Hypokeimenon

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The Selfless Esther

Bleak House is a novel of interconnections. As its readers, we are asked to imagine a sprawl of nodes, hubs, and hinges between which worlds are made and unmade. Caroline Levine even argues that “Bleak House uses networks to reconceptualize character”, casting narrative persons “less as powerful or symbolic agents in their own right than as moments in which complex and invisible social forces cross”. These defining “moments” are precisely of the kind that motivate philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour to speak of “actants” rather than “actors”. In an effort to overcome the ingrained hierarchy between subjects and objects (which is really a purification of “humans” and “nonhumans”), Latour maintains that “the two cannot be had separately, but are always bound up with each other in a network of relations”. What’s more, “actants”, whether human or no, “must not be conceived as free-standing entities that then enter into relations with each other. Only in these relations do they become actants; they ‘emerge’ within the networks that exist between them”[1].

So Bleak House is also a novel of self-constructions. Consider how Esther’s identity is bound to her place in a network: “I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married someone else, how should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would have been a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and blank form, that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in their basket again”. Indeed, for despite having been raised “like some of the princesses in the fairy stories” who altogether lack “worldly experience or practical knowledge”, the Esther we know clearly emerges within the domestic matrix the keys realize. Though first “quite lost in the magnitude of [her] trust”, Esther quickly finds herself transformed into “a methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little person”, who, with real zest, takes to remembering the contents of “each little store-room drawer and cupboard”. You see, the keys make a difference; they are “actants”, connecting Esther to Bleak House, her station, and the world beyond. We could say the keys afford access, a particular mode of being toward things – amid Bleak House’s garrets and cellars we find our “little old woman”, our “Dame Durden”.

But this is only half the story. Perhaps more interesting is the way the keys translate Bleak House. Esther likens the manor “one of those delightfully irregular houses” with a “bountiful provision of little halls and passages, of unexpected places and rooms and a back-stairs where you could hear the horses being rubbed down”. The keys disclose an economy of nooks brimming with “jams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and glass, and china, and a great many other things”. Esther writes of the house’s “hospitable jingle”, of its snug little rick-yard, its dear little farm-yard. About Bleak House all is of the same quaint variety, a “perfect neatness” exemplified in the whitest linen stored up with rose-leaves and lavender. What Esther gives us, then, is no outsider’s description, but fragments of an intimate knowledge, a kind of poetry of the house [2]. The bunches of keys open Bleak House, both literally and figuratively.

[1] Taken from Peter-Paul Verbeek’s What Things Do, pg. 149-150.

[2] “For instance, in the house itself, in the family sitting-room, a dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest, or of nooks and corners in which he would like to hide away, like an animal in its hole. In this way, he lives in a region that is beyond human images. If a phenomenologist could succeed in living the primitiveness of such images, he would locate elsewhere, perhaps, the problems that touch upon the poetry of the house” (The Poetics of Space 50).

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Dumb Men and Clever Women

The Dedlocks are undoubtably an odd match. Lady Dedlock “has beauty still, and, if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn”. Sir Leicester, on the other hand, is described as a “ceremonious, gouty, greyhaired gentleman” who will never again see sixty-seven. What’s more, Lady Dedlock’s character is acquired by her “fashionable state”, a thing “of precedent and usage” all “wrapped up in too much jeweler’s cotton”, whereas Sir Leicester’s is original, “as old as the hills”, of a venerable lineage traceable through the many portraits of Dedlocks past and gone. And while Lady Dedlock is prone to flight and bouts of restlessness, Sir Leicester’s repose is likened to that of his Chesney Wold, “rooted in [a] quiet park, where the ivy and moss have had time to mature”. Not least, Lady Dedlock is a thoroughly public agent, in and about high society, whereas Sir Leicester, now “retired”, is easily found “by the fireside in his snug dressing-room”. This last binary organizes much of the couple’s activities and influences in Bleak House.

Caroline Levine reminds us that “Western thought [has] longed to ground transcendent truth in a single, foundational concept, such as reason, mind, man, or the public sphere”. In establishing the identity of each foundational concept through what it is not, philosophers unwittingly produced a privileged term that by necessity affirms itself in an abjected, excluded, or “fallen” other. In addition, “the privileged term in each binary reinforces the privileged terms in all of the supposedly foundational binaries; thus the rational, masculine, public subject governs the emotional, private, woman object”. But this neat, symmetrical arrangement is sometimes upended in the matrix of hierarchies in Bleak House. For example, recall that though “Sir Leicester was going to Paris too . . . the delight of the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady”. Hence, having outlived his role in the public sphere[1], Sir Leicester is depicted as a kind of irksome homebody, an enfeebled androgyne filled with no better thought than that of his own esteem. It is difficult to think of Sir Leicester as properly acting in the novel; he is rather like one of its objects which, in the age of Dickens, authors allowed “to stand mute around or behind the characters themselves, as testimony to the nature of the world being created” (Fredric Jameson). In fact, when Mr. Rouncewell petitions the Dedlocks on his son’s behalf, it is the Lady, and not the lord, that he really addresses. When Sir Leicester expresses his indignation at the proposal, Lady Dedlock warns him off “with the slightest gesture of her pretty hand, as if he were a fly”. In turn, Mr. Rouncewell studies Lady Dedlock’s “composed face, whose intelligence is too quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness” with but the “least turn of his eyes towards Sir Leicester”.

Unlike the Dedlocks, Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet outwardly display a comic similitude. Mr. Bagnet is the picture of an ex-artillery man, with a general “unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air”, and his wife “a soldiery-looking woman”, “who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of follow, but to be another good sort of fellow herself”. It is as if the years have melded these two into a common entity, so thoroughly has Mrs. Bagnet adopted the rhythms and flair of her husband’s military life. And, according to Mr. George, military men are famously ill-versed in matters of business; they are “of the Roughs” and “haven’t the art to do it”, nor the head. Yet, domestic life seems to have endowed Mrs. Bagnet with a third eye; Mr. Bagnet grudgingly lets on that “it’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained”. Indeed, Mr. Bagnet, the more public of the two, seems to be all body, preferring “to discourse on indifferent matters” or else march woodenly up and down their little street. When expelled from Mr. Tulkinghorn’s chambers, he cannot manage a word, but only shake his head and say, “if my old girl had been here – I’d have told him!” The Bagnet’s domestic space, which “contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible speck of dirt or dust in it”, functions like the soundless caves of yore, where, being deprived of all that is sensory, oracles made their divinations.

Bleak House disrupts the way we traditionally regard binary arrangements, which, as the theory goes, sees “power and agency [consolidating] in the hands of white, male subjects”. In each of these examples, two hierarchal forms collide in such a way that one privileged term begins to undermine the other: the public light raises Lady Dedlock above her man, and the shelter of the private, far from reducing Mrs. Bagnet to another female body, provides the very conditions which allow her to think.

[1] Teresa Mangum’s article, “Growing Old: Age,” tells us that as Victorian men grew old, “they outlived their active roles as agents in the public realm. The aging nineteenth-century British male faced if not outright loss of sexual identity then a lapse into a state akin to helpless femininity” (Levine 96).

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The Automatism of Habit

If we look closely, there doesn’t seem to be anything particular about life in Chancery. As with Sir Leicester’s gout, events follow an inherited, patterned rhythm: “Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone’s, meeting the tardy morning which is always late in getting down there”. “The town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been suspended for a few hours, recommences”. “The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out; and plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at the stone walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves”. Even Mr. Tulkinghorn fails to notice Lady Dedlock’s passing, for is he not usually meditating some application this hour, and is Allegory not always pointing towards the selfsame window?

What Dickens gives us, then, is a kind of frieze, with Jo the central figure amid this motionless motion. And though he will complain that he’s “always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since [he] was born”, he cannot really move on. When he does manage to relocate to Blackfriars Bridge, he smartly resumes his occupation of “munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great Cross on the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral” while the crowd flows by him. In effect, this is why Jo cannot move on, or do much of anything else: he “sticks to the forms imposed upon him”, internalizing his place in the mercantile rhythms of Chancery until they have become as second nature as “the very beating of his heart”, or the “sound of his footfalls”.

Despite contrasts, Lady Dedlock’s case is not altogether different. The fashionable intelligence is, I dare say, hardly surprised by her restless movement: “To-day, she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow, she may be abroad”. In a single night, she attends “a grand dinner, and three or four balls”. Nevertheless, there is a mechanical, torpid quality about this “freedom”. In Paris, she “has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new […] under the worn-out heavens”. Her ‘place’ in Lincolnshire affords much of the same: the view from her windows is “lead-coloured”, the adjacent low-lying ground “a stagnant river”, its “surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain”. Irregularity has itself become regular, rhythmic, boring. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s “Unreal City”, a world of “numbed creatures” in half-life characterized by “monotonous repetition, an aimless circling without end or purpose”.

Our lasting image of Lady Dedlock is her “veiled” countenance; Esther describes her as “composed and distant and unapproachable” – beautiful, yet full of languor.

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Heart of the City

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House begins with a single, resounding word: London. It falls on the reader with all the weight of a bounded whole, a container joining disparate elements into one. And what does this London contain? A certain intensity, or flavor of life - “dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke”.

What is outside London remains, for the moment at least, unexpressed. But even so, is it not fully there in its indeterminacy? Derrida argues that there is no “inside” without a “constitutive outside”, and a similar logic could be applied to the act of our reading: the objective sphere surpasses what is explicitly represented by the states of affairs. In other words, our attention is always half upon London, and half upon what is unLondon. This latter half is a field of difference that expands in the reader’s mind—becoming a world—

In this sense, nothing is really bounded. If a thing or concept is always constituted by what it is not, everything is open to the other: the province bleeds into the city, and vice versa. As Esther notes when leaving for Bleak House, “by-and-by we began to leave the wonderful city, and to proceed through suburbs which, of themselves, would have made a pretty large town, in my eyes”. No boundary is ever crossed, nor is some “essence” lost sight of; the city dissipates by-and-by, as if it were an imaginary she herself chooses to give up.

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Represented Objectivities

Literature students will remember ‘Chekhov’s Gun’. In a letter to playwright Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, Chekhov warns, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

Story elements, then, should always do something. This may be true of theatre, where the limits of stage design seem to place special emphasis on each and every object represented. But what about the novel? Or even the short story?

In a literary work, many objects are seemingly just there. For example, on the first page of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina we read of a ‘morocco sofa’, ‘glass tables’, ‘little carafes’, ‘heavy blinds’, ‘slippers trimmed with gold morocco’, and a ‘dressing gown’. Gene Wolfe’s short story, “The Hero as Werewolf”, opens with an even greater concentration of objects and atmosphere: “nightblooming flowers scented the park air”, “trees lining the paths glowed with self-generated blue light”, “buildings new and old were mountains lit from within”, “a passenger rocket passed just under the stars, trailing luminous banners”. I chose these two books from my shelf at random, but their pages, like those of virtually any literary work, will surely disappoint someone who took Chekhov’s quip too seriously. Represented objects of these kinds rarely become embroiled in the plot.

Then what are they doing? Gerard Genette calls them mimetic, or ‘realistic’ effects. He uses an excerpt from Homer’s Iliad as an illustration: “this shore of the loud-sounding sea, a detail functionally useless in the story, is . . . fairly typical of what Barthes calls a realistic effect. The loud-sounding shore serves no purpose other than to let us understand that the narrative mentions it only because it is there, and because the narrator, abdicating his function of choosing and directing the narrative, allows himself to be governed by “reality,” by the presence of what is there and what demands to be “shown.” A useless and contingent detail, it is the medium par excellence of referential illusion, and therefore of the mimetic effect: it is a connotator of mimesis.”

Useless and contingent details – in Genette’s analysis objects function as a sort of passive backdrop, or ‘scene’. They provide the illusion that we are dealing with a reality.

For contrast, let’s look at what Gaston Bachelard says about ‘useless’ objects in literature. He uses J.P. Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyne as his example. The author, in describing an autumnal forest “weighted down with red berries”, completes the picture with “vigorous, thick moss that looked like pine trees, or like palms.” Bachelard speaks of being transported by this image: “from one forest to the other, from the forest in diastole to the forest in systole, there is the breathing of a cosmicity.” But his greater point is that represented objects are invitations to dream, taking us out of that world and into another – “Daydreams of this sort are invitations to verticality, pauses in the narrative . . . they are very pure, since they have no use”.

In Bachelard’s phenomenology, objects possess the reader, and, strangely enough, lead us back to a preobjective encounter with a world.