Bleak House: The Comedy of Authors, or, The Two Narrators of Dickensona

Don't go fencing with Vladimir.

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The first type of authorial representative is the first-person narrator, "the moving pillar,"an "I" who tells the story either as a character or an extradiegetic creation. Only writing that previous sentence did I understand Nabokov's description of type one as the moving pillar: a capital I, a straight and true and sturdy column, able to go anywhere and everywhere. For type one is by nature a sturdy, reliable device for the writer and the reader. We read a book to be engaged in a story, and a story reported to us is fine, but when someone with direct involvement in the tale is describing from their point of view what actually happened, we feel a little more drawn in. Our curiosity is piqued, interest level raised just that much higher (though not so high as to make us mad with the literary Fed), all thanks to a presumption that someone else is taking us into their confidence and sharing information (and remember how important acquiring information was in Bleak House) which we would not otherwise possess. A long, long time ago I wrote about the power of Obama in relation to Nabokov's theories on this blog. Obama's gift as a rhetorician was making his narratives personal, of speaking in a way which seems one-on-one and including YOU in his scope and vision. The first-person narrator is a boon for the writer who wants to exploit the role of literature as rhetoric. By framing the narrative as a sort of personal conversation between two people, the narrator imparting fact and opinion and the reader absorbing, the author's meaning has a somewhat better chance of coming across and impacting the reader by making the reader think, as Obama does, that the meaning is being told directly to THEM and not some impartial audience. When I read War and Peace and absorb its ideas, I am affected, but Tolstoy's third-person distance from the narrative forces me to intellectually work out his ideas and not emotionally respond to them as much. In The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, I find myself relating on both levels in greater degrees to the tragic forces which foil Gatsby because Nick is telling me about them first hand. I share the experience of the story with a personal narrator who is struggling to find meaning from it himself. It only ratchets the intensity of my response.

Nabokov uses as an example of the extradiegetic first-person narrator the Arabian historian of Don Quixote. For those of you who have not read Quixote, I would advise turning to Borges, whose short stories are chock-full of first-person narrators who are outside the actual narrative. "The Library of Babel" and "Brodie's Report" spring to mind, two "I" chronicles of events they did not take part in.

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The second type of authorial representative is "the sifting agent," more often third-person than first-person, a character such as Fanny Price or, later, Emma Bovary who "sifts" the characters, settings, and plot actions through their own "emotions and notions." Such agents "may or may not be representative of the author's own ideas." The latter point: the Structures and themes of a novel in relation to rhetorical meaning can be tampered with. Sometimes an author may explore their themes by narrating a story in a fourth-wall-breaking mixture of first and third person, either sincerely, as with Trollope, or with artistic attitude, as with Thackeray in his piling irony as one piles whipped cream on a sundae over the narrative of Vanity Fair. But again, the fact that they are clearly a third-person narrator puts a little distance between us and the meaning. However, using a sifting agent, a successful author may create layer upon layer of rhetorical ideas without ever dropping their dispassioned state or turning to a conversational voice. It also is a bit psychologically easier on the writer, for when assuming a first-person narrator there is the added danger of falling out of character, of their narrative and style not ringing true because the author does not understand their avatar fully enough…Tom Wolfe, one of the most acclaimed writers of my lifetime, suffered derision for his last novel thus far, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and the problem was right there in the title: unless you have extraordinary capabilities for empathy, it will take a major and sustained effort for, say, a septuagenarian man to remain in character as a naïve female college freshman over a long, long story. Whatever meaning Wolfe wished to impart was lost in the incongruity between Tom Wolfe the author/rhetorician and Charlotte Simmons the narrator/figure of empathy, an incongruity which distracted from everything else. So to avoid falling into this possible pothole, a writer may choose to present his meanings through the eyes of a markedly dissimilar character in the story to him or herself. Gustave Flaubert was not a farm girl from the countryside, obviously, but when he wanted to write a novel to depict the flaws of a rapidly modernizing society, he chose a sifting agent named Emma Bovary who sees the action through her younger, more romantic point of view. A first-person Madame Bovary would have grated on us because Emma would have been telling the story through starry eyes, but when her passions are balance by Flaubert's third-person omniscience, the reader shares in her downfall and understands through the juxtaposition how the circumstances of changing France contribute to the destruction of her and Charles.

I realize in writing the above that I may have contradicted my support for type one. Actually, I think that type one and type two are equally efficacious options where employment depends on what kind of author is telling the story and what methods they are comfortable with using. Some may feel powerful enough to use a first-person voice, others may want to play it both safer and somewhat richer with a third-person, partially contradictory voice. There is no "better" solution, but one method is more suitable in each case of a certain author telling a certain story.

The third type of authorial representative "is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with fencing. But this does not matter much since I invented the term myself many years ago." I was absolutely compelled to insert that entire passage. If called before the literary judges someday to defend my love of Nabokov, this might be exhibit number one.

The perry is a character with no identity, heart, or mind. His or her purpose is solely to go places and meet people whom the author could not introduce or later keep in the story any other way. The perry may have an actual character in portions of the book, but in such chapters as those described above that purpose is everything. "Without the perry a story is sometimes difficult to direct and propel; but better kill the story than have a perry drag its thread about like a lame insect dragging a dusty bit of cobweb." Good authors with all faculties working will employ types one and two, but type three seems reserved for bad authors or good authors stuck for inspiration or simply good authors gone lazy. Nabokov may have distrusted movies, but he would have shared the belief of the modern screenwriting guru, the late, great Blake Snyder most of all, that exposition must be handled simply, directly, and as quickly as possible. The perry is a character who for the time being is only here to provide exposition. Nothing else. There may be no deader weight imaginable in the aesthetic world. For most of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim are living, breathing, three-dimensional figures in a satirical and powerful story, but for one chapter they become perries, when on one of their rafting stops they witness the duel between the weak, slobbering drunkard and the proud, imperious army officer. Mark Twain wanted to make one of his most cynical comments about American morality, but could think of no other way to "integrate" it into the story than have Huck and Jim get off the raft, happen to see this, and get back on the raft. The characters never reappear, Huck and Jim never return to the town, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the narrative of their flight southward to freedom. Twain had something he wanted to say and inserted a short story into a long, otherwise well-flowing novel. The ultimate perry may be Thompson the reporter in Citizen Kane, of whom Orson Welles flat-out told Peter Bogdanovich that he existed only as a device. I suppose this is an exception which proves the rule…if you're GOING to use a perry, you'd best be sure that everything else in the story is SOLID.

Esther Summerson functions as all three types of representatives in Bleak House. She narrates half the novel, sees most of the story (including her commenting on portions from the "Charles Dickens" half) from her own point of view, and sometimes is called on by Dickens to visit places and people needing description, i.e. the first, unmotivated visit to the Jellyby house. Dickens is one of only two authors I can think of who utilized his protagonist this way. The second, coming after Nabokov's lecture and doing things in a far more brilliant and integrated manner, was Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook. Ostensibly The Golden Notebook is a third-person story where Anna Wolf is Lessing's sifting agent for an examination of the mid-twentieth-century female psyche, but Lessing's expert intercutting between her narrative and Anna's own fiction and autobiographical fragments makes Anna a moving pillar both inside and somewhat outside the narrative. And because Lessing wanted to write about leftist points of view, Anna is also a Communist whose relations to the party, which do not fit in as well with the main story, are thoroughly described. However, Lessing cuts back on Anna's perry qualities by presenting her links to the party in the form of documentary-style clippings and journal entries and some references to her Communist work in the "autobiography" portions. As Nabokov will show, Dickens was not as successful as Lessing in balancing out Esther…though there may have been reasons for that.

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Nabokov felt there were eight distinctive Structural features present in Bleak House…

First, the novel has two narrators. Of the sixty-seven chapters, thirty-four are narrated by Charles Dickens, or at least an appropriate stand-in calling himself "Charles Dickens," but from Chapter Three onward, these are mixed with thirty-three chapters narrated by Esther Summerson, her portion composed seven years after the fact. ("A wonderful memory!" Nabokov sarcastically applauds.) However, though in the beginning Esther's first-person narrative uses the language and voice of an innocent Victorian schoolgirl ("bubbling baby talk") in comparison to Dickens's elaborate, Thomas Carlylean oratory and satire, Dickens soon finds that his story is so "robust" that half of it in Esther's voice won't do, so he little by little inserts figures of speech, comparisons, imagery, all absent from Esther's style at the beginning, until at the book's close, they "at last merge almost completely," the wise man and the naïve girl whose mutual abilities at depicting scenes and conversations are indifferential. Nabokov calls Esther's incorporation "the main mistake" of an otherwise brilliantly-plotted novel. "I would not have let the girl near!" However, on my own examination, something is happening under the narrative surface which Nabokov may have missed.

It is true, as he says, that Dickens quickly starts forgetting that his voice and Esther's voice are supposed to be different and the only distinctions between them at the end are her stronger individuality as narrator in the beginning and, in her chapters, a smoother-flowing narrative. (As she is not "Charles Dickens," she does not break into eloquent speeches in moments of anger, sorrow, and agitation, and Dickens also kept her mostly separate from the murder mystery, a prototype of a form to be fully developed over the following century and thus somewhat chunky in plot.) But in a novel which Nabokov praises for its Structural qualities, such a gap doesn't seem to fit in, and there are at least two theories on why Dickens and Esther lose their separateness. I say at least two because both theories are my own…somewhere out there somebody is probably arriving at a new, different conclusion.

First, one of the recurring ideas of Bleak House is that Esther is by far the best person in the story, but her devotion and service to man and God have psychologically stunted her ability to judge her self-worth. Time and again, practically everyone she meets praises her goodness and skills, with her uniformly reacting in embarrassed demurring. As the novel progresses and Esther does more, she grows in her capacities and, though she would never admit it, becomes more confident. The Esther at the beginning would never have challenged Skimpole at the end, even though that challenge is minor, and I believed in this action of hers. She GROWS as a character. So perhaps, when Esther begins to write her story, she struggles in the telling and writes in an unsure, simplified, am-I-really-writing-a-novel-here style, but with more and more words on the page she finds her rhythm, becomes quietly confident, and uses her gifts—the gifts she is continually complimented on—to the fore. Someone of her abilities must have a significant level of intelligence, and that intelligence could make you a writer nearly up to the snuff of, say, Charles Dickens if purposefully employed and focused.

I like that theory—it IS mine—but the second possibility is even more interesting. In Esther's opening paragraph she points out that she is writing with a collaborator, and her writing is an autobiography being set down almost a decade later than the major events. Esther Summerson is a novice at such work, and "Charles Dickens" is a seasoned, already-renowned professional. Can we assume that Esther might have turned to "Dickens" not only to fill in the gaps of her story but also EDIT her work and bring it into a publication-ready form? And in this editing, would "Dickens" have been able to resist peppering the text with his own flourishes? This theory is as psychologically sound as the first: a timid, self-esteem-deficient Esther would have sought help from a friendly master of the art in telling her story (Dickens treats Esther with reverence throughout, and everybody loves the girl already, so they definitely would have gotten along), and her willingness to agree with others would have allowed her to acquiesce in Stylistic changes along the way. More importantly, it raises implications relating back to Miller's examination of Bleak House as a saga of discipline, information, and power-wielding. An editor has a power over the author to advise in shaping a narrative…Fitzgerald always reverenced Maxwell Perkins for his suggestions in fine-tuning Gatsby. Dickens surely would have had the upper hand with Esther, her gentleness against his maelstrom of pent-up Victorian zeal expressing itself through the written word. If Dickens is editing Esther and controlling how their narratives intersect, it may be that he is controlling what goes into the story. Esther may have written more plot which did not fit with the flow or his own thematic agenda and needed to be excised. Dickens may have tinkered with her observations and reports of conversations, or shaped them in way suiting his point of view more than hers. We might even go so far as to think the entire book is Esther's and Dickens appropriated parts of it out of his own belief he could tell the story better or Esther fearing herself not up to chronicling the more intimate, adult sections of the story! "But this is speculation about someone who doesn't even exist!" you might say. But if Bleak House is a novel about empathy and the institutional use and abuse of power, Dickens, representing a literary institution, may be trying to raise an awareness in us that nothing we read exists on its own. It is the invention of an author who has a point they wish to make, but that point may be lost if the author is stymied by an institution with points of its own. By casting doubt on the total legitimacy of Esther's narrative, Dickens might want us to think how far we can trust any first-person story…how far we can trust anything we don't experience ourselves…but, in beautiful paradox, how such trust is essential for the fostering of empathy. No two people have the same experience, but they can feel for each other by looking at the experience through each other's eyes. Charles Dickens and Esther Summerson tell this story through their eyes, and by design or by empathy, their stories compliment and ultimately unite despite their differences. How this happens, and what it means to society, is left for the reader to judge…

However, it would certainly be interesting to carefully examine Esther's narrative, with a special eye for where her and Dickens almost intersect, and see where she begins to sound like Dickens and what that means for the plot and theme overall.