Abstract
With the exception of D.A. Miller’s brilliant but exceptionable chapter in The Novel and the Police (1988), nearly all important accounts of Bleak House have given some sustained attention to the novel’s dual narration, that famous experiment which Steven Marcus called (with much justice) ‘the most audacious and significant act of the novelistic imagination in England in the nineteenth century’.3 Miller’s having so little to say about the matter, already remarkable in a chapter entitled ‘Discipline in Two Voices’, becomes more remarkable still when we remember that Miller interrupts his argument with some theoretical reflections on how ‘[p]henomenologically, the novel form includes the interruptions that fracture the process of reading’, yet pays almost no attention to the factor that makes this particular novel into a veritable self-interrupting machine: the dual narration.4 Regarding the relationship between Dickens’s impersonal narrator and Esther Summerson as a kind of hypertrophied specimen of the novel’s intrinsic relationship between narrator and character, third-person and first-, and thus as a nineteenth-century representation of novelistic form, this essay will argue that Bleak House defines the novel for its era as the self-interrupting genre par excellence and that it does so as part of what I consider its ‘proto-ethnographic’ labour.
‘Where would you wish to go?’ she asked. ‘Anywhere, my dear,’ I replied. ‘Anywhere’s nowhere,’ said Miss Jellyby, stopping preversely. ‘Let us go somewhere at any rate.’ said I. Dickens, Bleak Houser1
Omnia determinatio est negatio — the very demarcation of a social totality places it under the sign of contingency. Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’2
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Notes
D.A. Miller, ‘Discipline in Two Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House’, in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 83.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; rpt. Prospect .Heights, III.: Waveland Press, 1984) 25;
McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 125.
Cf. James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Lawrence Grossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992) 96–116; esp. 99, 114–15.
Cf. Alfred Kroeber, ‘The Superorganic’, American Anthropologist 19/2 (1917), 163–213.
J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (orig. 1958; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) 160–204.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Buzard, J. (1999). ‘Anywhere’s Nowhere’: Dickens on the Move. In: Sadrin, A. (eds) Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27354-6_10
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