BLEAK HOUSE AND SERIAL FICTION

BLEAK HOUSE AND SERIAL FICTION

Complex Interrelations

Detection in a Serial Form

http://www.princeton.edu/~asfaw/resources/images/projects/bh-cm/color-bw-posters.pdf

Economics

D.A. Miller: The Novel and the Police

The many plots engender desire for interpretable project—ie detective story

However, this cannot work as individual project: need outside functions to interpret: the detective serves as a symbol of the individual absorbed by the social

“On one side of this relationship there would be a detective story whose shallow solution naively gratifies our appetite for closure; on the other, there would be a Novel that, insisting at the very moment of solution on the insoluble, abiding mysteriousnessof human and literary experience, provides superior nourishment by keeping us hungry. Not to be identified with Chancery, the novel contrasts the aimless suspension of the suit with the achievement of its own ending; but not to be confused with the police either, it counters the tidy conclusion of the case with a conspicuous recognition of all that must elude any such achievement. If, in the first instance, the novel must affirm the possibility of closure, in the second it is driven to admit the inadequacy of this closure.

In the end, then—precisely there—the novel’s attempt to differentiate its own narrative procedures from those of the institutions it portrays falters, and the effort to disentangle itself from one institution only implicates it in another” (97)

Far cheaper than the "triple decker"

Multiple novels/magazine

Increased literacy of middle/working class (1840: 1/3, 1900: 97%)

Bleak House as Serial Form

Form, Natural Theology, and Literary Value

The Serial Novel

I March 1852 1–4

II April 1852 5–7

III May 1852 8–10

IV June 1852 11–13

V July 1852 14–16

VI August 1852 17–19

VII September 1852 20–22

VIII October 1852 23–25

IX November 1852 26–29

X December 1852 30–32

XI January 1853 33–35

XII February 1853 36–38

XIII March 1853 39–42

XIV April 1853 43–46

XV May 1853 47–49

XVI June 1853 50–53

XVII July 1853 54–56

XVIII August 1853 57–59

XIX–XX September 1853 60–67

Gown Dawson

‘Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Studies 53 (2011), 203–30

Viictorian anatomist Richard Owen "had been able, starting from just a single extra tooth in a fragmentary cranium brought back from South America by Darwin, to explain the relation between all the apparently anomalous elements of the Mega- therium’s “peculiar . . . type of structure,” and show that their harmo- nious relation to each other allowed a mode of feeding that, while ungainly, was closely suited to the particular environment in which the gigantic creature had lived (“Fossil Mammalia” 1: 106). in his Descrip- tion of the Skeleton on an Extinct Gigantic Sloth (1842) Owen observed that the principle manifested in the “admirable adaptation” of the multi- faceted “fore-foot of the extinct Megatheroid quadrupeds” was “beau- tifully set forth by the poet” in the following lines:

in human works, though labour’d on with pain,

A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain:

in God’s, one single can its end produce;

yet serve to second too some other use. (149)

when properly understood, the apparent monstrosity and incongruity of the Megatheroid structure, Owen suggested, was in fact best repre- sented by the neoclassical formal coherence of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–34). Pope’s epigrammatic poem was an exemplar of enlightenment natural theology, and Owen’s use of it to depict the exquisite functional adaptations of a creature in which, as he later observed, the “fertility of the Creative resources is well displayed” implies a connection between aesthetic and divine design (Memoir on the Megatherium 41). the serialized novel, as a species of literary Mega- therium, might too reveal an underlying design behind its seemingly ill-proportioned parts that would render it as aesthetically unassailable as the most revered literary works of the previous century, as well as naturalizing its claims to represent the world realistically by intimating that the novel’s own form had an underlying organicism. it might even suggest a parallel between the initially enigmatic but nonetheless perfectly integrated designs of the serial novelist and those of the omnipresent author of the natural world.

Generally 2o installments

Magazines/Newspapers

Plotting

Had to be in discrete sections

Wanted to keep reader interested

"Multiplot novel"

Jennifer Hayward: refusal of closure; intertwined subplots; large casts of characters (which span a range of ages and classes); interaction with current political, social, or cultural issues.

Henry James: "Loose, baggy monsters."

George Levine: bagginess of novels is move beyond literature to reality and refuses containment “meaning that will not allow for varieties of experience uncontainable within ‘premeditated art’ must be recognized as itself merely arbitrary and far too selective” (141)

Reader Involvement/ Metatexuality

Authors changed endings based on reader response

Serialized vs Finished versions

Illustrations a big element of the experience