Reading Disinterest: Bourdieu, The Chimes, and the Bad Economist
This paper reads Charles Dickens's The Chimes through the lens
of Pierre Bourdieu's study of class ethics and his problematization
of working-class disinterest. Arguing that nineteenth-century British
literature tends to characterize working people as either obsessed by
financial schemes or economically disinterested, it suggests that
Bourdieu's non-dualistic epistemology can change the way we
understand class in literature, and indeed in any discipline that offers
images of working people along the lines of an economic/ethical split.
Bourdieu's way of seeing economic practices in ostensibly
non-economic activity, while seeing in that economic activity a deep
stratum of ethics, rectifies representations or interpretations of class
where a simple working-class pragmatism that capitulates to the economic
alternates with an inherent working-class moral superiority.
Dickens's Christmas story, The Chimes, is interpreted using
Bourdieu's materialist ideas so as to model how other
representations of class can be rethought.
In her closing commentary to the Modern Language Quarterly's
special edition on Pierre Bourdieu, Toril Moi asks, "What is the
use of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture for contemporary
literary criticism? Or in other words: flow can Bourdieu's
sociological method benefit the practice of literary critics?"
(1997, 497). Her answer is not optimistic. Moi believes that because
Bourdieu's methodology, as demonstrated in The Rules of Art (1992),
involves both the collection of massive quantities of data on an author
and the painstaking examinations of all practices that contributed to
the struggle for success, critics of American and British literature
will have "huge problems" writing a Bourdieuian textual
analysis (Moi 1997,497).The problem is not unique to Bourdieu's
ostensible methodology: "huge problems" await each and every
cultural materialist because the 'material' we might study and
work from -- all that goes into the production of a text -- is
interminable. In the spirit of Bourdieu, however, we could respond by
saying that if one dispenses with such hard categories as inductive and
deductive, qualitative and quantitative, or historical and theoretical,
in order to interpret and contextualize a text, some of the inherent
difficulties in developing a sociology of literature can be overcome. In
this essay I argue that Bourdieu's approach to class practices and
distinctions, which is neither purely a priori nor a posteriori, is
valuable for the discussion of the representation of class, and
especially the working classes, for it offers a subtle yet widely
applicable corrective to a great deal of critical literature that
characterizes working people as obsessed by financial schemes on the one
hand, or economically disinterested on the other.
This essay aims to demonstrate that Pierre Bourdieu's study of
working-class cultures, and especially the ambiguity in the semantics of
disinterestedness that notoriously complicates his work, can be read
against this habit of dichotomizing working-class practice along the
lines of short-term pragmatic interests or a disengaged moral
resistance.Though I continue to have difficulties with Bourdieu's
tendency to create a world where nothing is ever done entirely for its
own sake, as distinct from something being done because it has to be
done, I argue that his non-dualistic epistemology can greatly enhance
the study of the ways in which class is represented in literature, and
is indeed relevant to any discipline that considers working people along
the lines of an economic/ethical split. In fact, Bourdieu's way of
seeing economic practices in ostensibly non-economic activity is matched
by an impulse to locate a deep ethical stratum in that economic activity
(for example, as demonstrating pride in the distinguishing features of
one's class culture). Taken together, these elements rectify
interpretations that move between a simple working-class pragmatism
amenable to capitulation to the economic-as-it-is, and an inherent
working-class moral superiority. Bourdieu insists that the signs of
non-capitalist activity are a response to necessity, that they are not
purely driven by extra-economic values, and indeed betray an economic
logic. But Bourdieu's working-class habitus,"an internal law
through which the law of external necessities ... is constantly
exerted," is also "irreducible to immediate constraints,"
for it never operates in the absence of ethical and extra-economic
considerations (1990, 54-55). Bourdieu assumes that only a relational
analysis appreciates the logic of the classes, and that cultural
differentiation based on economic lines can have a political
correlative. He demands, that is, a problematization and
politicalization of disinterest.
I will begin by tracing the ways in which working-class culture has
typically been drawn according to a divide between self-interest and
disinterest. My examples are mostly taken from nineteenth-century and
early twentieth-century British literatures, which reflects my area of
study. I wall then discuss Bourdieu's counterintuitive and
counteractive articulation of working-class economic and non-economic
activity, finally, I will offer a reading of one of Charles
Dickens's Christmas stories, Ihe Chiittes, that identifies elements
of economic logic at work in the ostensible disinterestedness of its
working-class characters. The model of class practices provided by
Bourdieu, I argue, ultimately challenges readers to complicate the story
in constructive ways and allows a cultural materialist hernieneutic to
proceed without massive quantities of historical data.
This essay discusses only historical questions about working class
representation, and not the question of what they were or what they are.
Attempts to plot the development of the working classes upon
extra-economic grids have tended either to project a bifurcated
conception of class or link class to culture with a view to dissolving
the solidarities of the one into the complexities and vagaries of the
other. For that reason. I am interested in understanding the
retrospective construction of fc working-class culture' and its
abstract categorization of 'the working classes'. In this
essay then 'working class' means all that has been subsumed
under the term: popular culture, urban culture, and a cluster of other
historically unspecific concepts that describe historically specific
political, economic, or social practices. In Languages of Class (1983),
Gareth Stcdman Jones argues that notions of class are the effect of
linguistic contexts. In a rather different manner I ask, in what way is
'the working class' an effect of a binary discursive logic?
lwen in the best studies of the working class, such as Jonathan
Rose's, that claim to be deeply or entirely historical, one
nonetheless sees a split characterization of u as either economically
interested or playfully pre-capitalist; such polarizations range across
the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction, conservative and
liberal, and Britain and the Continent, and continue from the nineteenth
century to today. But the ahistorical conception of'the working
class,' as at one moment optimizing potential gains and in the next
presenting a moral challenge to the very idea of utility; is undone by
Bourdieus elision of the moral and economic. The interfusion of motives
we see in the characterization of Bourdieus working classes allows us to
retroactively complicate stereotypes that arguably originate in the
nineteenth century but persist today.
These stereotypes were largely set in motion by the early
sociological accounts of the 'Condition of England1 pioneered by
the hugely influential Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle downplays the economic
activity of his working class because acknowledgement of economic
ambition might have been associated with a comparable political
ambition. Despite the radical and Chartist movements of the 1830s and
l840s. Carlyle presents a working class eager to deny political goals.
His working classes are naturally subservient, only in need of
paternal-organic guidance, and desire only to work for the sake of
working. The working classes, according to Carlylc, need work in order
to fulfill an internal need. This external need is often deprecated:
"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other
blessedness" (2005, 196). John Ruskin would later repeat the idea
that the best of the working class deny economic needs, so that
"with brave people the work is first, and the fee second"
(1903-12, 18:413). Yet at the same time Carlyles working classes are
written as if governed solely by need, poverty being the only
determinant of their aspirations under the shadow of capitalism. Ruskin,
arguing that laborers "have no pleasure in the work by which they
make their bread," can only admit that they "therefore look to
wealth as the only means of pleasure" (1903-12,10:194). Often, the
characterization of the working class depends upon the implied audience.
When the implied audience is the working class -- as if the nonworking
classes (who primarily comprised Carlyle's actual audience) were
schooling the working class -- the emphasis is on work for its own sake.
When the implied audience is the non-working classes, Carlylc rages
against the injustice faced by the working class, how a greedy middle
class and a lazy upper class have forced the working class to revolve
around need. Here he addresses "that question of work and
wages" (1965, 26). The two poles of the contradiction, desire and
necessity, are never brought into negotiation-There is no sense, for
example, that the path towards intrinsic satisfaction, and thus social
peace, might be through extrinsic satisfaction.
In this respect, the major difference between the sociology of
Carlyle and the fiction of his contemporaries is that Carlyle depicts
the working classes conjunctively as both rationalist and disinterested,
although the two practices of working-class life never occur
simultaneously, while in the fiction of the era, for narratological
reasons, authors represent the working classes disjunctively, as either
disinterested or ruthlessly self-interested. The examples are too
numerous and well documented to record at length. Mary hagleton and
David Pierce have characterized the working classes as represented in
middle-class fictions of the 1840s "as the needy, the other nation,
the trouble makers,"both sympathetic and antagonistic (1979, 14).To
express disgust at industrialism and its attendant values, urban working
people are written as abounding with caritas, integrity, and a deep
human goodness incompatible with any economic sensibility, even when
their lives are dominated by necessity. So in Charles Dickens's
Dowbey and Son (1848), for example, the capitalist's gloomy,
life-denying home (the House' of Dombey) is negatively compared to
the "cheerful homes" of working men "and the children who
wait watching for them" (2008, 446) or the vital, life-affirming
working-class home of the'loodles family. Self-interested
working-class villains and the dangerous and profligate cram the pages
of Condition-of-England stories, but for every rogue there is a
domesticated or romanticized member of the people who draws our sympathy
by raising essential humanistic values over economic necessity, despite
poverty7 and industrial hardship. In Hani Times (1854), Dickens
contrasts the self-effacing Stephen Blackpool, who seems to have no
self-interest at all, to the megalomaniac Slackbridge, who has no
ethical standards. And in this novel we are told that "the Good
Samaritan was a Bad Economist'4 (1995, 215). One major variation to
this dichotomy between ethical and economic activity or deserving and
undeserving poor, occurs among authors more closely aligned to political
economy. In Illustrations of Political Uconomy (1832-34), Harriet
Martineau sets a hard-working, economically scrupulous, deserving
working class against a lazy, cheating, undeserving working class. In
Elizabeth Gaskelfs Mary Barton 1848) and North and South (1855),
responsible working-class moderates contrast with insidious union
members. But the central division between an ethical, socially
responsible poor and a self-interested poor who are a symptom of the age
remains intact. Despite the clear differences, as Regenia Ciagnier
argues, middle-class representations of the working classes in the 1840s
are "largely of a piece" insofar as "similarities finally
outweigh the differences" (1991, 103).
Coming relatively lace in a tradition of middle-class writing that
evaluates working-class practices, George Orwell helped naturalize this
polarized view of the working classes. Clearly sympathizing with his
subjects, and in many ways admiring and even imitating them, he
exaggerates a very familiar image of a compartmentalized mind. As often
as not, Orwell's working classes are economically preoccupied, and
understandably so. Their lives of hop-picking or dishwashing, for
example, force upon them a rationalistic. economistic point of view,
where need and money dominate every aspect of their decision making.
Immediate economic struggle means making rational choices and keeping a
constant calculating eye on the use-value of anything or anyone coming
their way. It also means an almost willful ignorance of long-term
economic issues and their political counterparts. But Orwell also
represents working people freed from bourgeois penny-pinching, a truly
hedonistic class oblivious to the money-centered world. Here the working
classes are generous despite their situation, focused on morality and
not money In "Hop-Picking" (1931). Orwell describes migrant
workers constructing their lives in terms of 'reality." of the
probable and not the possible. They become all but preoccupied with
finding pragmatic ways to optimize their advantages, scheming amongst
themselves for small rewards. But he also says that he has "never
seen anything that had exceeded their kindness and delicacy," that
generosity and anti-bourgeois sociability follow from a culture of
traditional living (Orwell 1968, 63-64).' For all the power of
economic imperatives, somehow Orwell's working classes easily step
out of the economic context that appears at other times to dominate
their lives. Orwell may see 'decency' in working-class
pragmatism, but this is not equivalent to Bourdieu's identification
of an ethical basis in economic action; rather, it is an expression of
sympathy for a traditional group of people trapped yet persevering
within a capitalist system from which they rarely or barely benefit.
British working-class culture has in this way been predominantly
historically represented as either bound to necessity and therefore, to
use Max Weber's language, 'formally rational,' or as
fundamentally outside mainstream capitalist society; and thus
Substantively rational/ Weber argues that an action is formally rational
if it is an efficacious means to a premeditated end and is governed
solely by that end. Substantive rationality identifies rationality from
the point of view of an ethical end, which entails ethical means. Most
contemporary critics of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century British
class system do not formulate a divide in working-class culture between
(formal) rationality and spontaneity. But across what is arguably a
still relevant debate between Structuralism and 'Culturalism,'
beneath Perry Andersons 'hard Marxist materialism' and E.
P.Thompson's 'soft Marxist resistance,' run two contrary
images. The first is of the working classes as hard economic agents who
in their contest with necessity capitulate to and are indistinguishable
from the system-as-is. They are here incapable of challenging the world
to which they have to answer. The alternate image sees the working
classes as inherently subversive non-economic 'folk'
expressing dissent through the very marginality of their culture to the
dominant culture, living as if in the realm of freedom. The working
classes, accordingly, are without agency insofar as they are part and
parcel of the world they inhabit, or with agency insofar as they are
unsuccessful in that world and implicitly outside that world. Nowhere in
this bifurcation of the working classes is the possibility that working
people live this very real split tactically (to use Michel de
Certeau's term), simultaneously, or dialectically Accepting the
crossover of practices allows students of the working class to move
beyond the divides between the rational and the non-rational, or between
conscious and unconscious agency.
Against this perennial oscillation is Bourdieu's conception of
the interplay of economic and ethical ends. Alhough his working classes
are not the same working classes as in nineteenth-century England, he
allows us to identify in nonworking-class representations of working
classes what Fredric Jameson calls a strategy of containment.2 I
therefore turn to Bourdieu's emphasis on the underlying economic
characteristics in every field of working-class life. Applying
Bourdieu's non-dualistic epistemology, we can rewrite or
recharacterize representations of the working classes by Carlyle,
Dickens, and Orwell by identifying how codes of honor and loyalty and
modes of pre-capitalist activity are employed to work towards the final
aim of improving or maintaining economic status.
In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu argues that "[e]ven when
they give every appearance of disinterestedness because they escape the
logic of 'economic' interest (in the narrow sense) and are
oriented towards non-material stakes that are not easily quantified, as
in 'pre-capitalist' societies or in the cultural sphere of
capitalist societies, practices never cease to comply with an economic
logic" (1990, 122). He searches among workers and working classes
for signs of "the logic of costs and benefits, including the costs
of transgressing the official norm and the gains in respectability
accruing from respect for the rule" (17). Dickens's Blackpool
can thus be given alternative ambitions "informed by a kind of
objective finality without being consciously organized in relation to an
explicitly constituted end; intelligible and coherent without springing
from an intention of coherence and a deliberate decision; adjusted to
the future without being the product of a project or a plan" (50).
This practical logic is not a finalist or mechanistic economism because
it does not correspond to narrowly understood economic interests, a
profit motive for example, but to general optimizing strategies of which
economic strategies are but one among many. Bourdieu does not envisage a
zombie-like determinism, nor does he reduce materialism to ideological
prescriptions, a materialism cut off from the material word. His concept
of the habitus implies a new materialism," a practical relation to
die world" or "the preoccupied active presence in the world
through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its
things to be done and said, things made to be said, which directly
govern words and deeds" (52). The habitus initiates an internalized
logic that generates and organizes practices or dispositions in a
non-mechanical manner, creating non-mechanical behaviors. But an
economic logic nonetheless intersects with or overdetermines all
non-economic activity, especially the ostensible manifestations of a
pre-capitalist ethos.
In terms of an analysis of class ethnology, Bourdieu is by no means
simply interested in working-class culture. In some ways he confuses the
notion of class by refusing to restrict a conceptualization of it to
relations of production, social origin, income, property, education, or
conditions of existence such as sexual difference or age. Rather, he
looks at "the structure of relations between all the pertinent
properties" and thereby diverges from even the possibility of a
reductive, determinist account of cultural life (1984, 157). As David
Swartz points out, above all Bourdieu "roots human consciousness in
practical social life," making him a materialist who does not rely
on a theoretical economics to interpret class and the distinct cultural
practices of a specific class (1997, I 39). The elite or ruling class
has a distinct cultural capital, one that relates to the particular
properties of that class: the value of status. of display, and of an
aesthetic disposition. It hoards its cultural capital -- a taste for the
avant-garde or the classical, as long as it supports a contemplative
constitution and leisurely indifference to materialism -- because such
capital is capital for that particular class only. Working-class culture
has its own capital. What might appear to the observer as pre-capitalist
(loyalty, honor) is comparable to, if not emerging from, economic
practices. For liourdieu, "every transaction of honour" is
"the expression of a strategy" (1979, 117). This offers a
needed correction to the representation of a pre-rational working-class
culture as represented by both nineteenth-century liberals and
conservatives who, howsoever unconsciously helped justify the lines of
exploitation and the maximization of profit through low wages by
constructing honor or loyalty as goods in themselves. It is also much
more plausible than the hard materialist argument that there cannot be
any pre-capitalist activity under capitalism. Bourdieu's
materialism, however, is in some ways even more far-reaching than the
hardest Marxism in arguing that the code of honor which contradicts
"the spirit of calculation and all its manifestations, such as
avidity and haste, can be seen as so many partial and veiled
formulations of the objective 'intention' of the economy"
(1979, 18).
Bourdieu implies that the working classes have a special
relationship to the habitus:
Though virtue made of necessity can be seen as an
'intention' of the dominant economy, it is equally true that
such activity is the symbolic capital of a working-class economy If
poverty can be converted into symbolic or cultural capital when it is
used to tactical advantage, then it does so primarily for the poor. In
this way Bourdieu seeks to refute the dichotomization of economic and
non-economic forms of capital. Because the working classes do not have
access to the same amount or kind of wealth-producing information as the
non-working classes, to privilege the 'purely' economic would
be to divorce the working class from its habitus, the day-to-day world
in which it negotiates. Always central to Bourdieu's analysis of
the working class is the immediacy of material necessity. Whether it is
to avoid the disapprobation of peers, or to meet necessity in a more
immediate manner by developing a taste for particular types of food, or
to be the most loyal or honorable, the working class is seen to work
within the logic of its own economic practices, economic practices which
are also remotely shaped by dominating economic practices. A ritual
exchange between members of the working class, even though it may well
be "totally foreign to the spirit of calculation." nonetheless
"never steps outside the most strict calculation" because the
alternative spirit works within the unconscious framework of necessity
(1979, 18). As Carolyn Betensky suggests:
However, Bourdicu does not imagine a world where the working
classes cannot challenge die received culture, which is also in its way
materialist. Making good for the working classes is different from
making good for other classes, lor Bourdieu, working-class economic
rationality is never isolated from the field of ethics. He insists that
working-class "calculation is in the service of the sense of equity
and is absolutely opposed to the spirit of calculation which, relying on
the quantitative evaluation of profit, abolishes the hazardous and (at
least apparently) disinterested approximations of a code of generosity
and honor'' (1979, 18). Drawing on I Iusserl and the
phenomeno-logical tradition, he argues that "working-class people
expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only that of a
sign, and their judgments make reference, often explicitly to the norms
of morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their
appreciation always has an ethical basis" (1984. 5). Just as his
representation of disinterestedness consistently falls back on an
economic strategy his representation of working-class economic
rationality returns again and again to a concept of what is right and
wrong according to an unconscious loyalty to cultural solidarity, itself
crystallized by an opposition to the cultural solidarity of other
classes. Bourdieu emphasizes that the 'culture of necessity'
preferred by but also determined for, the working classes functions as a
critique of the aesthetic of the dominant class. This provides a
necessary corrective to the construction of a working-class economic
rationality that only sets its sights on short-term survival, and
responds to necessity by merely adopting the practices of the dominant
class.The relational terms of the social field as a whole, and the
differences in the cognitive, moral, economic, bodily linguistic, and
perceptual schemes that characterize die diverse groups within it,
almost guarantee an ethical dimension (and therefore dissent) in
working-class economic rationality. That working classes desire to
maintain their difference because of an inability to distinguish formal
economic rationality from moral reasoning might whittle away the idea of
their agency, but it also positions working people as a much stronger
critical force than the middle and upper classes:
Having said this, Bourdieu has been accused of perpetuating the
myth of homo economicus, and all his classes are in fact uniformly
guided by the specter of a market system. Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocyba,
and Bernd Schwibs find that according to Bourdieu, individuals are
conspicuously identical as "unconscious bearers of interest
calculation," a uniformity which suggests that Bourdieu js
methodology is by no means entirely governed by a strict sociological or
historical analysis of raw data (1986, 42). Bourdieu may protest that
the habitus "is durable but not eternal," and that it is Han
open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to
experiences" (1992,133); but in Distinction (1984), Algeria 1960
(1979), and The Logic of Practice he presents a picture of working-class
practices that remain constant despite geographical and temporal
differences. The people of Kabylia in North Africa, whom he examines in
Vie Logic of Practice and Algeria 1960, have the same class
distinctions, logic, habitus, and relation to the governing historical
context as the French classes discussed in Distinction. Honor and
loyalty act identically despite historical conditioning and whether one
is a landless peasant, a casual laborer, a dockworker, a journeyman, a
farm worker, or unemployed. As Jeremy Lane suggests:
This is in part why Terry Eagleton questions whether there is room
in Bourdieu's social analyses for any kind or degree of
"dissent, criticism and opposition" (1992, 114).
However, if it is true that classes naturalize their understanding
of themselves in history and treat their idea of the world as
self-evident and absolute, according to Bourdieu they can nonetheless
alter their views and convert doxa into heterodoxy in periods of social
crises and through cross-cultural contact. As Robert Hokon argues,
Bourdieu's "concern with the dynamics of cultural struggle and
historical change" emphasizes "a constant destahi-lization and
a constant modification of common sense" (2000, 93). This is where
differences are discernible between his various accounts of the working
classes, even if they all, despite an often scrupulous attention to
detail, seem to share the same mechanisms for economic or ethical
action. Notwithstanding this limitation, the point here is that Bourdieu
attempts to transcend the subjcctivist/objectivist dichotomy wherein the
subject is either free to negotiate the social world with his or her
practical consciousness alert and operative (subjectivist), or is
condemned to reflect the social world and be governed by social
relations of production (objectivist). He attempts to widen the space
between "an objectivist vision that subjects freedoms and wills to
an external, mechanical determinism or an internal, intellectual
determimsm" on the one hand, and on the other "a subjectivist,
finalist vision that substitutes the future ends of the project and of
intentional action, or, to put it another way the expectation of future
profits, for the antecedents of causal explanation" (Bourdieu 1990,
46).
Challenging the demarcation between objectivist and subjectivist
approaches can also be extremely useful when it comes to discussing
authorship, the production of literary texts, and their historical
location. But the argument of this paper is much less ambitious. I will
focus on Dickens's The Chimes (1844), the Christmas story Dickens
wrote the year following A Christmas Carol (1843), but one that is
especially relevant to my discussion here as it was written in response
to what he saw as the economism (or Malthusianism) underlying a review
of A Christmas Carol. In the June 1844 Westminister Review, a critic
asked. "Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob
Cratchit might get them -- for, unless there were turkeys and punch in
surplus, someone must go without." In The CHmm, Mr. Filer scolds
Toby Veck for eating tripe, "the least economical ... article of
consumption," by saying, "You snatch your tripe ... out of the
mouths of widows and orphans" (1988, 100, 101). The story is also
ripe for a Bourdieuian analysis precisely because it seems to make the
point that economics plays little to no role in the lives of the
honorable or worthy poor. As Michael Slater has argued. Dickens in this
way follows Thomas Carlyle, who says in Past and Present^Wt have
profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole
relation of human beings" (2005, 149).3 For Dickens and Carlyle,
deeply concerned over the gross commodification of post-Romantic
England, it is primarily the working classes who remember that humans
are something other or more than optimizing, rational agents of the
economy. In The Chimes, at least, working-class culture would actively
reject Benthamite theorizing, while the middle-and upper-class
individuals in the story, such as Filer, have an exaggerated
supply-and-demand view of human relationships.
Dickens's Christmas stories, alongside Hard Times and Domhey
and Sony are often celebrated for their satirical vilification of the
exclusive preoccupation with the economic. Dickens tends to attack
economism by sentimentalizing the poor or powerless as victims of
middle-or upper-class greed. In doing so, he often minimizes or even
erases not the economic needs of the poor but their own desire to
satisfy those economic needs. I have spelt out the frequency of this
narrative trajectory above, and in its representation of a moral poor,
The Chimes follows suit. However, with Bourdieu's dedichotomizing
of the economic and ethical, and with a refusal of such permanent
categories as inductive and deductive or historical and theoretical,
readers of Dickens' work, and of The Chimes in particular, can
begin to generate alternate, materialist readings implicit in this type
of narrative, without necessarily accessing overwhelming quantities of
data on all the possible material conditions involved in the production
of his texts.
The Chimes is mostly about Toby or "Trotty" Veck, an
aging ticket porter who, after being bombarded by the newspapers and the
economically-centered middle and upper classes that the working classes
must be innately 'bad,' begins to despair at the sound of
Church bells, and to lose the hope that they once represented for him.
After telling him that he died falling from the bell tower, the spirits
of the bells and their goblins bring Toby on a tour of the world, only
to have him waken to a renewed faith that working people and the poor
are not naturally inclined to wickedness. The similarity to A Christmas
Carol is clear: as with Ebenezer Scrooge, Toby learns to celebrate the
spirit of the season, which in both stories is a spirit of unalloyed
goodness and generosity that ought to be the guiding principle all year
long. But The Chimes is often considered a more political story than A
Christmas Carol The main difference, as Sally Ledger has pointed out, is
that the economically-preoccupied middle and upper classes never adjust
their attitude toward working people, and the story ends with the
classes socially, politically, and ideologically divided (2007, 129),
Toby is poor despite having worked diligently his whole life.
Money, however, does not seem valuable to him for its purchasing power;
rather, Toby sees money in a symbolically different way, as proof of his
value to society: "A weak, small, spare old man, he was a very
Hercules, this Toby, in his good intentions. He loved to earn his money.
He delighted to believe -- Toby was very poor, and couldn't well
afford to part with a delight -- that he was worth his salt" (1988,
90). He loves money, that is, not for its crass worth, but as a sign of
his participation in and value to the community. Bourdieu would see Toby
as making a virtue of necessity, accepting the necessary, and
accumulating symbolic capital so as to increase his prestige in the
habitus; Toby wants money to signify that he is still a provider. A code
of integrity and honest, hard work defines Toby, as well as all the
other members of the working class Dickens introduces, and such
characterization tends to minimize or elide their economic or pragmatic
interests. Later, Toby is seen looking uall round the street -- in case
anybody should be beckoning from any door or window for a porter"
(97). This suggests that Toby cannot but help think in terms of economic
opportunities, but he sees only Meg, his daughter, who has brought him
the tripe. A reminder thatloby needs work (for whatever reason) becomes
an opportunity to show that this symbolically charged food provides all
the fulfillment he needs, both spiritually and bodily, until the
economically minded Hler robs him of the satisfaction. Meanwhile, Meg is
to be married to Richard, a blacksmith, who like Toby seems to work more
for his sense of identity and community than for his pocketbook. Again
like lbby he proudly displays his work on his body:4 Richard has a
"face as glowing as the iron on which his stout sledge-hammer daily
rung. A handsome, well-made, powerful youngster he was; with eyes that
sparkled like the red-hot droppings from a furnace fire" (99).
Pride in one's work and in having work provides symbolic capital
within the community: Richard is what he does, and Meg is consequently
proud to show off her fiance. Elsewhere, the unemployed William hern
claims that, "'Tor myself, master, I never took with that
hand' -- holding it before him -- 'what wasn't my own;
and never held it back from work, however hard, or poorly paid. Whoever
can deny it, let him chop it off! ... There's others like me.You
might tell' em off by hundreds and by thousands, sooner than by
ones'" (117). Like the working-class men in Elizabeth
Gaskell's Mary Barton, he compliments his desire for honest work by
taking care of orphaned children. Bourdieu would see Will as searching
for a chance to maintain his social position in the community despite
his loss of stature. Pursued by unjust laws and crude utilitarians, and
despite the hardship he can barely endure, Wills primary goal seems to
be to demonstrate his unflinching humanity to others in the community
and his devotion to effort. As with Bourdieu s working classes, the
working classes in 'Hie Chimes could be said to use their culture
in order to censure the narrowly economic practices and preoccupations
of the other classes. But such attitudes do not negate the possibility
of a more complicated working-class logic operating within a framework
of necessity and the making of virtues out of necessity. A Bourdieuian
analysis would emphasize that expressions of loyalty to one's class
and to the intrinsic values of work, or any other manifestation of a
precapitalist ethos, have a final aim of improving one's status in
the group.
Against what are positioned as the morally sound and ostensibly
disinterested practices of working people in lite Chimes are the
economically obsessed middle and upper classes. In addition to Mr.
Filer's objection to tripe is his hostility towards working-class
marriage. Satirizing Malthusian logic and theories of population control
Dickens has Filet mock Meg for her desire to marry Richard because
marriage for "these people" reflects "the ignorance of
the first principles of political economy" (1988, 103). Filer sees
working-class marriage as bad economics, and evidence of "their
improvidence: their wickedness" (103). Later, Sir Joseph Bowley,
practicing a patently false paternalism, says,"We should feel that
every return of so eventful a period in human transactions, involves
matter of deep moment between a man and his--and his banker" (110).
By enforcing a hard juxtaposition between economically preoccupied upper
classes and morally vested working classes, Dickens seems to imply that
to think economically is itself'bad.' As the story progresses,
and until the arrival of the spirits, Toby begins to accept the position
that the working classes are 'bad,' partly because they do not
think in terms of a cash-nexus and utility -- but of course the story
encourages us to see that this is his mistake.
Dickens wants readers to understand and to be as outraged as he is
himself, not so much by the injustice of Toby's poverty as by the
corruption of his positive outlook. But Dickens, it seems, can establish
Toby as the worthy poor only by insisting on his innate economic
disinterestedness, which is part and parcel of that positive outlook.
Toby is represented as decent and natural in proportion to his inability
to calculate: "as the functions of Toby's body, his digestive
organs for example, did of their own cunning, and by a great many
operations of which he was all together ignorant, and the knowledge of
which would have astonished him very much, arrive at a certain end; so
his mental faculties" (1988, 91). This suggests an opportune moment
to employ some of Bourdieu's a posteriori arguments to tease out
the class politics of the story and correct the correlation Dickens
assumes between working-class economic disinterest and morality Bourdieu
represents resistance to capitalist rationalism as a
'being-in-the-present' that starkly contrasts with the
calculating rationality and euphemizing formality of the other classes.
Toby's disinterest confirms this 'being-in-the-present'
and acts as a criticism of the dominating ethos of the dominant class.
But Bourdieu's strategy for analysis could remind readers that a
deep ethical stratum, which offers moral resistance to the
economic-as-is by demonstrating that human relations are not absolutely
subordinate to economic ones, can still be maintained when pragmatically
based interests generate such oppositional ethics. The ostensible
economic/ethical division, with the working classes seen as
disinterested and thus moral and the middle and upper classes
represented as economically preoccupied and thus immoral, is problematic
in that it entirely depoliticizes the working classes and denies any
degree of working-class self-reliance. Without such an autonomy some
group other than working people is required to ensure working-class
economic interests, a paternalist creed that is itself ridiculed in the
story through the figure of Bowley.Toby is undoubtedly marked by honor
and loyalty lie assists Will Fern so that Will can avoid arrest even
though, as a messenger, he would likely lose clients by doing so. But
this act need not be considered as wholly 'disinterested.'
Given that Dickens is so careful to define class relationally if not
antagonistically, we have to ask what costs would be associated with
Toby's rejection of working-class moral codes. Again, Toby need not
be seen as calculating or planning a deliberate "explicitly
constituted end," but he can be understood as employing general
strategies to assert his place in the community he identifies with
(Bourdieu 1990, 50). Rejecting the "spurious choice between purely
material, narrowly economic interest, and disinterestedness" (290)
enables an interpretation that allows for alternatives to the
characterization of working people as entirely content with the
intrinsic satisfaction provided by work and working-class culture, as if
culture could be neatly and completely severed from economics.
Even a partial application of Bourdieuian analysis has another
hernieneutical benefit here. Michael Slater sees Dickens promulgating a
"key to the solution" of class conflict that "lay in the
spreading of mutual understanding and sympathy between the classes"
(1970, 508). This is a common reading of Dickens and The Chimes, and
reflects a longstanding tradition of critical understanding of the story
and Dickens's politics. Many years earlier, John Forster, also
writing about The Chimes, insists that Dickens "never ceased to
think as odious [the attempt to set class against class] as he thought
it righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the
other" (1928, 348). The last line of the story confirms this most
characteristically Dickensian sentiment, a pica to "endeavor to
correct, soften, and improve" wherever possible the "stern
realties" of the poor (1988, 159). But as Michael Sheldon writes:
But as Sheldon cautions, while "[i]t is easy to make this
judgment, ... there is much more behind Dickens's social criticism
than a general feeling that society has failed to treat the poor with
common decency" (Sheldon 1982, 330). A Bourdieuian analysis would
indeed problematize the story by stressing a relational definition of
class character, where the classes define themselves against other
classes. With this focus. The Chimes is anything but a call to
kindliness or sympathy. The story presents two culturally differentiated
classes that are never reconciled: they speak different languages,
appreciate different food (although Filer ends up eating Toby's
tripe), and have opposed understandings of what is of basic value.
Remarkably, and unlike much of Dickens's other narratives, the
'happy ending' of the story sees only members of the working
classes come together to celebrate the New Year and the hope it
represents. The class character of the upper and middle classes remains
foreign and antagonistic to Toby and the other working-class characters.
The power of the story comes from Dickens's stark refusal of the
conversion narrative so often central to Christmas stories, and not only
those by Dickens. The classes remain loyal to themselves only, and
therefore ideologically opposed. In fact, at the close of the story Toby
regains his composure by rejecting the voices of the other classes and
their definition of the working classes. The story's resolution,
then, lies in symbolic difference, rather than in ideological
reconciliation. A Bourdieuian analysis emphasizes that the solidarity of
the working class in regard to a set of self-generated cultural norms is
directly opposed to the cultural uniformity of the other classes, making
Hie Chimes in this way a radical argument for working-class
consciousness, culture, and self-reliance. What might be read as
ostensibly disinterested or extra-economic activities would instead be
seen as symbolic self-representation, and thus as pointing to political
subtexts behind what appear as purely moralistic acts.
However, a more conflictual reading of the story, centering on the
internalization of economic ideology, emerges if we read Toby as
discarding the abstract logic of economic rationality for
unquantifiable, non-material benefits that nonetheless comply with an
embodied economic logic. As well as establishing the practical value of
apparently disinterested acts, Bourdieu's way of identifying
economic activity in what appears to be non-economic or even
anti-economic helps to complicate The Chimes, and brings to the fore the
ways in which middle-class logic is internalized. In following their
codes of working-class honor, which appear to stand outside of economic
calculation, both Toby and Will Fern participate in the
'intention' of the economy, pursuing its requirement for
diligence and productivity. Toby and Will have no "spirit of
calculation," (Bourdicu 1979, 18) yet their devotion to work for
its own sake has economic implications beneficial to the
eco-nomic-as-is, which is a separate matter from their wresting symbolic
capital from that code of honor. Instead of seeing The Chimes, then, as
a story that pits moral disinterestedness against immoral economics, it
can be seen as a story that narrates the modern entwinement of the
economic and the ethical, and the necessity of negotiating the influence
of the outside world on working-class identity.
Bourdieu's analysis of how the world imposes its presence on
class identity enhances Dickens's explicit critique of the way in
which the dominant culture, via newspapers, political rhetoric, and the
language of political economy, would impose its presence on Toby -- for
example, by making Toby think that all working-class people are
"born bad" (1988, 122). After his encounter with Filer,
Alderman Cute (who believes the poor are all criminals and must be
summarily "'put down'5), and the conservative
"red-faced gentleman" "lbby echoes the thoughts of all
three: "'Put 'em down, Put'em down! Facts and
Figures, Facts and Figures! Good old Times, Good old Times! Put 'em
down, Put 'em down!' -- his trot went to that measure, and
would fit itself to nothing else" (1988, 108). Toby then, begins to
be convinced that the working classes must be essentially
"bad." The process of internalizing anti-working-class
prescriptions is even more pronounced in his encounter with Sir Joseph
Bowleg who says:
Although Bowley has an image of working-class culture that does not
match the working classes in the story (indeed, Bowley insists the
working class must begin to do what it already does), he would construct
the working classes to suit his own interests and ego.
In The Chimes, the working classes repeatedly face the danger of
having their identities scripted by external groups. Later, Bowley uses
the explicit language of indoctrination: "1 do my duty as the Poor
Mans Friend and Father; and I endeavor to educate his mind, by
inculcating on all occasions the one great moral lesson which that class
requires. That is, entire Dependence on myself. They have no business
whatever with -- with themselves" (1988, 111). As I have argued,
Toby eventually learns to refuse middle-class ideologies that would
convert the character and desires of working people. The. spirits
eventually divest Toby of such external threats by reminding him that
the "voice of lime ... cries to man, Advance," (Dickens 1988,
128) articulating one of Dickens's central beliefs that
England's future could not be modeled on a nostalgic vision of the
past. This can be read in terms of middle-class ideologies of progress,
but it conies closer to revolutionary discourse when 'Toby realizes
"that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there
is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or
oppress us will be swept away like leaves ... I know that we must trust
and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one
another" (156).
While Toby and his working-class circle betray a dimension of
economic reasoning in their ostensibly non-economic activities, as a
Bourdieuian analysis would insist upon, this process also involves the
threat of internalizing and naturalizing capitalist habits of mind. The
working class in Dickens's story seeks to find ways to escape or
defy the laws of the market. But if it is seen as having naturalized an
economic logic within its own terms, it is also threatened by the
internalization of middle-class ideology, lending the story a more
conflictual and antagonistic meaning. It may not have been
Dickens's intention to illustrate any degree of economic
determinism, nor to imply that working classes might be simultaneously
moral and economic. Yet a Bourdieuian analysis nonetheless helps
excavate what lies buried in the text, suggesting that The Chimes is
anything but a sentimental, 'Christmas-all-year-round' story
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Notes
(1.) Re-reading Orwell's "Hop-Picking" from Down and
Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) in
light of Bourdieus habitus results in a complete re-evaluation of
Orwell's sociology. For example, the camaraderie that Orwell
celebrates in all these texts becomes much more than an example of
Orwell's masculinist nostalgia for static social roles. Consider
Bourdieus description of the French working classes: "the desire to
distinguish oneself, to stand apart, [is] a way of challenging others
and crushing them. The demand for conformity can thus he understood
within the logic of honor: to stand apart from others, especially by gra
tuitous and ostentatious novelty, is to throw down a challenge to the
group and its point of honor" (1984, 19). Bourdieus discussion of
the observer and participant in sociological studies also complicates
Orwell's social exploring. A full-length study of their similar
projects but hugely different findings might illuminate our understand
ing of both Orwell and Bourdieu.
(2.) Jameson defines a strategy of containment as an intellectual
or narcological frame that "allows what can be thought to seem
internally coherent in its own terms, while repressing the unthinkable
... which lies beyond its boundaries" (1981, 53).
(3.) Dickens in fact sought Carlyle's 'approval'
before taking the story to publica tion (Goldberg 1972, 62).
(4.) A ticket-porter would wear a badge, or'ticket,' to
show he was licensed by the city to carry messages or goods.
Rob Breton is Associate Professor of English at Ni pissing
University, Canada. His hook, Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in
Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell, is published by University of Toronto
Press.
The fundamental proposition that the habitus is a virtue made of
necessity is never more clearly illustrated than in the case of the
working classes, since necessity includes for them all that is usually
meant by the word, that is, an inescapable deprivation of necessary
goods. Necessity imposes a taste for necessity, which implies a form
of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of the necessary, a
esignation to the inevitable. (Bourdieu 1984,372)
Generally, for Bourdieu, the term 'symbolic capital' designates what
is considered (in a given cultural context) to be honor or prestige,
systematically misrecognized as economically disinterested ... it is
by definition convertible into material 'economic' (in the most common
sense of the term) capital, and his symbolic capitalist necessarily
akes good in some extra symbolic way (2000,208)
[J]ust as the Algerian sub-proletariat had been judged incapable of
constructing a rational political project for the future and the
Kabyles incapable of achieving objective distance on their own
social-cultural practices, so the working class were taken to inhabit
a realm of doxa, a kind of pre-reflexive immanence or absolute
immediacy which prevented them from ever achieving the reflexive
distance necessary to construct a genuine artefact. 2000, 163)
The basic message of 'The Chimes seems very straightforward and
uncomplicated, close to the simple call for kindness that Dickens
makes so effectively in A Christmas Carol Speaking in plain terms,
the laborer Will Fern spells out the message to members of the upper
classes assembled before him on the estate of his employer, Sir
Joseph Bowley.... Will pleads with his audience to 'Give us, in mercy,
better homes when we're a lying in our cradles; give us better food
when we're a working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us
back when we're a going wrong; and don't set Jail, Jail, Jail, afore
us, everywhere we turn.'To some critics this speech represents the
extent of Dickens's view of reform in the story, and therefore
they dismiss it as too general and too simplistic. (Sheldon 1982,
330)
'Now, the design of your creation is -- not that you should swill, and
guzzle, and associate your enjoyments, brutally, with food;' "Toby
thought remorsefully of the tripe; 'but that you should feel the
Dignity of Labour. Go forth erect into the cheerful morning air,
and -- and stop there. Live hard and temperately, be respectful,
exercise your self-denial, bring up your family on next to nothing,
pay your rent as regularly as the clock strikes, [and] be punctual
in your dealings: (Dickens 1988, 111)