Several critics have used the term surrealist to describe the blend of fantasy and realism found in Dickens’s novels: the interspersion of Gothic supernaturalism and fairy-tale elements with intensely realistic descriptions, the dream-like or hallucinatory style of many of his passages, and the psychological and metaphysical concern Dickens had with dreams. However, these critics hesitate to discuss his work in specific terms of surrealist techniques and concepts. Unwilling to associate him with as radical a movement as that of André Breton and his followers, they do not take their discussions much beyond the term itself.

Dickens’s novels anticipate the surrealist movement in much more concrete and conceptual ways than most scholars may realize. While even early critics such as George Henry Lewes have noted the hallucinatory strain of his work, most will discuss this quality only in terms of mood or atmosphere rather than as evidence of Dickens’s concern with probing the unconscious. Even Taylor Stoehr, whose extensive study The Dreamer’s Stance posits that Dickens’s style and narration create a governing vision that is often dreamlike, emphatically maintains that the author’s work is not surrealist. His argument is based on the questionable assumption that Dickens, unlike the later artists, did not consciously set out to imitate dreams. The distinction, for him, thus lies in artistic intention.

Stoehr is undoubtedly correct in refraining from labeling Dickens a surrealist per se. It is quite unlikely that the novelist whose works are so finely interwoven and whose artistic control is so apparent would have completely agreed, for example, with surrealist notions about the function of the artist and methods of style and composition. Dickens was too concerned with the aesthetic, too conscious of his craftsmanship, to release the artistic control surrealists considered an obstacle to art. Dickens, though, did share a much more central concern with the movement, that is, he used his art to explore the role that dreams and fantasy play in our understanding of external reality and what lies beyond it. His novels therefore contain a substantial number of elements that are strikingly similar to those present in surrealist painting and fiction. A close study of the many similarities between Dickens’s work and the later movement, rather than simply providing a trendy means of approaching the novels, elucidates the surprisingly modern concern he had with the unconscious and the innovative means he used to explore it.

A study of Oliver Twist will be particularly fruitful, as readers generally have criticized the novel as poorly constructed, inconsistent, and overly sentimental. However, a comparison with surrealist practices suggests that what are usually thought to be infelicities and weaknesses in characterization, structure, and plot are perhaps instead signs of Dickens’s modern experimentation with examining dreams. Moreover, a likening of elements in the novel to those of surrealist painting will emphasize the pictorial quality of his work: his attention to images, objects, lighting, shading, and spatial arrangements. Finally, a comparison should reveal the complexity of those passages on dream states, passages that readers have generally found to be among the most interesting yet puzzling aspects of the novel.

Mary Rohrberger has been the only scholar to argue that a comparison to surrealism is a valid means of approaching Dickens’s work, and she also chooses Oliver Twist as the focus of her study. While her article points to some important connections between the novel and surrealist and Freudian theory, it is not inclusive. There is no mention of such important concepts as critical paranoia, hallucinatory realism, or surrealist ideas about the object. Nor does Rohrberger discuss surrealist fiction, some of which is remarkably similar to Dickens’s novels in terms of characterization and setting. Her major omission, however, is that she fails to discuss surrealism as a visual art. Since it is primarily through painting that the surrealists expressed their fascination with the unconscious, such neglect of paintings and the techniques used to create them seriously weakens an understanding of the movement and its relation to Dickens. Finally, a study of the novel still needs to take into account the context of other Dickens novels that are replete with surrealist elements. References to other novels will clarify how this “apprentice” work launched Dickens’s fascination with dreams and the unconscious.

Surrealism has as its essence a desire to draw upon and even imitate dream experience; ideally, its followers wished their art to be an expression of imagination as realized in dreams. Adopting Freud’s theory that the unconscious is the domain where real motivations of conscious thought are to be discovered, the surrealists believed that human beings achieve self-discovery through exploring the unconscious as manifested in the dream state.

What most attracted the surrealists to the unconscious is its blending of the fantastical with external reality, a synthesis that they regarded as fundamental to human understanding. Contrary to popular notions, surrealism’s basic aim was not a rejection of the material world but its reconciliation with dreams and the imagination. In fact, the surrealists ultimately strived for a reconciliation of all that appears to be contradictory. Breton elaborates in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “Everything leads us to believe there exists a certain point in the mind in which life and death, real and imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions” (Manifestoes 123). Reaching this point is their ultimate aim, which can be realized through exploring the seemingly disparate nature of dreams.

Oliver Twist comprises many conflicting or incongruous elements and forces. The most obvious of these is, of course, the two “camps” of good and evil as represented by the Maylies and Brownlow on the one hand and Fagin and his gang on the other; others include realism and supernaturalism, dream and reality, darkness and light, open pastoral and crowded city, anguish and contentment, youth and old age, birth and death or near-dying, and innocence and corruption. As Steven Marcus observes (67), at first glance it seems that there is a distinct separation between most of these pairs of opposites, so much so that a traditional reading of the novel posits a clear demarcation between the realms of goodness and wickedness. A close study, however, challenges this black-and-white approach, and reveals that Oliver Twist attempts a reconciliation of seemingly contradictory elements similar to those found in dreams.

To begin with, there is the merging of realism characterized by precision and detail with unbridled fantasy: a fusion that is a significant characteristic of the dream. As Stoehr observes, one of the main similarities between Dickens’s work and dreams is a predilection for detail. Dickens’s vision, which deals with the familiar detail rather than the unfamiliar, complex abstract, and which often dwells on apparently insignificant objects, has much in common with the vision of a dreamer: “The fragmentation of perception and the displacement of feeling to the isolated inanimate parts has a leveling effect, so that everything is somehow of equal emotional weight; thus, as in dream or magic, the smallest irrelevancy has talismanic force” (Stoehr 88).

Acknowledging the importance of detail in dreams, many surrealists painted with a surprising exactness and concern for detail. This emphasis on accuracy was an important part of what they termed “hallucinatory realism,” defined as “a careful and precise delineation of detail, yet a realism which does not depict an external reality since the subjects realistically depicted belong to the realm of dream or fantasy” (Osborne 529). Thus, painters such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Victor Brauner tempted the viewer into a feeling of familiarity engendered by recognition of forms while simultaneously usurping this familiarity by rendering their landscapes with a strangeness, sense of displacement, or fantastical quality.¹ Similarly, the vivid detail of the London scenes in Oliver Twist works to transform ordinary streets and places into an alien, sometimes magical, often horrific world. The heavy use of detail with no focal point, as in surrealist collages, disorients and assaults the reader so that realistic images become hallucinations or fantasies.

Dickens achieves this same disorienting blend of detail and fantasy in Martin Chuzzlewit. In this early novel, Dickens carefully delineates objects while simultaneously infusing them with animation. The passage that describes the view from the roof of Todger’s boarding-house exemplifies this technique most clearly:

The purpose here, as in many other passages from the novel, is to force the reader to observe objects closely: “We cannot dismiss them with our usual unseeing recognition, a recognition that identifies but does not perceive” (Stone 96). In Martin Chuzzlewit, the magical quality of objects that are so carefully described causes the viewer to question his own reactions to external reality since what he normally regards as mere background suddenly moves to the forefront of his perception and assaults his senses. This manipulation of the viewer through emphasis on objects is a distinctive feature of many surrealist paintings. In Giorgio de Chirico’s work, such as The Anxious Voyage, objects that are traditionally represented as background (pillars, columns, statues) appear prominently in the landscape while human figures are faintly represented in the distance. Even more interesting is that these figures seem to be in a state of motionless anonymity; we have no idea who these people are or for what they are waiting, only that they are part of a landscape where objects tower over and, in fact, seem to paralyze them. Interestingly, this relationship between objects and persons is also an important aspect of Martin Chuzzlewit. The objects that can be viewed from Todger’s render the observer absolutely passive. Their magical presence exerts such force that the viewer has no control over perception or consciousness.

Of course, Oliver Twist differs from Martin Chuzzlewit in that it places a child at the center of detailed yet fantastical visions. As a child, Oliver perceives his experience and surroundings in very concrete terms; he is not yet able to apply rational or philosophical explanations to them. The overwhelming sense of terror he feels through much of the novel acts upon his childish sensations, and therefore transforms detail into exaggerated or phantasmagoric forms. Being an orphan, Oliver feels a profound sense of isolation and helplessness that causes him to perceive the world as a domain where continual threats and surprises await him, where there is no comforting sense of certainty. Since we often assume Oliver’s point of view, we too see the detail of London as alien and fantastic.

The perspective of the child—combining a capacity for exaggeration, emphasis on detail, and primordial sense of fear and helplessness —is one that many surrealists tried to convey in their art. As Breton explains, men in the world of dreams are like very small children, still unable to classify, situate, or interpret the elements of the outside world. Hence, Joan Miró uses the child’s perspective as the governing vision for most of his art. This perspective is also present in some surrealist fiction. René Crevel employs a child as the central figure in his novel Babylone. Her outlook, juxtaposed to the rational and flat perspective of the adult world, infuses the external world with hidden possibilities, transforming ordinary objects into elements of wonder. Similarly, Oliver’s perspective transmutes such seemingly insignificant objects as trees and wooden boards into phantoms and turns definite, oft-traveled places into unknown and dangerous domains, as this passage in chapter 16 describing Oliver’s journey with Sikes conveys:

This helpless position of a child promotes paralysis: stricken with terror and uncertainty, Oliver cannot exert control over his experience. Consequently, he remains passive through most of the novel and emerges as a fragile symbol of innocence rather than a believable character. Critics have generally maintained that Dickens’s portrayal of Oliver is a major defect of the work. On a realistic level, Oliver’s character is an artistic failure. However, if we compare Oliver to the figures of many surrealist novels, his passivity becomes not only excusable but necessary. The essentially passive role of a dreamer was one of the most significant aspects of dreams for the surrealists. Acknowledging that in dreams man submits without questioning and what he appears to see and experience offers him little surprise until he returns to the waking world, surrealists tried to adopt that position for themselves as artists and for their viewers. This approach also applies to surrealist novels. J. H. Matthews explains that the “protagonist” in a surrealist novel is, or becomes, listless as a result of despair and frustration with the external world and consequently seeks refuge in dreams (Surrealism and the Novel 38). He thus achieves self-discovery not through action in the external world but through submission to the dream state, a surrender of the will to the unconscious.

As Rohrberger notes, Oliver’s desire to escape an anguish-filled reality causes him to submit easily to either a hypnogogic or dream state. In fact, Oliver spends more time hallucinating, fainting, or sleeping than he does anything else. Moreover, the descriptions of these dreams or dream-like states add to the novel’s complexity and help refute a judgment of Oliver as simply another of Dickens’s “flat” characters.

Catherine Bernard explains that Dickens’s psychological approach to dreams differed markedly from the contrived dream usage of his Victorian contemporaries or the Gothic novelists who preceded him. Unlike those found in Gothic novels, for example, Dickens’s dreams are generally designed not to “promote plot or heighten atmosphere” but to reveal the underlying conflicts or desires within his characters. Nor did his employment of dreams conform to Victorian literary conventions or ideas of morality: “Forfeiting the popular Victorian tenet that dreams serve as a type of moral index to character, he permitted his loathsome villains like Headstone and Orlick to sleep away in peaceful slumber, while he assigned long troubled dreams to his pure innocents, those who seem totally shut off from dark imaginings of any sort” (Bernard 207). Bernard points to Esther Summerson’s dreams during her illness in Bleak House, visions that reveal the altruistic heroine’s reticent desire to be released from social responsibility. Notable also in Esther’s dreams is the focus on the objects of the necklace and staircase. This focus is another indication of Dickens’s surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of dreams; according to Freud, the meaning of dreams is primarily expressed through the symbolic objects that they contain.

Bernard’s observation, however, also applies to the “simple” character of Oliver himself. The opening episode of chapter 5 in Oliver Twist exemplifies her argument most clearly. Alone for the first time in the basement of Sowerberry, the undertaker, Oliver timidly surveys the room before going to sleep. There are several noteworthy elements in this episode: foremost among them is the revelation of Oliver’s death-wish. Dickens conveys this desire in terms that are close to surrealist philosophy:

Though not actually in the dream state, Oliver is close to it. And as he approaches the unconscious, Dickens reveals the disturbing, seemingly anomalous desire for death in childhood: a wish the surrealists would have considered one of those “contradictions” that should be reconciled.

Another noteworthy element in this description is the close, stifling atmosphere of the basement that suggests the feeling of suffocation that is often characteristic of the nightmare. Fear of suffocation runs throughout Oliver Twist, emphasizing the fine line Oliver (as well as Nancy, Sikes, Fagin, and Rose) walk between life and death. The motif is present in other novels, most notably in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The fictional world of Cloisterham is remarkably still and constrictive—almost as if it were sinking into the cathedral crypt that lies beneath it. Interesting too is Dickens’s withholding the name of the village until the third chapter. Rather than immediately establishing a location for the reader and thus rendering a sense of reality to his setting, he begins the novel with a dream in which the dreamer cannot locate where he is: “An ancient Cathedral town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here!” (37). Hence Dickens forces the reader to question the reality of his world right from the beginning. This technique of using an unnamed and hermetic setting resembles the effect of Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros: “What these people are doing is not made clear. We do not even know where ’here’ is, nor why Hebdomeros wishes to escape. Chirico leaves us with the impression—which becomes clearer and clearer as the novel progresses—that we are reading a novel which can only be described as obstinately closed and hermetic” (Matthews; Surrealism and the Novel 75). This is of course the sensation we experience in Oliver Twist and, with even more eerie intensity, in Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Perhaps the most striking surrealist element in the above passage from Oliver Twist is the death-wish the boy expresses as he focuses on the coffin, an object to which Oliver responds with the antithetical feelings of attraction and fear. This conflicting and intense reaction to an object exemplifies the surrealist perception of how an object should affect its viewer. Marcel Jean and Arpad Mezei explain:

The coffin is at once a concrete expression of Oliver’s primordial fear of and desire for self-destruction, a desire that Freud argues is shared by all men. In this sense as well, the coffin is a surrealist object, since the surrealists attempted to create an object as a sort of Jungian archetype, an “image in which each of us can recognize his own desire” (Jean and Mezei 243).

Dickens takes other modern approaches to dreams in Oliver Twist that anticipate surrealism. Chapter 28, for example, relates how a dazed, semiconscious Oliver stumbles blindly alone after the attempted robbery and hallucinates that he is reliving the events of the previous night. A montage of “rapid visions” focusing on Sikes, Crackit, and gunfire flashes across his mind. This visual condensation of experience is, according to Freud, characteristic of a dream or hallucination. Dickens anticipates Freud’s theory in his depiction of Esther Summerson’s dreams as well. As she describes them, her dreams compress past experiences of childhood and adulthood together, making it impossible for her to distinguish individual time periods. All the past becomes merely one small part of her dreams: “I had never known before how short life really was, and into how small a space the mind could put it” (431). Understanding the compressive nature of dreams, surrealist painters such as Max Ernst tried to imitate condensation in collages or frottages where apparently unrelated or disjunctive elements or objects illustrate a condensation of dream thoughts.

Oliver’s hallucinations, as the Sowerberry episode illustrates, also cause him to attribute other dimensions to elements of external reality—a sort of reverse of dream condensation. His childish sensations act upon objects and thus present the reader with a host of possible realities. The intensity of these sensations is so keenly described that external reality seems to lose a definite value since objects are continually subject to alteration through Oliver’s imagination. Dickens also explores this technique in the second chapter of Great Expectations where Pip, frightened on his nighttime journey to the graveyard, transforms his surroundings into phantasmagorical shapes (14). The intensity of Pip’s imagination leaves such a distinct impression as to establish initially a confusion for the reader over what is illusion and what is reality: a dominant concern of the novel and, in fact, most of Dickens’s novels. Martin Chuzzlewit also presents objects that are constantly undergoing change. In this novel, however, the change does not stem from the viewer’s perception but is an inherent part of the object. In fact, the viewer himself is subject to the same change that occurs in the external objects he perceives. J. Hillis Miller offers a fascinating interpretation of the relation between object and viewer in the novel:

The surrealists defined and implemented a concept strikingly similar to what we see in Dickens’s work; crucial to their art was the concept of “critical paranoia.” Jean and Mezei elaborate on this term: “A given reality suggests two, three or more different ones (depending on the individual’s imaginative capacity), each one as acceptable as the original since each variation can be perceived and accepted as real by others.…From which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all” (207). Certainly, the external world of Oliver Twist has little “immediate value” if we take the novel only on a realistic level, since Dickens encourages the same confusion between fantasy and reality in his reader that Oliver experiences. In fact, Harry Stone observes that in no other novel does Dickens so strongly suggest supernatural explanations of realistic events. Stone points to two scenes to support his thesis. The first is the episode in chapter 32 when Oliver sees the Chertsey house where he had been taken before the robbery and that has now been transformed completely. Dickens never explains the reason for this transformation, leaving the reader to wonder whether a supernatural cause is at work.

This fairy-tale illogic is precisely what the surrealists considered as part of reality along with the physical world. As Anna Balakian explains, what attracted the surrealists to the fairy tale was the fact that it had been “the only form of art that reconciled the contradictions which even the most imaginative adult mind found to exist between reality and the dream” (83). Similarly, by leaving no rational explanation for his reader, Dickens encourages a vision of reality that, like the fairy-tale world, presents realistic detail side by side with fantasy, finding its illogic in the logic that creates it.

Stone also refers to the scene in chapter 34 in which Oliver at twilight (symbolic of the threshold between dream and reality) falls into the same half-waking, half-dreaming state in which he saw Fagin gazing over his jewels. This episode is particularly noteworthy not only for its fairy-tale structure but also for its surrealist approach toward the dream state. As in other episodes where terror overtakes him and presages the approach of the nightmare world, Oliver feels the air grow close and confined as he dreams that he is back in Fagin’s den. Dickens’s description here of the dream state is unusual because it emphasizes a sleep in which the conscious and the unconscious work upon each other—again, a surrealist reconciliation of opposites:

The idea of external reality working with the unconscious to form a new vision clearly anticipates surrealism. Moreover, the description of how an object unapprehended by consciousness can affect our visions resembles the surrealist notion of the object’s or image’s function. Generally scornful of traditional symbolism that was based on the obvious and logical representative nature of objects, the surrealists created their objects to appeal to the unconscious; hence, their meaning or value in external reality or consciousness is, to use Dickens’s word, “silent.”

Oliver’s vision in this episode is of Fagin and Monks standing within touching distance, a vision that lasts “but an instant.” And when Oliver, Ralph Maylie, and Mr. Losberne pursue these intruders, they discover only that they have vanished. There are no marks of the criminals’ flight, even though they covered terrain that would normally have left tell-tale signs. Their disappearance seems magical.

Certainly on a rational level, one could argue as Ralph Maylie does that Oliver was simply dreaming, which he was in part. However, Dickens strongly encourages us to believe in the reality of that dream vision—to forego rationality, reconcile the workings of the unconscious with the conscious, and accept Fagin and Monk’s appearance as more than a projection of Oliver’s imagination. At the novel’s end, in fact, their appearance is confirmed by Brownlow. Dickens, though, never closes up the question of the unmarked ground, thereby encouraging the reader to accept the apparent illogic of an actual event with supernatural characteristics. And an event, moreover, that marks the intrusion of evil into the pristine world of the Maylies, making the demarcation of opposites even more blurred.

Dickens’s use of shadows and light, his emphasis on darkness, and his employment of liminal imagery are also important to an understanding of how he deliberately blurs the line between fantasy and reality in Oliver Twist. Surrealist painters used shadows frequently to give a supernatural aura to their landscapes; the early work of Picasso (for example, Factory, Horta del Ebro [1907]) uses deep, menacing shadows in which hard lights gleam, visual representations that disturb the viewer with their unreality. Similarly, Dickens played with the dramatic possibilities of light and shadow to instill confusion in his characters and his readers. In chapter 18, he describes how the dim light afforded in Fagin’s den “made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows” (179); these shadowed rooms provoke a sense of fear and disorientation in Oliver. Shadows, in fact, abound in Oliver Twist, functioning visually as expressionist projections of Oliver’s terror. This use of light and shadow to create an alien, unreal atmosphere occurs more frequently and is much more developed in his later novels such as Bleak House, particularly in the Dedlock scenes where Dickens so vividly describes “The Ghost’s Walk” in terms of shadows and bright lighting (498-99). In fact, many of the physical descriptions in Bleak House are in harsh tones of black and white. Noteworthy also is that much of Oliver Twist takes place at night, a mystical time for the surrealists. As Breton explains: “During the night hours man, like the child and the primitive, faces all his fears and his feelings of the infinite… .” (63). As in numerous surrealist paintings and novels, darkness pervades Oliver Twist. Many of the events associated with the world of Fagin occur at night or in dark rooms where day never enters. Darkness, however, suggests uncertainty and mystery as well as evil, for it is also the time when Oliver faces his fears of the supernatural.

A surprising number of the scenes in Oliver Twist, as in surrealist painting, also occurs at dawn: Nancy’s murder, Oliver’s embarkation for London, the departure of Sikes and Oliver for the robbery, and so on. In these scenes we can also see how Dickens played with the suggestive power of light and darkness to create an unreal and often menacing atmosphere. In the episode where Sikes and Oliver depart for the robbery, for example, Dickens presents the dawn as a time of uncertainty and confusion—a reversal of the traditional notion of dawn bringing the light that symbolizes understanding or direction: “There was a faint glimmering of the coming day in the sky; but it rather aggravated than relieved the gloom of the scene: the sombre light only serving to pale that which the street lamps afforded, without shedding any warmer or brighter tints upon the wet house tops and dreary streets” (202).

The visual quality of Oliver Twist has, admittedly, been recognized by Dickens scholars as one of the novel’s merits. While they are quick to praise the pictorial nature of the work, they have far more problems with its structure. Most readers tend to see the extreme coincidences and highly improbable plot as detracting from the novel’s realism.² A surrealist approach, however, helps refute such judgments in that we can examine the coincidences not strictly in terms of plot and structure but as part of a thematic whole emphasizing the reconciliation between fantasy and reality.

Oliver’s world, including both “camps” of wickedness and goodness, is a world of chance. Practically everything that happens to Oliver is fortuitous: his encounter with Brownlow, who just happens to be the best friend of his dead father; his accidental arrival at the Maylies’, where his unacknowledged sister Rose just happens to be; his chance meeting with the “artful Dodger,” and so on. Admittedly, these coincidences seem contrived and inconsistent with Dickens’s realistic, often naturalistic, depictions. If, however, we attempt to see these apparently opposing elements as a logical whole, we can conclude that they are yet further examples of the surrealist world of Oliver Twist, a world that has its logic in its very illogic.

At the heart of surrealism lies the concept of objective chance, defined as the belief that “inexplicable coincidence is central to reality, which is not an orderly system of events apprehensible by logical thought” (Osborne 529). The surrealists, in fact, considered chance to be the governing universal force rather than an order created by an omnipotent being or scientific determinism. In a surrealist world “disorder becomes the real God and providence which is generally revered as the manifestation of the mystical order of things, gives way to the worship of hazard, or chance, the mystical manifestation of the inconceivable but extant disorder of things” (Balakian 11). This is why, of course, the surrealists were fascinated by the irrational and seemingly random workings of the dream that they saw as an analogy to the irrational workings of coincidence. If we therefore accept Stoehr’s thesis that Dickens tried to present a reality that was dreamlike, we must accept these coincidences as consistent with that reality.

Dickens represents this world governed by chance primarily through the image of the labyrinth, an important image for the surrealists as well. His London streets are narrow, winding mazes that hold the continual possibility of threat or surprise. Such labyrinths abound in Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In these novels, however, it is the adults who are lost or subject to terror. The surrealists also saw the street as a terrain of discovery, disorder, and confusion. Chirico created maze-like porticoes and streets in many of his paintings, for example, in The Anxious Voyage. These mazes imply to the viewer the presence of something beyond what the painting depicts—perhaps an apparition that waits to be discovered. Paul Delvaux’s night-enshrouded winding streets also suggest a haunted domain. Similarly, the labyrinthine passageways of Oliver Twist create anticipation in Oliver and, arguably, in the reader as well, of some hidden terror or marvel. Oliver’s initial journey to London, for example, is marked by an emphasis on the dark, narrow streets that seem filled with continual threats and surprises:

Among the threats that exist in this world where anything can happen are phantoms, the reality of which is reinforced by Dickens’s subjecting the adult mind of Sikes to them as well. As Sikes flees from the scene of the murder and journeys to London, he is haunted by a persistent vision of Nancy. The ghost is, on the realistic level, a projection of Sikes’s guilt; yet on a deeper level, it is also a fruition of the supernatural sense that pervades the landscape. Like Dickens, the surrealists intended to bring to life within the subjective human experience and ordinary reality the active presence of a haunted domain. Hence Breton and many others were drawn to the Gothic novel in much the same way as Dickens was. The typical Gothic trappings of ghosts, castles, romance, and nightmare intrigue appealed to the surrealists because they seemed to be drawn largely from the realm of dream and nightmare. Oliver Twist, like many surrealist novels, employs Gothic devices not simply to advance plot or heighten atmosphere, but also to incorporate the supernatural within a realistic setting and give a reality to the visions of the unconscious.

In order to heighten an anticipation of supernatural discovery, many surrealist painters invested their landscapes with a suggestive stillness. Chirico’s landscapes, for example, are often set in the slumberous quiet of late afternoon. Their very absence of motion indicates to the viewer that they contain something that, although not visible, is nevertheless present and perhaps about to be revealed. Dickens does this as well. Though Oliver Twist employs an active and crowded plot, there is still the frequent sense of an uncanny cessation of movement. The London streets and Fagin’s den are close and hot and therefore restrict freedom and force one to wait passively for discovery. Moreover, Dickens’s emphasis on night, twilight, and dawn, generally times of silence and depopulation, powerfully evokes the supernatural: “It was a cold, dark night. The stars seemed, to the boy’s eyes, farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground, looked sepulchral and deathlike, from being so still” (95).

This cessation of movement is particularly important for the surrealists because it is a characteristic of what they term the absolute. At this point, the infinite becomes reality; man has transcended the barriers of life and death and all contradictions cease to be perceived as such. Unlike the Romantics, who regarded movement as the traditional symbol of escape from the physical world to the infinite, the surrealists believed man can realize eternity by getting at the essence of material reality; movement is therefore an antithesis of the absolute. A key to achieving the infinite was stripping objects of their physical nature; thus, the surrealists had a “tendency to disregard the natural phenomenon and to refuse to imitate it in art: by divesting it of the concepts of time, space, and movement” (Balakian 97). Similarly, Dickens suggests in Oliver Twist that a landscape divorced from movement holds some sort of revelatory power. There are several scenes where Oliver senses something unearthly—something suggestive of another, hidden reality—when he is left alone in the stillness of a landscape at night or dawn.

However, for both Oliver Twist and surrealist works the realm of the unconscious or fantasy is not entirely comprised of nightmare elements. As there is an insistence by Dickens on the reality of such horrific elements as phantoms, so too is there an insistence on a paradise lost. Children such as Oliver and Little Dick, who have that state of grace so important to the surrealists and the Romantics that enables them to perceive the infinite, are allowed to glimpse this paradise through dreaming. In a description of Oliver’s initial sleep at the Maylie home that has Platonic overtones, Dickens posits the existence of a “former and happier life which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall” (268).

At the center of Oliver’s dreams is Agnes, who emerges, despite her illicit affair with Oliver’s father, as a sort of divine mother and woman. Interestingly, the surrealists also regarded woman as a mystical being, the very projection of the marvelous into our dreary existence. Paul Delvaux’s paintings, for example, portray women who are ethereally lovely; the largeness and haunted expression of their eyes as well as the translucent fairness of their skin recall, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” who also functioned as a catalyst between man and an unknown world. Woman, for these artists, is man’s key to reclaiming that paradise lost, one of their fundamental motivating impulses. Without pressing the point too far, perhaps it is possible to see Dickens’s treatment of Agnes as anticipatory of how the surrealists view women. Though Agnes dies at the beginning, her presence is nevertheless felt throughout the novel by Oliver and Brownlow. For both boy and adult, her image conjures up thoughts of a higher, spiritual reality in which all anxiety and suffering will be gone. Hence Agnes functions as an intermediary between men and the unknown. To a limited extent, we may view Rose Maylie this way as well. Her role is not so much to participate actively in the plot of the novel as to fulfill the symbolic function of representing goodness in an unfair, confusing, and often evil world. Her near-death, an aspect of the novel that has often been criticized, thus signifies the precariousness of goodness’ existence in material reality rather than Dickens’s weak attempt at a twist in plot. Similarly, women in surrealist fiction are often passive characters, serving only to bring the male protagonist to some sort of recognition of the divine. Their end in fact is often a sudden or violent death; in Julien Gracq’s novel Au Chateau d’Argol, Heide, the woman who acts as the catalyst for the self-discovery of other characters, is the victim of a sadistic and brutal attack that ends in her death. Her tragedy is Gracq’s statement that the woman who acts as intermediary to the unknown world has no lasting place in material reality—that indeed she is too good for this world.

To reclaim this lost paradise in Oliver Twist, one must, as Oliver does, surrender to the unconscious as well as the conscious and to the fantastical as well as external world. Rationality and logic that place trust only in what is known to external reality hold little value and meaning in Oliver Twist. Dickens’s novels illustrate the belief that it is not in our disorder but in our order that confusion and terror lie, a belief that culminates in his later novels, particularly Bleak House, where system equals chaos and human truth is often spoken in the voices of the insane. However, it also applies to the early novel Oliver Twist, where a complex world of apparent opposites cannot be grasped by logic, but through submission to dreams and our unconscious, wherein the magical mysteries of unknown worlds await.

Source

From South Atlantic Review 54, no. 2 (May 1989): 41-58. Copyright © 1989 by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Reprinted by permission of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

I would like to thank Dr. Charles Edge for his comments and his kindness.

Works Cited