Two advocates of Discipline
97, Continued
“Il brile par son absence.” “He shines by his absence.” The author of a book should be a Godlike presence (to borrow an idea from Flaubert), “invisible and omnipresent.” But even the most unobtrusive author still has a presence in the novel. Nabokov himself knew this, from his understanding of the third-person narration of Mansfield Park as after the fact. It may be wise for a moment to turn to Gerard Genette, the great narrative theorist and a profound influence on my own studies, for if literature is rhetoric, then the WAY we are told the story is as important as THE ACTUAL CONTENT. Anyone reading a book must recognize there is someone telling them a story, because most stories do not occur in straight chronological order in real time. Show me one novel which does this and I’ll be stunned like I was going up against James T. Kirk. The narrator is given extraordinary powers over a story. He or she can change the order of events, change their frequency, fast-forward, rewind, and stop time at will. He or she may know more than the characters, may use their storytelling to comment on the action or address the reader directly. And most crucially, he or she’s mere presence creates a distinction between narration and narrative, what is being told and what someone is telling. The narrator may not fully grasp the meaning of events, or may choose to shape them in a way which creates a distinct interpretation.
Human beings love having control over a situation, and storytelling, narrating, writing, is one of the simplest ways we achieve control. When we tell a story, we decide what will be said and how it shall be said. Others may challenge us but we have the right to ignore them.
The idea of narrative control will be a basis for much exploration in Bleak House particularly in the light of an essay by D. A. Miller I recently read in Harold Bloom’s collection of Dickens criticism. To briefly summarize: one of Charles Dickens’s main ideas in his work was a need for discipline, not in the strict sense of Foucaultian punishment but in behaving in an exemplary manner at all times, of following a sort of human order which produces benefits for society. Bleak House challenges this view by showing the paradoxes of discipline. Chancery is controlled by rules, but it is boundless…it seeps into the fabric of the lives of everyone it touches. Moreover, its rules seem to create indiscipline in the form of how the cases never get resolved at all. Chancery is thus odious and an even worse influence then I previously had thought in this commentary. This, for Miller, explains the importance of the mystery plot. All of the characters in Bleak House are trying in their own way to uncover a secret or unravel a mystery (Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mrs. Snagsby, even Richard with the lawsuit) because they want to be in possession of truth. Of knowledge. They want to wield some personal power. However, these characters die or are foiled because they are too weak against the apparatus of Chancery. The only detective who succeeds is, of course, Mr. Bucket, because the police are the only force equal to Chancery: a rule-making system of limitless power and authority. (Dickens describes Mr. Bucket as “magical” in how he can be everywhere at once, and Mr. Bucket works for both the police and as a private investigator yet never loses any respect.) Even the novel itself is indisciplined, employing two narrators and a multitude of plotlines which at first don’t link up, and being of such a length that it cannot be read in one sitting. You have to put it down and go into the real world, where you’ll still have it on your mind, allowing the indiscipline to spread. Of course, Dickens, like Chancery, offers hope in the form of an eventual concrete finish…but again, as Miller says, how do we know the end will be a true conclusion and not just an abrupt stop which doesn’t satisfy all the stories?
The salvation of Bleak House both in the story and in terms of discipline is family. Dickens saw the family as the integral social unit. Indeed, they are the foundation of empathy by virtue of being a close-quartered territory where people must care about and think about others to survive. Families are put under siege when the outside world--the law, the police, the novel—intrude, but if good families instill a sense of discipline and proper behavior, as Esther possesses, then there is a chance they can be a bulwark against this entropy masquerading as order.
Miller’s ideas will be extra fuel for my very imminent discussion of Bleak House’s remarkable narrative techniques and the juxtaposition between Charles Dickens and Esther Summerson. For right now, two points. His theory confirms the Godlike ability of the novelist, since under these terms they have the power to deny all sense of gratification and to narrate events in as confusing a manner as possible to the outside world as long as it MAKES LOGICAL SENSE TO THEM. Dickens eventually groups his narratives into a logic we can recognize, but this is not true of every writer. Quentin Tarantino’s short but mesmerizing “Death Proof” from Grindhouse is my favorite example, as two sets of characters have two long conversations with a significance unfathomable to me, each conversation ending in a showdown with a malevolent killer whose motivations are never concretely described. In Bleak House, the action and dialogue make sense, connect with each other, and the why’s of the narrative are all answered. Second, Miller made me take stock of my defense of Mr. Bucket as one of the “good” characters because he is almost a direct agent in Jo’s death as Skimpole: the detective sends Jo out into the harsh world at Mr. Tulkinghorn’s insistence even before he pays off Skimpole to learn where Jo is. My defense of this is that for all of Mr. Bucket’s omniscient powers, he does not know much which lies outside his pursuit of justice. He had no idea Jo was terminally ill. He is guilty of ignorance, to be sure, but not an evil ignorance. Of course, Mr. Bucket’s inability to know everything casts doubt on the importance Miller gives to the police…are they as powerful as Chancery if things can slip through their fingers? But if they possess the actual information which Chancery does not have and can never attain due to its structured inefficiency, does not their advantage mean Chancery itself is weaker than we suppose? Is Jo’s death, therefore, Dickens’s way of letting us know that the institutions can always be brought down?
There are two kinds of narration for an author: as the all-knowing figure and as a “representative.” Nabokov draws fewer distinctions than Genette, but his simplification is, for what it is, appropriate enough. Some novelists use traditional “Once upon a time…” Others “descend into their book under various guises or send therein various middlemen, representatives…spies, and stooges.” The derision such representatives are characterized by is another sign of the power of the author. How easy is it to make a figure equivalent to your ideal audience the storyteller, but to write that figure in such a way that contempt for the audience is shown?
“Il brile par son absence.” “He shines by his absence.” The author of a book should be a Godlike presence (to borrow an idea from Flaubert), “invisible and omnipresent.” But even the most unobtrusive author still has a presence in the novel. Nabokov himself knew this, from his understanding of the third-person narration of Mansfield Park as after the fact. It may be wise for a moment to turn to Gerard Genette, the great narrative theorist and a profound influence on my own studies, for if literature is rhetoric, then the WAY we are told the story is as important as THE ACTUAL CONTENT. Anyone reading a book must recognize there is someone telling them a story, because most stories do not occur in straight chronological order in real time. Show me one novel which does this and I’ll be stunned like I was going up against James T. Kirk. The narrator is given extraordinary powers over a story. He or she can change the order of events, change their frequency, fast-forward, rewind, and stop time at will. He or she may know more than the characters, may use their storytelling to comment on the action or address the reader directly. And most crucially, he or she’s mere presence creates a distinction between narration and narrative, what is being told and what someone is telling. The narrator may not fully grasp the meaning of events, or may choose to shape them in a way which creates a distinct interpretation.
Human beings love having control over a situation, and storytelling, narrating, writing, is one of the simplest ways we achieve control. When we tell a story, we decide what will be said and how it shall be said. Others may challenge us but we have the right to ignore them.
The idea of narrative control will be a basis for much exploration in Bleak House particularly in the light of an essay by D. A. Miller I recently read in Harold Bloom’s collection of Dickens criticism. To briefly summarize: one of Charles Dickens’s main ideas in his work was a need for discipline, not in the strict sense of Foucaultian punishment but in behaving in an exemplary manner at all times, of following a sort of human order which produces benefits for society. Bleak House challenges this view by showing the paradoxes of discipline. Chancery is controlled by rules, but it is boundless…it seeps into the fabric of the lives of everyone it touches. Moreover, its rules seem to create indiscipline in the form of how the cases never get resolved at all. Chancery is thus odious and an even worse influence then I previously had thought in this commentary. This, for Miller, explains the importance of the mystery plot. All of the characters in Bleak House are trying in their own way to uncover a secret or unravel a mystery (Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mrs. Snagsby, even Richard with the lawsuit) because they want to be in possession of truth. Of knowledge. They want to wield some personal power. However, these characters die or are foiled because they are too weak against the apparatus of Chancery. The only detective who succeeds is, of course, Mr. Bucket, because the police are the only force equal to Chancery: a rule-making system of limitless power and authority. (Dickens describes Mr. Bucket as “magical” in how he can be everywhere at once, and Mr. Bucket works for both the police and as a private investigator yet never loses any respect.) Even the novel itself is indisciplined, employing two narrators and a multitude of plotlines which at first don’t link up, and being of such a length that it cannot be read in one sitting. You have to put it down and go into the real world, where you’ll still have it on your mind, allowing the indiscipline to spread. Of course, Dickens, like Chancery, offers hope in the form of an eventual concrete finish…but again, as Miller says, how do we know the end will be a true conclusion and not just an abrupt stop which doesn’t satisfy all the stories?
The salvation of Bleak House both in the story and in terms of discipline is family. Dickens saw the family as the integral social unit. Indeed, they are the foundation of empathy by virtue of being a close-quartered territory where people must care about and think about others to survive. Families are put under siege when the outside world--the law, the police, the novel—intrude, but if good families instill a sense of discipline and proper behavior, as Esther possesses, then there is a chance they can be a bulwark against this entropy masquerading as order.
Miller’s ideas will be extra fuel for my very imminent discussion of Bleak House’s remarkable narrative techniques and the juxtaposition between Charles Dickens and Esther Summerson. For right now, two points. His theory confirms the Godlike ability of the novelist, since under these terms they have the power to deny all sense of gratification and to narrate events in as confusing a manner as possible to the outside world as long as it MAKES LOGICAL SENSE TO THEM. Dickens eventually groups his narratives into a logic we can recognize, but this is not true of every writer. Quentin Tarantino’s short but mesmerizing “Death Proof” from Grindhouse is my favorite example, as two sets of characters have two long conversations with a significance unfathomable to me, each conversation ending in a showdown with a malevolent killer whose motivations are never concretely described. In Bleak House, the action and dialogue make sense, connect with each other, and the why’s of the narrative are all answered. Second, Miller made me take stock of my defense of Mr. Bucket as one of the “good” characters because he is almost a direct agent in Jo’s death as Skimpole: the detective sends Jo out into the harsh world at Mr. Tulkinghorn’s insistence even before he pays off Skimpole to learn where Jo is. My defense of this is that for all of Mr. Bucket’s omniscient powers, he does not know much which lies outside his pursuit of justice. He had no idea Jo was terminally ill. He is guilty of ignorance, to be sure, but not an evil ignorance. Of course, Mr. Bucket’s inability to know everything casts doubt on the importance Miller gives to the police…are they as powerful as Chancery if things can slip through their fingers? But if they possess the actual information which Chancery does not have and can never attain due to its structured inefficiency, does not their advantage mean Chancery itself is weaker than we suppose? Is Jo’s death, therefore, Dickens’s way of letting us know that the institutions can always be brought down?
There are two kinds of narration for an author: as the all-knowing figure and as a “representative.” Nabokov draws fewer distinctions than Genette, but his simplification is, for what it is, appropriate enough. Some novelists use traditional “Once upon a time…” Others “descend into their book under various guises or send therein various middlemen, representatives…spies, and stooges.” The derision such representatives are characterized by is another sign of the power of the author. How easy is it to make a figure equivalent to your ideal audience the storyteller, but to write that figure in such a way that contempt for the audience is shown?
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