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“Like so many relationships, Bleak House begins in the...”

written by Janet Lewison on 03/08/2009

Like so many relationships, Bleak House begins in the fog:





'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river...fog down the river...chance people on the bridges...with fog all round them.'





Repetition breeds a delicious sensory pleasure. This is Dickens's incantatory requiem to visual perception. Indeed our perceptions of the real are under review. This marked investment in temporary blindness is a metaphor for the secrecy and moral misjudgement that contaminates the novel on all levels. For Bleak House is a labyrinthine novel which attempts to conceal as much as to reveal; a novel peopled by isolated, lost individuals, clinging to their secrets and stories buried deep beneath the complex narrative web that is Bleak House.



Everything stands for something else in Bleak House, nothing is ever just itself. Dickens's use of the dual narrative, with the seeming transcendence of the third person narrator set against the apologetic observations of Dickens's only female narrator, Esther Summerson, engenders displacement at every turn. For this split responsibility for disclosure serves to protect the innocence of Esther as mid-Victorian heroine, whilst also tantalising the reader with hints at erotic passions that lie way beyond the permitted script of the upstanding Victorian novel.



Every reader will have their favourite moments in Bleak House for it is a truly gorgeous novel. My personal favourite was revealed to me years ago in a letter from Steve Newman my most inspiring tutor at Liverpool University , and it has never been supplanted in my affections:



'For I don't,' says Jo,'I don't know nothink.'
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language-to be every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!'


This must be one of the most Romantic moments in fiction. The sense of wonder grants the street boy Jo a temporary human story that his abject inhuman poverty precludes elsewhere. Not knowing is rescued from ignorance and becomes a creative 'other' experience, where the narrator revisits the known and retranslates it from Jo's point of view.

The lostness of Jo in terms of his illiteracy becomes a metaphor for the novel's own search for significance. For everyone is lonely in Bleak House. Everyone in Bleak House is lost. Everyone is attempting to decipher something, or someone, or somewhere, and these imperatives destroy as much as heal.



Dickens repeatedly employs the infinitive in this passage and in doing so creates an overriding sense of separation and even suspension. Seeing is not believing, it is bewildered incomprehension. Like Pip in Great Expectations when he gazes at Miss Havisham still dressed in her ancient wedding gown, Jo's encounter with the world involves stasis and fear. Jo's impotence in the world is represented through this deployment of the infinitive, rendering the finite a place way beyond the scope of Jo's destiny.



Wonderful!