PARTISAN REVIEW
85
hands
into the public domain, where they are borrowed with no
pangs
of conscience by other writers, who sense, perhaps, that their
presumed creators merely found them
in
the communal imagination.
Though
Oliver Twist
and
Old Curiosity Shop
remain basically
pop as well, all of Dickens' novels after them aspire to become sym–
bolist
rather than mythological-tend, that is to say, toward "High
Literature." So that the single book of Charles Dickens which be–
longs wholly to the popular genre is
The Pickwick Papers.
The arche–
typal character of Pickwick (suggested by an engraver to begin with)
was appropriated by painters and potters and playmakers, as well as
rival pop writers, in especial G. W. M. Reynolds, who sent him to
France in
Pickwick Abroad,
gave him a wife in
Pickwick Married
and actually turned him into a teetotaler in
Noctes Pickwickianae.
But why
not,
after all? Had not Dickens himself played a similar
game, attempting to reappropriate his own characters (quite as
vainly as Shakespeare trying to revive Falstaff in
The Merry Wives
of Windsor)
in
Master Humphrey's Clock?
Pop art, even in the age
of individualism, tended to be collective, collaborative-like the slowly
accreting epics on one end of the time scale, and corporately produced
movies on the other. Perhaps Sue and Lippard, maybe even Reynolds,
may have regarded themselves on occasion as lonely artists trying to
make a name as well as a fortune by their art. Typically, however,
the author of this kind of fiction seems to think of himself as help–
ing, along with his predecessors, contemporaries and ghostwriters to
compose an immense, cooperative, nearly anonymous work: a mon–
strous supernovel, which exists not in any book with its author's name
on the spine-but in the heads and hearts of the mass audience.
Difficult as it has been for traditional criticism to come to terms
with the antiform of the popular novel, it has been even harder for
it to arrive at any final understanding of what is really signified by
its antiideas, which is to say, its nonphilosophical themes. There is,
however,
an
essential clue to this in the word "mystery" or "mys–
teries," which appears in so many of the titles.
As
a matter of fact,
even Lippard's book smuggles this key word into its second subtitle,
"A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime"; and his
German translator-adapter gave it an even more prominent place, call–
ing his version
The Quaker City and its Mysteries.
In recent times, the word has survived only in our habit of call–
ing detective novels, "mystery storiest as if the sole mystery in our
