Abstract
Excerpt: Charles Dickens’ ghost story “To Be Read at Dusk” was first published in 1852 in Heath’s Keepsake. Though it seldom appears in recent Dickens scholarship, the story is unique for its self-reflexivity, a quality not often as apparent in Dickens’ works. The text consists of two ghost stories inside a frame narrative whose occupants are observed by the narrator who, as I explain below, is interrupted by the author himself. While all of these layers of narration would be enough to call attention to the act of storytelling itself, there is an additional level of self-reflexivity in the content of the various tales; they are all concerned with figuration and representation. The focus of the frame narrative, and thus the motive force behind the telling of the two inner tales, is the simile and its properness – who voices it, to whom does it belong, to what does it refer, and does it do so convincingly? The two internal tales then serve to demonstrate how likeness, similitude, operates. This operation is, it seems, commonly uncommon; while one of the storytellers claims that the events narrated, instances of likeness, are “as common as cherries in the Black Forest,” they are nonetheless events that most would label supernatural – premonitions, phantoms, doppelgangers and the like (Dickens 235). These events, linked as they are, in Dickens’ tale, to the simile, call attention to the use of figuration itself as a commonly uncommon activity; while it can be performed easily and innocently enough, it conceals the violent initiatory act involved in every representation.