Fund Drive for Dickens/High School Collaboration

Please join me in donating to the Dickens Project this week (Oct. 24-28) and supporting their ongoing collaboration with high school education (http://c-fund.us/nb3). I’ve been part of the Dickens Universe for fifteen years now, since I joined as a Rutgers graduate student in the summer of 2004. The first two years of grad school were really hard, and I jumped at the chance to spend a whole week discussing A Tale of Two Cities with other students, Dickens fans, and faculty. I loved the book, but I really, really loved the people and the environment: it was the first time I felt at home as an academic. As time went on, I graduated from joining as a grad student, to attending as a faculty member with my own grads, and the project has become increasingly important to my work and life.

But the most rewarding part has been the chance to collaborate in the Project’s partnership with USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), and its profound and inspiring collaboration with Jacqueline Barrios and her high school students. Jacqueline’s senior English class at Foshay Learning Center, a Title I high school in South Central LA, spends all year collaborating with the Dickens Project. Beginning in the fall each year, I and my graduate students, along with other Dickens Project alumni, get to join Jacqueline’s team as they begin read through the Project novel for the coming summer, kicking it off with a marathon reading. Through a series of follow-up workshops, we work on close reading the novel, studying how Dickens’s art translates for a modern audience, communicating lasting insights into self-transformation, class conflict, urban experience, and the legacy of historical trauma. But we also take time to savor the humor of his novels, from the exuberant vitality of his minor characters, to the sharp irony of his various narrative guises. Over the course of the fall, Jacqueline and her partners also work to translate the novel into a full-length stage drama, really, a two-day multimedia installation, including workshops, musical and dance performances, and elaborate stagings of the novel. (If you can get to LA, performances of Copperfield will be staged on Jan. 31 & Feb. 1 of next year.) Every year, these students produce an entirely new experience of Dickens’s art, sharing insights into his fiction, and unfolding for me the profound reach of his imagination, and its continuing hold on the present. And they excel; each year Foshay sends more students to USC (and on a full scholarship) than any other high school, public or private, in the country. While many go on to study fields like engineering, science, and medicine, they also often stay involved with the Dickens Project collaboration, from volunteering to help out with the annual performance, to attending the summer conference.

For me, this collaboration defines the marvelous reach of what the Dickens Project does to help bring together scholars and readers of all ages and all groups. It is really the beating heart of Victorian studies on the west coast, but more than that, it shows how literature and the humanities continue to shape people’s lives (including my own) in lasting ways. So far, with only a couple days left, we’ve raised almost $5,000. Please join me in helping to keep this important work going.

Yours,

Devin

To join me in participating in supporting the collaboration with Jacqueline and her students, visit the following link: http://c-fund.us/nb3

For more on Jacqueline’s Dickens “Lit Labs,” including last year’s work on Barnaby Rudge, visit: https://litlab.ucsc.edu/about/
https://litlab.sites.ucsc.edu/…/73835ba9-80b9-423c-b316-45f…

About – Lit Lab
Barnaby Lab is a year-long study of the novel Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens.The project is directed by Jacqueline Jean Barrios—a public school teacher and graduate student of literature and urbanism at UCLA—and supported by seniors of the USC NAI program who are enrolled in Ms. Barrios’s AP Literature class….
litlab.ucsc.edu

And for more on NAI, from a column by Frank Bruni, see https://www.nytimes.com/…/usc-neighborhood-academic-initiat…
https://static01.nyt.com/…/26…/26bruniWeb1-facebookJumbo.jpg
Opinion | Lifting Kids to College – The New York Times
www.nytimes.com

Paperback Coming + Full Index for “The Age of Analogy”

I’ve been proofing the hardback edition of my book so that I can fix any errors in the paperback, which will be coming out in September, 2019, and I remembered that I’d composed a more detailed index which had to be trimmed for publication. I’ve decided to post it here, on the book’s page (link). Honestly, I’m kind of stunned by how much went into the book. I don’t think I’ll write one like that again.

Intro to Graduate Studies

Anna Kornbluh recently asked how we’re approaching the question of our discipline in our teaching and it reminded me I meant to post my syllabus for our intro to grad studies course . Many thanks to everyone who helped me pull together “crisis of the humanities” articles over the summer. The title of the course is officially “History and Literary and Cultural Theory.”

Some background: In our program, roughly 1/2 to 2/3 of incoming grad students are creative writers (on the fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction track). We had a conversation about the class last year, and have sort of agreed that it doesn’t make sense to make a theory survey the foundation course for our program any more. (There are lots of reasons for this, but one I would suggest is the proliferation of mixed theoretical approaches today and the growing range of approaches we might class as “theory.” The post-critical moment is obviously not post-theory but reflects a less catholic, less orthodox approach to working with theory.)

I’m teaching the course as a mixture of about 1/3 history of the discipline (English departments, the Ph.D. program, and the creative M.F.A., now Ph.D.); 1/3 survey of a few selected topics in current theory (with background readings that fill in the critical genealogy optional); 1/3 future of the discipline, including alternative-academic and public humanities publication. Because of the nature of our program, we’re taking a writing-centered approach, with periodic writing workshops focused on genres of academic writing (exclusive of the seminar paper).

Link to syllabus: here.

Other syllabi: here.

Taking Cover

Been looking at the MLA’s Job Information List — the first jobs for the fall hiring season just listed — while revisiting Gerald Graff’s “Taking Cover in Coverage” with our intro to grad studies seminar at USC.
 
I want to set aside the question of just how “bad” the market will actually be, with the incremental release of jobs on the JIL, etc., though I note Romanticism and Victorian lit are currently showing a dozen jobs in Romanticism, Victorian, or C19 British lit COMBINED.  I’m struck by the relation between the seeming collapse of some of the more specific fields and Graff’s argument about the postwar expansion: “One of the most conspicuous operational advantages was the way the coverage model made the department virtually self-regulating” and it allowed faculty fo avoid harder questions about rationale, the integrity of the major, etc. Left out of the analysis (but implied, I think) is the closed circuit between a coverage model-based curriculum, graduate training, and hiring that subsisted during the expansion and during smaller retractions in hiring.
 
Things look different now, and recently some have resumed Graff’s call. (Eric Hayot, in “The Sky is Falling“: classes should “ask big questions and teach you how to do things” rather than cover “The Modern Novel or Medieval Europe.”)
 
And further setting aside questions of the causal relation or the Wisdom of How it All Happened, it *does* seem like expanding enrollments coincided with the expansion of coverage-based courses. And it makes me wonder what it would look like to actually decouple education and training from period coverage. For me this raises a series of questions.
 
(1) What might we do with graduate exams, especially as some argue for graduate training that is flexible about period, public-oriented, or concerned with alternative career possibilities?
 
(2) How do you articulate a non-coverage curriculum to a “technobureaucratic” administration in which distribution requirements, core curriculums, etc. seem to be the rage — especially when we’re lucky enough to be able to run a search?
 
(3) Should we be looking to universities in countries that experienced a postwar recession rather than expansion — thinking the UK, Germany, Italy? — to see how they adapted their curriculum?
 
I’m raising these questions because it seems clear, when talking to graduate students today about the market tomorrow, that the It That Shall Not Be Named is undergrad enrollment — something they have no control over, but we might. And this is doubly, triply true when training graduate students in fields like “Victorian literature” or “Modernism” or even “Romanticism” that have little or no meaning for a matriculating freshman.
 
Where are people at with this?
(Link to a discussion of these questions on Facebook here.)
[UPDATE: I’ve gathered the discussion around this post into  Google Doc with the working title “Fixing English” — link here. There are some fascinating discussions of periodization, historicism, & enrollments, and various political, economic, and administrative pressures on the major.]

Call for Proposals: “Unformalism” Panel for NASSR at Brown, June 22-25

“Unformalism”
Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
Brown University, 22-25 June 2018
Call for Panelists

From Coleridge’s “caverns measureless” to Shelley’s “pil’d” and “primeval” floes of ice, from Blake’s “want of … bounding form” to the “chaotic universality” of Schlegel’s fragments, Romanticism is preoccupied with forms verging on formlessness. Even as the Romantics theorized organicist models of form that privileged totality, unity and harmony, they tested forms that were interstitial, fissured, and open in contour. This panel explores the tensions and collusions between form and formlessness, and the crisis such collusions induce for thinking about the patterns of literature.

We are especially eager to consider the following questions: How do Romanticism’s open forms and fragmentary poetics call into question or model alternatives to the notion of form as rigid and inflexible—as an agent of containment and control? What is Romantic formlessness? What is its politics? Can forms, for instance, not only capture the self-contained and the (pre)determined, but also open up to the intermediary and the transitory? Are form and unform processes or states, things or actions? What is the relation between formalization and deformation? How might literature precede formalization or escape it altogether? If Romantic form is aligned to organicism and vitality, what is the relation between the unformed and the inorganic and lifeless? If formlessness is an iteration or type or instantiation of form (rather than its antithesis), what is not form in the Romantic period? If formlessness is form, where does form begin and end? Do open or intermediary forms possess particular affordances? What are their pitfalls and liabilities? Finally, do these forms ask us to read differently? What un-formalisms might Romantic formlessness produce?

We invite proposals for 15-minute papers that take up (but are not limited to) the above provocations and questions. Submit proposals for consideration by 8 December 2017 via email to Devin M. Garofalo, Florida Atlantic University ([email protected]), and Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California ([email protected]). Presenters will be notified of acceptance no later than January 1.

Analogy and the History of Comparatism

Right now I’m working on a long article about the cross-disciplinary history of the modern comparative method. It’s really, really interesting to read disciplinary histories from across the humanities & social sciences (mainly linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and literature) and see how different fields and their objects inflect basic questions about the nature of change, the implications of pattern, and the relation between historical and synchronic/contextual perspectives. The article tests a key argument from my book, The Age of Analogy (a claim for the interplay of “analogy” and “comparison” in the formation of the modern comparative method), by looking at disciplines beyond literary and scientific history, and considering scholarship in French and German, as well as English.

If I wanted to be cheekily topical in that article (and I don’t), I would point to the comparisons that people are now drawing between the crowd sizes at the 2009 and 2017 presidential inaugurations. Such comparison is (1) meant to gauge something about the distinctions between two different political formations and two different moments in historical time, and (2) is necessarily structured by analogy. To read the comparison is to recognize the relation between a common structuring spatial scheme (the Mall), and its service as a framework for a series of implicit analogical relations, which can be summarized in the form “A is to B as C is to D,” or A : B :: C : D. The most obvious implied analogy here: Obama’s 2009 crowd size : enthusiasm for Obama :: Trump’s 2017 crowd size : enthusiasm for Trump. (I note that the counter arguments offered by Sean Spicer and others center on why the two situations aren’t analogous: there were white ground coverings in 2017, new delays in the security, etc.).

This isn’t an example used in the article, which will (hopefully) be out sometime toward the end of this year, but I thought I’d share here my [lightly edited] response for our MLA panel in Philadelphia a few weeks ago on “Analogy after the Enlightenment.” It was organized by Adam Sneed and Taylor Schey, and featured impressive papers by Taylor, Elizabeth Duquette, and Ken Hirschkop.

The question I want to begin with: why should we study analogy? Listening to these papers, the answers seem to be (generalizing broadly — and what is the job of respondent but to generalize?):

(1) We should study analogy because (as Taylor accurately notes) it has been positioned as a key marker for the transition between Enlightenment/Augustan poetics and Romanticism (a formulation that has helped make sure it was almost entirely overlooked in the C19). To return to analogy, in his account, then means to refigure the deep Romantic investment in relationality and uncertainty in a longer framework — one that wouldn’t require us to forget the eighteenth century (or even the rest of the 19th in the signature Romantic leap to modernism), but recognize a more continuous narrative.

(2) In Elizabeth’s account, the turn to analogy helps us rethink the philosophical coordinates of the mid-nineteenth century novel, or at least, Melville and the way that philosophical discourse presents a problem for the novel’s investment in incident and character, forcing it to tell rather than to show. So, to return to Taylor’s argument, if the Romantics put paid to analogy, and Anglophone print culture was truly transAtlantic, it should be deeply surprising that analogy remained a concern for mid-nineteenth century novels (popping up also in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and George Eliot’s Felix Holt).

(3) Finally, as Ken explains (with extraordinary precision), analogy was not only important to linguistics, but perhaps the most important formal procedure for the formation of Saussure’s structural distinction between langue and parole. If this is true (and I think it is), this means that analogy is central to the structural turn — an unacknowledged founding move that helped to birth many of the critical procedures that we gesture to when we say (or used to say) postmodern or poststructural.

To these I would add that there’s a strong argument to be made for analogy’s central role in new historicism (as Alan Liu has argued) by way of Clifford Geertz and American-school social anthropology, with its focus on comparing thin and thick description, text and context. And it was also an important procedure for Marxist formalist criticism, with its profound but compulsive concern for the relation between economic or productive “base” and cultural “super structure.” Even a work like Frederic Jameson’s Political Unconscious — a book that continues to be a central pivot for our reconsiderations and anxieties about what it is that we do when we do literary scholarship — can be seen as an extended meditation on the Marxist problem of “reflection,” which is most simply just another disciplinary specification of a dynamic that, in a longer history, was called “analogy.”

So: Why do we study analogy? For lots of good reasons. Analogy is part of the story of how we got here. And in the current political moment, the story of how we got here seems really, really important.

A further question might be: How might we flesh out what analogy means, particularly in the nineteenth century, when its cultural, methodological, and philosophical meanings were (and are still) in flux?

As I have recently argued, in my book, “The Age of Analogy” (just out from Johns Hopkins Press), both analogy and comparison — as terms and as methods — were fundamentally reformulated in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century — in the transition that put us “after the Enlightenment.”

Analogy, which had played an important role in Western philosophy, Christian metaphysics and philology, had long represented a strategy of relational analysis that studied similarity. First stop. Comparison, on the other hand, was largely incubated in the classical rhetorical tradition as a way to underline contrasts and distinctions. Second stop. The modern comparative method emerged when these two traditions were brought together and focused on the problem of studying both how things are similar and different — what we now call, in primary education, to “compare and contrast.”

When I first stumbled upon this claim, while writing yet another abstract of the book to be, it seemed so simple, it simply couldn’t be true. With the benefit of several more years I can say, not only is it true, but it applies not only to English, but to academic writing in French (where the operative terms are “comparaison” and “analogie”) and German (and the terms “vergleich” and “analogie”). Not only that, but this reformulation of analogy and comparison played an important role in the formation of the modern humanist disciplines, organizing in important ways not only how people like Matthew Arnold thought about culture, as an object and as a hermeneutic, but more generally, in the formation of anthropology, biology, sociology, religious studies, philology/linguistics, mythology, political science, and of course, literary criticism in English. At the most general level, analogy structured the linguistic and cultural turns that later dominated 20th century humanism.

Seen through this lens, analogy starts to look less like our peculiar hobbyhorse — that rhetorical figure that for some reason has seemed less sexy than metaphor, allegory, or symbol — and more like an important engine for the disciplinary formation of the modern humanities.

And yet it’s quite rare, not just in English literary criticism, but in the various disciplinary histories that I’ve been reading recently, truly rare for anyone to talk about the relation between comparison and analogy. This is true even in a field like linguistics that, despite having retained the term “analogy” for a specific language phenomenon, as Ken explained, virtually never considers the importance of analogy to the formation of the comparative method, a moment that essentially birthed modern linguistics from the older traditions of philology, translation, and rhetoric. Analogy in linguistics, as in Romanticism and most fields of comparative analysis, remains a kind of abject term that denominates outmoded or problematic practices even as we happily go along comparing and contrasting. What else, for instance, might we call the “relational comparison” of Édouard Glissant & Shu-mei Shih? Or the “equivalences that do not unify” described by Franz Fanon and Natalie Melas? Virtually all modern disciplines, comparative literature not excepted, have amassed a range of new terms that have formalized procedures that were once more loosely termed “analogies.” (A bit closer to my disciplinary home, I don’t know if anyone else here was at the panel yesterday on “‘Victorian’ in a comparative field,” but in spite of some really impressive accounts of the past, present, and future of comparative literary studies, the term “analogy” never came up.) This is surprising and truly interesting if you believe (as I do) that there is no comparatism, historically or methodologically speaking, without “analogy.”

Conspicuous absence arguments are always a kind of a critical Mcguffin, but I do think we should think more about why this is so. Why is it that discussions of comparatism don’t invoke analogy as an important critical object, and vice versa? I hope we can start to think more but also talk more about the relation between analogy and comparison. For one thing, it would help us in thinking concretely about the expressive forms and generic histories of comparative study. This isn’t simply a question of intellectual history; to overlook analogy’s place in the modern comparative method is to overlook the basic formal structure that allows comparatism to operate.

To put it differently, it might be more appropriate to think of analogy as a network of affiliated practices, each with important histories and contexts, rather than as a stable object or single tradition. To adapt Franco Moretti’s argument in his most influential essay, “Conjectures on World Literature,” (which itself draws demonstrably on disciplinary arguments over the nature of analogy within comparative literature and anthropology as well as evolutionary biology); as I say, to adopt Moretti’s argument, we might study analogy as an interplay of waves and trees. On the one hand, we might study analogies in the waves of interdisciplinary contact through which relational analysis is adapted to new phenomena — often founding or substantially remaking entire fields of study. But we might also study analogy through trees of influence, through narratives of differentiation that trace the network of those operations over time and study the patterns of these engagements. This would also help us place the importance of specific applications and discoveries of analogy within the wider humanities.

A final problem is that, if analogy is in fact central to humanist scholarship, its historical study inevitably depends on its object as method. This isn’t a new problem, but certainly demands that we think carefully about how the dynamic we identify as “analogy” plays into our study of its various applications.

So, we should keep talking about analogy after the Enlightenment. Because it might be the case that analogy helps describe a big chunk of what happened in our disciplines after the Enlightenment. “After the Enlightenment,” after all, is shorthand for modernity, so let’s keep thinking about how analogy helps explain (or perhaps pose) our modern condition. Thanks.

Download as PDF.

“Romantic Planet: Science and Literature within the Anthropocene”

My Literature Compass article went live last week and I’ve been waiting to post about it; the idea for the piece was originally that it would try and locate my book (The Age of Analogy) within the subfield of literary criticism called “Romantic science and literature.” Along the way, though, I became more interested in what the field might tell us about the Anthropocene and the new “planetary” solidarity that, some argue, is required for a collective action that can address global warming.

I’ve been waiting to post the article while we worked on the html formatting of the Keats lines at the beginning. They’re the lines used as the epigraph for Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and they go:

The sedge is wither'd from the lake
        And no birds sing.

Looks simple, right? Turns out, though, that formatting poetry is hard in html, in part because it makes it difficult to tinker with line spacing, indentation and other formatting issues. The css that Literature Compass uses does have a block poetry class, but (ironically) it makes a hash out of the lines (when it was first published, the first line was broken at “the” and the second at “no,” producing “The sedge is wither’d / from the lake And / no birds sing”).

The folks at LC and the editor, Jonathan Sachs, have been working on it (and I feel kind of bad asking for the special attention), but the lines just look crazy when they’re not formatted right. Right now I’m seeing if they can try using the <pre> tag (as I have here) to try and preserve formatting. I suggested the following inside the block quote:

<i class=”icon icon__block icon__poem”><pre style=”font-family:Arial;”><p>The sedge is wither’d from the lake,</p><p>         And no birds sing.</p></pre></i>

In the meantime, you can check the piece out in html or download the (properly formatted) pdf — it’s outside the paywall for another couple of weeks! Here’s the abstract:

This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such studies may offer the recent “planetary turn” in ecocriticism and postcolonial research on the Anthropocene. Situating these studies in a longer critical history, it explores their implications for how we engage modern climate science. The “Romantic century” 1750–1850 marks both the dawn of the Anthropocene and a formative stage in its sciences and technologies, from the industrial revolution to modern theories of climate change and ecology. Because ecocritical writing, including green Romanticism and ecofeminism, as well as research into colonialism, empire, and global capitalism were traditionally skeptical of Western science, their recent theorizations of “planetarity” do not adequately confront a new investment in the empirical claims of global warming. Positing that the traffic between science and social forms is asymmetric – two-way but uneven – the author argues that Romantic science and literature both furnishes a sophisticated historical epistemology for planetary studies and, in its concern for the technologies, genres, and social forms that produced the Anthropocene, an “epistemology of the climate” that may help us dig our way out.

Sampling the Novel (Dickens and Network “Connexion”)

A few weeks ago statistician Andrew Gelman posted an article that used Dickens’s social novels as an example of the perils of sampling networks (h/t to Jonathan Stray and Andrew Piper for tweeting about this). Whereas, in statistical methodologies, you can “sample” a larger diffuse or “atomisticcollection and get an accurate picture of what the larger group looks like, when sampling a few points in a large network, those samples give a very poor picture of the larger network structure. It’s a bit like the difference between picking a handful of M&M’s out of a bag and making an inference about the total color distribution (reasonably accurate), and sampling a handful of molecules within an M&M and making assumptions about what the larger shape, taste, paint pattern, etc. look like. The former doesn’t have much structure, but the latter does — and that structure matters.

Here’s how Gelman applies this to Dickens:

In traditional survey research we have been spoiled. If you work with atomistic data structures, a small sample looks like a little bit of the population. But a small sample of a network doesn’t look like the whole. For example, if you take a network and randomly sample some nodes, and then look at the network of all the edges connecting these nodes, you’ll get something much more sparse than the original. For example, suppose Alice knows Bob who knows Cassie who knows Damien, but Alice does not happen to know Damien directly. If only Alice and Damien are selected, they will appear to be disconnected because the missing links are not in the sample.

This brings us to a paradox of literature. Charles Dickens, like Tom Wolfe more recently, was celebrated for his novels that reconstructed an entire society, from high to low, in miniature. But Dickens is also notorious for his coincidences: his characters all seem very real but they’re always running into each other on the street (as illustrated in the map above, which comes from David Perdue) or interacting with each other in strange ways, or it turns out that somebody is somebody else’s uncle. How could this be, that Dickens’s world was so lifelike in some ways but filled with these unnatural coincidences?

My contention is that Dickens was coming up with his best solution to an unsolvable problems, which is to reproduce a network given a small sample. What is a representative sample of a network? If London has a million people and I take a sample of 100, what will their network look like? It will look diffuse and atomized because of all those missing connections. The network of this sample of 100 doesn’t look anything like the larger network of Londoners, any more than a disconnected set of human cells would look like a little person.

So to construct something with realistic network properties, Dickens had to artificially fill in the network, to create the structure that would represent the interactions in society. You can’t make a flat map of the world that captures the shape of a globe; any projection makes compromises. Similarly you can’t take a sample of people and capture all its network properties, even in expectation: if we want the network density to be correct, we need to add in links, “coincidences” as it were. The problem is, we’re not used to thinking this way because with atomized analysis, we really can create samples that are basically representative of the population. With networks you can’t.

Gelman goes on to argue that all of the supposed “coincidences” of a Dickensian novel are an attempt to simulate network structure or “links” where the number of sampled nodes are too small to fill out a real map of the network’s structure. So coincidences simulate what would be major linkages in the actual network of London ca. 1850.

It’s a cool idea — and it gets right to the heart of the famous question posed by the narrator of Dickens’s Bleak House:

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

But for Dickens, “connexion” obviously means more than association between characters. It has moral, filial, and in Bleak House, even epidemiological dimensions. One of the questions that launched my book, The Age of Analogy, was to ask what connected the various discursive registers that operate in Bleak House — what connects the legal system of the Court of Chancery to the salvage economy of Krook’s Court; what links the virtue of Esther Summerson’s narrative position to the small pox that sickens her? (Ultimately, I came to believe that one thing that links them as a new way of thinking about analogy — between characters, social formations, and discursive vocabularies — as a way to get at the sedimentary nature of history and social formations. I say “believe” because, along the way, Bleak House & Dickens fell out of the project.)

But whether this is true, Dickens’s characters do not operate “atomistically” or even as atoms linked by coincidence. What they do and how they interact displays a great deal of structure that is not pure invention. One way to get at this is that the network model has a dispersed physical and temporal dynamic that doesn’t lend itself to thinking about narrative.  Narratives are not links, though narratives may feature interactions between characters (moments that would count as either “links” or “coincidences” in Gelman’s account). But they also convey important information about the transformation of individual characters, and their transit with respect to other conditions beyond the social: geographical and economic movement, maturation from youth to age, etc. And narratives, through their invocation of generic history, constantly invoke links to modes of thought and histories of representation that, in some sense, exceed the network of the novel and even the network of London at any given time.

Gelman himself brings up another kind of sampling in his paper that I think provides a better way of thinking about how Dickens attempts to get at larger social structures, something he terms “fractal sampling“:

When you do a survey, you want to learn at all levels. For example, if you’re studying politics, you’ll want to know what’s happening nationally, you’ll want a nationally representative sample. But you’ll also want to know what’s happening at the state level, the city level, and the neighborhood level. You can’t expect to get good estimates for all the neighborhoods in the country or all the cities or even all the states, but you’ll want some information at all these levels. That’s what fractal sampling is all about.

Basically, the point is that you can change the sampling methodology in order to capture specific kinds of group & scalar structure. I think this is a better description of what Dickens’s novels do. For a given social question (configured through a specific subset (or sub network?) within the larger world), each novel seems to seek out representative constellations of character that capture the key groups that operate within that network. So, to return to Bleak House, the key problem seems to have to do with poverty and responsibility, as configured by different social & class postions within the city, and as they interplay with legal, administrative, religious, medical, and domestic networks. And if we go back to Bleak House’s famous question, it basically samples along those lines: a country house, a townhome, a servant (the “Mercury in powder”), a street sweeping urchin (“Joe”), a metaphysical visitation (the “distant ray of light”), the dirty churchyard step. I used to read this as an open question that assembled a more or less random collection to pose in extremis the problem of connection that underwrites all of what Henry James would later term “loose, baggy monsters.” Now I think there’s a fair case to be made that the question embeds a set of structural relations that underwrite the fractal sampling of a wider network of encounters: country and city, estate and town, servant (and master), poor and rich, church (and the secular government that will user Jo from that stoop), and worldly infrastructure (the stone of the church) in its tenuous possible connection to divine revelation (the light from above).

Of course, as Jonathan Grossman has taught us, there are lots of different kinds of networks in Dickens’s novels. But it’s interesting to think about how single sentences, “What connexion can there be…,” can be important nodes in bringing them together and suggesting their analogies.