Imagine what Dickens would have done with the smoke...
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"Salvation for the former, perdition for the latter." A Dickensian trademark…I automatically think of Oliver Twist, with the good characters all finding happiness, marriage, wealth, combinations thereof while the evil characters find death or total loss of power. The Dickens novel also usually features a (ultimately) good character who suffers a noble death…Lady Dedlock and, to the degree he is good, Richard have analogues in Nancy, Smike, and Dora Copperfield. Increased pathos makes for increased melodrama, especially when the death is showy or needless.
Dickens meant for his characters and conflicts to be symbolic, but his artistry allowed him to proceed without driving the point in our faces. My immediate reaction is that Dickens would have taken Paul Haggis's material for Crash and made it an inarguable masterpiece by playing up the characters just so and softening the sledgehammer approach to racism. Bleak House, and even I'm getting sick of saying it by now, is a hugely ambitious novel—five or ten Crashes in one—but Dickens doesn't say he is writing about injustice and the worst of the world. Instead, he dryly describes religious meetings and conferences among lawyers, or has Esther weep a little over some unfortunate people once we've gotten used to her personality. The subtlety is part of why I want to pick up Bleak House again in the near future. It lets the themes go down easy while feeding us some thought. However, how can Nabokov skirt around his denial of the social and political aspects of the book if he admits the symbolism? His out is to claim they symbols are for "universal forces," which is the truth…the aspects of our nature Dickens wants us to think about are as old as civilization and will not go away. I do not want to deny, though, that these forces were not linked to certain institutions which carry on in some way, shape, or form today: civil courts, corporate charities, ultra-organized evangelicalism, watered-down electoral politics, etc.
Bleak House has three major plotlines or themes which Dickens "[juggles]…keeping them in a state of coherent unity, maintaining these three balloons in the air without getting their strings snarled."
Bleak House rewards those who study narrative, not just for the narration itself (again, an incredible discussion which will be forthcoming) but for how the three major themes switch back and forth. Very few actual events link up the stories, but every character, including thirty or so children by Nabokov's estimate, slide in and out of the narratives of Chancery, the plight of the young, and the murder mystery. Trollope in his grand meta-narrative would often forget details about his characters halfway through a novel. That Dickens keeps everyone in play and consistent in backstory and behavior is an extraordinary feat.
Two singular cases: Rachael and Hawdon. Nabokov admits that in the diagram he drew for his students showing the connections between characters, Plot, and Theme, he left out two people through either ignorance or a failure to interpret a proper place for them. Among the frauds and hypocrites, Rachael Chadaband is one of the largest, although unlike many her actions sew a seed of good. Rachael is the ultra-religious nurse who tends to Esther until her school days. She knows about Esther's parentage but never says anything, and her joining in the general condemnation of illicit relations prompts Lady Dedlock to keep the secret which eventually kills her. Rachael, in the significant part of narrative time happening off-page, marries the pompous Reverend Chadaband and becomes his accomplice in bombastic, needless religious activity. Rachael is still typical of some of today's more outspoken conservative evangelicals, who usually come across as more letter than spirit and are distasteful, but her constant imprimaturs to Esther to be a good person help forge her character into the selfless, life-giving heroine she is. Captain Hawdon, who dies before anyone can speak to him in the story, is not just one of the only friends Jo has, but Esther's father due to his long-ago love affair with Lady Dedlock. Interestingly enough, Krook, Guppy, and the other Chancery figures refer to Hawdon—who in his older age becomes an ultra-reclusive but excellent law copyist—as Nemo. Esther is thus the daughter of no one, of no man at the least. She is free to forge an identity for herself not connected to anyone else…and as Chancery shows, having connections is enough to land you in worlds of unhappy trouble.
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Dickens is always an artist, but for the first plot he is also an enchanter, the second plot a crusader, and the third plot a clever storyteller. Nabokov uses the right words. From the very first page and the evocative description of Chancery's fog, Dickens uses this part of the novel to create its most poetic and memorable portions. Miss Flite and her birds, Krook, his warehouse, and his death, the swirling mass of words whenever law activities are referenced…or the fog stirs up again. The second plot is where Dickens unleashes his anger, pointing to the way things should be by documenting the way things are. Our human flaws and worse institutions continually fail but deal their worst blows to the novel's children. Chancery destroys Richard and Ada, religion and the law put down Jo, the Jellybys, Pardiggles, and bricklaying families are stunted by philanthropy, and that devilish self-proclaimed child Horace Skimpole hurts the vast majority of those he comes across. The third plot is great, compact storytelling, an Agatha Christie or P.D. James murder mystery in half the time, with suitable complexities, and no energy lost despite being surrounded by the other two plots. Only an artist could excel in such a manner.
The next blog entries will move from theme to Structure and Style, form, imagery, and verbal magic. Just a preview J
Chancery's power to drive those who cross it insane. Chancery is the locus for all negative or otherwise evil forces in Bleak House. The lawyers are the ones who wield all the power and are in control of the situation with their horrid speeches and almost-as-terrible briefs. Almost everyone who approaches Chancery without sufficient understanding of its power will suffer, and of course, this means all who bring suits to Chancery expecting justice and finding a netherworld of unintelligible, finance-and-will-draining proceedings. Mr. Jarndyce is an even-tempered man who realizes it is not worth his while to expect anything from a suit which started long, long ago, and so keeps his wits and his goodness. Esther has no connection to the suit and remains similarly unscathed, and uses her maternal forces to shield Ada. However, Richard will go insane by slowly coming to believe—an opinion provided by the lawyers and the financially disinterested—that he can resolve the suit in his favor, the strain and energy of fighting such a hopeless battle ultimately killing him. Mr. Gridley will similarly die, though the comparably minor state of his suit means the lesser intensity will "only" slowly kill him over many years. And Miss Flite is one of those unfortunate people who knows but does not understand. Observing so many cases come through Chancery without ever getting a glimmer of how the system "works"—she even respects Krook!—does not destroy her body and spirit, but warps her mind. She cackles, casts incantations, and sometimes sobs her way through the proceedings.
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