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International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences Volume 5, Issue 1, (2021) 01-15 www.ij-ss.eu Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House Abdelhadi Benamar*, Abou Beker Belkaid University of Tlemcen, Department of language studies and literature, Chetouane, Algeria Suggested Citation: Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 Received December 15, 2020; revised February 10, 2021; accepted May 18, 2021. Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Huseyin Uzunboylu, Higher Education Planning, Supervision, Accreditation and Coordination Board, Cyprus. © 2020 Birlesik Dunya Yenilik Arastirma ve Yayincilik Merkezi. All rights reserved. Abstract Dickens could never get rid of his everlasting catching style even though the very novel has been said to be one of his maturities. The style is there with more repetition and mock. The latter is not obvious to readers; it is dramatically welded to the circumstances, bizarre, rare but not alien to commoners of the very epoch. One of the most stunning texts and range of words, wordiness and elements within contexts alluding, saying but revealing the hidden, forbidden and the taboo, is the introduction of his novel A Tale of the Two Cities. In the following excerpts taken from Bleak House, the introduction is dense and irregularly shaped in English: the very language of his and her majesty. Wherein the question poses itself and raises the discrepancies among form and content; a dichotomy that ought to be considered in conducting the investigation of style and stylistics upon the forthcoming texts. Keywords: Dickens, stylistics, narrative, techniques, Bleak House. * ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE: Abdelhadi Benamar, Abou Beker Belkaid University of Tlemcen, Department of language studies and literature, Chetouane, Algeria E-mail address: abdelhadi.benamar13@gmail.com
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 1. Introduction Dickens, as usual, draws the picture of settings to his readers, introduces the place and time, the mood, atmosphere and even the circumstances that should be sensed a bit further through the reading phenomenon. In fact, he sets the reader straightforwardly in London, in the very scene of the court, at the bottom of the pinching fog, where the Lord Chancellor should prevail. He never sets aside the element of time beside space; the November weather still and steady, stationary. A season that could convey but melancholy, misery, agony and connotes with mourning someone, something or some entity that the author emphasises and stresses the reader to distinguish. It is easy for Dickens to exaggerate when exaggeration is his very technique in the narrative. Style and fiction are intricately intertwined. The green meadow is not to refract the refreshing hope. Everything is muddy, foggy and the forces of nature are plotting against the sun, source of life and light; darkness overshadows the setting. 2. Semantic interpretations In dealing with the elements of nature, the author introduces dialogism, existentialism and the characters’ interactions among them and with the reader; he goes further to address the reader directly seeking for his point of view and it might be found indeed in most of his introductions. The surface of the town is covered with mud at a very large scale when the writer uses ‘earth’ instead of the ground; a description that tastes hints of archeology within the background of Dickens and polyvalent schemata or knowledge. ‘Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun’ (Dickens:03). The aforementioned understatement where smoke, which is actually lighter than air, is lowering down, going against its natural logical process. Dickens associates the adjective ‘soft’ to black; grammatically correct, but at the level of semantics, is somehow mesmerising and appealing for an otherwise interpretation than to say ‘black drizzle with big flakes of soot that could cover the sun’. There is no logical connection in a text written in English between such combinations of words. A cluster of adjectives that is not deemed incorrect at the grammar level; it is at the syntactic structure wherein there is no need to double the adjectives with non-linguistic connotation and logical word order or universal sentence patterns. The undertaken comparison with ‘as…as’, comparing thereby the soot to snow, the flakes of the former to those of the latter; opponents that read the same edge; mourning. The first meaning is to mourn the death of the sun; another one is implied and lets the reader interpret. This funeral might be the apocalyptic atmosphere of forthcoming destruction and dooming events. Things that could be with intertextuality by allusion to chaos implied in the book the first-A Tale of the Two Cities-where the period is described with the same impression and narrative techniques; repetition, litotes and juxtaposition of opposites. Notwithstanding, with wit, Dickens intrudes to point out his sense of reality and rational perception of matters. 3. Repetition In short, the prevailing stylistic device upon Dickensian style could be but ‘repetition’. The present excerpt offers the following: ‘mud, fog, crust upon crust’ are repeated for emphasis; ‘fog everywhere. Fog up the river; fog down the river […] fog on the Essex marshes […] fog on the Kentish heights […] fog creeping […] fog lying out […] fog creeping […] fog in the eyes and throats […] fog in the stem and the bowl. Fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his little shivering ‘prentice boy on deck’. (04); but others should be for mock as in ‘since the day broke (if this day ever broke)’ (04), ‘…the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city’ (04). 2
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 The mock seems to characterise the author’s style and, more precisely, his addresses in his narrative, mainly, within introductions where he plays the role of the foregrounding of readers, and at the beginning of parts, and chapters that might define the flow of events and action as they unfold. Any given word interacts with the adjacent ones to convey the meaning that should be meant to be transmitted; in other words, the context underlines the meaning of the word. In this way, Malinowski in Widdowson (2004, pp. 36–37) raises the notion of context, and ‘associates this context-dependent functional use of language with spoken interaction…’. He adds that ‘the meaning of any single word is to a very high degree dependent on its context’ (Malinowski, 1923, p. 306) (37). He ascertains that ‘this also applies to a modern civilized language’, but ‘we are prevented from seeing it because of the priority accorded to writing’ (idem). If the word ‘fog’, as an example, is closely examined according to every context; fog is everywhere, London is known to be foggy in such moments of the year and it is precisely ‘implacable November’ and it is normally ‘the fog’ as an element of the weather. In the context of the river, up or down; it could be explained in terms of weather or as what is unclear and blurred in both sides of Thames River. ‘fog’ is transported in another context wherein it is personified into an entity that lies out and creeps; an evil that dwells within the eyes and throats of prisoners; an unseen devil that pinches the toes of the boy who serves as an apprentice and referred to as ‘ “prentice”, to show belittling of children at work and abuse where they could not reach even the appellation of apprentice; shame on the employer who pushes them behind the limits; then ‘fog’ in this particular context is that evil. The word is conveying different meanings according to geographical standpoints if so to speak. So, according to Malinowski (1923), the context-dependent functional use of language is fulfilled with regard to spoken language. In this particular literary text written by Dickens, the words are spoken and sentences are utterances. The use of some stylistic devices and some other narrative techniques in a specific text shifts the perception of whether the words are written or spoken. In this fashion, ‘form and content’ shall be characterised at once. Here, the style is defined as a choice since it is defined by Simpson (2004) as ‘an important marker of style’. The repetition is, therefore, the latter which eventually associates Halliday’s (1994) conception of the ‘mental picture of reality’ (106). In this vein, Dickens, as previously mentioned, put forward the foreground which, in the first place, let the reader fulfil through a psychological and mental interaction with the word and phrases that do not stop keep repeating themselves. This technique is grammatically realised through a process of transitivity which, by itself, refracts the experience in dispensing the language elements and exponents. Thus, the meaning is encoded within the process itself. The semantic of the wordiness is realised through phrases such as in the example of ‘fog’; everywhere to put the reader within the narrative and, thereafter, shatter the meaning according to the context. Dickens in other parts of the text, and still the bargaining is about meaning. Should any figurative language feature set aside by virtue of the undertaken stylistic endeavour. The writer, then, intertwines the mental process with the material one transgressing therewith to the behavioural while using abstractions draw the very picture of initial and main settings, deemed to be very important to understand in order to keep up with the shift forth and back of the element of time and space as well. It should be odd to think or consider the ‘space’ as one of the undermining factors that build up the narrative in a Dickensian fashion. However, for the analysis of style, such components are key factors to profile what should be. Chapter one is loaded with what is called elements of narratives; in other words, the governing forces that display the action within the fiction. Space is referred to through the elements of nature viscosity, the density of the air, that is, the physical properties of these elements. Juxtaposing matters is a fashion acknowledged to Dickens when he presents ‘since the day broke (if this day ever broke)’ (04) the period for example; encompassing the mock and juxtaposition; it should 3
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 also be recognised as a pun. But since any figurative characterisation has been set aside for the sake of narrowing the scope on the style and stylistics, ‘day’ is used twice within the same fragment of text. Grammatically speaking, within a prepositional phrase and then in a dependent clause of condition; ‘the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city’ (04), within this part of the sentence, adjectives like great and dirty do not come together in the same raw unless for the reason of violations of linguistic connotations so as to taste, otherwise, rather than to be a regular text and not literary. The repetition is also found at the morphological level keeping the same root for an eye-catching impression and performing therewith comparison in the superlative form as is often the case for the writer. Should it be evident if the very phrases of the excerpt from ‘the Period’ (A Tale of the Two Cities) are characterised beside the following one. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are the muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery (04). In this very passage, lies the key element of this chapter the ‘Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery’ is cited at the very beginning of chapter one as an introductory key component and, then, in pages four and seven in raw, and this regardless to the occurrence of ‘Lord High Chancellor’ and ‘Court of Chancery’ separately, that is, in other spots languishing the text for the purpose of setting up of the ‘foregrounding’ (Verdonk, 2002). It is a call upon the reader’s memory and a manner to help understand the complexity of Dickensian fiction. The chapter seems to mirror what was appearing at the beginning as settings, characters, though shallowly presented as a large unwillingly making up of the atmosphere that should prevail on such narratives. The Lord sits at the beginning and the old lady with her documents appears on the threshold, and they come all together to wind up and conclude the first chapter entitled ‘In Chancery’. Notwithstanding that the chief element mostly cited and repeated is ‘fog’; a destitution of nature behaviourism of fresh air, it has rather become an entity or monad to dwell within the reader’s mind and within a very court of law; looking for a cousin; everyone looks for that specific cousin; ‘and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him’ (08). Everyone vanishes indeed; the Lord does; and fog languishes the atmosphere wherein the dying sun could but exasperate and stare at the dooming fog devouring everything. The adjectives raw, dense and muddy are grammatically transformed into the rawest, densest and muddiest, respectively. Practicing a superlative impression within the description might render it easy to be memorised for the reader and it would be easy to recall. This very end of chapter 1 seems to pave the way to chapter 2; a mood of mystery, mysticism and supernatural that is not the general die of the narrative, for it is not meant to reflect a qualitative undermining. Concerning the model of transitivity offered by Simpson (2004), there should be a major relationship between the physical existence, a world of abstract relations and consciousness. The latter is very important. 4. Utterances for physical existence Elements of nature are highlighted at the very beginning of chapter one earth, mud, sun, fog, animals like dogs, and others alike but they seem to be horses. An apocalyptic threshold standing for the physical setting of a specific scene, be it the main one or any other, is a standing point to relate the forthcoming action and event to the very reality of London court where fog controls everything and even everyone. The shift of style is sensed within the existential procedure; the use of ‘dummy subjects’ is not employed in the very introduction, contrary to what has been deployed within the 4
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 beginning of the novel ‘book the first’, ‘the period’; ‘it was the best. It was the worst…’. In this excerpt, the passive is prevailing and subject ’it’ as in the example provided by Simpson ‘Daniel was nipped’ and ‘there was a nip’. It is believed that the present novel was produced in the maturity of Dickens; the transitivity is, thereby, accomplished through a magnificent, precise but not concise textual configuration and presentation. The text is complicated, complex and violating grammatical forms. However, the style seems to keep the same flow; long sentences, repeated items and intertextuality either by allusion or by reference for the sake of setting the mood and the atmosphere, for it is done so as not to bewilder the reader by to mark and stress the path and the setting up of the guide for the narrative fiction; the more the reader dives into the story; the more skilful he becomes in terms of literary knowledge and societal foregrounding. The reading process proceeds in the action, on and within interruptions; of short or long term. 5. Utterances for world of abstract relations This physical undermining undertaken and galvanised by the writer ensures the shift from the physical to the psychological impalpable supposed interaction and drawn bridge between reader and word. The target ground is the meaning according to Iser (1974). Dickens shows the relations among abstractions (forces of nature) set in the threshold. Thus, what could relate animals, mud and fog to pedestrians, prisoners and their inner impressions on life, their deeds, sorrows, regrets and prospective in their existence in London? The allusions in the style moved from a range of figurative and aesthetics to intertextuality by allusion; if Dickens meant by the two cities and the two crowns, France and England though obliquely expressed; in this narrative, he explicitly devoured the shy style, he tackled matters by reference and settings; an aware reader would be set on the track from the beginning. In short, as Dickens became more mature, he wrote straightforwardly to the point. By this procedure, he widened the audience within the era and foresaw who would read him, then he could be aware of his readership; a projection onto a forthcoming audience in the early mentioned processes. 6. Expressions for consciousness This branch of transitivity should be traced back to the exploration of ‘the inner workings of consciousness’ (Daigle, 2010, p. 18) wherein Sartre wrote, The Transcendence of the Ego in the light of Phenomenology originating in the works and thought conceptions of Edmund Husserl. Daigle characterises his philosophy as ‘quite complex’ (idem) and influencing the forthcoming thinkers. Dickens in the vein stood before this time and dealt with phenomenology by setting a breach between ‘the external world’ and ‘consciousness’ long prior to the institutionalisation of such thoughts and doctrines by thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and others stated in Daigle in this order. Dickens’s productions might have served as investigating grounds for such thinkers, literary ones, Sartre’s literary characters, Husserl in investigating phenomenology before him and others before that. According to Daigle (2010), the notion of ‘cogito, ergo, sum’ ‘I think therefore I exist’, the existence plays a crucial if not an essential one in the Dickensian narrative; moving deep inside the fiction and having a realistic literary foreground. What is really important, therefore, is the intertwining of existence and consciousness resulting in ‘space’ by means of the bracketing off or the ‘epoche’. In the same fashion, Daigle assumes that, ‘if consciousness is always conscious of something, then when one takes away the world, one is left with a pure conscious life that is antecedent to the natural being of the world (idem). She adds, it is the method by which one suspends one’s judgments about the natural world in order to access things as 5
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 they really are. When one is conscious of something i.e., of the world, one finds intentionality. Using bracketing, Husserl was trying to uncover the nature of pure consciousness, i.e., pure intentionality (idem). This means that the author expects or frames the reader who, in his turn, produces judgments around the set elements which are separate and related at the same time in space, and mutually construct an awareness that should be read as producing thereby a dialogue; not one of the characters but the one that is meant to be in relativity, in Bakhtin’s (1984) terms. More than that, the bracketing off enhances and stimulates the above explanation of the happening. As is often the case for Dickens austere leading narrative, it is rather intentional to do so, viewed from a critic angle and, therefore, intentional wherein the very concept definition is expressed by Daigle (2010) as, ‘intentionality is the fundamental property of consciousness’ (idem.) and ascertains that, ‘Husserl saw that intentionality is a movement by which consciousness moves out of itself, however. It throws itself out into the world by being conscious of something’ (idem). This means that the writer intentionally moved outside the setting to set the readership watch from a vantage point of his and only he could control all over the narrative. In other words, ‘Stream of experiences and consciousness as a point of discussion within the narrative’ (idem); where lies the discussion rises the dialogue and dialogism. 7. The Onegin model The above analysis might lead to think of it as a phenomenon in the literary field of criticism and view of things and leaves as they unfold. More than that, ‘For Husserl, phenomenology is the science of essential being. By “bracketing off” certain things from consciousness, he hoped he arrived at the essence of things’ (19), in the same fashion; Dickens displayed the phenomenology of the ‘bracketing off’ spontaneously or intentionally in his narrative. If referring to his own biography production, he could have intentionally separated his settings as they were meant to be in the unfolding of the action and events from the elements of nature in chapter one rehearsing, hereby, for the creation or consideration of space; this is what it is also characterised by Bakhtin (1984) in the dialogic imagination as an ‘Onegin’, a novel said by Belinsky (1923) to be ‘an Encyclopedia of Russian life’. In fact, Holquist and Emerson (1986, p. 38), in this very investigation, present the very term as ‘a dialogized system made up of the images of languages, styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language’. Everything is centripetalising around what language might do. They add that, ‘the novel by contrast dramatizes the gaps that always exist between what is told and the telling of it, constantly experimenting with social, discursive and narrative asymmetries (the formal teratology that led Henry James to call them “fluid puddings”’(idem). Here, the point of the fluidity of deals and literary operations shall be characterised at most mostly by virtue of the form or genre taken in this spot which is the novel. Originally, the term or concept of the Onegin had been put forward by Pushkin (1831) himself, and depicted and shall be so in the narrative of Dickens. It is stated in the Penguin Dictionary of literary terms (1977) that, ‘Onegin stanza is the stanza invented by Alexander Pushkin for his verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1830). Modelled on the sonner but significantly deviating from any of the standard forms, it consists of fourteen iambic tetrameters rhyming ababccddeffegg. The a, c and e rhymes are disyllabic and provide the poet with opportunities for bathos and irony in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan’ (613). In fact, what has been deemed by Bakhtin to be Onegin in the narrative has been depicted in the present one. Within the lines and the voice of the narrator, there lies the Onegin style as stated by Belinsky (1923). The Dickensian style could no longer be stratified as mere fiction prose, dragging it 6
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 therewith to poetics which explain the difficulty the readers encounter to grasp or follow the flow of the events and conjuring of characters as the action unfolds. 8. Stylistic deviations It is observed that there is a spontaneous production of text in Dickens wherein the prescriptive approach might not be discarded for any reason or so. In the first chapters; Everything was strange – the stranger from its being night in the daytime, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw and cold –that I read the words in the newspaper without knowing what they meant and found myself reading the same words repeatedly. As it was of no use going on that way, I put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and I looked at the room which was half-unlighted, and at the shabby dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at the bookcase full of the most inexpressive looking books that ever had anything to say for themselves. Then I went on thinking, thinking, thinking; and the fire went on burning, burning, burning, and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers-until the young gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair; for 2 hours (26) There are surely some deviations in either case; if the text had been kept in its original form, that is, prose in lines, and there should be deviations in what it had to be set with in order to sustain the Onegin perspective depicted in the narrative, russified but had as origin the book. The following verses shall enlighten the assumption further to conclude; Everything was strange- the stranger from its being night in the day time, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw and cold- that I read the words in the newspaper without knowing what they meant, and found myself reading the same words repeatedly. As it was of no use going on that way, I put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and I looked at the room which was half-unlighted, and at the shabby dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at the bookcase full of the most inexpressive looking books that ever had anything to say for themselves. Then I went on thinking, thinking, thinking; and the fire went on burning, burning, burning, and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers- until the young gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair; for 2 hours (26). 7
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 The passage is severed into verses according to the punctuation offered by the author and the dense figurative language and repeated items that should provide a quite violated rhyme in fiction prose. This perhaps should be the least convincing excerpt in the narrative to provide the alibi to an Onegin Bakhtinian perspective but shall unveil an utmost talent in the use of the English language by the author. It should also be contrasted with the following ‘exceptional dazzling translation by Sir Charles Johnston of Eugene Onegin (tgZil and Vikram Seth’s Californian verse-novel, The Golden Gate (1986). The opening stanza of the latter provides a good example’(613). It is stated in the same row and flows that. ‘Seth’s poem is an extraordinary tour-de-force. It has the plot of an ordinary modern novel, which it tells in 590 of these stanzas. A wide range of tone and mood is achieved: elegiac, comic, satirical and parodic. Even the acknowledgements and the biographical note about the author are in the Onegin form’ (idem). These stanzas shall testify of what has been advanced; Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon A time, say, circa r98o, There lived a man. His name was John. Successful in his field though only Twenty-six, respected, lonely, One evening as he walked across Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss Of a red frisbee almost brained him. He thoughg 'If I died, who'd be sad? rUfho'd weep? Sfiho'd gloat?'Who would be glad? \UTould anybody? ‘As it pained him, He turned from this dispiriting theme To ruminations less extreme 9. The reader at challenge The above stanzas are going to suffer a change into lines in prose in order to be contrasted with the former excerpt from Bleak House and the result is as follows: Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon A time, say, circa 1980, there lived a man. His name was John, successful in his field though only 26, respected, lonely. One evening as he walked across Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss of a red frisbee almost brained him. He thought 'If I died, who'd be sad? Who’d weep? Sfiho'd gloat?'Who would be glad? Would anybody?'As it pained him, He turned from this dispiriting theme to ruminations less extreme. An unaware reader, if asked to read the above passage, he would think that it is prose, and might link it with that of Dickens if sustained with the introduction of A Tale of the Two Cities or the one of BH, ‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather’. (BH 03) they are as one text as the reader in question would think; violations in syntax, grammar and punctuation; things that are barely allowed in poetry, then the style 8
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 turns to poetics rather than prose and it transcends the confines of the definition of literary language. More than that, they add that. The Onegin stanza has been described as constituting a ‘little chapter’, in which the first quatrain introduces the main idea, the second and third develop it and the couplet epigrammatically sums it up. It has been imitated in several languages, but English, with its poverty of rhyme, has mostly proved resistant to its tightness. Notwithstanding that, it should be noted that Dickens could succeed in the task because most of his introductions in chapters or books are modeled accordingly to the above-studied model of Onegin which gave strength to the narrative and consistency, at the same time, making it linguist rather than a novelist. 10. Realism and fluidity Dialogism develops further in the narrative of Dickens; the epoche, intentionality, space, fluidity. In other words, the extraction of the consciousness out of itself results in the creation of space between what has been said by the author in the very novel at points where settings are displayed and what should be told. This appears through the investigation that points out that fluidity is prescriptive in Gogol’s terms according to Fanger (2004), and the setting is realistic as the doctrine is realism. Fanger (2004) wrote, in his The Creation of Gogol that Gogol’s had been caught reading Dickens in the university garden. Fluidity as pointed out by Henry James, the pioneer of the psychological novel, seems to range Dickens and Gogol in the same rank; for Gogol satirises his fiction and characters; Dickens through his gentle and shy shadow overpowered and generated the mock, satire without being too fluid. In fact, he prescribed his realism and he has been previously been analysed under the scrutiny of both the beginning and end of chapter 1 where he clusters as he starts. In the same vein, the psychological aspect rises and imposes itself in the narratives of Dickens. In the second chapter as a series of capitalisation of words and letters within; certainly, to draw the reader’s attention to what is going to be said afterwards. This is what is usually deemed, ‘to attract the reader’s attention’ in any common literary analysis. But, if the following sentence is considered ‘it is not so unlike the Court of Chancery’ (Dickens 08) followed by ‘that we may pass from one scene to the other’ (idem); a mere conversation between reader and writer, an address that has as a sole audience the readership to say instead ‘it is like the court of Chancery’. The writer splits the chapters playing on words. The previous is not different from what is coming. The author is intrusive in the very case. He stresses his prescriptive endeavour and shows that he would never surrender to the facts and being ‘taken over’ by his own characters. He masters his fiction and controls his narrative under the shallow veil of fluidity and mock supposedly said to be of idiosyncratic belonging origin. ‘Rip Van Winkles’ but not ‘Rip Van Winkle’, Washington Irving ‘s great and weird imagination, , a reference which is a standpoint of comparison and contrast with ‘the Court of Chancery’ and ‘the world of fashion’; beauties hat sleep hundreds of years; Knights with ‘K’ within a regular sentence without any grammatical alibi or in terms of punctuation and standard regulations, violates and trespasses, but in terms of literary fertility, the comparison within is not of austere and tacit extension but shall be explored further and farther. ‘Rip Van Winkles’ written with a plural form ending is the very nest and cradle of the supernatural, bizarre, devilish, escapist and what so ever qualifies it to be transcending the sphere of realism fraught with other than rational and obvious; the technique of bringing down realism as persuasive, committing doctrine with completely other genres of literature; making a breach in the novel tradition and discussing the male pregnancy in a world of patriarchs. 9
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 11. Text and context In the second chapter, second paragraph, the author uses the bracketing off or epoche to displace the world within which there should happen what comes next in further text, from other worlds. In fact, he creates the space in time, a parallel of worlds one of which is soft, ‘wrapped up in expensive cotton and fine wool’; evil at the same time characterising, thereby, a morass sphere where characters shall be displayed. Dickens introduces the first character in the afore-described separated world; giving some details; highlighting herewith her social class that might be mocking her behaviour and belonging or, even, her background. The repetition of the word ‘fashionable’ and its root ‘fashion’ sustains that Dickens is mocking lady Dedlock; the very name that Nabokov in his lectures, reads as a dead not functioning lock. The manner the author satirises everything leads to a Gogolian fluidity but with restraint and more manners to fit the gentleman he is. More than that, every single character has significance in the eyes and understanding of the Victorian audience. Dickens named his characters on purpose as pointed out by Watkin (2009), but what is mostly controversial is that the modern reader cannot handle or understand the meaning of the names of characters. Yet, the novel is shaped accordingly to an ‘onomasticon’ ‘A Greek term for a book of names or a vocabulary. Formerly used sometimes for lexicon and dictionary’(614), and the technique employed in most of the writer’s narratives and fiction prose should be the ‘onomastics. The study of names and naming practice, especially of the patterns and principles adopted by writers in the selection of proper names; hence “onomastic”, “of names”’, and more likely to be labelled the onomastics of sounds. 12. Onomatopoeia In this way, the very representation of nature is displayed in prose fiction according to ‘onomatopoeia (Gk ‘name-making’). The formation and use of words to imitate sounds. For example: dong, oaclele, moo, pop, atbizz, uboosb, zoorn. It is a figure of speech in which the sound reflects the’ (idem). In the novel, the author represents most of natural manifestations in the manner, for instance; ‘Chapter VII The Ghost’s Walk While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling–drip, drip, drip–by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace- pavement, the Ghost’s Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again (72). The representation of sounds of rain, and rain connotes with bad and apprehension of the worst at the same time and association of the title of the chapter and the presentation of Esther in two different states that are not close but associated in the description of the very psychological pathology of sleepwalkers or rather a diagnosis of her instability. The same state is transferred to the very end of the book in the following; ‘It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost’s Walk, on the stone floor below’ (6-). He also says, ‘The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall– drip, drip, drip–upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time the Ghost’s Walk, all night’ (2-). 10
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 He went on in his description of Lady Deadlock’s home ‘place’ to be a boring, sad and dull to live in ‘dreary’. The name spouses the surrounding. Additionally, the description as it unfolds is detached and pasted upon the description of nature; a dialogue of falling rains that speaks in every single drop; sounds of drops; muddy streets said to be sad and quagmire, devilish dead thoughts and appreciations that smell dead corpses of her rotten and decomposed ancestors. 13. Characters and meaning The recurrence of the author’s childhood within the fiction; chimneys, a boy Oliver Twist, misery and oppression; psychology, experience and consciousness prevail the style. The very character of Lady Dedlock seems to refract the world that was supposed to be wrapped up ‘in jeweller’s cotton and fine wool’ (BH 08). It is through the eyes and perception of Lady Dedlock that Dickens describes the surrounding or the ground where fiction fertilises; or it might be the fertiliser. In other words, his character shall play the role of a reflector of fiction, be it a minor character flat or a round one. This leads to thinking about a minor but true and genuine character in history, a personage that is ‘recambolesque’; Rougeville de France and Normandy deemed also to be the reflector of fiction, in Simpson’s terms, since he influenced and happened to be the source inspiration of Alexander Dumas in his fiction and started, thereafter, to reveal major characters through flat ones. Rougeville de Marie Antoinette, a character that few historians gave importance, stands to reflect untold stories of history. (Ref) It has also been stated by Forster (1974) that some flat characters are said to be of great omnipotence in the construction of the action in general. It might also be recurring in the process of deconstruction in the very sense. Flat characters embody a single idea or trait. An example is Mrs. Micawber in Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–50) whose constant cry of ‘I will never desert Mr. Micawber’ encapsulates her essence. Forster (1974) does not dismiss flat characters, partly because their constancy answers our need for permanence in art, but mostly because a good novel requires their presence as much as it does round ones (Bradshaw, 229). This means that Lady Dedlock is a crucial character and as important as Esther’s, and roundness or flatness are not important, and the creation of a great number of characters in this narrative is done on purpose so that each flat character in each plot or subplot is the crystal stone knitting the others together and to the others after that in a form of network. And, therefore, the dialogue should happen among these two parallel characters in terms of space and time, mother and daughter, flat and round. When Dickens wants to reflect and project something else through Lad Dedlock, he made her leave this awkward place of hers and wander about, to the calamities of nature, weather, mud even to animals in saying ‘has left it to the rain and the crows, and the rabbits, ad thee deer, and the partridges and pheasants’ (09). The coordinating conjunction ‘and’ is repeated over and over instead of listing, which is the right way to say it, but he did it on purpose to sustain his mocking narrative technique, then it should be written as follows, ‘has left it to the rain, the crows, the rabbits, the deer, the partridges and pheasants’. 14. Reference as a speech act Reference in Bleak House stands as a hallmark in the narrative; every now and then, there occurs a reference of a famous person in history such as Alexander in a genuine situation that, he, at a certain point in his quest for the world, experienced bitterly. A literature reference ‘Rip Van Winkle’ with a plural inflection; then who does not know the Rip Van Winkle? But with this distortion it stands for the talent of Dickens to use language and grammar and all distortion is a technique. 11
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 15. Expressions of reference The reference in literature is most of the time about intertextuality. It is also a speech act according to what Searle (1969) advances. He posits that, ‘Referring expressions point to particular things; they answer the questions “who?” “What?” and “which?”. It is by their function, not always by their surface grammatical form ir their manner of performing their function, that referring expressions are to be known’ (27). For ‘Alexander’ as a reference, Dickens puts it inside a wordiness that gives further detail when details are said to be the original genius of the very author (Miller in Jordan, 2006). ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ is also a reference, belonging to the narrative, does not unveil any intertextuality but inner intertextuality to refer to the business of the brothers Jarndyce. ‘How Alexander wept’ expression of reference describing the state of the person in question. Most of references that are depicted in the Bleak House ‘I’ narrative are definite rather than indefinite; referential than predicative. The referential utterances are universals in this case, expressions like ‘Everest’ (Searle, 1969, p. 27). Other referential according to Searle, ‘A man came’ and ‘John is a man’, ‘a man’ is an indefinite utterance occurring the first one referential, and the second is rather predicative’ (idem). The utterance, in this case, is a ‘referring expression’ not to say ‘an expression that refers to’ (ibid), but the notion of utterance is in terms of spoken words not the words found in the text. Therefore, for Searle (1969), reference is a speech act that implies talk to itself, oneself, others; in short, a dialogue; the dialogue author-reader, narrator-reader or character to character. Alexander should stand for an irrelevant sentence within the same paragraph but, in fact, it is an address or an appeal to a specific reader as if the lines, words and phrases are going to interact with the reader and there should be speech acts rather than very words. 16. Deep structure in sentences If the sentence patterns in English are considered in the way of surface, deep structure, there should be but ‘proper names, noun phrases beginning with the definite article or a possessive pronoun or nouns and followed by a singular noun, and pronouns’ (Searle, 1969) (28). Speech acts for Searle (1969) are bound to the complex range that surface grammar can offer (29). However, this cannot be taken into account when dealing with a literary text far from the boundaries and confines that hedge the language to expand. The factor of context shall also stress the deep structure of the same pattern of correct grammatical items. Literary is ‘human experience’ for James (1930); in other words, ‘consciousness should be raised in this very spot; Husserl’s intentionality which is derived from consciousness and it’s moving out of it and experiences which is also the chief constituent of a written set of utterances or speech acts. James posits that, ‘human consciousness is selective, it concentrates on some things and ignores others’ (James in McGreal, 1992, p. 402). He adds that, ‘one cannot prove finally whether human action is free or determined, but there are some great reasons, especially moral ones, for believing that human action involves freedom’ (idem). Dickens found in literature the freedom, intentionality to criticise the society he lived in and those of readers. With wit and conceit, he created those limitless number of characters in Bleak House. Onegin aspect in BH, according to what Bakhtin (1984) qualifies it to be ‘then I went on thinking, thinking, thinking and the fine went on, burning, burning, burning, and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there were snuffers’ (26). Africa, Niger are also references tackled by the author in the following naming it, thereby, The African project ‘we hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred 12
Benamar, A. (2021). Investigating style and narrative techniques in Dickens’ Bleak House. International Journal of New Trends in Social Sciences. 5(1), 01–15 https://doi.org/10.18844/ijntss.v5i1.5498 healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrio Boola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger’ (34); by this, he explicitly denunciated the so-called mission of civilisation of the British enterprise over peoples of the world. 17. Conclusion This paper presents to be account about style and stylistics wherein different approaches are tackled. It should stand as an analytic tool for upcoming research; for all aspects of style are going to be raised to fulfil the basic and primary problematic. Added to this, the different stylistic devices and techniques should be explained and illustrated through the literary text substance. Furthermore, the theoretical breach and parcels have been identified in terms of syntactic structures and grammatical nuances that usually occur in narratives. The fiction prose identification is more described at the cognitive level considering thereby all levels of analysis. References Allen, W. (1954). The English Novel: from Pilgrim’s progress to sons and lovers. London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd. Allan, R. J. & Buijs, M. (Ed.). (2007). The language of literature: linguistic approaches to classical texts. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: four essays (Edit. By M. Holquist, C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics (Edit by C. Emerson, Trans). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres & other late essays (W. McGee, Trans, Edit by C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin, TX: Texas University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Liapunov & M. Holquist, Trans). Austin, TX: Texas University Press. Beale, W. H., Meyers, K. & White, L. L. (1982). Stylistic options: the sentence and the paragraph. Northbrook, IL: Foresman and Company. Beard, A. (2003). The language of literature. London, UK: Routledge. Boulton, M. (1974). The anatomy of the novel. London, UK: Routledge & Keagan Paul Ltd. Bradford, R. (1994). Roman Jakobson: life, language, art. London, UK: Routledge. Bradford, R. (1997). Stylistics. London, UK: Routledge. Brandist, C., David, S. & Galin, T. (2004). The Bakhtin circle: in the master’s absence. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Brewer, E. C. (2001). Dictionary of phrase and fable. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Edition Limited. Budick, S. & Iser, W. (1996). The translatability of cultures: figurations of the space between. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Buss, A. E. (2003). The Russian-orthodox tradition and modernity (W. J. Hanegraaff, Trans). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Carter, R. & Simpson, P. (Ed.). (1995). Language discourse and literature: an introductory reader in discourse stylistics. London, UK: Routledge. Chambers, J. K. & Trudgill, P. (2004). Cambridge textbooks in linguistics: dialectology. Oxford, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cornwell, N. (Ed.). (2001). The Routledge companion to Russian literature. London, UK: Routledge. Cutting, G. The Cambridge companion to foucault. Oxford, UK: Cambridge University Press. Daigle, C. (2010). Jean-Paul Sartre. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Dentith, S. (1995). Bakhtinian thought: an introductory reader. London, UK: Routledge. 13
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