Yael Maurer

Bio: Yael Maurer is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Trope (philosophy). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

Rubbing "That Wonderful Lamp Within": Reading Martin Chuzzelwit

Abstract: R. W. Buss's 1872 unfinished tribute to Dickens entitled "Dickens's Dream depicts the author sitting in his study at Gads Hill, shod in slippers and surrounded by the many creations of his imagination. (1) The scene is domestic and cozy. The author appears to be immersed in a day-dream. He is positioned in front of his bookcase but the many creatures of his fancy float around him, uncontained and unwilling to stay trapped inside the book covers. On Dickens's outstretched palm there is a small figure looking up at her sleeping creator. In "Performing Character," Malcolm Andrews interprets this famous portrait as an allegorical representation of Dickens's writing process. "Dickens's Dream," he argues, "suggests a process of creation that is akin to spontaneous generation: fictional characters are born into the world out of dreams. The author is a passive host: to reinforce this, Dickens's chair has been pushed some way back from his work-desk" (71). Surrounded by fictions he has created, Buss's Dickens seems to be at peace with himself, a day dreamer who has generated out of thin air the figures floating around him. In this essay, I will argue that this image of Dickens comes to life in the figure of Tom Pinch, who embodies the author's attempts to face the deception and duplicity at the center of Martin Chuzzlewit and eventually triumph over reality by relying on the "magic lamp" of fiction. In what follows, I shall examine how Tom Pinch, the "Aladdin" in Dickens's universe, does not get what he wished for. But what he finds in the vicarious pleasures of both fiction and "reality" may prove to be a different but not lesser kind of joy implicit in the "happy endings" of his earlier novels. Pinch never marries or raises a family of his own. But by sharing the domestic bliss of his sister Ruth and of his beloved Mary, he manages to create a Pinchian universe in which he is blessed and happy. The appearance of books and the preoccupation with reading texts and reading character signals Dickens's concern with the notion of semblances and realities. The novel's textual world is one where appearances often mislead and where schemes and deceitful fictions abound. The characters in Martin Chuzzlewit are actively involved in the construction of fictitious selves and fictional schemes. Dickens examines what being "human" and "natural" entails in a world where these notions seem to have been perverted almost beyond recognition. The novel queries the possibility of a return to a more human and humane notion of self and selfhood, one which would be "natural" rather than "artificial" or constructed. These concerns are best embodied in the figure of Tom Pinch, the naif who is depicted as the only true man in a world of deceit and artifice. Tom is described as a book lover and thus the role of reading becomes a central trope in which reading and misreading in a textual world revolve around deception and misinterpretation of both self and other. Tom Pinch is a lover of fiction, but he is also a "misreader" of the people around him, a position he maintains even after he comes to realize that his employer, the deceitful Seth Pecksniff, is in fact a manipulative and evil man. Tom gives up this "fiction" of Pecksniff as a good man, but still holds on to other fictions which help sustain his almost child like existence--a day-dream world in which those around him appear as surrogate "parents." In the figure of Tom Pinch, the most gullible and deluded character in the novel, Dickens offers us an exemplary instance of both the pleasures and the dangers of reading. Tom is presented as a quintessential book lover and avid reader of fiction, unlike Mr. Pecksniff, who only uses books for show. Tom's love of books, by contrast, is genuine, clearly evident from his response to bookshops in the scene when he first visits Salisbury. "But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy', inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! …

Gathering and Scattering: Figuring Interest in Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract: Abstract:Disinterestedness is a mystery in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens's novel about selfishness almost completely lacks the means for representing the process by which people may, by reflection, achieve a measure of detachment from a self-interested perspective. Characters such as Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit, who doggedly pursue their interests without hesitation, are counterbalanced by others—chiefly Tom Pinch—for whom disinterestedness is less an accomplishment than a kind of grace that places them almost completely outside the field of relentless competition that the novel depicts. The former characters aggressively "lean in" to attain their goals; the latter exhibit a similar posture, but they do so in pursuit of solidarity rather than gain. Interestedness so rules the world of Martin Chuzzlewit as to become the fundamental organizing principle of perception and action, with the result that disinterested characters almost cease to be characters at all. Like Tom and the "sketchy gentleman," they hover between being there and not, between one and zero.

Fuzzy Logic: Modern Mathematics and Myopic Aesthetics In Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract: Abstract:Martin Chuzzlewit is a blurry novel. Where Dickens typically invites his audience to picture precisely what he sees (whether in life or only in his imagination), in this book he keeps us at a troubling distance, rendering textual imagery—characters, places, events—in language that tends to obscure rather than clarify. I interpret the blurriness of this text through key innovations in Victorian mathematics that give rise to the fuzzy logic of the twentieth century. A spirit of algebraic abstraction pervaded nineteenth-century mathematics. I look here to the emergence of many-valued truth systems in (algebraized) British logic, which suggested that a vague term might still be considered an articulate one. I propose that Dickens was experimenting with the bounds of language—and the parameters of the real—in ways similar to contemporary mathematicians, and that vagueness in his writing anticipates perspectival shifts towards abstract aesthetics in the decades that followed. Furthermore, I argue that Dickens feigns shortsightedness in this book to manifest an uncomfortable distance between novel and reader, as an expression of the estrangement he felt on his 1842 American tour, and as a warning to audiences in America and England alike that ego makes strangers of us all.