18 When David first arrives, Aunt Betsey asks Mr. Dick what to do with David, and Mr. Dick answers, “w (...)

20When David first enters the room and inquires about the progress of the Memorial, Mr. Dick responds with the mad dialogue that brings in Charles the First, who interrupts the Memorial’s proper address to the Lord Chancellor. But when Mr. Dick points to the failed writing on the Kite—as David is about to leave—he begins his first true address to his friend. Likewise, just after Mr. Dick has convinced Aunt Betsey originally to let the orphan David enter her home18—and thus make his first real progress in the plot that will lead to his writing—the failed writing of the Memorial ultimately allows Mr. Dick to enter the plot of the story when he first befriends David around the creative use of the writing on the kite. The kite thus becomes the literal means of moving the story along, even as it moves the words on the pages from their original place to the side of a creation that can be flown.

• 19 The scene of kite-flying-and-watching might also, therefore, be considered a scene of witness. The (...)

23The kite is thus also a figure of the literary that, in releasing the written word, also memorializes through the impact of an address19. Floating between David and Mr. Dick, the words that mark Mr. Dick’s failure to tie his language to himself begin the new journey, and language, that tells the story of David and Mr. Dick. No longer attempting to master his past, but—in David’s fancy—letting the words take him up with them, Mr. Dick is thus passed on through a writing—and a reading—that at least in part frees him from the traumatic disfiguration of the past.

• 20 It is remarkable that one of the main contributors to the OED was a “madman,” though Dickens wouldn (...)

27The search for roots that occupies Dr. Strong appears the opposite of Mr. Dick’s kite-flying, just as the upward-gazing dreamer appears to have little in common with the downward-gazing scholar20. Yet the pun on the word “roots” that introduces Dr. Strong’s project and the etymological link to the word “string” in Dr. Strong’s name bind the new manuscript, linguistically, to that of Mr. Dick, whose own name is also literally inscribed in the Dic-tionary.

• 21 David seems to be passing on a history as well, then—in fact that history of the uprooted root—thro (...)
• 22 The relation between the dead metaphor and the “living” metaphor might be thought of as another sto (...)
• 23 These scenes of reading are remarkably devoid of content or interpretation, which suggests that it (...)

31When the Dictionary, read by Dr. Strong, “goes to the roots,” Mr. Dick begins, once again, to soar: “and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering . . . upon the wings of hard words.” In David’s retelling, Mr. Dick flies on new wings with his friend, which, in David’s words, are themselves no longer simply English, but Greek—and specifically Homeric Greek, since “winged words” is a translation of ἔπεα πτερόεντα (epea pteroenta)—one of the most common Homeric formulaic epithets.21 The English phrase here, by introducing the semantic meaning of the Homeric metrical phrase (and dead metaphor)22 “winged words” as a figure for Mr. Dick’s listening (Mr. Dick’s wits soar, as he listens, on the “wings of hard words”), both pass on something of the Greek and suggest that it is the foreign word that lifts Mr. Dick up. Untrained, himself, in foreign languages, we must assume that Mr. Dick listens to, and flies along with, the sound of the roots, with the mere sound of the letters, a foreignness of the letter within English and a wandering of the signifier undone, in writing, from its meaning. This uprooting of meaning had haunted Mr. Dick, in his Memorial, but also frees him in the history of friendship that is possible in the scenes of reading between him and Dr. Strong23.

• 24 This is from a passage in which David describes the scraps of paper sticking out of Dr. Strong’s po (...)

32David is equally affected by this sight, “one of the pleasantest things . . . I ever have seen.” The “memorialization of Mr. Dick” thus takes the form of an address to him by Dr. Strong that also “memorializes” David, who passes on the figure of Mr. Dick as another letter that passes up into the skies: “and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering God knows where, upon the wings of hard words.” As the word “Dick” floats up to the sky with the Dictionary, the kite itself emerges in the story through its own linguistic history—the “kite” achieved its name as a figure of the bird that it seemed, in its floating, to resemble—though it is a history that ties it most closely, as a figure, to the sound and to the non-signifying letter. This is also, though, the generation of the character at the heart of the plot, as Dr. Strong’s very project, searching through the roots of foreign languages--through the foreignness of the roots of what had appeared to be a single language--in fact emerges, mythically, from the destruction of language in the Babel story that echoes through the sound of Mr. Dick’s uprooted paternal name. “Babley” in a sense returns, or is given back to Mr. Dick, in Dr. Strong’s (reading of his) “cumbrous scraps”24—and in David’s retelling of the scene of reading—as the allegory, or history, of the return of the name in the dispersal, and persistence of a string of letters.

• 25 The “D” insists here beyond its meaning or signification (even as the first letter of a name). (It (...)

34Dr. Strong joins Mr. Dick in the sky—and in the story—through the return of the letter—the “D” now released even from “Dick” and “David” (and “Dickens”) to the honorary title “Dr.,” by which he is equally often referred to in the text—which persists in the story even as it is uprooted, and floats, beyond any determined name25.

• 26 The word “employed” is used by Aunt Betsey about Mr. Dick’s writing of the Memorial when she first (...)
• 27 Mr. Dick helps others (and himself) the more occupied he is with pure writing and letters. This cou (...)

35The story of this letter never entirely returns, in David Copperfield, to a determinable name or figure. Yet it is in this continuing reproduction of meaningless writing that Mr. Dick is given his final “employment”26 in writing in another memorable scene. For through the friendship of Dr. Strong, and David, Mr. Dick continues to act centrally in the plot in the service of helping others repair their own catastrophic stories. Toward the end of the story, when Aunt Betsey has been ruined by the machinations of the nefarious Uriah Heep, David and a friend put Mr. Dick to work both to distract him from his own distress over Aunt Betsey’s plight, and to help her begin to get over it27. The employment of Mr. Dick--a copyist at a Clerk’s office that recalls both David’s and Dickens’s own employment histories—begins to free him of the obsession with the Memorial, but it does so through the meaningless production of more letters:

• 28 This is a citation from Lacan’s essay by that name, though the interpretation of the “letter” in th (...)

37Who is memorialized in the story of Dickens, David, Dr. Strong and Mr. Dick? In the orphaning of the letter, we learn of a certain history. But this takes place, it would appear, in the dispersal of a name—and a figure—that is strung up, though never gathered together, throughout the text. In this dispersal one might first begin to read new sets of relations, that, seemingly mad, nonetheless emerge into apparent legibility in the novel: the events of a divisive political past and the struggles of a man who cannot quite write; the institutional history of “madness” and the development of a canonical “literature”; the language of a traumatic story and the history of the (English) language. Emerging and disappearing in the rearrangements of letters and puns are fleeting configurations that bind the referential losses of a text’s witty word play with the (historical) burden of listening to a new, and apparently mad, form of address.

• 29 This insistence might be considered both the repetition of a traumatic history and its transformati (...)

38Another “history” can also be said, perhaps, to repeat itself, unconsciously, in the history of the critical search for roots in David Copperfield that continually forgets, and nonetheless repeats, the stor(ies) of the D. This may be what most addresses, and persists, in this story, a history that is equally undeterminable, and transmissible, in the insistence of the letter29 that, in David’s final recollection, memorializes the letters of Mr. Dick in the proliferation, and flight, of orphaned words: