Author: boundary2

by Danielle Coriale

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ([1874] 1997) “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” the first of four essays published in his Untimely Meditations, opens with an image of quietly grazing cows and slowly builds to a bitter critique. Unlike those critics who “smear their thick brush-strokes” “across the most graceful design,” Nietzsche tackles the impulse that would motivate such critics to regard their smears as “corrections” (1997, 87): a pernicious form of objectivity that infiltrated Germany in the nineteenth century. According to the meditation, this form of objectivity spread from positivist science like a “fever” (60) or “infection”  (120-122), destroying all personality, originality, and emotion in the historical writing of his generation. It was a naïve epistemology that stripped false away from true; it was no more than “idolatry of the factual” (105).

Nietzsche’s case against objectivity would be the first of many.[i] Alfred North Whitehead (1925), Isabelle Stengers (2000), and Bruno Latour (2004) exposed its limitations in the sciences and argued for more generous alternatives that do not mistake fact for truth. In literary studies, Eve Sedgwick (2003) made one of the more powerful cases against facticity. Writing at the peak of New Historicism’s early popularity, she argued that the paranoid logic of exposure and demystification had come to dominate the field (Sedgwick 2003: 139). Although her theory is rooted in psychoanalysis, her formulation is similar to Nietzsche’s. Paranoid knowledge, she argues, disavows the “affective motive and force” behind it while “masquerading as the very stuff of truth” (138). And Sedgwick touched upon a point of special interest to Nietzsche when she concluded that paranoid reading practices gathered momentum in historicist studies because they were “infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling” (143). This postulate hints at the paradox of disciplinarity that Nietzsche explores in the first meditation. If scholars could become so inured to the foundational principles, methods, and forms that circumscribe their disciplines, then the practical regimens that defined disciplinarity could actively inhibit originality and creativity. As Whitehead so elegantly put it in Science and the Modern World, the narrowness of professionalized knowledge makes it effective, but also “produces minds in a groove” (1925, 197).

Like Sedgwick, Nietzsche was interested in the teaching protocols that imbue young men with an historical sense. Carrying his metaphor of infection forward, he insists that the “fever of history” spreads pedagogically (120-122). It is transmitted to students by the “basic unit of intellectual life in the academy”—the discipline (Anderson and Valente 2002, 1). Toward the end of the first meditation, Nietzsche protests the “historical education of modern man,” arguing that it had become purely instrumental (1997, 116). The routinized practices that defined historical education in nineteenth-century Germany seemed mechanistic and teleological to him: “the words ‘factory,’ ‘labour market,’ ‘supply,’ ‘making profitable,’ and whatever auxiliary verbs egoism now employs,” he writes, “come unbidden to the lips when one wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of learning” (Nietzsche 1997, 99). Nietzsche apologizes for having to use Marxian language to conjure his dystopian vision of universities, but explains that such a characterization was only natural. Schools were no more than factories that produced the “speedily employable man of science” rather than the “free cultivated man” (117). In this regard, the first meditation is untimely yet again. Its critique of the German academy in the nineteenth century anticipates our current dismay at the business models that have been installed in universities throughout the United States. The meditation also underscores a different explanation for the homogeneity that Sedgwick observed in her graduate students a decade ago. Confronted by a precarious market, they would have no choice but to adopt what Sedgwick describes as the “near professionwide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization” (Sedgwick 2003, 144).

Even as the first meditation offers a still-resonant critique of the academy, which often assists the commodification of creative thought and intellectual labor, it also diverges from the critical mode. Hayden White ([1973] 2014, 66) once described it as Nietzsche’s “most destructive work,” but the meditation is also “additive and accretive,” to borrow Sedgwick’s words (2003, 149). It releases a reservoir of pent-up emotions—envy, disgust, fury—that counteract the dispassionate analysis associated with critique. To do otherwise, Nietzsche concluded—“To take everything objectively, to grow angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything”—would only make one “soft and pliable” (Nietzsche 1997, 105). Nietzsche’s undisciplined writing is anything but pliable, of course. It refuses to comply with the conventions of truth discourses, which pare away falsehoods to arrive at singular truths. Rather, it jams the historical machine by unleashing waves of metaphor. One might remember the forgetful cows, for example, when history itself appears in the guise of an animal later in the meditation. Nietzsche describes the positivist historian who, reflecting on an action in his past, “dissects it, prevents it from producing any further effects by analysing it, and finally skins it for the purpose of ‘historical study’” (102). Through metaphors that pull against one another in this way, the meditation offers a model of knowledge as poesis. It multiplies meanings rather than separating the false from the true, and accumulates metaphors that cannot be distilled into a single fact. Like the “genuine historian,” Nietzsche “remint[s] the universally known into something never heard before” (94). In the climate of austerity that we are currently enduring, such proliferations resist the seemingly objective, quantitative methods and forms of expression that are encroaching upon the humanities daily, promising to make our knowledge more useful, appealing, and accessible—or as Nietzsche would have it, softer and more pliable to the will of others.

[i] For an excellent study of varieties of objectivity that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity.

References

Anderson, Amanda and Joseph Valente, eds. 2002. Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2008. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 225-248.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1874] 1997. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life in Untimely Meditations.” In Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale and translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

White, Hayden. [1973] 2014. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Simon & Schuster.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Danielle Coriale is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.  She is working on a book manuscript, Captivating Subjects: Victorian Fiction and Animal Science.

by S. Pearl Brilmyer

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Scholarship on Victorian literature and science has often drawn parallels between the attempts of nineteenth-century scientists to produce an accurate and objective account of the world and the ambition of realist novelists to represent reality in all its shining and particularate detail. Realist epistemology, the story goes, finds an analogue in the ethically charged project of nineteenth-century scientific objectivity, which aspired to minimize the distortive effects of the embodied perspective of the observer through self-imposed rules and automated processes. Third person narration, the proliferation of descriptive detail, increased attention to physical objects and landscapes—such strategies contributed to the production of a “reality effect” in fiction analogous to that of nineteenth-century scientific work.

In this short provocation, I turn to Nietzsche in an attempt to trouble this story about the relationship between objectivity and the realist novel as well as to inspire reflection on the way that we as scholars of Victorian literature call upon the work of historians, and in particular historians of science, in order to situate and theorize our literary objects. It is a commonplace now in discussions of Victorian literature and science to cite Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s seminal study Objectivity (2007) as a means of characterizing the realist desire to produce an view of reality untainted by the desires, concerns, and affects of all-too-embodied and willful subjects.[1] Although Daston and Galison’s taxonomy—in which categories such as “mechanical objectivity” and “structural objectivity” signal conceptually discrete but historically overlapping scientific-epistemological paradigms—has proven incredibly useful for literary scholars interested in tracing confluences between literary and scientific movements, to align the aesthetic aims of nineteenth-century realism with the epistemological aspirations of scientific objectivity risks eliding the extent to which realist artists not only did not always seek to know the world, but sought to critique and transform modes of scientific knowledge production (2010 [2007]: 5).[2]

In what follows, I thus add my own term—impassioned objectivity—to Daston and Galison’s taxonomy in order to describe the specifically literary mode of representation that Victorian realists cultivated in their description of reality. This mode of objectivity, I argue—quite unlike the paradigms of scientific objectivity that Daston and Gallison describe—aspired to multiply, rather than subtract, affect.

In his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874) however, Nietzsche warns against the reduction of a vast spectrum of historically situated voices—literary, scientific, philosophical, political—to a single historical episteme. Collected in the book Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche’s essay advocates for increased critical attention to “untimely” works that do not reproduce the dominant epistemological paradigm of a time, but somehow transcend it. In so doing, the piece inspires reflection on the dangers of effacing the distinction between literary and scientific practice, as if both were mere expressions of a broader spirit of the time.

But Nietzsche’s musings on history and life become even more relevant to our concerns when he begins to address the relationship between objectivity and affect. Expressing discontent, in his own untimely fashion, with the equation of objectivity with bodily abnegation and self-restraint (the paradigm of objectivity, importantly, that Daston and Galison propose shapes Nietzsche’s era) Nietzsche criticizes practices of description that aspire to the minimization of affect and the erasure of self. In the mode of historicism Nietzsche’s essay sets out to critique, “the subject,” he puts it, “becomes silent and wholly imperceptible. What is then preferred [in this paradigm] is that which produces no emotion at all… One goes so far, indeed, as to believe that he to whom a moment of the past means nothing at all is the proper man to describe it” (1997 [1874]: 93).

“These naive historians call the assessment of the opinions and deeds of the past according to the everyday standards of the present, ‘objectivity,’” he writes (90). Curiously though, rather than insisting upon the impossibility of objective account of history, Nietzsche goes on to recuperate objectivity as a worthy ideal. As he argues a few pages later, “objectivity [Objektivität] is required, but as a positive quality” (93).

What does it mean for objectivity to be a positive quality?

Objectivity, he explains, is “a moment of composition of the highest sort.” It involves—and I must admit I adore this phrase—“loving absorption in … empirical data” (93). While for the historian Nietzsche critiques, the description of reality is a subtractive process—a diminishment of perspective, feeling, and the trace of the body—in Nietzsche, objective description is additive. It aggregates, multiplies, and differentiates affects. Thus, much later, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), “the more feelings [Affekte] we allow to come to expression … the more complete our ‘concept’ of it, our ‘objectivity’ [Objektivität], will be” (2009 [1887]: 98; emphasis in original). Conceived of “positively,” objectivity thus entails the affirmation rather than the negation of feeling. While one intense feeling about a thing might not make one very objective about it, having different, conflicting feelings might. The valorization of the diversification of affect in the production of knowledge is what I am calling impassioned objectivity.

I propose a similarly additive strategy for our approach to the Victorian discourse of objectivity, which philosophers Nietzsche, as well as novelists—especially realists—of the period, did not merely echo or confirm but altered, recuperated, transformed in diverse and often untimely ways. In his 1891 essay, “The Science of Fiction,” to cite just one example in closing, Thomas Hardy develops a critique of objectivity strikingly similar to that of Nietzsche. Denouncing the aspiration of what he calls “scientific realists” to the ideal of objectivity in their imitation of the scientific method in their literary practice, Hardy argues that what the literary naturalist cannot but “maintain in theory what he abandons in practice,” defining his “impartiality as a passion, and plan as a caprice” (2001 [1891]: 101-2). Like Nietzsche, who in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” argues that the truly objective historian is the ultimate artist, in “The Science of Fiction” thus Hardy envisions a literary practice attuned rather than averse to the impulses of the body, a “science of fiction” that would build upon “the fruits of closest observation” to produce a “widened knowledge of the universe and its forces, and man’s position therein” (101-2).

References

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2010 [2007]. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Hardy, Thomas. 2001 [1891]. “The Science of Fiction” in The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader, edited by Stephen Regan, 100–4. London: Routledge.

Levine, George. 2002. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2009 [1887]. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglass Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997 [1874]. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in Untimely Meditations, 57-124. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes

[1] See for example Levine (2002), who argues that, like Daston and Galison’s nineteenth-century scientists, Victorian realism expresses a “willingness to repress the aspiring, desiring, emotion-ridden self and everything merely personal, contingent, historical, material that might get in the way of acquiring knowledge” (2).

[2] For Daston and Galison “mechanical objectivity” names the paradigm of objectivity emergent in the mid nineteenth, while “structural objectivity” replaces the former in the 1880s (2010 [2007]: 5). Proponents of structural objectivity, Daston and Galison writes, “understood the threat of subjectivity in different terms than the advocates of mechanical objectivity had: the enemy was no longer the willful self that projected perfections and expectations onto the data; rather, it was a private self, locked in its own world of experience, which differed qualitatively from that of all other selves” (45).

 

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

S. Pearl Brilmyer is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently completing a manuscript, Character Density: Late Victorian Realism and the Science of Description.

by Devin Griffiths

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

The organizers of the V21 Colloquium in Chicago invited my panel to “theorize the present,” by way of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical account of historicism, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874). The problem is that I don’t think we’ve sufficiently theorized the past. In particular, I’m not sure that this contrast between the present (and its theories) and the past (by way of historicism) is fruitful without a fuller sense of how nineteenth-century historicism worked. This is part of the challenge of the “V21” mashup: how do features of the “Victorian” period operate in the 21st century? The critical and controversial account of “positivist historicism” that occupies the first four theses of the V21 Manifesto (V21 Collective 2015) suggests (in the spirit of Nietzsche) that nineteenth-century historicism was “bland,” and remains so today. But the nineteenth century gave birth to several different kinds of historicism, various “styles of reasoning” (as Ian Hacking has put it (1992)), that continue to enliven and shape our thinking about the past. Here I want to suggest — by way of Nietzsche’s essay — what a more comprehensive grasp of nineteenth-century historicism offers today.[i]

Nietzsche’s main argument, which censures an unreflective nationalism that sees history in terms of progress or achievement, aligns closely with the critique of Enlightenment historicism that Chakrabarty has given (2000: 244-9), and for that matter, that Karl Popper gave in The Poverty of Historicism (1957). These accounts closely link unitary narratives of progress, identified by Herbert Butterfield as a “Whig interpretation of history” that emerged after 1688 (Butterfield 1965: 11-12), with the “stadial” historicism of the Scottish Enlightenment, described by O’Brien as “a natural process of development in which societies undergo change through successive stages based on different modes of subsistence,” and typified in the writings of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Alexander Tytler (O’Brien 1993: 53). But I think we should set both progressive and stadial history aside — not because they aren’t important — but because they’re a legacy of Enlightenment thinking. Even if both remained major styles of C19 history, they don’t get at the emergent modes of historicism that more precisely characterize the nineteenth century and its claim on us. Insofar as we are Victorianists (and for that matter, Romanticists or Modernists), we need to ask: what are the historicisms peculiar to our period?

Nietzsche is a case in point. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, the second of Nietzsche’s four “Untimely Meditations,” extends upon the critical account of progressive history given in David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer (1873), anatomizing specific schools of a “mighty historical movement” that was the pride of contemporary German scholarship (Nietzsche, 1997: 59). The taxonomy Nietzsche offers is not important here (though, in his analysis, “monumental” history has both progressive and stadial features). What is striking is that this taxonomy does not include the mode of historicism Nietzsche deploys in the essay, a strategy of critical juxtaposition and differentiation that makes such taxonomies possible. Yet Nietzsche recognizes his own strategy as a mode of historical reasoning rooted in his study of ancient literature. As he acknowledges in the forward, “I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely — that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (Nietzsche 1997: 60, emphasis added). This startling admission embraces historicism, not simply as an object of critique within David Strauss or On the Use and Abuse of History, but as the critical location of the “untimely” itself — an untimely historicism, produced through an oppositional reading of the past, that grounds Nietzsche’s critical method.

Here we recognize the seeds of Nietzsche’s genealogical approach, a way of using historical juxtaposition to expose the discontinuities of history. As reworked by Foucault, this contrastive strategy continues to condition historical scholarship (see Foucault 1980: 139-64). The important point is that this is still a kind of historicism, an untimely historicism that emerges in the nineteenth century, and which continues to shape the collection of strategies and critical methods we invoke when we theorize the past.

This is the nineteenth-century historicism that we need to account for. Conveniently for me, Nietzsche’s formulation bumps into my own work, which recognizes untimely historicism as one feature of the wider comparative turn in nineteenth-century thinking about history. In my view, various nineteenth-century genres of the past — from economic history, to natural history, to historical fiction — collaborated in formulating a new comparative historicism; one that refurbished analogy as an analytic that considered the multiplicity of narratives that constitute the past, and connect the past to an uneven present (see Griffiths, 2016). This stood, and continues to stand in our critical practice, in contrast to an Enlightenment emphasis upon unitary narratives — whether those unitary narratives tell a story of progress or assume a universal pattern of transformation. Comparative historicism provided a way to think, within history, about the patterns of the many rather than the coherence of the one. Rather than narrative, the pattern between narratives; rather than the whole, relations and distinctions between and within wholes. Insofar as this furnished a way of reading history comparatively, in terms of differentiation and juxtaposition, Nietzsche was as much a nineteenth-century inheritor of this style of historical reasoning as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, or Karl Marx (Griffiths 2013).

Comparative historicism continues to shape our work. It connects the study of homologies between text and historical context (as Alan Liu points notes, the constitutive analogies of New Historicism (1989)) to the study of repetition and filiation across time and space (say, Wai Chee Dimock’s fractals (2006)).[ii] It underwrites various methods of relational interpretation, from Shu-mei Shih’s “relational comparison” (2013) to the analogies of “identity/difference” that, in Andrew Cole’s view, organized dialectical thought and, by these means, gave “birth” to modern critical theory (2014: 35).[iii] The point is not just that all theories are embedded in history, but that much of critical thought is founded on thinking about history comparatively. Hence our constant use of analogy’s vocabulary in our own writing, whether formulated in terms of analogy or its usual cognates: homology, allegory, metaphorization, alignment, relation, and reflection. Rather than singular plots, we emphasize parallelism, divergence, correspondence, filiation, exclusions, and alternatives. Rather than wholes, we speak of assemblages, relations, mixtures, networks, family resemblances, multiple centers, and multiple peripheries.

The Chicago V21 conference was bracing, warm, and characterized by lively disagreement. At the end of the day, no one really seemed to believe that historicism and theory are in opposition, least of all in our writing and teaching. My claim here is that we can better see why this must be so if we recognize, within nineteenth-century historicism, a key resource for contemporary theory. To read C19 historicism this way is to ask for the timely recognition that it’s both part of our present and a stubborn but resourceful part of our C21 future.

This paper was first presented at the V21 Colloquium at the University of Chicago. I am grateful for our discussions at that gathering.

References

Beiser, Frederick C. 2011. The German Historicist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Cole, Andrew. 2014. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dimock, Wai-Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Griffiths, Devin. 2013. “The Comparative History of A Tale of Two Cities.” ELH 80, no. 3: 811-38.

Griffiths, Devin. 2016. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1992. “Statistical Language, Statistical Truth and Statistical Reason: The Self-Authentication of a Style of Scientific Reasoning.” In The Social Dimensions of Science, edited by Ernan McMullin, 130-57. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Heringman, Noah. 2013. Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Liu, Alan. 1989. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” ELH 56, no. 4: 721-71.

O’Brien, Karen. 1993. “Between Enlightenment and Stadial History.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16, no. 1: 53-64.

Manning, Susan. 2010. “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of Modern Disciplinarity.” In Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, edited by Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen, 57-76. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Daniel Breazeale. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Popper, Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon Press.

Shih, Shu-Mei. 2013. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 79-98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

V21 Collective. 2015. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses.

Notes

[i] The other main object of the historicist critique is the idea of a history for its own sake, which the Manifesto describes as “bland antiquarianism” (V21 Collective 2015). I think this is misplaced. As Manning (2010) has shown, the comic figure of the antiquarian long served to justify more “philosophic” or “scientific” approaches to history. Yet Heringman (2013) has recently explored how antiquarianism developed sophisticated critical methodologies that continue to shape our understanding of the past. More generally, this critique (which Nietzsche also takes up) capitalizes on the notion of historicism as a fantasy of immersion, an escape into the minutiae of the past, sometimes given in shorthand as the ambition to tell the past (as Leopold von Ranke put it) “as things actually happened.” Yet, far from expressing a naïve faith in the historian’s craft, Ranke’s famous statement was a caution against reading the past as a precursor to the present. His point was that the past is “actually” radically different from the present; its autonomy and complexity demand respect (see Beiser 2011: 268-77).

[ii] As Liu puts it, “What is merely ‘convenient’ in a resemblance between context and text (in Foucault’s sense of contiguity) soon seems an emulation; emulation is compounded in analogy; and, before we know it, analogy seems magical ‘sympathy’: a quasi-magical action of resemblance between text and context” (Liu 1989: 743).

[iii] Shih derives the concept of relational comparison from Glissant (1997).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Devin Griffiths is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California.  His book The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins UP.

by Daniel Wright

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

In what follows, I aim to read Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” unhistorically—that is, I want to avoid falling into the trap that catches Nietzsche himself, as he laments that he rails against an excessive attachment to history only by writing the history of that attachment. What would it mean, Nietzsche wonders, to take loving as an alternative to knowing? To take, in other words, the messy incoherence and the ineffable singularity of love as an alternative to the knowledge that promises ordered lines and networks and shared, shareable vocabularies? Most specifically, Nietzsche sets us a difficult task when it comes to love: to love the historical and the unhistorical equally. History, for Nietzsche, appears as the law-giving Father “who preserves and reveres” (Nietzsche 1997: 72), whose job is “imposing limits” (64); but just as we must offer that father loving obedience, we also must love the unhistorical aspect of our existence, figured as the succoring Mother who is an “envelope,” a fecund “atmosphere” (64), but also the “animal … contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over” (61). This animal mother, the warm-blooded unhistorical embrace that holds the body together so that those awkward fractions can’t break off and fall away, is of course a difficult mother to love, because so vaguely omnipresent: an environment in which I move rather than a discrete object. History, on the other hand, is similarly difficult to love. We only really know the historical past, Nietzsche argues, as a melancholic introjection of something forever lost but nonetheless achingly loved—imagined as those “indigestible stones of knowledge” that we carry in our guts, “rumbling about inside” as ill-formed and indigestible content, or as “a snake that has swallowed rabbits whole and now lies in the sun and avoids all necessary movement” (78).

History, in other words, appears to protect the shape of our collective existence by ingesting the knowledge of the past and holding it safe, preserving it inside, but in the end this historical impulse “no longer conserves life but mummifies it” (75). Nietzsche figures historical knowing in this essay as a threat to love, because the imperative to take in and hold fast to the facts of history would also require us “to take everything objectively, to grow angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything” (105); it would “cut off the strongest instincts of youth, its fire, its defiance, unselfishness and love” (115). Nietzsche asks us to love (or to defy, or to misunderstand, or understand too narrowly, or set fire to) rather than only to know, to play with history and to use it for life only within the warming, protecting, fertilizing atmosphere of the unhistorical. What kind of reading of the past can Nietzsche’s theory of the unhistorical model for us literary critics, whose practices of close reading always precariously balance the knowledge of history with the playful love of the unhistorical?

When I read a novel or a poem or a philosophical treatise, pen in hand, it gives me something—many things: it instigates, it sets boundaries, it prompts, it moves me in predictable and then unpredictable ways. The marks I make with that pen do not, ideally, impose a shape upon the text or simply trace and make visible shapes and lines of demarcation that exist there already as a limited set of ghostly potentialities. Those marks do not really mark the text, in other words, but rather interact with it, enjoining it to play. In those moments when reading scintillates and when the pen seems to move freely—circling, underlining, starring, annotating—the text also makes marks in me. We move each other in turns, according to an improvised system of rules. We observe, most of the time, a propriety in our mutual contact, except when the energy of the game overtakes us and we play, for a moment, rough-and-tumble, or we provoke too pointedly, so that tears fall or laughter (sometimes pained and sometimes giddy) provides relief.

D. W. Winnicott, for example, explaining his commitment to the use of play in the psychoanalysis of children, insists that the power of play lies in its refusal of traditional, unilateral structures of interpretation. Instead of the analyst who responds to the free associations of a patient by transforming that formless mess into a coherent interpretation, we have the analyst whose interpretations are careful, cooperative, and provisional. Winnicott believes that this is the only way to allow the patient the freedom of honesty and spontaneity, rather than the feeling that she is simply complying with the interpretive narrative of an analyst who seems already to have her figured out:

Interpretation outside the ripeness of the material is indoctrination and produces compliance. … A corollary is that resistance arises out of interpretation given outside of the area of overlap of the patient’s and the analyst’s playing together. Interpretation when the patient has no capacity to play is simply not useful, or causes confusion. When there is mutual playing, then interpretation … can carry the therapeutic work forward. This playing has to be spontaneous, and not compliant or acquiescent, if psychotherapy is to be done. (Winnicott 2005: 68, original emphasis) [1]

I am committed to a bold and unapologetic application of Nietzsche’s model of unhistorical love, and Winnicott’s theory (related, I think) of “mutual playing” to the practice of close reading that we as literary critics engage in almost every day. A novel or poem cannot be made compliant; it is capable of responding to me spontaneously; its shape changes as my shape changes; the rules of the game are self-sustaining and yet flexible, designed to allow for free-wheeling, interactive movement. My own impulse to retheorize our uses of history, to remain skeptical of historical knowledge and its potential to calcify, speaks to a deeper desire to perform close reading differently, to take it personally but at the same time to develop robust methods by which taking it personally can also take it public—by which my play with the text, my love of history and unhistory, can conserve rather than mummify the details of my own idiosyncratic absorption in the Victorian past.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. In Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale, 57-124. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Notes

[1] D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 2005), 68, original emphasis.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Daniel Wright is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He recently completed a book manuscript, Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel.

by Eleanor Courtemanche

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Even if we wanted to—and I’m not sure we really do, at this conference—it would be hard to read Nietzsche from a purely historicist perspective. Nietzsche casts a powerful shadow on his own futurity; we cannot but read him through subsequent history, what Megan Ward has called the “historical middle, the period between the Victorians and ourselves” (Ward 2015). Part of good scholarship, as cultural critics know, is to try to avoid dismissing Nietzsche merely because the Nazis loved him. For that misfortune we blame his anti-Semitic sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who dressed Nietzsche up in a classical-looking toga and invited guests to gawk at the genius, in Weimar in the 1890s after his brain had been eaten away by syphilis (MacIntyre 1992). Or perhaps he didn’t have syphilis at all—an article from 2003 alleges that the explanation of Nietzsche’s dementia as syphilis was a smear by anti-Nazis after WWII, and that in fact Nietzsche might have died of a brain tumor (Matthews). The existentialists reclaimed Nietzsche after the war and popularized him in Walter Kaufmann’s translations, with introductions that were later considered too apologetic by politically more stringent cultural critics. And it’s hard to talk about Nietzsche at the University of Chicago without disturbing the shade of Leo Strauss, who may (or may not!) have created a neo-Gnostic cult of esoteric insider wisdom, training up elite cadres at Chicago and Claremont, that has given American neoconservatives the Nietzschean über-confidence to treat democracy as a noble lie for consumption by the masses (Waite 1996).

Or do we see Nietzsche as a friend and antecedent, merely one of the paragons of the hermeneutics of suspicion, forerunner of Foucault’s vision of power as dispersed and all-pervasive—and hence, in a development he would no doubt despise, the ancestor of our politically-informed “suspicious readings” that see lurking imperialism and heteronormativity everywhere? Our allegiance to this legacy of suspicious reading on some level legitimates the recent turn to historicist critique, as well as our reconsideration of that critique today.

As Victorianists, we should theoretically pay attention to none of those things. We should be trying to peel back the layers of post-hoc myth, antiquarian reverence, and political toxicity to figure out what Nietzsche meant at the time he was writing, in 1874, in the wake of German unification (an event that actually does inform Nietzsche’s whole essay). However, despite all our careful attention to the past, there is one aspect of Victorian writing we seem blind to and can’t properly describe: its lingering Platonism, with its constant appeals to something higher, purer and more noble, which we see everywhere in this essay despite Nietzsche’s reputation for anti-metaphysics. After WWII, I think, this idealism was purged from our scholarship, marking a clear distance between our values as cultural critics and those of the nineteenth century.

I personally have yet another layer of historical experience that clouds my vision here: my very first public conference paper, as a first-year grad student at Cornell in April 1992, was on this essay, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” at conference on Nietzsche organized by Geoff Waite. Although I haven’t been able to access the MacWrite file, which is lost to the ages, I squirrelled away the original talk (entitled “The Boundaries of the Cultural Organism”) in a file I’ve been carrying around for unexamined sentimental reasons since then. This talk is amazing for me to read today, because, in defiance of everything I now tell my own grad students, I analyzed no sources at all outside the original text. Back then, I was so naïve that I just read Nietzsche’s essay itself and traced its component paradoxes. Nietzsche’s essay lends itself beautifully to being deconstructed: as I pointed out in my paper, in this essay you can’t actually tell the difference between the malady and the cure; the man who is merely affecting tranquility and the artist whose calm demeanor masks inner flashing life; the overripe and the not-yet-ripe; vulgar egoism and noble selfishness; the culture that has successfully internalized all barbarian attacks and forged them into something new (that is, the Greeks) versus the culture that is merely a hapless cosmopolitan aggregate (that is, the newly unified German nation). I’m sort of amazed I used to write like this—it feels kind of raw despite its sophistication. My whole paper just assumes philosophy is worth analyzing and analyzes it. Perhaps the current practice of elaborate historicism will seem just as alien to critical readers in twenty or thirty years.

There are many horizons of ignorance in Nietzsche’s essay, arranged to protect some kernel of irrational stupidity that he thinks is crucial to cultural health, but that no scholar can really defend. Sorry, Nietzsche—humans just do want to know more than we should. But the essay’s eloquent yearning to know better, to know more usefully in relation to our own lives, and with fewer veils, conventions, and compromises—that part of “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” has not gone out of date.

References

MacIntyre, Ben. 1992. Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche. New York, Farrar Strauss & Giroux.

Matthews, Robert. 2003. “‘Madness’ of Nietzsche was cancer not syphilis.” The Telegraph, May 4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3313279/Madness-of-Nietzsche-was-cancer-not-syphilis.html.

Waite, Geoff. 1996. Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Ward, Megan. 2015. “Theorizing the Historical Middle.” V21 Collective (blog), June 1. http://v21collective.org/megan-ward-theorizing-the-historical-middle/

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Eleanor Courtemanche is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818-1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism was published in 2011.

by Emily Steinlight

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

I’m taking “Bleak House Today” as an invitation to think about the place of the present both in Victorian studies and in the peculiar form of Dickens’s novel: the ways in which Bleak House calls on a sense of contemporaneity, partly though a narrative structure where historical time is always out of joint, past and present tenses taking turns but keeping their distance. This novel’s mode of occupying and refracting the present has often tempted readers to resituate its today-ness in another historical conjuncture or another art form. I’m thinking, for example, of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” which in 1944 brought Dickens into a different present than our own by crediting him with inventing montage (1977: 195-255). By juxtaposing non-contiguous spaces in narrative and thus shattering the frame of a discreet spatiotemporal situation, the argument runs, Dickens’s technique made modern cinema possible—from D. W. Griffith to the experiments of a Soviet avant-garde, including Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein himself. With V21 in mind, this intentionally anachronistic claim makes me wonder whether Dickens’s novel, which seems so consummately of its time, might lend itself to anachronism, or even to an engagement with the untimely—and, if so, what that untimeliness can do for us. In considering this novel’s untimeliness, I’m of course channeling Nietzsche’s definition: “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (Nietzsche 1997 [1874]: 60).

For now, I’ll turn to just one register of that untimeliness: the novel’s split narration, divided between Esther’s personal voice, recounting past experience from a safe biographical distance, and the impersonal narrative, with its polyphonic mix of styles and tempos, panning across the city in the present tense to map a far larger social world than Esther or any individual can grasp, and shifting focalization away from the protagonist. I’d like to consider the political logic of what this form does, first, to the organization of time on which plot and history alike rely, and second, to the function of character. With regard to time, the tense shifts between past and present have an estranging effect on narrative as well as historical process. The present in which Dickens drops us is both deeply mired in natural-historical time and explosively out of time. The novel’s classic opening gives us a street scene we can very roughly date by the industrial soot half-illuminated by gas lamps, but all its chronotopes summon the pre- and post-historical: on the one hand, geological strata of a ground formed by human movement and struggle in urban space, layers of mud mimicking the process of capital accumulation (building up “at compound interest”), yet apparently primeval, as if “the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”; on the other, smoky darkness evoking “the death of the sun” and the thermodynamic end of the solar system (Dickens 2003 [1852-53]: 13). I’m curious how this consciousness of a vast temporal scale beyond human history, yet rendered in the present tense, would line up with Frederic Jameson’s account of the narrative reflux in realist fiction between two distinct orders of temporality: the time of the event—the chronological succession of past-present-future—and the time of affect, linked to a suspended, impersonal present. (Surprisingly, given his focus on tenses and temporality in Antinomies of Realism, Jameson doesn’t discuss the present-tense narration in Bleak House when the text comes up in passing.) What makes realism dialectical, he suggests, is the gap between those orders of time, and the consequent standoff between “destiny” and “the eternal present” (Jameson 2015: 18). The novel form falls apart if this tension gets resolved. Perhaps serial fiction holds open this space in a distinctive way, since on first reading, the future is literally unwritten.

It sounds, initially, like that suspended present is where freedom from determinacy becomes possible. But fiction’s will to inhabit present time reappears as a problem for Jameson. The realist novel’s presentism, he suggests, inheres in its commitment to the exposition of the contemporary, which reveals the form’s ideological character: realism “requires a conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as such, and an aesthetic need to avoid recognition of deep structural social change … and contradictory tendencies within the social order” (145). Antinomies is a fascinating book, but I’m not so sure about this claim. It flows from a critical model that charges realism with rationalizing a new status quo by denying historical change. As against that model, I want to stress the political dynamism of the world Dickens’s narrative constructs. At the level of material description, Bleak House offers up a stratigraphic record of deep structural change in process; at the level of form, its plot mobilizes a set of contrary political demands, which collide and throw off sparks as they do.

This dynamism relies on the way the novel’s two narrative systems mediate between character-subject and social order. Critics have often seen in the dualistic structure of Bleak House a certain ideology of form. For Audrey Jaffe, in Vanishing Points, omniscient narration is the novel’s Lacanian Big Other, a site for the fantasy of total knowledge; for D.A. Miller, it’s the literary equivalent of surveillance (Jaffe 1991, Miller 1988). There’s a word I’m struck by, though, in Miller’s book: speaking of another realist novel in the introduction to The Novel and the Police, he writes that its narrator’s sympathy for the suffering it inflicts on characters is credible “only in an arrangement that keeps the function of narration separate from the casualties operating in the narrative” (1988: 25). “Casualties” is an apt term precisely because it pinpoints what’s missing from Miller’s model. The form of power that disavows agency for its “casualties” isn’t surveillance at all; it’s more like laissez-faire. In Bleak House, the prevailing forms of governance operate less by a totalized and invasive disciplinary gaze than by programmatic inaction: letting things happen as though their causes were past the reach of human agency. The constable who repeatedly orders Jo to “move on,” when asked where exactly the homeless boy should move to, replies, “my instructions don’t go to that” (Dickens 2003: 308). Even in its direct, law-enforcing forms, policing intervenes by enacting a broader policy of non-intervention: vagrancy isn’t allowed here, go continue your vagrancy elsewhere. This may be one of the reasons Bleak House resonates with us today—why it evokes the Malthusian austerity policies we’ve seen (again) since the 2008 crash, the dismantling of welfare systems for several decades prior, and perhaps what Zygmunt Bauman unsettlingly describes as the irony of modernization: that the production of wealth in capitalist societies entails the global mass production of what appears as “‘human waste,’ or more correctly, wasted humans” (2004: 5).

Giving a figure like Jo a name and narrative space doesn’t remove him from what Malthus called surplus population—but this surplus, strangely, comes closer to capturing the novel’s subject than any individual character. For all Esther’s insistence on evaluating fellow characters as individuals linked by personal obligation, the other narrative compulsively generates scores of figures, mass bodies, abstract numbers that don’t sustain characterization. The first human subjects we encounter, preceded by muddy dogs and horses, are just pedestrians in general, like “tens of thousands” before them; “chance people on the bridges” lost in fog (Dickens 2003: 13); in Chancery, “eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends,” each with eighteen hundred pages of legal briefs (18); the population of Tom-all-Alone’s infesting London “in maggot numbers” (256); crowds flashing by Snagsby “like a dream of horrible faces” (358)—everywhere, more life than Dickens has time to characterize, count, or name. (Alex Woloch’s work is important here in stressing the saturation of character-space, which in his reading yields unequal divisions of attention and human complexity.) This is why, looking at the digital character maps created at Franco Moretti’s Stanford Literary Lab, I’m not sure whether such infographics capture a network of relationships in the text or just affirm what’s already taken as given: that character is a consistent unit, analogous to the individual person. There’s a distinct too-muchness at work in Dickens’s writing that makes characterization complicit in the process of crowding rather than a means of setting individuals apart from masses. Bleak House turns that demographic excess into a political force: something like what Jacques Rancière would call the count of the uncounted, a throwing off of the proportion between subjects and social places that politics requires. I suspect that the dizzying scalar shifts within this novel between a materially accumulating present, multiple historical pasts, and signs of geological and planetary time contribute pretty centrally to this disproportioning—but we can leave that for discussion.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity.

Dickens, Charles. 2003 [1852-53]. Bleak House. Edited by Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin.

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1977 [1944]. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 195-255. San Diego: Harcourt.

Jaffe, Audrey. 1991. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2015. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso.

Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997 [1874]. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 59-123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Woloch, Alex. 2003. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Emily Steinlight is Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  She recently completed a manuscript, The Biopolitical Imagination: Literary Form and the Politics of Population.

by Jonathan Farina

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal. 

My title puns on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, a work of skeptical philology that aspires to liberate the future by recasting western values as products of a history of distorting or inverting human greatness. Etymological history, the genealogy of words, promises a novel articulation of what counts as good and bad. Nietzsche idealizes ruminative, philological reading, “that venerable art,” as he puts it in Daybreak, “which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow – it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento” (1975: 5). Slow historicism, then, but neither positivist nor antiquarian, as some modern scholarship has been described: for Nietzsche, “for precisely this [slowness]”, philology

is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. (1975: 5)

For all its velocity, Dickens’s prose rewards and even personifies Nietzsche’s slow philology. Bleak House, in particular, exemplifies how we might practice a poststructuralist, materialist philology that reanimates the past embedded in the present. And, given the late fad for mindfulness and being present, never mind the topic of this inaugural V21 symposium, “presence” is not a bad word with which to start.

Alert as Dickens is to expressions, by turns axiomatic and idiotic, idiomatic and idiosyncratic, including Bart Smallweed’s “I don’t know but what I will have another” and Snagsby’s “not to put too fine a point on it”; alert to portmanteau words like wiglomeration, and to professional discourses, slang, and puns, to “gammon” and “spinach,” Dickens offers plenty of fodder for philological rumination to rehistoricizes our present word by word (1977: 249, 180). The earliest criticism of Bleak House, favorable and unfavorable, distinguishes the prose style or “manner” of Dickens for its reducibility to small, iterative phrases, “the queerest catch-word,” as Henry Chorley called it, or “congeries of oddities of phrase, manner, gesticulation, dress, countenance, or limb,” in the words of James Stothert (Collins 1986: 280, 279, 294). Critics remarked on how these portable phrases indexed the present, mediated “current table-talk or our current literature,” as David Masson said (Masson 1875: 257-8). This facility translating mannerisms into currency, to condense attitudes into fungible expressions, makes Dickens’s style thematize presentism.

Indeed, the word “presence” serves many times as a synonym for manner and personality in the novel: Mrs. Snagsby, for instance, has a “dentistical presence,” ready to pull the “tender double tooth” of a secret she suspects her husband of holding; and Kenge, for another, has “conversational presence” (Dickens 1977: 316, 760), and so on. With 43 instances of “presence,” 250 uses of “manner,” and a chapter on and thematic investment in “deportment,” Bleak House dwells on the way style and manners coalesce to mediate our temporal experience of and presence in or bearing toward the world. Manner, deportment, composure, disposition, presence, and style: these performances of temporality are miniature fictions with which individuals inhabit times and places and relations that often clash with the actual present, the actual times and places and relations their bodies occupy. Assuming a characterological stance against the imperatives of the present, “presence” and “deportment” are modes of embodied critique. As such, they personify how the philological plenitude of other words readily offer, in their connotations and histories, a critique of the present.

From Kenge’s own system-cementing trowel-wave of the hand to Snagsby’s variously expressive coughs, from Esther’s emphatic humility to Bart Smallweed’s injunction at the legal triumvirate’s sexually-charged lunch at the Slap-Bang— “and don’t you forget the stuffing, Polly!”—telling mannerisms and multivalent words abound in Bleak House (1977: 247).  But for polemic purposes let me stick with “deportment” as a salient example. Bleak House recognizes the “currency” of the word, that is, its relevance and fashionable circulation in the present, even as it foregrounds its historicity and ambiguity. Tale the moving reunion of George Rouncewell and Sir Leicester Dedlock: waiting for Bucket to reclaim runaway Lady Dedlock, George offers his “arms to raise … up” the debilitated Sir Leicester, who in turn raises George from despondency: “‘You have been a soldier,” he observes, non-sequitur, “‘and a faithful one’” (Dickens 1977: 696). At the Dedlock’s London home, just where we might think George’s typically awkward manner might put him out-of-place, the soldier shines. He humbly parries Sir Leicester’s praise: “I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do” (Dickens 1977: 696). He has felt uncomfortable everywhere else, he protests his unfitness for other modes of life (especially the domestic industrial married future exemplified in his brother), but here amidst a fading aristocratic dinosaur George’s deportment reciprocates and makes meaningful Sir Leicester’s, about which Dickens says, “He is very ill, but he makes his present stand against distress of mind and body, most courageously” (Dickens 1977: 694). “Present” here works as both adjective and noun: through his presence, that is to say, through his bearing, he makes present circumstances appear closer to his ideal temporality and structure of feeling. His presence, then, as a sort of regulative fiction, contests his present reality as he and George concurrently revisit the past in their minds and manners.[i]

George and Sir Leicester—odd models, to be sure—might thereby personify here the potential work an interpretative philology might do in reanimating the present with the past. Where traditional philology sought to fix the correct meaning of a word, a reinvigorated, Nietzschean version would eschew determination. As John Hamilton has written, an interpretative philology

may provide a privileged means for holding determinations at bay, for perpetuating community and its constitutive communication, not by fixing a word’s properties conceptually, with sovereign authority, disciplinary control, or tired complacency, but rather by pursuing its transit through time and across cultures and thereby allowing it to be translated, over and over again, on the basis of its very untranslatability. (Hamilton 2013: 21)

In this scene of exemplary deportment, marked by gestures more than words, Dickens nearly redeems an erstwhile unlovable aristocrat, whose virtue accrues to his loving insistence that words and manners remain constant: “I revoke no disposition I have made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed on her. I am on unaltered terms with her” (Dickens 1977: 698).[ii] At the same time, however, the narrative acknowledges the terrific contingency of our reception of these “terms”: “His formal array of words,” the novel says of Sir Leicester’s forgiveness, “might have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it; but at this time, it is serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true,” and “the lustre of such qualities,” Dickens adds, lest we impugn something decidedly aristocratic to the act, are available to the “commonest mechanic” and “the best-born gentleman” alike (1977: 698). Mannerisms and words that are ludicrous early in the novel thus recur “serious and affecting” “at this time.”

The scene complicates the novel’s preceding travesty of deportment personified in “Old Mr. Turveydrop,” about whom Caddy tells Esther, “No, he don’t teach anything in particular … But his Deportment is beautiful” (Dickens 1977: 169). Turveydrop caricatures the universal “dandyism” and agency of “fashion” that Bleak House disparages, but Turveydrop’s problem isn’t deportment itself so much as his own bad deportment, marked by ill-fitting clothes as much as by his maladjustment to the people around him: he is disposed to a trivial, fantastic, nostalgic version of his past (a fleeting encounter with the Prince Regent) rather than to a meaningful fictional past—like the “Young England” that suits George and Sir Leicester—or the present needs that Esther answers. Like Mrs. Jellyby’s telescopic philanthropy, more literally still like Smallweed on his litter, Turveydrop’s deportment carries him away with himself from the circle that deserves his attention, his caring presence. In his vanity, Turveydrop mocks style as a lack of substance and a deformity of truth, as Dickens makes plain with his overstretched outfit. Turveydrop, like the Prince Regent before him, has no sense of deportment, and his son and Caddy both misrecognize the correlation between deportment as Turveydrop practices it and presence, a characterological bearing toward time, as exhibited by others.

Genuine deportment constitutes a mode of speech and manner that carries one away from oneself so as to connect to other personages and times. “Deportment”: the nominative form, as the OED says, of deport, a late 15^th-century self-reflexive verb meaning “to behave (oneself),” derives from the 12^th-century French verb déporter, whose provocative range of meanings includes to be patient, to dally and even to take one’s specifically sexual pleasure with. Deportment thus shares much with Nietzsche’s notion of slow and deep philology, with its pleasures in dallying. The word combines amusement with stability, remaining, delaying, and tarrying of the sort Sir Leicester does as his time declines. Such tarrying originates in the root word “portus,” for harbor, as in to harbor a feeling. And so deportment evokes not just a person’s manner, but also a tendency to hospitality, to protect, cheer, comfort, and console.

And yet the prefix “de” means “from” or “off” and with the Latin root word “portare,” “to carry,” this implies an attitude of detachment, impartiality, and impersonality, a coldness and superficiality. The subtle difference, if any, between comportment and deportment inheres in the direction of bearing, or carrying: deportment denominates an orientation away from oneself and to the public whereas comportment, while still a form of behavior, stresses one’s togetherness, integrity, or self-maintenance. Yet another philological detail, a tasteless joke, suggests that for Dickens’s milieu, deportment was decidedly physical: one of the fake book spines Dickens authored and ordered for his office at Gad’s Hill was “Miss Biffin on Deportment.” Miss Sarah Wight Biffin was a well-known painter born with no arms and only vestigial legs; she was 37” tall. Modern readers might also carry the connotation of reverse immigration, being deported from a country, but the “old lady of the censorious countenance” in the novel brings that up, too: “‘the father must be garnished and tricked out,’ said the old lady,” of Turveydrop, “‘because of his deportment. I’d deport him! Transport him would be better!” (Dickens 1977: 173). Transport, like deport, had the same double valence as a term of movement of people and goods as well as of feeling and disposition.

Aptly, then, Michel de Certeau invokes “countless tiny deportations” to describe walking, his paradigm for the everyday practices by which people exert their freedom and creativity as they actualize given places like the city into productive spaces of their own (1988: 103). For de Certeau, “The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place—an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric” (1988: 103). Turveydrop caricatures not just a belated dandyism, then, but also personifies the way Dickens’s characters all inhabit spaces obliquely different, in temporality, ideology, and attention, from the places they occupy. Turveydrop’s deportment condenses and highlights the “countless tiny deportations” by which characters’ presence differs from the circumstantial present they inhabit. Given how de Certeau extends walking as a metaphor for reading, I want to suggest that these deportations, too, might model how a certain poststructuralist philology might license our freedom from the historical place given by the texts we read.

Despite his inanity, Turveydrop models the most telling function of deportment: he inspires belief.  His wife “had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and deference. The son, inheriting his mother’s belief, and having the deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith … and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle” (Dickens 1977: 173). The style of a text, at the level of diction but also of syntax, trope, and genre, constitutes its deportment or presence; it is the medium by which it moves readers to belief. Considering style as an index of what Steven Shapin calls “epistemological decorum,” the conventions recognized as guarantors of knowledge, we can not only see how Dickens’s world knew and felt in a traditional historicist sense, but also how we might reimagine how and what we can know and feel—how we are disposed toward the world. If we, as a profession, are to inhabit the past, then our deportment, our orientation to the present, cannot be like Turveydrop’s, a blind nostalgia, but instead ought to take up the likes of George and even Sir Leicester and, like Nietzsche, rearticulate alternative values as critiques of our imperfect present. While he values upheld by these odd bedfellows are unlikely to be the ones we uphold, their manifestation as a presence, as a tarrying against the stubborn often inhuman agencies of the present, is nevertheless moving. And it models, I think, how philology of a poststructuralist sort, however old-fashioned, might still translate our present concerns into past forms for a better and believable future.

References

Collins, Philip, ed. 1986. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Edited by George Ford and Sylvère Monod. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Hamilton, John T. 2013. Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton University Press.

Masson, David. 1875. British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of  British Prose Fiction (1859). Boston: D. Lothrop and Co.

Nietzsche, Freidrich. 1997. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter; translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Notes

[i] “Unaltered Terms” certainly has temporal parameters, and this scene generates enormous tension by moving slowly in the slow indoor space of the chapter while we know, outside its cozy confines Bucket and Esther chase Lady Dedlock for dear life in the snow and slush. The mutual deference George shares with Sir Leicester, toward whom he repeatedly, stiffly bows, likewise accompanies mutual nostalgic reveries: “The different times when they were both young men … and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold, arise before them both, and soften them both” (Dickens 1977: 697), Dickens writes. The residual manners of a bygone era mediate and soften an otherwise discomfiting present and even a terrifying future. Mrs. Rouncewell recognizes accordingly that Sir Leicester, in refusing candles and keeping the curtains open, “is striving to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late” in more senses than one (Dickens 1977: 699): he is holding open hope for Lady Dedlock’s return but also for the survival of a system of manners, a disposition that favored him, to be sure, but which nevertheless also comforts George who craves the discipline that his friend Bagnet always claims to maintain with his wife, who’s clearly in charge. In rejecting his brother’s offer of employment or even partnership, George rejects the paradox Hegel ascribes to the bourgeois, who must work for another because work arises only from external constraint but who can only work for themselves because they have no masters. The passage personifies the tragic backwardness of Disraeli’s “Young England,” which imagined that recovering paternalistic, feudal values would somehow produce a different future, then, even as it also indulges in and valorizes the ethos of Disraeli’s practical historicism. George and Sir Leicester are comfortable in the past.

[ii] Bleak House introduces Sir Leicester in a way that seems to mock his mannerisms as contrived, pompous, and cold, but it emphasizes from the beginning their stability:

He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him. (Dickens 1977: 12)

If this seems to fan the flames of the “dandyism” that pervades the novel’s world of religion, politics, law, and sociality, Dickens undercuts it immediately, “Indeed, he married her for love” (1977: 12).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Jonathan Farina is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University.  His book Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is forthcoming from Cambridge UP.

by Elisha Cohn

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

I was intrigued by the choice of Bleak House as V21’s representative novel, how the audacious, even pugnacious, and enterprising mood of this collective critical gesture resonates with or against the bleakness of Bleak House, a novel that invites attention to affective atmosphere. What is that bleakness? How does it emanate, and what does it do? More self-reflexively, how do the critical paradigms that newly attune us to atmosphere or mood reimagine the novel’s project, as they also ask us to consider the ethos of our own? Prompted by influential critics whose careers begin in Victorian studies (Miller 1988; Sedgwick 2002; Anderson 2006; Felski 2008), I hope to think about the mood of critical discourse to emphasize the conditions that allow knowledge and value to come into view. Ours is a field that drew considerable energy from the hermeneutics of suspicion, thanks to the Victorian novel’s pervasively social vision. But perhaps thanks also to Victorian literature’s continual, dialectical evaluation and reevaluation of individual perspectives within living systems, it has also brought us important work on the affects that accompany specific forms of theory. So how does the bleakness of Bleak House inflect today’s project—its reparative status, its aura of regenerative optimism, or intrepidity?

Mood is said to lack a telos in itself; Jonathan Flatley defines it as “a kind of affective atmosphere, … in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can attach to particular objects” (Flatley 2008: 19). But mood has a paradoxical status: if philosophy positions it as a precondition for thought or action, it is also associated (in Dickens and elsewhere) with stasis, particularly the stasis of melancholy. We tend to understand narrative as structured by the temporal framework of plot and event, but mood offers a vocabulary for what evades this forward drive, deferring or blocking plots of coming-to-knowledge. Mood, then, might offer an importantly minimalist way of indicating a narrative mode––but also a critical motive––that declines the desire for mastery.

In the case of Bleak House mood or atmosphere might be said to reformulate narrative conventions associated with emotional fulfillment and the production of knowledge by working as a textual effect. Bleakness flows among characters rather than belong to any of them individually, permeates even the not-character of the omniscient narrative voice, suffuses the polluted fog that flows from London to the suburbs, the “filthy air of our prosperous England” that John Ruskin was so appalled to find represented in fiction. Esther assures us that John Jarndyce has transformed the affective character of the house he inhabits, but bleakness lingers, an intransigent, if low-key, global effect. Implicitly, the institutions (houses, destroyed houses, courtrooms) that shape sociability do so not only by mapping out pathways and blocking off windows of relation, but by making those circuits of relation palpable as feeling. The map of London the novel creates archives these circuits of attractions and repulsions, hurts and pleasures. But because these feelings register bleakly, they elude recognition, purpose, or object. Bleakness reaches outward, too, to the implied reader––it constitutes a secret in which, à la Snagsby, the reader is a “partaker, and yet … not a sharer,” not consciously implicated but creepingly registering effects (Dickens 2003 [1852-53]: 607). If we cannot attribute or contain bleakness to any one character, if it instead responds to the distorting pressures of a system without being presented as adequate motivation to launch a critique of that system, how does this diffusive state affect the role of knowledge in the plot? The project of producing critical knowledge of the text?

By suspending the importance of outcomes, the less than revelatory quality of mood lights up how Dickens’s novel, even qua detective novel, thwarts the production of stable knowledge. In Esther’s narrative, atmosphere pulls against the plot of her growth, development, and avowed identity. This formal reticence might appear to suggest that her style reflects her post-traumatic consciousness, its holes of unspeakability signaling the presence of wounds that cannot be more directly owned. But the atmosphere is also due to more than her avowed self-effacement because it becomes a general narrative principle, infusing even the illustrations. In the third-person, present-tense narrative it evokes an ongoing, systemic process never to be completed and not located in or attributable to any one consciousness or agent. So atmosphere” speaks to Dickens’s interest in Bleak House in privileging feeling and mood over plot, event, or revelation.

I propose one specific consequence of moodiness in Bleak House for V21’s context. The novel’s atmospherics provide a way of thinking about feeling—even and especially about critical feeling—as shared but nonteleological. The role of this concept in the novel—at least as our present critical vocabulary for mood would configure it—speaks back to the critical project in less than fully optimistic or energizing, yet valuable, ways. I would recognize that my own interest in novelistic mood partakes of same atmospherics of deferral within Bleak House itself; I see a resonance between the novel’s deferral of the final potencies of self-reflection and my own desire to find it there. Thus I would question whether my theoretical bent toward the inassimilable, the incommensurable, and the least instrumental aspects of the text too willingly accepts the marginalization within the academy of the kind of knowledge the humanities are supposed to produce. Yet I think this sense of deferral, and its lack of triumphalism, also might allow us to quietly value the practices of repeated readings performed not only by experts, but also by Dickensians who revisit novels not to definitively gain a purchase on the world—to effect political revelations; to transform perceptions, forms of knowledge, or communities—but to experience a world. So while we might draw on the idea of atmosphere to stress the efficacy of the text in attuning its readers to new sensations and sympathies, nonetheless, I would desist from offering a too-confident model of what these bleaker feelings allow us to know.

References

Anderson, Amanda. 2006. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dickens, Charles. 2003 [1852-53]. Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin.

Felski, Rita. The Uses of Literature. London: Blackwell.

Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Elisha Cohn is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2015).

by David Sweeney Coombs

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Within the lexicon of contemporary criticism, “resonance” is a term that is often marshaled to designate a loose, heuristic sort of presentism. For an example, look no further than the critical blurbs promoting recent editions of Bleak House, where A. A. Gill declares the novel “one of the few [Dickens] stories that has modern resonance: the tale of a never-ending court case can be seen—if you squint—as the precursor of Kafka and Orwell.”[i] We don’t need to agree with this judgment to note how the acoustic register of resonance gives way to the visual here at just the moment that the sentence moves from the airy declaration that Bleak House is still relevant to the specification of a literary genealogy to substantiate that claim. The virtue of resonance is typically understood to lie in that airiness. We use the term to posit unspecified or as yet mostly speculative connections between apparently very different objects—like an 1853 novel and the legal black sites of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Resonance, that is, lets us say that we feel the reverberations when we still can’t say exactly why. Hence the term appears rarely in articles and monographs, which aspire to rigor and precision, but frequently in the more informal discussions at scholarly conferences. Despite its informality, resonance, I want to suggest, offers us a potentially precise way of thinking about the form of Bleak House and the way the novel and our readings of it fold together different temporalities.

Bleak House famously combines antithetical narrative modes, most signally by alternating between third-person narration in the present tense and first-person narration in the past tense.[ii] One of the effects is a torsion between the formal boundedness of Esther’s first-person narrative, centered in a single character retrospectively relating the events that shaped her life’s development (and thus the process by which she came into being as narrator), and the open-endedness of the third-person narration, which jumps from place to place and character to character in a present tense filled with all the present’s sense of ongoing possibilities.[iii] With uncanny prescience, Bleak House in this way overlays two theories of the novel: the (then still soon-to-emerge) Victorian physiological novel theory described by Nicholas Dames, which conceived of the novel as a temporal unfolding akin to music; and the Jamesian novel theory of Percy Lubbock and the New Critics, which understood the novel instead as a sculptured, well-wrought whole. While Bleak House’s third-person narrator unfolds a stream of events, Esther’s task as narrator is to sort and arrange her own fugitive impressions retrospectively in a way that strikingly resembles the work of Lubbock’s critical reader, who, having finished reading a novel, must similarly put together a stable, clearly outlined form out of the “moving stream of impressions, paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages” (1921: 14).

Esther, Lubbock might say, has to turn music into sculpture, but Bleak House figures Esther’s activity and its own formal division using a different analogy: the acoustics of houses. Consider the description of Lady Dedlock’s reaction to the news that Esther, her secret illegitimate daughter taken away at birth, is still alive. Shouldn’t her anguished cry rock the foundations of the Dedlock estate, Chesney Wold, the novel melodramatically asks before concluding, “No. Words, sobs, and cries, are but air; and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town, that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber, to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees” (1996: 433). Here, aerial waves carry Lady Dedlock’s words, but the wave-form carries Dickens’ words too. Published and read in installments, the form of Dickens’ novel is, like a wave, defined by sequence and periodicity.^[iv] In Bleak House, however, the wave-form’s diffusive circulation also takes on a more ominous quality, operating as a pattern of dispersal in the disclosure of Lady Dedlock’s secret and the confusion and entropic disorder propagated by Chancery, including the miasmic spread of disease (likewise through the air). Houses, on the other hand, can shut in and shut out waves more or less artfully, and the novel’s canniest household artist is its signature domestic woman, Esther, who is not only an angel but also an actual housekeeper. As her jingling keys continually remind us, Esther the housekeeper regulates flows within Bleak House like a veritable Maxwell’s Demon. What if we understood Esther’s narration in a similar way, not as transforming a music-like sequence of events into a static visual form, but as a kind of acoustic sorting that amplifies and silences (shutting in and shutting out) by turns?

Among other things, we might then pick up on the ways that Bleak House resonates with a major scientific reassessment of the nature of musical tones then underway, one that complicates Dames’ (2007: 10-11) suggestion that physiological criticism understood the novel exclusively in terms of musical sequence, of melody or rhythm as opposed to harmony. In the early 1830s, Gustav Hällstrom began experiments with a siren, a new instrument emitting pulses of air through a series of holes on a rotating disk. While each pulse is separately audible when the disk is rotating slowly, at increased speeds the pulsations run together into a continuous tone. Hällstrom’s work led scientists to reduce tones to pure periodicity—pure sequence—but by the time Bleak House appeared, this theory was on the verge of being demolished by Hermann von Helmholtz in the single most influential scientific text on music in the nineteenth century, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Helmholtz was convinced that the particular quality of a tone (its timbre) is determined by the superposition of several soundwaves with different frequencies. Starting in 1855, he had devised a series of special resonators that vibrated with just one frequency of a tone, prolonging that one particular wave in a compound wave-form while silencing the others. In this way, Helmholtz’s resonators made it possible for him to perform a fine-grained analysis of sound. “Resonance,” Stephan Vogel (1993:281) notes, “became the fundamental concept in Helmholtz’s research program.”[v] His experiments with resonators, including, evocatively, the human mouth as a resonant cavity, led him to his famous resonance theory of hearing, which conceived of hearing as the result of thousands of platelets in the ear each vibrating in response to one frequency across the spectrum of audible sound. Both an experimental method and an explanatory theory, resonance shifted the science of acoustics from melody to harmony, from a theory of music as periodic succession—one damn pulse after another—towards a theory of music as constituted by the layering of different temporalities.

Bleak House layers temporalities in a way that is attuned with the temporal complexity of resonance. Helmholtz’s resonators revealed the complexity of tones by isolating one part of it, extending that one wave while letting the rest fall silent. His resonators thus functioned very much like the musical technique of suspension, where one note in a chord is prolonged into the next chord of a piece’s harmonic development. The resonance of Bleak House asks us to do something similar—to mark through our own reverberations the continuity as well as the discontinuity between past and present. Dickens’ resonance, that is to say, invites us to read as strategic presentists.

References

Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1996. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. 2015. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921. London: Jonathan Cape.

MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. 2014. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vogel, Stephen. 1993. “Sensations of Tone, Perceptions of Sound, and Empiricism.” In Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, edited by David Cahan, 259-287. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Von Helmholtz, Hermann. 1954. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. New York: Dover.

Notes

[i] Gill’s blurb appears in several different online iterations of promotional materials for the novel. For one example, see “Bleak House Editorial Reviews.” Random House Books Australia. http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/charles-dickens/bleak-house-9780099511458.aspx (accessed February 10, 2016).

[ii] But this is not the only way it does so. Tanya Agathocleous, for instance, observes that the novel combines the techniques of the panorama with those of the sketch to present a “kind of time-elapsed panorama,” an overview of Victorian London accumulated through momentary glimpses rather than seen instantaneously (2011: 111).

[iii] This torsion goes some way towards explaining the divided critical opinions on the coherence of Bleak House, which tend to see the novel as either ultimately formally bounded and enclosed or impossibly diffusive. In a recent instance, we can see readings of the novel by Caroline Levine and Allen MacDuffie fall out on this question even as both conceptualize the novel as a network. Levine (2015: 130) reads Bleak House as embodying all the radical open-endedness of the network-form while MacDuffie, reading the eventual emergence of the network-form over the course of the novel as a conservative retreat from the scathing environmental critique that opens it, remarks disappointedly that “what initially looked like an overwhelming sea of people turns out to be a large, but manageable network” (2014: 112).

[iv] Further, Dickens had a lifelong interest in Charles Babbage’s theories of sound waves as circulating endlessly through the air, which, John Picker (2003: 15-40) suggests, promised Dickens a kind of indefinite circulation for his own authorial voice.

 

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

David Sweeney Coombs is assistant professor of English at Clemson University. He is currently at work on a book examining the Victorian literary response to the distinction drawn between sensation and perception by the nineteenth-century human sciences. 

 

 

by Megan Ward

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Understanding how Bleak House resonates through time typically means understanding its echoes in the present moment. What, though, about the other futures of the Victorian novel that are our pasts? Today, I will mount a short argument for the place of Dickensian form in the long history of information systems. Though excellent analyses by scholars such as Anna Gibson, Jonathan Grossman, Caroline Levine, and Franco Moretti demonstrate the networked form of Dickens’s novels, they tend either to think of the network as historical context (the railway) or universal form (hubs and nodes) (Gibson 2015, Grossman 2012, Levine 2015, Moretti 2011). Instead, I wish to invoke Claude Shannon’s 1948 articulation of information theory, a mid-twentieth-century system that acts as both afterlife and model for the linked, predictive structures of Dickensian character.

Shannon’s innovation was to assess information as a measure of predictability rather than as specific pieces of knowledge. By measuring information in bits, Shannon divorced information from meaning. Predictability, for Shannon, measures of our ability to foretell the next signal based on what has come before, what Shannon calls measuring the “residue of influence” from one signal to the next (Shannon 1948: 15). Famously flat, Dickens’s characters have been both critiqued and rehabilitated on the question of predictability; as E.M. Forster famously pronounced, “If it never surprises, it is flat” (1974 [1927]: 118). But Forster’s idea of predictability measures individual interiority – measures knowledge, secrets, and revelations – while Shannon’s informatic understanding of predictability proves a better match for the networked form of Bleak House. By re-reading Dickens’s so-called flat characters as systems of networked predictability, we can see how the novel works to produce a system of unpredictable intimacies as information moves and imprints, leaving Shannon’s “residue”s.

Two brief examples: Lady Dedlock’s bootlegged portrait, which moves from Chesney Wold to a printed annual to the wall of the law clerk Jobling suggests we can actually know a character intimately from the circulation of a superficial image. Lady Dedlock’s “speaking likeness” generates not just the false intimacy we might attribute to the surface (or social media) but becomes a way of knowing and being known, instantiating her relationship to Esther and even, eventually, becoming a version of Esther herself, at least in Guppy’s formulation of Esther as the “image imprinted on my art.” (Dickens, 1996 [1863]: 470, 429).

Usually offered as evidence of predictability, Dickensian characters’ famous catch-phrases also work to connect characters in surprising ways across the text – and, in doing so, up-ends the very definition of predictability. For instance, Skimpole’s protestation that he is merely “such a mirthful child” connects him to the “graver childhood” of Charley, the perennially aged Smallweeds, and Esther, who becomes prematurely aged when John Jarndyce proposes that she reminds him of “the little old woman of the child’s (I don’t mean Skimpole’s) rhyme” (Dickens, 1996 [1863]: 226, 11). Skimpole’s abandonment of his own family – “all children” – links to the child he abandons, Jo, and to Lady Dedlock’s substitution of Rosa “my child” for Esther (Dickens, 1996 [1863]: 624, 421). Not simply a verbal tic, Skimpole’s “childishness” complicates the sense of knowing and being known usually attributed to unfolding interiority by attenuating these qualities across a system of circulating, widely-imprinting characters (Dickens, 1996 [1863]: 624).

Reading Bleak House through Shannon’s measure of predictability thus upsets the hierarchy of round over flat characters, of ineffable interiority over corporeal tic, even as it accounts for the vast fields of characters in the Victorian multi-plot novel. By historicizing the information system as a Victorian future that is also our past, we begin to re-think the entanglements of history and form – our literary forms may need theories that come from other histories. In articulating information theory in 1948, Shannon occupies the heart of what I recently termed the under-examined “historical middle.” In that middle lies the future of Bleak House, the past of the internet, and the present of informatic form.

References

Dickens, Charles. (1853) 1996. Bleak House. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University, Press.

Gibson, Anna. 2015. “Our Mutual Friend and Network Form.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 48, no. 1, 63-84. novel.dukejournals.org.ezproxy.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/content/48/1/63

Grossman, Jonathan. 2012. Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Morretti, Franco. 2011. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” New Left Review no. 68: 80-102. newleftreview.org/II/68/franco-moretti-network-theory-plot-analysis

Shannon, Claude. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379-423, 623-656.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Megan Ward is assistant professor of English at Oregon State University. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Human Reproductions: Victorian Realist Character and Artificial Intelligence.