Ron Carter’s analysis of the opening three paragraphs of Bleak House (in Working with Texts, p113-5) is a reminder of how constructed Dickens’ writing is. Carter shows that there are no ‘finite verbs in main clauses in the text’, providing no ‘anchor’ in Time. The timelessness of present participles such as ’waddling, jostling, slipping, sliding…’ echoes the reluctance in OMF and GE to tie the text down to a particular moment in time, something Jeanette Winterson avoids with the specific date 1601 (although would they have had booze-cruises in 1601?) and then subverts with Silver’s time travelling and the Dragon’s enigmatic pronouncement,
‘…Time passes,’ said the Dragon, ‘ the clock chimes, men are born, grow old, and die, the world changes. All that is true, Jack, but that is not the sum of truth. You are young, but your deepest mind is as old as the mind of the first man who ever was, and what he saw, you can see, and what he knew, you can know, and what he feared, you fear too. You are many Jacks, many minds, many lives, but you live this one now, and that is what you see, like a man in a great house who confines himself to a single room and a single view…
Jack thought of the Thames and how his mother had told him that the Romans had rowed up the river and how in those days, so far away, the banks were thickly wooded and mammoths roamed the land. And how there were rich houses along the banks of the Thames, and the mammoths were all gone, but the river still ran its course. It was the same river. Perhaps his mind was like that river…’ (JW(2009), p94).
The Fog, timelessness of verbs and confusion of craft makes a tuneful river that echoes between Lizzie, Gaffer, Pip, Herbert, Provis, Silver and Jack.
