"Anywhere's Nowhere": Bleak House as Autoethnography

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v012/12.1buzard.html

James Buzard

The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere. --E. B. Tylor 1 Within the boundaries of the tribe the writ of the same culture runs from end to end. --Bronislaw Malinowski 2 "Where would you wish to go?" she asked. "Anywhere, my dear," I replied. "Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely. "Let us go somewhere at any rate," said I. --Charles Dickens 3

I. Since Dickens's Bleak House so famously starts twice, with its bold and puzzling technique of double narration (half the novel told in the third person, half in the first), this essay on it will follow its lead by starting twice, too. I begin with some observations on two important pieces of recent humanistic scholarship, then enter upon a treatment of the novel that is meant both to address certain key questions in contemporary critical debate and to offer a new perspective on the cultural and ideological effects of the novel form in mid-Victorian Britain. The first piece of recent work, Stuart Hall's "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," 4 reflects on the centrality of "globalization" in contemporary cultural analysis. Hall cautions that "from the perspective of any historical account of English culture, globalization is far from a new process," and he levels the charge of "historical amnesia" against theorists who write as though "just because we are thinking about [this] idea it has only just started" (Hall, 20). Within the expanded historical framework he recommends to us, Hall then goes on to delineate two eras: the so-called

English phase, during which worldwide economic exchange was dominated by imperial nation-states that possessed a "strongly centered, highly exclusive and exclusivist form of cultural identity"; and the late-twentiethcentury phase of a more decentered "American-style" variety whose "global postmodernist" culture is if anything excessively, complacently open to differences, and whose capitalism, far from trying to remake all cultures in its image, "works in and through [the][End Page 7] specificity [of different cultures]" (Hall, 29). The farther into Hall's essay one goes, the more stable and uncomplicated the older, English-imperialist form of globalism comes to appear, as it plays its role of foil for the dizzying postmodern variety we now inhabit, which occupies most of Hall's attention. In the earlier era, Hall says, "The 'English eye' sees everything else but is not so good at recognizing that it is itself actually looking at something. It becomes coterminous with sight itself. . . . [K]nowing where it is, what it is, it places everything else" (Hall, 20-21). In point of fact, the dominant "Englishness" has always been just as much an ethnicity as any other, just as much a place-to-speak-from--as little an Olympian vantage point--as any other site on earth; but that, Hall maintains ( la Hegel), "is something which we are only now beginning to see the true nature of, when we are beginning to come to the end of it." The bygone imperialists appear to have believed in their own representations of Englishness as something "perfectly natural," something "condensed, homogeneous, unitary" (Hall, 22). Hall speaks of the "large confidence with which the English have always occupied their own identities" (Hall, 26). Elsewhere in his essay Hall identifies as the "most profound cultural revolution" of our times the "struggle of the [postcolonial and other] margins to come into representation"; he celebrates, in terms by now a veritable reflex of humanistic study, "the emergence of . . . communities hitherto excluded from the major forms of cultural representation" and now able "to speak for themselves for the first time" (Hall, 34). He notes that the rediscovery of one's ethnicity, of "the necessary place or space from which people speak," is an important, even an essential moment in this process, but goes on to ask, "do [these newly empowered marginal voices] have to be trapped in the place from which they begin to speak?" (Hall, 36). Hall's postmodern global moment is above all an ambivalent one, attuned to two voices: one extols the capacity to roam about a world of differences, the other holds fast to a localism that does not want to involve itself in any larger world it cannot comprehend. A proper grasp of this moment, Hall insists, must include the recognition that these two voices arise "out of the same place" (Hall, 32). Yet I believe the ambivalence Hall perceives is no new phenomenon, but rather a defining effect of the notion of culture.

Now let me turn to item number two in my beginning number one. In her justly admired book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 5 Mary Louise Pratt introduces a variety of promising concepts, the least developed but most suggestive of which is "autoethnography." "If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others," she writes, "autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (Pratt, 7). Pratt cautions us against thinking of these texts as pure, "authentic" or "autochthonous forms of self-representation"--as coming solely or simply from Hall's "necessary place" of ethnicity--insisting that we see them instead as products of a self-conscious, creative negotiation or confrontation with difference. Pratt is enough of a postmodernist to place "authentic" in inverted commas: readings of autoethnographies, she argues, must chart a course between regarding them "simply as 'authentic' self-expression or 'inauthentic'[End Page 8] assimilation," for at either pole "their transcultural character is obliterated and their dialogic engagement with western modes of representation lost" (Pratt, 102). Yet because she limits the application of her concept to the reactive products of the colonized--there are no conqueror's autoethnographies, nor any autoethnographies without prior, offensive ethnographies--her model remains trapped in just the kind of undeconstructed metaphors she seeks to avoid: those of the Voice, of Letting the Silenced Speak or of Talking Back to Power. What Pratt calls "dialogue" could better be termed "rebuttal": an erroneous and coercive representation, produced by hostile aliens, is counteracted by an indigenous one which, however much it may appropriate the modes of the former, can be securely distinguished from it (and preferred to it) only by virtue of its "authentic" indigenous status. It seems to me that, more broadly applied, the concept of "autoethnography" promises to place us in a more uncomfortable, but perhaps richer and more creative, confrontation with such notions as "culture" and "ethnicity" than we have had to endure during much of the past thirty years or so. A thoroughgoing historical and methodological critique seems to have left anthropology, our expert discipline on ethnicity and culture, in a position not unlike that of certain companies unlucky in civil litigation, which go on existing solely in order to pay off punitive damages to the many plaintiffs ranged against them. This critique has had the effect of identifying "the ethnographic perspective" almost exclusively with the aggressive force of a colonizing gaze. On this view, the anthropological concept of culture "might never have been invented without a colonial theater that . . . necessitated the knowledge of culture (for the purposes of control and regulation). . . ." 6 An "essential tool for making other," culture corrals subjugated peoples into governable thoughtpackets. 7 It subjects real, encounterable-in-the-field people to the

"symbolic violence" that turns them into nothing more than mouthpieces and mannequins for their cultures. 8 To its postcolonial critics, culture plunges living communities into a conceptual vat for "metonymic freezing," trapping them forever in that "ethnographic present" in which the "common denominator people" of anthropological discourse ("the Nuer," "the Trobriander," etc.) describe the same "typical" motions endlessly. 9 It enables that "denial of coevalness" by which anthropologists separate themselves from their objects, whom they deny any open-ended, historymaking temporality. 10 It cuts peoples off from the larger world, demeaning them for their isolation and backwardness even as it professes to celebrate them for their uncontaminated "authenticity." Though not exactly wrong, such arguments read as if ethnography and "culture" were always and everywhere nothing but gadgets for turning others into The Other. The never-quite-satisfactory distinction between two putatively distinct disciplines of social analysis--Sociology (for "us," the modern West) and Cultural Anthropology (for "them")--has precluded consideration of any other affiliations or tendencies of "the ethnographic," to the point that nowadays the discipline of anthropology is agog over the radical implications of "bringing the ethnographic gaze back home," of "studying up," as they say--as if (in Hall's terms) "just because we are thinking about an idea it has only just started." Let us return for a moment to Stuart Hall's movement from the crucial and empowering step of "discovering one's ethnicity" to the question "but do they have to [End Page 9] be trapped in the place from which they begin to speak?" No sooner does one locate one's "necessary place" of ethnicity or culture than one locates in oneself the powerful urge not to be confined to it. The voice from the margins longs to speak against the pressure of "minoritization" 11 --that pressure to speak nothing but the message of the marginal group, to be nothing but a representative of that group. But what about the voice from the center? And what about Hall's account of why it is no longer possible to be so blind as he implies the English imperialists were to the fact that the English eye is not sight itself, that Englishness is an ethnicity or place like any other? Anyone would acknowledge "increasing international interdependence"--economic, geopolitical, ecological, cultural-as a sign of our times; but, like a number of other recent theorists, Hall appears to suggest that the earlier globalists couldn't have been alert to the fact that their identity was "always something negotiated against difference" (Hall, 22) because they didn't experience our level of interdependence. This simply won't do as an historical explanation. It ascribes to intellectuals of the second global era a privileged, Minerva's-owl view of the first, and it oversimplifies that earlier time, forestalling any account of how complex or how conscious the process of negotiating identities may have been back then, even for the seemingly confident colonizers. I think the Victorians experienced a level of international interdependence that seemed quite

sufficient for them, and that they were sometimes driven to invoke ideas of English national culture as a protective reaction or as a preemptive strike against the future they glimpsed. The reading of Dickens's Bleak House that follows takes one celebrated (but never sufficiently celebrated) classic of Victorian fiction as an overdetermined extreme case in both the history of the novel and the (pre-)history of ethnographic representation. I treat Bleak House as a metafiction that burlesques the features of its form while implicitly defining that form as a leading variety of "metropolitan autoethnography": a romance focused on the fantasy of "a self-subsisting totality," coming to the fore when life in the imperial nation has come to feel "radically incomplete" in its dependence upon that which lies beyond it. 12 My work intersects here with that of critics who have focused recently on the nineteenth-century novel's imperialist "ideological mapping." Edward Said has valuably described the British novel of the period as laying out "a slowly built up picture with England--socially, politically, morally charted and differentiated in immensely fine detail--at the center and a series of overseas territories connected to it at the peripheries"; but, like Hall, he and others have tended to regard such spatial configuration as a sign of the dominant culture's attitude of "confidence" or "superiority" toward all those regions and peoples outside England that afforded the material basis for both the whole English way of life and its novelistic representation. 13 The critic's job then becomes that of "reading noncollusively," of focusing on "what is unsaid and occluded" among the multitudinous details of English fiction. 14 But I believe we should ask not "why didn't the leading genre of nineteenth-century Europe deal with the fundamental fact of empire?" but rather, "why did Europe in its imperial heyday reconfigure the novel and elevate it to preeminence as a genre devoted to furnishing a more exhaustive, more densely historicist account of modern Western societies than had hitherto been attempted?" Putting the matter [End Page 10] this way helps us think about the ideological work of the novel as defensive rather than "confident" or "comfortable." Like the primitivist ethnographies that followed it, the novel employs its mimetic devices to invent an imperiled "culture" it then presents itself as "salvaging": only the novel's fictive cultures are those of the metropolitan West. 15 The nineteenthcentury novel's "nationalism" is precisely the kind of localism Stuart Hall envisions in our own age--a deliberate turning away from that seemingly boundariless world in which the nation's destiny, identity, and "culture" (its way of life) are embroiled. One should also say (and consider the implications of saying) that the novel attempts to locate the abstract idea of "the nation" as a locality or "place." No novel performs these labors as studiously, energetically, orperformatively as Bleak House. Not merely hypersensitive scrutiny of the novel's peripheries, but detailed formal analysis of its central structures and language remains indispensable, because the nineteenth-century novel made itself into the preeminent

textual analogue for the social unit that was its subject, its boundaries standing in for the culture's or nation's, its plot the centripetal force that laid down those boundaries, its narrator the mobile authority capable of grasping the whole. In the case of Britain, factors impelling novelists to salvage their culture, to secure its physical and conceptual borders, are not far to seek. Reaction to the revolution in France made repudiation of global abstractions a reflex of British self-identification. France was not simply that other nation against which Britain defined and defended itself, but the nation that embodied an empty, destructive transnationalism in several of its (even contradictory) tendencies: in its Catholic church, its Enlightenment universalism, its revolutionary rhetoric. Then, too, the new physical and social mobility of Britons themselves, enabled by the harnessing of steam, threatened to obliterate familiar forms of spatial relation and must have added fuel to a desire to resituate British identities in British ground. And it may have become important to secure the link between Britishness and its territory at a time when, by virtue of the empire's enormous expansion, the British seemed capable of going anywhere--and consequently of becoming ever more entangled in places and conditions offshore. Approaching midcentury, the economic woes and Irish immigration of the 1840s constituted the century's first peacetime crisis necessitating a positive specification of British identity. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the same period witnessed the emergence of a new anthropology insisting on the fixity of race and plurality of origins as a means of demarcating human types once and for all--a polygenism that authoritatively entered into anthropological debate upon the publication of Robert Knox's The Races of Men, in 1850. Nationwide attention during that same year focused upon another traditional foe of British integrity, the Church of Rome, which, in an act decried as "Papal Aggression," had reinstated its episcopal network in Britain for the first time since the Reformation. To Britons resenting the move as an act of "cultural colonialism," the establishment of Cardinal Wiseman and his cohorts seemed a fitting insult to crown that dismal experiment, the Oxford Movement, which had aimed at revitalizing the Anglican church but had wound up by making Papists of some of its principal advocates. But if there was one spark that touched all this tinder into the brilliant flame of[End Page 11] Bleak House, it had to have been the inescapable British event of 1851, the grandiose "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations" which ran in Hyde Park for six months preceding Dickens's composition of his novel, and which consecrated, if it did not exactly inaugurate, a new era of global capitalism. Stuart Hall's characterization of our period as one in which capital "works in and through the specificity of

different cultures" finds a rather precise match in Prince Albert's claim that the Crystal Palace exhibition demonstrated a "Unity of Mankind" that would not "break down the limits, and level the peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the Earth," but would be "the result and product of those very national varieties and antagonistic qualities." 16 The Crystal Palace gave Dickens the immediate cause to produce a work in many respects more determinedly exclusive in its national focus than any of his others; yet Bleak House does not simply deliver up to us the sort of "strongly centered, exclusive and exclusivist cultural identity" that Stuart Hall discerns in the "English" phase of globalization; it enacts a highly ambivalent, demonstrative, self-conscious exploration of the processes and motivations by which the idea of discrete, exclusive "cultures" comes to dominate modern thinking. Stuart Hall flatters us by depicting our moment in a mode all too common among contemporary theorists: his denizens of the English phase basked in a prelapsarian simplicity and ignorance at once enviable and contemptible to fatally riven, romantically tragic souls like ours. We bear the destiny of ambivalence, doomed to be drawn by the strains of two alternately bewitching and loathsome sirens: "place" and "motion," "culture" and "freedom." Yet a century and a half ago, in the stylistic experiment that has been called (and with much justice) "the most audacious and significant act of the novelistic imagination in England in the nineteenth century," 17 Dickens put just such a pair of voices in play against each other in the fictional autoethnography of Bleak House.

II. Every reader of Bleak House will remember the scene in which, on her tour of the desperate slum known as Tom-all-Alone's, the shrouded Lady Dedlock gazes in horror through the gates of the decrepit graveyard where her lover lies buried. The particulars of the conversation she has with the miserable street-sweeper who is her reluctant cicerone may not come so readily to mind. Only Dickens could have concocted the mix of pathos and absurdity that makes up their exchange: "Is this place of abomination, consecrated ground?" "I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still staring. "Is it blessed?" "WHICH?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed. "Is it blessed?" "I'm blessed if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever. . . . (BH, 278) This bit of dialogue is one of those many passages in Bleak House in which narrative context appears to drop away for a moment and the language

radiates outward to offer large implications about the novel we are reading. Jo mistakenly substitutes "consequential" for "consecrated" because he does not know what "consecrated" [End Page 12] means, has perhaps never heard the word (though it is hard to imagine him having heard "consequential," either) and is surely unfamiliar with the idea of something's being sacred or blessed. The substitution is an ironically apt one, for consecrated things are in a sense those considered especially consequential to God. What Jo says to Lady Dedlock amounts to, "I don't know of any place that matters, I've never been any place that matters, no place where I am could matter." Someone who can confess to knowing nothing of any consequential ground recognizes his own inconsequentiality to the world in which he lives. Yet in its handling of such forgotten people as Jo and the self-styled "Nemo," the novel appears to imply the lesson of Matthew 10:29-31, those verses assuring us of a Father in Heaven who numbers the very hairs of our heads and lets not even a sparrow fall by accident: the "Our Father" to whom, later on, the heroic doctor Woodcourt instructs Jo to direct his last words (BH, 705). Bleak Housesuggests, in other words, that it is impossible to be exiled or to exile oneself from the sphere of things consequential to God, since nothing anywhere is beneath God's notice or beyond his care. And important characters in the novel do seem to go about setting us examples of how to imitate the Great Rememberer. John Jarndyce constantly gathers up human strays into his protection, among them the neglected little girl called Esther Summerson; Esther herself attempts, though too late, to include Jo among that circle of protgs to whom she directs her quiet, personal acts of kindness--the sort of unassuming yet consequential assistance Jo never got from the selfsatisfied preachers or "charity workers," the Mr. Chadbands or Mrs. Pardiggles of the Dickens world. The Dickens world: much of the most influential criticism on Dickens, from Humphrey House (The Dickens World) to Hillis Miller (Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels) and beyond, has accustomed us to that phrase. Yet the argument of Bleak House is by no means simply or consistently or even more than occasionally the one I have characterized in the preceding paragraph, so it becomes a legitimate and important question to ask how large this "world" is, in which the element or the person once thought inconsequential and separate is held to be consequential and connected after all. Whereas the Gospel of Matthew and, closer to Dickens's time, the Natural Theology of William Paley and others concur in envisioning a perspective from which everything everywhere, however trivial or base it appears, argues for design, that nothing is "lost" or overlooked, what seems to be going on in Bleak House is the appropriation of such reasoning for an implicit argument about the specific national community-an act which transforms the principle "everything everywhere matters to God" into the profoundly different "everything here matters here" (to cast it

in terms of place) or "everything that is ours matters to us" (to cast it in terms of identity). 18 This transformation presents itself as the repudiation of an unmappably vague universe, lacking in coordinates, to a demarcated place capable of founding and sustaining collective and individual identities. It is specifically here, within the culture of Great Britain, Dickens attempts to demonstrate, that nothing fails to matter, and there is no inconsequential ground. That Bleak House performs an "anatomy of society," exercises the "sociological imagination," provides "a model in little of English society" 19 -claims of this kind were established by the middle of the 1970s as the very staples of criticism on this [End Page 13] novel and on nineteenth-century fiction in general. I am plainly indebted to them; but they lack a forceful enough appreciation of the energies of limitation that structure Bleak House. Readings demonstrating the proto-sociological labors of the Dickens novel have shared that novel's commitment to the movement of thought that stretches outward from particular elements (individuals, social classes, places) and shows their unsuspected broader interconnection. They aim to answer the text's famous gauntlet-throwing questions, "What connexion can there be, between the [Dedlocks'] place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom . . . ? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of the world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!" (BH, 272). In Marxist versions, the critic imitates or renders explicit Dickens's own labors of connection in order to redress the reification of social reality, its devolution from a totality of relationships into an aggregate of inert things. Foucauldian treatments (D. A. Miller's is the best known) 20 exhibit the same widening tendency, with "disciplinarity" now the surprisingly expanding element that refuses confinement to the realm of law courts and police stations, but pervades every corner of social life. With their outward-stretching impulse, such treatments have underplayed Bleak House's countervailing impulse to close off and secure the boundaries of the widening field, to deny its equivalence to "the world." The sociologizing account does not contradict the limiting vision, but that vision is not, as Foucault would say, "dans le vrai" of the sociological perspective: it remains outside the set of questions with which the sociologist is concerned. With their everything-is-connected arguments, the explicators of Dickens's sociological imagination have gone only half the distance necessary to comprehend a novel in whose form the trope of the unforeseen-but-now-revealed association is matched by and even grounded in a trope of dissociation. Consider the novel's much-noted motif of disease. Bleak House assures us that Tom-all-Alone's, that place "avoided by all decent people" (BH, 72), will

turn out to be balefully consequential ground after all, in every atom of its being. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. (BH, 683) All the emphasis here is given to expanding the scope of the neglected place's influence, as the unforeseen and unwelcome force from the slum overrides distinctions once taken as crucial or determining but now shown to be illusory or merely "internal" to the system. "[H]is Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance," because the affliction can go (hyperbolically speaking) "everywhere," reach all levels. The noxious fog that saturates the novel is called "a London particular" (BH, 76), but of course it is not particular to London or to any portion thereof: it is "everywhere" (BH, 49), and the Chancery Court which is its center and source [End Page 14] "has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire[,] . . . its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard" (BH, 51). Yet no matter how insubstantial and airborne this miasma that spreads from part to part, it will halt at the shore, remaining a British infection: Bleak House imagines the island nation as an airtight container, like the street where Mrs. Jellyby lives, "an oblong cistern to hold the fog" (BH, 83). Each atom of moral poison will carom off the inside surface of the outer boundary of the nation, to do its dreadful work throughout the interior. The ideal of "consequential ground" requires the fencing around of one specifiable place from surroundings not credited with the same degree of "place-ness." So one must consider not just how the novel occupies itself with "the social world," the "knowable community," or the "imagination of society,"21 but how a powerful distrust of "universalism" made the Britain that emerges in Bleak House exactly the kind of site Marc Aug describes when he writes of the anthropologist's "field": a region whose indigenous inhabitants live in it, cultivate it, defend it, mark its strong points and keep its frontiers under surveillance, but who also detect in it the traces of chthonian or celestial powers, ancestors or spirits which populate and animate its private geography; as if the small fragment of humanity making them offerings and sacrifices in this place were also the quintessence of humanity, as if there

were no humanity worthy of the name except in the very place of the cult devoted to them. 22 If we were to require a name for the "place-less," unrepresented, external spaces of unmeaning or unvalue against which British consequential ground locates itself, we could hardly find a better one than that of Mrs. Jellyby's current philanthropic object: "Borrioboola-Gha"--as good a label as any for the nonsensical, boundariless "rest of the world," the anywherethat-is-nowhere, from which nothing of consequence is ever to be expected. In the moral logic of Dickens's novel, readers are not to object to Mrs. Jellyby's misdirected charity because it has deleterious effects "out there"--there are no effects out there; they are to protest its waste of resources needed in that bounded region of "home" where they can have effects. 23 In Bleak House, the unit of one positively integrated national culture, a unit plotted in space and endowed with properties of a physical body, 24 can appear to be the grand desideratum implied by seemingly "everything" represented--even, or especially, by such throwaway lines as "consequential ground" or "anywhere's nowhere," because the novel that contains them implies that it, too, is organized on the principle of "consequential ground," and that any little thing that occurs in it might matter enormously. 25 More insistently and more self-consciously than in any other of his works, Dickens cultivates inBleak House an aura of omnisignificance, encouraging exactly the kind of interpretive paranoia he makes a point of mocking through such figures as Mrs. Snagsby, who converts every innocent datum of her husband's behavior into a proof of guilt: Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo, as he is brought into the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he comes in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them, why else should Mr. Snagsby be confused, [End Page 15]and cough a signal cough behind his hand? It is clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy's father. (BH, 411) He is nothing of the kind; but what diligent Dickens reader has not been prone to the exegetical excesses Mrs. Snagsby commits? The reader's predicament upon entering the Dickensian "field" resembles that of the newly-arrived anthropological fieldworker. Malinowski spoke of the "intense interest and suspense with which an Ethnographer enters for the first time the district that is to be the future scene of his field-work . . . on the lookout for symptoms of . . . hidden and mysterious ethnographic phenomena behind the commonplace aspect of things." Malinowski's pupil Hortense

Powdermaker articulated the operant principle for both fieldworker and Bleak House reader: "[n]othing [is] too small to escape my notebook." Dickens's novel asks readers to imagine of its textual organization what Gregory Bateson imagined for "cultures" when he wrote that "[i]f it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as it appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture." But the novel also anticipates the kind of question Raymond Firth posed about such models as Bateson's: "If everything is related to everything else, where does the description stop?" 26 Toward the perception of that national culture in which no one and nothing would fail to be accorded a place and a value, Dickens centers his novel on a great nightmare likeness of "consequential ground": the Court of Chancery and its crowning glory, the seemingly endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. In these, Malinowski's ethnographic rule that "nationality means unity in culture" is faithfully honored--in darkly parodic form. 27 At once enacting and symbolizing the collective life, the Chancery proceedings resemble some grand travesty of the sort of tribal rituals studied by anthropologists--such as the Kula gift-exchange cycle of Malinowski's Trobrianders--and they are treated as identifying features of the nation. Sir Leicester Dedlock esteems the court as "a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing" (BH, 60), and the solicitor Conversation Kenge celebrates the Jarndyce case as "a cause that could not exist, out of this free and great country" (BH, 68). Like any central cultural practice, the procedures of Chancery strike us from the outset as matters always already underway, obeying a momentum of their own, and compelling participation: as John Jarndyce puts it, "And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning all over again, and nothing ever ends. And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and must be parties to it, like it or not" (BH, 146). Malinowski's Trobrianders put this same observation more tersely: "Once in the Kula," they say, "always in the Kula." 28 When Bleak Houseannounces that "[t]he one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself" (BH, 603-4), it aims to criticize a legal system more devoted to selfperpetuation than to justice; but it also provides a distorted mirror-image of its ethnographic ideal: the functioning culture as a self-reflexive whole or perpetual-motion machine. 29 [End Page 16] But as Edmund Leach once argued, the thesis "that cultures are functionally integrated . . . expresses a Utopian state of affairs." As perhaps the utopian idea of modern times, "culture" has been a notion as much to be distanced from its formulators as desired by them: it takes an

alienated mind to formulate "the integrated culture," yet such a mind would never want to inhabit its ideal for long. In Notes toward the Definition of Culture (1947), T. S. Eliot recognized that rigorous application of the culture idea to our own lives would give "an importance to our most trivial pursuits, to the occupation of our every minute, which we cannot long contemplate without the horror of nightmare." 30So it is that, at the same time that Dickens's novel may be seen to foreshadow the totality of culture, it may also be detected in the act of "chart[ing] the irregularity and accident and excess and privation that . . . unravel the order of culture." 31 Animated by something like that "desire to unmake as well as to make a whole" which James Clifford has discerned in Malinowski's founding ethnographic texts, 32 Dickens's great work of 1851-52 stimulates the urge for a national culture and denies it in turn.

III. This brings me to the crucial stylistic experiment, Dickens's division of his narrative more or less evenly between an anonymous third-person voice, presumably masculine, and the first-person voice of Esther Summerson. The sociological template has hampered criticism of Bleak House almost as much as it has aided it because Dickens's masterpiece is most vitally "about" the linkage between its ultimate object of representation and its peculiar mechanism of representation. Edgar Johnson's thesis that Bleak Housepresents an "anatomy of society," for example, implies an anatomist's position of confident overview altogether too stable to do justice to the book's definitive narrative effect "of pulsation, of constant expansion and contraction, radiation and convergence." 33 More recently, D. A. Miller's brilliant but exceptionable reading in "Discipline in Different Voices" has--as seems strange for a chapter of its title--next to nothing to say about the double narration: and even though Miller interrupts his argument with some theoretical reflections on how "[p]henomenologically, the novel form includes the interruptions that fracture the process of reading," he pays almost no attention to the technique that makes this particular novel into a veritable self-interrupting machine. 34 The necessity of alternating, often chapter by chapter, between two different and even incommensurable narrative voices makes the effect of reading Bleak Housenothing at all like that of reading works of nineteenth-century social anatomy, such as Bulwer's England and the English. It was in modern ethnography, not sociology, that the holistic social unit came to be understood as, in effect, "that which it takes a participant observer to find," and the participant observer as "the one who goes in search of (the holistic social unit known as) a culture." Dickens's narrative procedure in Bleak House provides us with a kind of hypertrophied specimen of the novel form's intrinsic

relationship between narrator and character, third person and first, and between what narratologists call discourse- and story-spaces: it puts forward an exaggerated (which [End Page 17] is to say, a characteristically Dickensian) representation of novelistic form, embodying the ambivalence intrinsic to the emergent culture idea and implicitly defining the novel as a self-interrupting genre. In Bleak House, Dickens appears to both presage and parody the ethnographic principle that once a culture is figured "as a discrete, selfcontained whole, . . . there can be no substitute for a system of concentrated fieldwork designed to generate something resembling an insider's view of it."35 Chancery operates like some weird cult whose workings outsiders cannot fathom: scores of "the uninitiated" "peep in at the glass panes in the door" (BH, 50); later on, Richard Carstone dismisses the opinion of his friend Woodcourt because the good doctor is "not in the mysteries" (BH, 751). Because the "participant" side of the fieldwork method, conveying the mystique of self-transcendence, was so much stressed in the promotional literature of early-twentieth-century ethnography, it has received the lion's share of attention: many pages by many hands are devoted to the problems and rewards of "establishing rapport" with the natives, of coming to feel like an insider in their culture. But the "observer" side has always been no less crucial, for it addresses the requirement, often left implicit, that the ethnographer get back "outside" again, or that enough of the ethnographer remain outside, even while some part passes "in," to enable the production of ethnographic knowledge. 36 The total organization of a culture has typically been assumed to be imperceptible to ordinary members, who, Malinowski wrote, are "of [their culture] and in it," but who have "no vision of the resulting integral action of the whole. . . ." 37 Mere insiders such as these are also discredited in Bleak House: "[t]he parties to [Jarndyce and Jarndyce, we are told,] understand it least," and "no two Chancery lawyers can talk about [the case] for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises" (BH, 52). Famously urging his followers "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world," Malinowski was really recommending a "simulated membership," a "membership without commitment to membership." 38 The ethnographer's authority hinges upon the demonstration, not simply of achieved insideness in the other culture, but of an outsider's insideness, a passage into alien lifeways that nevertheless holds any final "going native" to be an abdication of authority and identity alike. 39 Self-subjection to the ways of another culture carries the risk that one will drown in the culture's minutiae (something like this happens to Bleak House's Richard Carstone) or, to alter the metaphor, that one will be consumed by the mountains of information one attempts to

"digest" in one's search for the figure in the carpet (something like this happens to Mr. Krook). Authoritative ethnographic representation involves the representation of oneself as a being psychically flexible enough to dive into the "destructive element" of alien life, yet proof against any dissolution of identity the plunge might threaten. 40 As "outsider's insider," the ethnographer strives for the paradoxical goal of a place within culture's consequential ground that does not take up any space: an anonymous participation, an invisible centrality. A similar aspiration animates both narrators of Bleak House: the thirdperson, notably demonstrative nonentity who can move at liberty over and through the social field of the novel, and the compulsively self-effacing young woman who centers a [End Page 18] whole little moral universe upon herself wherever she alights. Between them they describe a kind of "interactive travel," a spatial practice (as Michel de Certeau would call it) that transforms amorphous space, running off endlessly in all directions, into the "discrete social space" of a cultural field. 41 The ethical principle enunciated and epitomized by Esther begins with a commitment to people personally known and reaches outward from there: "I thought it best to be as useful as I could . . . to those immediately about me; and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself" (BH, 154). Focusing on the outward-reaching movement from isolation to connection, Esther's narrative does not explicitly indicate the radius of this ring of moral responsibility. But Dickens's other narrator works the other way around, invoking the most abstract, faceless, and "distant" national avatars and implying a unifying movement "inward" from there. We see this--to take only the most famous instance--when he pronounces poor Jo [d]ead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus about us every day. (BH, 705) Throne, Parliament, Church, readers: the specific moral community of the British is conjured up by reference not to known individuals but to people considered solely in light of their institutional functions, as well as to a nonindividualized British readership. Where Esther conceives of community from the inside out, as it were, this narrator imagines it from the outside in, intimating that each one of those men and women is addressed or "covered" by those institutions, just as each is held accountable in the matter of Jo. Each narrator differently embodies a pervasive or hyperbolic tendency that, enclosed within rigid borders, cannot go just "anywhere": the third-person narrator, seemingly the familiar disembodied omniscient storyteller, is

limited to one half of the text; 42 Esther Summerson's "circle of duty" expands and expands, but not wider than the national community to which the heroine is bound, by myriad allegorical chains (which I will examine later on). The beginning movements of the novel encourage us to read the third-person narrator as someone--or as a special sort of no one--in flight from cultural place and identity, Esther as someone in transit toward them. It would be a mistake to rest there, construing too final an opposition between a male capacity for active detachment from culture and a female passive situatedness, but it is important to explore the gendered division of labor Dickens institutes at the outset. 43 If one boundary invoked in the imagination of culture separates "consequential ground" from the inconsequential, non-narratable backdrop of the world, another works inside, dividing the authorized occupants of culture's place from certain deviant trespassers, who must be expelled (sacrificed, scapegoated) in a process capable of being presented (as in novelistic plot) as a recovery or "salvaging" of coherence. 44 Bleak House's most obvious interloper is the murderous French maid Hortense, lone foreigner in the cast of characters, a figure whose name keeps always before readers' eyes the idea that she belongs outside (dehors) the text and its social "world." Lady Dedlock herself operates in a similar fashion. Helping to defineboth of Bleak House's narrators by opposition, demarcating their [End Page 19] ground by being expelled from it, this woman breaks out from the intolerably confining role of "My Lady Dedlock" and wanders off in search of oblivion. Her going literally astray toward the close of the novel recapitulates her past sexual "waywardness" and makes her the novel's most important rule-proving exception, the image of the woman-on-the-move, the woman of desire, the woman-who-"flies." 45 Her difference from her daughter is never more pointedly illustrated than when, in pursuit of her, Esther rides as the passenger of the detective Mr. Bucket, one of several characters who acts as something like an "emissary of the third-person narrator." 46 In the logic of Bleak House's dual narration, the expulsion of the wandering, desirous woman from the British cultural domain must be authored by the woman who permits herself to be driven by an eternally rest-less man: the Mr. Bucket whom, we are told, "[t]ime and place cannot bind" (BH, 769). Esther's story defines a self that is rewarded--given place and value--for differing from her mother's errant womanhood; 47 in turn, the male voice of Bleak House's other chapters hasEsther on hand, as the model of a defined (fenced-in) selfhood it rejects for itself. Bucket represents but the most prominent of Dickens's many gestures inBleak House toward what Audrey Jaffe has called the "project of omniscience" in the nineteenth-century novel, the "fantasy of [an] unlimited knowledge and mobility" felt to be irrevocably lost. 48 Preparing to pursue Lady Dedlock, Bucket "mounts a high tower in his mind, and looks out far and wide" (BH, 824); but his failure to find her in time makes a mockery of

an established ideal of knowledge which he appears to invoke, the ideal according to which the mind--like the Enlightenment symbol of human knowledge, the Encyclopedia--is a data receptacle, an ever-expandable bucket capable of containing all the world. Another such evocation of lost possibilities of overview comes with the original name for the Jarndyce house, "the Peaks" (BH, 146), an eminence from which all of Dickens's characters have fallen, down into a pitiable embroilment "in Chancery"--that is, into subjection to a social order like the Court of Chancery, at once peremptory and "chance-like," maddeningly impervious to understanding. Such reflectionsin the narrative of the omniscient narrator's perspective on it testify to something like that "lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more" which de Certeau has described in his essay "Walking in the City": the theorist's urge to "rise above" the level of everyday practice. 49 But in Dickens, we must recognize this urge in a more particular way, as aiming at "a viewpoint and nothing more" on a culture that comes into view as one's own through the very motions undertaken to disengage from it. The Dickensian narrator does not fly into some zone of theory, some non-place of relationless exteriority to all cultures or local knowledges whatever, but is dialectically "mapped" by his assertion of distance from his culture. 50 Mirroring the spatial logic of ethnography, the autoethnographic narrative aims not at "outsideness" to culture as such, but at an insider's outsideness to a specific culture. The paradoxical goal is an "omniscience"--a potent nonentity or anonymity--still specifically British (and masculine). This would be the positive counterpart of that similarly paradoxical English no-one-ness exemplified by characters like Nemo and Jo, who function in a manner similar to that of the "unknown soldiers" commemorated by most countries today: they serve as the catalysts for an affective bond capable of both expanding to the [End Page 20] conceptual horizon of the nation (because they are personally unknown to us) and stopping there (because they are ours). More effectively perhaps than any other loss recorded in Bleak House, the death of Jo consolidates the national "us" in the very gesture of indicting it: when the narrator caps his announcement of the event with the phrase, "And dying thus around us every day" (BH, 705), he identifies it as a mundane occurrence, visible any time on any spot of Britain's consequential ground. 51 To pursue the line of interpretation I am suggesting here is to regard the disembodied voice that opens Bleak House as informed by the implicit claim to have transcended the mechanisms of culture and their product, the recognizable, place-able, socialized self. This narrative pre-text could apply to any instance of omniscient storytelling, but it is rendered a positive problem for us in Bleak House, is "developed," like a photographic negative, by its exposure to the contrasting narrative told by Esther, the

embodied light of the "summer sun." 52 It seems fitting that, of the two narrators, it should be this impersonal one who introduces us on the novel's opening page to the awful condition of being "in Chancery," and who then says almost nothing about it for the rest of the book--for the very reflex of recognizing oneself as the product and insider of a culture is the desire to get out. This urge is also encoded for us, one should add, in the arrangement of the occupants Esther encounters in Mr. Krook's house, a structure recognized in its neighborhood as a parodic double of the official Chancery Court. When we reflect that the top floor is occupied by a Miss Flite and her caged birds, the middle by a man called Nemo, and the bottom by the garbage-sifting landlord Krook (known in the neighborhood as "the Lord Chancellor"), we are on the way to a view of the British Everyman ("no one in particular," "he might be any one of us"), stretched between his culture's social "law of gravity" and the hankering to fly free. But look now at Bleak House's famous beginning: LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might say, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better, splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. (BH, 49) The voice that addresses us here shows itself doing what none of those foot passengers can do, namely rising out of that accumulating muck to range from the topical present of the mere insider scribbling in a diary ("LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over") to the grand vista bounded by the dawn and end of time (primeval mud and Megalosaurus on the one hand, "death of the sun" on the other). The magical levitation of the narrator stands in implicit contrast to that mock-hierarchy [End Page 21] of the creatures presented in the London street (dogs, horses, foot passengers), where the much-vaunted ascendancy of humankind over the beasts seems held up for daily ridicule. Later on, in proceeding from the novel's first chapter to its second, from "In Chancery" to "In Fashion," the narrative voice displays its capacity to move "as the crow flies" between segments of

the culture whose inhabitants cannot perceive their connection (BH, 55). And throughout the novel it presents itself as capable of repeated crossings-back into the story-space and cultural order from which it has absconded, of re-entries into the social field without the risk of entrapment. Like a pair of "gaunt eyes," two holes in the shutters of the dead Nemo's room look in upon the man who is the narrator's unlucky counterpart, since, in dying, Nemo "has established his pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one." Defining himself in effect as a Nemoin-the-positive-sense, this narrator becomes the lamenting "Banshee of the man upon the bed," and he implicitly offers to do the same for every forgotten English subject, in any overlooked nook or cranny in the nation (BH, 188, 190). One dazzling manifestation of the performative aspect of Dickensian omniscience occurs in Chapter 10, when a crow darts back and forth across the line that imperfectly divides material in the story from the devices of its telling. Mr. Snagsby watches the crow fly into Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the snooping lawyer Tulkinghorn lives; upon which the narrative shifts its attentiononto Tulkinghorn--flying with the crow, as it were--and follows him as he makes his way to Snagsby's, moving "as the crow came" and exhibiting other crow-like features (the black clothes, the "scavenging" for information). The bird that began its life in this novel as part of the figure of speech for describing the narrator's freedom of movement from scene to scene has temporarily become a creature visible to characters in the novel, and has even "become" a character, Tulkinghorn--who, as someone bent on making connections among disparate spheres (for harmful, not beneficial ends, of course), is after all one of the novel's partial or negative objectifications of its nameless teller. We ought also to note the narrator's sudden, momentary return to the arena of characters at the crucial instant, just at the novel's midpoint, when the hapless duo of Guppy and Jobling come upon the charred remains of the spontaneously combusted Mr. Krook. The crossover occurs just at the point of discovery. They advanced slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.

Help, help, help! Come into this house for Heaven's sake! (BH,511) Since the lamp is in Guppy's hand as the two characters approach Krook's cellar (BH, 110), this imperative "Hold up the light," seems to indicate that the narrator has now quartered himself upon Jobling, Guppy's pathetic "inside man" at Krook's, [End Page 22] set up in Nemo's old room to keep an eye on the hoarder downstairs. Having taken Nemo's place, "where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him . . . as if they were full of wonder" (BH, 339), Jobling now becomes a site temporarily occupied by the No One who narrates. There then follows the abrupt and unmistakable resumption of generalizing "distance," to close out chapter, installment, and first half of the novel on what amounts to an astonishing vision of anti-culture: The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally--inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only--Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died. (BH, 51112) This sickening destiny of Krook's, occurring at the very structural center of the novel, offers up the figure who undergoes it as the defining antithesis of the ideal authoritative, autoethnographic self, his "inborn, inbred" death a travesty of culture's self-perpetuating order. It is set up in contrast, first, to the destiny of Esther, the figure always at the moral center of the novel. Her resolution "to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could" (BH, 65) identifies her with a circular and efficient process of exchange: out from Esther go good acts, back to her comes the love that is the consequence of those acts; she reaps what she sows, and the recipients of her kindness can seem no more than intermediaries in a system that is essentially self-contained. The blasting apart and dispersal of Krook--liquidated and airborne, the criminal "essence" once concentrated in him can now touch "everyone"--is also set in opposition to the free movement of the third-person narrator who describes it. This masquerader drops his Jobling act and takes to the air, becoming once more the wide-ranging, traveling authority who has surveyed institutions and systems "in all places under all names soever" and places his global experience before a particular auditor ("Your Highness") who is his counterpart in authority or "highness" over one specific national community.

IV. Considering many degraded or defeated interpreters among the novel's cast of characters (Bucket, Tulkinghorn, Jobling, Guppy, Mrs. Snagsby, et al.), we may well concur with Audrey Jaffe's claim that nineteenth-century omniscience constructs itself "in relation to and at the expense of what it constructs as characters," and we may go further, in likening it to the authority of the ethnographer, which, Levi-Strauss says, consists in "the subject's capacity for indefinite self-objectification (without ever abolishing itself as subject), for projecting outside itself ever-diminishing fragments of itself." 53 No wonder the Jarndyce case is called a "scarecrow of a suit" (BH, 52), since it and the whole social system for which it stands represent everything anathema to the putatively crow-like narrator who can come to roost for a time among his characters without being lastingly identified with them. [End Page 23] Yet alongside all the labor expended in Bleak House to figure the male narrator as someone who has shed the limitations of identity and become a "Nemo in the positive sense," considerable attention is also devoted to the task of making us acknowledge the other form of becoming no one. When, in the "consequential ground" scene, Lady Dedlock asks Jo to point out her lover's grave, the poor boy turns almost excessively informative: "He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in. "Where? O, what a scene of horror!" "There!" says Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Among them piles of bones, and close up to that there kitchin winder! They put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it with my broom, if the gate was open. That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's always locked. Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!" . . . She drops a piece of money in his hand, without touching it, and shuddering as their hands approach. "Now," she adds, "show me that spot again!" Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. (BH, 278-79) Hundreds of pages further on, when the novel returns us to this same low site to watch Esther discover her mother, this same Lady Dedlock, "cold and dead," the narrative has exercised its "utmost power of elaboration" in its determination to "show [us] that spot again."

The ugly vision to which the eye is repeatedly referred in Bleak House is that of the grave for everyone, of everyone slipping down into soil. John Ruskin complained of the novel's high body-count as a symptom of the degraded taste of the age, but it might instead reflect the work's dogged commitment to the trope of memento mori. 54 The motif is there at the start, in that downward-sliding ladder of the creatures navigating the morass of the London street: up out of the mud and the beasts arises humankind--but for what? To wage war over a few square inches of pavement, it seems, before the deluge that will soon engulf all. 55 It is there again at the epicenter, where Guppy and Jobling confront the combusted Krook, this truth of the body "from which we run away" (BH, 511). Those two "great eyes in the shutters" of Nemo's room look in upon a corpse, "that last shape which earthly lodgings take for No one--and for Every one" (BH, 196). At such moments as these, Bleak House's slogan of "Anywhere's nowhere" means "Everyone's Nemo." 56 Keeping the mud at bay is the novel's governing trope for the labor of Civilization, that Sisyphus's chore of delineating "the human" from "the low," "the crooked," "the bestial." Bleak House implies there can be no Civilization--or "Culture," in the sense used by Victorians--without the particular, ethnographic or small-c cultures, those expandable but finally closed circles of duty which furnish the largest human aggregates capable of meaningfully distracting us from the final, universal aggregate of mud. The novel features three sweepers, two of whom pointedly fail at their tasks, as if to highlight the path by which the third may succeed. When Jo enacts his celebrated death-scene, he is in effect laying down his broom for the last time, resigning his quixotic chore of keeping the little space of his self [End Page 24] clean all byhimself: the maintenance of the self is the work of a culture. At the other extreme is the minor character named "Miss Wisk." When we see her at the wedding of Prince Turveydrop and Caddy Jellyby, we instantly classify her in that gallery of untrustworthy universalists and abstractionists whose leading figure is the telescopic philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby. Miss Wisk does not attempt practical reforms, but swipes Jacobin-style at the entire institution of marriage in her zeal to defeat "the Tyrant, Man" (BH, 479). Between Jo's futile small career and Miss Wisk's futile grandiose one lies the career of Esther Summerson, who is charged with the taxing but intelligible and manageable job of ridding Bleak House of its cobwebs (BH, 148). 57 It is Esther's confrontation with Mrs. Jellyby and her cohorts, with all their blather about the "brotherhood of Humanity" (BH, 90), that makes Esther resolve "to be as useful as I could . . . to those immediately about me" (BH, 154), for, as she sees it, being everybody's sibling is tantamount to being nobody's. In her and John Jarndyce's ethic, being somebody, and being of some genuine consequence, means having a place--in other words, not having every place;it means standing in determinate relation to a limited group of people-

-in other words, standing in no relation to "the world" or to "Humankind." When the parasite Skimpole lavishes one of his empty encomiums on Ada Clare, calling her "the child of the universe," John Jarndyce pithily replies, "The universe . . . makes rather an indifferent parent" (BH, 122). The character of Skimpole amounts to Esther's narrative's parody of the freefloating voice that narrates the novel's other half: it is Skimpole who expounds the pleasures of being "bound to no particular chairs and tables, but [able] to sport like a butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took one!" (BH, 296). To belong to a culture is to occupy and be identified with a "site" where, by the kind of differential processes explored by Saussure in linguistics and Lvi-Strauss in anthropology, meaning and value can accrue. Yet the appearance of the narrating Esther in Dickens's third chapter immediately invites the question: does the first narrator, purportedly beyond culture as he is, nonetheless need to define himself with the kind of contrastive mechanisms that operate within and between cultures, by yielding a portion of the narrative space to his seeming anti-self, a woman imagined as fully containable in her social function? It is with an air of having been commissioned or compelled to narrate that Esther starts to speak. Her first words treat her task as if it were a burdensome assignment--"I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages" (BH, 62; but how apportioned? by whom? to what end?). Emphasizing her identity's dependence on the recognition of others in the very act of telling us her name--"they called me Esther Summerson" (BH,63)--she appears to bear away from her counterpart the onus of such a contingent sense of self. The narrative she reluctantly contributes is first and foremost a report on her acculturation, her process of acquiring a local habitation and a name--in fact, a good number of names--in compensation for her early deprivation. Raised outside the embrace of culture--virtually "friendless, nameless, and unknown" (BH, 290)--by the aptly named Miss Barbary, Esther travels from the [End Page 25] condition of "barbarian" to that of "mistress of Bleak House." She bears the burden but also embodies the ideal of that utopian urge for the equation of self and cultural "place." The tacit argument written into Dickens's heroine is that it takes one who has known exclusion from culture to value what culture gives; only those unacquainted with the cold outside would cavil at culture's "chancery" nature. The once-exiled perspective enjoys a unique authority in grasping just how impoverished and vacant any notion of the self "beyond culture" must be. Early in her narrative, Esther recalls her pathetic attempts to mimic a relationship of reciprocity with a doll that, she says, was "always staring at me--or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing" (BH, 62): her excuse for child's play suggests that the self that lacks the affirming look of

others effectively isnothing. The institutionalized structure for recognizing, for bestowing meaning and value upon, its members, a culture consists, as E. E. Evans-Pritchard said, not of "facts" or "things" available to the empirical grasp but primarily of "relations . . . and relations between these relations": like Saussure's structuralist model of language, it amounts to a "self-referential system 'without positive terms.'" 58 It is not in themselves that the elements of a culture are or signify anything of consequence. People can, as Ernst Cassirer put it, "construct [their] symbolic world out of the poorest and scantiest materials," so "[t]he thing of vital importance is not the individual bricks and stones but their general function [in an] architectural form." This function "vivifies the material signs and 'makes them speak.'" 59 Esther is precisely such a "material sign" endowed with the power to speak; in her life before the events recounted in her narrative, she has been only one more avatar of the speechless Nemo that is everyone. It seems no accident that the novel's wretched slum, that place where people lose their names, itself goes by the name of Tom-all-Alone's, as if to evoke not only Tom Jarndyce, driven to suicide by his dealings with Chancery, but also the "poor Tom" of King Lear, the "unaccommodated man" evacuated of cultural content and reduced to the status of a "poor, bare, fork'd creature" spouting gibberish. Esther's pragmatic refusal to be disturbed by the foundationless nature of cultural forms and values underwrites the extensive meditation on names and naming in Bleak House. In his seminal treatment of the theme, J. Hillis Miller responded to the gap between name and nature in a tragic key that seems quite unsuited to that portion of the novel for which Dickens's heroine speaks. One can imagine the third-person narrator agreeing with Miller's observation that the proper name "alienate[s] the person named from his unspeakable individuality and assimilate[s] him into a system of language"; but Esther would recognize no "individuality," hence no alienation. 60 In spite of the plot operations that tease us with the promise of "true identities," the name in Dickens is nothing more than the device of an individuating principle that distributes across the social field the human matter that would merge into senselessness if not partitioned. In crucial instances, names are surrounded by such ambiguity that the question of their being "true" names seems nonsensical, inconsequential. In Esther's case, for example, Mr. Guppy comes to believe he has discovered that Nemo "really is" Captain Hawdon and that Hawdon is Esther's "real name" (BH, 464); but this label tends, when probed a bit, to devolve into the [End Page 26] generic function of all names as fences. Considered as a corruption of "hawthorn," Hawdon can reverberate with meanings like "a thorny shrub or small tree, extensively used for forming hedges." 61 For "haw," the OED gives (among many other meanings) "enclosure," "a hedge or encompassing fence (OE); hence, a piece of ground enclosed or fenced in; a messuage (OE); generally, a yard, close, or enclosure, as in timber-

haw." We are directed to the entry under "church-hawe," meaning "churchyard," that last enclosure for Christian No Ones--and Everyones--en route to their final dissolution. 62 The personal name is a wall or container--a Bucket--for the self, which will spill out into an inconsequential everywhere if its protecting wall is breached. This "Nemo process" happens to the person so insistently referred to throughout the narrative as "my Lady Dedlock" when she sheds her customary clothes and role. Perhaps the most static and uninteresting character in Bleak House--the ingenue Ada Clare--is only an extreme embodiment of this idea of the self as an empty space provisionally cordoned off to defend it against contamination and spillage. Having invested Ada with all innocent goodness and identified her as the very locus of purity, Esther when dangerously ill singles out this person, who most wants to attend to her, as the one absolutely prohibited from entering her sickroom. Her frantic insistence on the matter may be taken as the amplified expression of a general anxiety to prevent leakage at the borders of self and sense. Only the sealed bucket can retain what is poured inside. In her alacrity in accepting the gift of culture, Esther tends not to acknowledge what signs all around her are saying, and what she herself so plainly exemplifies: that the positions and identities assigned by culture are susceptible, for good or ill, to considerable refunctioning. I have in mind here, for one thing, the many discrepancies in Dickens's novel between names and the people or places to which they attach--discrepancies that do not go so far as to affirm a capacity to break free from culture's law, but suggest the latitude of that circumscribed liberty which is the only actual kind. 63 The relation Esther bears to the name "Hawdon" is a case in point: however much the cognomen lends itself to being read as "hoyden" and conjures up her mother's dishonor, her own behavior erases the obloquy: honi soit qui mal y pense. Bleak House, to take another prominent instance, is not at all bleak, because John Jarndyce has made it that way; but he retains the name his predecessor gave it, demonstrating a comportment toward the past humbler than his predecessor's. Tom Jarndyce's choice of "Bleak House" as a new label for "The Peaks" was a reflection of his own sad consciousness, and his act of relabeling illustrates a deluded or hubristic conception of how far human will should go toward revising, uprooting, or scrutinizing what culture bestows: a conception manifested in the doomed effort Tom made, and Richard later makes, to "get to the bottom" of the Jarndyce case. This attempt is bound to fail--just as Jobling discovers, when he agrees to turn himself into the infiltrating "Weevle" (the burrowing weevil?) at Krook's house, and the search for secrets leads only to the explosion of their possessor and the expulsion of the searchers. What John Jarndyce says of the Chancery case holds good for the bedrock dogma of any given culture: "it won't do to think of it!" (BH, 146).

In one of its most arresting paradoxes, Bleak House hazards, then, that to go too deeply inside one's culture is to wind up outside it. The culture idea imagined here [End Page 27] does not involve an external "system of controls imposed upon desire," but "a system of desire": to probe the very basis of one's way of living and desiring is to risk reducing oneself to an impotent and "inconsequential" skepticism. Up to their elbows "in Chancery," Tom Jarndyce and Richard Carstone fall outside their culture and wind up in a condition not dissimilar from that of the novel's more obvious outcasts, who flail and roam without object or orientation. They bear out Malinowski's contention that "[i]f you remove a man from his social milieu, you . . . deprive him of . . . his stimuli to moral steadfastness and economic efficiency and even of interest in life." 64Interpreting the "scientific fable" of the early-nineteenth-century Wild Boy of Aveyron, Christopher Herbert has discerned the lesson "that in order for desire to exist in any coherent, active, and potentially satisfiable form, it must embed itself in a fully social matrix, . . . [must] become directed toward objects conventionally defined and symbolically coded as desirable by human society." 65 Jo, Dickens's Wild Boy of London, is constantly hounded to "move on," and he wants only to know, "But where?" The sympathetic Mr. Snagsby seconds this desire for positive aims when he remarks, "Really, constable, . . . that does seem a question. Where, you know?" (BH, 320). Jo longs to be headed "somewheres"; but to get where he is doomed to go, any road will serve: for as he perceives, "they dies everywheres" (BH, 488).

V. That ambivalent refunctioning of the cultural past which I have described above--the principle of keeping-but-changing or changing-but-keeping-works its way into the very smallest details of Bleak House. Consider the umbrella. It is introduced in the work's first paragraph as the symbol or fetish of Victorian solipsism, the symptom of a "general infection of ill temper" (BH, 49) which Dickens diagnoses as the very antithesis of positive culture: each London passerby claps his (or her) umbrella over one head, strives to keep one pair of feet out of the mud, colliding with and cursing the many others engaged in the same pursuit on the same ground at the same moment. Their common selfishness makes the Londoners of Bleak House's opening page epitomize the "embrace of mutual hatred" Carlyle discerned in capitalism's "cash nexus."66 Yet the umbrella, this important emblem of malaise, undergoes a remarkable transformation in the novel's second half, where it resurfaces as the talisman of the indomitable Mrs. Bagnet, "the old girl," who has carried it with her around the world in her capacity as wife to the now-repatriated common soldier Matthew Bagnet. The umbrella which is still "invariably a part of the old girl's presence out of doors" has been

taken from posting to posting (sites commemorated in the Bagnet children's names: Quebec, Malta, Woolwich) and has "served, through a series of years, at home as a cupboard, and on journeys as a carpet bag." As if determined to signal the symbolic rather than merely utilitarian function of this ordinary household article, the narrator indicates that Mrs. Bagnet "never puts it up [for protection from the rain] . . . but generally uses the instrument as a wand with which to point outjoints of meat or bunches of greens in marketing, or to arrest the attention of tradesmen by a friendly poke" (emphasis added). [End Page 28] It points not just to the tradesman's ribs but to the ethic exemplified by the Bagnets: that of a resolute and resourceful lower-class patriotism which Dickens implicitly recommends to the superior orders. Like most of the Bagnets' mean objects of daily use, the umbrella testifies to extensive service on behalf of the nation and empire: "The kit of [their] mess, if the table furniture may be so denominated, is chiefly composed of utensils of horn and tin, that have done duty in several parts of the world" (BH, 442). "[A]n article long associated with the British army" (BH, 530), the Bagnet umbrella is a bayonet of sorts, enabling Mrs. Bagnet to defend herself, her family, and their British values, wherever her wide-ranging travels might lead her. Symbolically refurbished, the umbrella has been transformed from the token of a British anti-culture into a sign of a positive Britishness that seems imaginable only from outside, by the traveler who goes abroad and then returns--as the Bagnets and their kit have done, bringing the national self-image back with them like some trophy of an arduous crusade. A true vision of the collective identity requires distance and exposure to the alien "beyond," after which it may be borne back to homebound, narrow-sighted compatriots. The Bagnets' career itinerary crosses paths here with a circuit familiar in travel writing--the kind described, for instance, by Edward Gibbon, who wrote of feeling that he had returned from his Grand Tour "a better Englishman than [he] went out." 67 Only British travelers like the Bagnets comprehend that highest praise which they give their son in labeling him "a Briton. That's what Woolwich is. A Briton!" (BH, 440). "The old girl" herself is a quantity of pure Britishness returned safely to Britain's shores: she commands her husband's awestruck admiration for the way she "[m]ade her way home once. From another quarter of the world" (BH, 768). The recuperative process of carrying a perfected or recovered Britishness home from abroad precisely mirrors the participant observer's willed submission to an alien culture and reemergence from it with new authority. Back from their immersion in that destructive element of "the world," the humble Bagnets seem to have settled into the autoethnographer's position of insider's outsideness. 68 I have been locating the constitutive ambivalence of Bleak House as it manifests itself through the novel's dual narration; but we need also to

entertain the thought of each narrator's account as divided in itself. If the anonymous narrator of half the novel's chapters is always demonstrating his freedom to revisit the culture that does not contain him, his frequent returns can appear compulsive, suggesting an inability finally to remain outside. As an important one of those partial objectifications of the thirdperson narrator to materialize in the novel, the good doctor Allan Woodcourt not only makes a sudden, almost ghostly appearance by Nemo's deathbed, but later reenters as a "brown, sunburnt gentleman" who, compelled to leave his homeland for the vague outside world, now returns bearing a new charge of authority and commitment to serve his home culture. This latter Woodcourt has been tempered by the ordeal of an offstage shipwreck in "East-Indian seas"--immersion in the alien element, indeed--and is now the modest but effectual hero who can be of practical use to those immediately around him. This is the man who settles down with Esther Summerson at the end of Bleak House. Yet some portion [End Page 29] of the energy informing the character of Esther seems to move away from the interconnected, nationwide circle of recognition which that character has evidently been created to invoke and celebrate. Whereas the anonymous narrator, whose authority has been based on demonstrations of an achieved movement out of culture, now appears drawn back inward, the other narrator, whose authority has been based on demonstrations of an achieved movement into culture, now seems drawn outward again. This secondary, fugitive tendency begins in the middle of the book, when Esther is infected by the smallpox she contracts from Jo. Her feverish dream of herself as a bead strung on a "flaming necklace" expresses an "inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing" (BH,544). Many readers have regarded the disfigurement that results from her illness as a symbol of her mother's shame, which she takes on when she learns the story of her illegitimate birth. But this is a form of inscription thaterases; like the "reality effect" described by Roland Barthes, it is a sign of non-signification, releasing its bearer from the burden of having to point to anything or anyone outside herself. Before acquiring her "altered self" (BH, 549), Esther's resemblance to Lady Dedlock had rendered them both liable to exploitation by the likes of Guppy and Tulkinghorn. Once the disease has done its work, Dickens's heroine is grateful "that I was so changed as that . . . nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us" (BH, 565). This movement away from everything she has seemed to embody leads her finally to that Yorkshire rural paradise to which Esther and Allan withdraw in the end--an ostentatiously pastoral setting that seems safe from that all-embracing national network so much insisted on in the rest of the novel (BH, 911-13). But we might take Esther's Yorkshire retreat as a "green world" in which social possibilities may be envisioned anew, for in the culminating marriage of Esther and Allan, the novel offers to inaugurate a new Britain where

every former nobody will be accorded consequence. 69 Esther is of course well suited to usher in this new dispensation. Offspring of a Barbary and a Nemo, she is doubly a nobody herself and embodies a veritable formula for the hybrid vigor which Daniel Defoe famously claimed for that "heterogeneous thing," the "True-Born Englishman" (or Englishwoman). Holding to her belief that "I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers" (BH, 571), Esther "becomes a Queen"--so Bucket pronounces her (BH, 857-58)--and this new Queen Esther evokes, of course, the Biblical heroine who saves her people from destruction. Miss Barbary turns out to have raised her, of all places, in Windsor, though for most of the novel her royal court is situated in St. Albans, a town named for England's first Christian martyr (A.D. 303) and thus linked to the destinies of those latterday English martyrs Nemo and Jo. Esther goes on to wed a man half Welsh and half Highland Scot who has had to overcome the parochial loyalties of his ancestors and embrace the British union (BH, 69, 292, 468). Around their marriage crowd those restless ghosts of the national past that have been conjured up in seemingly "every" odd corner of Dickens's narrative.70 We read in Bleak House, for instance, of the marriage of a Prince (Turveydrop) and a Caroline (Caddy Jellyby), and of the conflict between a George (Rouncewell) and his enemies (the Smallweeds), one of whom habitually calls out for "Charley over [End Page 30] the water" (BH, 345). We meet the puppet-like Mr. Smallweed, who bankrupts George and gains control of the decisive Will in Jarndyce: he is likened to a Guy Fawkes effigy, and looks as if he "might be expected immediately to recite the popular verses, commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old England up alive" (BH, 425). We read, of course, of a doomed marriage (the Dedlocks') that recapitulates the strife between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and of a wicked Frenchwoman (Hortense) who manifests "a lowering energy in her face . . . which seem[s] to bring visibly before [Esther] some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror" (BH, 373). All the threats to the nation from within and without that are evoked by such references are to be laid to rest, along with the specters of Nemo and Jo, those English nonentities whose fates are emphatic rebukes, neither to the "brotherhood of humanity," nor to the smaller but still transnational body of Christendom, but specifically to "this boastful island" (BH, 202). Bleak House's insistence that "everyone's Nemo"--its stress on a common inheritance of mud--must not be taken for evidence of any "leveling" sympathies; Dickens's point is that culture constitutes not only the moral oneness of the nation but the system of internal differences that delineates meaningful roles and identities. Dickens seeks a vantage point from which different parts of the nation can appear, as T. S. Eliot memorably put it, "United in the strife that divides them." 71 Near its end, Bleak House intimates this kind of vision in its account of the rapprochement

between Sir Leicester Dedlock and his neighbor Boythorn, whose longstanding dispute over the border between their properties has been transformed into a sort of collaboration, rekindled by Boythorn in order to give the bereft Dedlock something to live for. "Mr. Boythorn," we read, "found himself under the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass in order to restore his neighbour to himself"; and when we take our leave of these characters the contest between them continues "to the satisfaction of both" (BH, 929; also 169-70; 301-2). This situation describes the very dream of intra-national differences: maintained and defended in a form of serious play, division and inequity obscure but also imply a "deeper," systemic interconnection and likeness. Elsewhere, landed and industrial interests reconcile themselves as parts of one family, their opposition not rending but rather defining and securing the national culture that contains them both: the runaway George Rouncewell comes home to serve as steward for the ailing Dedlock, but he also makes peace with his "Ironmaster" brother. Industrial and landed classes, urban and rural: the differences between them do not rend, but define and secure, the culture that contains them.

VI. If there was one piece of "consequential ground" in Britain at the time Dickens began writing his novel, all the organs of official and mainstream opinion declared it to be the 772,824 square feet of the Park enclosed within Joseph Paxton's iron and glass Crystal Palace, constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851. As if determined to provoke comparisons with the expansive products of the nation's foremost novelist, [End Page 31] the Exhibition's promoters treated their event as a kind of text in which was written not just the British national story but the tale of all humankind. "Here in a great Open Book," theIllustrated Exhibitor proclaimed, "we read of the industry of our brethren of the north, the south, the east, and the west." 72 It was a book "everybody" in Britain was reading in 1851; it was, as William Howitt said, "the one great topic of conversation." 73 "Everything" made reference to it: it might seem to have cornered the market on British representation, even to have absorbed or annihilated space (in concentrating all the world on a single spot of ground in England) and time (in suggesting that all history had pointed to this one great trial of Civilization). Like Bleak House, but on a global scale, it aimed to balance a message of connectedness with an appreciation of differences. In pronouncing its goal to be "that great end to which indeed all history points[:]the realization of the Unity of Mankind," Prince Albert hastened to add that this would be "[n]ot a unity which breaks down the limits, and levels the peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the Earth, but

rather a unity, the result and product of those very national varieties and antagonistic qualities." 74 The whole spectacle would "afford a true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived . . . and a new starting point from which all nations would be able to direct their further exertions." 75 Central to this world-historical event, of course, was the delineation of Britain itself as leader among developed nations and seat of a rational power that could overcome a world of challenges. The nation's willingness to host the amicable contest bespoke, it was said, a "conscious greatness . . . sufficient to warrant such a bold and unprecedented step." In the picture of the world supplied by the Great Exhibition, Hoggs' Instructor argued, Britain stood out in bold relief the principal figure . . . occupying and engrossing mainly the foreground, a rich and troubled sky above her, the principal light issuing from one cloudless spot, and of which she was the recipient, her surrounding grouped neighbours being but partially within its blaze, dimness and darkness increasing with the distance, till the horizon and sky blended, completing the picture. By "rhetorically positioning England amidst the opposed examples furnished by rival countries," the Exhibition sought to demonstrate not only the host country's superior manufactures but its unparalleled "ability to order and restrain the influx of goods and people from around the world--to accommodate, in its stable, homogeneous capital, the wild profusion of nations. . . ." 76 Conveying "the image of a 'non-exclusive interior'" in its walls of glass, Paxton's palace invited everyone to witness British industrial and organizational supremacy in action. 77 Like a book scarcely needing to be read because its meanings appeared so self-evident, the structure suggested that international capitalist social relations were transparent, plain for all to see. Nestled snugly in their categories, the displayed items bore no price tags, as if they held their value wholly in themselves and owed nothing to the variegations of demand. And as the least site-specific of buildings--made out of materials not bearing the signature of any particular terrain, capable of being taken down and re-erected elsewhere-the Crystal Palace seemed to imply the universal applicability of its message. Yet it offered the comforting fantasy that the category of [End Page 32] the nation could retain its predominance in a radically free market, instead of being swept into irrelevance as capital went looking for opportunities and markets anywhere on earth. Albert first conceived that all the commodities in the Exhibition might be shown irrespective of their national origin (all steam-engines here, sewing-machines there, and so forth). There were logistical reasons for the commissioners to balk at the idea, but some anxiety over the glimpse it afforded of a future without

boundaries may also have played its part in ensuring that the floor-plan would be laid out on national lines. 78 The Exhibition exhibited the dominance of representations in modern life at the same time that it exercised its seeming dominance over representation by stimulating so much of it. The much-publicized labors of preparation for the Exhibition--of the builders, to put up the structure with amazing speed and precision; of the organizers, to arrive at a workable scheme for classifying the myriad objects to be displayed; of the institutions of transport and accommodation, to move and house the millions of visitors--all these contributed to the rhetorical labor of showing Britain controlling the world. The implicit authorizing narrative in which the enterprise was framed described the nation's willed descent into a dizzying welter of details and its triumphant reemergence to mastery of the whole. 79 Audience members were assured that, "[f]ar from being abandoned in a labyrinth of cosmic alienation," they would discover "'[t]he mighty maze' has not only its plan, but a plan of the most lucid and instructive kind . . . as in a well-arranged book." 80 This architectural text and the seemingly self-replicating mass of words and images that surrounded it bore down upon Britain's most ambitious novelist as he prepared to write his most ambitious work. "Il n'y rien--rien--partout except l'Exposition," Dickens wrote to Count D'Orsay two weeks after the Exhibition opened: there was nothing anywhere but it. 81 He sympathized with some of its aims but deplored its ubiquitous self-congratulation. In a magazine piece entitled "The Last Words of the Old Year," he had the spirit of the departing year speak of having seen "a project carried into execution for a great assemblage of the peaceful glories of the world," but then ask, "Which of my children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants, of England, equally united, for another Exhibition--for a great display of England's sins and negligences, to be, by steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all hearts, set right?" 82 By the time he began writing Bleak House in the fall of 1851, Dickens seems to have come to regard Paxton's glorified greenhouse not as the consequential ground it was proclaimed on every side, but as one enormous "oblong cistern to hold the fog." For all its putative transparency, it obscured the true condition of Britain. From seeing "nothing anywhere but the Exhibition," Dickens moved in the direction of seeing the Exhibition as the gigantic nothing that was everywhere. Succeeding the Exhibition in becoming the cultural event that "everybody talked about," the serial publication of Bleak House responded to the Exhibition's triumphant universalism by exhibiting, not the works of industry of all nations, but the neglected human by-products of one British anti-culture. Instead of a sweeping celebration of human "Progress,"Bleak House recounted "A Progress": that is the title of the novel's third chapter, in which Esther first introduces herself and begins her specific, allegorically

national story of development [End Page 33] and promised redemption. Like the Exhibition, the novel attempted to make its audience into "participant observers" of a sort; but, mobilizing its readers around the monthly ritual of the new installment, it aimed at effects contrary to those envisioned by the Exhibition planners. Whereas the Exhibition's open book lay out a putatively indisputable and universal "teleological narrative," the Dickens serial sought to actualize a single British culture around a national spectacle of waste and neglect--and, "[i]n a novel where the life of England in 1851 is otherwise fully represented," it gave no space at all to the site that was everyone's destination and the subject on everyone's lips. 83 James Buzard is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and the author ofThe Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture,' 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture. He has recently coedited a special issue of Victorian Studies on "Victorian Ethnographies" and is working on a book for Princeton University Press calledAnywhere's Nowhere: Fictions of Autoethnography in the United Kingdom.

Notes
1. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,
Religion, Language, Art and Custom (1871; Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1874), 1:24.

2. Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1944), 60.

3. Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 96. Subsequent references cited in the
text as BH.

4. Originally a 1989 lecture; published in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19-39. References cited in the text as Hall.

5. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
References cited in the text as Pratt.

6. Nicholas Dirks, "Introduction: Colonialism and Culture," in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Dirks (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 3.

7. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing Against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the

Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), 137-62; quotation from 143.

8. "Symbolic violence": see Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1977), 129. As Malinowski himself had said, "We are not interested in what A or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidental course of their own personal experiences, we are interested only in what they think and feel qua members of a given community." See

Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; reprint, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1984), 23.

9. "Metonymic freezing": Arjun Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in its Place," Cultural Anthropology 3:1
(Feb. 1988): 36. "Ethnographic present": James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 32. "Common denominator people": George E. Marcus and Dick Cushman, "Ethnographies as Texts," Annual Review of Anthropology (1982): 32-33.

10. "Denial of coevalness": Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its
Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); see 25-69.

11. Cf. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds., Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical
Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

12. Quoted excerpts are from Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Nationalism,
Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43-66; see 58. Cf. James Buzard, "Ethnography as Interruption: News from Nowhere, Narrative, and the Modern Romance of Authority," Victorian Studies 40:3 (Spring 1997): 445-74.

13. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 74. 14. Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 2.

15. On the "salvage" motif in ethnography, see James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Allegory," in Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 98-121.

16. Quoted in Tatiana Holway, "Contingencies of Meaning: Dickens and the Great Exhibition," ch. 3
of Speculation and Representation: Charles Dickens and the Victorian Economic Imagination (dissertation in progress, Columbia University), 112. Here and in the concluding portion of this essay I owe much to Holway's exciting work-in-progress.

17. Steven Marcus, "Literature and Social Theory: Starting in with George Eliot," in Representations:
Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, 1975), 194.

18. Mary Poovey has recently described the uneven process by which new "domains" of human
knowledge and experience emerge out of and amidst older ones, in such a way that vocabularies and protocols of reasoning that were developed in certain domains (such as the theological, for instance) are borrowed and applied in emergent ones (such as the nineteenth-century domain of "the social"). The borrowed elements carry their persuasive force over with them, but they also appear "irrational" and incompatible with the protocols developed in the new domain. See Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The language of natural theology acquires just this combination of familiarity and strangeness in the novels of Dickens, as those novels take up the task of presenting the whole British culture of their time.

19. "Anatomy of society": Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1952), 2:762-82; "sociological imagination": Barbara Hardy,Dickens: The Later Novels (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1968), 14; "a model in little of . . . society": Hillis Miller, introduction to Dickens, Bleak House, 11.

20. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 3.

21. See, respectively: Lionel Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," in The Liberal
Imagination (New York: Scribner's, 1950), 212; Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970; London: Hogarth, 1984), passim; and Steven Marcus,Representations, xiii-xvii, 161-82, 183-213.

22. Marc Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
(London: Verso, 1995), 42.

23. Cf. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958): "Mrs. Jellyby's real action in the world [of Bleak House] is her destructive effect on her husband and children, not her charity to [or her destructive effects upon] the natives of BorrioboolaGha" (207).

24. See Poovey, Making a Social Body, esp. 1-24. 25. Friendly reviewers were quick to adopt the hyperbolic rhetoric of the totally integrated artwork
which the novel seemed to license. Dickens's cohort Forster asserted that "the great Chancery suit . . . is worked into every part of the book," and that "[n]othing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the larger interest all the rest is irresistably drawn." This transposes to an aesthetic context the insistent moral argument of the novel itself, when it describes how "not a drop, not an atom, not a cubic inch" of Tom-all-Alone's will fail to have its effect. Nor was Forster alone in attributing to the book a degree of organization that appeared to admit of no accidents and no loose threads. Henry Fothergill Chorley, reviewing the book in theAthenaeum, found that "[n]ot a point is missed,--not a person left without part or share in the gradual disclosure--not a pin dropped that is not to be picked up for help or harm to somebody." These readers were responding to the novel's implied ideal for itself, that of a text in which, as Detective Bucket would say, "the whole bileing of people was mixed up in the same business, and no other" (BH, 863). Dickens manages to keep this ideal in view even while liberally violating it by furnishing many prominent loose threads. Both sought and disavowed, the idea of a total literary structure was felt to be at stake in discussions of this work, to the extent, unprecedented in novel criticism, that negative reviews could be so correspondingly opposite to the promoters' claims that they effectively paid tribute to what they negated: either everything was successfully connected, or nothing was. George Brimley, in the Spectator, lamented the book's "absolute want of construction," saying that a large number of characters "might be eliminated from the book without damage to the great Chancery suit, or perceptible effect upon the remaining characters." He compared Bleak House to a quintessentially modern form of representation depicting only the most adventitious of relations among its subjects: "So crowded is the canvas which Mr. Dickens has stretched, and so casual the connexion that gives to his composition whatever unity it has, that a daguerrotype of Fleet Street at noon-day would be the aptest symbol found for it." Was Brimley thinking of the novel's opening scene? It gives us something very like the caught moment of the daguerrotype, a scene of random "foot-passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke. . ." ( BH, 49). For the reviews, see Philip Collins, ed., Dickens: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 291, 278, 284 respectively.

26. "[I]ntense interest": Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 51, 20. "Nothing":
Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York: Norton, 1966), 61. Powdermaker adds that Malinowski "told us to note down everything we saw and heard, since in the beginning it is not possible to know what may or may not be significant" (61). For a group of anthropologists' recent reflections on the subject, see Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). "If it were possible": Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of a Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (1936), 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), ix. "If everything": Firth, "History of Modern Social Anthropology," unpublished paper, quoted in Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), 74. Cf. Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5: "the presumption that [the] array of

disparate-seeming elements of social life composes a significant whole, each factor of which is in some sense a corollary of, consubstantial with, implied by, immanent in, all the others . . . renders the various elements of a way of life systematically readable just as the notion of organic unity in literary texts rendered them readable according to the norms of the discipline of 'new criticism.'"

27. Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 61. This is the kind of claim about which Leach wrote
back in 1957, "There is almost no part of the world in which recent first-hand accounts have not tended to contradict this assertion in every particular." See Leach, "The Epistemological Background," in Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Firth (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 126.

28. Argonauts, 83. 29. See J. G. A. Pocock, "The Origins of the Study of the Past: A Comparative
Approach,"Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (1962): 211: "all societies are organized [in such a way as] to ensure their own continuity."

30. Eliot, "Notes toward the Definition of Culture," in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1949), 104.

31. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott,
Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6.

32. Clifford, "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski," in The Predicament of
Culture, 104. See also Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11: "A narrative of nation making that includes unmaking, asserting and contesting, constructing and dissolving competing ideas of collective identity may more closely approximate historical experience."

33. W. J. Harvey, "Bleak House: The Double Narrative," in Dickens: Bleak House: A Casebook, ed.
A. E. Dyson (London: Macmillan, 1969), 230

34. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 83. 35. Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 150-51. 36. On the idea of the necessary departure from the field, see Vincent Crapanzano, "The Writing of
Ethnography," Dialectical Anthropology 2:1 (1977): 69-73.

37. Argonauts, 11-12, 83. 38. Malinowski, Argonauts, 25; for "simulated membership" and "membership without commitment,"
see Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 125.

39. Though indebted to James Clifford's influential essay "On Ethnographic Authority," I do not find
this fundamental characterization of ethnography's authorizing rhetoric among the topics covered there. Clifford's more recent essays have begun to investigate how "specific disciplinary practices (spatial and temporal constraints) have tended to become confused with 'the culture'" an anthropologist studies; but because at least half their purpose is to survey and promote contemporary alternative forms of ethnography, they do not give sufficiently focused attention to the analysis of past practices. See "Traveling Cultures" and "Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology," both included inRoutes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17-46 and 91, respectively; the quotation is from 21.

40. In ethnographic texts, this has often required not only the narration of the ethnographer's passage
"inside" but the continual interruption of that narrative by portions of the text issuing from that other, detached perspective retained, or returned to, by the worthy claimant to ethnographic authority. See, for example, Malinowski, Argonauts, 220-21, and Buzard, "Ethnography as Interruption."

41. The wording here is from James Clifford, "Spatial Practices," in Routes, 54; cf. Michel de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

42. See Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of
Omniscience(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128: "The double narrative, constituting as it does a boundary omniscience cannot cross, raises a problem for the very notion of omniscience," for "what does it mean for omniscience to have a place?"

43. I am indebted to Amanda Anderson's recent work on the dialectic of detachment and engagement
in nineteenth-century literature here, particularly to her fine essay "George Eliot and the Jewish Question," The Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (Spring 1997): 39-61.

44. See Daniel Cottom, "Ethnographia Mundi," in Text and Culture: The Politics of
Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 72: "the boundary of culture must run through itself as well as around itself."

45. On the importance of the female walker in Victorian city writing, see Deborah Epstein
Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

46. The phrase is Richard T. Gaughan's, in "'Their Places are a Blank': The Two Narrators in Bleak
House," Dickens Studies Annual (New York: Arno Press, 1992): 79-96; see 86.

47. See Blain, "Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House: A Feminist Perspective,"
in Charles Dickens's Bleak House: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 139-56.

48. Jaffe, Vanishing Points, 148. See also Richard Maxwell, Mysteries of Paris and
London(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992) for the argument that the "novel of urban mysteries" stakes out a position between two extremes, that of "excessive reliance on experiential understanding" and that of an absolute view of knowledge (23). Maxwell also contends that "the relation between the two narratives is a great deal like that between theory and practice" (179).

49. See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92; cited in Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets,
238.

50. A similar characterization may be found in T. S. Eliot's contention that "the types of atheism will
vary according to the culture of the religious communion in which they, or their parents, or their grandparents were reared": see "Notes toward the Definition of Culture," 147.

51. Jo and Nemo exemplify what Benedict Anderson has called the "general details" that help
narratives convey the "solidity" of the national group: "none [is] in itself of any unique importance, but all [are] representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence)" of the national life. Readers' indignation and pity have nothing to do with "who the dead vagrant individually was"; they center on "the representative body, not the personal life." Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 36, 35, 37, respectively. Anderson's own example, a dead beggar whom the hero reads about in the newspaper in the 1924 Indonesian novel Semarang Hitam, could have been inspired by the cases of Nemo and Jo in Bleak House.

52. "Dickens loses no opportunity," Christopher Herbert notes, "to highlight the strangeness of this
voice that speaks out of thin air and magically translates itself from scene to scene 'as the crow flies' in the twinkling of an eye." See "The Occult in Bleak House," in Charles Dickens's Bleak House: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Bloom, 123.

53. See Hillis Miller, introduction to Penguin Bleak House, 17-18; cf. Jaffe, Vanishing Points, 13. LeviStrauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 32. Buss's famous image Dickens' Dream, showing the novelist in his study surrounded by the tiny forms of his own fictional characters, acquires a new resonance in this connection.

54. John Ruskin, "Fiction Fair and Foul," Essay I, in The Genius of John Ruskin, ed. John D.
Rosenberg (Boston, London, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 435-44; see 440-41.

55. Modern readers might look to Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, with its rising mound of earth and its
parasol-wielding, self-distracting Winnie, for a commentary on Bleak House's opening scene of isolated, umbrella-clutching souls, all condemned to occupy the same patch of turf but each separately engaged in the same futile attempt to keep out of the mud, "which is made of nobody knows what, and collects about us nobody knows whence or how: we only knowing in general that when there is too much of it, we find it necessary to shovel it away" ( BH, 186).

56. Consider also how Leopold Bloom's reflections on the "Cityful passing away, other cityful coming,
passing away too" give rise to the conclusion "No one is anything" in James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Random House, 1986 ["corrected text"]), 135. Alexander Welsh uses this phrase as one of the epigraphs to his The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

57. Esther and John Jarndyce would concur with Joseph de Maistre's anti-Jacobin assertion that
"there is no such thing as man [tyrannical or otherwise] in the world," but only "Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc." Like Edmund Burke or, later, Matthew Arnold, Esther repudiates the Jacobin chimera of an abstract and universal rights-bearing humanity in favor of distinct, duty-bearing communities: she would assent to Arnold's reflection that "the deeper I go into my own consciousness, . . . the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of abstract reasoning, inferring that the obligations they are conscious of towards others, others must be conscious of towards them. . . ." De Maistre: from Considrations sur la France (1797); quoted in Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14. Arnold: Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 175.

58. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a
Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 266; Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 11. If the first Bleak House narrator harks back to some pre-narrative moment when an ordinary member of a culture "took flight" from his single "insider's" position and assumed a protean omniscience, Esther points back to a time before the commencement of her story, when the confirming look of the mother was once (fleetingly) capable of securing her identity. What offers to recompense her for the loss of the mother's gaze is the expandable-but-limited circle of recognizing and affirming faces that represents Dickens's model for genuine culture.

59. Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1944), 36.

60. Hillis Miller, introduction to Bleak House, 22. Miller's rueful reflections on how no name can ever
name its subject "truly or finally" would appear to be rather good news to someone whose name is, say, "Prince Turveydrop."

61. Oxford English Dictionary.

62. Consider also "my Lady Dedlock." It is gratifying to learn, late in the novel, that this character's
first name is Honoria (BH, 787), but this is not a clue to her "true character" in itself. The applicability of the label is vindicated by both Esther and Sir Leicester Dedlock when they honor the woman who bears it even after they learn of her sin--when they forgive her, in short, proving that control over the meaning of one's name lies with others. And for all that we may feel motivated to think that an important segment of Bleak House's plot is concerned to reveal who Lady Dedlock really is, we never discover her original family name. Or do we? In the chapter in which she learns Esther is her daughter, she says to herself that her sister "renounced me and my name" ( BH, 466): such renunciations usually involve the family name, but what was that name? There seems no reason to doubt that "Barbary" is an alias assumed by Esther's aunt when she took the illegitimate infant into hiding (see BH,290): shield and symbol at once, like the neurotic symptom, it wards off and points to the disgrace that necessitated it; she might just as well have called herself "Outcast." And yet Krook, of the prodigious memory, lists "Barbary" among the names involved in the Jarndyce case ( BH, 102). It is difficult to imagine why an alias, taken only after the birth of Honoria's unhallowed child and taken only by one member of the family as a contrivance to cut herself off from the others, should figure in a legal action that is "the only property my Lady [Dedlock] brought" into her marriage. The question, "was her real name Barbary, or not?" is the wrong question: everyone's "real" name is that: Outsider, Nemo.

63. See Burke on the concept of "social freedom," "that state of things in which Liberty is secured by
the equality of Restraint": this is from a letter of autumn 1789 which was a trial run for the Reflections on the Revolution in France. See Conor Cruise O'Brien's introduction to the Penguin edition of Burke, Reflections (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 15. In Dickens, such refunctionings as I speak of may not always be beneficial: the neighborhood called "Mount Pleasant" is home to the more-thanunpleasant Smallweeds (BH, 341); Miss Flite is the name of a woman who cannot bring herself to fly from Chancery.

64. Malinowski, Argonauts, 157. 65. Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 50; "system of desire," quoted above, is from 51. 66. Graham Smith, Dickens, Money, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968),
139.

67. Gibbon, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, vol. 1, ed. J. E. Norton (New York: Macmillan, 1956),
197-98.

68. In contrast, the more privileged Richard Carstone resigns his army commission, and so refuses
the chance to school himself in true Britishness, because his obsession with the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case requires that he remain in Britain. "I must have been ordered abroad," Richard explains to Esther, "but how could I have gone?" ( BH, 676). Like Kipling after him, Dickens favors the common soldier over the officer class.

69. The fact that Esther and Allan's new home is called "Bleak House" ( BH, 913) suggests, among
other things, that it caricatures the novel itself, which, however large its dramatis personae and however tragic certain elements of its plot, remains a tidier, more manageable imitation of the social life it attempts to encompass. A place ludicrously out of keeping with its title, the second Bleak House offers the novel's most extreme example of the positive refunctioning of cultural "givens."

70. On Bleak House's use of gothic conventions and occult imagery, see Arac,Commissioned Spirits:
The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (1979; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 114-38; Herbert, "The Occult in Bleak House," 125-30; and Richard Maxwell, Mysteries of Paris and London, 160-90.

71. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950(New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958), 143.

72. Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 61. 73. Quoted in Holway, "Contingencies of Meaning," 112. 74. Quoted in Holway, 58. 75. Quoted in "History of the Great Exhibition," in The Great Exhibition: A Facsimile of the Illustrated
Catalogue of London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition (New York: Grammercy Books, 1995), xi. This is a partial facsimile of the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of all Nations (1852).

76. Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72. The two preceding quotations ("conscious greatness" and "Britain stood out") are from The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of People (London: Religious Tract Society, 1851), 53, and Hoggs's Instructor 6 (1851): 285, respectively, and are quoted in Novels Behind Glass, 76 and 75, respectively.

77. Andrea Kahn, "The Invisible Mask," in Kahn, Drawing Building Text (Princeton: Architectural
Press, 1991), 96.

78. See Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition (London: Harvill, 1950), 211. 79. For an account of the debates over the classification system, see Briggs, Victorian Things, 54-56. 80. "Far from": Philip Landon, "Great Exhibitions: Representations of the Crystal Palace in Mayhew,
Dickens, and Dostoevsky," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20:1 (1997): 30. "The mighty maze" passage is quoted on the same page, from The Crystal Palace and its Contents: Being an Illustrated Cyclopedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), 33.

81. Letter of 18 May 1851; in Charles Dickens: Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-), 4:392. 82. Household Words 2:41 (4 Jan. 1851): 338. 83. Holway, 32. John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), 182.
For considerations of why "the Great Exhibition is deliberately, even conspicuously, excluded" from Bleak House, see: Butt and Tillotson (esp. 182); Norman Page, Bleak House: A Novel of Connections (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 27; Landon, "Great Exhibitions"; and Holway's forthcoming work.