Chappell 2013

Patrick Chappell. "Paper Routes: Bleak House, Rubbish Theory, and the Character Economy of Realism." ELH 80.3 (Fall 2013), pp. 783-810. Web.

• Bleak House (1853)
• Claim: "Theorizing the regenerative material systems that inform the novel [… which] possesses a deep affiliation with Bleak House's structural form. If BH partakes of the dust yard and paper mill's shared logic of objects' transformational fluidity…then the novel also extends this logic beyond the material realm to include both the informational world included on parchment as well as the characterological world that interacts with that paper." (784)
• "…novelistic form is a remarkably unstable organizational unit. And yet in BH that instability is precisely what creates the productive possibilities for the metamorphosis of value according to the temporally contingent system of rubbish."
• Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory has 3 categories:
  • Transient - that which decreases in value over time, like most ordinary goods
  • Durable - that which increases in value over time or retains its value
  • Rubbish: objects which have no immediate or apparent value but, paradoxically, is necessary if a transient object is to become durable
• Situating the paper economy of the novel in these terms and by performing close readings of the spaces and characters most tinged by rubbish
• Reads the icon of a paper mill on Krook's shop as a sign of the materiel of his shop as implicated in the manufacture of paper, based on an economy of varying levels of formality of rags being transported to mills to be upcycled into paper
  • So, situating his theoretical argument in terms of Victorian paper manufacture and Victorian interest in recycling
  • Doesn't mention the paper shortage that brought this to the fore
  • Including Dickens' own surreal it-narrative about paper manufacture in Household Words
• "The article [from 1842] demonstrates quite comprehensively that potential value lies in nearly all waste objects, provided they're reutilized in innovative ways." (791)
• "The evidence suggests that, in mid-Victorian culture, paper was less a fetishized commodity with obscure origins than a product whose manufacturing methods were of great interest to consumers." (791)
  • It can be both, and it is both in the novel: there is the interest in the material conditions and thing-ness of documents which Chappell maps, but also Richard's descent can be read as a fetishization of the value that must be inscribed somewhere in the documents he pores over, the abstraction that bleeds him dry.
  • "To fetishize commodities is, in one of Marx's least-understood jokes, to reverse the whole history of fetishism. For it is to fetishize the invisible, the immaterial, the supra-sensible. The fetishism of the commodity inscribes immateriality as the defining feature of capitalism." (Stallybrass 184)
• He posits paper as the "connexion" between class and space in BH's most famous quote (792)
• Paper and characters: "Despite their grisly deaths, the ragged bodies of these characters [Krook, Nemo, and Jo] linger in an intermediate and interstitial state much like the contingent rubbish theory." (792)
• Close reading of Krook: "If these evolving stages of figuration reiterate the novel's underlying system of rag recycling, the physical dispersion of Krook's actual body suggests a similar material endurance." (796)
• Reads Nemo's textual production as rubbish, returning to durability (798)
• The dustcart metaphor in the chapter of Jo's death: "The elaborate metaphor's most obvious, or at least most adjacent, point of reference is the loaded dustcart from eight chapters before." (800)
• The limits of a rubbish theory of character visibility: "When we speak of this broader field of minor characters - including, say, Miss Rachael, Phil Squod, or Mrs. Pardiggle - we admittedly begin to move away from the physical world of waste paper and rags, but the logic of paper's metamorphosis remains within the deeper structures of the novel." This seems tendentious, and doesn't incorporate the remixability of the serialized novel, that we are never away from the physical world of waste paper and rags when thinking about the material condition in which BH entered the world
• "Such cases [Mrs. Rachael's multiple roles] exemplify BH's tightly knit narrative frugality, a method of characterization allegorically represented by the shadowy figures that Esther sees during her first day in London." (802)
  • An interesting way of reading which avoids questions of coincidence - but should those questions be avoided, and is that the causal system Dickens is trying to work out?
• "…what Dickens's novel demonstrates so well is that lengthy and densely populated realist novels organize character positions around a series of stages on the way to other stages that are themselves never stable or permanent; in the process some characters temporarily rise to prominence while others lapse away into irrelevance, sometimes permanent, sometimes not." (803)