Objectified

In Jeff Rackham's The Rag & Bone Shop: A Novel Based on the Secret Life of Charles Dickens (2001), Ellen Ternan, one of the novel's three narrators (along with Georgina Hogarth and Wilkie Collins), contemplates her new housekeeper, Molly:  "Still, she was cold and distant, a strong-looking woman with nervous hands.  She wore long sleeves always and, from time to time, tugged at them, as if to hide her wrists.  Her face seemed drained of colour, like someone who'd spent a number of years  in prison" (123).  The alert reader will recognize another Molly, Mr. Jaggers' housekeeper from Great Expectations--the woman with the muscular (and murderous) wrists.  Given that The Rag & Bone Shop constitutes an extended meditation on Great Expectations, it's hardly surprising to find a Molly-equivalent, even one named "Molly."    But when Ellen Ternan looks at Molly, she sees, in effect, what Dickens sees: the pallor, the wrists, the suggestion of criminality.   Dickens' imagination does not, after all, belong to Dickens, nor is it even imagination.  Instead, Dickens transcribes, allegorizes, or documents "objective," real-world phenomena--working them up in his particular style, to be sure, but not inventing them.  In part, this is an attempt to deal with the core problem of any novel (let alone film) about a novelist--namely, that the most interesting action, the reason the reader picks the book up in the first place, is fundamentally private and, ironically enough, not really interesting at all.   Such fictions understandably externalize the writing process, displacing it with characters or events that apparently pre-exist (or predict) their fictional manifestations.  (By the same token, the real author's novels turn into mines of autobiographical "information," even though there may be little overlap between the author's private opinions and his work.)  And yet, the overall effect reduces the novelist's achievement, turning him into either an allegorist of his own psychic traumas or a bricoleur who assembles fiction out of ready-made parts.