Pickwick's Writing

Writing could well be considered imaginative matrix of The Posthumous Papers of Pickwick Club. In his search for congenial material for his first novel, Dickens, like Sterne before him, finds it partly in problematic of writing itself. The incompatibility between Dickens and first illustrator, Robert Seymour, who had initially proposed a Nimrod serial to publishers, was probably due partly to fact that Dickens's comic genius found its home in language, in signifier, whereas illustrator's focus was necessarily on referent, scenic signified, on pratfalls and other foregroundings of fictive objects. Despite an occasional study for an artist, I novel is primarily a display of verbal strategies. The novel's full title points to an official accumulation of writings by members of Pickwick Club. Pickwick's purpose in extending his travels, and consequently enlarging his sphere of observation, is to forward . .. authenticated . .. together with all tales and papers . . . to Pickwick Club, stationed in London (1-2). For this purpose Pickwick and his three friends constitute the Corresponding Society of Pickwick Club (2). Hence writing is official raison d'etre for expedition; it is occasion for all adventures of Pickwickians as well as direct cause or theme of many, such as brawl with very first cabdriver. The medium of writing is doubly emphasized in first chapter when an editor of these pages announces himself, and then refers to the secretary, to whose notes we are indebted (1, 2). Hence every episode supposedly bears traces of at least two mediators before it is laid before reader. Although these personages wither away, as does Pickwick's conscious purpose to forward authenticated accounts of his observations, theme has been marked for us, and Dickens's comedy constantly re-presents it-in diverse manifestations of ambiguous letters and notes and of misreadings and prevarications-over course of novel

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