Bleak House again

Thinking more about the recent Atlantic article about the end of reading and its horror story of college students struggling to read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House : I looked up the source (account required): Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel’s “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.” And I began to wonder: does it make sense to give students the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s novel with nothing in the way of context, nothing to orient their reading? And: is it wrong to think it appropriate and necessary to offer some context?

I looked up the handout (that odd word) that kicked off my teaching of Dickens’s novel. Bear with me:

Bleak House

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), 1853

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! [Chapter 15]

Present time: perhaps the late 1830s. The events of the novel unfold in relation to the Court of Chancery, a court devoted to matters of wills and trusts. As a note to our edition of the novel says, the Court of Chancery was “a byword for inefficiency and delay,” a world of endless legal entanglement and complication. One of those endless entanglements is a lawsuit known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce. (Jarndyce is pronounced jarn dice .)

Bleak House is a novel of “connexions,” some of them immediately graspable, others remaining mysterious or unrecognized for a long time. Jane Austen gives us a world whose connexions range across a limited cast of characters drawn almost exclusively from the English aristocracy. Dickens gives us a world in which connexions multiply unpredictably to form a vast network of social relationships among people from all walks of life. Austen describes her task as a novelist as a matter of working on a tiny piece of ivory with a fine brush. Dickens, we might say, is painting on a canvas as large as a city.

Bleak House is an example of what’s called serial publication: the novel appeared in twenty installments over nineteen months. We’ll be taking twenty-one classes to read the novel, one installment per class (at least twice as much time as many college profs spend on the novel). I want for us all to really read Bleak House, not run and stumble through it.

Some advice about reading

1. Read nothing but the novel. Consider yourself honor-bound not to look elsewhere. There are mysteries in Bleak House that should remain mysteries until it’s time to figure them out. Reading any sort of summary will ruin the novel for you. Don’t read the notes at the back of the Penguin edition (they’re prefaced by a warning to first-time readers). Don’t read anything but the pages of the novel. Some details and references will therefore be unclear, but that’s okay. We’re not going to get everything.

2. Take notes as you read. Much of the challenge—and pleasure—of the novel lies in working out the connexions among the novel’s people and in figuring out the significance of past incidents as they fall into place in the novel’s design. If you don’t make a record of your reading, you’ll be lost. We’ll spend lots of time in class putting together our sense of what’s going on, just as readers of the serialized text no doubt did.

3. Don’t fall behind in the reading. If you do, the novel will soon become impossible. Put in the time to read for every class, and come to class excited to talk about what you’re reading.

4. Recognize that much of what makes this novel the great pleasure that it is is not to be found in “what happens.” Reading for “what happens” will leave you at many points pretty disappointed. But reading for Dickens’s genius as a storyteller, as a creator of characters, as a describer of scenes, as an inventor of dialogue, will leave you (I hope!) absolutely delighted. Dickens is a great entertainer. Give him the chance to delight you as he has delighted millions of readers (in countless languages) before you.

See? I’m always optimistic.

My fear is that “They Don’t Read Very Well” feeds the assumption that we can’t ask students to engage difficult texts, that we must, as the mantra goes, meet them where they are. It’s better to invite them in, I say, and then offer a map of the territory: You Are Here.

Related reading
All OCA reading posts (Pinboard)