A Plea for Eros: Essays

Seeing Things

Metaphor always changes the way we see things in our minds, When one thing is compared to another in a sentence, I merge the two in the mental picture I create while I’m reading. Dickens’s metaphors, however, are more radical than those of most writers because they dismantle the lines of conventional perception, and I am continually reorienting the images I see in my mind as I read his books. Normal vision is determined to a large degree by our expectations. We learn to distinguish things as isolated identities out there through the way our brains develop to order visual and linguistic material that make “whole object” representations possible. To put it simply, we don’t see a naked world but a visual field that has been determined by experience, memory, and language. Every reader of Dickens notices that in his work objects often have human traits and people often resemble things. This mixing of the inanimate and the animate is both funny and subversive. When Fascination Fledgeby wants to gain entrance to a house, for example, the reader is told, “he pulled the house’s nose again and pulled and pulled … until a human nose appeared in the doorway.” When the metaphorical nose is followed by a literal nose, the comic tension it creates undermines the status of both noses, making the “real” one appear alien and disembodied, as if it were floating alone in the dark space of a doorway. Dickens’s language plays havoc with whole object representations by breaking them down. Rather than isolate the human body from its environment and make neat distinctions between the living and the nonliving, Dickens confuses these “normal” separations until, over time, he rearranges our expectations entirely.

In Silas Wegg, Dickens creates a character who is already literally part object. He has a wooden leg, which the narrator tells us Wegg seems “to have taken to naturally,” perhaps because the man is also metaphorically wooden: “Wegg was a knotty man, and a close grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman’s rattle.” Both his body and facial tics are more thing-like than human. Then, in a chapter titled “Mr. Wegg Looks After Himself,” we discover that the wooden gentleman has been reluctant to give up what he has lost, and obeying a wonderful logic all his own, he goes to a dingy little shop in London and calls on himself:

“And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr. Venus?”

“Very bad,” says Mr. Venus, uncompromisingly.

“What am I still at home?” asks Wegg with an air of surprise.

‘Always at home.”

The first time I read this passage, I had no idea what was going on, but when it became clear to me that the “I” in this remarkable exchange is Wegg’s lost leg bone, I burst out laughing. In order to arrive at this “I,” Wegg has to wrench the familiar pronoun from its usual place and force it into another: He adopts what is normally the third person as the first. The French linguist Émile Benveniste makes an important distinction between what he calls the polarity of person and non-person: “There are utterances in discourse that escape the condition of person in spite of their individual nature, that is, they refer not to themselves but to an ‘objective situation.’ This is the domain we call the ‘third person.’“ The difference between polarity of person and nonperson is clear — in dialogue person is always reversible. I can become you, and you, I, while this is not true of he, she, and it. By moving the first person outside of dialogue, Wegg’s person has become nonperson, a leap that brings me back to Mr. Inspector’s earlier confusion about how he should address a dead man. The “I” bone, after all, is a corpse piece of Wegg, one that has made its way to the morgue a little earlier than the rest of him.

Wegg is only one of many characters in Dickens who has a body that has fallen apart. The novels abound with amputees, bloody messes, bodies that explode, disintegrate, or liquefy, as well as countless metaphorical references to going to pieces. In Dombey and Son, a train steams over Carker with “its fiery heat and cast his mutilated fragments into the air.” In Bleak House, Krook spontaneously combusts. In Oliver Twist, Sikes leaves the murdered Nancy “a dark heap in a blood-stained room.” In Little Dorrit, Blandois is crushed and found “in a dirty heap of rubbish,” his head “shivered to atoms.” In Martin Chuzzlewit, Joseph Willet loses an arm and Simon Taper-tit’s legs are crushed and replaced by wooden ones. In the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it’s obvious that Jasper has disposed of his nephew with quicklime, an acid that eats skin and bone. And this is the short list. The crushed body is a leitmotif in Dickens — an image central to the writer’s imagination. In Our Mutual Friend, this destroyed corpse becomes the vehicle for the obsessive question: How does one construct a self?

Wegg’s dearly departed leg is in the possession of Mr. Venus, a man in the business of articulating bones. I like to think that in this dingy bone shop Dickens gathered together all the smashed corpses from his earlier books and gave Venus the impossible task of rebuilding them. Venus faces three problems— seeing, recognizing, and finally identifying the fragments he has in front of him. Throughout the narrative, Dickens isolates each step, which echoes the realities of perception. In a dense fog I may see shapes in front of me but not recognize any of them, or, as often happens, I may recognize a face but can’t identify it with a name. Venus, underworld Encyclopedist that he is, sets about trying to order the bits and pieces of the dead from what the narrator tells us is “a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick …. among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct.” This “muddle” isn’t limited to the bone shop; it is continually present in the story from its beginning. The novel opens in the gloom of twilight on the Thames. The narrator points out two people in an unmarked boat, which has “no identifying marks whatsoever.” Four paragraphs later, the setting sun illuminates the craft’s hull for an instant, and the reader catches a glimpse of “a rotten stain” that bears “some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form.” Muffled and muddled are words that pertain to the whole world of the book. Perceiving what’s out there is difficult. Dust blows in the streets. Obscure figures appear and disappear. “Misty, misty, misty,” says another character, Jenny Wren, as she tries to make sense of who is who and what is what in her own life. “Can’t make it out.”

Making out the world is a perceptual conundrum in Our Mutual Friend, and Mr. Venus’s job is rebuilding splintered bodies. In a startling little parable about isolating, recognizing, and naming things, Mr. Venus gives Wegg a tour of his shop. “I’ve gone on improving myself,” he says, “until by sight and by name I’m perfect.”

“A wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto … human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Oh dear me, that’s the general panoramic view.” Having so held and waved the candle as all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named and retire again.

The candle makes the objects visible and recognizable, but it is the names that seem to call forth each thing from the murk and make it legible. Venus articulates his anatomies in space and in language, creating sense from nonsense through categorization. Wegg expresses admiration for the anatomist’s work by saying, “You with the patience to fit together on the wires the whole framework of society — I allude to the human skelinton.” By collapsing the “framework of society” and the bones of the human body into one, Wegg again makes a brilliant hash of things. Of course people in society need their bones, but the wooden gentleman’s allusion to this framework reverberates throughout the novel on two levels — how the body is represented visually in space and in language.

We all need to assemble ourselves, to have a working image or framework that we carry around with us as an inner representation of our own bodies, to which we attach an identity. Pathologies of body image, whether caused by lesions in the brain or emotional distress, make it clear that these representations are both essential and mysterious. “Phantom limb syndrome,” for example, in which amputees feel the presence of a missing leg or arm, and often suffer pain in it, is a form of Weggism. These people have an ongoing relationship with a part of them that has, in fact, disappeared. Anosognosia, another disorder, caused by damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, leaves patients unaware of what they’ve lost. They refuse to acknowledge what’s obvious to others — that they’re paralyzed or can’t move their left hand, or whatever their handicap happens to be. Others are afflicted with a condition simply called “neglect.” They ignore the left side of their bodies and the entire left side of space, as if it weren’t there. People with severe neglect may even deny, against all reason, that an impaired arm or leg belongs to them — reverse Weggism. Anorexics, bulimics, as well as many people who wouldn’t be considered clinically ill are also prone to deranged images of their own bodies. Contemporary Western culture is full of people who feel fat when they are actually thin, who obsess about their thighs and stomachs, their bags and their wrinkles, and even those who have a relatively stable body image are subject to mutations in their dreams. I lose parts of myself regularly when I’m asleep, often my teeth and hair, but I’ve also lost hands and feet. Distorted, partial, and broken visions of the body make it clear that these representations are far more precarious than we might like to think. It is precisely this inner fragility that Dickens maps with astounding acumen.

Wegg’s allusion to articulation is double. Words are articulated as well as bones, and language might well be called “the framework of society,” because it makes our collective life possible. In the world of the book, the word society refers to a specific group of characters, the most important of whom are the Podsnaps, the Lammles, and the Veneerings. Despite the fact that Mr. Venus’s shop and fashionable society couldn’t be more removed from each other in terms of the story, Dickens binds them metaphorically. They are linked by the morbid fragment, the piece or part, which, like Wegg’s bone, refuses to be incorporated into a meaningful framework — the thing that cannot be articulated. “I can’t work you into a miscellaneous one, nohow,” Venus tells Wegg. “Do what I will, you can’t be got to fit. Anybody with a passable knowledge would pick you out at a look, and say — No go! Don’t match!”

In a scene at the Veneerings’, Dickens’s “society” is depicted as a broken anatomy, not seen directly but in a mirror. The long passage is written entirely in sentence fragments, as if the piecemeal nature of what the narrator is describing has invaded his syntax.

Reflects mature young lady; raven locks and complexion that lights up well when well powdered — as it is carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk and his teeth.

As a reader, I see a depthless field of reflected shards, in which torso and teeth are equivalent to studs, buttons, and even talk, an image that again evokes the bits and pieces of Mr. Venus’s bone shop and his articulations of the “warious.” By using a mirror, Dickens clearly wants to depict society as a world of surface, artifice, illusion, as a veneer, but he doesn’t have to shatter the conventional boundaries of the body to do that. In fact, mirrors are the only place where we experience ourselves as a visual whole from the outside. The “I” takes the position of a “you.” Most of the time we see ourselves only in parts, our hands moving in front of us, our arms, fingers, torso, or our knees and feet. This total view of the body in the mirror is what led the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to posit his theoretical mirror stage, which for him meant the moment a child recognizes itself as a whole person in a reflection through the eyes of what he calls the Other, which is both a real other person and the whole symbolic landscape in which the child lives — namely language. Lacan was not Piaget. He wasn’t a great observer of children, and I don’t believe that his mirror stage corresponds to an actual event in the story of human development. Rather, it was his way of speaking to the fact that we as human beings are born without an awareness of our corporeal boundaries. Infants are fragmented beings who come together as whole selves only over time, and the borders and categories established in language are crucial to the creation of a separate and complete idea of the self. This psychoanalytic model of development that moves from a fragmentary to a whole body image becomes more potent as an idea when it is linked to cases of brain damage or mental illness like the ones I mentioned earlier. For Lacan, the person seen in the mirror represents a form of therapeutic wholeness, a kind of ideal body, one that is never completely achieved because it has been built over a substrata of fragmentation.

Whenever things are going to pieces in Dickens, the reader can be sure that identities are wobbling and the smell of death is in the air. A moribund quality pervades Dickensian society. These are people who, like Wegg’s bone, escape articulation. The aged Lady Tippins, for example: “Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name any fragment of the real woman may be concealed is perhaps known to her maid.” When this bonnet-and-drapery shakes a fan, the noise is compared to the “rattling of bones,” a sound that echoes a comment Eugene Wrayburn made earlier in the novel. Looking down at the bloated corpse of Radfoot, he quips, “Not much worse than Lady Tippins.” The morsel on the traveler’s plate is reincarnated in biting satire. The question is: How can you identify with a name what you can’t make out?