Describing the Unseen: The Visceral and Virtual Construction of Spaces in <em>Bleak House</em>

Abstract

Space and place have up to now been conceived by narrative theorists in terms of vision and movement. The term focalization and its ancestor, point of view, are dead metaphors likening construction of narrative perspective (another visual metaphor) to act of standing in particular spot and seeing diegetic world from there. Marie-Laure Ryan's entry on in online Living Handbook of Na r rato logy explains that descriptions are the major discourse strategy for disclosure of spatial information, which she conceives in visual terms as a more or less detailed glimpse at current spatial frame (par. 19). Ryan observes that space can also be rendered more dynamically through references to movement of characters or objects, reports of characters' perceptions, narrativized renditions of how particular places came into being within storyworld, and implications arising from reported events. The visual and kinesthetic are not, however, only dimensions of spatial construction available to English novel, as close look at Charles Dickens's Bleak House will show.1 Extending corpus of narratology's examples back into earlier periods of literary history-as all essays in this collection demonstrate-can expand and complicate narrative-theoretical concepts of how storyworld spaces take shape.My close analysis of Bleak House suggests that Dickens's text challenges current theories of spatial construction in two ways, both of them departures from assumption that narrative spaces are conceived as virtually Indeed, I will argue that Dickens creates spaces through invocation of unseen. First, there is visceral: although novel is full of countless examples of spaces taking shape through vision and motion, many of those places are characterized by smell, touch, sound, and even taste. By adding olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and tactile to techniques for constructing narrative space,2 Dickens's practice invokes sensations registered not just by eyes but by multiple parts of body, from nose to skin to mouth.3 Dickens's mode of creating space moves beyond visual perception to what I will call apperception.4 Not so much visceral as virtual, second way in which Dickens relies upon unseen to create fictional spaces is technique I will call ekphrasis. If ekphrasis is description of art works within verbal text, reverse ekphrasis is device for bringing to mind extra-textual works of art with which audiences would have been familiar. Like all nineteenth-century realist novelists, Dickens constructs spaces visually through reference to boundaries of particular setting and to selected objects within those boundaries. In Dickens's novels, these special objects have at least two functions. They often serve as mnemonic devices to aid serial reader with remembering characteristics of important spaces during breaks between parts, similar to Dickens's famous trick of assigning definitive action or phrase to character who repeats it upon every appearance.'1 Those individual objects also serve as cues around which reader can build up more fully realized imaginary space that goes beyond what is seen in text.In Bleak House those details operate in concert with reverse ekphrasis, drawing on an audience's familiarity with engravings and sketches of popular artworks to help construct virtual image of fictional space. The illustrations by Phiz (aka Hablot Browne) that appeared in monthly serial parts as well as in bound first edition of Bleak House reinforce verbally invoked visual details but oddly do not augment them very much. These drawings, like written descriptions, clue readers in to what they can't see in descriptions or illustrations in Bleak House but might be able to reconstruct from other pictures they remember having seen. Both visceral apperception and reverse ekphrasis, then, refer in different ways to unseen in passages of description: not just to what fictional space looks like but to what it smells, feels, and tastes like as well as to remembered visual images reader might bring to bear upon picturing storyworld. …