Dickens—Bleak House Scope: The work of Dickens—melodramatic, over-rich prose in the grand style—is a hard sell, and the elephantine Bleak House is particularly hard. Like Balzac, Dickens enlists the detective story schema, with its emphasis on blindness, as famously signaled by London fog on the opening page, fog as the labyrinthine legal system, fog as perceptual murk, fog as material dirt. Yet this is a novel about exploration of the huge urban container where individual lives play out. Often faulted (today) for his omniscient practice, Dickens is contrapuntal here: The benighted Esther Summerson’s story is spliced with the all-knowing narrator’s account. Dickens makes use of the reliable Victorian “dirty laundry” plot: discovering concealed sexual secrets (a model that harks back to Oedipus Rex in more ways than one). Rejected, damaged, or abandoned children litter this novel and constitute one of its major themes. But the story of an illegitimate child will be folded into something larger still: an ecological fiction. Individual hegemony is on the line. Outline I. Charles Dickens’s (1812.1870) Bleak House, published serially in 1852.1853, stands as the grandest English novel of the 19th century: an erotic whodunit, a gallery of grotesques, a moving melodrama, a social critique, and a display of technical virtuosity—all keyed to great issues that still plague us today, such as the diseased environment and blindness about our place within a larger scheme. A. The novel opens memorably with a depiction of London fog and a reference to “the death of the sun,” suggesting the apocalypse. 1. Historical accounts tell us that 19th-century London was a filthy place and that the fog distorted vision. Of course, the London streets were mostly mud. 2. Not seeing clearly is perhaps the book’s dominant motif, harking back to the figure of Tiresias in the Oedipus of Sophocles and governing much of this novel’s energies. 3. The inability to see clearly further reminds us of Corinthians 13, where Paul says, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” Paul’s dark glass stands for our incapacity to make sense of things. 4. The fog or dark glass might also represent a formula for detective fiction or, indeed, for reading in general. We might go further still in asserting that the path to knowledge is similar: We must go through the murk to achieve clarity. 5. Dickens is (wrongly) faulted as being an omniscient author who leaves little labor to his readers. But Bleak House is spectacularly contrapuntal, consisting of a brilliant weave between the all-knowing narrator and the in-the-dark protagonist, Esther Summerson. As we will see, Esther’s groping vision is an important component of this book and a sharp contrast to the grandiloquent, authoritative discourse of the omniscient narrator. B. Bleak House can also be understood in terms of power: the power of institutions as they coerce individual lives; in this light, it reminds us of the theories of Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, we breathe in, in a sense, the authority of our culture’s institutions, and these institutions inform us in ways of which we aren’t aware. 1. Chancery, the court of law, constitutes the supreme legal institution in the novel, and the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce informs and poisons every individual in the text. The case has been ongoing for decades and seems to have taken on a life of its own. 2. Many of the main characters of the book hope for a settlement of the case that will give them the benefits to which they believe they are entitled. The life of Richard Carstone, in particular, is cued to the suit. He suspects that he will be cheated by his benefactor, John Jarndyce, who in turn realizes that the boy has somehow absorbed the case’s poisonous atmosphere. 3. This view of life as a legal labyrinth looks forward already to Kafka’s dark and surreal worldview that we will see in The Trial. 4. We soon realize that Chancery is also a bristling metaphor of sapped hope, diseased feelings, and living death. A number of characters will die in connection with Chancery. II. Like so many great 19th-century novels, Bleak House is a marvelous detective story, cued to sexual secrets, airing what we might call Victorian “dirty laundry.” This tradition is alive and well today also, as we see in our soap operas and TV detective programs. A. We mentioned Oedipus earlier in the lecture, and we might note that this play shares some similarity with a detective story. Both Oedipus and Bleak House deal with the need to cleanse the community. 1. In the work of Sophocles, it turns out that Oedipus himself is the transgressor; his killing of the king and sleeping with the queen have brought on the plague in Greece. 2. The play, therefore, has a kind of purgative plot; once the evil is found and excised, the disease is cured. 3. This returns us, again, to the detective story. Once the murderer is discovered, the community can sleep safely. B. The fundamental plot in Bleak House focuses on the origins and fate of the young protagonist Esther Summerson. 1. Esther believes herself to be an orphan, but the reader soon realizes that she is the illegitimate child of the beautiful, aristocratic Lady Dedlock, who had a liaison with the mysterious Captain Hawdon, known initially by the resonant name Nemo (“no one” in Latin). 2. These threads start to come together when Nemo, reduced to the position of legal scribe, copies a document for a case involving Lady Dedlock. She recognizes the handwriting of her former lover and nearly faints, raising the suspicions of the family lawyer, Tulkinghorn. 3. The novel is driven by an epistemological imperative: to illuminate one’s origins. This classic plot harks back to Oedipus: We are in the dark concerning our own most basic relations. Esther begins as someone groping toward the light, and at a key moment in her evolution, she goes literally blind. C. Esther, like Oedipus, is the “cast-out child.” But in her case, her abandonment is linked to sexual shame; the determining words she has heard since infancy are,“your mother is your disgrace, and you were hers.” Dickens is out to measure what kind of damage this constitutes. His culture, like his novel, is filled to the brim with injured children. 1. The plot rotates around three “abandoned” young people: Esther the orphan and the two wards of the court, Ada and Rick. All are enmeshed in the ancient labyrinthine legal case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. 2. In characteristic Dickensian fashion, these young people, all of whom are in trouble, are taken under the wing of the wise, paternalistic John Jarndyce. As we’ve said, Esther is an orphan, and Rick and Ada are depending on the case to be settled, although its settlement will lead to the death of Rick. 3. In the meantime, Rick and Ada fall in love, and Ada becomes pregnant, bringing one more child into the scene. 4. This novel, we begin to understand, is written under the aegis of damaged children, and it is no accident that a key early scene entails the death of an infant, a sickly child born into the most gruesome socioeconomic arrangements. 5. Other children also come into view, including the monstrously childlike Harold Skimpole, who lacks moral maturity, and the distant children of both England and Africa, who are the “targets” of the novel’s philanthropic women. Dickens can be searing in his critique of bad (idealist) mothers, women blind to their own flesh-and-blood progeny. D. Esther illustrates to perfection the price paid by injury and abandonment. 1. Unloved in childhood and persuaded of her own guilt in her conception, she personifies the complex Victorian attitude toward gender and libido. She is the novel’s “angel in the house,” stamped by self- abnegation; cheerful, capable, self-effacing, she is a figure of tireless goodness; we are entitled to wonder what price has been paid for such virtue. 2. As mentioned earlier, Esther goes temporarily blind, a condition brought on by smallpox, and it’s not farfetched to think of smallpox as some kind of displaced sexual punishment for her mother’s transgressions. 3. When Esther finally meets her mother, she is especially gratified that her disfigurement will not allow anyone to recognize her and thus cause embarrassment to Lady Dedlock. E. The exemplary damaged child of the text is the orphan Jo, who underscores the fact that London is a place where children go under. 1. Jo is a child of the famous slum called Tom-all-alone’s and a friend of Nemo’s. His motto is “I don’t know nothink,” meaning that he is the most benighted figure of the text. 2. Jo’s illiteracy constitutes what may be the deepest blindness of the novel. Perhaps the inability to read, to gain access to language, is what it truly means to live in murk and fog. Essential Reading: Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Supplementary Reading: Janice M. Allan, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: A Sourcebook. Gordon Bigelow, “Market Indicators: Banking and Housekeeping in Bleak House.” Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. Questions to Consider: 1. Do you think Dickens is a hard sell today? If so, why? If you were obliged to defend him as a “must-read,” how would you proceed? 2. The Victorian culture maintained a view of women that seems to us today to be impossibly high-minded and repressive. Is Bleak House stamped by such a view? In particular, does the entire Dedlock plot seem like a thing of the remote past to you, or do such affairs matter even today? Lecture Thirteen Dickens—Bleak House, Part 2 Scope: All of Dickens’s novels seem overpopulated, crawling with individuals, yet the plot is invariably one of linkage and connection. This fiction of relationship goes counter to our intuitive sense of freedom, contours, and hegemony. But the novel is out to explode our sense of untouchability, and thus posits the great London slum known as Tom-all-alone’s as the core of the city and of the novel; everyone will be affected or infected by it. The logic of plague is borne out by Jo’s role: The exemplary orphan child of the slums infects Esther with smallpox, and Esther, thus, experiences her sisterhood with the boy. The novel is tentacular. Most spectacular is Krook’s death by spontaneous combustion: an explosion, as it were, of urban pus. The coherence of Bleak House is the coherence of epidemic, of systemwide exposure, of no conceivable immunity. This is an economic and philosophical concept that speaks to us even today. Bleak House is a terrifying family novel because we are “related” beyond our knowing. Outline I. Although the erotic whodunit initially commands our attention in reading Bleak House, we gradually come to understand that the novel tells a more ambitious story that entails a new vision of the world of interconnection—a tentacular vision in which people find, usually to their amazement or horror, that they are connected to others more closely than they might have imagined. A. The long-awaited revelation of Esther’s status as illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock sends shockwaves along social lines because it is a looming, likely fatal dishonor for the aristocratic lady. Dickens exploits this side of things to the hilt. Little can match the breathless final pursuit of the fleeing Lady Dedlock by her daughter, Esther. B. But we gradually recognize that the fable of unacknowledged, illicit connection goes much further than even this. More so than Balzac’s Pere Goriot, Bleak House registers new lines of family and identity, a new model of brotherhood and sisterhood that is at odds with all notions of agency and hegemony that individualism takes for granted. 1. Thomas Carlyle once wrote of a woman dying of typhus who walked from house to house in her village, begging for help and telling her neighbors, “I am your sister! You must help me! I am bone of your bone!” Of course, no one helped the woman, but her disease infected the others, thereby proving her “sisterhood.” 2. It is this sense of family that comes through in Bleak House—not some happy, cozy affair but a much larger, more lucid and angled picture of how we are connected beyond our ken. C. In this light, the central relationship in the novel may well be that of the orphan Esther to the orphan Jo. There is no blood tie here whatsoever, but, of course, the infection model posits linkage of a different sort. 1. Jo—illiterate and impoverished, abused more than anyone in the story—has no home and is told incessantly to “move on.” Sick and bereft of help, he ends up at Bleak House, where Esther’s maid, Charley, tends to him, then catches his smallpox. Esther tends to Charley, and she, too, contracts smallpox and becomes disfigured. Here is Dickens’s virulent tale of human connection writ large. 2. Esther’s gathering relation to Jo is invariably figured by Dickens as a challenge to Esther’s sense of self: She has inklings of being something other than who she thinks she is. 3. Think again of Oedipus: The backdrop of that story is the plague, but the foreground shows us a man rediscovering who he is. The story of epidemic or disease inevitably entails a redefinition of the human subject. We rethink our own boundaries and contours, as Esther does here. 4. Esther’s experience of smallpox itself is narrated with great metaphorical power; it graphs Esther’s bursting out of her old self, almost as if she is pregnant with something larger than herself. D. The sense of connectedness in this novel is perhaps captured in the German phrase auf dem Leib erfahren, meaning “to experience in the flesh.” Dickens is equally demanding of his characters. 1. Esther describes her pain: “Dare I hint at that worst time, when strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads?” 2. On one level, the image of the necklace reminds us of the finery worn by Esther’s mother, Lady Dedlock. 3. At the same time, a necklace or a starry circle is a larger shape made up of components. Esther has no agency or hegemony here; she is a cog in the system. In ecological or environmental terms, she is part of a larger family. This is the lesson taught by disease. 4. Dickens initiates Esther into this family through pain and disfigurement, but in a sense, the transformation is grand. She is reborn and reconfigured—even her face is altered. 5. We are all changed by intense experiences—religious, emotional, moral—and Dickens is out to chart that evolution in terms of moral growth, human responsibility, and spiritual citizenship. 6. Each of these terms positions us in a larger framework, where we have no control, and this is the experience of Esther. II. The fluid world of linkage and connection that becomes visible in this tale of plague and infection radically challenges our sense of the contours we have taken to be real, concerning the shape of both our selves and the world. A. This key truth of the novel can be expressed in another familiar term: pollution. As we saw with disease, pollution betokens a scheme of incessant yet invisible traffic between subjects and environment; pollution cashiers all our notions of confining boundaries and annihilates any view we might have of immunity. 1. We might think of the body as a fairly closed proposition, but in fact we are porous, both ideologically and emotionally. All that we’ve seen or heard or read goes through us; our bodies are not membranes that can keep the world at bay. 2. This is what is meant by the phrase “Subjectivity is constructed”: We are the products of many influences that have come through us. 3. As we know, our bodies are physically porous as well. The smoke from an exhaust pipe makes its way into our lungs. No one has immunity—not behind walls of skin or stone or class. 4. Hence, the slum of London, Tom-all-alone’s, is the central force field of the novel. Its pestilence cannot be contained. Its power links together high and low, and it makes for a new constellation of meshed people. 5. Despite all our normative logic, the sick and the poor in this life have the keys to the city. Of Tom-all- alone’s, Dickens says, “He has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere.” 6. Those who study environmental science will attest to the truth of this statement. As we saw with Chernobyl, the wind eradicates borders and defenses between countries. B. The list of characters in Bleak House would outrun most Russian novels, but every one of them is connected to someone else. For Dickens, that connection is not just an aesthetic concept—it is the structure of life itself. 1. We see, in Dickens’s complicated detective story, numerous ways to be connected—through money, power, or disease. The book charts the hidden, concealed, and denied connections between people who appear to be separate and independent. 2. Nothing illustrates this more handsomely than the infamous scene where the mysterious Krook—rag- and-bone man and possessor of secrets—dies of spontaneous combustion. He literally explodes, and his oily fluids coat the scene where he is discovered. 3. Those fluids seem to image the logic of Dickens’s novel—whatever is inside and hidden by our skin can explode and flow out into the environment. 4. We have the makings here of a systemwide diagnosis. “Something is rotten in the state of Britain,” seems to be Dickens’s guiding belief. This scheme is stunningly somatic, and Krook’s flux of oily, viscous fluids may be understood as urban pus. 5. The fates of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce and of Rick himself are linked to the same imperious figurative logic. When Rick discovers that he will receive nothing in the case settlement, he opens his mouth to speak but blood flows out, as if we are all merely collections of fluids that can explode in a moment of crisis. C. This powerful image leads us, in closing, to the self-awareness of Bleak House. Much of what we have discussed about Bleak House is invisible to the eye—powerful forces that invade us. The project of this book—indeed, the project of literature—is to make those invisible connections visible, to bring them to language and legibility. In Bleak House, language is not so much celebrated as achieved. Essential Reading: Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Supplementary Reading: Janice M. Allan, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: A Sourcebook. Gordon Bigelow, “Market Indicators: Banking and Housekeeping in Bleak House.” Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. Questions to Consider: 1. Dickens was a passionate student of urban hygiene, with a reformer’s zeal. Is Bleak House rewardingly read as a text about the environment, a text about the ramifications of pollution, or is such a reading a little tendentious? 2. What do you make of Krook’s “spontaneous combustion”? Is this simply over-the-top, or is Dickens pointing at a higher kind of logic here? And why does Dickens choose Krook—an otherwise fairly minor character—for this spectacular event?