by Anna Kornbluh

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

Between two novels, a thought.  A thought they each think, but a thought whose thinking appears more forceful by the shade of their juxtaposition.  Reading for this contiguity necessitates looking awry at the obvious distance between the two: one 2005, the other 1853.  Two novels, one hundred and fifty-two years apart, nonetheless conceptually close; historically divergent but intellectually congruent.  Both routinely heralded by critics as emblematic of paths for the novel form, high social realism and avant-garde experimentalism.  Both in their own right institutions in the history of the novel, and both demonstrably novels of institutions.[1] Both unfold along central axes of settlements to cases of grave legal and financial complexity.  Both drive their action with architectural repetition, assembling a succession of spaces that double or foil one another, and climaxing in the construction of architectural replicas.  Both systematically perform and probe copying and repetition.  Both take the dynamic overlaying of these topoi, the law, architecture, and repetition, as a commanding impetus for the novel form.  Repeating law, repeating architecture, the architecture of the novel, the law of the novel, the architecture of the law, the law of architecture.  A hypothesis: Bleak House and Remainder together novelly conceive a political formalism, a commitment to the architectural constitution of lived social space.

This is a thought whose repetition between two novels belies its novelty.  Amidst today’s hegemonic vitalism – so many tomes of 20^th and 21^st century critical theory directed to the anatomy of governmentality and the excision of the state, law, and form itself; the practical lament of sovereignty, suspicion of organization, encomium of anarchy, ecstasy of life; the historicization of the Victorian age as the origin of the species of modern domination; the hypostasization of freedom as a messianic sublime beyond every institution, beyond every state, “beyond every idea of law”[2] – amidst and against these theoretical and practical orthodoxies of the contemporary, with Remainder and Bleak House we can think another, rarer kind of thought, a thought out of time yet all too timely.  In the lavishness of their repetitive thought of law, architecture, and repetition, these novels ratify shaping, sheltering, formalizing as insuperable, indispensable, and inventable.  Human is zoon politikon, the political animal, the animal whose very life is owing to the house of arbitrarily formalized collectivities; the prevalent post-political fantasies in the post-human era repress this material fact and suppress practices and theories that might build entirely new kinds of houses.  Affirming radically ungrounded acts of house fabrication, showcasing the artifice without which there is nothing, fathoming the instituting of a minimal socius as a process both legal and architectural, plumbing the infrastructures of existence, opposing vitalist orthodoxy – this is the thought of Bleak House and Remainder.

It is a thought whose transtemporality or acontextuality is integral, a thought that gains gravity precisely by virtue of its repetition in history, in these two such differently situated and differently styled projects, a thought requiring repeated, apposite clauses.   A thought about the enduring repetition of intricate legal negotiation as reduplicative construction of lived space, a thought not of a historical particular, not issuing from or caused by a historical situation, but of history, mediating a universal.  It is a thought of the history of sociality and social formalization in modernity, a thought of the history of the novel as the art form uniquely addressed to such history.  Not to say that the thought is unthought in Bleak House before Remainder, nor that Remainder merely repeats or rethinks – remainders – Bleak House (One could ask Tom McCarthy if he’s read Bleak House; I didn’t).  Rather to say that what Susan Stanford Friedman has called “cultural parataxis,” the radical collage of texts from different geohistorical coordinates, can produce new textual insights and new theoretical insights (2013, 42).  Knowing things in their place is obligatory, but taking things out of place might help us appreciate here how much displacement orients both of these texts: in their procedures of replicating place and of auditing the lack of an authentic place, lack of a functioning place, lack of an immanent scheme for the placing of place, both of these novels function as theories of displacement, and demand therefore to be read displacedly, out of context.

Thus, I take the fact of repetition – of recurrent tropes and recurrent combination of tropes that amount to recurrent thought – as sufficient authorization for reading these texts together, for committing a certain presentism in celebrating reverberation and hearing there a resource for contemporary theoretical debates.  The repetition between Bleak House and Remainder transpires in history, but stakes no roots in that repetition Giovanni Arrighi (2010) finds in the long centuries of capital’s cycles; nor in the repetition as discontinuous intensification that Walter Benjamin (1968) finds in nonlinear philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic trajectories.[3] Let’s guess instead that the repetition is its own pattern, not governed by other patterns – simply a recurrence with neither linear cause nor intensifying arc, a recurrence of a thought, a thought that is less discursive (anecdotally characteristic of a particular society at a particular moment) and more generic (sociality as such entails the reiterative delineation of social space itself, the reiterative contrivance of formalized shelter and formalized relation, the reiterative production of worldliness which animates “the novel” art).  A thought that repeats because, indeed, it is a thought of repetition, a thought of the reiterative, redoubling, reformative ungroundedness of form.

Arguing then that the repetition signals the resonance, the import, the portability of the thought across context.  That what is common to the form of these two texts (where form is genre, theme, plot, and above all the engineered, dynamic collision of multiple topoi) is an illumination of common form, of the forms that structure being-in-common.  This would therefore be an abstract thought, and thus a thought abstractly broaching other idioms, in contemporary work on the aesthetic caliber of politics and the political by Jacques Rancière (2006) and Caroline Levine (2015) – even as it is a thought that largely countermands the consensus in much contemporary theory, and even as it is a thought concretely enunciated by the form of the novel in each text and by the form of repetition across the two texts.  Superposing tropes of displacement, replication, inauthenticity onto tropes of architecture and housing onto tropes of legal suits and legal regulations, Remainder and Bleak House highlight the aesthetic facets of social structuration: the art, the artful, the artless, the arbitrary formalizations of social relations.

An abstract thought, but one best legible in the concrete affinities between two novels.   Try to take both novels as the subject of claims and sentences, to hold two novels in single (dilated, ungainly) sentences, to contrive a grammar of resonance, to suspend privileging one over the other.  Both Bleak House and Remainder derive their premises from the law, from civil proceedings and settlement negotiations, from legal intricacies in process after other legal instances before them (Jarndyce & Jardynce, Dickens carefully points out, has no exact referent but extrapolates from cases regulating compound interest accumulation in estates and on cases whose contestation costs absorbed entire estates; a “remainder” is first and foremost (in the OED) a successive property interest, possessable only when prior interests granted simultaneously end, as in “die”).  Both begin in medias res (in Bleak House the case has been on for decades and “has in the course of time become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means”; in Remainder the offer of a settlement for a never specified matter begins the action on the very first page and the dispensing of funds fuels the events in the narrative).  Both also begin in a present tense that heralds its own limits: “About the accident itself I can say very little.”  “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever.”  “London.”  Present tense, ongoing verbs, first person split from itself, single-word sentence, dual-beginning, incapacity to narrate at the inauguration of the narration.  Both refuse any standard plotting around their central legal conceits: there is no origin of the legal story (in Bleak House no flashback to the legator’s intent nor rival versions of the will; in Remainder no account of the accident prompting, nor parties to, the settlement), and there is no resolution of the legal story (in Bleak House the estate consumes itself in court costs, rendering irrelevant the determinations of who the true beneficiaries are; in Remainder the settlement funds may or may not be consuming themselves in risky investments and the narrator may or may not have worse injuries than the settlement covers).  Both novels further refuse resolution at the concluding moment of their final sentences, the 1^st Person narrator of Bleak House notoriously ending the 1000 page novel with a sentence fragment (“even supposing…”), and the narrator of Remainder ending his adventures at their height, in an airplane he has hijacked, up in the air, flying in loops, with neither plan nor indefinite fuel (“just keep on.  The same pattern…the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.”)  Both novels conduce to end where they begin, “closing the loop, so to speak” (R, 4):  Remainder’s narrator makes loops in a plane in the sky in his final phrases, loops from which the third sentence opening the book might follow (“It involved something falling from the sky.  Technology.  Parts, bits.  That’s it really.”) – the narrator chronically tastes and smells cordite, a substance used in ejector seats from planes -; while Esther is restored to her origins and installed at the replica Bleak House.  Both novels emphatically underscore copying – technologies of copying, from handwriting to mimicry to cinema to reconstruction, and ontologies of copying, from missing originals and obscured origins to imprecise rendering and unreliable narration.

Between the two novels, and common to the two novels, is a certain shared thought about the structuring force of the law accompanied by the irrelevant content of the law: law is premise, law is impetus, law is tautology, law is originless, law is repetitive; law is not plot.  Legal absolutism: there are settlements, there are cases, the law is the origin of all plots – even as there is also a profound indifference to the law’s particulars.  In the repetition between the two novels, such absolutism appears much less as judgments of laws in their particular instance and context and more more as meditations on the universal character of law as organizing form.  Such transtemporality is also formally inscribed in both novels’ refusal of resolution, refusal of origin, ongoingness, concluding gerunds: a persistence, a perdurance, a transcendence of this character of the law.  Bleak House and Remainder are projects in world-making that both fundamentally exalt manifold constructions and manifold replications, and grant the groundlessness of any construction.

Both Remainder and Bleak House mobilize these formalist reflections on the law in the context of their manifest absorption with architecture and architectural repetition.  Bleak House, to state the obvious, is about a house, about the house, once “The Peaks,” then “Bleak” (dark), then “Bleak” (light), replicated in London, and replicated in New Bleak House, about houses of law, of aristocracy, of debt, of orphans (Chancery, Chesney Wold, Coavinses, Krook’s, boarding), about houses as buildings, dwellings, shelters, about clusters of buildings (Tom All Alone’s), about contradictions at the heart of houses, about the insufficiency and ill-fabrication of every house, and, for an ostensibly urban novel, its action markedly takes the form of procession through a series of houses (take just one strata of this about-ness: when Esther learns of her mother’s identity from Lady Dedlock, her narrative dispatches with the climactic dialogue in two paragraphs of retrospective summary, but then immediately lingers for pages of description of Chesney Wold, a better evocation of her “place” than any personal melodrama; the preferred mode of characterization throughout is to describe a character’s house).  Remainder is about a crack, a wall, a bathroom, a building, a courtyard, a cluster of buildings, a space and the protagonist’s drive to effect the space’s meticulous, minute (re)construction, about plaster, wood, glass, about the pursuit of a nonexistent original, about finance, coordination, about the large scale industry of building and “reenacting” a milieu, about construction work repetitively undertaken, workers humming “History Repeating.”  Both novels foreground the labor of all this repetitive constitutive construction, especially in figures of clerks (Nemo the law copier, Snagsby the stationer, Guppy the uppity clerk, Krook the document collector, Tulkinghorn the portmanteau pilferer, and the countless clerks in Chancery are resounded in Remainder’s Nazrul Vyas the TimeControl™ “facilitator,” from “a long line of scribes, recorders, clerks” (77), Annie the submanager/designer, and the countless subcontractors they coordinate). The law and architecture, repeated, and the labor and craft and writing of repeating them.  Repetition of the law, repetition of architecture, repeated.  In the lamination of law and architecture, of inscription, institution, repetition, and the built form, both of these novels give us to think the structuration of social space.

In their manifold affinities, these two novels of course manifestly differ, but  formulate the difference in terms other than context: each text uniquely approaches its cast, the marriage plot, multiplotting, mystery, money, empire, perpetuity.  For the sake of brevity, focus on the most crucial difference: systematicity.  Bleak House effectuates the repetitive assembly of houses as its objective core (the novel studies the ways of the world, the repeated instituting of social space, the manifold failures that drive these repetitions), whereas Remainder expressly subjectivizes this project (the novel presents itself as the study of one man’s drive).  Remainder fittingly enacts this subjectivism in its narration, a 1^st person narrator eschewing any reliability pretensions; Bleak House objectifies unreliability in the split between its 1^st and 3rd person, not only by alternating chunks of chapters and differentiating tenses, but by lapsing each narrative mode into the purview of the other, frequently styling Esther as an omniscient observer and frequently styling the 3^rd person as a partial, 1^st person plural.  Bleak House, one might say, is more systematic in its political purview, percussing the dynamics of social formalization more widely (in different kinds of institutions, in different kinds of people, in different registers of consciousness), while Remainder hones the narrow point of political ontology, the remaining fundament that ligates life to social forms.  This difference has little to do with the nineteenth century novel’s reputed referentiality and representational naiveté, little to do with the twenty-first century novel’s reputed robust irony, and much to do with varieties of repetition: Bleak House repeats its insights at scale, contemplating “the whole framework of society,” while Remainder thematizes repetition with centripetal force.

Remainder perhaps appears then as a minimalist, bleaker Bleak House, an attenuated vastness, distillate of a gurgling solution.  It zeroes in on money as predominant institution, it takes replication without referent as its single plot, it individualizes and delimits world-building, since the replicas originate in personal trauma and drive towards larger-scale violent destruction, and since it seemingly dispenses with the very possibility of 3^rd person narrativity.  But if it is thus a kind of crystallization of Bleak House, Remainder also thereby refracts Bleak House’s own limits: the novel we are so accustomed to lauding above all for its largeness, is in so many ways, a small novel, a novel devoted to limning the limits of novel worlds and of worlds outside.  From its principles of spatial contiguity to its admonition against telescopic philanthropy to Esther’s self-deprecation to its oscillating, mutually delimiting narration, Bleak House enshrines limits even while it criticizes the limits of institutions.  Each of these novels function with different syntaxes for the same questions about limits as enabling constraints, about the very installation of the law as a necessary outlining of sociality.[4]

If Remainder punctuates Bleak House’s own punctual, liminal, aesthetic contemplation of limits, they share most intimately a project to deploy the form of the novel as a laboratory for constructing forms of social space, for world-making, building possible and foreign worlds, rather than recording this world.  Dickens (1854) professed of his craft that he had “systematically tried to turn fiction to the good account of showing the preventable wretchedness and misery in which the mass of the people dwell”; McCarthy (2011) hypothesizes that “literature can be understood as a process of producing space, and spaces, whether they be urban or domestic spaces, or political spaces, or metaphysical spaces.” The fictive production of social space, in accordance with limits –finitude and mortality, available materials, temporal linearity and corporeal indivisibility, structural integrity – this is a plausible definition of one abiding modality of the novel (the modality we could call, in want of distinction from its foremost antipode, science fiction, “realist”).[5] Both of these novels achieve less an instantiation of this modality than a theory of it, Bleak House in so robustly underlining the limits to its own breathtaking breadth; Remainder in framing meticulous replication as an utterly fictive enterprise, and both novels reifying nothing other than the inauthenticity of reality.

A long tradition finds in Bleak House an archive of pernicious totalizations about which the novel can, at least, cheer, and, at most, despair, and a shorter tradition finds in Remainder a Nietzschean indictment of the inauthenticity of all things.  But the sheer fact that both of these novels build themselves out of repeated scenes of repetitive constitution of social spaces invites us, as readers of the history of the novel genre and as readers of a contemporary present over-determined by the poles of lamentation and resignation, to behold another thought, resurgent in Rancière and Levine’s theorizations of redistributions of the sensible and repetitive enactments of forms: the made world is only made and can therefore be remade, though no building project will not repeat the ungroundedness of every social structuration.  Novels in general uniquely ramify this made-ness of the world, this poetics of worldmaking; the particular novels Bleak House and Remainder actively theorize not only the artifice of any socius, but the freedoms that surprisingly inhere in political forms.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998.  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arrighi, Giovanni.  2010.  The Long Twentieth Century.  London: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter.  1968.  “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Illuminations New York: Schocken Books.

Brennan, Tim.  2007.  Wars of Position.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Dean, Jodi.  2009.  Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, Jacques.  1992. “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature.  London: Routledge.

Dickens, Charles.  1854.  “To Working Men” Household Words 7 October.

Hensley, Nathan.  2012.  “Allegories of the Contemporary” Novel 45:2.

Kornbluh, Anna.  2015.  “The Realist Blueprint,” Henry James Review 36.

Levine, Caroline.  2015.  Forms.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McCarthy, Tom.  2011.  “Interview with Tom McCarthy” The White Review 1.  http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-tom-mccarthy-2/

McNulty, Tracy.  2014. Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Ranciere, Jacques.  2006.  The Politics of Aesthetics London: Bloomsbury.

–––. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury.

Stanford Friedman, Susan.  2013.  Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes

[1] I mean this claim with respect to critical reception, and to these novels’ manifest interest in organizations and constructions, but I also mean it more pointedly in Jacques Derrida’s (1992, 72) sense of a literature of institution, “which consists in…producing discursive forms, works and event sin which the very possibility of a fundamental constitution is at least fictionally contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precariousness.”

[2] Agamben (1998, 59) belongs to an arc along which I would also situate not only Foucault and Judith Butler, but also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and “the new materialisms.”  For helpful overviews of aspects of these trends in critical theory, see Brennan (2007) Dean (2009).

[3] Hensley (2012) makes robust use of Arrighi in an essay making similar transtemporal comparison that I found inspirational here.

[4] For the Jewish and psychoanalytic origins of this concept of law as enabling constraint, in contrast to a prevailing Pauline view of law as tyrannical letter, see McNulty (2014).

[5] I argue elsewhere (Kornbluh 2015) for this understanding of realism, rooted in its affinities with architecture, but that is only a different repetition of the thought between Bleak House and Remainder.  Also note McCarthy’s (2011) insistence that “realism is a construction…it’s about the constructedness of the natural and how everything that we take to be natural is in fact artificial.  Nineteenth-century realists knew what they were doing was a convention.  To lose sight of that is catastrophic.  It’s crazy.”

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP, 2014) and is currently completing a manuscript The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space.

 

by Carolyn Betensky

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

In Fire in the Ashes:  Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, Jonathan Kozol recounts a scene that took place repeatedly in New York in the mid-1980s:   theatergoers exiting the Broadway musical Les Misérables kept being solicited for money by groups of children from a nearby homeless shelter that was notorious for its squalid conditions.   The NYPD did their best to chase the children away, but eventually the theater owners and other businesses adopted more elaborate measures to keep the groups apart – including hiring other homeless people to “cleanse” the theater district (2012; 3-6).

Beyond its presentation of the theatergoers’ exquisitely ironic plight – they had just finished being moved by the trials of nineteenth-century Parisian street urchins when they were forced to contend with the demands of flesh-and-blood poor children — Kozol’s anecdote offers us an especially vivid tableau of contrasts:  the rich (with money to spend on entertainment) and the poor (whose basic needs are not being met), the genteel and the unruly, the happy few and the miserable.  In many respects, his tableau replicates the troping of social problems in nineteenth-century novels (including Hugo’s).  Victorian readers would have been familiar with every element in it — from the high irony and the contrasts, to the presumed obliviousness of the well-heeled theatergoers, to the banding together of the business owners, to the calling in of the authorities.  They would even have been familiar with its representation of art’s failure to elicit sympathy for the poor within a work that aimed, itself, to elicit such sympathy.

We produce, learn, adapt, repeat, and perpetuate ways not to have to think or to act consistently, from one context to the next.  New York’s “stop and frisk policy,” which regularly subjected minorities to arbitrary humiliation and abuse in the name of public safety, was considered reasonable until very recently, not only by the Bloomberg mayoral administration but also by many white people who felt “safer” because of it.  The Black Lives Matter movement has had to insist on the value of black lives, as opposed to “all” lives, because black lives have not registered as valuable, in the manner of “all” lives, to the white majority.  When I taught at a large, private, urban university, all of the food court workers in the student union building and all of their student clientele were in their late teens and twenties; strikingly, and yet somehow invisibly, all of the food servers were black, and most of the students were white.  Closer to home, most of the universities I know of, including my own, rely on the labor of adjunct professors whose names we never learn because they are not “really” our colleagues.

We are incredibly good at not knowing what we know, and so were the Victorians.  The same culture that developed and embraced modes for representing inequality and injustice could be horribly blind to its own oppressive practices.  The same Dickens who wrote humanitarian epics wrote deeply racist essays.  The same narrator in Jane Eyre who famously makes common cause with slaves describes Bertha in stock racist terms.  Elizabeth Gaskell undercuts her representation of the suffering working classes in Mary Barton with caveats about the “dumb and inarticulate” masses. There are many, many examples any of us here could cite of Victorian disjointedness – so many that we tend to expect them.  “Blind spots” like these are so normal that they themselves have become easy to ignore.[i]

The book project I’m developing considers the active production and naturalization of such blind spots in Victorian texts.  Unlike historicist analyses that contend that we cannot fault the Victorians for not knowing what we know, I am arguing explicitly that they did know – and did not know – what we both know and do not know.  My purpose, however, is not to fault the Victorians but rather to understand the ways Victorian culture created pathways of non-cognition that enabled them, and us, NOT to have to bring contradictory ideas and feelings into conversation with each other.

Contemporary relational and interpersonal psychoanalysts see “the” self as a compendium of self-states – distinct ways of being, feeling, and understanding that are called up and activated within different sorts of contexts – as opposed to the unitary, essential, continuous “self” of the depth model.[ii]  According to theorists such as the late Stephen Mitchell, Philip Bromberg, and Donnel Stern, who are themselves working in traditions established by Harry Stack Sullivan, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Melanie Klein, dissociation is in some sense a normal state of affairs.  Because different self-states kick in at different moments – depending on what we’re trying to avoid or accomplish, depending on who we’re with and the histories our interpersonal configurations evoke – “we” often don’t experience what “we” experience.  Different self-states get excluded in a process that works much like what Sullivan (1953; 319) called “selective inattention”:  “the classic means by which we do not profit from experience which falls within the areas of our particular handicap.  We don’t have the experience from which we might profit – that is, although it occurs, we never notice what it must mean; in fact we never notice that a good deal of it has occurred at all.”

With some exceptions, the implications of these theories have not been considered beyond the clinic.  Yet it seems to me that the concepts of the self-state and dissociation, understood as normative cultural mechanisms, have much to contribute to our understanding of texts and other cultural practices.  The discontinuity of self-states offers us a way to comprehend the disconnects within texts without explaining them away:  incompatibilities, disconnects, and blind spots may be seen less as contradictions (sutured or not) than as the adaptation of culturally sanctioned ways of not thinking things together.  The blind spots, disconnects, and disjointed thinking we see so clearly in Victorian texts are heritage behaviors that are passed down, pre-approved and systematically naturalized; they are cultural patterns that endorse and enshrine gaps between discordant ways of thinking and thereby keep them from contaminating or challenging each other.

The therapeutic goal of clinicians working with dissociation is to get the patient to “stand in the spaces,” as Bromberg (1998; 274) puts it – to become capable of acknowledging and tolerating these dissonant selves.[iii]  The aim of these clinicians is not to “unify” the selves in some way, in other words; rather, it is to help the patient to bring the conflicting demands and expectations of the different selves to the fore.   More than standing in the spaces between discordant self-states in Victorian novels, my own goal in this project is to note the cultural production of the spaces themselves.   At this early stage, I anticipate writing a metacritical chapter, a chapter on the contributions of form and genre to cultural practices of dissociation, and a chapter on the implications of dissociated self-states for the notion that literature can change “the” reader.

Obviously, this project is unapologetically presentist, as any attempt to differentiate Victorians’ not knowing from our knowing (as in, “the Victorians didn’t think about racism/anti-Semitism/classism/sexism, etc. the way we do now”) serves to help us lie about our own cultural moment in the manner of Michel Foucault’s (1990; 6) “speaker’s benefit.”[iv]  Treating the Victorians as other in this regard suggests that we have achieved mastery over familiar kinds of injustice, a manifestly specious notion.  And further, when twenty-first century scholars insist on a constitutive difference between Victorians’ uninformed or undeveloped sensibilities and our own, we lose track of the cumulative development of a technology that assists us in not knowing what we know.  I would add that the regularity and unguardedness of nineteenth-century inscriptions of racism, misogyny, contempt for the poor, etc. offer twenty-first-century educators abundant opportunities to discuss less visible (to us) dissociative cultural logics in our own midst – if we dare to treat Victorian literature as an occasion for encouraging our students to think critically about their own world.

References

Bromberg, Phillip M. 1998. Standing in the Spaces:  Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation.  Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic Press.

Foucault, Michel.  1990.  The History of Sexuality. Volume 1:  An Introduction.  Translated by Robert Hurley.  New York:  Vintage. Foucault, Michel.

Hacking, Ian. 1995.  Rewriting the Soul:  Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Kozol, Jonathan.  2012.  Fire in the Ashes:  Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America. New York:  Broadway Books.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. 1953. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York:  W.W. Norton.

Notes

[i] Critics have paid abundant attention to these discrepancies – sometimes arguing that they are not in fact discrepancies if considered in historical context, sometimes arguing that what appear to be discrepancies are continuities, etc., etc.  I can’t attend to this point in any detail here but want to acknowledge that apparent contradictions such as these are far from new objects of critical analysis.

[ii] Ironically, nineteenth-century psychologists such as Pierre Janet and William James had developed discontinuous conceptions of the self that, respectively, preceded and rivaled Freud’s depth model.  See Hacking 1995 for a historical account of the rise, fall, and resurgence of psychiatric theories of multiplicity. I’m hoping this study will provide another perspective on the consuming interest in dissociation and dissociative phenomena among nineteenth-century writers more generally.

[iii] “‘Standing in the spaces’ is a shorthand way of describing a person’s relative capacity to make room at any given moment for subjective reality that is not readily containable by the self he experiences as ‘me’ at that moment.’”  Bromberg (1998; 274).

[iv] Foucault writes of the self-serving tendency of post-Victorians/post-Freudians to call out the Victorians for being “repressed,” thereby establishing themselves as “liberated” (1990; 6).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Carolyn Betensky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island.  She is the author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (Virginia UP, 2010), and the co-author and translator of Eugène Sue’s 1843 blockbuster Les Mystères de Paris (Penguin, 2015).

by Matthew Sussman

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

In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” the second of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche argues that we should use history for the sake of “life,” a concept that is obscure but central to his argument.[1] The idea of life is obscure because rather than give it specific positive content—suggested vaguely by words such as “action” (59) and “health” (63)—Nietzsche defines it largely through negation, emphasizing what corrupts or inhibits it. But despite this ambiguity life remains central because it provides the essay’s ultimate moral principle, the summum bonum against which the value of all other things must be measured. If something furthers the interests of life, then it is good, and conversely, that which gets in the way of life must be eliminated. This means that for Nietzsche, methodological questions in the study of history are ultimately moral ones, and disciplinary practices need to be evaluated pragmatically, insofar as they promote these moral ends.

We can see an example of this approach in the way Nietzsche attacks the idea of historical objectivity (88-95). For many of his contemporaries, objectivity was appealing precisely because it called for historical data to be treated in a morally neutral way, unaffected by the subjective prejudices of the historian. But, according to Nietzsche, this denial of moral interest itself expresses a norm of “justice” (88) that prohibits the historian from distinguishing between the meaningful and the trivial. Hence, a certain amount of injustice to the historical record is required if historians are to avoid the pitfalls of a bland and morally deficient antiquarianism that reduces every past event to a meaningless expression of flux. As in other works, Nietzsche calls for the revaluation of values not as an attack on the idea of value per se but rather to force us to ask what our ultimate values are and whether our methods serve them.

There, I think, lies the lesson of Nietzsche’s essay for contemporary literary criticism. In scientific endeavors, objectivity will always be an epistemic virtue because the basic purpose of such disciplines is to distinguish opinion from fact. What we do with the facts is a matter of opinion, but the need for facts remains. However, humanistic disciplines such as literary studies are not quite so obligated. For one, the status of a fact in our discipline is much more ontologically doubtful and the utility of facts once we know them is also limited. For example, the kind of historical knowledge that Nietzsche alludes to may enrich our reading of a text, but that sort of enrichment is just one interpretive possibility among many, a possibility whose hegemony Nietzsche helps us question. Furthermore, as Jesse Rosenthal suggests in his contribution to this symposium, the kind of historical record or tradition produced by literary critics—and in this way we resemble philosophers—is for the most part an invented one, determined less by material circumstances than by atemporal conventions of intersubjective agreement. These conventions may have a basis in historical reality, but their ultimate goal is to float free from that reality, allowing us to involve ourselves and our subjects in “conversations” that are consciously, often quite deliberately, unrestricted by the circumstances of time or place.

The title of Nietzsche’s essay advances this view. The meditation is untimely not simply because it goes against the grain of its period, but because it does so by reviving a Hellenic moral framework over two thousand years old whose bearing on the present is a matter of opinion: “What I mean by this—and it is all I mean—is that the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes…provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honour and our spur” (103). Unlike material history, which is successful only insofar as it conforms to reality, aesthetic or intellectual history seeks to create a parallel reality whose greatest virtue may be its very freedom from excessive facticity. In this light, it is helpful to remember that one of Nietzsche’s greatest contributions to culture—his distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus—was criticized when it first appeared for lacking a credible basis in the texts and culture from which Nietzsche purported to draw it. A more “objective” nineteenth-century historian might never have had Nietzsche’s insight—or, as we may more accurately say, have invented his compelling idea.

Of course, there are many risks associated with an outright denial of historicist values, and Nietzsche carefully argues that knowledge of the historical origins of our values is imperative if we are to assume the superior perspective that is necessary for intellectual and artistic freedom (102-3). However, this concession still suggests that the preeminent value in knowing our history is the subsequent ability to set it aside—as long as we remain creative enough to substitute some other criterion of value in its place, and bold enough to convince others of its merit.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). This edition is hereafter cited parenthetically.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Matthew Sussman is lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia.  His articles have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Studies in English Literature, Victorian Studies, and Arizona Quarterly.

 

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 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).