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NOTES ON ISSUE 10: ALLUSIONS
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…not often troubling himself to
reflect that dust he was and to dust he must return…
The reflection that one is dust, and that to dust one will return,
echoes Genesis 3:19, in which Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden
of Eden and told by God, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou
taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” This
passage is also echoed in the Burial Service in the Book of Common
Prayer, and is a familiar part of funeral orations (“ashes to ashes,
dust to dust”).
…looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. “It must
be forty feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
The pillar of fire in the sky invokes Exodus 13:21, in which God leads
the people out of Egypt and through the wilderness: “And the Lord went
before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by
night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.”
This, as an image of liberation, is appropriate to the pillar of fire
issuing from the burning château, for the fire symbolizes the
abolished tyranny of the Marquis. Further, the people’s estimation of
the height of the pillar of fire – forty feet – associates it with the
gallows upon which Gaspard was hanged. Thus, the pillar of fire becomes
symbolic of both personal and national vengeance – vengeance for
Gaspard against the Marquis, and vengeance of the oppressed masses
against a tyrannical aristocracy. The Exodus allusion helps to
strengthen the association between a single event – the destruction of
the Marquis and his château – and a national movement of the
oppressed.
It had never been a good eye to see with – had long
had the mote in it of Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a
mole’s blindness – but it had dropped out and was gone.
The “mote” in the “Bull’s Eye” alludes to Matthew 7:3-5:
And why beholdest thou the mote
that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in
thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the
mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt
thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Sardanapalus’ luxury refers to the last
king of Assyria (7th century B.C.), who was famous for his sensuality
and material largess. Besieged, and aware that his downfall was
imminent, Sardanapalus threw himself on a funeral pyre with all his
possessions on it, surrounded by his harem (Sanders 128). Byron made
Sardanapalus the subject of a tragedy, and there is a famous painting –
“The Death of Sardanapalus” – by Delacroix (which can be viewed at www.abcgallery.com/D/delacroix/delacroix39.html).
Finally, moles, as subterranean creatures, have very poor eyesight. The
Dictionary of Daily Wants (1859) describes and
illustrates the mole as follows:
MOLE. – An animal chiefly
remarkable for leading a subterranean life. It is from four to six
inches in length; the body is thick and cylindrical, the head much
prolonged, especially the muzzle, and the legs extremely short. These
little animals are generally regarded as pests, and are suspected of
committing great ravages with plants and agricultural produce. To
exterminate this animal, it is sometimes considered best to remove the
mole hills. (687)
Drawn to the Loadstone Rock
A loadstone is a magnet, specifically one consisting of magnetic
oxide of iron. The word “load-stone,” meaning literally
“way-stone,” comes from the use of magnets in marine
navigation (Oxford English Dictionary); figuratively,
a loadstone is an object that attracts. In Dickens’ use
of term – in the title of this chapter, and in later references
within the chapter – he is alluding to a particular loadstone
in the Arabian Nights. In the story called “The
Third Calender’s Tale,” Ajib, a prince and a calender
(a calender is a Persian or Turkish mendicant dervish [OED])
describes a voyage of discovery in which his ship was irresistibly
drawn to an enormous Loadstone Rock. The Rock, exerting such
a force on the ship as to pull all the nails out of its structure
and sink it, effectively marooned the calender on its shores.
It was surmounted, however, with a bronze statue of a horse
and rider; and Ajib, receiving advice (in a dream) that he should
shoot the statue with a bronze bow he had found, did so and
was liberated: The statue disintegrated, and Ajib was borne
off in a bronze boat to further adventures (summarized in Sanders
125-6; Burton, vol.1, 139-61).
Like the fabled rustic who
raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight
of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled;
so Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards for a
great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for
compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he
took to his noble heels.
Sanders, in his Companion to A
Tale of Two Cities, suggests that the story to which Dickens
alludes here is Aesop’s fable of “The Old Man and Death,” which runs as
follows:
An
old labourer, bent double with age and toil, was gathering sticks in a
forest. At last he grew so tired and hopeless that he threw down the
bundle of sticks, and cried out: “I cannot bear this life any longer.
Ah, I wish Death would only come and take me!”
As he spoke, Death, a grisly skeleton, appeared and said to him: “What
wouldst thou, Mortal? I heard thee call me.”
“Please, sir,” replied the woodcutter, “would you kindly help me to
lift this faggot of sticks on to my shoulder?”
We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. (Æsop, “The
Old Man and Death”)
Death in this fable seems to appear
much as the Devil is supposed to, though the Old Man does not exactly
go to “infinite pains” to raise him. Sanders suggests that Dickens may
have been thinking of La Fontaine’s version of the fable, in which the
“sufferings of the French peasantry” are explicitly represented.
Reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards is supposed to be
a charm for raising the Devil; indeed, the notion has survived
up to the present day. Multiple websites transcribe the prayer
backwards, both word-by-word and phonetically. Forwards, the
Lord’s Prayer (from the Book of Common Prayer) reads as
follows:
Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as
it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive them, that trespass against us. And lead us
not into temptation; but deliver us from evil: For thine is the
kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
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