Abstract
The outside weather with which Bleak House commences clearly has as its corollary an interior, discursive climate wherein an opaque ‘wall’ of writing shuts out the still, small voice of advocacy as surely as the implacable sheets of London fog obscure the noonday sun, and Dickens’s own writing, as a surrogate for omniscience, often works to obscure the voice of Esther Summer(son). We have scarcely begun reading the first chapter when we become aware of the systematic repression of voice at the hands of writing. For Chancery is an institution where even ‘briefs’ are given a longevity and ‘shorthand writers’ (BH 1, p. 50) struggle to enclose voice within an overly condensed, compressed system of inscription that chokes all vestige of tonality:
‘On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here — as he is — with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some scores of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be — as they are — mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of word.
(BH 1, p. 50, italics added)
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Notes
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984). See especially the chapter on Great Expectations pp. 113–42 in which Brooks speaks of the logic and syntax of meanings that develop only through succession for Brooks, a mediation between repeating and reproduction, which would give plot a ‘lineage’ always under pressures of displacement, like that of the family.
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 34–77.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), p. 340.
David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economies of the Novel (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 110.
Taylor Stoehr, Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965).
Ellen Moers, ‘Bleak House: The agitating women’, Dickensian, 69 (1973), 13–24. For background on the role of women in nineteenth-century philanthropical movements, see F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), pp. 1–61.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1964), p. 167 (Marx’s emphasis). Even more relevant here might be Marx’s observation that ‘circulation sweats money at every pore’, almost like Chadband circulating his imaginary texts. See Capital I, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), p. 113.
Jean-Joseph Goux, Freud, Marx: Economie et symbolique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 53–6.
Michael Ragussis, ‘The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House’, NCF 34 (1979), 253–80, argues persuasively that all of the secrets in Dickens’s novel are in fact linguistic.
Mark Lambert, Dickens and the Suspended Quotation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) analyzes distinctions between what he terms ‘tagged’ and ‘untagged’ utterance. See especially pp. 2860.
D. A. Miller, ‘Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House,’ in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 55–106, applies Foucault’s paradigm of institutional control of the family to the emergence of Bucket. For Miller, the presence of Bucket allows for the existence of a field outside the dynamic of power and free from its effects, whereas in my analysis, admittedly more Marxisant Bucket allows Dickens to talk about the ways in which the state bureaucracy is allowed to disguise itself as yet another benign ‘guardian’. The novel itself suggests that all such guardians are potentially formalisms disguising themselves as something else.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Baly and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw, 1966), pp. 111–13.
Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 82 ff.
Robert Caserio, ‘The Name of the Horse: Hard Times Semiotics, and the Supernatural’, Novel 20 (1986), 5–23, argues that in Hard Times the slippage of sound is achieved by a variety of speech impediments which afflict the characters. In Caserio’s reading, the ‘opening’ of language in the novel is not conducive to political silencing, but rather to a freedom from semiotic, political or economic ‘grasping’. The difficulty with such a reading is that the structures of ‘open-ness’ are often simultaneously structures of concealment and repression, depending upon the syntagmatic context. Language, like the veils of Bleak House is an instrument of ‘sharing’ as well as ‘hiding’, often at the same time.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962).
Jurgen Habermas, ‘Legitimation Problems in the Modern State’, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 178–205. For Habermas the ‘state’ defines itself in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in opposition to the family by assuming control of certain institutions which the family could no longer successfully privatize: education; health care; certain instruments of communication; and the idea of a ‘general welfare’.
Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), Vol. 3, pp. 46–8.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 1058.
John Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 46.
Christopher Hibbert, The Making of Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 51.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. Introd. Rev. R. H. Malden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 203.
Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 139–40. Poulantzas’ critique of Althusser’s ISA was continued in a number of essays over a prolonged period, but all tend to emphasize a less repressive and more collusive process of interpellation. The fiction of a ‘general interest’ — hygiene and the pursuit of criminality in Bleak House — means that the activity of interpellation itself appears almost authorless at the same time that it assumes everyone is part of an extended family that is anti-genealogical. Dr. Woodcourt’s ‘practice’ takes over from Mrs. Pardiggle’s tracts.
Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). An intriguing history of copyright law and its impact is to be found in the volume of lectures by Augustine Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books (South Hackensack, NJ: Rothman Reprints, 1971; 1899). The reconceptualization of copyright law, both legally and in terms of the role of the author, shifted the meaning of a particular text from a specific form of ownership of the means of production to a specific form of control of the labour process so as to produce surplus value. This shift corresponds to the transformation from petty-commodity production to industrial capitalism that certain commentators, most notably Hindness and Hirst, have observed in the production of other commodities between 1750 and 1850. Bleak House could be read as a large printing enterprise churning out reams of paper within its own pages in such a way that the ‘production’ of Chancery and the ‘production’ of Esther’s diary are in some sense similarly self-consuming. They both ‘mean’ as the cumulative effects of interventions in the productive process itself.
John A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone Press, 1976), p. 27.
Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
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© 1996 Jan B. Gordon
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Gordon, J.B. (1996). ‘In All Manner of Places, All at Wunst’: Writing, Gossip and the State of Information in Bleak House. In: Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376946_4
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