10.13125/2039-6597/2623
The paper proposes to approach the issue of literary realism through the prism of archive art, i.e. the artworks that are archives of objects, documents, statements, even other artworks by other artists etc. The preservation of the otherness of an entity, which is subsequently taken up and kept in an archive, is one of the key challenges involved in such projects. The second task of an archival artwork is to construct—in fact add—an encompassing totality that correlates with the authorship and gives significance to the archive-artwork as a whole. The paper scrutinizes possible links between the archival approaches to art production in the 20th and 21st centuries and the practices of realist writing beginning in the 19th century. 
application/pdf
2039-6597
2623
13
en
Aleš Vaupotič
Between
the avant-garde
How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art? The Case of Charles Dickens' Later Novels
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
Belonging in Expression and Representation
2017-06-02
2017-01-28
2017-06-02
2017-06-02
1
Aleš Vaupotič
2017/06/02
10.13125/2039-6597/2623
University of Nova Gorica
2039-6597
13
the avant-garde
en
How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art? The Case of Charles Dickens' Later Novels
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2623/2477
7
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




     How to Study Literary Realism as
      Archive Art? The Case of Charles
           Dickens’ Later Novels
                                Aleš Vaupotič


                                 Archive Art
      Instead of collecting and placing side by side individual artworks,
as in literary journals, anthologies, at public readings or in art
museums, in archive art the artwork itself becomes a collection of
individual items. In this case, a collection—an archive—is an artwork,
one artistic statement.1 Of the two concepts used, artwork and archive,
the archive seems less ambiguous, since the notion of art is becoming
more and more difficult to define. Most contemporary art—in
literature, fine arts, media arts etc.—questions its status while facing
other creative, reflexive and communicative practices of the different
disciplines, cultures and contexts. For instance, what is included in the
literary canon is decided through highly complex procedures that,
nonetheless, cannot really explain, what is it which makes something
an artwork. Is the Adornian culture industry using commodified “high
art” part of art domain or not? It, however, does not coincide with the
notion of Kunst from the romantic period. Realism, as an artistic
tradition that started in the 19th century traversing literature and other
arts, seems to be necessarily struggling with the issue of belonging in
the ivory tower of fine arts, since it programmatically connects themes
and effects of an artistic statement to an epistemological question about

     1
          For a number of perspectives on this idea see Merewether’s collection
(2006).


                                                                                    1
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



the world and to a political question, what position and agency one is
to assume in a given situation. This weak connection of realism to an
unambiguous definition of a (more or less) autonomous artwork
justifies the focus of this article on the study of the possibilities of an
archival language in realism in literature and other artistic practices.
      The question of what makes something an archive, within the
domain of arts polysystem or in everyday life, is crucial. An archive
can refer to an institution, such as a library, also in the sense of some
technical device for storing, sorting and retrieving elements. But, the
archive is primarily not the storage facility itself, it is the sum of all
content that is stored, and only subsequently the concept is transferred
to a specific technical solution to the problems caused by the need to
store and manage objects. It is a response to given requirements
demanded by some material already collected or identified as
necessary to be preserved in a retrievable way. The entities, the units
that are brought together in an archive, however, cannot be just
anything: they must be completely separated. Here is an example
pointing to a sort of anti-temporal nature of the archive: a year is a
multitude of days, but it is not an archive of days. Evidently, one does
not require “a year” as an object to experience the days, they happen
anyway. By the fact that one lives through days, the year is realized,
however, it is not kept, the days and the year are both lost. In contrast,
the archive stores all its elements at the same time, keeping them
distinct from one another, putting effort into preserving each element.
The Kantian idea of space being the foundation for comparison—as a
form of pure intuition—, opposed to time, which gives ground for
change, may be referenced (Janiak 2016). The situation is similar in the
Aristotelian idea of narrative plot that consists of a beginning, a middle
part and a conclusion—it does not constitute an archive, since the
whole and the parts cannot be thought of in separation.2 Another, and
of a different kind, nonarchival collection is implicit in the Saussurean


      The dichotomy database vs. narrative is one of the core ideas in Lev
      2

Manovich’s theory of the language of new media which construes the new
media object as a database, an archive (Manovich 2001, Bovcon 2009).


2
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



idea of language as a system: the signs rely exclusively on differences
between and among the signifiers and signified, the real elements of
the language are not the comparable ideas or sound-image segments
but the negative medium of a nondifferentiated difference (de Saussure
1959: 120); for this reason, it is impossible to archive a language as
such, only its realizations in the speech (parole) can be recorded. To
summarize, what is essential for an archive is the ability to provide
access to any element at any time. This causes each element to become
completely isolated from all other elements in the same archive. The
archive is never one whole, a totality, it must remain an ad hoc group of
disjointed elements.
     However, any such fixation of an element in the archive is a
problematic act from at least two points of view: on one hand, the
human experience and interpretation of phenomena occurs in time and
in context; on the other hand, the materials physically deteriorate,
change—this process of transformation, however, can only be
destroying the archive, it never positively contributes to it.3 The
isolated elements gathered in an archive are always cut off from their
original context; the infrastructure of an archive is a response to this
twofold damage that occurs to entities, when they are included in an
archive. To return to the “year and days” example, the reverse view is
possible: as the days rhythmically perish, evidently, a need to preserve
something from the past emerges, while other aspects are let to vanish,
and the archive is the response to this fundamental human need. The
archive elements therefore appear as much less substantial than they
would be in their (wished-for or imagined) “original” existence. In fact,
there is always something “wrong” with the elements—in the sense of


     3
        A strain of archive art displays, even fetishizes, the decay of everyday
objects, which in turn weakens the impulse towards establishing order, e.g.
Christian Boltanski’s art installations (Merewether 2006: 10-11). The ironical
use of the concept of archive in arts, e.g. the concrete blocks containing doc-
uments in Akram Zaatari’s installation at the dOCUMENTA (13), where the
documents are virtually inaccessible, is representative of the institutional cri-
tique art practices (Alberro & Stimson 2009).


                                                                                    3
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



the allegorical imagination of Walter Benjamin (see below)—, which
resounds in the meaning of the word archive as a more or less rigid
technical infrastructure, which seems to leave its mark on the elements.
      The studies on archive art often reference Borgesian chance
recombination of letters and punctuation in books, which would build
a universal library, such as the one from the short story The Library of
Babel (La biblioteca de Babel, 1941), as an example of archive art.
However, the archive as discussed above can only include elements
that are found, consciously collected, and stored. The archive cannot
generate new items, as is the case with the randomizing Borgesian
library. In general, this issue is considered in Mikhail Bakhtin’s early
treatise Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity in the chapter on rhythm.
He states, for example:

      Rhythm takes possession of a life that has been lived […] If,
      however, the meaning that impels the hero’s life fascinates and
      absorbs us as meaning, i.e., if we are fascinated with its being
      imposed as a task to be accomplished, and not with its individual
      givenness […], then the achievement of form and rhythm is
      rendered difficult. (1990: 132)

If the reader faces the same problems with understanding and acting in
the world, as the hero of a literary work, then the rhythm and
symmetry as the ordering principles—or even less so as generative
forces—are impossible. For rhythm to emerge, the reality needs to be
objectified. Recombinant permutations are always alien to the practice
of collecting. This is further linked with Bakhtinian rejection of any
coherent theory in favour of preserving the uniqueness of phenomena,
e.g. in his Toward a Philosophy of the Act, and also, in the works from the
middle period, in connection with the rhythm in poetry in his famous
essay Discourse in the Novel:

         Rhythm, by creating an unmediated involvement between every
      aspect of the accentual system of the whole (via the most immediate
      rhythmic unities), destroys in embryo those social worlds of



4
                                             Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



     speech and of persons, that are potentially embedded in the word.
     (2004: 298)

Of course, Bakhtin’s main goal is to preserve and non-destructively
represent the multiplicity of voices in the dialogue, an archive of
voices, which turns out to be a very complex task.
     Another example. Even though the theory of the modern museum
by Boris Groys theorizes the emergence of “new” on the basis of a
transition from some “profane space” outside into the valorising inside
of a museum, seemingly postulating an abstract mechanism for
building archives, what happens really is a reordering of an archive.
For Groys, the profane outside is not an amorphous chaos but consists
of artefacts from some neighbouring (cultural) archive. His particular
case is the Soviet avant-garde that is misaligned with the Western idea
of the avant-garde (Groys 2002: 100).4 The bordering archives,
consequently, form an ever larger and increasingly unmanageable
archive.
     This is also Foucault’s point of view from The Archaeology of
Knowledge (11969). Foucault’s archaeology is a theory of archive which
takes structuralist negative notion of sign as a starting point. In turn, it
strives to differentiate the differences: “[The archaeology’s] aim is not
to overcome differences, but to analyse them, to say what exactly they
consist of, to differentiate them” (1982: 171), thereby establishing an
archive of differences:

     Between the [de Saussurean] language (langue) that defines the
     system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that
     passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a
     particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of
     statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many
     things to be dealt with and manipulated. […] It is the general system
     of the formation and transformation of statements. (Ibid.: 130)




     4
         See also chapters Muzealizacija vzhoda and Postsovjetski postmodernizem.


                                                                                     5
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



The archive is not a mere collection, it strives to establish an order
within the collection. The archaeological description is never complete:

      The never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the
      archive forms the general horizon to which the description of
      discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of
      the enunciative field belong. (Ibid.: 131)

It is important to keep in mind that an archive itself is never a single
object, it must remain a dispersion of elements that resist unification. If
an archive can completely explain each of its elements, and their joint
significance as a whole, then it is not an archive any more,5 it becomes
a structure or an organic whole.
      Archives are used to preserve human experience; the living world
is therefore in part translated into archives. Reality itself is not an
archive. Archive is a cognitive tool, a particular model of reality, which
helps us to deal with and to some degree understand reality, especially
when reality is in crisis. And this paper (implicitly) argues that the
current European reality can profit from such a model of reality. From
the point of view of an archive, its contents are all that is available to
human cognition. Particularly in situations, when the outside world
does not make sense, the archives are consulted to provide a way
forward.




      5
        This is a free paraphrase of Gayatri Spivak: “If the subaltern can
speak, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more” (Veeser 1989:
283). A political task of naming is to empower the excluded, to integrate it
into the dominant discourse. Similarly, the archive preserves something that
is fragile and elusive, not the elements that already exist in excess. In the let-
ter case, an archive is not needed.


6
                                          Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




Novels as Archives of Voices: Hard Times and Our Mu-
                       tual Friend
      In Joseph Peter Stern’s theory of realism, which could be linked to
the archival paradigm via its ties to the late Wittgenstein’s method of
family resemblances, the author emphasizes that it is a feature of
realism to build bridges, i.e. to connect collected phenomena, and
through connections thus established indicate even the transcendental
phenomena, as far as they are continuous with the conception of one
singular reality, the world that we all share. In Dostoyevsky’s novel,
The Idiot (1869), Count Myshkin imitates Christ. His love is, of course,
inadequate by comparison:

     Yet it is only just inadequate: informed by a greater love he might
     have succeeded. But seeing that a greater love is continuous with
     the lesser, is conceivable within the same terms as those in which
     we accept the novel as it stands, a happier ending need not have
     been less realistic […]. The story of Myshkin is a bridge—the
     building of bridges between the visible and the invisible […] is a
     prerogative of realism. (Stern 1973: 47)

Archive thus functions as a collection of possible solutions, models,
“terms” for action and understanding, that are available.
      This chapter will show how Charles Dickens’ novels, in particular
the so-called “later novels,” embody an archive-like model (Vaupotič
2001). To demonstrate the archival structure of a novel the Mikhail
Bakhtin’s methodology is used (Vaupotič 2009). A segment of the
world in time cannot be automatically considered an archive.
Bakhtinian dialogism provides a solution: an archive-like novel could
relate to a model of reality and of literature, which consists of
individual socio-historically specific human voices. These are
separated from one another, describable, and subjected to
categorization and control. Michel Foucault’s works (1981) provide
ample proof for the existence of such an understanding of the world,
i.e. of the practices of introducing order—and power—into discourses.


                                                                                  7
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



     Bakhtin postulates a homogeneous semiotic horizon, which
includes the three elements: world, human and language. He defines a
human as plethora of more or less isolated voices.6 The voices feature
in literature as heroes with more or less strong opinions, i.e.
ideologists, as worlds represented in world-views, or as languages and
ideologies used impersonally in a narration of a work. The analysis of a
novel as a single internally (voices and languages within the novel) and
externally (i.e. in respect to the novel’s contexts) dialogised utterance
should therefore scrutinize the relationships between these voices.
Bakhtin emphasizes “the distinctiveness of novelistic dialogues, which
push to the limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people
who speak in different languages” (2004: 356, 405). The ideal type of a
novel that his theory thus presupposes is a network of voices that
remain strictly separated. The voices do not even understand each other
and therefore never reach an agreement in a joint world-view—on the
contrary, the communication virtually equals misunderstanding.
     The analysis shows that Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854) is an
archive of voices, which cannot be reduced to a single all-
encompassing voice, i.e. an ideology of the whole work. While not
following the usual interpretation of this novel—with an image of Sissy
Jupe as an idealized counterbalance to the utilitarian evil of
Gradgrind—the Bakhtinian approach shows that multiple sides of the
conflict consist of “internally persuasive discourse” that Dickens
“experimentally objectifies” (ibid.: 348).
     Here some additional explanation regarding the objectification of
a voice is needed. To make something an object usually means its
appropriation into the discourse of the one who objectifies, and the
destruction of the object’s otherness. However, Bakhtin argues that
even though some resistance of the voice of the other is lost in a
“language-image”, to merely include in a novel the chaos of recorded
voices as they are given would nonetheless result in an author’s
monologic utterance, which, additionally, fails in the artistic sense

      6
        Bakhtin explicates his model of literary interpretation comprehensive-
ly in his text Discourse in the Novel (2004: 269-422).


8
                                           Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



(ibid.: 366). In his early phenomenological writings, such as Author and
Hero in Aesthetic Activity, Bakhtin states that a human is not an isolated
entity, but exists in a dialogic relationship.7 A human existentially
needs another human, who exists outside of one’s spatial and temporal
spheres and outside the limits of meaning. Bakhtin uses the terms
“extra-location” and “transgredience”. The “objective shadow”
therefore, in Bakhtin’s early works, relates to the Godly mercy,
protection and the transgredient gift of the other (1990: 41, 66-67). The
voices in a novel are partly objectified images, and «the novelist […]
attempts […] to achieve an artistic consistency among the images of these
languages» (2004: 366).8 Here the key issue of an archival discourse is
clearly stated: artfully curated images of the things, that are to be
collected, are present in the archive as mediated and objectified
substitutes and not the fragments of (past) reality themselves. The
elements of the archive are, for Bakhtin, necessarily impure.
      To show the archive-like discourse in Hard Times, the analysis has
to stress the strict boundaries between voices. An example of this
feature is the scene when Sissy, a simple girl, makes an aristocrat,
Harthouse, leave the town and disappear from the story altogether.
This reading of the chapter Very Ridiculous (B.3/Ch.2) demonstrates,
that the world-views of Sissy and Harthouse are completely separate
and impenetrable. Both horizons of understanding are closely linked to
diverging—but nonetheless really existing—ideologies in the society,
and cannot be explained by goodness or malice of a character or even
by her or his intelligence, since both world-views are internally
coherent and well defined. Sissy rejects political economy teachings
and stubbornly follows her world-view.

     […] after eight weeks of induction into the elements of Political
     Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three
     feet high, for returning to the question, “What is the first principle


     7
        In this early period, however, this key Bakhtinian term is not used
yet. The idea, however, is already clearly formulated.
      8
        Emphasis A. V.


                                                                                   9
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



      of this science?” the absurd answer, “To do unto others as I would
      that they should do unto me.” (B.1/Ch.9)

“The absurd answer” is a citation from the Church of England
catechism9 (according to Dickens, satirically or not, every person
always speaks with foreign words). The quoted fragment shows also
that, here, the narrator is someone who does not share the author’s
view, since the reference is—perhaps ironically—ignored. On other
occasions, the narrator himself uses Sissy’s language.
     When Sissy speaks to Harthouse, a total communicative
breakdown occurs—each character sees and assesses the situation in a
completely opposite way, to such a degree that the situation becomes
somehow superfluous and subsequently Harthouse leaves the
remaining part of the plot. It is interesting, however, that it could be
argued that Harthouse’s views are the closest to Dickens’ own—he sees
the dangers of statistical methods of utilitarian political economy, he
understands the plot well, at least much better than Sissy.10 What
Harthouse cannot grasp at all is Sissy’s point of view. Harthouse
summarizes the events of the chapter—which was here of course much
too schematically referenced—as follows: “He glanced at her face, and
walked about again. ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know what to say. So
immensely absurd!’” (B.3/Ch.2).




      9
         Reference to Matthew 7:12 (“Therefore all things whatsoever ye
would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law
and the prophets”), and the Book of Common Prayer. Her statement is com-
monly known as the Golden Rule. See Discovering Dickens.
      10
         In relation to the novel Bleak House (1852-53) Alexander Welsh (2000)
points to the alignment of Dickens’ views with the negative character, Har-
old Skimpole (the chapter Jarndyce and Skimpole). Welsh considers the novel
Hard Times as the key to Dickens’ later novels, and an epilogue to Bleak House
(see the last chapter).


10
                                        Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



      It is the absurdity of the misunderstanding, which could be one of
the characteristic Dickensian features.11 It can be demonstrated that all
characters in the novel share mutual misunderstanding, which
includes the narrator’s voices. Since Bakhtinian universe consists of a
network of voices, and if Bakhtinian method seeks indications of
nonunderstanding between world-views, what happens to the
communicative link between the author and the reader? Do the two
literary partners successfully understand each other, as opposed to the
heroes and narrators in the worlds of Dickens’ novels? In the transition
from the early novels to his later ones Dickens increased the level of
misunderstanding. For instance, a similar situation to the one in Hard
Times could be shown in Bleak House (1952-53), Little Dorrit (1955-57),
etc. The last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), radicalises this
element of misunderstanding even more (Geppert 1994: 463, see also
Solomon 1988, Mundhenk 1979). Dickens explicitly plans and then
“writes” a large segment of the story, which happens without the
readers knowing it. Mr. Boffin, John Harmon (John Rokesmith/Julius
Handford) and Mrs. Boffin decide that Mr. Boffin shall pretend to
become a miser. It is not possible for the reader to know this because
along with the character Bella and others, who are deceived, even the
narrator and the circumstances confirm, that Mr. Boffin has in fact
changed into a miser (Mundhenk 1979: 44). The revelation comes as a
surprise almost half of this long novel later, which is highly unusual.
The reader cannot understand half of the novel correctly. Does this
segment of the novel’s content in fact exist, if it is hidden from the
readers for such a long time? Does it only emerge in the second
reading? The scholars argue, that this causes a problem for the overall
artistic quality of this particular work by Dickens. In any case, it is
difficult to imagine the next stage after such a bold experiment in
novelistic narrative. However, since Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’ last
completed novelistic plot, the answer must remain open. On the other

     11
        The deconstruction-like scholarly approaches to Hard Times focus on
the disintegration of language in Mrs. Gradgrind. Dickens probably consid-
ered such perspective as one among the existing world-views.


                                                                               11
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



hand, the case of reader failing to understand the plot, in fact, confirms
the Bakhtinian vision of the novel as a network of liberated characters
acting in highly complex and mutually incomprehensible ways—its
author and readers included. A world in Our Mutual Friend becomes a
puzzling archive, which includes the reader as a strictly limited part,
torn off from the whole.

                             Types of Archive Art
      The idea of an artistic archive connects two tendencies: the
attempt to preserve the otherness of collected phenomena, and to
construct the archive as a new meaningful whole. Among the most
referenced examples of archival discourse are the art historian Aby
Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas (Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1928-29)—a
series of black boards with attached photographs that represent the
expressions of passions in visual arts and are ordered to express
similarities and links—and Walter Benjamin’s unpublished Arcades
Project (Das Passagen-Werk, 1927-40), a compilation of texts on Paris
arcades and their cultural context. In both cases, the contents—pictures
or, in Benjamin’s case, text fragments—are atomized and then
consciously ordered into a constellation, which preserves the
disconnected elements.
      Art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh12 distinguishes between two
types of archival aesthetics in the historical avant-garde practices: a
collage or montage aesthetics, on the one hand, and an aesthetics of
archive in a narrow sense, on the other. The former foregrounds the
shock of juxtaposition and the latter a didactic nature of an ordered
archive. Buchloh argues that the shift from collage/photomontage to its
critical rejection and to ordering of the collected material happened
already after 1925 in the works of the inventors of photomontage
themselves, such as John Hartfield, Hannah Höch or Alexander


       The 1997 article is the extended alternative version of the article from
      12

1993. The author focuses on the 1920s and photography, but also on the post-
war visual arts.


12
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



Rodchenko as an “archival counter-aesthetics”. The two types of
archival art can be traced in literature too: late realism of Dickens’
novels would represent the ordering of an archive, whereas Joyce’s
early conception of epiphany connects fragments of the world following
the montage aesthetics. For Joyce, epiphany was the name for a short
prose genre from his early period, but, according to Richard Kearney,
“the entire novel itself [, i.e. Ulysses, is] an epiphany from beginning to
end” (2005).13 In a Joycean epiphany, what at first appears vulgar and
insignificant becomes meaningful in a mysterious way. Realism, of
course, cannot use such mystical discursive strategies, the realist
discourse remains limited to the problematic relationships between
existing and contiguous phenomena. For a novel, such as the two
Dickens’ works discussed above, Foucault’s discourse-theoretical
conception of reality seems symptomatic—the discursive facts are
rare,14 which is a consequence of the practices of elimination of certain
elements, e.g. through incarceration practices or censorship, and they
all exist on the same level. Foucault calls this the “exteriority” principle
of the discourse, since there is no silent deep background behind
statements. In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault calls himself a
“positivist”, which signals a somehow unexpected alliance with
Auguste Comte’s historical positivism, and this could be explained
through Bakhtinian insights into Dickens’ works.
      The archives consist of elements. Theoretically, there are two
possible types of elements. Dickensian or Foucauldian archives consist
of elements of reality which follow the principle of verisimilitude. One
collects pieces of reality, like Dickens on his legendary night walks.15


     13
         See Geppert 1994, chapter “Daedalus Arifex” und seine “epiphany” bei
Keller und Joyce, and Joyce 1963.
      14
         It is interesting to note that György Lukács’ conception of “real possi-
bility”, a key element of his theory of realism, turns out to be comparable to
Foucault’s rarity of discourse (Lukács 1958, Adorno 1958: 157).
      15
         In 1860, the year he began work on Great Expectations, Dickens wrote
an essay called “Night Walks” (All Year Round, 1959, and Ch.13 in The Un-
commercial Traveller, 1961): “[T]he door knocker from the entrance to the


                                                                                   13
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



The opposite option is to be found in Walter Benjamin’s only published
scholarly monograph during his lifetime, The Origin of the German
Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928), which is a
study on the German counter-reformation “mourning play”
(Trauerspiel) of the 17th century. Benjamin defines the language of
allegory, which employs fragments or ruins, in fact corpse-like remains
of a decaying world, to express new meanings. The elements used have
completely lost their potential for meaning, they are grotesque
transformations, Byzantinisms, ornamental transformations, masks,
completely different from the elements of a realist archive. The
allegorical discourse draws elements from emblem-books as stock
requisites, not from experience. Benjamin states:

         If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy,
      if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains dead, but
      eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is
      unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite
      incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own;
      such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He
      places it within it, and stands behind it; not in a psychological but
      in an ontological sense. (2009: 183-184)

The meaning is—of course this is a paradox—arbitrarily provided by
the allegorist, since the reality fell into ruin. The meaning does not stem
from the author’s consciousness in a “psychological” sense but
somehow emerges as in a sort of negative theology—or, maybe, it does
not really emerge at all (this situation is explained as Benjamin’s
presentiment of the destruction of culture in the holocaust).



women’s side of Tothill Fields Prison and an armoured metal door, bristling
with rivets and bolts, from Newgate Prison. / This door is simultaneously re-
al and imaginary—a postmodern twist Dickens would have appreciated—for
as well as being a genuine leftover of the old prison, it is also one of the doors
of Newgate stormed by the rioters in his historical novel Barnaby Rudge.”
See In the Footsteps of Charles Dickens.


14
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



     The allegorical imagination of Benjamin is not a realist perception
of the world. The element of verisimilitude is missing. Fragments
collected in a realist archive are not mere signs of transience but
somehow still point to something substantial, to a reality that people
have in common. Realism, at least in its archive-like versions, follows a
more pragmaticist response: the archive of concrete observable social
practices is the foundation for its ad hoc reconfiguration. For example,
Hans Vilmar Geppert, by using Peircean pragmaticism, argues for a
conditional (i.e. limited knowledge, no reliability) and imperative (the
imminent need for a solution to the current condition) version of truth
and knowledge as the ground of realist semiotics, which is to be found
in the realist novels.16
     The discussion of the archive art focussing on early 20th-century
avant-garde movements, but also reaching further back to German
baroque and forward into the late 20th century, can shed additional


     16
         Literary realism is construed by Geppert as the art of the interpretant,
stemming from an immediate experience of a semiotic, and therefore existen-
tial, crisis. Peirce’s six-level model of the sign—representamen, immediate
interpretant, immediate object, dynamic object, dynamic interpretant, final
interpretant—translates into realist discourse as follows. The “realist way”
starts from the immediate interpretant as the first interpretation of the repre-
sentamen evoking the conventions in a dysfunctional state, which produces
the immediate object, “the motivated illusions”, such as Emma Bovary’s self-
destructive expectations about the world. It is the media-induced “inter-
reality” that clashes violently with the given conditions, the dynamic object.
The crisis is “amplified” in the reproduction and condensation of available
cultural codes and their effects in—and on—the hero’s or heroine’s illusions.
The dynamic interpretant is the narrative arch of the realist novel. It consists
of a multiplicity of immediate interpretants with their immediate objects in
experimental recombinations. It is in the recombinant constellations of the
dysfunctional cultural codes that the realist verisimilitude is grounded—
realism does not reproduce reality but the discontinuous archive of cultural
codes. The final interpretant is the method itself, realism as a dynamic and
continuous path that stands in stark opposition to a static spatial constella-
tion (Vaupotič 2012).


                                                                                   15
Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?



light on important cases of realist literature, such as the Dickens’
novels that were discussed, or, among others, Gustave Flaubert’s
works: the posthumously published Dictionary of Received Ideas (Le
Dictionnaire des idées reçues) is in its outward form an alphabetically
ordered dictionary of very short entries related to ideas in Flaubert’s
novels.17 The discursive nature of all reality, an important issue for
postmodern literature, can be reflected upon, in respect to the artistic
use of the archive. The theories of the archive by Bakhtin and the turn
in archival aesthetics in visual arts, pointed to by Buchloh, both
emerged around 1925. The result of an approach focussing on archive
art proposes a revised image of the literary history of the 19th and 20th
centuries.




       See a Foucauldian discussion by Philippe Desan of Flaubert’s novel
      17

Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869).


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                                        Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




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Aleš Vaupotič, How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art?




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                                     The author
        Aleš Vaupotič

The author is a literary comparatist, a videoartist, an assistant
professor, the dean of the School of Humanities, and the head of the
Research centre for humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. In
his work, he combines artistic and scholarly approaches. His areas of
research include theory of discourse, theory of new media and theory
of literary realism.

        Email: ales.vaupotic@ung.si




                                      The paper
Date sent: 31/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017



                          How to quote this paper
Vaupotič, Aleš, “How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art? The
Case of Charles Dickens’ Later Novels”, Longing and Belonging/ Désir et
Appartenance, Eds. Massimo Fusillo, Brigitte Le Juez, Beatrice Seligardi,
Between, VII.13 (2017), http://www.betweenjournal.it/



20
Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




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