Abstract

Abstract:

Martin Chuzzlewit is a blurry novel. Where Dickens typically invites his audience to picture precisely what he sees (whether in life or only in his imagination), in this book he keeps us at a troubling distance, rendering textual imagery—characters, places, events—in language that tends to obscure rather than clarify. I interpret the blurriness of this text through key innovations in Victorian mathematics that give rise to the fuzzy logic of the twentieth century. A spirit of algebraic abstraction pervaded nineteenth-century mathematics. I look here to the emergence of many-valued truth systems in (algebraized) British logic, which suggested that a vague term might still be considered an articulate one. I propose that Dickens was experimenting with the bounds of language—and the parameters of the real—in ways similar to contemporary mathematicians, and that vagueness in his writing anticipates perspectival shifts towards abstract aesthetics in the decades that followed. Furthermore, I argue that Dickens feigns shortsightedness in this book to manifest an uncomfortable distance between novel and reader, as an expression of the estrangement he felt on his 1842 American tour, and as a warning to audiences in America and England alike that ego makes strangers of us all.

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