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Paper is the material support for psychic and social disintegration in Bleak House. For Dickens, as for Melville, the distraction and dispersal of mass mediacy has an overwhelming effect on individual and collective states of stability based on self-containment. In Bleak House the metaphor for such a state in the collective sense is the home. In Dickens’s sprawling novel the home is scattered with mass-produced paper. Domestic breakdown connects Bleak House to an aesthetic tradition that culminates in Lukács’s theory of the novel as the genre of “transcendental homelessness.” But Dickens’s novel does not remain within the framework of this traditional aesthetic perspective. For the scattered state that emerges in Bleak House is not that of “transcendental homelessness” either in the individual or in the collective sense of the term. Rather, the homeless motif in this work moves away from the conceptual foundation of a phenomenological theory of the novel as a genre, whether Lukács’s classic Hegelian essay or more recent efforts to interpret the novel as an institution of Foucauldian “discipline.” Exposed to the dynamism of an especially unsettling mass movement, the home in Bleak House leaves this phenomenological space. The handling of mass-produced paper in Dickens’s novel dramatizes the decline, not just of the domestic aura, but also of domesticity as a metaphor for a stable sense of place. In Bleak House the individual, the collective, and the novelistic medium become involved in a movement that deWes the conventional metaphor of the home as a self-contained state. One cannot simply be within, or without, a home in Bleak House. The removal of the home from a traditional concept of place in Dickens’s work corresponds to the “shattering” of tradition and transmissibility that links modern techniques of mass production to the novel as a literary genre in Benjamin’s writings.1 At issue is a crisis of exchange precipitated by the death of reciprocity. In this chapter we will analyze the role played by paper as a material support in this crisis in Bleak House. Dickens might have viewed such a crisis as deriving from the “deranged condition” of England in the “Paper Age.”2 This would account for the Xow of paper from Chancery Court. But the novel exposes Chapter 4 The Paper State: Collective Breakdown in Dickens’s Bleak House a mass movement breaking down the self-consistency of Carlyle’s paper metaphor. Such a widespread breakdown involves the material support in the broadest possible sense: not just the masses of paper, but also the masses—the individual and collective subjects that become receptive to the process.3 The following is an attempt to pursue these paper subjects in Dickens’s Bleak House. The Hand of Nemo Paper abounds in Bleak House: from the courtroom and law ofWces to the shops and homes of the novel’s protagonists.4 This is the reader’s overwhelming impression of the opening chapters. There are, in order of appearance, the “tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages” copied by the copyists (BH 17), the “eighteen hundred sheets” of the lawyers (BH 18), the “heavy charges of papers” hauled off by the clerks (BH 19), the papers copied by a certain “Nemo” and placed before Lady Dedlock by Mr. Tulkinghorn “on a golden talisman of a table” (BH 26), the “bundles of papers” (BH 45) in Kenge and Carboy’s law ofWce, “the nest of waste paper” from which Mrs. Jellyby dictates endless philanthropic letters to her daughter Caddy (BH 57), the piles of “waste paper” in Krook’s rag and bottle shop (BH 67), and the paper advertising the copying services of Nemo put up in the window of the shop along with a picture of a paper mill (BH 67). In a state where endless copying has become the law subjects are less metaphors, as J. Hillis Miller has suggested, than supports—paper subjects.5 Moreover, the law of copying in Bleak House is not restricted to legal copyists such as Nemo. It applies equally to the young Caddy Jellyby who “can’t do anything hardly, except write . . . for Ma” (BH 60) and to the illiterate Krook who demonstrates “a turn for copying from memory . . . though [he] can neither read nor write” (BH 76; Figure 6). Amassing paper and taking on its capacity to bear reproducible marks, Krook ultimately merges with the very substance of the support—the mingling of his ashes with “burnt paper” “is all...

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