Tragic Relief

The first time I read The Pickwick Papers, I was surprised by all the inserted short stories. They annoyed me, too; I wanted to know more about the antics of the Pickwick Club, but every few chapters, some character would offer to tell a legend, and I kept having to work my way through dreary stories about ghosts and criminals. I’m pretty sure the copy I read included an introduction that told me the stories were dreary and annoying, and I let myself be impressionable. The second time I read the book, the tangential stories weren’t surprising anymore, but I think they still annoyed me.

But I just finished reading Pickwick for the third time, and I’m happy to say not only that I enjoyed the embedded stories – ghosts and criminals are good subjects for short stories, after all! – but that I found them almost necessary. I think that introduction that I read forty years ago said the book wasn’t really a novel but rather a hodgepodge or scrapbook of disconnected stories and comic vignettes. In other words, that Pickwick wasn’t cohesive or unified. Well, it certainly is a novel, with or without the stories, but now that I see their purpose, they seem part of a cohesive structure, as well.

We all know about comic relief. The clowns in Shakespeare’s tragedies provide familiar examples. Well, I think these stories of murderers and hopeless characters provide tragic relief to the ridiculous adventures of Pickwick and his companions. The Food Network’s Duff Goldman is always telling contestants on baking championships to use acid or even umami in desserts to balance the sweetness. Maybe 700 pages of unrelieved comedy would get cloying for the reader. Or maybe even a hundred pages of it did for the author. Maybe Dickens tasted his Pickwickian batter and decided his cake needed some acid to balance the sugar, whipped egg whites, and sprinkles that the humor of Pickwick served up.

Besides contributing to an alternating structure of dark and light, several of the stories have themes that work their way into the outer plot, too. Someone tells a Christmas ghost story, for instance, and then Mr. Pickwick and his friends attend a Christmas dinner. Another inserted story tells the tragic tale of a man who goes to debtor’s prison, sees the family he can’t provide for perish one by one, and then is released and wreaks awful vengeance on the creditor who had shown him no mercy. Several chapters later, Mr. Pickwick himself goes to debtor’s prison. Both presentations show the horrors of debtor’s prison and helped abolish the institution in Britain. But the episode of Mr. Pickwick’s sojourn behind the hopeless walls includes some silliness from himself, Sam Weller, Mrs. Bardell, and others, so the story within the story and its unrelentingly lurid tale of despair and revenge provides a necessary part of the message by working on different emotions.

I wish I hadn’t read that introduction all those years ago. But I’m glad I read The Pickwick Papers for a third time and finally got the bitter taste out of my dessert experience.