Counting On: A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

At the end of Book I, chapter 5 of A Tale of Two Cities , there is an apparently trivial exchange between Jarvis Lorry and Ernest Defarge, which occurs just before Lucie Manette and Lorry see her father for the first time since his release from eighteen years’ imprisonment in the Bastille. Lorry speaks first: ‘Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?’ ‘I show him … to a chosen few.’ ‘Is that well?’ ‘ I think it is well.’ ‘Who are the few? How do you choose them?’ ‘I choose them as real men, of my name — Jacques is my name.’ (TTC, I, v, 40) Defarge then strikes ‘twice or thrice upon the door’, drawing ‘the key across it, three or four times’ (I, v, 40) before they enter the room. In this threshold scene, wrapped in enigma, it is striking how often we are asked to register countable numbers: two, three and four times, as well as the uncounted ‘few’ who are privileged to witness the still-suffering Manette, and who are both named and unnamed by the generic ‘Jacques’. But this is of a piece with the novel as a whole, which is full of counting, and troubled by its relationship with naming. I want to argue that we should be more aware of this distinctive and insistent quality of the book, and should particularly note the ways in which such counting and uncountability represent (or figure, or account for) kinds of political being and obligation in relation to other kinds of more familiarly novelistic action and duty. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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