A Plea for Eros: Essays

Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment

“WHENEVER I AM AT PARIS, I AM DRAGGED BY SOME INVISIBLE force into the Morgue. I do not want to go there, but I am always pulled there.” Charles Dickens gave this sentence to his narrator in The Uncommercial Traveller, but he used the same words to describe his own compulsion to look at dead bodies: “I am dragged by invisible force to the morgue.” In 1847, this unseen power lured Dickens again and again to the Paris morgue, and on one of those visits he found himself enthralled by the disfigured, bloated body of a man who had been drowned. Sixteen years later, Dickens would begin a novel about drowning, Our Mutual Friend. It was to be the last book he finished before he died. The image of that nameless dead man lying on a slab in the morgue must have stayed with Dickens over the years like a ghost waiting for a story. The tale he came to write attacks the problem of the corpse with a full arsenal of verbal weaponry — humor, irony, and pathos. The dead body was Dickens’s muse, the catalyst that generated the writing of Our Mutual Friend, the abject thing that launched a torrent of words to do battle with the truth every person faces: The corpse is my future. I will die.

The closer I find myself to death, the more threatening it becomes. The time I saw an open wound on an operating table, I fainted. A few years ago, I was in a car accident. Right after the crash, my vision blurred, I was overcome with nausea, and although I managed to retain consciousness, I went into shock. Even after I had been released from the hospital and sent home with the knowledge that I was only banged and bruised, I woke up with a start for several nights in a row to the impact — the sudden terrific blow that shattered the windshield and crushed the car around me. I felt it in my body as if it were happening again exactly as it had happened, and in my terror I was jolted awake. This dream image had no relation to other dreams I’ve had; it was brief and isolated — a reenactment of the moment the van hit us. I suspect that this “dream” was closer to traumatic memory. Soldiers in wars and victims of crimes or disasters may suffer from these unwanted memories for years — gruesome fragments of experiences that can’t be digested because they don’t make sense. The mind resists categorizing horror — it doesn’t know where to put it — but traces of the incomprehensible may linger nevertheless; no longer fully conscious, they seem to float outside of place and time.

Dickens’s traveler is drawn to view a body in the morgue, and then after he has seen it, he begins to imagine it everywhere. He goes to the baths and has a fantasy of the “large dark body” bobbing toward him. When he accidentally gulps down some bathwater, he recoils, thinking he senses “the contamination of the creature in it.” Still later, “that very day, at dinner, some morsel on my plate looked like a piece of him.” Although the body the traveler saw in the morgue was whole, he is haunted by a corpse that is both leaking and falling apart, a loathsome object that threatens to enter him as bacteria or food. His repulsion comes from an anxiety that the protective barrier between him and it will shift, fall, or crumble. Horror movies play on this fear all the time — that the dead are, well, not dead but moving about in the world, usually chasing some howling young woman. Although fantastic, these films don’t lie. Eventually, death catches up with all of us.

Early in Our Mutual Friend, the reader encounters the first of several drowned bodies. A police inspector has taken charge of the corpse, but he has trouble knowing how to refer to the thing in his custody. He first addresses the dead man as “you”; then a little later, he announces to a bystander, “I still call it him, you see.” Mr. Inspector is the first of a number of characters to have pronoun difficulties. What does it mean to call someone you or him? When does he turn into it? These are ultimate questions, and they are posed relentlessly in the novel. When I defended the dissertation I wrote on Dickens at Columbia University in 1986, Steven Marcus, the Dickens scholar and author of From Pickwick to Dombey, asked me if I thought Dickens knew what he was doing, if he knew that his work was metaphysical. I said, “No,” and he agreed with me. But in art, knowing isn’t everything — the unknown often pushes its way to the surface. In recent years, neuroscience has demonstrated that Freud was surely right in this sense: A huge part of what the brain does is unconscious. And every novelist can tell you that while writing, things happen. You don’t know why the characters or their words appear to you or where they come from, but there they are, and often these peculiar ghosts and their voices, rising up from nowhere, are exactly the ones that are most crucial to the story.

The novel’s plot turns on the identity of the drowned man Mr. Inspector calls “you,” “him,” and “it.” This body is hauled from the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, who then hand the corpse over to the authorities. The papers found on the body lead them to identify it as John Harmon, son of a London dust mogul and heir to a fortune. With the son dead, the money goes to the Boffins, The Golden Dustman and his wife, formerly loyal servants to Old Harmon. Silas Wegg, a sly observer of the Boffinses’ new wealth, plots against them. A cash reward, offered for information leading to the perpetrator of the crime, inspires Rogue Riderhood, a low-life river rat, to a deception that takes him to the offices of Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood, lawyers for the Harmon estate. Riderhood then falsely accuses Gaifer Hexam, the man in the boat who found the body, of murder. This brings the highborn Eugene Wrayburn and the lowborn Lizzie Hexam together, and their love story begins. But the authorities are wrong. The body found in the river did not belong to John Harmon but to George Radfoot, a friend of Harmon’s who bore a resemblance to the heir. This mistake allows John Harmon, who has been away from home for many years, to pose as someone else and become a spectator of his own death. He changes his name to Rokesmith, goes to live in what was once his father’s house, works as a secretary to Boffin, and there observes the beautiful but spoiled Bella Wilfer, ward to the newly flush servants and the woman to whom he has been given in his father’s will — his marriage to her being a condition of his inheritance — and their rocky courtship begins. Through social connection or simple coincidence all the dispersed elements of the story intersect: Lizzie and Bella meet. Bradley Headstone, schoolmaster to Lizzie’s brother, and Eugene Wrayburn are thrown together and become rivals for Lizzie. In the grip of a terrible and fatal passion for Lizzie, Headstone allies himself with Riderhood. Mayhem ensues. Riderhood, Headstone, and Gaffer all drown. Eugene Wrayburn almost drowns, but in the end couples are united, the wicked are punished, and most of the good characters seem headed for the fairy-tale state known as “happily ever after,”