Bleak House (1853)

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General Notes

Page numbers in this and the next section refer to Dickens, Bleak House. ed. Patricia Ingham. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2011.

  • 61 he seeds so many themes in the first paragraphs: Chancery, London, mud and fog fuddling the senses, mud as the encrustations of time, climate/atmospheric awareness, the jostling collocation of biblical and new scientific ways of knowing, infection, and finance
    • l/u compound interest: “Money paid for the use of money lent (the principal), or for forbearance of a debt, according to a fixed ratio (rate per cent.). Interest is paid at fixed intervals, usually once or twice in the year. simple interest is the interest paid on the principal as lent. compound (†compounded) interest (interest upon interest), is the interest eventually paid on a principal periodically increased by the addition of each fresh amount of interest as it becomes due and remains unpaid. Interest in this sense was formerly called usury, a name still applied when interest is charged at a rate beyond what is considered legitimate or just.” (OED)
  • 62 repetition
  • what do we know about chancery from the first para? What does the narrator want us to know?
  • 63 chancery networks the nation: generates/effects imagined community
    • 166 Rumour, too, in and around Chancery (from Snagsby's to Tulkinghorn)
  • 66 main chars intro'd without names by LC: mediated by the legal apparatus and their role in the case
  • cyclicality of imagery - like the novel in minature
  • careful lamination of image clusters in key descriptions
  • "fashionable intelligence" (rumor) another networking imagined community
  • 71 not naming or delayed/mediated naming of major characters but memorably naming Mr Sladdery who never appears again(?)
  • 75 shift in ch 3 (along with the wider from omniscient to first person) to revealing thematics, as of gender, through dialogue rather than narration description as much
  • 87 why does ada need a companion?
    • because she'd be the only lady in Bleak House and she might be lonely; plus this works as a pretext to get ES a job. "Impecunious gentlewomen who did not want to govern or teach or keep a shop could sometimes find a post being a companion to the widowed or the otherwise lonely" (What Jane Austen Ate p 289).
  • 89 Mrs J's project is imperial as well as philanthropic
  • 93 "momentous imptance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things"
  • 98 effect of ending #1 where it does?
  • 111ff intro to Bleak House & Jarndyce, esp 114 (what does description do)
  • 117 Skimpole: arrested on 122, 125 "he is a child"
    • compare to the Jellybys (caddy esp)
  • 133 Guppy recognizing Lady D painting - it looks like ES
  • 134 Ghost Walk story - what is it doing?
  • 138 exposition about J & J Chancery suit (thru 141 - Wiglomeration)
  • 142 she won't let him tell her her story
  • 172 suspense about whether Nemo is dead at the end of #3
  • 173 Opium legality in 1850s?
  • 175 Snagsby explaining how he came to employ Nemo
  • 176 Krook outside of, or at the edges, of the paper and ink based knowledge economy in Chancery neighborhood
  • pawnbroker's tickets
  • 177 rumour spreading through the street
  • 178 register/syntax switch - effect?
    • narration of the inquest - > high-toned at the end of the chapter
  • talk about all the paper in ch 11
  • 181 Jo first mentioned at Coroner's Inquest into Nemo's death
  • is justice served at Nemo's inquest?
  • 182 Snagsby's snobbery about Jo
  • 183 Guster "murders sleep" - MacBeth
  • 186 Misremembers Ariel for Puck in describing Lady Dedlock's world weariness (Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream)
  • 185-6 Again Lady D's plight -> Connecting in Boythorn and Nemo through a letter (again it's Tulkinghorn but he himself is absent)
  • 189 Hortense
  • 191 Boodle, Coodle, Doodle satire (but rooted in picking at the Oxford movement and old fashioned moneyed interests)
  • 197 Jarndyce blames Richard's indecision and blitheness in part on the chancery case
  • 200 Guppy stalking Esther
  • 202-3 The Bayham Badgers - groteseque but funny
  • 204 Ada and Richard's love and Jarndyce's imploring him to be constant
  • 208 ES holds back that "a young gentleman" was at the dinner party - Allen W - unreliability
  • 211-2 Caddy J: compares herself to a slave, and then lathers on domestic ideology rather thickly
  • 213 will have to define deportment -- connects to the Dandyism at Chesney Wold (at least in its earlier, less insidious incarnation according to narrator)
  • 215-6 Mr Turveydrop - patterning of irresponsible or absent parents
  • and different models of gentlemanliness
  • 223-4 Ms Flite's birds, and meeting Allen again. Plus Krook
  • 230 Skimpole -> Coavinses (dead) -> The Neckett children, including Charley
    • building toward the poverty of Tom All Alones it seems (via Chancery with Mr. Gridley, 234)
  • 235 Gridley railing against "the System"
  • 238 "What connexion can there be"
  • 238ff Tom All Alones and Jo
    • ties in chancery, develops illiteracy theme from Krook (the illegibility of the economy and his illegibility to it)

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

  • 63 paper economy of knowledge and power: all the court docs, then Miss Flite's documents
  • 71 Mr sladdery the society librarian
  • 72 lady d recognizes nemo's handwriting in the affidavit
  • 148 Mrs Pardiggle has left a book (Diffusion of Christian Knowledge like) at the brickmaker's which he's refused to read
  • 164 Snagsby - legal stationer

Materiality

  • 94 the things in the Jellybys' house all have an ideological as well as a comic meaning
  • 101ff Krook's

Gender

  • 67 Lady D's situation like that Dorothea laments on 257 in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
  • 91 the gendered ideological valence of the narr's criticism of Mrs J
  • 95 Ada says ES "would make a home out of even this house"
  • 116 E gets the house keys
  • 140 E's nicknames

Socioecon

Enviro

  • opening paras: fog, mud, heat death of the sun
  • atmosphere at chesney wold - insulated
  • 84 London particular - contextualize
    • l/u miasma theory

Shakespeare

  • 69: lady d has "all her perfections on her head" where Old Hamlet has all his imperfections on his

BH seminar notes (Jesse's class 1-2017)

Context

  • regarded as D's masterpiece
  • v impt in history of the novel and of novel criticism
  • Vic pd
    • industrialization to scale: a world transformed by this
    • urbanization - overwhelming experience of modernity
    • BH opened around the time of the Great Exhibition
      • "works of industry": cotton gin
      • cultural dioramas - spectacle
      • an embodiment of mid-Victorian culture: museum and shopping mall, "temple to the commodity"
      • democratic and privatized space - "industrial capitalism's coming out party"
    • BH is the all-encompassing cultural project, the shadow exhibition (with the mess the GE leaves out)
  • double narration
    • really weird
    • tense switches too
    • it's basically unique in doing this so it's innovative but sui generis
  • parts - serialized
    • feedback loop of still writing as he published
    • not being paid by the word but by the part issue (page/word count range): hard to fill and to fit
      • forms affect meaning
  • we tend to read for plot: but how important is it, actually?
  • everything has to be there in OMF, maybe not so much in BH

Novel

  • beginning "In chancery"
    • fuddling sense data but also set pieces from mid vic pd: dinosaurs, capital
    • death of the sun (heat death), geological record of dinosaurs, all Victorian "news" in science, folded into the fog
    • miasma theory - rotting matter
  • if what we understand a novel to be is a series of events, when does something happen
    • there are repetitions, but discrete people doing discrete actions is hard to come by til Tangle and the Lord High Chancellor
    • the novel begins before the narrative
    • audience: narrating the parts of London his audience might not have gone to
    • human extinction hinted at - Lyell's books would have been familiar to Dickens as to Tennyson
    • time as accumulation/encrustation: in mud, in papers
  • Esther's narrative
    • she hasn't been necessarily asked by the lawyers to write: she's obliged but it's unclear by whom
    • the third person narrator hasn't got a presence in the story world, there's a break there that's never resolved
      • if you're a vic reader you know it's in the recent past because of certain features of the city - but the third person is in the present tense - the temporality is super weird
      • Latour's entire career is about resituating "scientific objectivity" in a person: not that a scientist is wrong but embedded
      • 3rd person omniscient: we ascribe this to the C19 realist novel but where are the "view from nowhere" narrators? D is acutely aware there's no view from nowhere. He's trying to have it both ways but it it turns out super weird.
  • narratology - "implied author"
    • from [Narratology Handbook]: "The concept of implied author refers to the author-image evoked by a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text. Thus, the implied author has an objective and a subjective side: it is grounded in the indexes of the text, but these indexes are perceived and evaluated differently by each individual reader. We have the implied author in mind when we say that each and every cultural product contains an image of its maker. The implied author is therefore not a category specific to verbal narration; nevertheless, it is most often discussed in relation to verbal texts, particularly in narratological contexts."
    • the implied author "Dickens" shouldn't collapse into the narrator, which plays up the agency implied in the book: does the novel itself have agency? Maybe yes -- cf. Felksi 2011
  • Levine, Forms: the form of a network and of a narrative are at odds: rising action vs decentered network. "Affordances" becomes interesting and useful when these things are mashed together, teleological suspense and networked action
    • network: a set of interconnected nodes (people, social systems) (not narrative)
      • chancery, London, rumor, family, etc.
    • form: a meaningful arrangement; Hensley: an enabling constraint
      • genre is a form of forms; BH has properties that inhere only to it
      • formal analysis is predicated on a type of abstraction: what does it do that it has this shape, ex, length
  • Jo/slave analogy implicit in Tom-All-Alone's chapter (16) - person without legal personhood
    • can you show people being objectified without being complicit in their dehumanization? Can satire step outside that?
  • Jo as animal - Darwin erased that boundary
  • black holes in the narrative: Jo and Tulkinghorn
  • is it prejudiced to have realist subjectivity as the standard for "real" that Jo stands outside?
  • Dickens' embeddedness in commodification of the novel - not trying to distance himself from the market too much
  • Armstrong, "Vic Archive and Its Secret"
    • bureaucratic paperwork, information systems/theory
    • Foucault: archeology of knowledge, disciplinary apparatuses of modernity - bureaucracy - DA Miller: everything in BH becomes intelligible to power through bureaucratic apparatus
    • Armstrong is distinguishing because the junk is what the bureaucratic view can't internalize or instrumentalize: not everything can be reduced to Foucault
    • Interested in what can be encoded as information and what can't: the connection between natural and sexual selection and the archive: the way things accumulate, thru the bureau process you're classifying things as readable and some are't, sexual selection throwing into flux what can be readable the way the bureaucratic archive does, an analogous mechanism
    • the junk shop matters because that stuff doesn't seem to be useful but could be in a different way: it's not the classificatory Foucauldian reading of stuff; the potentially useless could be useful in a way you don't expect that disrupts classification, like sexual selection
      • detritus can come out and be read, and that's the pay-off: anti-Foucauldian-sih
      • Darwin and Dickens as anti-Linnean, anti-taxonomic
      • reading Darwin in terms of Dickens: impt flip
  • Tom All Alone's - "what connexion can there be?" - this is what BH is about
    • imagined communities - Anderson - citizenship and literacy - is Jo a citizen really? Not reading: private belonging but not public, bureaucratic, legal
    • what is beyond the Foucauldian bureaucratic gaze (Armstrong) - Jo's personhood
    • does he become a citizen when Tulkinghorn wants him? A person with a relationship to the social polity?
    • status of legal identity really important in the novel
      • invested in legal questions of who is a legal person: Agamben: "sovereignty is the right to decide who is killable" (Homo Sacer section 6)
  • Bucket - are his aims justice?
    • avenging the odious Tulk
    • Hortense keeps talking about the 1792 revolution but not 1848: a Dickens oversight?
      • her frenchness could mean many different things, but here it seems to be french radicalism of a maid prepared to murder members of the establishment (innate racial characteristics everywhere in C19)
  • Aristocracy
    • illegitimacy <-> aristocracy
    • "dull repose" of Chesney at the end - the grave stasis of Lady D xferring tot he horse itself in the ending of Sir L's line
    • Sir L broke class norms by marrying her - arrogance in his sense of the family's impenetrability to controversy
      • you get his decency in his rels to George - it gets worked out there rather than directly with Lady d
    • George becoming a servant at CW is a "good outcome" for him
      • Ironmaster chapter: class stuff working out with Rouncewell waiting to take maid away - rising bourgeoisie blowing Sir L's mind
      • history is leaving Sir L behind but in this quasi-nostalgic way
        • it's not a condemnation of the existing class structure, which can be critically frustrating: a philanthropic rather than a Marxist model
  • Industrialization (ch 63)
    • not a main theme but implicit not least of which in industrialization of paper, and of time and power
    • we need both brothers - the ironmaster for the position of CW in the novel
      • brother has historical role: voice of industrialization which has changed premises of everything
    • people are constantly trying to reinscribe George in a social order and he ends up in a past one (aristo servant)
    • Rouncewell is the factory owner, Phil is the factory owner: a humorous guy who's been blown up a few times - the winners and losers of industrialization
  • BH impt and early in history of detective fiction
    • there is a host of detectives trying to make sense, not just Bucket (tho he's crucial in making th enovel end)
    • detecting is a new problem solving mode for making plot vs marriage plot, social mobility
      • social problems in difference senses
      • marriage plot solves the social, detective plots are more epistemological (how do we know what we know?)
    • what Bucket is doing is now highly illegal: official police and private, investigation for Tulkinghorn AND Dedlock - coopting the state for private means (Blackwater in Iraq War...)
      • privacy means very little: Holmes is less intrusive than he is
    • Bucket creates assemblages of people, constellates characters, whereas Holmes deduces
  • Esther as a narrator gains a poetic sensibility, "unreal things become more substantial" (Ch 59)
    • it seems unnecessary to drag ES around, it's excessive, a lot of effort for putting everything together. Does it succeed as suspense? Maybe. "A wintry day" inbetween for counterpoint
    • is lady d trying to get back to CW, or that's what they thing
    • "I did not know that" in last paragraph of the novel: again epistemological frustration highlighted and cycling back to the mud at the beginning
  • it doesn't make sense historically or medically for ES's disease to be smallpox (with facial scarring): isolated case, Jo as a nonmanifesting carrier unlikely
    • cholera makes more sense actually, smallpox for plot reasons: Dickens wants her to be disfigured
    • fascination with disfigurement - freak shows - different moral vs scientific valences historically
  • ES marrying Allen W
    • setting up a trajectory and then switching
    • child marriages, sexless marriages - the former understood then as unfortunate but not necessarily perverse and wouldn't have precluded the possbility of children
    • Jarndyce and ES "partly but not thoroughly creepy"
    • partly is D wanting to reserve Esther as a romantic heroine - restored at the end
    • feminized old men in Victorian culture - redomesticating them from the separate work sphere
  • How much does the plot matter?
  • materialism as metonymy (Freedgood 2006)
    • synecdoche: part standing for whole, "all hands on deck," even more proximate than metonymy
    • metaphor: comparison based on implied resemblance (I got "bulldozed")
    • simile: comparison based on stated resemblance using "like" or "as"
    • metonymy - proximate association, "re-naming"
      • the White House is not a part of the presidency
      • it can be arbitrary, proximity doesn't need to be literal: "Madonna": "the 80s," "Like a Prayer," "Virgin Mary" all conceptually proximate
      • Dickens loves metonymy, loves association
      • slippery: can be an infinite set of associations
      • use can vary too: stream of consciousness can model metonymy but the difference is, are you using it to contain meaning (metonymy doesn't do containment)
      • free association can disrupt meaning, using "crown" for sovereignty but you hear "dental crown"
        • Eliot hates losing control this way; Dickens loves this play
      • metonymy is good at adding but not at taking away
      • metonym is produced by proximity not necessarily resemblance
      • Barthes: a lot of objects are not there to produce metonymic effects except with "the real world" (The Reality Effect)
  • Presentism
    • bad when the present idea is mapped onto the past, when anachronistic
    • strategic: if we allow ourselves a little of it, we can do something important (Dickens wouldn't ask this question but I know I'm doing it) - leveraging the gap to make a point about our moment or the gap ourselves
    • transparent presentism: historicizing but answering "So what" "Why does it matter now?"
    • explicitly being historicist b/c you know it would've been different to be a woman then but needing to do a lot of work to figure out what's different, the actual modes of their resistance; it's natural for Victorian "feminists" to think with the cognitive essential difference between biological senses, for example
    • reading anachronistically is interesting because it tells us something about now, e.g., Wolf Hall tells us about 2000 rather than 1525 (the historicist argument)
    • but being self-conscious about the danger of presentism: in order to dramatize aspects of this society I couldn't do otherwise, I will have people say "fuck" in Deadwood (because C19 profanity is hard to comprehend for us b/c it's so much about blasphemy)
  • "the female body is a problem in C19 lit as is its porousness and permeability"
  • the agency of novels - "the chain of signification does not move from the city to the novel as copy but the other way around": the agency of literature does not proceed from another referent.
  • novel at the individual/modern subject - How Novels Think

Reading Notes 1-17

Page numbers refer to: Charles Dickens. Bleak House. Pub. 1853. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. New York: Penguin, 2003.

  • 14-15: the ways the fog fuddles positivist sensory knowledge: we are in a space where scientific epistemology is rendered vague
  • "No one knows for certain, because no one cares" (Miss Flite)
  • 16 document/paper based economy of knowledge, unstable signifiers like Flite's "documents"
   * 26: which lady D enters through knowing Nemo's handwriting
  • Ch 3 beginning of Esther's narrative "my portion of these pages" -- the paper object is epistemologically or even ontologically unstable here
   * 40 Esther's narrative is a legal document itself
  • Track writing (and how forms of knowing otherwise are undepenable but even writing is unsteady)
   * 27
   * 31
   * 32
   * 38 periods
   * 40
   * 43 *
   * 47
   * 53 caddy
   * 60
   * 66-79: Krook's
   * 73: cutting prints and pasting to wall
   * 76 krook copies but can't read
   * 117 the Growlery
   * 119
   * 123 rags tracts and the charitable paper economy
   * 149-50 Guppy’s proposal in legal discourse
   * 154 Snagsby — law stationer
       * Ghosts and paper? Peffer, plus 156
   * 158 Rolls’ Yard
   * 159-164 Tulkinghorn -> Nemo
   * 170
   * 195
   * 230
   * 235
   * 236 krook teaching himself 
   * 257-60 Jo's illiteracy and how Tom all Alone's isn't represented in writing
       * Inadequacy of written representation of the social scales up to the novel itself (following Levine 2009)
   * 276
   * 284 business like
   * 300
   * 316
   * 317
   * 325
   * 328 krook is rags like omf
   * 344
   * 352
   * 358-9 xian sign
   * 371
   * 385
   * 388
   * 396
   * 403
   * 408
   * 415
   * 429-30 hawdon nemo
   * 434
   * 447
   * 459
   * 462-3
   * 467
   * 477
   * 486 Charley learning to write 
   * 508
   * 511-2
   * 515
   * 520
   * 532
   * 534 lady d's letters
   * 552
   * 556
   * 559
   * 563
   * 569
   * 575
   * 580
   * 595-6
   * 609
   * 612
   * 614 self conscious about prosing...in BH
   * 615
   * 622
   * 629
   * 632-3 clearing krook's
   * 652
   * 654
   * 675
   * 684
   * 688
   * 700
   * 711
   * 721-2
   * 728
   * 731 Jo's epitaph
   * 744
   * 768
   * 772
   * 776
   * 780
   * 784 dusty papers/Richard's mind
   * 805-6
   * 808
   * 820 Bucket tells sir l in the library
   * 824
   * 835
   * 842
   * 848-851
   * 853
   * 854
   * 858
   * 863
   * 866
   * 867 another likeness of lady d circulating, following her into the dark
   * 880
   * 887
   * 895
   * 900
   * 906
   * 909
   * 919
   * 920
   * 921
   * 932
   * 935
   * 944-5 the other will 
   * 948
   * 950
   * 953
   * 957
   * 960
   * 964
   * 972
   * 974
   * 983
   * 985
   * 987
  • 37 pie wrapped in paper
  • 44 Esther as a blank text for ada to confide in
  • 93 a little clutch of Shakespeare
  • 105 genre positioning at Chesney Wold (fairy tale/fancy vs Gothic)
  • 115 Esther narrativizing space/landscape outside BH
  • 118 starting to explain chancery case
  • 121 Wiglomeration
  • 122 Narrative imperatives of different genres and characters, Tom J and the case vs Esther's own biography (self-effacement)
   * The way not knowing, narrative indeterminacy, is associated with happiness
  • 127 the Pardiggles even more entertaining than the Jellybys
  • 135 strange that he demurs to narrate the perspective of the poor (rem of Forster's remark)
  • 177 Jo’s intro
  • 183 Lady D “sees everything"
  • 197 Richard's character shaped by chancery
  • 214 who is the dark young surgeon? Woodcourt 237 why the deferral?
  • 225 -- Turveydrop pairs with Sir Leicester (?), Skimpole and Boythorn
   * Actually he pairs with Mrs Jellyby but all are useless in their own way
  • 228 levelling age/deportment
  • 251 Gridley the system vs individuals
  • 282 Richard behaves like someone in poverty by buying things -- better to invest capital in property than in something abstract to that pov
  • 292 lady d's face as a broken glass to Esther
  • 310 what does engage for Jo's moving on mean?
  • 312 What is mrs Chadband's connection to Esther? Was mrs Rachael 398
  • 333 smallweeds and compound interest
  • 347 hawdon
  • 371 Richard
  • 385 Charley shuttled from the smallweeds to bleak house -- how labor is the vector of the network so often
  • 406 mrs snagsby perceiving the network of all people, jealousy and suspicion as vector
  • 451 conflict between ideological time schemes
  • 458 sir leicester perusing the backs of his books
  • 464 guppy connecting lady d and Esther
  • 474 mr jellyby gets out of bankruptcy by "going through the gazette"?
  • 507 Weevle and Snagsby tasting Krook on the air...
  • 523 snagsby keeps mentioning fate but it's not adequate to the narrative
  • 566 ms flite
  • 575 Esther's negative subjectivity or affect, the absence of affective response being narrated that's so revealing
  • 583 sentimentally exculpating lady d
  • 621 English law making business for itself
  • 643-5 class and politics with Leicester
  • 672-3 how morally culpable should we hold John J for his apologizing for Skimpole and Richard's subsequent fall under the influence he and of Vholes?
  • 732 metafictive -- fate as engine of plot, of networking
   * Bucket's book of fate 806
  • 735 indeterminate Shakespeare reference
  • 795-6 the negative position of bucket in the narrative rel to george -- detective a bit more ambivalent heee and in Moonstone vs later detective fiction
  • Ch 58 886ff. he's quite powerful in his elegiac mode (though still funny)
  • 902 Esther a pattern
  • 908 othello and mrs snagsby
  • 932-3: could we take Skimpole's anti-capitalism seriously? Could Leigh hunt be a guide?

Bibliographical Notes

  • Per Sandra Kroupa (ask her for dealer name): "Talked to my dealer expert at the Book Fair in CA—the book never came out as a 3 vol. novel in England. If there is one, it is a unique rebinding of the parts." Caroline Levine makes this error, as do others.
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