1. Introduction
‘Quotidiolects’— just a quirky witticism that comes about by conflating the words ‘quotidian’ and ‘idiolects’. It is meant, however, to encapsulate and refer to the central goal of this thesis: to arrive at and envision, through my reading of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, daily enunciative acts of responsibility that are actuated by the other’s singular call and are constitutive of a truly ethical practice.
Bleak House’s opening account — describing postdiluvian quantities of mud and a dense
blanket of fog—portrays the raw conditions in which London’s passersby trie to traverse the city. Interestingly, these two conditions are indicative of one of the novel’s main concerns. Mud, accord-ing to the Oxford English Dictionary, figuratively means “somethaccord-ing regarded as base . . . a cause of frustration, delay . . . liable to perplex or confound”. Fog is also described as “obscuring or re-stricting visibility”. The mud and fog, in turn, introduce the base, perplexing sphinx known as Chancery and the limited field of vision it induces. Bleak House is thence established as primarily concerned with visibility, recognisability, the extent to which a person can be apprehended — that is to say, known without being reduced to a normative scheme — and his or her life is shown to matter. Dickens details the precarious conditions of individual lives and uncovers the interlocking strands that connect these lives to those of others. Indeed, Bleak House seems to reiterate these questions time and again: when, how and to what extent should one be(come) responsible for an other? The novel thus strongly engages with social injustices that exclude some from a political, juridical field of perception. Hence the question central to my thesis: What does Dickens’s Bleak
House have to offer to contemporary notions of social (in)justice and ethical responsibility?
In this I take my cue from Levinas, whose notions of ethics and responsibility are central to my reading of the novel. I am not the first person to use Levinas in relation to a nineteenth-century author: Mitchell’s Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference uses Levinas in order to re-ap-praise Victorian realism’s representation of “the process of apprehending the alterity of the other” (3). It seems, however, that her use of Levinas is limited to his thoughts on alterity; Melvyn New, seeking to resolve Levinas’s ambivalent stand towards arts and literature, tries to “offer a Levinasian reading of Dombey and Son that turns philosophy into art, into that image of itself which . . . refuses domination of the text” (86); Levinas and Nineteenth-century literature, a collection of essays published in 2009, in and of itself attests to the widespread use to which Levinas is put. And herein lies the rub. Time and again, Levinas is used, like an ace up the academic sleeve, to illuminate, elucidate, re-assess, etc. Inversely, the goal of my thesis is to rethink Levinas through an analysis of Bleak House. More specifically, I am interested in how to envision the movement from a Levinasian theory of ethics towards a praxis of the responsibility he envisions. Jill Robbins rightfully observes that “Levinas gives us very few examples for the ethical in his work, as if it could not be translated into empiricism” (“Introduction” 5, emphasis in original). When asked how his
no-tion of responsibility translates to concrete situano-tions, Levinas resorts to biblical examples that em-phasise the “material misery” (“Interview with François Poirié” 52) of the other as the actuating principle behind responsibility. It is almost as if Levinas is afraid of providing a more concrete ex-ample, weary of the reduction such an example would entail. Levinas’s theoretico-ethical approach is characterised by anarchic (root-less) otherness, non-thematisable and irreducible, and can therefore be seen to refute any example of a corresponding empirical praxis of responsibility. As I hope to show, and what the image below is meant to make clear, an analysis of Dickens’s Bleak
House will help us to traverse the epistemo-ontological plane on which Levinas’s ethics play out
and will allow us to envision what a quotidian praxis of responsibility would amount to.
In this thesis, I will read Bleak House as a fictional account of a quotidian praxis of responsibility, one that can arguably be seen to lay bare the discursive, fictional principles underlying such a praxis. I use the term ‘fictional’ advisedly, not just to refer to a work of fiction, but, more importantly, to denote the imbricated nature of ‘the real’ and the discursive subset that underlies our perception of it. As Rancière puts it, “[t]he real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (38). In this line of thought, one can turn to Dickens in order to gain insight into the ‘fictional’ principles underlying an empirical praxis of responsibility, precisely because “the logic of descriptive and narrative
arrange-Image 1. Envisioning the movement from ethical theory to ethical praxis: traversing an
ments in fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world” (37).
Furthermore, Dickens’s narrators will be seen to describe what Rancière has termed a ‘distribution of the sensible’: a politically charged “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simulta-neously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the re-spective parts and positions within it” (12). In Bleak House, people’s judgments are clouded or their lines of sight are impaired, their access to the ‘facts of sense perception’ is limited and their posi-tion relative to those of others is characterised by inequality, dispossession and exclusion. In this context, I would like to consider the operation and performative power of heterotopia, points of “polemical reconfiguration of the sensible” (Rancière 40) that change what can be perceived — i.e. what is sensible — by rerouting it through the instant of responsibility.
My readings will focus on the passages in Bleak House that are generative and/or illustrati-ve of the theoretical field that I seek to broach. The image aboillustrati-ve is meant to sketch the outlines of this theoretical field; a schematic division representing the various theoretical positions and theo-rists operating in the same field. To reiterate, whilst my thesis is primarily concerned with the transi-tion from ethical theory to ethical praxis, the analyses of both primary and secondary sources tou-ches on and interacts with the field of epistemo-ontological theory. This has resulted in the follo-wing chapter division. In Chapter One I would like to elaborate on the theoretical ethical imperative to be responsible by considering Derrida’s treatment on hospitality and Levinas’s explanations on how the I is primordially constituted as responsible for the other. Concurrently, I will argue, the pre-sence of a multiplicity of others, understood by Levinas as the approach of ‘the third’, ushers in the fields of force in which responsibility is actually enacted. The third catalyses the shift from the theo-retical to the practical, which brings us to Chapter Two, in which I want to consider Bleak House as a critique of political, juridical fields of perception and the discursive frames that engender them — frames constitutive of a given distribution of the sensible. By focusing on the interlocutionary, inter-pellative and performative aspects of these frames, I try to show how Bleak House enables us to think through recurrent themes in the works of Judith Butler: the scene of address, the frame itself and the differential allocation of precariousness. The resulting question is whether and how change can be brought about from within an unequal system. In Chapter Three, therefore, I will use Fou-cault’s work on heterotopia to illuminate and flesh out the idea of perceptual change brought about by heterotopic moments. I will consider how responsibility, as heterotopia, comes to bear on the perceptual fields generating inequality in Bleak House. With reference to de Certeau’s work on everyday practices and the concepts of strategy and tactics that he develops, finally, I hope to con-clude my argument by showing how the quotidian performative acts portrayed in Bleak House can inaugurate a recalibration of the sensible and a (social) justice that is more embedded in a Levina-sian notion of one-for-the-other.
Summary
In lieu of a comprehensive summary, here is a brief overview of what Bleak House is about. Cen-tral to its plot is the Chancery suit of Jarndyce & Jarndyce which has dragged on endlessly, has involved innumerable people, and has caused despair to whole generations. This is clearly illustra-ted when the narrator concludes a rather lengthy and dreary description of the suit with the unner-ving account of Tom Jarndyce who “in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane” (Dickens 4). The main plot features Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, wards born into the protracted suit, Mr. John Jarndyce of Bleak House who is their guardian and party in the Chancery suit, and Esther Summerson, elected housekeeper of the Bleak House establishment. Though the novel is built around the Chancery suit and its expected outcome, it is interlaced with another th-read which relates the unfolding insight into Esther’s background. These two thth-reads are mirrored by the complexity of narration, the story being told from both Esther’s perspective and a more dis-tant narrator’s point of view. Seeing as Esther’s narration comprises one half of the novel, it is no surprise that the reader finds her central to many of the incidents and people she describes. In both narratives, Dickens has included a wide array of characters whose sundry backgrounds and occupations do not at first suggest their importance to the plot, yet whose respective stories even-tually reveal a centrality to it that attests to the complexity of Bleak House and the ingenuity of its author. Whilst parts of the novel are set in the country side and in the North of England, most of the events take place in London; that is to say, in residences of the affluent and influential elite, in the homes of those with proper means of sustenance, and in the less salubrious cottages and hovels sheltering the unfortunate and poor. Bleak House kaleidoscopically interweaves these scenes and the people inhabiting them. In so doing, it becomes an intricate and densely populated novel sug-gestive of the crowdedness of London itself.
2. Chapter One: Economies of injustice & the imperative of responsibility
2.1 Of Chancery and Fashion
In Dickens’s book it is not too far from Chancery court to the world of fashion. That is to say, more than just the respective topics of two consecutive chapters, Chancery and fashion are quite alike in that they are antecedent to and perpetuating profoundly warped sensory fields: “the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun” (Dickens 8, emphasis added). Clearly, the narrator condemns ‘the evil’ of these two worlds: they are impenetrable by auditory and visual stimuli, impervious to a sensory appeal originating in worlds exterior to their woollen econo-my of muffled up self-interest. It should be noted that the etymology of econoecono-my hinted at (Greek
oikonomia— law of the household) is only partially represented by translating nomos as ‘law’. In its
own right, nomos is retraceable to nemo (νέμω) which denotes the distribution or division of some-thing. Economy can therefore be interpreted as the linguistic subsumption of ‘distribution’ under 1
‘law’ and hence the entrenchment or sedimentation of a given distribution (nemo) within the law (nomos). This philological routine essentially clarifies Bleak House’s distrust of the law as perpetu-ating inequality and iniquity. The etymological force of economy is fully present here, both in rela-tion to the court of Chancery — supposed to uphold the principles of the law — and in relarela-tion to the residential palaces of the elite. This presence becomes clearer still because of the emphasis
Bleak House puts on the centrality of the household, the place to be at home, to the variegated
characters populating the plot, more on which later. With respect to the economy of Chancery and fashion, it is worth stressing again that these elite worlds are more or less enclosed and self-regulatory. They operate on a system of “precedent and usage” (8) that is fundamentally detached. Fashion and Chancery are portrayed disparagingly, in ways unmistakably stressing their fairytale-like — fictional— aloofness . An attentive reader will conclude that the allusions to “Rip van Win-kles” and “sleeping beauties” are not only indictments of the phantasmagoria constitutive of the worlds of fashion and Chancery, but are subsequently sublimated into a parable in which the ar-rival of the capital letter “Knight will wake [them] one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to turn prodigiously” (8). Suddenly, an eschatological oikonomia —a proikonomia (προοικονομία) or foreshadowing— is introduced in which the ‘spits in the kitchen’ have infernal connotations. The narrator all but consigns the worlds of Chancery and fashion to hell, venting a subdued exasperation at the iniquity and transgressions identified: a distorted sensory attentive-ness correlative with an economy of exclusion, both of which perpetuate inequality. They stand
I am indebted to my colleague Katerina Daskalopoulou for providing me with this insight. 1
convicted for not extending the hospitality of the worlds that they inhabit and are welcomed home in.
2.2 Welcoming
Hospitality is owed to the other as stranger. But if one determines the other as stranger, one is already introducing the circles of conditionality that are family, nation, state and citizenship (Derrida, “Hostipitality” 8)
As mentioned, the household — the laws of which dominate the relation to the outside world — is pertinent to the ‘at-home-ness’ of the diverse characters in Bleak House. Oftentimes, the novel in-troduces these people in the context of their habitation and the family or friends they live with; the Bagnets’ home , the Jellyby household, the Smallweeds’ quarters, Miss Flite’s attic apartment, Bleak House itself, the Brickmaker’s home — far from exhaustive, this short list is a case in point of the importance of the household, of opening up one’s home and being hospitable. Bleak House conjures up a continuum of openness to the other, to the outer world and the strangers inhabiting it. It posits examples that stand in stark contrast to the closed, excluding worlds of Chancery and fashion and their sensory numbness. The ‘precedent and usage’ constitutive of Chancery and fashion are inherently conditional and exclude the majority of others on the basis of their being a stranger. The novel, however appears to promote the idea (along with Derrida) that ‘hospitality is owed’ precisely to the ones who are otherwise dispossessed and marginalised because they do not fit the bill. Welcome is due to the stranger as ‘other’ instead of the stranger as an already fixed category. Such a welcome precludes the thematisation producing the divide between Chancery and fashion, on the one hand, and what the novel calls ‘the larger worlds’ on the other. Additionally, it builds on a notion of hospitality that acknowledges the responsibility incumbent on those who are welcomed home somewhere, a responsibility to extend that welcome to others. In Derrida’s words, “we must be reminded of this implacable law of hospitality: the hôte who receives (the host) […] is in truth a hôte received in his own home […] the hôte as host is a guest (Adieu 41). In Bleak
House, the most illustrative character in this respect would have to be Esther. Indeed, while some
have faulted her for overly expressing a sense of self-abnegation and too often emphasising her little worth and comparative merit, it is Esther who throughout the novel shows kindness, compas-sion and hospitality without the ostentation characteristic of a Mrs. Jellyby or a Mrs. Pardiggle. Es2 -ther’s self-abasement and self-effacing acts come closest to capture what Derrida intends when he writes that “[o]ne will understand nothing about hospitality if one does not understand what ‘inter-rupting oneself’ might mean” (Adieu 52). That is to say, for Derrida, “[t]he one inviting becomes
“Esther is ‘modest’, ‘coy’ and ‘indirect’ […] It is precisely these qualities in Esther’s narration that have annoyed many
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most the hostage of the one invited […] the one who keeps him at home” (“Hostipitality” 9). One’s comportment should evince this sentiment, this emptying out of oneself for and towards an other. It is here that Derrida intersects with Levinas, who wrote that “[w]hen man truly approaches the Oth-er he is uprooted from history” (Totality and Infinity 52). The heavy ethico-theoretical presence at this juncture is warranted by the novel’s repeated underlining of the same ethical principles, as we will see later on. For our present purposes it is necessary to first consider Levinas’s view on ethical behaviour — that is, with a little help from the ostensibly benevolent and childlike Mr. Skimpole.
2.3 ‘Responsibility’ and positions of the self
‘Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?’ [Mr. Skimpole] repeated, catching at the word with the pleasantest smile. ‘I am the last man in the world for such a thing. I never
was responsible in my life — I can’t be’ (Dickens 530)
Mr. Skimpole, self-proclaimed epitome of non-responsibility, appears to us as the embodiment of what Levinas, with reference to Spinoza, calls the conatus essendi, the persistence of self-interest and incessant striving for self-realisation of an individual life. This conatus always arises in relation to and at the expense of others, in being among beings, or interesse (from Latin ‘between’ and ‘to 3
be’), which is the primary condition of human life. In the novel, Mr. Skimpole literally lives at the ex-pense of others. He insistently repeats (we will get to the performative nature of speech later) that he cannot keep account of his expenses and does not have a clue as to the monetary value of things and the logic of money itself. He professes innocence and non-responsibility as though both are meritorious, and idles away his time and squanders money that others (primarily Mr. Jarndyce) generously provide him with in order to keep him out of trouble. Yet even though he appears rela-tively innocuous, he is also unscrupulous in who he receives money from and for what purposes. Early on in the novel we encounter him wilfully allowing himself to be released from an accumulat-ed debt by Richard and Esther who interpose financially with their own savings (Dickens 75). Later on we learn that he has been remunerated, bribed, for recommending a shady attorney to Richard — which ultimately results in Richard’s untimely death. Mr. Skimpole’s concern, even though care-fully wrapped in a flaunting display of whimsicality, is solely for himself. Clearly, for him, “the
cona-tus essendi […] is the supreme law” (Levinas, “Paradox of Morality” 175). Yet, whereas Levinas
argues that “with the appearance of the face on the inter-personal level, the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ emerges as a limitation of the conatus essendi.” (175), Mr. Skimpole does not heed the call arising from the face or even the explicit address made by others. If Skimpole’s relation to others is asymmetrical — he subsists on the pecuniary aid proffered by others but refuses to take
Cf. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: “Esse is interesse \ essence is interest […] It is confirmed positively to 3
be the conatus of beings […] Being’s interest takes dramatic form in the egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together” (4).
responsibility in return — it is so in a way profoundly different from what Levinas means by “the asymmetry of the relation of one to the other” (Levinas, “Useless Suffering” 101):
The important thing here is that I am the hostage […] that the I is without reciprocity. […] The way in which my ‘I’ is an I is something utterly singular in the world. And there-fore, I am responsible, and may not be concerned about whether the other is responsi-ble for me (Levinas, “Being-Toward-Death” 133, emphasis in original)
Opposite to Skimpole’s sense of responsibility stands Levinas’s idea of substitution, of one-for-the-other. Responsibility, for Levinas, is pre-originary, ordained from before the moment when the I is constituted. It is anarchic, rootless, arising in relation to the proximity or approach of the other yet “conceived outside of ontological categories” (Otherwise than Being 15) in which the other is al-ready closed off, thematised. This responsibility is characterised by “antecedence to my
freedom” (15) to choose. Whence Levinas’s conclusion that I am the hostage, “posited straight-away for-the-other, straightstraight-away in obligation and straightstraight-away as the only one who is ready to re-spond and to bear this responsibility” (“Being-for-the-Other 117). Moreover, “[f]or the I this amounts to its very identification in its uniqueness as an I” (118). Again, Levinas posits that “[i]t is starting from the existence of the other that my existence can be posed as human” (“The Philosopher and Death” 129). We can begin to appreciate the epistemo-ontological plane on which Levinas oper-ates. His is an attempt to transcend, to pass over and beyond the primary condition of human life, the conatus, towards a dis-inter-esse where I cede my place to the other, where the other’s con-cerns implicate me. This is a sober and weighty calling, indeed, and it does not have a limit. In-stead, it “reverses the order of interest: in the measure that responsibilities are taken on they mul-tiply” (OTB 12). In elliptical phrasing expressive of Levinas’s distrust of the verb ‘to be’, responsibili-ty consequently is likened to:
Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than all pa-tience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of a hostage who substitutes himself for the others: all this is [...] a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity. And this, pushed
to the limit, is sensibility, sensibility as the subjectivity of the subject. It is a substitution
for another [...] expiation (OTB 15, emphasis added)
Notice the centrality to Levinas’s analysis of the word ‘sensibility’; a quick perusal of the Oxford
English Dictionary confirms its roots in ‘sense-ability’, that which can be perceived by the senses.
Could it be too much to argue that responsibility, taken to its limits, is what opens up the fields of perception to the presence of the other and as such is intricately linked to a redistribution of what is
sensible? Although Rancière does not explicitly engage with Levinas, here is a peculiar (though not the only) opportunity to link them together. Incidentally, we also find a reason to clarify how Mr. Skimpole’s insensibility and irresponsibility are connected. He is insensible because he is not open to the responsibility asked of him by the other; he neither hears nor heeds their call. This can be said to work vice versa and ad infinitum, as the two will continue to reinforce each other in a per-petual downward spiral. Mr. Skimpole’s passivity is not of a Levinasian ‘acussative form’ in which one not only stands accused by the other, but is forced into the object position denoted by this in-flection. Quite to the contrary, Skimpole’s essential inability to move outside of his egocentric solip-sisms attests to their ‘nominative’ (subject) nature, whilst his keen ability to position himself as ‘childish’ and ‘in need’ are indicative of the ‘dative’ form (indirect object) of his flowery perorations. As we will see and in contrast with Mr. Skimpole’s position, ‘responsibility’ has everything to do with being impelled to an ‘accusative’ position; one in which every other—not just one— enters into the equation.
2.4 ‘Responsibility’ and ‘the third’
“Mrs. Jellyby […] is a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes her-self entirely to the public” (Dickens 34)
“Everything is modified once the ‘everyone’ is affirmed. There the other is not unique. This value of holiness — and this upsurge of compassion — cannot exclude or ignore the relation with others in the simultaneity of everyone.
(Levinas, “Interview with François Poirié” 50-51)
‘Responsibility’, as we have seen, is pivotal to whether the senses are open to the invocation by the alterior other. Mrs. Jellyby, we are told, is one who has taken on her shoulders the heavy weight of responsibility: she “is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa” (Dickens 34). Ironically, the conditional subordinate clause turns this description into a backhanded compliment, since it implies that Mrs. Jellyby vacillates significantly between the pos-sible objects of her devotion. Also, from the start, we get the feeling that something is not right, that Mrs. Jellyby elects her purposeful causes instead of being elected by the other, as Levinas would have it. Can we blame her, though, for having to divide her energy and time? Even though she is otherwise indefatigable, she is a human being after all and it would be vacuous reasoning to ex-pect her to attend to all causes simultaneously. The chapter in which Mrs. Jellyby makes her pearance, “Telescopic Philanthropy”, therefore reveals (at least) two striking things. Firstly, the ap-pearance of ‘the third’ person, another other, introduces “the problem of choice” (Levinas, “Inter-view with François Poirié” 51). To be sure, the other who is unique and singular is not the only
oth-er. Levinas postulates that “the presence of the face, the infinity of the other, is a destituteness, a presence of the third party” within “the relation with the Other”; “a discourse which by essence is aroused by the epiphany of the face inasmuch as it attests the presence of the third party, the
whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me” (T&I 213, emphasis added). In every instance of
‘responsibility’, the relation with the Other, I should be cognisant of the whole of humanity. As Bernasconi explains, the fact that “the third—and thus the whole of humanity—looks at me in the eyes of the Other is what secures in Levinas’s thinking the passage from the Other to the Others, the passage from ethics to justice, from inequality in favour of the Other to equality” (“Failure of Communication” 104). This is an important conceptual hinge point, because inexorably, in the ‘passage from ethics to justice’, from one Other to all the Others, we are drawn into comparing be-tween incomparable ones, compelled to draw them into simultaneity, into a hypostatised version in the present. It is no longer the truly alterior other one is facing, but a re-present-ation. This is what Levinas calls the “exigency of a comparison between uniques and their return to the common genus” (51). ‘The third’ can therefore be seen as inaugurating the practice of Levinasian ethics, because a third propels us from the relationship with the Other into a relationship with a multiplicity of Others. The ‘passage from ethics to justice’ is simultaneously a passage from theory to praxis! The ‘comparison between uniques’ thus instigated should be safeguarded, as Bernasconi argues, by the presence of the third in the encounter with the Other. It should be, but Bleak House shows otherwise. Whilst the notions of ‘responsibility’ and ‘the third’ explain Mrs. Jellyby’s devotion to the public at large and the philanthropic projects subsumed under such a devotion, they also generate the concern flagged by Bleak House, which is that, secondly, care for an other can go at the ex-pense of other others. To be more precise, Mrs. Jellyby stands accused for severely neglecting her own family and household — and all this for a cause that, as we will see, is highly doubtful.
When Richard, Ada and Esther arrive at the Jellyby household, Mrs. Jellyby is wholly en-grossed in her current project - ’the subject of Africa’. The whole of her time and the radiant efflu-ence of her beneficent spirit are spent on the cultivation of “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha” (Dick-ens 37). As obscure as this reference to a tribal area on “the left bank of the Niger” (37) sounds, it is pervasively present in Mrs. Jellyby’s thoughts, occluding a sensible awareness of her children and her husband. The obfuscatory pre-eminence of her project is underlined by her habitual distant gaze; eyes that have “a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if […] they could see nothing nearer than Africa” (36). The poignancy of Mrs. Jellyby’s utter neglect of her duties as a mother and wife is increased by the fact that her concern for the African native is itself hedged in and consequently trivialised by imperial and colonial motives: “the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives — and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our su-perabundant home population” (34). Incredible but true, the narrative shows no indignation at the racial marginalisation of the African native. It eventually even offhandedly ties up the loose strands of Mrs. Jellyby’s involvement with Borrioboola-Gha by stating she was frustrated in her designs by
the local King summarily selling everybody for Rum (878). Clearly, the novel’s primary objections 4 are related to Mrs. Jellyby’s disregard of her family and, by extension, the more pressing needs within the British homestead itself. One wonders, with Esther, if this telescopic philanthropy at the expense of the suffering close by is not altogether a hypocrisy, a wilful blindness, an unheedful-ness of the irreducible demand of Mrs. Jellyby’s fellow human beings. It is noteworthy that, again, lines of sight are so prominent to a balanced responsibility. In Mrs. Jellyby’s case, everything is as-sessed on the basis of its pertinence to her (distant) project and judged according to its relevance to the encompassing frame. Yet, as Levinas maintains, the other has to be met on the other’s own terms, not captured and closed-off in the freezing frame of ‘the Said’.
2.5 Performing ‘responsibility’
Mr. Jarndyce […] had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all (Dickens 100)
to insinuate that one […] offers hospitality, thus appropriating for oneself a place to welcome [accueillir] the other, or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality (Derrida, Adieu 15)
At the end of this section, I would like to move on to a discussion of how a system of justice, ush-ered in by ’the third’, is dependant on and ought to continuously reconsider the discursive, fictional, frames through which it distributes its legal authority (remember, also, our discussion of the etymo-logical relations between ‘law’ and ‘distribution’). First though, we will consider how Bleak House’s account of Mrs. Pardiggle indicates the discursive fields of force in which responsibility plays out. Hopefully, by now, the meaning of the word responsibility will be seen to shift from a strictly Lev-inasian theoretical sense to a more empirically embedded one. I will try to show here that hospitali-ty and responsibilihospitali-ty are inherently discursive and performative in praxis. Given that responsibilihospitali-ty is enacted in interlocutionary scenes of address, it runs the risk of inaugurating interpretive frames that reduce the other to a factor within a given chain of charity. It is not surprising, in this regard, that Levinas almost pre-emptively stresses “What nonetheless remains behind the scenes is the ethical, an original being delivered over to the other” (“Being-Toward-Death” 136). Mr. Jarndyce’s distinction between ‘two classes of charitable people’ is foregrounded by a similar sentiment; the idea that altruism or simply charitable behaviour can be(come) part of a performative enactment and projection of the self. Derrida, likewise, locates the danger of a solipsistic ulterior motive for
See Sabine Clemm’s Dickens, Journalism and Nationhood: Mapping the World in ‘Household Words’ for a historically
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assuming the position of the hospitable host. It is easy to see why Dickens would be critical of such egocentrism and self-righteousness. Yet the way in which this critique is cast is ultimately more im-portant, because its careful wording reveals the discursive layers and interlocutory acts that under-lie ethical praxis.
Enter Mrs. Pardiggle. Known for her “rapacious benevolence” (Dickens 100) and an obnox-ious habit of intruding on people’s lives with unsolicited advice, she prizes herself on not treating her children like Mrs. Jellyby does hers. Nothing, however, is mentioned about Mrs. Jellyby’s scan-dalous neglect of her children. Rather, Mrs. Pardiggle advocates her own policy not to exclude her offspring “from participation in the objects to which she is devoted” (102) (said of Mrs. Jellyby). Ac-cordingly, she cheats her children of their pocket money by signing them up on subscription lists, primarily in order to boast about their prodigious devotion to charity. Her person, then, has “the ef-fect of wanting a great deal of room”, both figuratively and literally as is illustrated by the way in which she “overturn[s], as if by invisible agency” (103) pieces of furniture that are not even in close proximity to her. Yet, as with everything else, her enormous efforts “impart[ ] great liveliness to all concerned” (105) in the promotion of the various noble causes, but fail to provide succour and sanctuary to those in actual need. Esther acutely observes that “she certainly did make, in this, as in everything else, a show that was not conciliatory, of doing charity by wholesale and of dealing in it to a large extent” (108, emphasis added). Intriguingly, Esther’s language reveals the performative substrate of Mrs. Pardiggle personality: “her commanding deportment” (103); “military in her man-ners” (104); “with a great show of moral determination”; “talking with much volubility”; “business-like and systematic” (106); “with a forcible composure”; “calculated” (107); “with demonstrative cheerfulness” (108). The sanctimonious moral deliberation with which Mrs. Pardiggle takes the Brickmaker and his family “into custody” (109) and the zeal of her self-aggrandising comportment are shown to be performances. Following J.L. Austin’s distinction between constative and perfor-mative acts, Mrs. Pardiggle’s behaviour can be seen as a composite of speech acts through which 5 she moulds and forms her image for and of others. Her locutions frame the way she is to be per-ceived, but also project a frame onto others, thus instantiating a hypostatisation. The reason why she, as a character, can be perceived as offensive and antagonising is that she reduces the uniqueness of the other to a construct of her moral vision. Levinas maintains that “responsibility is established neither beneath the gaze of simultaneity of the givens of knowledge, contemporary for the gaze which apprehends everything, nor in the reciprocity within economic society” (“Being-for-the-Other” 118). Mrs. Pardiggle, contrarily, evinces one of the problems inherent to the transition from ethical theory to ethical praxis. As soon as responsibility is acted out in a closed-off, level playing field (consequent of the presence of ‘the third’), it risks becoming thematised itself in a de-finitive and measurable frame. Here, the persistence of the conatus essendi becomes visible again, as responsibility is propitiously reduced to yet another means of self-realisation. Should one,
Cf. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
concomitantly, criticise and forestall an empirical praxis of ethics or is there a valid alternative in attending closely and critically to the ways of framing a responsible life?
3. Chapter Two: Fields of perception and discursive frames
3.1 Interlocution and linguistic givenness
For Dickens the everyday tissue of family, social, and political life is woven of innumer-able speech acts, performatives small or large, private or public, oral or written, voiced or silent. These momentary breaks, interruptions, or veerings change the whole social system, in however small a degree. Everything is different thereafter.
(J. Hillis Miller, Moments of Decision 55)
Should language be thought uniquely as the communication of an idea or as informa-tion, and not also - and perhaps above all - as the fact of encountering the other as other, that is to say, already as response to him? Is not the first word bonjour? […] It underlies all the rest of communication, underlies all discourse.
(Levinas, “Interview with François Poirié” 47)
If, as Hillis Miller’s argument about Bleak House goes, performatives are ubiquitous and constitu-tive of even the smallest of practices within the private sphere, one should also note that for Lev-inas the Saying is a linguistic event taking place in the interlocutionary scene of address. Lan6 -guage does not just equate to the encounter of the other. More accurately put, Levinas under-stands the Saying as “the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification” which is “antecedent to the verbal signs it con-jugates” (OTB 5). To commit oneself in language in a performative act is, fundamentally, to engage with the other in the ethical event of the Saying. This performative event thus both presupposes and enacts responsibility, the ceding of one’s place to the other. This is not to be taken lightly. Lev-inas stresses that “Saying is not a game” (5). It could be argued that it involves what Butler calls “the primary dependency that any speaking being has by the virtue of the interpellative or constitu-tive address of the Other” (Excitable Speech 5-6). To clarify, Levinas focuses on the asymmetrical and non-reciprocal responsibility for the other to which I am elected. Yet Levinas’s insistence on discursive, “linguistic underpinnings of an encounter with the other” (Clarkson 96) signals the pre-carious balance of such a performative event. That is to say, the condition of linguistic vulnerability resultative of one’s “being interpellated within the terms of language” (Butler, ES 5) is a generalis-able and universal one.
Incidentally, the assumption of a generalisable and hence symmetrical condition of linguistic vulnerability appears a problematic premise for Levinasian responsibility, particularly bearing in
See Clarkson’s argument on pp. 95-97 of Drawing the Line for a more detailed treatment.
mind Levinas’s stress on asymmetry. Inversely, however, it is Levinas’s insistence on asymmetry that becomes problematic in the light of these findings. Drucilla Cornell’s engages with this prob-lem in a very thorough and illuminating way in The Philosophy of the Limit. Based on readings of Hegel, Adorno, Levinas and Derrida, she concludes: “Levinas’ project turns against itself without the recognition of a ‘strange symmetry’” (91) that consists in the phenomenological givenness of each and every person; a givenness that here finds expression through language and hence gen7 -erates a condition of linguistic vulnerability. To be sure, my vulnerability to interpellation — to being linguistically, discursively constituted — precedes my ability to even apprehend and reflect on the process of interpellation. The very terms by which I come to be elude me. The interlocutionary scene in which these terms reside and operate exceeds retrospective recuperation. Judith Butler writes, “this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for nar-ration” (Giving an Account 8). Further, “the terms by which recognition is regulated, allocated, and refused are part of larger social rituals of interpellation” (ES 26) and so I am interpellated not just within ‘the terms of language’ but into a larger social economy; a sedimented distribution in which I risk being pinned down and closed-off through the language that constitutes me. We are reminded, again, by Butler’s careful wording (narration, recognition, regulation, allocation) of the ‘fictional’ log-ic that underpins a distribution of the sensible. Butler argues that “[t]here is no way to protect against that primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition that solicits
existence” (ES 26). Then again, as Bleak House’s shows, some are more vulnerable than others. The novel seems to suggest that this vulnerability inaugurates an ethical comportment towards those who are unable to efficaciously counter the interpellative, performative feats of others and are consequently objectified and dispossessed. Does not Levinas suggest the selfsame thing with regard to the vulnerability of the Other? Let us therefore turn to Bleak House and its depiction of 8 vulnerable ones, their relative helplessness and subjugation predicated on a linguistic, interlocutory illiteracy.
Further, “we are to remain faithful to the ethical asymmetry that inheres in the respect for the Other as Other. But, as we
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have seen, Derrida also shows that this respect for difference demands the recognition of a ‘strange’ phenomenological symmetry […] we are the same precisely in our difference as egos” (Cornell 171).
E.g. in “Interview with François Poirié”, Levinas writes “the face, behind the countenance that it gives itself, is like a
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being’s exposure unto death; the without-defense, the nudity and the misery of the other. It is also the commandment to take the other upon oneself” (48).
Again, in Otherwise than Being, “The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself” (88).
3.2 Framing charity
In Bleak House, we find Esther professing her lack of qualifications for assisting Mrs. Pardiggle on her visiting round:
That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situat-ed, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate
knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to
learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good inten-tions alone. (Dickens 104, emphasis added)
The irony of Esther’s statement lies, of course, in the fact that Mrs. Pardiggle is expected to have the qualifications that Esther purportedly lacks, whereas the subsequent visit to the Brickmaker’s house reveals otherwise. Mrs. Pardiggle barges in and usurps the space of attention, taking the family “into religious custody” as an “inexorable moral Policeman” (107). She is described as me-chanically “taking possession of people” (107). Interestingly, her imperial manner is comparable to Mrs. Jellyby’s. That is to say, it is a projection of moral determination that is coterminous with an extrapolation of the self as the basis for a conception of the other. Esther stresses the necessity of adapting both one’s mind and the point of view of one’s address to the one addressed. Though, admittedly, one can never fully exhaust the process of adapting one’s mind other than by reifying the addressee, which is tantamount to making the same fault that Mrs. Pardiggle makes, Esther’s cautionary reflection rings true with Levinas. That is to say, both Levinas and Derrida state that the other precedes me, addresses me from before the start and that, therefore, my address to the oth-er is already a response. Esthoth-er’s remark can be seen to acknowledge this sentiment as hoth-ers is 9 an openness to the other as other. At the same time, Esther’s disqualifying herself saves her from seeming pedantic; her description of ‘minds differently situated’ that need to be addressed from ‘suitable points of view’ raises the question as to whether the position of these ‘minds’ is inferior or superior relative to hers. Further, who is to determine what is suitable? Esther pre-empts the bear-ing these questions have on her, yet the text does raise the issue, is it possible to address the oth-er in a non-violative way? What is required in ordoth-er to do the othoth-er justice? These are questions that we will have to return to later.
See Levinas in Otherwise than Being: “All the negative attributes which state what is beyond the essence become posi
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-tive in responsibility, a response answering to a non-thematizable provocation and thus a non-vocation, a trauma. This response answers, before any understanding, for a debt contracted before any freedom and before any consciousness and any present, but it does answer, as though the invisible that bypasses the present left a trace by the very fact of by-passing the present. That trace lights up as the face of a neighbor, ambiguously him before whom (or to whom, without any paternalism) and him for whom I answer.” (12); See, also, Derrida: “This movement without movement effaces itself in the welcoming of the other, and since it opens itself to the infinity of the other, an infinity that, as other, in some sense precedes it, the welcoming of the other (objective genitive) will already be a response: the yes to the other will already be responding to the welcoming of the other (subjective genitive), to the yes of the other. This response is called for as soon as the infinite — always of the other — is welcomed. (Adieu 23)
Meanwhile, in Bleak House, the Brickmaker protests against his “being drawed like a bad-ger” (107). This badger baiting metaphor equates Mrs. Pardiggle, or perhaps rather her speech, with a dog that is sent into the badger’s den to draw him out. The metaphor thereby evokes the antagonism that inheres in the situation of address. The addressor, Pardiggle, takes the family into custody through her address. The content of her pontifications, the demeaning derogation of her addressees, is inseparable from the interpellative force of the address itself. In the moment of her ‘charitable’ address, Mrs. Pardiggle dispossess the addressee. As Butler’s argument goes, “an ‘injury’ is performed by the very act of interpellation, the one that rules out the possibility of the sub-ject’s autogenesis” (ES 27). It is imperative, therefore, that one develops “a critical perspective on the kinds of language that govern the regulation and constitution of the subject” (27). Bleak House provides ample opportunity to do just that. Moreover, Esther’s acute insights, though professedly naive and unwitting, shed a critical light on the way in which people are regulated and constituted. It should be added that Esther’s recommended approach is one of charitable actions, rather than words: “For these reasons, I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind ser-vices I could, to those immediately about me; and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and natu-rally expand itself.” (Dickens 104). How different from the intent and purport of moral volubility, and how different from, ultimately, the detriment caused by the law in Bleak House!
3.3 Perceptual fields
And so we arrive at one of the central concerns in Bleak House: political, juridical fields of percep-tion and the discursive frames that engender them — frames constitutive of a given distribupercep-tion of the sensible. Here, Bleak House opens up to Butler’s discussion of the frame and the differential 10 allocation of precariousness, and asks if and how change can be brought about from within an un-equal system. Most poignant in this regard perhaps is the rejection of Jo the crossing sweeper as a witness in court. As will become clear from the passage cited below, his illiteracy and unknowing-ness are cast as reasons for his exclusion from the law:
O! Here’s the boy, gentleman! Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! — But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two
See also Vanden Bossche’s historiographic account of Bleak House’s contemporary context: “the liberal political tradi
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-tion that, beginning at mid-century, envisioned an English na-tion that was not divided by class but was unified as a single people. In radical discourse, the people had always been a double figure. On the one hand, such discourse represented a nation divided between the included elite and the excluded people, the nation as it is now; on the other hand, it referred to a unified nation without class division, the nation as it should be. Dickens’s novel draws on this radical tradition to cri-tique class discourse that seeks to define social inclusion and agency through the exclusion of others, and to assert the right of the people to political inclusion.” (9) And again: “[Bleak House] depicts the problem of class and political exclu-sion as a problem of discourse and seeks to reform the discursive terms in which public discourse is framed, making resistant discourse the preliminary to the achievement of popular agency” (10).
names. Never heard of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie […] and so he’ll tell the truth. […] Don’t you think you can receive his evidence, sir? […] Out of the question […] We can’t take that in a Court of Justice, gentleman. It’s terrible depravity. Put the boy aside. (148, emphasis in original)
We are reminded, yet again, of the pervasive inequality that has seeped in and sedimented within the economy portrayed here. In terms of a distribution antecedent to the law, Jo, frankly, is bereft and is kept in the dark. The embodiment of dispossession, he does not look the part, does not have a full first name nor a family name, has no relations, no education and no fixed place of abode. He is a spectral, peripheral figure within the system and is put aside because of this being 11 other to the system. He cannot be pinned down properly by means of the system’s normal machi-nations and is, therefore, framed as other, unfit, a depravity in a Court of Justice. That is to say, since social markers of identity (name, family, education, address) are absent, the absence of these markers becomes the social mark or stigma that demeans Jo. Quite emphatically, by means of a deictic ‘that’, his existence as a human being is reduced to mere being. This deictic, performa-tive act at once makes Jo visible and confines him in the narrow categories of what is commonly accepted as worth seeing. Jo is interpellated into a perceptual frame that pulls him out of the spec-tral pullulation at the fringes of society, only to reduce and tie him to the conditions constitutive of that peripheral existence. “Perception and policy are but two modalities of the same process whereby the ontological status of a targeted population is compromised and suspended”, writes Judith Butler (Frames of War 29). The question, subsequently, is what this process consists of, whether it is conclusive and irremediable, and what it is, exactly, that is incumbent on us because of the precariousness that is laid bare. This is what we will turn to next.
3.4 Vulnerability and grievability
To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business, here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be per-plexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle, go me by,
Jo is generally considered as emblematic of the poor. Also, a subject for further research would be the importance of
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Jo’s (lack of a) full first name. Considering Jo as short for John allows us to compare and contrast him with the novel’s other John (Jarndyce), which adds to the considerable layers of ambivalence in Bleak House.
and to know that in ignorance I belong to them, and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! (Dickens 221)
Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?
(Butler, Precarious Life xiv-xv)
Bleak House’s narrator purportedly infers Jo’s thoughts. He was overlooked until he came into
be-ing through interpellation, a performative enactment of a frame that dispossessed him further still. Interestingly, Jo’s vulnerability as a subject, his lack of linguistic, subjective agency, is paralleled and emphasises by his syntactic position, as the narrator repeatedly uses the ‘passive voice’ to describe Jo’s situation. Jo appears more vulnerable to the workings of such interpellative force be-cause of his illiteracy and ignorance. He can be hustled and moved on precisely bebe-cause he does not have the linguistic performative power to withstand the powers exerted through the frame that pins him down. Bleak House questions whether or not Jo’s life is considered ‘livable’ and ‘griev-able’, not just in relation to the law but in in relation to society at large. The apparent distrust of the law is contrasted with the question as to society’s, and thereby every individual’s, responsibility to engage critically with and alleviate the systemic injustices correlative of the law. Indeed, the novel’s suggestion that it is through the face-to-face apprehension of the other as other, and the recogni-tion of an other in need, effectively critiques the frame that would suspend the other’s alterity. This face-to-face encounter and a concomitant ceding of place is expressed quite literally by Esther’s loss of her face to smallpox. Notably, it is when she takes care of Jo and shortly after nurses her maid Charley that she contracts the disease. Mr. Skimpole would rather turn Jo out of the house to shift for himself because of the “bad sort of fever about him” (Dickens 433). That will not do, obvi-ously, and so Mr. Jarndyce and Esther proceed to accommodate the feverish boy for the night. Mr. Jarndyce percipiently remarks that “if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his hospital would be wide open to him” (434), implicitly critiquing a system which so unevenly distributes pre-cariousness. That is to say, the unequal allocation of the “sustaining conditions” (Butler, FoW 23) that constitute life socially and materially is what Bleak House repeatedly draws attention to. As such, it interrogates how frames work to perpetuate inequality.
3.5 Framing binaries and overcoming the frame
Before we proceed, it might be useful to dwell a little longer on the frame, its trappings and repro-ducibility and how the frame and the law operate in Bleak House:
Go into the Court of Chancery yonder, and ask what is one of the standing jokes that brighten up their business sometimes, and they will tell you that the best joke they have, is the man from Shropshire. I […] am the man from Shropshire (Dickens 214)
Mr. Gridley’s irascibility and violent disposition aside, his case is indicative of how the law and a given distribution entrenched within it frame an individual. He has become a standing joke, a run-ning gag in court, and cannot, of his own account, escape this reductive way of viewing him. One of the problems is that the moment and way in which Gridley contests this juridical mistreatment is already captured within the demarcations of the frame. His very oppositional defiance merely serves to perpetuate the binary paradigm through which he is seen. I say binary because the frame operates on the basis of that which falls within its parameters or is excluded by it. The in-stant Gridley contests the position he is relegated to is fraught with this exclusionary logic. So, at the risk of oversimplifying, if Gridley were A he would be in the position necessary to say some-thing about what it means to be A, how A should function, what is incumbent on A, etc. One can argue A only by occupying the corollary A position. Equally, one cannot argue A when being or oc-cupying the position of B. The attempt to argue or claim A on the proposition of B fails within an equation in which A ≠ B.
The system! I am told, on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into Court […] My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to admin-ister the system. […] He is not responsible. It’s the system. […] I will accuse the indi-vidual workers of that system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!
(Dickens 215)
The frame, then, is primarily a way of thinking through the way in which a delimited perceptual field, that works to distribute recognizability, is instantiated and perpetuated. Butler observes that, firstly, “certain lives are perceived as lives while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as such” (FoW 24) and, secondly, “such perceptual categories are essential to the crafting of material realities” (25). In other words, material reality has a perceptual, fictional sub-strate according to which some lives are considered to matter, whereas others do not. The distinc-tion between what Butler calls ‘allocadistinc-tion of recognizability’ and what Rancière calls ‘distribudistinc-tion of the sensible’ is blurry. Both refer to the sensory, perceptual field which invariably frames people
through its instantiation of contextual borders that delimit and define people. Butler argues, in this respect, that “there is no context without an implicit delimitation of context” (FoW 10) and therefore without a frame. This delimitation, concurrently, construes what is “paradigmatically human” or in-human (PL 143). The frame normatively decides what forms of life and living can, perceptually, be apprehended. It does so in (at least) two ways according to Butler — ways that became apparent from Gridley’s case:
one operates through producing the symbolic identification of the face with the inhu-man, foreclosing our apprehension of the human in the scene; the other works through radical effacement, so that there never was a human, there never was a life
(PL 147)
Inevitably, one comes up against a dilemma regarding the verisimilitude of a subject’s agency as entailed by the definitive, exclusionary logic of the frame, at least in the way it has been discussed so far. Bleak House seems very pessimistic in this respect. Jo, Gridley and Richard are only three cases in point in which life is extinguished in both figurative and literal ways, primarily through the inability of these people to counter the interpellative force of the frame that constitutes and binds them. It appears that the bleak picture the novel paints entails both a negation of individual agency of the excluded and dispossessed, and the irrevocable social burden this places on (relatively privi-leged) others. Concomitantly, the question is not whether or not people are framed, but indeed how they are constituted through and by the frame and whether the frame itself can be made visible. According to the type of logic followed hitherto, in order to perceive that which frames our percep-tion, the frame itself has to be framed. Whence Butler’s remark that “[t]o frame the frame seems to involve a certain highly reflexive overlay of the visual field” (FoW 9). Moreover, she continues, “to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside” (9). Yet, how does one, first of all, circumvent the per-ceptual limitations of the frame in order to retroactively foreclose its project? It would be preferable to steer clear of the polemical minefield of individual agency as such. The Levinasian project of 12 responsibility, after all, concerns the other and not oneself. It seems impossible, however, to ignore the question of agency altogether, since framing the frame entails being aware of the perceptual limitations set up by the frame. Paradoxically, I have to see outside of the fictionally construed field that determines what I can see. This epistemological aporia is recognised and sidestepped by But-ler who maintains that while these frames “are politically saturated […] operations of power” they
Nevertheless, see Foucault’s “The Subject and Power.” for a thought provoking account of an individual’s agency.
cannot be said to “unilaterally decide the conditions of appearance” (FoW 1). It is important to 13 drive this point home, because, according to John Wild’s introduction to Totality and Infinity, Lev-inas’s propositions are coterminous or at least contiguous with Butler’s in this regard:
“unless we desire [to know the other person], and go on trying, we shall never escape from the subjectivism of our systems and the objects that they bring before us to cate-gorize and manipulate […] But we may seek to transcend [our thoughts and feelings], first as individuals and only later, perhaps, as a group. The individual becomes free and responsible not by fitting into a system but rather by fighting against it and by acting on his own” (Wild, T&I 18, emphasis in original)
Levinas’s project clearly postulates the ability to recognise, challenge and transcend the frames inherent to and constitutive of the systems of perception that threaten to thematise the other. Pre-suming, therefore, that a frame can be framed so as to call into question the division it sets up, we can now proceed to analyse how this process is played out in Bleak House. Is it tenable to say that the novel itself already frames a variety of frames? It is hinted at that the novel is to be understood as being allegorical. Indeed, Mr. Tulkinghorn’s quarters are said to “enable Allegory […] to look tol-erably cool” (Dickens 305) despite the oppressive summer heat; a meta-narrative cue for reading
Bleak House as “A story, picture, etc. which uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning,
typically a moral or political one; a symbolic representation; an extended or continued
metaphor” (OED). To dwell a bit longer on the idea of the allegorical picture, it can be said to imply the presence of a frame: the photographic lens determining the focal point and, inversely, what falls outside of the picture. Similarly, the narrative recuperation of how Chancery has affected and shifted the focal point of the Jarndyce & Jarndyce suit effectively frames the original, performative frame instantiated by Chancery itself. This juridical frame is now wrenched from its original context and presented to us in the light of a different frame. Next, therefore, we will discuss how Chancery is framed in Bleak House.
Foucault is similarly optimistic: "When I study power relations, I try to study their specific configurations [...] I'm very
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careful to get a grip on the actual mechanisms of the exercise of power; I do this because those who are enmeshed, involved, in these power relations can, in their actions, their resistance, their rebellion, escape them, transform them, in a word, cease being submissive [...] I think there are a thousand things that can be done, invented, contrived by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are involved, have decided to resist them or escape them. From that viewpoint, al my research rests on a postulate of absolute optimism” (“Interview with Michel Foucault” 294)
3.7 Framing Chancery
‘I don’t know who does [understand this Chancery business],’ he returned. ‘The Lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a Will, and the trusts under a Will — or it was, once. It’s about nothing but Costs now. We are always ap-pearing, and disapap-pearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away’ (Dickens 95)
As J. Hillis Miller notes regarding the performatives constitutive of these juridical procedures, “their use is not to settle the case and administer justice but to keep the case going and to go on making the lawyers richer […] They use the Court of Chancery to obstruct justice” (Moments of Decision 52-53). Interestingly, their iniquity in equity becomes clear precisely when looked at from a different vantage point, the newly instated perceptual field in which we come to know “every masterly fic-tion, every form of procedure known in that court” (Dickens 20) differently. By extension, it would not seem untenable to maintain that Bleak House, as a narrative, ipso facto stages and frames its subsumptive content. Then again, apprehending the frame and effecting a perceptual recalibration is not peculiar to narrative or novelistic devices per se. As Butler, building on Walter Benjamin’s argument, writes, the frame already breaks from its original context in order to perpetuate its per-ceptual rule:14
the frames […] must circulate in order to establish their hegemony. This circulation brings out or, rather, is the iterable structure of the frame. As frames break from them-selves in order to install themthem-selves, other possibilities for apprehension emerge. (FoW 12)
Consequently and inexorably, the representational substrate underlying Bleak House’s account of the injustices perpetrated by Chancery already severs Chancery’s performative frames from their inaugural spatial and temporal moment. Thus, as Butler’s argument goes, we are led “to a different way of understanding both the frame’s efficacy and its vulnerability to reversal, to subversion, even to critical instrumentalization” (FoW 10). Accordingly, even as Mr. Kenge underscores that, in Jarndyce & Jarndyce, “every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of pro-cedure known in that court, is represented over and over again” (Dickens 20, emphasis added), he
Cf. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
unwittingly attests to the process by which the hegemonic power of the juridical performative frame is eroded and dislodged. Indeed, through its portrayal in Bleak House Jarndyce & Jarndyce is 15 instrumentalised as a critique of Chancery practices. In a similar vein, Bleak House’s description of Tom-all-Alone’s (Jo’s place of abode) frames Chancery’s predilection for prolonged suits: 16
It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants . . . Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint . . . This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. (Dickens 220)
‘Desirable property’ — the irony is bitter, even more so because of Chancery’s involvement. It is clear that “the suit ha[s] laid the street waste” (220). However, for all its instrumentalising of a frame in which the prolongation of suits is one of the main foci, this passage, by framing the frame and thus erecting its own frame, instantiates a hypostatisation that one has to be equally suspi-cious of. Notice how the description is filled with disgust as to the dilapidation and putrefaction comprising Tom-all-Alone’s. Likewise, the intensely disapproving account of the burial site of Nemo, captain Hawdon, can hardly show more revulsion: “a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated” (151). Both accounts evince that “affective responses are invariably mediated, they call upon and enact certain interpretive
frames” (Butler, FoW 34). Neither of the two accounts, however, provide any sign that the narrator is aware of the epistemological pitfall of representation, which in this case amounts to a violence in its own right. That is to say, whereas the accounts frame Chancery for the reader to adjudicate and condemn Chancery’s practices, they do not “call into question the taken-for-granted character of those frames, and in that way provide the affective conditions for social critique” (Butler, FoW 34-35). At the risk of seeming banal, let me point out that the description of Tom-all-Alone’s fails to zoom in on the individual plight of its inhabitants, and instead rather represents these people like vermin and insects. This passage, clearly, seems more concerned with the putrefying filth of the
Similarly, Skimpole’s performative refrain of non-responsibility becomes increasingly untenable as his reiteration
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thereof exposes fault lines that allow Esther and the readerly audience to apprehend the refrain for what it is, deceitful and self-centred.
Allan notes that “[b]y the mid-nineteenth century, the Court of Chancery had evolved into a notoriously inefficient and
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expensive system that was governed by a set of needlessly complex procedures […] For example, any party involved in a suit needed to maintain both a solicitor and a barrister whose financial interests lay in the indefinite perpetuation of the suit” (18).
