"The prismatic hues of memory" : Visual Story-Telling and Chromatic Showmanship in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield

• Published in: Connotations (Münster in Westfalen, Germany) Germany), 2023-01, Vol.32, p.17-38
• Main Author: Letissier, Georges
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Color; Consciousness; Copperfield, David; Criticism and interpretation; Dickens, Charles; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); Fiction; Memory; Methods; Novelists; Novels; Storytelling; Symbolism of colors; Visual communication
• ISSN: 0939-5482
• DOI: 10.25623/conn032-letissier-l

What if the memory of colour was an integral part of the act of story-telling? David Copperfield, Charles Dickens's "favourite child," illustrates the author's will to hold his control over profuse, errant memories, in order to fashion his semi-fictitious autobiography. Yet what has not been analysed so far is the part played by colours in this mnemonic enterprise carried out through fiction. Indeed, chromatic dynamics partakes of memory work. David Copperfield can become the hero of his own life if, and only if, he succeeds in turning "the ghost of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments dimly seen" (734) into a succession of bright, vivid memories, paving the way of his Kunstlerroman towards both artistic success and domestic bliss. Even if direct references to colours may be few and far between, they nevertheless feature at crucial moments and are put to many different uses. They are of course given pride of place in David's phenomenological recreation of his childhood. They are like beacons in his amorous journey, from Dora Spenlow, the "child wife," with her invariable rose bud of a mouth and blue eyes, to Agnes, the "sister wife," with her colour-shifting face. Red is polysemic, pointing in turn to Steerforth's last feat of heroism when, aboard his sinking ship, he sports a singular red cap, to Uriah Heep's ubiquitous red eyes. Colours accordingly would seem to both serve a contrapuntal function, bringing out the more dramatic episodes, and to propound a graphic analogue to what can hardly find any fitting verbal transcription, such as Heep's egregious deviousness. In his retrospective novel Dickens uses colours sparingly to catalyse the act of remembering and detach his autodiegetic narrator's consciousness from the blank of an indistinct past so as to attain the vivid colourfulness of fleeting epiphanic episodes illustrative of the temporary presentness of the past.