Reading the Mesh of Metonymy in Bleak House

In this article, I would like to combine an analysis of Charles Dickens's use of metonymy in Bleak House (1852–1853) with some concepts from cognitive linguistics and ecocritical studies in order to explore how the abundance of metonymic connection and deferral in the novel figures the complexities of connection and interdependence in the Victorian urban world—or what ecocritic Timothy Morton calls the mesh, a term that denotes the complex interconnectedness of all living and nonliving beings. I argue that Dickens uses metonymy to figure the strange, unsettling aspects of existence within the mesh and that what seems like an unjustified use of the figure by the third-person narrator at the novel's opening is justified as the narrative unfolds and as the novel's other narrator, Esther, explores the city and traces the implied connections and metonymic associations proposed in the novel's opening. In this way, I hope to show how a long narrative may use metonymy to reveal or create new knowledge. In Bleak House this new knowledge is about the depth of interconnection and interdependence in the urban world and the troubling implications of this interconnection. The novel shows how entities in the urban world cannot be fully understood or defined in themselves; rather, they must be understood in relation to other entities, life forms, or beings—that is, metonymically.

I will begin by discussing common approaches to looking at metonymy in nineteenth-century narrative and the difficulties that lie therein. I would then like to look at the excessive use of metonymy in the novel's opening chapter, in which the third-person narrator presents a grand, all-encompassing view of London, fog, mud, mire, and the proceedings of the Court of Chancery. The narrator suggests a metonymic connection of some sort between these things. The vocabulary of literary criticism and cognitive linguistics will help explain why such a deployment of the figure is unjustified; and work from cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker can help explain what the novel would need to do in order to justify such an association. I will then show what the novel does instead. That is, rather than showing a single, linear chain of contiguous links connecting Chancery to the fog and filth of London, the novel complicates the nature of connections and contiguity, as well as our ability to grasp and comprehend the scale and density of interconnectedness in the city. I will suggest that first-person narrator Esther—much like the novel's other, third-person narrator—also reads the city and her place within it metonymically. However, in contrast to the third-person narrator's all-encompassing view of the city and its interconnections, Esther's subjective, limited view is more personal and more emotionally charged. This helps to justify the initial, proposed metonymies, but it also unpacks their disturbing implications in a way that is more visceral. As the novel unfolds, Esther wades into what George Gissing called "a great gloomy city, webbed and meshed" (1: 174), or what Morton calls, simply, the mesh.

Reading Metonymy

Most literary studies of metonymy build on Roman Jakobson's discussion of metonymy and metaphor as constituting two distinct poles of thought. Jakobson associates metaphor with the axis of selection, based on similarity, and he associates metonymy with the axis of combination, based on contiguity (129–30). More recent work on metonymy in cognitive linguistics likewise privileges contiguity.¹ Whereas metaphor can bridge across domains or schemas via similarity, metonymy operates by contiguity within a single domain.² With this in mind, it makes sense to approach metonymy in a novel by focusing on how a novel necessarily must leverage our existing domains or schemas to point to, indicate, or reference elements out in the real world. However, this comes with its own challenges. Elaine Freedgood, for example, notes metonymy's "inability to stop wandering and the unpredictability of the associations that it may spark in the minds of readers" (13). After Roland Barthes, Freedgood differentiates between "strong" and "weak" readings of metonymy, and she suggests that a strong reading requires...