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Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
Читать онлайн.Название Collaborative Dickens
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821446737
Автор произведения Melisa Klimaszewski
Жанр Языкознание
Серия Series in Victorian Studies
Издательство Ingram
The direct, first-person voice of the next speaker keeps the second story anchored to the frame as the shipwright begins his portion by explaining that his arm sling results from an adze-wielding coworker having inflicted an “unlucky chop” at the shipyards. He then moves into the tale by saying, “I have nothing else in particular to tell of myself, so I’ll tell a bit of a story of a seaport town” (10). Following the first traveller’s references to an unspecified time in the future, the voice of the second traveller pulls readers right back into Christmas Eve at Watts’s, which acts as a reminder that the storytellers are randomly assembled. Such a reminder is especially fitting to introduce George A. Sala’s psychedelic story about Acon-Virlaz, a Jewish shopkeeper and jeweller whose characterization complicates critical understanding of ethnic “others” in Dickens’s collaborative canon. In Acon-Virlaz’s dream vision, he joins his friend Mr. Ben-Daoud on a shopping trip to Sky Fair, a bizarre place full of “live armadillos with their jewelled scales,” diamonds the size of ostrich eggs, and jewels that are sold “by the gallon, like table beer” (14). Weighed down by treasures, Acon-Virlaz fails to leave the fair before the closing bell and offers the gatekeeper his daughter’s hand in marriage to avoid being locked in for a hundred years. Although “women and children from every nation under the sun” (15) help block his way to the exit, the quick reference to other ethnicities does not lessen the story’s excessive attention to Jewishness. Early in the tale, some attempt at moderation appears when, on the subject of Acon-Virlaz’s name, the narrator says, “He went by a simpler, homelier, shorter appellation: Moses, Levy, Sheeny—what you will; for most of the Hebrew nation have an inner name as well as an inner and richer life” (11). Despite this defensive statement on behalf of “the Hebrew nation,” the story’s depiction of Ben-Daoud, who owes Acon-Virlaz money, is directly anti-Semitic. Ben-Daoud is “oily” with “a perceptible lisp” and pink eyes, and Acon-Virlaz casts him as the dream’s villain because he lures Acon-Virlaz to Sky Fair only to abandon him (12). In actuality, Acon-Virlaz has returned home drunk, and falling out of his chair “into the fire-place” wakes him from the dream (16).11
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