Abstract: With the exception of D.A. Miller's brilliant but exceptionable chapter in The Novel and the Police (1988), nearly all important accounts of Bleak House have given some sustained attention to the novel's dual narration, that famous experiment which Steven Marcus called (with much justice) 'the most audacious and significant act of the novelistic imagination in England in the nineteenth century'.3 Miller's having so little to say about the matter, already remarkable in a chapter entitled 'Discipline in Two Voices', becomes more remarkable still when we remember that Miller interrupts his argument with some theoretical reflections on how '[p]henomenologically, the novel form includes the interruptions that fracture the process of reading', yet pays almost no attention to the factor that makes this particular novel into a veritable self-interrupting machine: the dual narration.4 Regarding the relationship between Dickens's impersonal narrator and Esther Summerson as a kind of hypertrophied specimen of the novel's intrinsic relationship between narrator and character, third-person and first-, and thus as a nineteenth-century representation of novelistic form, this essay will argue that Bleak House defines the novel for its era as the self-interrupting genre par excellence and that it does so as part of what I consider its 'proto-ethnographic' labour.KeywordsParticipant ObserverSubsequent ReferenceHabeas CorpusDivine PerfectionGreat ExhibitionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot