Taylor 2016

Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: the London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Virginia: UP, 2016. Print.

Intro

• 5: Nature in the Anthroposcene exists in a state of perpetual withdrawal, a state of affairs that I have taken to calling "abnatural". The prefix ab- means both "away from" and "derived from." Thus, "abnatural" speaks to both nature's absence and its uncanny persistence.... Abnatural characterizes those moments in which nature appears other to itself, beside or outside itself.

Ch. 1: Bleak House

• 21: [Esther and Guppy coming into a "London particular"] What does it mean to imagine a manufactured climate? How do we dwell, meaningfully and coherently, in an abnatural world? These are questions of urgent, twenty-first-century significance, but they are also questions that we share with the Victorians.... Treating Victorian literature as Anthroposcene literature offers a paradoxically new perspective on the present, reminding us that we inhabit the future: we live after the end of the world to which our bodies, appetites, and ideas are adapted, in a state of perpetual withdrawal from the world we once called home, even as many of the species with which we cohabit the planet disappear entirely.
• 23: Drawing a correlation between realist fiction and the glasshouse suggests that we understand Victorian realism as a distinct participation in "environmentalism," in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, which James Winter has described as "an interpretative framework: the proposition that crucial aspects of human life and history are determined by distinct physical settings." Instead of expressing explicit concern about the vulnerability of the natural world, environmentalism offered the Victorians a mechanism for understanding the relationship between the human species and its habitat in dynamic interaction.
• 25 The artificial climate of the glasshouse offered a paradoxically more natural habitat than the soot-laden London fog. The city had become a space in which nature could be sustained only through artifice, sheltered from the toxic atmosphere outside the glass.
• 27 BH's query, "What connexion can there be?," is the prototypical question of anthropogenic climate change.
• [distributed agency of anthropogenic climate change - Jane Bennett -> Deleuze/Guattari] The assemblage thus offers a useful mechanism for understanding not only the distributed, multispecies, multisubstance agency of communities, corporations, cities, power grids, ecosystems, and storms but also the composition of complex organisms themselves. A whale ship is an assemblage; so is a whale.
  • Cites Bennett Vibrant Matter 24
  • cross ref. with Rhizomes and assemblages stuff
• 27-8 The distributed agency of assemblages provides a useful conceptual rubric for reevaluating the weird, abnatural realism of Charles Dickens. In literary terms, distributed agency and vicarious causation are closely aligned with metonymy, which is to say association by proximity[.] Dickens, a "master metonymyst," inscribes people, animals, objects, and language itself in vast recursive networks of cause and effect, woven out of what Elaine Freedgood [on 16] calls "the vagrant processes...of the metonymic imagination." In so doing, he reinscribes agency as a property of those distributed, adjacent, mediated interactions. Dickens's fiction abounds with textured materiality such that the imagined reality exceeds any grounding in mimetic accuracy. In the process, his novels do not represent a world aspiring to mimetic verisimilitude. Instead, they create an explicitly fictive world that renders legible otherwise invisible dynamics at work in the vast assemblage of Victorian London. Dickens was not simply a novelist in the usual sense but a media theorist experimenting with the technologies by which reality becomes virtual - and that is why he provides a useful point of departure for wrestling with the imaginative challenges of the Anthroposcene.
• The novel as a climate model depends not only on resemblance or descriptive [29] accuracy but also on the potential for the novel to make visible otherwise invisible truths about the world, not in spite of its fictive status but because of it.... The novel itself does not simply represent the world as a separate entity; it participates in that world and helps bring it into being. The "real" city of London is in part Dickensian, and not only because Dickens's novels depict the city in which they were written and read. But more profoundly, the novels constitute part of the city itself, just as Dickens's house, grave, and favorite pubs have become landmarks in it (as have the locations of key events in his fiction). The metropolis is built not only of bricks and mortar but also of words and stories.
• 29 The always vexing debates over the extent to which realism (or even language itself) provides an accurate representation of the world in the sense of a realistic copy elide the fact that what it actually does is stage a performance of that world, thereby revealing constitutive dynamics within it that may not be otherwise visible. Metaphor and metonymy are models, too: technologies that dramatize relationships between discontinuous entities in order to produce concepts that would not be possible without them. As Laura Otis puts it, "metaphors do not 'express' scientists' ideas; they are the ideas."
• 31 The Victorian era saw Nature supplant God as the ultimate guarantor of the real. As George Levine explains, "While 'Nature' had become for Carlyle a 'grand unnameable Fact,' poets and novelists were engaged in naming it." Victorian realism depended on a lifeline to the natural. Nor was this a one-way street, as seen in Charles Lyell's adopting a literary mode to explain geological time. But what happens when Nature can be imagined only as an absence, mutating within the hothouse of modernity, a grand fact in the middle of becoming fiction? The answer might look something like the weird world of Charles Dickens, in which people become objects, things become people, and either may explode for no apparent reason. Replacing the comforting minutiae of the reality effect, these unstable entities whisper, "We are artificial nature; we are the abnatural real."
• 32 Dickens conceived a language for metropolitan existence. Instead of revealing beauty through correspondence with nature, as Ruskin would have liked, Dickens's fiction reveals a world in which nature as separate from the human ceases to exist.
  • l/u Ruskin's review of BH, "Fiction Fair and Foul"
• 32 The memorability of Dickens's ostensibly minor characters needs to be taken not as an individual stylistic quirk or subsequent critical taste for the macabre but as a key innovation of his fiction. Dickens does not present a world filled with extraordinary minor characters; he presents a world in which there are no minor characters.
  • this whole section is really, really good
• 33 Rather than a closed system within an environment, the novel presents a tangled thicket of interrelated assemblages and multitiered systems at once legal, bodily, and economic, with all of the systems open to and affected by the others.
• 35 Trying to confine this cloud of signification to one register of meaning would simply undo the scene's aesthetic of indistinction. The London fog as composed on the page offers an extended immersion in the intellectual milieu of the Victorian era, which is to say the historical climate in which the novel was written.
• 37 Thus, while the atmospheric connection between Jo and Lady Dedlock [who die of exposure] seems to anticipate Ulrich Beck's succinct "poverty is hierarchical, smog is democratic," Dickens is keenly aware that the democracy of smog lies in its effects; its causes are quite the opposite.
• 38 come back to pt about narration
• 40 Pushing back on Nancy Armstrong's point that "the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same" because the individual subject is not a person but the city of London itself
• 41 ["mere realism"] ...Treating Dickens's fog as a description of the real fog of London does not go far enough, and ultimately obscures the novel's function as a phenomenological model, dramatizing the climatic encounter that cannot be experienced directly.