Third Instar

Here’s a relevant excerpt from an informal set of writings done for a seminar on Dickens.

I’ve decided that the thing to do with these pages is try to make them work for me. To that end I’ll proceed through my planned summer reading and do what I can to apply that to Dickens (and vice versa).

So I’ll begin where my reading begins: Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump. I haven’t actually cracked into this book yet, but it is one of those inescapable works about which you know a great deal before you pick it up. Everyone uses it. The concept I’m interested in presently is “virtual witnessing.” Shapin and Schaffer elaborate this “literary technology” as it was developed in the work and conversations between Boyle and Hobbes over the development of the air-pump. “The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication. Through virtual witnessing the multiplication of witnesses could be, in principle, unlimited. It was therefore the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact.” [http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/VirtualWitnessDiscussion/TheVirtualWitness.html] The implications for non-scientific literature are many, including the construction of reliable narrators, epistemological questions of fact and the importance of truth, and so on.

I immediately begin to think of Sketches by Boz here. To begin with, what is Dickens’s initial reason for cataloging his city? What does the “sketch” do and is it anything like virtual witnessing? I turned to David Seed’s article “Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects in Dickens’s London Sketches.” Seed quotes Carol Bernstein: “the urban sketch is at once the locus of memory and the attempt to fix objects and events in the memory” (157). Seed goes on to say “Dickens resituated exploration nearer to the reader’s familiar territory and engaged in a kind of local tourism that ironically implies both the proximity to the reader of the places visited and the unfamiliarity of those places” (157). It seems to me that the Sketches’ project, then, is quite anthropological. Dickens’s artistic defamiliarization is in part a product of a need for objectivity. To highlight the reader’s “unfamiliarity” the sketch mimics the practices of virtual witnessing. The writing witness must be modest and disinterested if he or she is to be believed by the virtual witness. This means language that posits and suggests but does not declare or command. More from Seed: “the sketch implies a distinction between the writer and the human figures he describes.” Seed quotes Audrey Jaffe: Organization and identity are external matters; characters are caught within structures the cannot perceive from outside” (156). We see in the sketch a reflective and thoughtful observer who is careful never to get so close to his subjects as to blur their division (and thereby blur accurate perception).

Furthermore, factual and scientific knowledge after Boyle is never the product of a single mind, but is instead socially constructed and agreed upon. (This is not to say that facts do not have an identifiable point of origin. Rather it is to say that ideas do not become facts until the social group voluntarily agrees to them (after virtual witnessing or actual replication of experiment/observation.)) Along this line it is certainly noteworthy that Dickens uses “we” in place of “I” throughout Sketches, and also that he generally provides the reader with the specifics of his route through the city, as Seed observes, making the trip repeatable by the reader (158). The present tense of all of ‘our’ observations places us always at the moment of discovery, standing alongside the witness as he writes. The sketch serves the literate populace, allowing them to ’see’ all of London without actually visiting the sites documented. Dickens would fail to connect with his audience if his rhetoric were built purely on Aristotelian pathos or epideictic prose. Instead he is our friendly guide, a Virgil clinical enough to be believed but comical enough to be liked.

Another interesting item in Seed:

Dickens [writing in The Uncommercial Traveller] predicts the impossibility of future ages being able to infer the grotesque contradictions within Victorian society: “If this mud could petrify at this moment, and could lie here concealed for ten thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our successors on the earth could . . . deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected children in the streets of its capital city. (162)

Seed then points out that this is an interesting use of palaeontology, a use of “Victorian science against its own age,” (163) which nicely contrasts the modern with the savage. To accurately perceive his surroundings one has to imagine reporting to a virtual witness ten thousand years outside of those surroundings, to think about what details it would be necessary for the firsthand witness to record in order to best communicate an environment. Dickens’s work fills the gap between the petrified mud and the future student of history.