The Rhymical and the Rhetorical

There are certain comedy tropes that I’ve acquired over the years, and I love it when I happen upon a passage in a course reading that reminds me of one. Take the early scene in Bleak House in which Jarndyce is so distressed by Esther kissing his hand that she thinks he’s going to jump out the window. Does it remind you of Major Major climbing out the window? Jarndyce hates gratitude as much as Major Major hates visitors. Or how about Mr. Chadband’s Apophatic inquiry into the nature of a Terewth: “Is it deception? Is it suppression? Is it reservation? No, my friends, it is neither of these.” Compare this with Lenny Bruce’s iconic routine of “Religions, Inc.” in which “the greatest holy roller of them all” adopts a similar approach to locating the heavenly land: “It’s not in the cheap neighborhood bar! It’s not in the burlesque house! It’s not in Dreamland!” Fortunately there’s no Mrs. Snagsby in the audience to interfere with their its education by fainting, but you’ll have to listen to the DVD to find out where the heavenly land is—if you want I’ll burn one for you. I call these type of recurrences intertextual rhyming.

I also loved Dr. Garrett’s response to my observation about Bleak House. As you may recall, I pointed out that Dickens uses the snooping, sleuthing, and schnorring to critique the characters’ obliviousness to the poverty around them. Our professor said that, although that idea is basic to the novel—I wasn’t sure if I liked that part—most people these days don’t make that connection. After I stopped gloating, it occurred to me that this is what reader response criticism is all about. Reader response theory posits that most if not all good novels have narrative gaps. As a result, they address two categories of readers: the one who reads the story unmindful of the gaps and the one who reads it by filling in the gaps. The first audience reads the narrator’s story and the second audience reads the author’s story.

Applying rhetorical theory to Bleak House, you might say that those who read the novel as a mystery comprise the narrators’ audience, and those who make the connection between the sleuths and snoopers and Tom-all-Aone’s are reading Dickens’ novel. But there are some exceptions to this rule. For instance, in the 6th paragraph of Chapter 16 the omniscient narrator makes this connection for us in the form of two rhetorical questions. (Curiously, the second question has an exclamation mark instead of a question mark. Is this intentional?) As you know, during class Dr. Garrett pointed this passage out as an example of the novel themanizing its own practice. But Dickens handles the intrusion artfully, without buttonholing us the way that Gaskell does.