For Minor Canon Corner was a quiet place in the shadow of the Cathedral, which the cawing of the rooks, the echoing footsteps of rare passers, the sound of the Cathedral-bell, or the roll of the Cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than absolute silence. Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of drudging and dying there... and behold they were all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one of the highest uses of their ever having been there was that there might be left behind that blessed air of tranquility which pervaded Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of mind — productive for the most part of pity and forebearance — which is engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play that is played out.

Red brick walls harmoniously toned down in color by the time... and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit yet ripened upon monkish trees, were the principle surroundings of pretty old Mrs. Crisparkle and the Reverend Septimus as they sat at breakfast. (MED, 53)

⯎ ⯎ ⯎

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is an incomplete novel which raises the issue of completion on several levels. Most obviously, it is a narrative which precisely because it is a mystery story makes the reader aware it is unfinished in a particularly maddening way. Understandably, many of the critics who have given it their attention have been concerned with finishing the work by identifying Edwin's murderer. In their efforts to realize the completed work, however, these critics are only mirroring the action of the novel itself. The Mystery of Edwin Drood has as its central question the possibility of its characters completing or fulfilling their lives. In the opening chapters of the novel both John Jasper and Rosa Budd feel themselves trapped in unfinished states. Both their stories are concerned with their attempts to realize their dreams and, in this sense, finish their stories.

The narrator's reference to the completed story in his description of Minor Canon Comer suggests, moreover, that his relation to his narrative is dominated by a similar desire for completion. His association of the "serenely romantic" (MED, 53) state of mind which pervades the Corner with the "tranquility... engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told" (MED, 53) reminds us that the narrator frequently insists that his story, too, is a "history" (MED, 255) set "in those days" (MED, 57) before the coming of the railroad. Like Minor Canon Corner, his narrative would seem to derive its meaning from the fact that it frames an action which is finished and which can be presented as a "play that is played out" (MED, 53). His art, then, is an art which privileges in a special way his use of the past tense. It is this tense which defines events as completed and enforces an historical perspective. And, evidently, it is only when the story is seen in its completed form, when it recedes into this historical past, that the mood of serene romanticism which defines its meaning can appear. His narrative is a process whose value is realized only in its completion.

Yet if this description of Minor Canon Corner exists in the text as an image of the text's own completion — an image which draws the narrator as surely as Jasper's dreams of "great landscapes" (MED, 260) draw him back to Princess Puffer's — it is clear that it exists as the image of an unrealized and problematic ideal. This is not simply the result of Dickens' sudden death. The narrator's efforts to present the history of Edwin's disappearance as a completed story are compromised from the very first chapter. We only have to realize the narrator's commitment to the past tense to remember that this tense neither begins nor entirely dominates the book. Of the twenty-three chapters in The Mystery of Edwin Drood fourteen are written in the past tense. But seven are in the present and two juxtapose past and present in striking ways. The chapters written in the present, moreover, deliberately seem to emphasize the ways in which they violate any ideal historical perspective. In them the narrator is swallowed in the immediacy of events, constantly emphasizing the problematic outcome of a character's actions, and narrative becomes the record of an ongoing and apparently open-ended process.

The juxtaposition of these two tenses implies that the opposition between the narrative as a completed story and the narrative as an open-ended process was fundamental to Dickens' conception of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The narrator's comment that events have their "highest uses" (MED, 53) only when they are completed suggests, moreover, why completion should be such a central issue, not only for Dickens but for the novel as a genre. The concept that the value of a story lies in its completion is in this context more than a statement of the necessity of a well-constructed plot. It implies that the text should be grounded in — should be the revelation of — some principle of completion. Like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Tom Jones and Pamela are stories of men who fall in love with and pursue women. They are narratives which record the movement of desire toward its chosen object. The marriages of Tom and Sophia or B. and Pamela, however, are not simply momentary satisfactions of desire. In both cases the movement of their narrative describes the pattern of the Fortunate Fall, the archetype which, in Christian thought, expresses providentially-controlled movement of the soul to God. In this context the marriages which end these stories figure the final completion of all desire in man's return to his origin. Both novels justify themselves as histories, not out of a simple commitment to realism but because their plot, like the plot of history itself, embodies a Providential plan which, seen as a finished pattern, reveals to man his true origin and end.

To say this is only to remind ourselves that the English novel has its origins in the Christian epic and Puritan spiritual autobiography and retains to some degree their teleological assumptions. Dickens' own fiction, moreover, testifies to the way these assumptions exist in the novel form not as a residual trace but as a powerful force. The narrator of Oliver Twist apparently identifies himself in a way Fielding and Richardson would find entirely familiar. He is both a portrait painter who finds and portrays in Oliver's face Oliver's true origin in the transcendent force of nature, and the historian who finds in Oliver's discovery of his parentage the allegory of man's return to this origin. The completed story of Oliver Twist, too, involves not just the resolution of a realistic situation-Oliver's orphanage — but the revelation of a principle which fills the absence signified by Oliver's orphanage. In pan, at least, the narrative and the narrator justify themselves in their positive imitation of this principle —and this completion.

There is still a suggestion of this possibility in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The narrator's description in one passage of the "mellowness" (MED, 211) of the cathedral walls which are transfigured by "a soft glow [which1 seems to shine from within them, rather than upon them from without" (MED, 211) makes the cathedral seem, for the moment, the manifestation of a divine presence. The narrator's juxtaposition, in this same passage, of the Cathedral with the gardens of Cloisterham which "blush with ripening fruit" (MED, 211) and his comparison of the "way-farers, leading a gypsy life between hay-making time and harvest" (MED, 211) with "travel-stained pilgrims" (MED, 211) is, from this point of view, entirely traditional. This description recalls again the image of life as a pilgrimage from the natural to the transcendent. If this moment could be sustained, then the tranquility of Minor Canon Corner would be rooted in its most obvious feature, the cathedral, and the narrator would assume an equally traditional role as the historian of this pilgrimage.

There is no doubt that the idea of life as a return to a transcendent origin retained a certain appeal for Dickens throughout his career. But there is no doubt, either, that by the time he wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood he no longer saw such a return as a real possibility. In this passage, the soft glow only "seems" to transfigure the walls of the Cathedral. Significantly, it is no longer a destination for pilgrims but only a temporary shelter where wanderers, like "Bedouins" "leading a gypsy life," pause before they "fry themselves on the simmering highroads" (MED, 211) again. The sense that the Cathedral testifies to a presence which, if it ever existed, has long since disappeared is reflected in the majority of the narrator's descriptions of the Cathedral. "Grey, murky and sepulchral" (MED, 94), it appears more tomb than church, more monument to a departed past than sign of a present meaning.

The recognition that the Cathedral no longer provides an end to the pilgrimage of life emphasizes the threat the present tense expresses perfectly: the open-ended temporality of a narrative which can only record the arbitrary wanderings of pilgrims who have become Bedouins. Such a "gypsy life" (MED, 211), and such a narrative, can, of course, end. But it can never be completed in the sense that Tom Jones describes the completion of Tom's journey in his marriage to Sophia and their return to Paradise Hall. The contrast between past and present tenses expresses perfectly the tension between pilgrimage and wandering and in so doing defines the problematic quality of the narrator's vision of the completed story.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood seems to have been intended by Dickons as a search for alternative grounds for the text's completion, of possible sources for the tranquility of Minor Canon Corner. For this reason it is one of Dickens' most complex and most important novels despite the fact that its mystery remains unsolved. In particular, The Mystery of Edwin Drood investigates two possibilities for the completed story — one which is implied in the stories of Jasper and Rosa and one which involves a radical transformation of the relation between the narrator and his narrative.

II

A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings. (MED, 269)

The first of these alternative possibilities is suggested by the way in which this description inverts the usual realtion between Cathedral and garden. In the description of the Cathedral cited on p. 4 the glow which transfigured its walls seemed to shine "from within them" (MED, 211). Here, however, the narrator describes the glow not as the manifestation of something present in the Cathedral but as the intrusion within these walls of the natural principle of fertility present in the "great garden" (MED, 269) of the island. It is the "vegetable life" which is "the most abundant and agreeable" evidence "of progressing life in Cloisterham" (MED, 23), which penetrates its shadows and preaches "the Resurrection and the Life" (MED, 269). And this intrusion implies a different relationship between the life of man and the life of nature, between the cycle of man's life and the "revolving year" (MED, 142) which fills the "cultivated island" (MED, 269) with "ripening fruit" (MED, 211).

The narrator's description of the wayfarers who appear in Cloisterham "looking as if they were just made out of the dust of the earth" (MED, 211) reminds us that man's life has its origins in the dust of the gardens and in the natural cycle which originates there. "Dust with the breath of life in it" (MED, 133), men, too, "come into existence, buds" (MED, 90). But it is not only human life which is bom out of the process of the natural world. Human desire has its origins there as well. The narrator's description of the nuns who have been walled up "for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since" (MED, 24) identifies that desire as the manifestation of a larger natural process. This relation is even more clear in the figure of Rosa Budd. Her name expresses her sense of herself as something still in the process of budding and, therefore, as something immature and incomplete. It is the sign of that lack or absence which is the origin of desire. In this, however, Rosa is only an explication of what it means for all men to come "into existence, buds" (MED, 90). With the exception of Crisparkle, her sense of immaturity is shared by all the major characters in the book. Such a sense of incompletion leads Edwin to concur in Rosa's decision to end their engagement and is behind his attraction to Helena, and, in similar ways, underlies both Neville's and Jasper's attraction to Rosa.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood men experience the movement toward ripening which dominates the natural descriptions in the novel as desire. The stories of the major characters in the novel imply a vision of human life as the movement of desire toward satisfaction in a way which is apparently the expression of the movement of the natural world toward maturity. If it is true, moreover, that desire has its origin in the natural world, then perhaps it has its completion there as well. Perhaps there is a parallel between the "revolving year" (MED, 142) and the "circle of [men's] lives" (MED, 152), so that men are not only born buds but come to maturity and ripeness as part of the same natural process. The sense of tranquility and completeness which the narrator celebrates will be found in man's immediate involvement in nature.

Such an interpretation would alter radically the meaning of the narrator's description of Minor Canon Corner. Its center would no longer be the Cathedral but rather the gardens "where annual fruit yet ripened upon monkish trees" (MED, 53). The narrator would remain an historian but he now would address himself to a desacramentalized history. If it is true that human and vegetable life are co-extensive, then the fulfillment of human existence will lie in the way the cycle of human life is intertwined with the cycle of the natural world. A history which recorded this cycle would never transcend the temporality of the natural. But it could still be a history written in the past tense because it would find in this temporality a process which carries man to fulfillment.

The stories of Rosa and Jasper are concerned with this happy union of man and nature. Like all mystery novels, The Mystery of Edwin Drood intends a demystification, and part of this intention is realized in the narrator's discovery of the principle of "Progressing life" (MED, 23) in the apparently timeless world of Cloisterham. This principle appears now not only in the life of its gardens but also in the "unexplored romantic nooks" (MED, 126) of its inhabitants. Mrs. Twinkleton's relationship to "foolish Mr. Porters" (MED, 25), Jasper's desire for Rosa, Edwin's attraction to Helena, and, in a wider sense, all the secret relationships which tie the East — associated throughout the novel with dreams and desire — to Cloisterham and the West, can now be seen as the manifestations of a natural process which should carry man to fulfillment. Only the Cathedral and the society of oppressive respectability centered around it seems to inhibit this process. They appear now as dead structures which give the past an unnatural and confining power over the present. The only thing necessary, it seems, is one act which would break the hold these structures have on the life of Cloisterham. Once their tyranny has been cast off, men will be free to complete themselves in the "fullness of time" (MED, 199).

Jasper's murder of Edwin is such an act. This "journey" (MED, 260) which he had performed "hundreds of thousands of times" (MED, 259) in his opium dreams is intended to break this hold and to allow his dreams to be realized in the world.

Yet although this act does free desire to express itself and to realize itself in the future, it does not bring Jasper satisfaction. The removal of Edwin, although it docs open the way to Rosa, docs not bring her any closer to him. Quite the contrary, it only drives her further away. The scene between Jasper and Rosa in the garden of the Nun's house is at once the moment in which his passion achieves its fullest expression and the moment its fulfillment becomes totally impossible. It is this encounter which drives Rosa away, which more than anything crystallizes the suspicions of Rosa, Grewgious and Crisparkle, brings them in league with one another against him, and results, if we can believe Forster's account of Dickens' plan, in his eventual imprisonment. The act intended to liberate and complete his life results, evidently, in his being confined to an even more monotonous and cramped "niche" (MED, 20) than he occupied as choirmaster. Jasper himself recognizes the failure of his intentions' "new medicine" (MED, 167) when he returns to Princess Puffer's to enjoy again in his dreams the journey which "when it was really done... seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon" (MED, 259). His dissatisfaction points directly to his failure by this journey to win Rosa and to realize in the real garden of Mrs. Twinkleton's, and in the true temporality of the world which is symbolized by its sundial, his visions of "great landscapes" (MED, 260).

One way to understand Jasper's failure is to see reflected in it Dickens' persistent distrust of any aggressive action, Jasper's deliberate and willful choice of Rosa makes explicit, more than any other aspect of this novel, the growing sense of individual freedom which surfaces in Dickens' later novels. Yet the fact that Dickens makes Jasper's choice require the removal of Edwin reveals that Dickens still retains an inherent suspicion of positive action and, in Jasper's growing isolation, we can see the well-documented tendency of such action in Dickens to imprison the self.

There is, however, another implication of Jasper's failure, one which becomes apparent when we juxtapose certain elements of Jasper's story with certain elements of Rosa's. Like Jasper, Rosa feels herself to be a prisoner in the past. In chapter II her dissatisfaction with her engagement to Edwin is contrasted to the pleasure she feels eating Turkish candy in the "Lumps-of-Delight shop" (MED, 30) in a way that is obviously meant to suggest in a different key the tension between Jasper's Eastern dreams and his role in Cloisterham. In a similar manner, her decision to abandon their engagement is, like Jasper's decision to murder Edwin, a rejection of the past. But there are obvious and important differences. Rosa's and Edwin's decision is mutually agreed to. More importantly, it is not a positive act aimed at the achievement of a chosen object but rather an act of resignation; and it lacks, therefore, the qualities of self-assertion which are associated by Dickens with isolation and imprisonment. It is not, the narrator tells us, "willful, or capricious" but "something more self-denying, honorable, affectionate, and true" (MED, 146). Jasper's act results, obviously, in the destruction of his relationship to Edwin. Rosa's decision on the other hand results in the transformation of her relationship to Edwin from fiancé to brother.

The necessity of Jasper's aggressive act is called into question, moreover, by the narrator's description of Cloisterham in the opening chapters. Here the idea that Cloisterham never changes, that it somehow has managed to imprison the flow of progressing life, is parodied in the pawnbrokers who take no pledges and in Sapsea's belief that the toasts of his youth are appropriate to the present. This sense of timelessness appears not as a real quality of Cloisterham but as the blindness of its inhabitants to the actual process of historical change. Cloisterham, the narrator tells us, was "once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another" (MED, 22). It is, therefore, "a queer moral to derive from antiquity" that "all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come" (MED, 23). The inhabitants who believe this do so with "an inconsistency more strange than rare" (MED, 23), for the real lesson of Cloisterham, it seems, is the knowledge that the principle of "progressing life" (MED, 23) carries it into the future with as little attention to the past as the children who "grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars" (MED, 23) pay to these former inhabitants. If human life is an expression of the same principle that allows the small salad to emerge from the dust of the past, then this principle will carry human life to fulfillment without the necessity of any radical act of destruction.

Rosa's self-denial in breaking her engagement to Edwin would seem to allow the future to manifest itself and desire to free itself in just such a natural way. Her décision makes Jasper's unnecessary. If he had only waited the way to Rosa would have been opened to him in the normal progress of events, and this suggests that his intense sense of confinement in Cloisterham is a false one. The future opens naturally to Rosa without any conscious aggressive action on her part. Consequently, this future should bring her a satisfaction un-marred by the isolation and guilt which seemed to Dickens the inevitable result of such action.

The story of Rosa after Edwin's disappearance is an investigation of this possibility. Her journey to London, a journey which parallels Jasper's, retains these qualities of self-effacement. Just as she did not leave Edwin for another but only resigned her engagement to him, so her move to London is not a movement toward a chosen end but, as the title of this chapter tells us, a "flight" from Jasper. And this difference seems to have important implications for her involvement in relationship to the "progressing life" (MED, 23) of the novel. Jasper's attempt to choose his future results in his being caught in the "wonderful chains that are forever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstance" (MED, 150). His willfulness determines not only his relation to Rosa and the other characters in the novel, it also determines his relation to time and circumstance. Rosa's flight, on the other hand, implies a more open attitude which is free to accept the ripeness which the natural movement of life will bring. "When one is in a difficulty or at a loss," Mr. Grewgious tells her, "one never knows in what direction a way may chance to open" (MED, 230). It is this "business principle" of Grewgious' "not to close up any direction, but to keep an eye in every direction" (MED, 230) which introduces Tartar into Rosa's life.

Rosa's relationship to Tartar seems, in fact, to promise the completion of her budding nature. Their chance encounter, which is certainly intended to be one of the "developing changes" which will move the "depths" of a self which "had never yet been moved" (MED, 82), is described throughout these last chapters in ways which appear to set it in opposition to the scene between Jasper and Rosa in the garden of the Nun's house. Rosa, on Tartar's arm, ascends "unexpectedly" (MED, 237) to "his garden in the air, and seemed to get into a marvellous country that came into sudden bloom like the country on the summit of the magic bean-stalk" (MED, 235). Here, in this world which is "like a dream" (MED, 238) and yet is an actual garden, Rosa and Tartar enjoy an "enchanted repast" (MED, 241). And this experience is repeated later in their excursion on the Thames to "dine in some everlastingly green garden" (MED, 246).

These interludes in these gardens which seem at once real and enchanted do seem to indicate that Mr. Grewgious' principle of openness to the future is vindicated and that through an acceptance of what the future brings the union of dream and reality can take place as a matter of course. Yet there are elements in the novel which imply that the seemingly obvious contrast between Rosa's experience of the union between dream and actual garden and Jasper's experience of the distance between the gardens of Cloisterham and the "great landscapes" (MED, 260) of his dreams is misleading. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is, of course, an unfinished work, and it is impossible to say what the final form of Rosa's and Tartar's relation would have been. But we must see that at the same time the narrator seems to imply that their enchanted gardens are realized in the natural world, he is carefully setting these occasions in opposition to the flow of time. Rosa's enchanted repast in Tartar's apartments ends because "Mr, Tartar could not make time stand still; and time, with his hard-hearted fleetness, strode on so fast that Rosa was obliged to come down from the bean-stalk country to earth" (MED, 241). In a similar manner their afternoon on the Thames ends when "all too soon, the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life, and the everlastingly green garden seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and far away" (MED, 247).

Such passages emphasize that no human garden is everlastingly green and that both Rosa and Tartar will inevitably travel "the silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge" (MED, 81). The most obvious example of Grewgious, "business principle" (MED, 230) of chance is, in fact, the drowning of Rosa's mother "at a party of pleasure" (MED, 81) not unlike Rosa's and Tartar's afternoon on the Thames. These references to death remind us that if the characters in The Mystery of Edwin Drood can attain any sense of completion it is, at best, a temporary one. Yet even this is called into question. The death of Rosa's mother not only cuts short her life, it also leaves Grewgious, whose existence is defined by his love for her, frozen at a "hopeless, speechless distance" MED, 125) from the object of this love. The emphasis in this novel falls more on the kind of living death which occurs when, through the action of time and circumstance, desire is held at a perpetual remove from its object than it does on death as the end of life. Thus the river not only carries Rosa and Tartar toward the "gritty state of things in London" where, Rosa remarks, people were always in the condition of "waiting for something that never came" (MED, 252). Here Rosa finds herself making "the most of what was nearest her heart" (MED, 253) not with Tartar himself but only in fantasies provoked by listening to Mrs. Twinkleton read books on voyages and sea-adventures.

Rosa in this way is not noticably better off than Jasper, who must return to Princess Puffer's in order to recapture through opium the satisfaction which the actual performance of his "journey" (MED, 260) did not bring him. The fact that both find themselves in this stare of perpetual waiting would seem to allow us to come to at least a provisional conclusion. Man is born from dust and "that mysterious spark which lurks in everything" (MED, 136). The Mystery of Edwin Drood accepts the fact that man has his source in this purely naturalistic principle, but continues to posit a radical discontinuity between human and natural life. This discontinuity lies not only in the fact that nature's life is cyclic while man's is linear — that individual consciousness does not die in order to be reborn — and that, consequently, he will never achieve the form of eternality which characterizes the natural world. It lies also in the fact that the "revolving year" (MED, 142) which brings ripeness to "the great garden of the whole cultivated island" (MED, 269) does not bring an equivalent ripeness, however temporary, to men. Although the romantic side of the characters in The Mystery of Edwin Drood has its origin in the "fermenting world" (MED, 24) of nature, it finds its expression in visions -Jasper's dreams of "great landscapes" (MED, 200), Rosa's enchanted gardens — which are incompatible with the gardens of the real world and the principle of "progressing life" (MED, 23) which they express. Because the natural progress of life does not satisfy their dreams, the characters in this novel find themselves imprisoned by desire in particularly intense and frustrating ways. They define themselves by their desire but find themselves separated from its satisfaction by the very force of time and circumstance which, seen as the principle of ongoing life, is its source. Not only are the last chapters of the novel, as we have it, dominated by the imprisonment of its characters in this sort of endless dissatisfaction. The logic of the novel implies that this will not be transcended in the second half, and that all the characters will suffer the fate of Grewgious at the hands of a Nature who says "I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is" (MED, 86).

III

The histories of Rosa and Jasper, then, have complementary meanings. Together they imply that man will never find fulfillment in the temporal world, either through his own actions or through the natural processes of life. Such a conclusion makes it clear that any vision of a completed story will never be realized in the imitation of history. In this context, Rosa's unfinished portrait describes the limit of a mimetic approach. "Humorously — one might almost say, revengefully — like the original" (MED, 14), its incompleteness can only reflect and emphasize the incompleteness of its subject. An historical narrative, based on a principle of imitation, will never become the "globular" (MED, 121) "picture of a true lover's state of mind" (MED, 120) which occurs when the "true lover has no existence separable from that of the beloved object" (MED, 121). Since a story which mirrors history will never record the historical union of a self with the object of its desire, this story, too, must remain unfinished.

If Rosa's story marks the inevitable failure of historical narrative, it does point to the ways in which the narrator's method represents a search for an alternative ground for the completed story. The direction of this search is implicit in the final situations of Rosa and Jasper. Both have turned from the frustrations of the world to experience their dreams in another way — Jasper in a return to Princess Puffer's and Rosa in the fantasies provoked by Mrs. Twinkle- ton's reading. If dreams cannot be realized, and the self completed, in history, then perhaps they can be incarnated and completed in some more appropriate form — in the world of language. Language is, after all, the product of consciousness and not of nature. Perhaps it would offer the proper medium for these visions which define the self's fulfillment. Such a language would not, of course, be tied to the real world. While it might find its subject in history, it would transform history into story — into a linguistic structure which is separate, and free, from the temporality of the natural world. To attempt this would be to follow Princess Puffer's advice when she tells Jasper "never take opium your own way... take it in a artful form" (MED, 257),

The narrator himself suggests this interpretation of his story when he ends his description of the flying waiter and the immovable waiter who serve Edwin and Grewgious by remarking that "it was like a highly finished miniature painting representing my Lords of the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort. Government" (MED, 118), The finished quality of this painting which refers only to the fictional Circumlocution Department is meant obviously to contrast with Grewgious' picture of a true lover's state of mind whose realization in the world must be forever incomplete. But this passage alerts us as well to the way in which its finished quality has been achieved through a process of transformation. The metaphors of the immovable waiter and the flying waiter appear initially as ways of describing the actual dinner. But in the course of the long passage, they lose their referential quality and become instead the thing being described. The passage, in other words, becomes a finished picture only by absorbing the "real" subject of the passage into a self-referential world of language.

The technique of the extended metaphor in which the linguistic surface of the description becomes gradually opaque and the reader's gaze becomes concentrated on this surface is only one of the techniques which the narrator uses to emphasize the verbal texture of the story and to detach this texture from any reference to the natural world. The translation of characters into objects — Mrs. Crisparkle into a "china sliepherdess" (MED, 52) — or the anthropomorphization of objects — the wine bottles which push at their corks like "prisoners helping rioters to force the gates" (MED, 118) and the extreme lyricism of passages such as Dickens' description of the "one great garden of the.. island" (MED, 269), which in its verbal extravagance makes the reader constantly aware that it is more language than description, all invite us to see the novel as a purely "artful form" (MED, 257).

From this point of view we can see one other possible way to understand the narrator's celebration of the completed story in his description of Minor Canon Corner. Perhaps this is not a description of some real quality of the Corner or of the history which has occurred there, but instead a product of the displacement of this history into story. This would be one way to explain why the "highest uses" (MED, 53) of these events are realized in their absence. The distance between event and narrative is no longer simply a temporal perspective but a much more radically conceived hiatus between history and fiction. The air of tranquility which characterizes the Corner occurs only when the narrator separates it from the world of progressing life and makes it the location of a separate and independent world of story. By the same token, the narrator's use of the past tense can be seen not as the past tense of history but of narrative, where the two are understood to exist in opposition to one another. If the tranquility of completion can appear only when the "ramping and raving" (MED, 53) of history has departed — then the past tense becomes one of the primary agencies by which die narrator distances the open-ended temporality of life and creates a world of story which can be "all told" (MED, 53).

The idea that the self can complete itself in fiction implies that a purely linguistic affirmation of subjectivity is possible. Although this seems to be a radical position for a novelist who is as conservative as Dickens it is one which, again, has been associated with the novel since its inception. If the novel has one source in the epic and religious autobiography, it has another in the set of attitudes associated with the late Renaissance experience of subjectivity. One aspect of this experience was the awareness that man — no longer defined as an image of God — could become his own creator. It is this power to create the self which is invoked both by Señor Quesada when he names himself Don Quixote and by Cervantes when he invents the notes and dedicatory epistles which justify his novel.

This radical strain exists as well in the most conservative English novels. When Richardson has Pamela refer to her letters as "a pretty novel" she has written or Fielding reminds us that it is he and not Providence who saves Tom from hanging both are asking us to sec their novels as equivalent acts of self-creation. Both these novels are defined by the dialect between radical and conservative interpretations, and in both cases these interpretations range themselves around the pattern of the Fortunate Fall in an interesting way. It remains the center of both readings, becoming at once the record of a Providential movement and the pattern of an orphan's invention of its own identity. In part this ambivalence is the natural result of the persistence of Christian tropes in an increasingly secular world and, from this point of view, Tom Jones becomes a destructive parody of Paradise Lost. In part, however, the symmetry of these novels appears as a kind of mystification whereby the created self takes on the same form and solidity that the Christian self possessed. This symmetry, in other words, implies that the act of writing as one act of self-creation can ground the self as solidly — as completely — as the act of writing understood as the imitation of a transcendent principle.

This ambivalence is present, too, in Oliver Twist. The narrator who defines himself as an historian also presents himself as a writer of burlesque melodramas who alternates comic and tragic, like the lean and fat in bacon, in order to please his audience. The history of Oliver becomes, in this context, a self-consciously fictional narrative, not the imitation of a real action. But the fact that the narrator as melodramatist chooses to write the traditional story of Oliver's discovery of his origin endows his narrative with an apparent solidity which transcends our ideas of the melodramatic and gives his narrative a quality of completion it would not otherwise have.

The narrator's intention is, from this point of view, clear. He assumes both Jasper's failure to choose actively a self in the world and Rosa's failure to find completion through the workings of chance. Consequently he turns his intention not toward the world but away from it toward the creation of a "finished painting" (MED, 23). The center of the Comer's serene romanticism would be no longer either the cathedral or the garden, but Mrs. Crisparkle's "wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and Minor Canon Corner" (MED, 100) which she turns to whenever her son "wanted support" (MED, 100). In the narrator's description of this closet the Cathedral bell and organ whose sounds "had made sublimated honey of everything in store" (MED, 101) appear not the echo of a transcendental harmony but as the expression of a more human art represented by the portrait of Handel who "beamed down at the spectator, with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a musical air of intending to combine all its harmonics in one delicious fugue" (MED, 100). And it is presumably this human art which is responsible for the fact that everyone who dips into these contents returns "mellow-faced, and seeming to have undergone a saccharine transfiguration" (MED, 101).

To sec the book this way is to see it as a fairy-story in which history is transformed into tale in the same way that ordinary materials of the world have been transformed into the "benevolent inhabitants" (MED. 100) of the closet, a "Court of these Powers" (MED, 100) whose members include "pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double breasted buttoned coat" who "announced their portly forms, in printed capitals" and jams "of a less masculine temperament and, as wearing curl-papers, announced themselves in feminine calligraphy, like a soft whisper" (MED, 100). The association of the calligraphy of the labels and the metamorphosis of the contents reminds us of the connection between the narrator's transformation of his subject through linguistic strategies, such as the extended metaphor and those moments when the narrator explicitly invites us to consider the resulting work as a fairy-story-by describing, for example, Bazzard as Mr. Grewgious' "Familiar" called into exbtence "by a magic spell which had failed when required to dismiss him" (MED, 114) or Rosa as "the fairy-queen of Mrs. Twinkleton's establishment" (MED, 144).'

An important critic of the novel has remarked that "certain fairytales still retain fragments" of an epic totality in which immanent and transcendental were inextricably interwoven. The association of Mrs. Crisparkle's closet with the harmony of the cathedral bell certainly expresses Dickens' nostalgia for such totality. But more than this, the a-historical world of the fairy-story seems to become for Dickens, as it did for some German Romantics, the appropriate mode to express the ability of consciousness to separate itself from the natural and create a realm which is the expression of this freedom. In this context the meetings of Tartar and Rosa in his "marvellous" garden and in "everlastingly green garden" (MED, 246) where they dine on their excursion become the locus of this attempt to separate story from history. These passages can now be seen to accept the irreconcilability of human dreams and ongoing life which is figured in Rosa's and Tartar's return to London, and to concentrate instead on the narrators ability to embody a sense of completion by transforming these events into fairy-story.

The relationship between the story of Rosa and Tartar and the narrator's assertion of his power to transform is suggested by the similarity between the locker from which Tartar, "by merely touching the spring knob... and the handle of a drawer," produces "wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs, magically-perserved tropical spices, and jellies of celestial tropical fruits" which make up their "enchanted repast" (MED, 247), and Mrs. Crisparkle's closet. This similarity provides the proper context for the "transfiguration" (MED, 101) which takes place when the narrator describes Tartar as a "water-giant" taking Rosa, the "fairy queen" (MED, 144), or "First Fairy of the Sea" (MED, 237), to his "garden in the air... a marvellous country that came into sudden bloom like the country on the summit of the magic beanstalk" (MED, 235).

The allusions to fairy-stories which are concentrated in this description suggest that if The Mystery of Edwin Drood was going to record "a tale that was all told" (MED, 53) it would do so only on the level of fairy-story. Such a completion would ground the tranquility which the narrator attributes to the Corner securely in the power of the narrator and would represent the novel as an aesthetic object over the idea of the novel as a realistic history. Yet the idea that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was intended to dramatize the narrator's transformation of history into story returns us to the tension in this book between past and present tenses, for the awareness that the past tense is an important agency in this transformation only underscores the conflict. Unfinished novels allow only probable conclusions, of course, and there is no way of establishing with any certainty the final success or failure of the narrator's effort. Yet the strong awareness of the present tense in a story which, from the narrator's point of view, should appear from its beginning as something completed would seem to compromise the success of his efforts, and, consequently, to undermine the ability of consciousness to define itself in language.

One key to understanding this failure lies in what might be called the centripetal movement of the important passage in which the narrator's description of Grewgious' and Edwin's dinner transforms it into a picture "like a highly finished miniature painting representing my Lords of the Circumlocution Department" (MED, 118). As we have seen, this passage located the narrator's vision of completion in his power to translate history into story, and centers the narration in the intentionality of the narrator's consciousness. But at the same time this description seems to be affirming the possibility of such a transformation effecting a completed story, it breaks the idea of the story as a closed, completed system by referring it to another text by way of the description of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit.

It might be argued that what is at issue here is simply the distinction between an individual work and the totality of an author's writing, and that Dickens is merely inviting us to see him embodied and defined by his presence in the entire corpus of his work. But this possibility is not borne out by the way in which the narrator's power of transformation is associated with the fairy-tale motif in the book. The narrator does nor choose a single fairy-tale as the basis of his narrative in a way which would allow us to see his use of this motif as the expression of an authorial intentionality. The case is quite the opposite. The references to fairy-tales appear in this work either in general allusions to enchanted gardens or in specific references to individual tales such as Jack and the beanstalk. But in neither instance arc they integrated into a single narrative structure. The effect of these references, consequently, is to dissolve the narrator's story through a scries of intertextual references which make it appear no longer centered in the narrator's act of transformation but force us to see it as one repetition of a set of narrative motifs. These are motifs, moreover, which are not themselves the expression of an intentionality. They do not. in other words, embody the presence of an individual consciousness. Like myths, faiiy-tales have no specific individual source but exist as elements in an essentially infinite series of variations which cannot be referred either to an authorial consciousness or to some independent, "real" world of which they are an imitation.

From this point of view, the narrator's story can never be finished in the sense that it might become a closed structure which affirms the individual existence of his consciousness. Instead, the act of writing opens out into a field of language which denies the centrality of the narrator who apparently brings it into being. The translation of history into story, which begins as the positive assertion of this individuality, ends in the impersonal play of narrative motifs. This is precisely the implication of his reference to the Circumlocution Department, where the intentionality of human actions is swallowed up and dissipated in the endless circularity of language.

These histories of Rosa and Jasper show that man is limited, finally, by an unbridgeable gap between himself and the natural world. Now, since it is apparently the nature of language that stories can never be self-contained, the narrator is faced with an equivalent rupture in his relation to his narration. He finds himself defined by a two-fold separation, distanced at once from the world of nature and the world of language.

This awareness leaves both the narrator and the reader in a double bind. Dickens' works, from the beginning of his career, have balanced themselves between realism and a kind of artful burlesque. On the one hand, he shares with most English novelists a distrust of purely aesthetic solutions. On the other hand, his writings are characterized by a kind of verbal excess which is always violating the limits of realism and seeming to assert the validity of linguistic structures. In this sense the narrator of Oliver Twist, who describes himself as a biographer, has always lived uneasily with the narrator who describes himself as a melodramatist.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not unusual, then, in the fact that it addresses these opposing tendencies. All of Dickens' work, and, as I have tried to indicate, much of the English novel, can be read as a dialectic between the ideas of history and story. What is important in this novel is the relentlessly precise way in which Dickens demystifies both history and story as possible grounds for completion. The narrator, it seems, can only record the inevitable tension between the idea of completion and the conditions which inevitably frustrate its realization. The Mystery of Edwin Drood seems, in this way, Dickens' final comment on his own search for tranquility. It is undoubtedly accidentai that he did not live to finish the novel. But the ironic awareness of the narrator suggests that its unfinished state mirrors, in an uncanny way, its theme and that even if Dickens had lived to end it, we would have found ourselves, like Rosa in London, awaiting a completion that never comes.