[Literature] Charles Dickens: Bleak House #6/501

Inasmuch as Esther’s persistently cheery “jingling about with [her] basket of keys” (p. 578) can be as exasperating as her coyness, the response she solicits most directly‍—“Of course, you are worthy (you silly goose)”‍—has at least one reforming effect: it confirms that Esther is “Somebody” (p. 409) and thereby corrects the original negation from which she never fully recovers. Such a process of emendation obtains in the structure of her narrative as well. “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (p. 30), Esther begins, emphasizing the impediments under which she labors to tell her story‍—even though, having begun to write it seven years after the events she describes, Esther has command of this story. Giving her the advantage of knowing “now” what “I did not [know] then” (p. 396), the retrospective perspective reveals that Esther has gained a measure of self-knowledge as well: she is knowing enough “now” to know she was not knowing enough “then.”

If the revisions built into Esther’s narrative make reading it a less than straightforward enterprise, this narrative presents a further problem from the outset. For, at the same time that Esther exhibits the extreme self-consciousness that cripples her, she also demonstrates a curious meta-consciousness of having a narrative companion as she sets out to write “my portion of these pages.” Given the third-person narrator’s preternatural awareness of Esther‍—he can move from scene to scene “while Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes” (p. 92)‍—it is tempting to imagine Dickens imagining the two narrators consciously collaborating in producing their distinct contributions to the book. One of the mysteries of Dickens, though, is how unfathomable his creative processes were and are. Writing in silence, behind closed doors, he revealed precious little about his imaginative life. What we have are its effects, and in Bleak Housethe effect of the presence of the two narrators is disconcerting. Both, to be sure, exhibit Dickens’s focus on the range and the limitations of vision and knowledge; together, they also further the characteristically Victorian project of studying the signs of the times. In Bleak House, though, Dickens pursues the project in an arrestingly new way, juxtaposing the perspectives of the two narrators whose chapters alternate in no regular or predictable pattern. For the original readers of Bleak House,this meant that the discontinuity inherent in the experience of reading a novel in monthly numbers was heightened by the discontinuities embedded within the monthly installments of this serial. Even now, though, the novel that must be read “by halves” keeps us “oscillating” in a “troubled state of mind” (p. 517) that comes of alternating between two minds throughout the entirety of the book.

Literally binocular, Bleak Houseinculcates a kind of double vision in the reader, who also confronts the highly concentrated double-ness of Dickens’s style page after page. Puns abound in this novel and rebound in several directions at once. Thus, when John Jarndyce calls the will in the Chancery suit “ ‘a dead letter’ ” (p. 105), this pun, like so many others in Bleak House,sets off a chain of biblical and legal associations, but as the narrative moves forward, playing off this scriptural conceit, as it were, it also circles back to the literal meaninglessness of “ ’dead letter,‘ ” which, in the end, amounts to what it was in the beginning: a moot point. Indeed, even when Dickens offers respite from the “great wilderness of London” (p. 621) and, focusing on Lincoln’s Inn Fields on a “very quiet night,” gives us a scene that is “ethereal,” bathed in a “pale effulgence,” with sounds of the city “softened,” “pass[ing] … tranquilly away,” there comes a jolt “where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stops” (p. 622). Chancery, indeed, “drones … on” (p. 20) inconclusively “ ’We are really spinning along’ ” (p. 651),Richard declares.

Such instances of word-play‍—of which there are a great, great many in BleakHouse‍—are not merely witty. They are consistent with the wit that animates much of Dickens’s writing and especially his writing in Bleak House.“Wit … may be considered a kind of discordia concors,”observed Samuel Johnson, “a combination of dissimilar images, or a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”⁵Dickens had this startling capacity, this illuminating faculty: “I think it is my infirmity to fancy or perceive relations which are not apparent generally” (quoted in Ford, Dickens and His Readers,p. 144), he wrote.