Deconstructing Hard Times Steven Connor Bleak House is, in obvious ways, an eminently "deconstructable" novel. Because of its very size, range and complexity, the issue of unity is a crucial one for the reader precisely because it is so difficult to achieve. The novel, we might say, is about the effort to make sense out of a mass of troublesome, diverse particulars which all the time frustrate neat and conclusive imaginative structures. Until, now, literary criticism, in- cluding structuralist criticism, has concentrated on the ostensible struc- tures of meaning in texts and has largely ignored all the hesitations, indecisions and contradictions which make up most texts and most read- ings of them. It is these that deconstructive criticism in part aims to restore. But why? Why pay such obsessive attention to incoherence rather than coherence? Why not see incoherence as just an unimportant sort of interference in a text, like the crackle round a radio signal which distracts but does not prevent the signal coming through? After all, despite all this fancy talk about the text's differences from itself, don't we all mean more or less the same thing when we talk about Bleak House? I think I would agree that there are dangers in allowing privileges to any kind of incoherence at the expense of any kind of coherence, for this can become just a new sort of orthodoxy. (There are signs that this is happening in some varieties of deconstructive criticism.) But it is honestly difficult to maintain that texts have the sort of coherence and in- telligibility that literary criticism has been concerned cl to find in them. If we do know more or less what we mean when we talk about Bleak House then that is not a function of the text itself but of the contexts, linguistic, ideological and institutional, in which we read it, all of which combine to confirm us in our recognition of Bleak House as a certain sort of novel. But, just as no readership can ever be wholly homogeneous -perhaps especially not the contemporary readership of 1851 - so any text is likely to be divided and inconsistent with itself in important ways. If meaning is dependent upon differences in language, then those differences are likely to split and differentiate meaning itself. All this doesn't mean, however, a licence to mash any text up into a dog's breakfast, about which anyone can say more or less what they like. On the contrary, deconstructive criticism sets out to try to show the par- ticular ways in which the conflict between presence and difference is established in texts, and in which the awareness of the conflict is then repressed. One of the clearest formulations of this I know is Barbara Johnson's: Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction. . . . The de- construction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or ar- bitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading that analyzes the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself. (The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading) It is because of this that Dickens's later novels seem to offer themselves for deconstructive criticism, even, in a sense, to deconstruct themselves from within; as the novels project increasingly complex and contradictory fictional worlds, the desire to enclose and control those worlds grows in proportion to the intensity of the internal arguments that the novels conduct with themselves. There is, however, one novel of this period in which, most critics are agreed, there is not quite the same conflict between coherence and incoherence. That novel is Hard Times. Many readers of the novel have been disappointed by the way that the issues with which it deals seem to have been conclusively sewn up from the start. The insistence with which it seems to present its rigid binary opposition between "system" and "fact," exemplified in Gradgrind's school and Bounderby's mill, and "life" and "fancy," exemplified in Sleary's circus, has seemed to many readers to make Hard Times seem more like a diagram or fable than a proper novel, pulsating with complex human life. John Lucas ar- ticulates this view when he writes [in The Melancholy Man] that "Hard Times is in the grip of an idea" and this view seems to be shared by dif- ferent critics employing different methodologies. This would seem to make Hard Times a good test case for a decon- structive analysis like the one I have just described. What can deconstruction do with such a simple and reductive text,, one that seems to have done so complete a jot) of silencing all internal dissension? One way to approach this would be to look at the ways in which the principal thematic issues are represented in I linguistic terms in the text, in order to examine the way in which the text's own form and language represent its content. As with Bleak House, 'metaphor and metonymy provide a good starting-point. From the first pages of the novel it is clear that Gradgrindery is to be characterized by an excess of metaphor, shown in the desire for ab solute interchangeability between signifiers and signifieds. The defini tion of a horse that Bitzer offers relies upon the implicit claim that language can account absolutely for the things it names, so that, having heard the definition, Sissy is expected immediately to "know what a horse is" (book 1, chap. 2). In Gradgrindery, the assumption is that, because signs can substitute absolutely for things, they are indistinguishable from them -therefore, since horses do not walk up and down walls in reality, you should not paper walls with representa tions of horses and, since you don't walk over flowers in reality (an odd assumption, this, for Gradgrind), you shouldn't put representations of flowers in a carpet. Gradgrind's rage for substitution means that he can conceive easily of perfect translations of one sign into another-"'What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact'"(book 1, chap. 2). Sissy Jupe, however, has a different view of representation, recognizing that the difference between the 'reality and the representa- tion means that you can't hurt a picture of a flower. For Gradgrind, no such distinction between signifier and signified exists, and especially not in speaking of himself, where his words correspond exactly with his im- age of what he is: In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words "boys and girls," for "Sir," Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him who were to be filled so full of facts. (BOOK I, CHAP. 2) The image which recurs throughout the book to designate this perfect equivalence is the mathematical calculation; Gradgrind sees himself as "a man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over" (book 1, chap. 2). This mode of exact substitution is characteristic not only of Gradgrind but of the other Utilitarian characters in the book. Bounderby announces his linguistic creed in his wedding speech: 'as you all know me, and know what I am, and what my ex- traction was, you won't expect a speech from a man who, when he sees a Post, says, 'that's a Post,' and when he sees a Pump, says, 'that's a Pump,' and is not to be got to call a Post a Pump, or a Pump a Post, or either of them a Toothpick." (BOOK 1, CHAP. 16) Bounderby is surrounded by objects in the material world which act as perfect signif iers for him; the correspondence between him and his front door is an absolute one: [Bounderbyl lived, in a red house with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street door, up two white steps, BOUNDERBY (in letters very like himself) upon a brazen plate, and a round brazen door-handle underneath it, like a brazen full-stop. (BOOK 1, CHAP. 12) Dickens's description here turns metonymy, the separate, con- tiguous details of Bounderby's house and front door, into metaphor, since every detail is merely a repetition of the designation "BOUNDER- BY." The figure is therefore that "metaphoricized metonymy" which we have seen operating before (see discussion of Dombey and Son [in Charles Dickens]). This kind of figurative exchange is found in descriptions of the Coketown workers, too: In the hardest working part of Coketown . . . where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called "the Hands,"--a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs -lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age. (BOOK 1, CHAP, 10) The "stunted and crooked shapes" are here not metonymic details connoting variety and difference, but metaphoric signs,. like Bounderby's front door, which signify only an identical poverty. The remarks about the "hands" remind us that the narrowing of rnetonymy into metaphorical substitution (for all functional purposes, the men and women consist only of their hands), is an actual violence as well as a quirk of language. As we might expect, the contrasting world of Fancy in the novel is characterized by a different attitude towards language and representa tion, and evoked in the text by different figurative means. Where Gradgrind's world is one of metaphorical substitution, the world of Fancy is characterized by metonymic accretion. This is brought out very well in the description of the sign outside the Pegasus's Arms: The name of the public house was the Pegasus's Arms. The Pegasus's legs might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse upon the sign-board, The Peg asus's Arms was inscribed in Roman letters. Beneath that in scription again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had touched off the lines: Good malt makes good beer, Walk in, and they'll draw it here; Good wine makes good brandy, Give us a call and you'll find it handy. Framed and glazed upon the wall behind the dingy little bar, was another Pegasus -a theatrical one - with real gauze let in for his wings, golden stars stuck on all-over him, and his ethereal harness made of red silk. (BOOK 1, CHAP. 6) Obviously the sign of the bar does correspond metaphorically in some respects with Sleary's circus, in its fantastic improvisation of detail and its good-humoured dinginess. But what is more noticeable about the sign and the description of it is the way that this simple kind of reading of correspondence is deflected and postponed. The signboard is, in fact, a series of metonymies, moving through the arms, legs and wings of Pegasus, the inscriptions beneath the picture, and into the details of the framed and glazed Pegasus inside the bar, with an energy' that makes it difficult to see the bar sign as stable and self-contained. The discontinuity of signifier and signified is also brought about by the close attention to signifiers themselves, in their material shape and tex- ture, the "Roman letters" and "flowing scroll" of the inscriptions and the gauze and silk of the framed Pegasus, as well as by the splitting of the signboard into three signifiers -the painting of Pegasus, the inscription beneath which names it (and the bar, of course) and the verse beneath that inscription, each new signifier making a signified of the previous sign therefore creatively exceeds what it signifies, in a way that contrasts very markedly with Bounderby's front door; the sign and the description of it produce a metonymic deferral rather than a metaphoric fixing of Sleary's circus. This is reinforced by the inefficiency and indistinctness of language itself in Sleary's world. The circus people's manner of speaking, with its private slang (outlandish to Gradgrind's ears), seems to emphasize the resistant material quality of language, rather than the communication of specific meanings. Sleary's heavy, bronchial speech does the same thing and reminds the reader incidentally of the "corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing" who mistakes Gradgrind's inten- tions in the classroom and offers free association instead of reasoning (book 1, chap. 2). The opposition of Fact and Fancy in Hard Times also results in a structured contrast between different kinds of and attitudes towards fic- tion. Where Gradgrind is suspicious of any fiction which exceeds- verifiable fact, Fancy expresses itself indomitably in fictional forms which transgress the rules of realism or plausibility. It is for this reason that fairy tale is so important in Hard Times (as in many other Dickens novels); fairy tale is precisely that form of narrative which permits im- aginative exceeding of the limits of the real world. It is appropriate that the story that Sissy remembers telling her father should be that of Schcherezade, in which a princess staves off her execution by telling a suc- cession of stories; it is a narrative which is actually about the deferment of reality by an excess of narrative. But even realistic fiction, "about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own" is regarded by the Coketown workers as a sort of relaxing addition to their lives, rather than an inert reflection of them, and Gradgrind is perplexed "at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product" (book 1, chap. 8). So we can see that, as in Bleak House, the opposition between dif ferent kinds of language and different attitudes towards it is a way of sus taining important thematic oppositions in the book. As in Bleak House, the contrast seems to be between metaphor and metonymy, or language as presence and language as difference. We ought to pause here, how ever, to notice an interesting reversal. In Bleak House, we remember, it is the metaphorical world of Jarndyce and Esther which the narrative ac credits against the endlessly multiplying, metonymic confusion of Chancery and the public world. But in Hard Times metaphor, or lan guage as presence, stands condemn ed as characteristic of the life signifier. The denying world of Gradgrindery, while metonymy and difference are the guarantees of life, communication and "amuthement." This is not to say that these distinctions are maintained absolutely. We saw [elsewhere] how, in Bleak House, they were liable to be inverted in important ways, and the same seems to be true of Hard Times. Gradgrind's ruthless commitment to the public world of fact often manifests itself in a wasteful surplus of written material which is reminis cent of' Chancery, as in the endless pamphlets that fie produces on social questions -"little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane" (book 1, chap. 8). Opposed to this is the dignity and rugged earnestness of Stephen's speech (book 2, chap. 4) and the primarily oral culture of the mill-workers -one of the principal grounds of objection to Slackbridge is the elaborately "written" quality of his language, with its effacement of dialect and suspicious complexity of syntax. These inconsistencies indicate the arbitrariness of the contrasts which are set up in the novel and therefore in so-ne ways threaten its thematic unity. Even more interesting and problematic is the way that Dickens's own language, produced as it necessarily is between the axes of the metaphorical and metonymic, is involved in this opposition and inversion of opposition. The first thing to strike us ought to be the very high degree of metaphoric substitution in Dickens's own language, Much of this is evidently ironical, as in the description of Bounderby's front door or of the schoolroom in the opening paragraphs of the novel: The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. (BOOK 1, CHAP. 1) The speaker and the schoolmaster are here shrunk down to par- ticular attributes, forefinger, sleeve, forehead, eyebrows and eyes, which then come to stand as complete images of them. This is again the metaphoricized metonymy found at the begining of Dombey and Son and it gives something of the same sense of premature closure. But here there seems to be even less room for invention and free ranging over detail; even the metonymical relationship between the speaker and his sur- roundings is forced grimly into a relationship of metaphorical exchange with the similarity between the "plain, bare" schoolroom and the speaker's "square wall of a forehead" and the connection between the 'monotonous vault" of the room and the "two dark caves" of his eyes. In this passage, the text inflicts the same violent reduction on Gradgrind as he inflicts upon the world. The irony is clear here, the very niggardliness of the narration marks it as an imitation of Gradgrind's putative style rather than the authentic voice of the narrator -if Grad rind were writing a novel, it seems to say, this is the kind of parched and grudging stuff he would pro- duce. The limitations of excessive reliance on metaphorical substitution are therefore asserted by implication and a longing for the liberating openness of metonymy established. The interesting thing is that Dickens's narrative only rarely satisfies this longing. Metaphorical modes appear insistently throughout the narrative and often in much less ironic ways. In a sense, the whole pur- pose of the novel is to convince us of a number of equivalences, most particularly that between the educational philosophy of Gradgrind and the economic theory and practice of the new industrialism; and it is in metaphor that this association is established. The descriptions of Gradgrind and Bounderby in book 1, chapters I and 4 establish a number of similarities between them which assist the metaphorical transposition of their roles and social positions: both men are more inanimate than animate, Gradgrind being like a wall, and Bounderby being "brassy"; both have distorted shapes, though in different ways-Gradgrind is recurrently "square" while Bounderby is round, "puffed," "swelled" and "inflated" and both have bullying postures. One particular metaphor is applied to both of them in a way that seals the resemblance; Gradgrind's hair is described as "a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface" (book 1, chap. 1), while Bounderby's hair is "all standing up in disorder . . . in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness" (book 1, chap. 4). The equivalence between Gradgrind and Bounderby makes the interchangeability of industry and education upon which Dickens insists seem natural and solid (though also, of course, to be condemned). I It may seem rather odd that when, on one level, the novel is a condem nation of the metaphorical or substitutive frame of mind, Dickens should resort to metaphor to affirm the structural resemblances in his novel. Another example of the way that Hard Times connives in what it condemns is the account given of the predatory voyeurism of Mrs Sparsit as she spies on Louisa and Harthouse. Her fixation expresses itself in a metaphor: Now, Mrs Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea in the nature of an allegorical fancy,, into her head. . . . She erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming. (BOOK 2, CHAP. 10) Mrs Sparsit's obsession with this metaphor is extreme and is clearly a mark of her jealous attempts to control and exploit people and events. The metaphor is of course a highly melodramatic one, and there is something satisfyingly appropriate about Mrs Sparsit's unconscious choice of this debased literary mode to embody her spite. But, although Dickens's narrative distances itself from the metaphor by means of its irony, it also begins to adopt it for itself and to extract profit from it. The Staircase becomes Dickens's leitmotiv as well as Mrs Sparsit's idee fixe-"The figure descended the great stairs, steadily, steadily; always verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom . . . . Very near bottom now. Upon the brink of the abyss . . . She elopes! She falls from the lowermost stair, and is swallowed up in the gulf!" (book 2, chap. 10). The titles of the chapters, "Lower and Lower" and "Down" also emphasize the theft of the image, as does the culminating scene of book 2, in which Louisa, having reached the bottom of the descent, falls in an insensible heap at her father's feet. The unconscious complicity between Dickens's language and Mrs Sparsit's is a sign of a more deeply rooted association between the domi- nant metaphorical mode of signification in Dickens's text and the metaphorical mode of signification it condemns in Gradgrind and the party of Fact. Metaphor is repeatedly used to discredit metaphor as Dickens mounts a systematic assault on systematic thought. All this is despite the fact that Dickens's own narrative tries repeated- ly to associate itself with the fanciful openness of fairy tale. Often fairy- tale images and references seem to offer an ironic kind of compensation for or revenge on the narrative and linguistic failure of' the masters of Coketown, as, for example, when Gradgrind's room is compared to Bluebeard's chamber (book 1, chap. 15), or when Mrs Sparsit is described (absurdly) as the Bank Fairy and (more acceptably) as the Bank Dragon (book 2, chap. 1). We've seen how fairy tale is presented in Hard Times as a metonymic mode, typified by excess and casual association of ideas. Cer- tainly, some of these authorial references to fairy tale have this playfulness about them, as with the running joke about the mills being "fairy palaces* with their "melancholy-mad elephants." But fairy tale is often used in another way, to fix, caricature and punish-as, for example, in the repeated characterization of Mrs Sparsit as a witch. The allusion to Ali Baba and the For-ty Thieves which ends the second chapter does this, too; there is a show of whimsicality in the way that the details of the correspon- dence are improvised, but the concluding metaphor actually locks together the two halves of the equivalence in a way that narrows and fixes the reader's understanding rather than releasing it: He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they con- tained. Say, good M'Choakumchild . . . When from thy boil- ing store, thou shalt rill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurk- ing within -or sometimes only maim him and distort him! BOOK 1, CHAP. 2) Dickens's narrative here takes possession of the idea of fairy tale in a way that shows surprisingly how apt the simplification of character and situation of fairy tale is to express the caricaturing outlook of Gradgrind- ery. This association is made even more firmly a couple of chapters later when a nursery rhyme is used to sum up the dismissive attitude of of- ficialdom to the Coketown workers: There was an old woman, and what, do you think? She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink; Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet, And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet. (BOOK 1. CHAP. 5) Clearly the use of the nursery rhyme is a deliberate insult to the digni- ty of Gradgrind and Bounderby, at the same time as it is a parody of their insulting attitude toward the Coketown workers and thus a device to focus the scorn of reader and author alike. But the status of the nursery rhyme is interestingly ambivalent here; does it stand as an example of liberating fancy, or as a characterization of the brutalizing simplications of the Utilitarian outlook? These examples of inconsistency in the use of metaphor and metonymy may not strike us in themselves as conclusive proof of the novel's self-deconstruction, but they do reflect an uncertainty about language, and particularly about the kind of language to be used in representing such strict binary oppositions as the one between Fact and Fancy, It comes down to a matter of authority. The text of Hard Times relies upon a notion of presence, upon its contract with its readers that it is speaking of real people and events, that its signifiers substitute for real signifieds, it, order to give authority to its, recommendation of the metonymic openness of Fancy. But if taken seriously the accreditation of metonymy and difference will tend to undo the firm opposition of Fact and Fancy essential to the book. The text is therefore recommending an open ness of interpretation which it must itself resist in order that the recom mendation may be made in the first place. Or, to put it another way, the text has to be strictly systematic in order to construct its condemnation of system. The paradox produces some moments of uneasiness in the novel, not least in the rather odd relationship between seriousness and levity which it displays. The text recommends "~amuthement" against the dogged earnestness of Gradgrindery, but itself lacks the expansive and anarchic comedy, and particularly the comically self-conscious use of language which characterizes other novels. The uncertainty about verbal comedy and its implications is made clear interestingly at the moment when Sissy makes a mistake in telling Louisa about her performance at school: "Then Mr M'Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, Here are the stutterings--" "Statistics," said Louisa. "Yes, Miss Louisa -they always remind me of stutterings, and that's another of my mistakes." (BOOK I, CHAP. 9) There is a neat little joke here and it's a pity to be tedious about it, but I think it is worth spelling out what is going on. The joke involves, of course, the opposition between the ideas of efficiency and inefficiency in language. The word "stutterings" is obviously in one sense mere noise, whose only meaning consists in representing Sissy's difficulty in pro nouncing the word "statistics." This kind of inefficiency of language is not without its own significance in Hard Times, as we have seen, for it associates Sissy with the metonymic openness of the language of Bleary and the circus. Sissy's stuttering corresponds to Sleary's lisp, for both bring forward the materiality of signifiers, which delays or prevents the simple substitution of words for things. Indeed, Sissy's own name is in- volved in this. "Cecilia" probably gives Sleary as much difficulty in pro- nunciation as "statistics" gives Sissy, and, of course, as far as Gradgrind is concerned, "Sissy" represents just the same objectionable metonymic slide away from distinctness as the use of "stutterings" for "statistics" (Sleary's own name seems to include a slide between "slurring" and "blearing"). But of course the joke consists in the happy accident that "stutter- ings" is not just a meaningless mistake. The word that Sissy hits upon does have meaning, in that it is an implied judgement on the inefficiency of statistics themselves. Useless as they are for the measurement and understanding of the subtleties of human feeling, statistics really are just -stutterings." It is therefore crucial to the joke that "stutterings" should be meaningless and meaningful at the same time - it would hardly work as well if Sissy thought of "stilts" or "stalactites." But this brings about an inversion in the sign. The inefficient metonymy becomes an efficient, meaningful metaphor, while the metaphor ("statistics") becomes mere sound, as inefficient as we have taken Sissy's mistake to be. This inversion involves other factors too. For one thing, it inverts the relationship between adult and child. The authoritative world is shown to be really only as playful and silly as the fanciful world of children. The joke plays as well on the opposition of speech and writing, for the authority of the written mode of statistics is undone by the oral mistake that Sissy makes. We could project some of the swapping of places which takes place in the joke into a diagram (the horizontal lines indicate the original associations, the diagonal lines the new associations established by the joke): [the diagram goes here] But this brings about an instability or "stutter" in Dickens's own nar ration and in the reader's reception of it. Si ssy's innocent use of the word and the narrative's knowing use of it are incompatible with each other, though, because of the structure of the joke, they are also necessary to each other. The reader therefore flickers between the two readings, the adult and the childish, the meaningful and the meaningless, without being able to decide which has priority. The joke has a residue of internal difference which makes it difficult to decide on a serious or nonserious reading. Most importantly, it represents the deconstruction of the narrative's claim to authoritative language, because the joke reveals the structure of difference which constitutes authority of meaning . Perhaps the most striking example of the dispersal of meaning is to be found in the language of Mrs Gradgrind. Though she is in many ways just a victim of the dominion of Fact, her scattered wits and language also associate her with the world of Fancy in the novel. For, in some senses, her feebleness with language is a strength; her vagueness about names, for ex ample, and, in particular, her inability to use Bounderby's name after he marries Louisa, is a comic resistance to the rage for permanence of naming. But there is also something very frightening about the tenuous grasp of language which Mrs Gradgrind has. Her subservience to a language which, instead of being her instrument, seems to speak uncontrollably through her, is like that of many characters in Bleak House,- like the victims of Chancery, Mrs Gradgrind feels that she "never hears the last of anything," because there is no end to language as difference. Personal identity is difficult to pin down once it is divided in this way by language, so that Mrs Gradgrind cannot even be sure that the pain she feels is her own. She ends up fixated upon an obscure and unnameable sense of lack: "there is something - not an Ology at all - that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen. (BOOK 2, CHAP. 9) Something strange has happened here; the metonymic diffusion of Fancy has come to seem like a symptom of the alienated language of Fact. It is as though the dominating structure of Hard Times had turned into that of Bleak House. The language of Mrs Gradgrind, both in her distracted speech, and in the "figures of wonderful no-meaning" she traces with her imaginary pen, poses a challenge to the stability and coherence of Hard Times. She represents the largest of a number of blind spots in the novel where the dispersing play of language as difference is activated. The narrative officially celebrates but implicitly condemns and therefore represses this play of difference; but its very meaning is in a sense built upon it. It is in the nature of these internal arguments within texts to be in- conclusive. I have not been trying to build a case that, unknown to so many readers for so many years, Hard 'Times is really a gloriously fragmented modernist or post-modernist text which flaunts its in- coherence and demands that its reader join in the vandalism of all mean- ing. What I do find interesting in the novel is the way that our firm con- victions of the clarity of its structure actually require the suspension of awareness of certain rather important internal inconsistencies. These inconsistencies have a residual force though, working athwart the main narrative but also, in a peculiar way, sustaining it, This is to say, then, that if our sense of the coherence and structural simplicity of Hard Times is an illusion, then it is a necessary illusion. Reading is a continually renewed struggle between the openness of text and the satisfying closure of interpretation. Each is related to the other indissolubly. Seen in this way, Hard Times may come to seem a little less naive. Because the book is so committed to the projection of the stark op- posites of Fact and Fancy, the risk is all the greater of discovering it to be haunted by internal difference, of the book being revealed as another text entirely from the one it represents itself to be. Nevertheless, this is the dangerous story that Hard Times begins to tell about itself. This is not the last account that Dickens a I ttempts to give of the con flict between "humanity" and "system.". . . . [T]he problematic shiftings between metaphor and metonymy, presence and difference, are more than just linguistic issues; they are related to fundamental questions about the nature and formation of identity in society and to specific questions of authority and power.