An addendum: Position of affect/present as mediated affect in Bleak House and Mill on the Floss

As I was writing my contribution to the collab post with Jon and Timothy, I started writing about elements of Cruel Optimism in regards to Bleak House and Mills on the Floss. It wasn't until I finished my thought about these two texts that I realized that it was more of an addendum to the collab post, but still felt really productive and fun to consider the present as mediated affect alongside these two texts who also seem particularly concerned with impasses and extended presents. 

I kind of only stick to Bleak House, but I also see interesting connections in Mill on the Floss with temporality as well, fitting these concerns.

First, Berlant’s question, “when did the present begin?” struck me as very significant within Bleak House and Mill on the Floss, two texts which seem to have interlocutors in their discussions of gender/temporality/climatological change. Both texts seem to have a lot of anxiety about the future and even the past in the ways those temporalities get displaced. Although Berlant is discussing sort of the American contemporary present, I think there’s also a way to suggest a crisis of time situates a lot of interesting temporal forms (very queer temporal forms) that manifest in Bleak House and Mill on the Floss. Both of these texts seem interested in the emergence of the Anthropocene as a condition that in a queer time sort of way is only able to move forward by looking back and yet when it looks back, what happens when there isn’t anything there? That’s the question I raise in these two texts. For example, in Bleak House, for Esther to continue on, at the end of the novel, all of the moments that are supposedly life markers of time passing get constituted as a reproduction or replication of the present. Rather than moving out of her queer kinship space (Bleak House) she shares with Ada and Jarndyce when she marries, she actually simply moves into a new Bleak House, which I call Bleak House 2.0 where everything has been recreated just as before, right down to its members (with the addition of her husband who is more like an ornament than person). Richard, Ada’s husband dies, but even that death gets subsumed in preservation of the present—Ada’s son, named Richard, is born, and though Charley, Esther’s maid, gets married and moves out, her sister comes to be Esther’s maid. And Ada’s/Esther’s queer relationship remains central as it has always been, being “mama” to little Richard.

Bleak House seems frightfully at an impasse, an inability to move forward or perhaps can’t even look forward or want to? and also refuses, very adamantly, to look back. There are two key moments of this in the text. The first is the death of Lady Dedlock, Esther’s mother. Esther finds her mother dead, the chapter closes and the next chapter opens with Esther giving an excuse as to why she has omitted any discussion about her mother’s death; it’s simply, much like an episode: “something mainly forgotten, distorted, and half-remembered” (Berlant 57). A similar episode occurs with the description of Chesney Wold, the sort of physical marker of the aristocracy within the novel. Chesney Wold goes into repose at the end, this sort of living dead space, symbolizing the death and demise of the aristocratic way of life—the past—as industrialization/the Anthropocene takes over. Yet, Chesney Wold is also long forgotten by the members of Bleak House. Although the members of Chesney Wold, particularly Sir Leicester, spend their time fretting over the potential future crumbling of the aristocracy and the need to preserve this way of life, I argue that their fear of the future has already happened, that they’re living in that extended present of the industrial Anthropocene and this impasse is dealt with differently by Chesney Wold (only becoming an episode because it cannot reproduce) and Bleak House 2.0 because it reproduces its queer space and queer kinship structures that are ready-made for that kind of landscape. Thereby positioning the survival of one structure (queer reproduction/replication) and the demise of another (hetero-reproduction). Queer reproduction as a means of maintaining or sustaining an ordinary life at the emergence of the Anthropocene.