Bleak House

Crédit photo ArtbyBenett - London fog digital

... and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Esther 4:14 (King James Bible)

I was very intimidated, without knowing why, by this iconic novel by Charles Dickens, well known to English readers.

Published in serial form in 1852 and 1853, it has some of the aspects of a soap opera: a gripping plot, a plethora of characters and subplots. Bleak House could have been a soap opera of its time, for on the surface it contains some of the effective ingredients of the genre: a touch of romance, a deep mystery, cliffhangers, with a social background and a subtle but incisive critique of the legal system by the author.

But Charles Dickens’ writing art makes all the difference between a soap opera and a brilliant literary creation.

Bleak House, a novel best enjoyed slowly, is so multifaceted that it is difficult to summarise. A trial that never ends, the legal machine that crushes and then devours its victims, is described with pertinence and finesse, without ever seeming to take centre stage. On the contrary, certain protagonists, through their actions, their reactions, there obsessiveness on details, their coldness, their omnipresence and their sometimes diabolical traits, personify this legal system, which pervades every sphere of the lives of the parties in the hitherto never concluded Jarndyce and Jarndyce case.

The novel's originality lies in its narrative form, which alternates between a third-person narrative in the present tense, mainly focused on high society life and legal proceedings, immersing the reader in the immediacy of the action, and Esther Summerson's first-person narrative in the past tense, telling her own story, distancing herself, or showing her lack of distance from the events she recounts.

Esther's narrative has the overtones of a bildungsroman or even, at times, a fairy tale, but it also betrays Esther’s clumsy eagerness for appreciation, for her childhood was sad and she wants to be loved at all costs.

There are four narrative voices in this complex text: Esther's immediate voice, in which she experiences the events, and Esther's later voice, in which she eventually recounts the events with the benefit of hindsight.

The third voice, a third-person narrative voice, allows for a change of settings and places, and also for a change of timeline in its textual flashbacks. The third-person narrative, by an unnamed dispassionate observer, seems objective, even if it reveals the omnipresence of certain key protagonists. Finally, the fourth voice is that of Dickens, who, in the face of social misery and the hypocrisy of those who have the power to change the sad situation, cannot suppress a healthy indignation, expressed in thoughtful but powerful terms. The text is skilfully interwoven with vivid descriptions and atmospheric renderings of urban or rural scenes in the purest Dickens style.

“A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this stranger’s wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.” (Chapter 48)

Bleak House is several novels in one: a social novel, a humanist and philosophical critique of a system, but also a barely sketched love story, diffuse and discreet, in which the protagonists develop and seek each other out, the novel of Esther's apprenticeship, as she gains confidence and strives to be a vector of balance and serenity between characters who are sometimes uprooted from life and behave erratically.

Bleak House is a novel of all sorts of dysfunctional families, bruised outcasts, ragged detachments in a merciless city: ladies who do great charity work but neglect their own children, abusive mothers, spouses, orphans, but it is also a tale of warm homes, of ersatz families rebuilt with bits and pieces, but so heart-warming, it is a tale of helpful and dedicated individuals. It is also a novel of other individuals, drowned in a sea of paperwork, legal documents, blue bags, red bags full of documents carried around in a lifetime, files, and letters. Proposals, love letters, letters revealing secrets, inefficient letters to a host of obscure charities, poison-pen notes, letters begging for forgiveness, apparently enigmatic letters which reveal more than it first seems.

Apart from a few protagonists, no one in this very nuanced novel is a complete villain. I even had at times some difficulty deciding who the real heroes were, as some seemingly secondary, if not minor, characters turn out to be larger than life.

But Bleak House hides a family secret that may perhaps appear predictable, depending on how perceptive we are. This secret is revealed to us not even halfway into the novel, without disclosing all the details. Another mystery turns eventually this atmospheric, sometimes gothic novel into a detective story, soon magnificently solved by a masterful detective inspector – a precursor of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who can also be read as an emanation of an omniscient and omnipresent narrator, who ties together all the loose ends of a complex story. Charles Dickens has masterfully given himself twelve more chapters after this first stage of denouement, to be published as the story progresses, to resolve the outstanding questions and unravel all the threads of this fascinating epic. Only at the denouement do these voices unite in a dramatic chorus, in the same temporality.

Bleak House is transfigured by intense emotion at the heart of the text, which does not exclude some subtly comic moments. Through a rich variety of protagonists, images and symbols, Dickens makes an uncompromising observation of an old world in decline, a society stuck in obsolete patterns, stunned by the emergence of a new world in the making, initiated by the industrial revolution, the modernisation of infrastructures and the entrepreneurial spirit.