Hello!
I am joining you live from my sofa, where I am eating tiger bread with nutella because I’m hormonal. I bring bad news: I still have not finished Bleak House. And yet! I have a lot of thoughts.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
Unsurprisingly, I have been reading Bleak House. We went over the whys and hows of it last week so I won’t bore you with it again, but I have had some productive thoughts about it that relate to my current research, so perhaps something brewing there.
What got me thinking about all of it together was encountering Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life for the first time. I read the first chapter and kind of skimmed the rest because it was evident that it didn’t exactly relate to my thesis and I was in a time crunch, but I’ll definitely revisit it. He talks about hauntology in relation to media like TV and music, especially from an audience perspective -- he analyses contemporary music since the early 2000s and comments that it is so reference-heavy that there is nothing new or revolutionary about it. He asks us to imagine the Arctic Monkeys being played on the radio in 1995, and how that audience would react to it. There would be no shock because it would sound so much like other music at the time that it would easily blend in, and they’d probably be disappointed that this is what music had ‘developed’ into.
I’ve always approached hauntology from a ‘futures that are created out of the past’ perspective and not a ‘possible futures that we can and can’t imagine’ perspective. I think reading Fisher has slightly altered that for me, and I now think of the present as being haunted by its possible futures, rather than a haunting of past things that goes on constructing itself. (I’m sorry if this is boring).
What caught my attention during this re-read of Bleak House is, hilariously, the illustrations, and how so many of them have a huge amount of people in them, and the others are either completely unpeopled or have just a hint of a person in them, as below (the first is ‘The family portraits at Mr Bayham Badger’s’ and the second is ‘A New Meaning in the Roman’).
The illustrations get gradually less crowded throughout the novel, which is a funny inversion of how many of the key chapters are structured; they start with an empty landscape -- Chancery in the morning, a poor district in the dead of the night, etc -- with Dickens reflecting on the makeup of the scene, and then he layers his characters into it. These scenes have so many possible futures: the court case that hangs over the novel could come to a close; a poor character could find shelter; secrets could be shared or kept. Like the text, these illustrations are haunted by the possibilities that Dickens could people them with, and yet everything in Bleak House is *so* inevitable, which is precisely what makes it, well, bleak.
Books on my radar
This week I also went to an event at my favourite book shop West Kirby Books, who had a little evening proof party. I maybe drank too much of the wine on offer and did not eat enough of the pizza to balance it out, but I had fun and picked up some exciting advance copies:
Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce. Published 23rd February by Fitzcarraldo.
In Ascension by Martin Macinnes. Published 2nd February by Atlantic Books.
A Girlhood: A letter to my transgender daughter by Carolyn Hays. Published 19th January by Picador.
The End of Nightwork by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce. Published 5th January by Granta.