OUTLASTING DISAPPOINTMENT UNDER POSITIVE LAW

In Bleak House, Dickens revisits, more than in any other of his novels, the complexity of expectations that is at the center of Bentham's project. He shares with Bentham a sense of disappointment about the complex ways the common law is practiced. However, while his text displays a high degree of formal complexity, Dickens does not, generally speaking, allow the reader to diagnose specific social problems of complexity, which the text depicts, as symptoms of an identifiable cultural crisis.

Among Dickens's novels, Bleak House stands out because of the unique wayit combines encyclopedic density with formal innovation, engaging in semantic and, to a degree, semiotic problems of order and coherence. Bymeans of a specific formal disintegration in terms of length, density, and closure, the text participates in, and is meant to influence, symptoms of what many of Dickens's contemporaries perceive as the role of the law in social and psychological disintegration. However, their perception of unconnected symptoms of disintegration on the level of responses to legal practices may already express a defensive mechanism.