Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (41 page)

But he [Tom-all-Alone's] has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. (575-576)

As this stunning passage—with a thrust at once moral, political, and even medical—makes clear, "immunity" is exactly what no one has. "Stop him!" is the suggestive title of the chapter in which these lines appear, and whereas those words refer overtly to the efforts to "catch" Jo (the emblematic child of the slums, more orphaned even than Esther, destined to be her double), they also are nonetheless tragically ironic, in that Jo—and the disease he carries—cannot be stopped, but will indeed be "caught." Jo and Tom-all-Alone's are familializing forces which can-

not be naysaid. The ecological fiction teaches us about neighbors we never knew we had, neighbors who are bound to us in ways we need to see.

This, too, means going beyond the retinal illusion of individual self and the still more stubborn social illusion of distance and difference. Nothing proves this argument more forcefully than the experience of infection, for it is here that the never dreamed-of "new family" announces itself physiologically, in the flesh. A great nineteenth-century theme is coming into view here—the remaking of the family, the bonding of disparate figures into a familial mesh—and we can find it in Whitman's democratic poems, Balzac's social critiques, even Baudelaire's city meditations. But nowhere are the consequences more brilliantly drawn out than in
Bleak House.

On the face of it, this constellation would consist of Esther discovering her long-lost biological mother, Lady Dedlock, which is what the dirty-laundry Victorian plot emphasizes. Yet plague has its word to say as well, and the more far-reaching family paradigm is brought about by Esther's fateful linkage with the orphan child, Jo, exemplary diseased citizen of Tom-all-Alone's. Esther touches and nurses the sick Jo. Next day, the boy has strangely disappeared, and Dickens's prose again rises to the occasion:

"It's the boy, miss," said he.

"Is he worse?" I inquired.

"Gone, miss."

"Dead!"

"Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off." (401)

"Gone clean off" turns out to be horribly untrue, since he has infected Charley (Esther's maid), who will infect Esther, who then goes on to live out her dread sisterhood by catching his smallpox, becoming blind (for a while), and then losing (permanently) her beauty. Disease moves. Jo is hounded in this book by London authority, told incessantly to "move

on," and we gradually realize that he does "move on," in that he moves into others, alters them, comes close to killing them.

Dickens's book is marked, in all ways, by the imperious inroads of sickness and disease, and like both Sophocles and Defoe, he is out to show that these issues augur life and death for the culture at large. Let us recall those harrowing last lines of Blake's poem "London," "But most through midnight streets I hear / How the youthful Harlot's curse / Blasts the new born Infant's tear, / And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse." Early in the novel, we are led to a squalid hovel where the brick makers live, and we encounter the paradigmatic event of this text: the death of an infant. Dickens does narrative high jinx with this episode, in that Esther places her handkerchief over the dead child, a handkerchief that we discover later as precious possession of Lady Ded-lock, as unacknowledged sign of blood connection and motherly love. And perhaps divine love as well: brought into that same hovel, Snagsby the stationer is reminded, in looking at one of the surviving babies, "of another infant, encircled with light, that he has seen in pictures" (287). Yet
Bleak House
seems to center around doomed children: Esther is parentless, the baby dies, Jo dies, Richard dies. Who is responsible, Dickens is asking, for these deaths?

The answer seems to be a large one, including all deficient mothers—Lady Dedlock, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle—but clearly going beyond these individual figures to point to the social and economic order itself, the order that produces Tom-all-Alone's. Hence, Esther—a figure of Victorian rectitude and piety who can be impossibly cloying at times, with her sobriquet of Dame Durden—almost dies, becomes pockmarked and permanently scarred, all as a result of her nursing the sick Jo. Dickens makes us realize that this act of contact, motivated by human charity, illuminates, nay determines, Esther Summerson's identity far more fully than the long-hinted mother-daughter link does. "Motivated by human charity" makes it sound as if such contacts were volitional, and in some limited but beautiful sense they are volitional, but the grim-

mer truth of the novel has little to do with private generosity and everything to do with the tentacular, miasmic vision of a writer who knows that connection is
prior
to individuation, that the simple acts of living and breathing are in truth versions of incessant
traffic,
that no human subject—especially no subject living in a metropolis like London—can claim immunity or think himself or herself safe behind the walls of stone, class, or flesh.

When Esther first goes to the squalid brick kilns, she has a singular thought: "I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was" (393). When the fateful, deforming smallpox fever comes on, she again becomes confused about identity, "with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too large altogether" (404). At the height of her pain and transformation, she suffers a visionary redefinition of Self as being exploded: "Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which /was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?" (447).

Personal disease is translated by fever and delirium into its appropriate cosmic frame—"flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle"—as the infected human subject is brought agonizingly (there is no other mode of transportation here; agony is the trip) into this brotherhood and sisterhood, initiated into the system by pure pain, as if pain were the ultimate connective tissue, the visceral and neural linkage that explodes all notions of bounded self. There can be no orphans in such a scheme, despite all the social labels we wear. Plague matters for Dickens, one wants to say, even more than sexual secrets or hidden identity, in that it writes on our very flesh the unwitting badge of citizenship in the world. Reformer and passionate student of urban hygiene that he was, Dickens announces that segregation is a myth, that the slum and its ostracized inhabitants actually possess the keys to the City, and that their blighted

lives are as uncontainable and unchartable as the Thames that Blake depicted in his version of London, such that their suffering and their venom infects the entire body politic.

But how would you represent this infection, other than by showing people "catch" it from each other? Dickens's novel remains in our minds as a tour de force along just these lines, as he tirelessly finds ways to write plague and contamination. We have already mentioned the filthy London air and the virulent winds that spread infection throughout the city. Could one actually devise a "language" for showing these matters? The very geography of this sprawling plot works in this fashion, since each major figure—Lady Dedlock (twice, fatally the last time), Esther, Bucket, Snagsby—will make his/her way literally into the dreadful Tom-all-Alone's, as if a magnet pulled them there. The "outsiders" are drawn into the pit, but the pit also "moves on," itself. The stunning scene, late in the novel—after the news is out about Lady Dedlock's transgressions and death, when Chesney Wold is invaded by the Beckett-like Grandfather Smallweed, the odious Chadbands, and the crazed Mrs. Snagsby, each rounding out the "dirty laundry" plot right in the aristocrat's drawing room—seems to figure forth the storming of the citadel. There is a weird
translation
of slum and scum into the manor house, establishing a Dickensian parallel to Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," in which we see the death coded as a lethal affair of unstoppable breaking and entering, disease on the move, against which no fortress can hold.

But the most striking index of spreading sickness is to be found, I think, in the novel's most infamous event: the death of Krook, owner of the rag-and-bone shop, by Spontaneous Combustion. Dickens was understandably testy about this episode, claiming to have it on good medical evidence that such physiological events could take place, that someone actually could
explode.
It is worth remembering that Guppy and Weevle, busily spying on Krook to discover his secrets, had been encountering grease and soot all over the place, prior to the actual discovery of the body, even to the extent of Guppy's very fingers being covered by a

strange fluid. A moment later they enter Krook's room, search for him, espy a "crumpled black thing" upon the floor, and then realize with horror that this is Krook, spontaneously combusted. The "thick yellow liquor" coming from the dead man's body but now coating the surfaces of rooms seems a haunting and precise image of Dickensian flux, of the
traffic
that binds seemingly independent figures, of the "inside" wildly emancipated and turned viscous, on the move, indeed "moving on." Germs in air or carried by fleas defy perception, so Dickens has elected to materialize the issue rather hugely, to splatter this secret-filled man all over the environment, to coat others with his residue. Krook, illiterate keeper of secrets, has exploded, has been writ large (as it were), as a kind of oily somatic version of the blood that runs down palace walls in Blake, but brought here to the pitch of actual explosion.

This explosion is to be followed by others. At the end of the book we are told that the nightmarish legal suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, responsible for much of the suffering depicted in the novel, is at last to be settled. But when Esther reaches Chancery, she runs into an explosion of lawyers, "streaming out, looking flushed and hot, and bringing a quantity of bad air with them" (796). This purgative moment, akin to the lancing of a wound, is capped by the revelation that no money is left in the centuries-old suit, that the lawyers have gotten it all, and Richard Carstone, whose entire life has been cued to this outcome, must needs speak to the judge; but his words come out like this: "He was stopped by his mouth being full of blood . . ." (798). That mouth full of blood is of a piece with Krook's spontaneous combustion, in that each reveals the human body—its history, dreams, and passions—as fluids that build up, mount to a frenzy, and explode.

A mouth full of blood is also an arresting, frightening image of language itself: can it be incidental that disease in this book is insistently coded in lingual terms? that Charley's smallpox is preceded by her efforts at orthography, that the dying Jo begs Snagsby the law-writer to write his death "uncommon precious large" (594)? that Sir Leicester's agony (upon seeing his life wrecked, his wife departed) requires a slate

on which Mrs. Rouncewell translates the stricken aristocrat's gutteral sounds into letters and words? that Krook himself, the other "Lord Chancellor" of the book, has letters galore surrounding him but cannot
read
them? Is this not the perennial challenge of the writer: to bring to legibility all those hidden or obscure forces that bathe and coerce human life? to translate the teeming and tentacular and incestuous life of the city into a language as material and in-your-face as fog?

Spontaneous combustion is Charles Dickens's surreal image of evil and illicit connection turned somatic, then horribly emancipated from the precincts of the body to become pure, spreading flux, a kind of urban pus. Here would be the very script of infection which underwrites Dickens's saga of London transgressions and rot. He achieves a staggering coherence of these materials by insistently linking them to letters, slates, words, and utterance, yielding what we'd have to call a massive diagnosis, a printout, of the polis-in-plague. The wide-angle lens of the nineteenth-century novel captures the diseased antics of an entire culture, as if infection were at last recognized as the essential map of our hidden linkages with one another, providing a kind of luminous urban hypertext with its nodal points and intersections—sites where exchange occurs: exchange of power, money, sex, disease—all on show, inviting our inspection, not even requiring that we click on them.

THE PLAGUE COMMUNITY: ALBERT CAMUS

Camus's landmark novel of 1947,
The Plague,
is at once a modern remake of Defoe's book, a meditation on the inroads of evil, and an allegory of the Nazi occupation. Camus is overtly philosophical, determined to "open up" Defoe's close-to-the-vest narrative, so that the fuller ethical ramifications of a collective scourge can be unpacked. Where Defoe is drawn to the drama of quarantine, Camus is out to measure how such a dispensation—the Algerian city of Oran is essentially under siege, so that no one can enter and no one can leave—redefines crucial humanist notions such as love, memory, and solidarity.