Between knowing and not knowing Dr. Manette

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other…that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings , a secret to the heart nearest it!” 

In the afore mentioned quote Dickens is pointing towards the limitations of knowledge  that

restrict our ability  to unravel the  mysteries that are buried in the  minds of other people, such that one may know someone and yet never know him.  This oscillation between knowing and not knowing is most profound in the case  of Dr. Manette who appears to me as an enigma.  I  shall here discuss something that I found particularly interesting  which is how the form of the narrative  contributes towards the mysteriousness that surrounds Dr. Manette and why this ambivalence is important in the narrative structure of “A Tale of Two Cities”.

Dickens employs mystery first through the unexpected entrance of Jerry on horseback and the letter that Lorry gives to him that says “ recalled to life” . The message has a dark gothic appeal  suggested through the idea of death and rebirth which accentuate the mysterious element of the novel for we don’t know who is being recalled to life  from where he is to be recalled to life and why so? Mr. Lorry’s contemplation and queer

imaginations also play an important role in propelling the obscurity that surrounds Dr. Manette as he wonders what it would be like to “dig some one out of the grave” who has been “buried alive for more than eighteen years”. Based upon this  it wouldn’t be wrong to argue that as far as Dr.Manette is concerned, the novel acts in media res whereby we don’t know about his past and the reason for his imprisonment in the Bastille and that it is he who is to be resurrected in the first place !The narrative is crescendo like and the mystery does not end with the final introduction of Dr. Manette either. 

Dickens employs “external focalization” as the reader views him as an outsider through  his facial features and a deliberate distance is maintained ;“no human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in the scared black wonder of his face”.  

However, in my opinion this mystery that Dickens struggles to maintain is important.  On the one hand it takes us back to a natural human condition that some secrets about individuals remain and we can never penetrate the workings of the minds of other people. But at the same time it reveals our inability to conceptualize  the incapacitating and psychological impact of prison life in the Bastille that can never be articulated completely.

We can act as spectators but never share Dr. Manettes inner life. It is almost like we do not have the  right to do so because we can never comprehend the enormity of solitary confinement. It is only the one who suffers who can know. That’s why Dr. Manette refuses to answer about his remembrances of his imprisonment ; “None my mind is blank”  he says. The Bastille was the nightmare of the proletariat and that nightmare Dickens suggests, can only be partially grasped through the effect it has had on Dr. Manette physically. Thus we are called  to visually examine the body and imagine the cruelty of solitary confinement; into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them even in his sleep. Moreover, we witness the de-individuation of this character through the way he refers to himself as “one hundred and five North Tower” which points towards the

brutal effects of prison life that urns him into a living dead creature. In addition to this physical scrutiny is the act of shoemaking which I see as  an attempt of a man to reconnect with a world he has been cut off with and to ward away the pain of solitude : it relieved his [Dr. Manette's] pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for the perplexity of the brain. These techniques that reveal Dr. Manette in a piecemeal and cryptic manner  point to the important position that his story has. Our partial knowledge of him presses upon us that his unknown past is indispensably connected to the present and the future and its effect lies in being suppressed for a long time.