Data di Pubblicazione:
2017
Citazione:
Describing Poverty : the Complexity of Social Sciences in Dickens's Bleak House / A. Vescovi. ((Intervento presentato al 28. convegno AIA Conference tenutosi a Pisa nel 2017.
Abstract:
According to a long-established convention, literary language is considered a discourse within
the multiple discourses in a given national language, or a parole, within the more general
langue. In fact, there are cases when the language of the novel, thanks to its polyphonic
characteristics, strives to become more comprehensive and certainly more complex than the
language of science, or the scientific discourse. A case in point is the social discourse in
Dickens’s novels, which expands the coeval social sciences in ways unpredictable by
philosophers, social scientists, and politicians. Most Victorian middle-class gentlefolks were
aware that a large part of the population lived below the poverty line. Yet they had only a
partial knowledge of the issue, based either on partial sights (e.g. walking by St Giles in
London) or on statistics and descriptions.
When Dickens takes up the subject of poverty, which he does often enough in his oeuvre,
he adds layers of complexity to the issue in two basic ways. First, he adds an imaginative and
emotional element, so that readers may visualize what it means to be destitute and how it may
feel. The second way in which Dickens adds knowledge to the concept of poverty is by
linking economic straits to other four related, but possibly distinct brands of poverty – in
knowledge, in spiritual life, in emotional life, in health. As early as in Christmas Carol, the
Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge how it feels to be poor, by hinting at the death of
Tiny Tim. However, the Ghost (Dickens in fact) keeps his most striking insight for the end of
the visit: immediately before his departure two ugly, repulsive children trouble the sight of
Scrooge. The Ghost explains that they are siblings: Ignorance and Want, the children of Man.
The Ghost admonishes Scrooge to beware of them both, but especially of Ignorance, a demon
that was possibly also looming over the middle class.
Noticeably mere economic poverty is not so scary to the former blacking factory boy as the
poverty that comes with cultural poverty. The author of the Carol went well out of his way to
include these two allegorical figures, which are often absent from film and stage versions, and
sometimes also from translations of the Carol, as, indeed, they are a bit eccentric in the
Christmas tale. Dickens certainly saw that they were not consistent with the rest of the book,
so he must have considered them an important insight. In fact a kind of complexity, since the
two are hardly ever perceived as twins in the Victorian social sciences, but rather as cause or
effect of the other. According to Victorian social science one should be “cured” with work
and the other one with schooling (eventually to be paid for by hard work).
One can see at work a partition that Bruno Latour has described as a condition of
modernity. According to Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), modernity is connected with
the project of “partitioning” nature and culture, a process that took place sometime in the
nineteenth century. Nature became the province of science, whereas culture is the province of
humanities. To the modern man, only science can say anything true and practical, whereas
literature can entertain him and uplift his spirit. As opposed to say physics, mathematics was
simplifying social sciences by reducing it to statistics – a move satirized in Hard Times.
In 1846-47 Dickens reflects upon poverty in connection with the Urania Cottage project,
an asylum where former prostitutes can repent, learn the basics of housekeeping and then go
to Australia to start a new life as married women. Clearly Dickens understood that poverty is
much more than a figure below the standard income. He understood that causes for po
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Keywords:
Dickens; Complexity; Bleak House
Elenco autori:
A. Vescovi
Link alla scheda completa: