Still on that Bleak House kick, YHB made it the whole way through Critical Essays on Charles Dickens's Bleak House, a collection of eight essays from varying viewpoints and methods. Or methodologies. Not sure.
I’m afraid I am going to be snide through this note. And without real cred for snidosity; I haven’t taken a lit class in fifteen years, and the three college-level courses I did take were light on secondary sources, anyway. OK, when I say light, one of them had none at all, and was in fact student-run (and notorious). Another was a freshman intro, and had perhaps one or two essays, I think, in addition to lots of primary sources. The third did assign some essays of the sort that this book collects. So, I’m saying that I have no idea whether this gang of writing is good, bad, or representative of its ilk, so my reaction is absolute, rather than relative.
Another warning: there are SPOILERS for Bleak House in what follows. I assume all my Gentle Readers know that I may well spoil the book I’m noting, but this is a warning for a different book, which is the subject of this book but not of this note. Anyway. So if you are still in the middle of Bleak House, or planning to read it someday, skip the rest of this note. Unless, I suppose, you’ve already seen the Masterpiece Theatre version.
Among the things that annoy me about this sort of essay is the tendency to overstate the case.
“The juxtaposition of Lady Dedlock’s brooding face and [her maid] Hortense’s black eyes [in a mirror] connects the two by contiguity alone. But Lady Dedlock has already disguised herself in her maid’s cloak to visit Captain Hawdon’s grave. The fusion of the two women is more or less complete.”
Lawrence Frank, “Through a Glass Darkly: Esther Summerson and Bleak House”, p. 69
More or less. Well, less. I mean, the point that I think Mr. Frank wants to make is that these two tricks make us think of one in terms of the other, and that by thinking of the two characters together, I can learn something about each of them that I hadn’t previously happened on. And that’s true. But they aren’t fused. They remain two different characters.
Mr. Frank is not alone in this, tho’ I won’t bore Gentle Reader with further examples. It’s just rhetorical hype, and it annoys YHB, but that’s not a real problem. It is a problem when the writer isn’t just using it for hype. Mr. Frank, after all, knows that Hortense is a character herself, and is metaphorically describing them as fused to make a point. I’m not sure Michael Ragussis, in “The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House”, understands that language is not a disease. I’m not sure he understands that names are not infectious. He did appear to be making a metaphor, at first, but then he treats the metaphor as if it had substance.
Mr. Ragussis’s essay has another problem I saw in a few of the articles, and I don’t know how to describe it. It seems to me that essays of this sort can do three things which are pretty useful: they can describe what Dickens intended to do and how he achieves that, they can describe the water Dickens was swimming in to show what he put in without knowledge or deliberation, or they can describe how the water we are swimming in ourselves refracts the story as we read it. Some of these essays I could put into one or more of those categories; Michael Steig’s fine “Bleak House: Iconography of Darkness” shows how Dickens used his influence on Phiz’ illustrations to achieve certain things, and how Phiz achieved them. “Will and Society in Bleak House”, by Joseph I. Fradin, makes some actual if not altogether persuasive and on the whole negligible points about Dickens’ intentions regarding “the dialectic between self and society”, tracing the various ways it plays out in the text, and reinforcing the idea (which I believe is George Orwell’s) that Dickens’ solution to all social problems is that people simply be nicer to each other. Well, Mr. Fradin wouldn’t call it a solution, but a rejection of other solutions. Much the same is the point of H.M. Daleski’s “Bleak House”, which, however, sees the play of the idea in different aspects of the book. “The High Tower of His Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Reader of Bleak House”, by Albert D. Hutter attempts, I think, to describe the water a current reader swims in, in order to explain how and why we enjoy reading it. I say “I think” because I don’t really understand the article, which makes claims about “universal psychological function” and “individuation”; it may well be that the man is talking sense, but if so, he isn’t talking to me. Still, I dimly understand what he is attempting, and I think it might be worth doing.
On the other hand, “The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House”. Heck, I have no idea what it’s about at all. I don’t know what “Bleak House I: Suspended Animation”, by Robert Newsom is about, either. Both of them seem to combine obvious falsehoods with baffling obscureness. I suspect that both are sufficiently deep into deconstruction that they have not only divorced words from meaning in the text at hand, but in their own works. Here’s Newsom: “Though Esther does not use the word ‘cause’ here, nevertheless she is implicitly carrying on the elaborate play on the word that has begun in the first chapter with ‘the cause’ of Jarndyce and Jarndyce and that in many ways forms the novel’s real subject or asks the central question—‘Where do I come from?’” (p. 141) As Jon Stewart would say, wha-a-a-a-a? Is the elaborate pun on ‘cause’ (legal causes, philanthropic causes, and causation, I think) the novel’s real subject? If it is, what does that have to do with “Where do I come from”? If the “Where do I come from” question is interpreted causally, so as to make sense in the context, it’s a trivial point; of course a central plot point is the mystery of Esther’s parentage, but then that mystery is solved two-thirds of the way through the book. And if Esther can carry on the so-called pun by a reference to one thing causing another, isn’t the pun carried on through Little Dorritt, and the Maltese Falcon and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or any book anywhere that has any discussion of any two events which bear, one on the other, some influence? And if any one of these stupid points really is your point, isn’t there some way you could have said so?
Oh, and here’s Ragussis:
The novel’s ever-present stain, a sign of the disease of language, explains the convergence of discourse with intercourse, of inkstain with bloodstain. The stain is at once a point of origin (the stain of the love letters, the father-writer’s stain of procreation) and an end point (the stain of Hawdon’s grave, the stain of Lady Dedlock’s shame that forces her to this same grave, the stain of blood on Tulkinghorn’s floor). Hawdon’s stained desk is the center of the novel: the inkstain on this desk is as inescapable as his past (in fact his writing does lead back to his past, and to his ultimate identification). This stained desk is the workplace of the sin of language, where the fathers name is blotted out, erased, only to give rise to a series of false names that make a ghost of the father—a sin that is visited on the daughter.
p. 151 [the paragraph goes on for 257 more words, but the typist collapsed]
It’s possible that Mr. Ragussis is just saying that there are a lot of references to stains of varying kinds, and that stains and blots and so on, literal and metaphoric, are also connected to disease, which also appears in the book a lot, and so, um, you see, oh, people give false names a lot, too, which is like a stain, sort of, if you look at it right, and um, what’s your fucking point?
Sorry about that. Anyway.
,
-Vardibidian.
_Was_ that student-run class notorious?
Of course the main thing that credentialed critics like Ragussis and Newsome are trying to do is impress other credentialed critics with their ingenuity and mastery of sophisticated interpretive discourses.
That acknowledged, I would suggest that Vardibidian’s list of what critics can usefully accomplish — they can describe what Dickens intended to do and how he achieves that, they can describe the water Dickens was swimming in to show what he put in without knowledge or deliberation, or they can describe how the water we are swimming in ourselves refracts the story as we read it — leaves out at least one appropriate critical activity. That is to interpret the novel, which may, and perhaps should, be done without specific reference to the author’s intentions. The New Critics would argue that it might better be done without specific reference to the historical context in which the author wrote, but they are long out of fashion. I would suggest, as one credentialed critic standing up for the guild, that Newsome and Ragussis are in fact attempting to interpret the novel: that is, to identify one or more of its central themes/subjects/ideas and to explain how that theme/subject/idea is articulated in the novel in a recognizable pattern of wordplay and images and what this patterned articulation of the theme might mean. Their approach, in fact, is rather old-fashioned and New-Critical in this sense, though they attempt to demonstrate their fashionable sophistication to their professional readership in three ways. First, they draw their explanations of what the articulation of the theme means from an approved theoretical scheme (I’d say both are more psychoanalytic than deconstructive. Deconstructionists would not make it their business to identify the center of the novel; they would be attempting to displace the center, to deconstruct the novel’s attempt to make coherent meaning, though perhaps the quotations only show us their first move of finding the center in order to dismantle it). Second, they elaborate the pattern with an ingenuity that looks far beyond what the common reader considers either obvious or reasonable. Third, they convey their points in a manner that obscures the difference between trivial points and profound ones, elevating them all to the level of professional mystery. These are the common ailments of professional criticism.
I would still maintain that interpreting the novel is a useful undertaking, and that their work in this regard has some merit. If one were to engage in sustained reflection on the subject of causes in _Bleak House_, and the way in which Dickens, at certain points, plays with the word “cause,” that could enrich one’s understanding of the novel. Likewise if one were to engage in considering the significant images of stains that appear throught the novel and reflect upon them, one’s understanding of the novel could also be enriched. If these critics fail to make their reflections enriching, they fail in their execution, not in their choice to attempt to interpret the novel.
That’s how it seems to me, anyway. My tolerance for this sort of stuff is necessarily high, so I may be letting them off too easily, and I haven’t read _Bleak House_ recently enough to be able to judge the pertinence of their observations with any precision.
Notorious? It was world famous in ML!
I’ll have to think about what you say. I think one of my problems is that I’m not sure how Mssrs Newsome and Ragussis ‘interpret’ the novel; part of the issue is that I am not the person the interpreter is talking to, so by definition I don’t understand it as an interpretation. That is likely because of what you call the common ailments of professional criticism, although I think it may be because I reject some of the basic ideas of what constitutes legitimate and useful interpretation.
In my snarky manner, the question that comes to me is ‘If a theme/subject/idea was not put in deliberately by Dickens, nor transmitted by him unknowingly due to his cultural influences, nor given new meaning by my own cultural influences, what good is it to me?’ But perhaps there is an assumption shared by the authors and the intended readers about how it would enrich my reading; it isn’t made clear in the essays themselves.
,
-V.
That’s not a snarky question, but a sensible one.
Here’s a fragmentary response.
1) We can’t, with any certainty, know whether or not any particular meaning of the novel was intended by Dickens. We can construct inferential arguments about what he meant, and that is a useful criterion for validity in interpretation, but it functions mostly negatively. There’s basically an unlimited range of meanings that Dickens could have intended. On the matter of intention, I’m willing to accept it as certain that Dickens was interested in the nature of causes in _Bleak House_, and that he thought the idea of stains was important, but if you want to get more specific than that, I’m unlikely to accept any definitive claim that “this is what Dickens meant,” accept as a loose rhetorical gesture. I’d say that the reader is making meaning out of the rich materials that the author has provided.
2) For a while, I was writing a lot of fiction reviews (I hope I’ll have time to write more again soon!). I sometimes had the opportunity to talk to authors I had reviewed about their work and my reviews. I would find matters of interest in their books of which they were not consciously aware. When they would read the review, they would recognize what I was pointing out as part of the book, but they would not claim that this meaning was part of their intention. Some meanings of this sort come in from the culture, as you say, but more are simply products of the work of art’s own compexity. An author’s unique skill and vision enables the creation of the work, but not the control of it. Thus meanings may be neither authorial in origin, nor cultural in origin, but still present in the work and worth understanding.
3) The critics whose work in no good to you are implicitly dealing with your third criterion: ways in which the work is “given new meaning by my own cultural influences.” It’s just that their cultural influences — a body of professional theories about literature and psychology — are not _your_ cultural influences, and therefore their criticism is of little use to you. College professors are notorious for assuming that their students will and should be interested in the same matters that are of interest to the professors, and much bad teaching and spectacularly damaging curricular design results from this assumption. If the critics in question were writing for a common reader rather than a professional one, they would a) have to think about what matters to a common reader, culturally and aesthetically, and b) begin by explaining their own cultural interests to the common reader in a way that would engage the common reader with those interests, at least provisionally.
Thanks for your additional comments; I think I understand the essays better, tho’ I don’t like ’em any better…
Oddly enough, I picked up the book (with, admittedly, some trepidation) because I wanted to enjoy a more ‘sophisticated’ reading of Bleak House; I wanted, in some sense, to be lifted above the common reader. I felt that most of the essays (not just the two I singled out for scorn) actually would have decreased my enjoyment, rather than deepen, by, as you say above, obscuring the difference between trivial points and profound ones.
I am, by the way, not altogether convinced that the narrow use of ‘intention’ is the correct one. Certainly Dickens intended to use the word ’cause’ where he used it, and not to use it where he eschewed it, even if he may not have intended to build a particular relation or effect that way.
,
-Vardibidian.
Belatedly: My first thought, too, was to wonder about the notoriety of that class. 🙂
Good questions, and good answers. (Thanks especially, Chris, for the cogent analysis of the ways in which the authors are attempting to “demonstrate their fashionable sophistication” (good phrase, too).) I would add one other side note, possibly not relevant to these particular essays: sometimes an academic writing about a work of literature is being playful, entering into a subjective space where wordplay (whether of the pun sort or otherwise) sheds a sort of dreamy half-light on the subject and perhaps casts surprising or interesting new shadows, bringing unexpected things into sharper relief. That was, at any rate, what I thought of when I read the bit about discourse and intercourse, inkstain and bloodstain. Out of context, my guess about that Ragussis paragraph was that it was meant somewhat playfully, not necessarily to be read as bringing The Full Weight Of Professorial Analysis to bear on a Deep And Serious Work Of Literature.