In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Anywhere’s Nowhere”: Bleak House as Autoethnography
  • James Buzard (bio)

The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.

—E. B. Tylor 1

Within the boundaries of the tribe the writ of the same culture runs from end to end.

—Bronislaw Malinowski 2

“Where would you wish to go?” she asked.

“Anywhere, my dear,” I replied.

“Anywhere’s nowhere,” said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

“Let us go somewhere at any rate,” said I.

—Charles Dickens 3

I

Since Dickens’s Bleak House so famously starts twice, with its bold and puzzling technique of double narration (half the novel told in the third person, half in the first), this essay on it will follow its lead by starting twice, too. I begin with some observations on two important pieces of recent humanistic scholarship, then enter upon a treatment of the novel that is meant both to address certain key questions in contemporary critical debate and to offer a new perspective on the cultural and ideological effects of the novel form in mid-Victorian Britain.

The first piece of recent work, Stuart Hall’s “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” 4 reflects on the centrality of “globalization” in contemporary cultural analysis. Hall cautions that “from the perspective of any historical account of English culture, globalization is far from a new process,” and he levels the charge of “historical amnesia” against theorists who write as though “just because we are thinking about [this] idea it has only just started” (Hall, 20). Within the expanded historical framework he recommends to us, Hall then goes on to delineate two eras: the so-called English phase, during which worldwide economic exchange was dominated by imperial nation-states that possessed a “strongly centered, highly exclusive and exclusivist form of cultural identity”; and the late-twentieth-century phase of a more decentered “American-style” variety whose “global postmodernist” culture is if anything excessively, complacently open to differences, and whose capitalism, far from trying to remake all cultures in its image, “works in and through [the] [End Page 7] specificity [of different cultures]” (Hall, 29). The farther into Hall’s essay one goes, the more stable and uncomplicated the older, English-imperialist form of globalism comes to appear, as it plays its role of foil for the dizzying postmodern variety we now inhabit, which occupies most of Hall’s attention.

In the earlier era, Hall says, “The ‘English eye’ sees everything else but is not so good at recognizing that it is itself actually looking at something. It becomes coterminous with sight itself. . . . [K]nowing where it is, what it is, it places everything else” (Hall, 20–21). In point of fact, the dominant “Englishness” has always been just as much an ethnicity as any other, just as much a place-to-speak-from—as little an Olympian vantage point—as any other site on earth; but that, Hall maintains (à la Hegel), “is something which we are only now beginning to see the true nature of, when we are beginning to come to the end of it.” The bygone imperialists appear to have believed in their own representations of Englishness as something “perfectly natural,” something “condensed, homogeneous, unitary” (Hall, 22). Hall speaks of the “large confidence with which the English have always occupied their own identities” (Hall, 26).

Elsewhere in his essay Hall identifies as the “most profound cultural revolution” of our times the “struggle of the [postcolonial and other] margins to come into representation”; he celebrates, in terms by now a veritable reflex of humanistic study, “the emergence of . . . communities hitherto excluded from the major forms of cultural representation” and now able “to speak for themselves for the first time” (Hall, 34). He notes that the rediscovery of one’s ethnicity, of “the necessary place or space from which people speak,” is an important, even an essential moment in this process, but goes on to ask, “do [these newly empowered marginal voices] have to be trapped in the place from which they begin to speak?” (Hall, 36). Hall’s postmodern global moment is above all an ambivalent one, attuned to two voices: one extols the...

Share