Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism

By Jacob Emery

According to Marx, the family is the primal scene of the division of labor and the "germ" of every exploitative practice. In this insightful study, Jacob Emery examines the Soviet Union's programmatic effort to institute a global siblinghood of the proletariat, revealing how alternative kinships motivate different economic relations and make possible other artistic forms. A time in which literary fiction was continuous with the social fictions that organize the social economy, the early Soviet period magnifies the interaction between the literary imagination and the reproduction of labor onto a historical scale. Narratives dating back to the ancient world feature scenes in which a child looks into a mirror and sees someone else reflected there, typically a parent. In such scenes, two definitions of the aesthetic coincide: art as a fantastic space that shows an alternate reality and art as a mirror that reflects the world as it is. In early Soviet literature, mirror scenes illuminate the intersection of imagination and economy, yielding new relations destined to replace biological kinship—relations based in food, language, or spirit. These metaphorical kinships have explanatory force far beyond their context, providing a vantage point onto, for example, the Gothic literature of the early United States and the science fiction discourses of the postwar period. Alternative Kinships will appeal to scholars of Russian literature, comparative literature, and literary theory, as well as those interested in reconciling formalist and materialist approaches to culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781609092108

Book preview

Alternative Kinships

ECONOMY AND FAMILY IN RUSSIAN MODERNISM

Jacob Emery

NIU Press

DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17           1  2  3  4  5

978-0-87580-751-5 (paper)

978-1-60909-210-8 (e-book)

Cover design by Yuni Dorr

Composed by BookComp, Inc.

Part of chapter 1 was originally published as "Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg," in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008). Reprinted with the permission of the Modern Language Association of America.

Part of chapter 4 was originally published as The Land of Milk and Money: Communal Kitchens and Collactaneous Kinship in the Soviet 1920s, in (M)otherhood as Allegory, edited Lisa Bernstein and Pamela Goco (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2009). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Emery, Jacob, 1977– author.

Title: Alternative kinships : economy and family in Russian modernism / Jacob Emery.

Description: DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015947 (print) | LCCN 2017010718 (ebook) | ISBN 9780875807515 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781609092108 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families in literature. | Kinship in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—Russia—History—20th century. | Modernism (Literature)—Soviet Union. | Bely, Andrey, 1880–1934. Peterburg.

Classification: LCC PG3020.5.F34 E64 2017 (print) | LCC PG3020.5.F34 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/355—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015947

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One: A Universe Akin

Chapter Two: A World of Mirrors

Chapter Three: Haunted Households

Chapter Four: The Land of Milk and Money

Afterword: Stock Exchanges

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

FAMILIAR FICTIONS

My interest in kinship grew out of an interest in literary form, especially how narratives represent themselves to the reader. One time-honored device of this kind is the mirror, which inherently stresses issues of representation and mimesis. In Nabokov’s 1925 short story Guide to Berlin, the narrator looks into a pub mirror and sees in it the same thing that the barkeeper’s child sees from an adjoining room: the blue-gray cigar smoke . . . and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap.¹ The narrator imagines he has glimpsed somebody’s future recollection, since the boy will treasure this scene in his memory in years to come. Here lies the sense of literary creation, the narrator declaims, to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times.² A scene like one this provides a metaphorical image of the larger text and functions, in Lucien Dällenbach’s words, to give the work a strong structure, to underpin its meaning, to provide a kind of internal dialogue and a means whereby the work can interpret itself.³ All the story’s major themes are staged in the mirror’s compact frame: aesthetic play with perspective, literary art as a bequest to the future, and how an imaginative Russian émigré makes a boring, foreign city, and expensive to live in, into a world of fascination and a lasting monument to himself.⁴ Often a metaphor for realism’s claims to faithfully reflect reality—a novel is a mirror you take for a walk down the road, writes Stendhal—the mirror can also figure art’s function to delude and to delight.⁵

The climax of Nabokov’s story belongs to a wide class of mirror scenes that is central to this book, scenes in which distinct characters are identified with one another through the mediation of a reflective surface.⁶ Often, as here, such scenes are accompanied by a more or less explicit statement about how art differs from ordinary experience, making clear that the mirror’s capacity to produce an unexpected image is a metaphor for art’s capacity to depart from reality. Indeed, the trick of perspective by which the mirror identifies the two people looking into it dramatizes the same but different mechanism of metaphor itself.⁷ The Russian symbolist Andrei Bely called the paradoxical A = B identity of metaphor the essential building block of imaginative worlds; the same claim has been made by Western critics like Northrop Frye, who argues that, when it comes to fiction, the formula ‘A is B’ may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even ‘black is white,’ which a reader has any right to quarrel with.⁸ This attitude assumes a radical difference between the real world, in which things are identical only with themselves, and the fantastic possibilities of art, in which anything can be made metaphorically identical with anything else. By exploiting these contingent identities, the smoke and mirrors of Nabokov’s story appear to humanize, even transfigure, the lonely and humdrum world of the narrator.⁹

In practice, however—in Bely’s fiction as in Nabokov’s, in Gustave Flaubert and in William Shakespeare, in mass as in canonical literature—the relationships articulated in mirrors tend to map onto family structure. Literary mirrors most commonly identify parents and children, and especially fathers and sons. The phenomenon we have just read as a declaration of fiction’s independence from the world seems from this point of view to be overdetermined by family relationships, which entail equivalences that are fundamental to the social economy: the exchange of generations and the inheritance of capital. The conservatism of everyday life secures for children the social positions and functions of their parents, wrote Aleksandr Bogdanov shortly before the Russian Revolution, and develops the activities of a child in the image of his father or mother.¹⁰ With this in mind, specular substitutions involving parents and children can be seen to express underlying economic relations of substitutability.¹¹ Echoing ideologies of kinship identity and mechanisms of inherited class, they demand critical approaches that correlate economic structures and literary forms, like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s effort to formulate a new science capable of analyzing homologies between kinship, language, and economics.¹² Marxist criticism especially has been invested in explaining cultural texts as projections of the economic and historical conditions in which they are produced.¹³

From this point of view, Nabokov’s triangulation of narrator, father, and son in the barroom mirror no longer symbolizes art’s redemptive break with reality. The story is now an impoverished exile’s fantasy of participating in a world where he is only a paying customer, exchanging money for the alcohol or artistic vision that will distort his perspective so that he can feel, at least for a moment, at home in the bar and in Berlin. Although he uses the mirror to insert himself into the relationship between the father serving drinks in the bar and the child drinking soup in the next room, that relationship is fundamentally one of the domestic economy from which he is excluded. In fact, the metaphorical exchange performed by the mirror is implicated in a series of material exchanges, most obviously and literally the financial transaction whereby the beer sold in the public house pays for the child’s dinner in the adjoining private room. This exchange makes legible a contrast between the disenfranchised exile whose intoxication subsidizes the publican’s family and the soup-drinking son for whom the industrious bartender lays in a more lasting inheritance. The narrator’s previous claim that the kindly mirror of art is made for our great-grandchildren, for posterity, now appears as a part of this effort to insert himself into a more literal lineage by way of the poetic imagination.¹⁴ On this reading, the future that the narrator imagines as an audience for his art is actually social class perpetuated over generations. And the rows of emerald-glittering empty bottles, collected from taverns, previously described in a meditation on various kinds of work I observe from the crammed tram, appear in retrospect to establish the theme of the attractive but empty play of light on glass, which the alcohol- or art-besotted narrator takes to ennoble his poor existence—the profit of the exercise accumulating in the pockets of the German bartender, that sober family man.¹⁵

Although these two brief readings of Guide to Berlin are in tension, they are not actually contradictory and might even be made to speak to each other. For example, the fantasy of art’s power to transform the world can be read as a powerful reflex against poverty and marginalization.¹⁶ For the moment, however, I would like only to stress how the mirror that identifies two distinct characters seems to open up two distinct readings, associated with distinct and frequently opposed approaches to aesthetic texts. On one hand, the specular identification performs for the reader the transfiguring power of art and requires a formalist reading that treats the artwork as a contingent world, constructed out of poetic metaphors specific to the text in question. On the other hand, that same metaphorical identification reiterates fundamental structures in the social economy and requires the reader to consider the artwork as expressing economic and material phenomena.

The major argument of this book is that the widespread trope of specular misprision, by manifesting aesthetic estrangement and social overdetermination in a single image, makes visible a level of organization on which these two critical perspectives complement each other. Specular misprision is an example of literature’s narcissism, since it reflects within the frame of a metafictional image how an imaginary world is spun out of verbal figures; at the same time, the trope alludes to its economic context by representing family relations, an institution that, Karl Marx writes, "contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society."¹⁷ In this fashion, the metafictional self-absorption that seems most radically to isolate fiction from social reality can also figure the organization of economic life. By engineering the metaphorical exchange of parents and children—an exchange basic to the social economy as well as the figurative structure of many literary texts—scenes of specular misprision present a pivot point between the social and the artistic imagination.

The interpenetration of these two spheres is uniquely urgent in early Soviet Russia, in which an efflorescence of experimental art and formalist theory coincided with a programmatic effort to reshape both cultural life and family structure. The primal scene of division of labor, of the power of men over women and the old over the young, the family is for Marx himself the germ of every exploitative practice; as the environment in which children are educated and socialized, it is the incubator of every ideology.¹⁸ Fiction’s preoccupation with family relations began long before Marx, of course. To say nothing of Oedipus or Abraham, nineteenth-century Russian fiction is studded with titles like Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 Fathers and Sons and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s 1880 Golovlyov Family. Specular misprision too has a distinguished history in the Russian tradition. Its two most famous family novels—Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 The Brothers Karamazov, which represent the canonical family plots of adultery and parricide respectively—both exploit identification in mirrors as a structural device. In Anna Karenina, the Anna-Kitty-Vronsky triangle, which sets up the motif of sexual betrayal and the major device of parallel plots, is first revealed to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face, which articulates her attraction to Vronsky as well as her identification with her rival.¹⁹ The death and morality theme too is voiced through the specular identification of Levin and his tubercular brother, whose decrepitude Levin learns to discern in his own reflection.²⁰ In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri sneaks onto his father’s property to claim an inheritance some time after assaulting him in a mirror-lined room. He watches through the window as the old man examines his bruised countenance in one of those same mirrors. As Dmitri thinks to himself, He’s alone, Karamazov suddenly turns from the looking glass to the window, forcing the son, who is spying from the yard over Karamazov’s shoulder, to shrink away into the shadows.²¹ The window framing the son’s face is clearly compared to the mirror framing the father’s face, and Karamazov’s start from the mirror to the window even implies that he has glimpsed his son’s reflection alongside his own (though he may have mistaken it for Grushenka, the woman they both desire). To the extent that the sensualist father and the sensualist son are identified by the mirror and the book as a single self-destructive force, in competition over the same woman and laying claim to the same money, it is a more profound question than Dmitri understands to ask whether his father is at this moment alone.

The family dynamics of both these novels become important subtexts for Bely’s Petersburg, the focus of this book’s first two chapters. However, my aim in this study is not so much to provide a descriptive account of kinship themes in the history of Russian fiction as to focus on the special case of Russian modernism in order to make a theoretical argument about kinship structure and literary language. Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s use of specular identification, masterful as it is, is essentially of a kind with kinship tropes in nineteenth-century European fiction more generally; these texts exemplify the prominent role of family relations in figurative and plot structures, but without providing a special vantage point on the problem.²² Russian modernism articulates the pivot between aesthetic and social structure in a unique way because the artistic experiments of the early twentieth century coincided there with a conscious and programmatic policy effort to reshape kinship structures. Friedrich Engels prophesied that the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.²³ When the Bolsheviks took power, they expended considerable energy on alternatives to genealogical kinship as the organizing principle of reproduction of labor and access to social privilege. Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution states the radical goal that a united and rationally organized humanity would reject the dark laws of heredity entirely and create a higher, social biologic type through new reproductive technologies.²⁴

That Trotsky’s fantasies come in a book of literary criticism suggests that we are dealing with a historical moment in which literature and kinship are conceptually interdependent. Some texts of nineteenth-century Russian literature consider alternatives to the bourgeois family (most influentially, the love triangles and utopian communities of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1862 What Is to Be Done?) or foregrounded legal fictions of kinship (Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk District, in which an illegitimate child’s inheritance plays an important plot role). But in the early Soviet context, literary conceits are actually continuous with the figurative thinking informing contemporary policy. When a character in Yuri Olesha’s 1927 novella Envy accuses a cafeteria director of dreaming to wipe away from the little faces of your babies their resemblance to you—that holy, beautiful, family resemblance, we can contextualize his sentiment not just within the novel’s own thematics of family resemblance (including a central scene of specular misprision), but within policies intended to eradicate the individual bourgeois household by arrogating to state kitchens the family’s raison d’être, the nourishment of children.²⁵ When fiction of the period replaces genealogical relations with blood transfusions, as in Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Red Star, or with a series of numbers generated by the Child Rearing Factory, as in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, it is important to remember that radical alternatives to the genealogical family were a matter of political policy and scientific research as well as the literary imagination. Bogdanov wrote Red Star before the revolution; after it, he headed a publicly funded Soviet research institute devoted to physiological collectivism—an immortal community of individuals linked by blood transfusions, which he believed was destined to supersede family ties in life, just as in his novels.²⁶

Many scholars have seen these Communist fantasies of a transformed society as continuations of the artistic avant-garde. In a 1926 manifesto, painter Kazimir Malevich envisions genetic technologies as fantastic as Trotsky’s. A new picture is formed by a new aesthetic activity. New animals are born in our modern factories, are colored according to our taste, and released in the world—apparently as brightly pigmented herds resembling suprematist canvases.²⁷ According to Boris Groys, early Soviet culture broadly shared this impulse to shape life after an ideal image, a visualization . . . of the new world and the new humanity.²⁸ For Irene Masing-Delic, the prototype of this aesthetic was philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s exhortation, in his 1906 Philosophy of the Common Task, to resurrect the bodies of dead ancestors in order to reconstitute the family of Adam; the crucial avant-garde concept of life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) similarly aimed for the transcendence of realism in an art that was to model life into an aesthetic text where the laws of current reality would be invalidated.²⁹ Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov explicitly compares himself to Fedorov when he advocates the common task of discovering linguistic principles for the whole family of languages and thus a universal tongue in whose verbal mirrors the whole itinerary from New York to Moscow would be reflected.³⁰ By linking poetic activity, a universal family of languages, and the mimetic function of the verbal mirror, Khlebnikov gathers together the basic ingredients of specular misprision.³¹ Avant-garde ambitions to create a universal idiom, the zaum language of Futurist poetry, can be compared to contemporary aspirations toward a universal kinship, whether a mystical family of Adam or a global siblinghood of the proletariat.

Because Russian modernism’s efforts to rethink family structure magnify the interaction of kinship metaphors and aesthetic figures onto a global historical scale, the period elucidates the complementary relationship of kinship and literature, and especially the metaphoric thinking that underlies both. Bely called metaphor the goal of the creative process; Olesha described his writing as a metaphor shop.³² For these authors, the kinship exchange dramatized in specular misprision represents the larger action of metaphoric figures—exchange, substitution, identity—and hence literature itself, since, as Marc Shell writes, literary works are composed of small tropic exchanges or metaphors.³³ Metaphor is also at work in the reproduction of labor, the substitution of children for parents across generations. Mark Turner notes that kinship relations give . . . our closest metaphors for metaphor itself. . . . From parent to child we see repetition and variation, similarity and difference.³⁴ What Danilo Kiš calls the universal myth of the chain of generations is an essentially metaphorical mechanism by which society understands itself to be a continuous entity although composed of successive elements, originating in the past and proceeding into the future without changing its essential identity.³⁵ A society that successfully reproduces itself across generations is like Theseus’s boat, whose rotten timbers, Plutarch says, were replaced so many times by new and sound ones . . . that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.³⁶

One philosopher who did not consider the problem of identity through time to be a mooted question was David Hume, whose 1738 Treatise of Human Nature contains a penetrating discussion on the topic. Because Hume explicitly contends that personal identity, literary works, and the social economy stem from a single kind of metaphorical thinking, his argument lays the ground for my own. "We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro’ a suppos’d variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness, notes Hume, while we also have a distinct idea of several different objects existing in succession; and this to an accurate view affords as perfect a notion of diversity, as if there was no manner of relation among the objects."³⁷ Although these two concepts of self-identity and succession are properly speaking opposites, the imagination facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage almost as smooth as if it contemplated one continu’d object.³⁸ This perception of identity between distinct objects is not only an epistemological, but an ontological error, for when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confin’d to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction—that is, a belief that is realized in behavior.³⁹

Hume’s attention to the fictions of equivalence between entities resolves into an interrogation of the concept of personal identity, a quality we attribute to a succession of different perceptions and mental states because of the union of their ideas in the imagination.⁴⁰ What we sense as identity, Hume argues in a famous passage, is not a continuous and self-identical ego, but rather our capacity to generate fictive connections between our different states—our capacity, in other words, for figurative thought. Without uniting principles in the ideal world, Hume writes, every distinct object is separable by the mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference and remoteness. ’Tis, therefore, on some of these three relations of resemblance, contiguity and causation, that identity depends.⁴¹ In modern critical parlance, these are the figural relations of metaphor (resemblance) and metonymy (contiguity and causation), by whose means the mind not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production.⁴² Figuration, or fiction-making, is according to Hume the very mechanism of identity, which cannot be said to exist until it is discovered or produced by symbolic thought. He explicitly extends this principle to the formation of social groups, as he cannot compare the soul more properly to anything than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members . . . give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.⁴³ From this point of view, the individual self, like the world as organized by human activity, is the product of a metaphorical operation.

In a passage that appears in some versions of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume engages in an excursus on literary form, arguing that unity of action in narrative art is likewise generated through the principles of resemblance, continuity, and causation, and that literary works present an especially profitable field, both more entertaining and more instructive than abstract philosophy, for formulating the figurative principles that underlie both literary form and social organization.⁴⁴ When novelists introduce familial identity as a key element in the figurative structures of a narrative, the figure can therefore be read in a double way: an invention of the literary imagination, but one that communicates with related social fictions. Genealogical tropes speak in particular to ideologies that articulate social class and the distribution of capital across generations, the reproduction of the conditions of production by which a society survives in a recognizable form across generational time.⁴⁵ In his historical study of the king’s two bodies, the medieval legal fiction that the hereditary monarch shares a corporate identity with his antecedents and heirs, Ernst Kantorowicz speaks of such conventions as a man-made irreality—indeed, that strange construction of a human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions.⁴⁶ The early Soviet period, which powerfully demonstrates the interpenetration of literary fictions and social policy, shows how figurative principles that arise in one arena come to extend into another.

Anthropological discourse has long stressed the fictional character of the family and demanded robust theories of metaphorical thinking in order to conceptualize kinship’s intersection with cultural and economic life. What confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character, writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature.⁴⁷ David Schneider has argued that social life is extended into fiction and fictions are implemented in social life through complex processes of figuration in which there is no readily identifiable proper and improper term. Consanguineous kinship itself is a folk biology, meaningful only insofar as it partakes of the fundamental system of symbols and meanings which inform and give shape to the normative level of action.⁴⁸ For Schneider, family ties are sometimes figured as genetic, sometimes hereditary, sometimes in emotional terms, and concepts like the perpetuation of the self in one’s own children are simultaneously images of the ties that bind and the continuity of life. Cooking and care may express these ties, but they also constitute the ties.⁴⁹ There is no proper term in the metaphoric relation that is kinship identity, because kinship is at the same time the fiction of identity that motivates economic behaviors, like cooperation and caregiving, and the economic institutions, like the domestic household or inherited wealth, that motivate the ideology of family identity.⁵⁰

Kinship thus articulates base and superstructure; it illustrates how cultural fictions inform social organization at the same time as economic structures determine cultural concepts. One model for approaching the interrelationship between cultural texts and economic phenomena is New Economic Criticism, which according to a programmatic essay by Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee asks how textual economy . . . mirrors economic conditions.⁵¹ Rhetorical and monetary exchanges mirror each other on a profound structural level, they argue, because metaphors by their nature imply relations of transfer and exchange.⁵² Their claim is anticipated in part by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argues broadly that language, kinship, and trade are all forms of exchange which are obviously interrelated, and that it is therefore legitimate to seek homologies between them.⁵³ Although narrower than potentially homologous systems like economic and linguistic exchange, which aspire to provide universal substitutes through the assumption that everything can be bought or named, heredity too assumes that one thing (a child) can be substituted for another thing (a parent) in order to instantiate identity. The involved relationship between imaginative figure and social and economic facts suggests that the study of literature—a discipline evolved precisely in response to the rhetorical morasses presented by systems of mutual figuration—is uniquely positioned to question, explore, and experimentally reconstitute the key fiction of the family. This is especially true in the early Soviet period, when both literary conventions and economic practices were being redefined. In fact, we might understand kinship as a realized metaphor, to use Viktor Shklovsky’s term for the emergence of figural elements into the real world of a novel.

Shklovsky first deployed this term in reference to Andrei Bely’s 1918 novel Kotik Letaev, a book with a central specular misprision scene.⁵⁴ Bely also influenced Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), which has been important to explicitly Marxist theories of culture in reinterpretations by Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, and others.⁵⁵ Shklovsky himself described defamiliarization in reference to Tolstoy’s 1886 story Kholstomer, in which a horse speaks of the human institution of private property in uncomprehending terms that make ownership, serf labor, and monogamous marriage seem absurd and immoral.⁵⁶ The term thus enters the theoretical canon as a critical technique for exposing economic relations as social fictions. Defamiliarization is a key mechanism of specular misprision, in which the reflex of recognition—a character seeing his image in the mirror—is short-circuited by a literary metaphor, thereby exposing an underlying ideology of kin identity. In the texts examined below, scenes of specular misprision dramatize some explicit understanding of kinship. Bely takes the one flesh of parent and child to symbolize an aesthetic unity; gothic plots characterize the self as a haunted house inhabited by its ancestors; and early Soviet fictions like Olesha’s Envy engage the alternative kinships promised by communism.

Like the materialist criticism that flowered at the same time, the major formalist concepts developed in the early Soviet period are relevant to literature’s relation with economic facts well beyond their original context. For example, the foot passengers traversing bad weather in the first chapter of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, "adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at these points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating