Making Connections

In Wilde’s letter to the editor reprinted on page xxiii of the introduction, he suggests that Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry are incomplete because they fail to strike a balance between indulgence and restraint. At least that’s what our text’s editor gleans from the author’s words. Taking this reading a step further, you might say that the novel allegorizes these impulses, with Basil representing indulgence, Lord Henry restraint, and Dorian the tension between the two extremes. It’s easy for us to forget that Dorian wrestles with this conflict because his efforts are so overshadowed by his losing record and the ugliness of his acts.

You could also apply a similar reading to Bleak House. In this case, Jarndyce, Woodcourt, and Esther also lack a balance between indulgence and restraint. (Although critics have characterized the binary in terms of desire and selflessness, I believe they derive from the same basic impulse.) Jarndyce gives care and protection to his wards, but he will not indulge himself by accepting gratitude. Woodcourt is heroic and generous in deed, but after seven years of marriage he infantilizes Esther and treats her like a domestic. Esther, on the other hand, begins as self-effacing, and like Jarndyce she runs from compliments—not literally like he does but by reflecting the compliment back onto the sender. But Esther at least tries to evolve; it’s just that her efforts are blunted by the men in her life. When she accepts Jarndyce’s proposal, she puts her arms around him and gives him a kiss, but he just stands there like a stone wall. Although she seems to concede defeat at the end, who knows what lies beyond that curious hyphen. 

The point I want to make is that it’s important for givers to accept gratitude for their acts. The process isn’t complete until the receivers express their thankful feelings and the givers accept them. Giving and receiving—whether in the form of material objects or love—is an organic process. It’s essential to the development of a civilized society—in contrast to the decaying world that Dickens portrays—but each link in the evolutionary chain must be fully formed before it can grow. The same logic applies to indulgence and restraint. Henry tells Dorian—in order to egg him on—that “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” (19). But this only leads to a life of indulgence, as Dorian shows. Temptation is part of the life force. It should not be replaced by restraint but informed by it. This also holds true for the relationship between life and art, the parallel theme of the novel. Their connection is a symbiotic one. Each cannot prosper without the other. It’s not an either-or question of whether life imitates art or art imitates life; they nurture each other. 

You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie

There’s a thread running from Carlyle to Dickens to Foucault that expresses their "bleak" views on charities and the people who staff them. In Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle carps about what he calls a “blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate Philanthropism” and “much self-laudation” that’s prevalent among the minority of the privileged citizens who even think about the poor. These practitioners try to cure poverty “by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the end render cure hopeless.” As for the charitable institutions themselves—those “universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies”—they are a “perpetual affliction.” Worse than the cholera fever, they are a “Benevolent-Platform Fever.”

In Bleak House (1852) Dickens puts a face on Carlyle’s rhetoric through the figures of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle. He might have alternatively named them Mrs. Outside and Mrs. Inside, for the one invests her energies in foreign campaigns and the other in the domestic front. Mrs. Jellyby works to benefit the inhabitants of Borrioboola-Gha. Although we don’t know what she intends to accomplish in this African colony, her feverish letter-writing has consumed nearly all her time and enough stationary to fell half of Essex Forest. The only other tangible result of her efforts is the king’s decision to trade his people for rum. Mrs. Jellyby should have written his majesty a letter on the dangers of drinking alone.  

The utilitarianism that Carlyle despises is even more perfectly depicted in Mrs. Pardiggle. Taking advantage of her closer physical proximity to her area of operations, she “pounces upon the poor, and applies benevolence like a strait-waist-coat.” Judging from the catcalls she collects while making her rounds, her supposed beneficiaries agree with Carlyle. In fact, the main benefits appear to accrue herself. As she boasts to Esther, “The excitement does me good.” However, Esther sees through her from the getgo. As soon as they enter the brickmaker’s house, Esther notices her “business-like and systematic” style, and she later calls her work “charity by wholesale.” The only material thing that Pardiggle leaves in her wake, other than a dead baby or two, is a useless book that no one in the family can read even if they wanted to. .

Writing over a century after Carlyle and Dickens, in his chapter on panopticism Foucault discusses the charity organizations in Paris during the July Monarchy (1830-1848). We see the martial spirit portrayed in Dickens echoed in how the parishes divided the city into geographic units and then allocated their manpower accordingly. Like Mrs. Pardiggle, the organization members made household calls on individual families. But Foucault is less interested in what the charities gave out than in what they took in. They collected knowledge on such things as the "stability of lodging;  knowledge of prayers; attendance at sacraments; knowledge of a trade, morality; and  . . . [personal] behavior.” The information facilitated the extension of the monarch’s power, through the police “to the non-disciplinary spaces” beyond the reach of the “enclosed institutions” (workshops, armies, schools). It’s not clear to me just how this information was transferred from the parish organizations to the police. Were the charities a part of the government?

But based on things that Foucault says elsewhere, the mere of recognition of being observed has a controlling effect. Across the Channel, Mrs. Pardiggle's subjects know—and resent—that she observes them. What's more, the "exciting contest" she has with one of her peers shows that she not only gathers data but quantifies it. Is this one of Foucault's "infinite minute web of panoptic techniques"? I think for that to be true it would have to demonstrate some sort of extra-judicial power. What about George when he refuses a lawyer because he'd rather face the hangman than his fellow citizens believing that he got off by a clever legal maneuver? Maybe this shows how discipline extends to those gaps that the law doesn't reach. Gee, if I can think of enough of these examples to fill a seven-page paper, it will end my misery. 

Watch Your Step and Hold Your Breath

Thanks for the link, Jane. And if anybody wants to get a visual of the London Streets go to this website: http://charlesdickenspage.com. Then click on the "Dickens' London" link on the left side of the page, and scroll down to the "Old London Street Scenes" video. Although the film was shot in 1900,  the streets were much different during Dickens' day. Note the proliferation of horse manure in the streets and that the people don't even bother to look down as they zig zag across them. Based on 19th century reports, it's been calculated that during Dickens' day the streets of London collected 40,000 tons of manure annually, mostly from horses but also from cattle and sheep on their way to the meat markets. Where did all these animal droppings go? It was eventually pulverized into dust. If you recall the references to the dust in Tulkinghorn's office (see Chapter 25 and especially the beginning of  Chapter 22), he seems to have taken in one ton of it himself. Hold your breath, Mr. T. That's poop dust in your air.

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. 

Some Thoughts on de Certeau, Benjamin, and Composition Theory

After reading Benjamin I felt the need to put him in context—that’s code for I couldn’t understand him—so I searched iTunes and found an informative discussion of him on Stanford University’s Entitled Opinions podcast. The episode’s guest commentator, a professor of German Studies and literary theory at UC Berkley, said that in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin says that film has great potential as a progressive medium because Chaplin empowers the common man more than Picasso does. I thought back to de Certeau’s allusion to Chaplin’s expanded use of his cane and of how frustrated I was by this example—which  I now realize isn’t an example of subverting the urban planner but an analogy of it, because it demonstrates how people can use objects beyond the limits of what their creators intended. And then, as I was rereading Benjamin, it flashed on me that street dancing subverts the designs of urban planners. Sidewalks exist to facilitate people’s access to the arcade. Street dancing represents a subcultural form of entertainment that impedes this, both in the sense that spectators are delayed from their bourgeoisie activities and others are inconvenienced, forced to walk around the crowd or into the street. Thus reading Benjamin helped me to interrogate de Certeau.

I made another connection from Benjamin. His binary between the decorator and the builder strikes me as analogous to the current debate in the schools between the “catch” and the “taught” methods of writing instruction. Briefly put, the catch method emphasizes content. Students are given assignments on topics that interest them and that allow them to be creative. The taught method stresses form. Students learn how to build the sentences that will become the containers for their ideas.* The reason that the taught method comports with Benjamin is that it privileges the rhetorical aspects of writing over the self-expressive. Just as painting outgrows art with the appearance of the panorama, clear and logical writing engages a broader audience. It’s expansive rather than inclusive, universal rather than cultish. As a Marxist, Benjamin’s interest in art centered on its ability to congeal the masses. I don’t know if the caught/taught debate breaks along political lines, but it seems to me that the taught method is more democratizing. 

*For those interested in reading an award-winning article on this controversy, I recommend “The Writing Revolution” by Peg Tye in the The Atlantic. It’s available on the web

How the Dickens Should I Read Dickens?

According to the lecture notes of Vladimir Nabokov, who taught European literature at Wellesley and Stanford during the 1950s, many of the social conditions depicted in Bleak House date back to the 1820s and 1830s, and had already been reformed by 1852 when the novel was published. But Nabokov overstates his case. Although parliament passed the Legal Reform Act in 1852, it wasn’t until the legal act of 1875 that the country’s judicial system was truly modernized. And the first Public Health Act of 1848 was not properly carried out in the municipalities until twenty years later. Nevertheless, these nominal pieces of legislation furnish Nabokov with a convenient opportunity to rail against scholars who read literary works for their sociological or political impact. Such readers, Nabokov scoffs, are “immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature” (64) and will never experience the “telltale tingle between the shoulder blades,” for to Nabokov the only way to read literature is “with your back” (70). Thus he counsels us to disregard the anachronisms of Dickens’ novel and celebrate its structure, style, imagery, and “verbal magic” (70).

Nabokov’s sentiments capture the sin qua non of the New Criticism, which was in vogue during the period that he wrote. As rulers of the roost in college English departments, the New Critics had little patience for scholars whose methods foregrounded a leveling approach to literature. But the hermeneutic winds would soon whisk the New Critics away and replace them with Post-Structuralists, Deconstructionists, and New Historicists, among others. The New Historicists pose a particularly interesting challenge to Nabokov’s aesthetics. By maintaining that historical literary texts can function as events, and the converse argument that the influence of historical events can be traced to literary texts, New Historicism privileges an expanded agency for literature as a social force. Thus Jerome McGann argues that readings displaced from their contemporaneous external significance do not even qualify as “critical operations” (McGann’s emphasis). “Rather,” he asserts, “they are vehicles for recapitulating and objectifying the reader's particular ideological commitments” (54-55).

McGann’s stinging rebuke to Nabokov’s stinging assertion deconstructs one of my most treasured moments as an undergraduate. It should come as no surprise to you that I went to college during the heyday of the New Criticism. In an English lit survey course I took, the instructor had just given his interpretation of an Old English poem, the title of which I have long forgotten. I raised my hand and gave a different interpretation. “Why, I never thought of that!” he replied. I was beaming. Okay, he was only a TA but he was smart. I guess if I were smart I’d remember the name of that poem and then determine its contemporaneous external significance.

But McGann also says something else not as controversial but truly memorable. The benefit of the great works, he suggests, is that they present us with ideological perspectives different from our own. This is why we “who are different, can learn from them.” It seems to me that even the “purest” of readers would agree with McGann, with the possible exception of a certain Russian author/critic.

Works Cited 

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. 

McGann, Jerome. "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner." 

Smith, Carlyle, and Mumford (and me)

“Leave the world alone; it can manage itself.” No, this is not a cry heard from the floor of St. Stephens during Carlyle’s day; it’s the mantra of the Laissez Faire Club of our day. The idea is the legacy of Adam Smith, or rather, the perceived legacy, because Smith never would have said those words. Smith understood that the irresponsible actions of a few could endanger the welfare of the many. As he wrote in Wealth of Nations,

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments.

Thus Smith never intended for laissez faire as an absolute doctrine. His purpose was to liberate the market from over three centuries of stifling mercantilist policies. This was a reasonable goal in Smith’s day, but, as Carlyle recognizes in this week’s excerpt from Past and Present, the “principle of Let alone (Carlyle’s emphasis) is no longer possible” in Europe, least of all in England. Yet the upper class sees the doctrine as a license for “misgovernment” and “no-government,” while the lower class goes hungry and starves.

The Sage of Chelsea, however, had few words of encouragement for the Chartists. The movement believed that the path to improved working conditions lay through the electorate; hence, the six-point charter and its call for procedural reforms like universal suffrage (for men) and a secret ballot. Yet Carlyle dismisses democracy as a zero sum game. The only thing it accomplishes is the replacement of one group of incompetent leaders for another. Throughout history, he argues, the meaningful “work was done” not by “loud voting and debating of many, but by wise ordering and insight of a few.” To Carlyle the most important right is the “right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser.” The fact that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time may have been reason enough for President Lincoln to have faith in democracy, but his contemporary across the pond wanted a higher batting average.

Writing with the benefit of nearly 100 years of insight, Mumford’s rhetoric lacks the power of Carlyle’s, but it shows a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. Mumford understands that those who reap the greatest benefits under a laissez faire economy will, if left to their own devices, engage in trade practices that deny opportunity that they had to others. Mumford saw this process at work in America under the Homestead Act. Although the act doled out 160-acre tracts to one and all, “gross social inequalities” awaited the next generation of farmers, in the form of land monopolies and inherited fortunes. Thus to keep the playing field even government must pass laws and monitor the market, otherwise political equality is a hollow concept.

During the decade that Mumford wrote, the U.S. government under FDR enacted many reforms designed to redress the excesses that led to the Great Depression. The result was  three postwar decades of unparalleled prosperity where income gains were widely shared across the population, notwithstanding blacks and women. But during the last three decades nearly all the gains have accrued to the very rich, so much so that today one percent of Americans own 42 percent of the wealth, up from 22 percent in 1980. Although America’s institutions are as democratic as ever, it’s common knowledge—except maybe to the blokes who watch Fox News—that big money has hijacked the American political system. 

You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine: Engels and Gaskell

The traditional view of the American Progressive movement (1900-20) is that it represented the victory of the will of the people over elitist business interests. But in the 1960s, while I was an undergraduate majoring in history, this view was challenged by the New Left historians. William Appleman Williams and others showed that many of the corporate titans who were thought to have opposed the movement were actually fanning the flames behind the scenes. Their motive? To shore up their profits by eliminating the fly-by-night competitors who undercut them in the market. They knew that having to pay higher wages and give shorter hours would force the smaller outfits out of business. Then, once the captains of Industry controlled the market, they could jack up their prices again. So picture my surprise upon reading that Engels had described the same dynamic at work in England. As our text shows, in an 1885 Commonweal article, which was reprinted in the preface of the 1892 British edition of his book, Engels writes that British labor reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century were the capitalists’ way of  “crush[ing] all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors” (314).

I was not as surprised to see that Engels and Gaskell have similar accounts of the horrid living conditions of Manchester’s working class. As the epicenter of the British industrial revolution, Manchester evidenced many of its worst horrors. Engels and Gaskell drew on their personal observations and probably read the same contemporary texts. The editor of our Mary Barton edition assumes that Gaskell read Peter Gaskell’s The Manufacturing Population of England, and it’s known that Engels read this book, a fact that’s verified by the similarity between his and Gaskell’s text. Keith Welsh notes that the living conditions Engels witnessed were so repulsive that he could not bring himself to place people in his descriptions (27). But Gaskell has no such inhibitions. The Davenports live next to a pigsty, in a dark cellar room with a fetid smell so bad it could knock a man down, and there little children roll around on a wet brick floor soaked in filthy moisture from the feces-laden street.

But Engels and Gaskell differ in their view of working class family life. Commensurate with Peter Gaskell’s study, Engels pictures it as dysfunctional. The husbands, in a desperate attempt to relieve the mind-numbing monotony of their jobs, turned to drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. Those unable to find employment are emasculated by their working wives and children who become the family breadwinners. With Gaskell, however, the family continues to be the cornerstone of working people’s lives, regardless of whether or not they are employed. Barton, Wilson, and Davenport never suffer any diminution in their devotion to their families or change in their patriarchal status.

It’s true that Engels and Gaskell agree that the workingmen of Manchester had strong communal bonds. But while this idea is consistent with Gaskell, it’s incongruous with Engel. It seems to me that the same moral decay that led to the breakdown of family life should have also fractured working class solidarity. But when Engels wrote the Commonweal article, he knew that history had judged him as overestimating the class consciousness of the workingmen, since they never rose up in a victorious clash with the capitalists. It’s possible that the role of the captains of industry in the reform movement may have been Engel’s way of saving face, because it implies that the only thing he miscalculated was the extent of the capitalists’ deviousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s prognosis, on the other hand (How could someone write about such miserable conditions without dispensing some hope?) was influenced by her deep Christian values. Where Engels puts his faith in a Marxist moment, if you will—although in 1845 Das Kapital had yet to be written—Elizabeth Gaskell anticipates that the two sides will achieve a moment closer to the 1960ish Kumbaya variety.  

 (1) Welsh, Keith Edward. Edmund Burke, Friedrich Engels, and Ideas of Community in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Poetry. Dissertation, U.M.I.: Ann Arbor, 1988. Google Search. 

Carlyle's Web

In “Signs of the Times” Carlyle targets Millites and Millenarians, nominally ideological opposites who close ranks in their predilection for prophesy. The Millenarians foresee the Second Coming of Christ while the Millites anticipate the first coming of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But since the repeal of the Test Acts, the “rage of prophecy” has gone viral and is sweeping the land. Newspapers and periodicals print “the most lugubrious predictions” on a daily basis. But don’t worry, Carlyle says, Old England has survived many “frenzies and Panics” in the past. Over a century has “mostly passed without loss of men’s lives,” notwithstanding . . . ahem, “much other loss than that of reason.”

The Sage of Chelsea counsels, however, that things will become clearer if, “instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, [we] look calmly around us.” Perhaps then people will see that the real threat comes from the drift of the people’s inner spirit, a sure sign that the Mechanistic has overtaken the Dynamic as society’s driving force. It’s not that Carlyle is a Luddite; he just thinks that the Mechanistic has gone beyond the tipping point, and that there should be a balance between the two countervailing ethics. This is not unlike what Simmel advocates some 80 years later in his objective/subjective dichotomy. But by couching his binary in geographic determinism, Simmel adds a Lockean twist that would have made Carlyle cringe. Carlyle’s main idea is that we have the power to shape our destiny, and he uses every bit of his inimitable style and crushing passion to argue this. 

As Carlyle sees it, the core of the problem is that the machine has appropriated just about every corner of Victorian life—from science to literature to politics— through the emergence of royal societies, philosophic institutes, scientific boards, and scores of other leveling institutions governed by the dictate that “two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind.” What’s more, public opinion watches over the people like a policeman, nipping in the bud whatever Newton or Mozart may have been spontaneously geminating in the moors. True, political freedom has been won, but at the cost of more precious moral freedom. Witness the failure of democracy to produce any great leaders or poets. The age has gone from Burghley to Castlereagh, from Shakespeare to Beau Brummel. Genius has actually fared better under the sting of tyranny than under the wings of democracy.

Girding Carlyle’s argument is, of course, the romantic view that genius emanates from what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “divine spark.” The modern view, on the other hand, demystifies genius. As Brooks wrote in a 2009 column, given the right circumstances, someone with above average talent and the drive to succeed and become a genius (1). Brooks cites a recent book that divulges that as a youth Mozart was only a “good musician” and “he would not even stand out among today’s top child-performers.” But Mozart had the same thing that Tiger Woods had, a father to mentor him and the ability to practice for long hours. They are geniuses not because of who they are but of what they do.

Thus in Brooks’ view, the man whose name Carlyle puns with the term Millite, his friend John Stuart Mill, is relevant today and Carlyle is passé. But if I had to choose one of them to be stranded on a deserted island with, I’d take the cranky iconoclast any day.

1. Brooks, David. “Genius—The Modern  View.” NY Times. 29 April, 2009.

Country Slights

Frankly, I’ve always felt that the reason Wordsworth gives in the Lyrical Ballads for choosing subjects of a “low and rustic life” is a bit condescending. He says that it’s easier for him to “contemplate” these feelings because they “co-exist in a state of greater simplicity.” But it seems to me that, just because country folk forgo the hustle and bustle of city life, they don't necessarily escape the emotional ambivalences that define the human condition. (If this be error, and upon me proved, please forward my mail to the High Sierras.) I’m reminded of the verse of an earlier poet, who, in contemplating a country churchyard, writes, “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid/Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;/Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,/Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.” It's possible that Wordsworth would have found it as difficult to read the emotions of Gray’s rural subjects as he did to read the strained language of Gray’s poems.

Writing over 100 years following the Lyrics, Simmel can relate to Wordsworth's valorization of the country condition, although he unearths some redeeming qualities about city life, namely the nurturing of the intellect. He argues that the metropolis bombards the senses with vastly more stimuli. This has several consequences, but the one that intrigues Simmel (and me) the most is the blasé attitude. This mental state is caused by the nervous system shutting down in reaction to the overload of the senses, like a sort of safety valve. The blasé attitude is manifest in the city dwellers’ habitual reserve in their interpersonal relations and in their reliance on price in assessing the value of material objects. However, current research shows that people placed in situations of sensory deprivation, such as prisoners in solitary confinement, compensate by developing hypersensitivity to the most minimal stimuli.[1] I find Simmel's rigid environmental determinism a little hard to swallow. I wonder what Wordsworth would say about Simmel's social theory. He might like the idea that rural people become much more emotionally engaged.   

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[1] Grassian Stuart. “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement.” Wash. UJL.( 2006): 345-46. Google Scholar.