A Plea for Eros: Essays

Floating Signs

There is no magical connection between words and things, or as the Old Soldier put it in David Copperfield, “Without Dr. Johnson or somebody of that sort we might have been at this present moment calling an Italian iron a bedstead.” Every once in a while, I find myself staring long and hard at a word I’ve written, a word like than, and I wonder what in heaven’s name it means and if I have spelled it correctly. At moments like this I come face-to-face with the utterly arbitrary and mysterious character of language. The sign or, as semioticians would have it, the signifier, the inscribed letters t-h-a-n, seems to float away from meaning and sits there on the page in front of me, stark naked and absurd.

Our Mutual Friend is a book that insists on the chasm between words and things. The comedy of “Lady Tippins” is that this name, supposedly meant to designate a whole and visible person, refers instead to an ad hoc collection of mobile feminine accoutrements. Society, however, is indifferent to the world out there because it fetishizes the name over the referent. The fact that Tippins can’t be made out at all is of little importance. When Veneering runs for Parliament, he hopes that the powerful Lord Snigsworth will “give his name as a member of my committee. I don’t go so far as to ask for his Lordship; I ask only for his name.” Veneering bribes his way into office, so that, the reader is told, “he may write a couple of initials after his name at the extremely cheap rate of two thousand five hundred per letter.” He exchanges pound notes for the letters M.P. As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is the ideal nonsensical sign. I have always found it amazing that in exchange for paper I can get a book or a dress, that the stock market actually rises and falls on rumor — mere talk — and that people trade in something called Futures, as if such a thing were possible. I accept that all this is part of my world, and yet I continue to find it bizarre. Dickens obviously shared this bafflement. As powerful as it is, money refers to nothing real. Currency floats. Dickens reiterates Marx’s idea of money as society’s founding gibberish, as “the general confounding and compounding of all things — the world upside down.” When money is hoarded, it becomes even more meaningless because it buys nothing. It just accumulates like so much wastepaper.

Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth as the three dry letters L.S.D. not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.

In an age when designer labels and celebrity names are used to sell everything from cars to lipstick, when meaningless slogans and lyrics and acronyms are constantly beamed and displayed and written on screens and billboards and the covers of magazines, when right-wing politicians hammer out the same empty phrases ad nauseam, corrupting words like freedom and truth until they are no longer recognizable and refer to absolutely nothing, Dickens’s satire on dry letters is hardly irrelevant to us. The ugly side of this is that such nonsense has power when it is delivered in the guise of authority.

As a young man Dickens studied shorthand. He called the cryptic squiggles of this new alphabet “the most despotic characters I have ever known.”

The changes that were wrung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing and in such another position meant something entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours but reappeared before me in my sleep.

I have a similar relation to numbers. Algebra, in particular, remains impenetrable to me. Many people can remember struggling in school under the weight of some unfamiliar set of hieroglyphs they were supposed to master and being threatened with failure if they didn’t. Children are expected to digest all sorts of arbitrary systems, and the demands from on high can be crushing. Despite the fact that he fathered ten children, Dickens, the writer, never gave up his position as a child. He identified with children and with the child-like — those who are not in power and who suffer under the fickle and often sadistic demands of those who are. The list of brutalized children in Dickens is so long that I could fill up pages with their names. But unlike Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield, where the miseries of having learning beaten into you by a cruel schoolmaster or stepfather are played out fully and poignantly in the stories of particular characters, Our Mutual Friend addresses the abstract nature of paternal authority itself.

The dead father, the missing father, the estranged father, and just the distant father are all figures of loss that reverberate deeply in life and in literature. Fathers are essentially different from mothers because we were all once in our mother’s bodies, are born out of those bodies, and as infants take food from them. Paternity is more distant and less direct than maternity; it’s a claim we accept as children, one inscribed in our legitimate, that is, legal, names. In Our Mutual Friend, a number of fathers never appear in the flesh— their bodies are out of the story. Like the letters and names that float in “society,” the paternal figures in the book are also figures of the paternal—more despotic characters that children find indecipherable, difficult to understand or speak to. They appear as signs or images of the law that can’t be addressed directly, because the person they refer to is either deaf to others or missing altogether. As a description of the law, this makes good sense. In societies that aren’t absolute monarchies or dictatorships, the law doesn’t reside in the body of a living person. It is written—inscribed in documents that proclaim rules, which carry the threat of punishment when broken.

Dickens’s patriarchy — Lords, MPs, judges, and fathers— are by and large an inscrutable group. Some of them exist only as paper or letters. Harmon Senior, dead before the book begins, speaks through the multiple “last testaments” and codicils he hid around his property, each one dispensing his money in a different way. There is no final will, no coherent word, just contradictory edicts. Eugene Wrayburns father appears only as an acronym, M.R.F. (Most Respected Father). In the imaginary arguments Eugene conducts with M.R.F., the internalized father crushes the son with his blanket prohibitions. Another character, Twemlow, has a father figure as well, the tyrannical Lord Snigsworth, from whom Veneering solicits a name only. Like M.R.F., Snigsworth never appears bodily in the narrative. He is only represented by a portrait that hangs on the wall. What we do know is that when Twemlow visits Snigsworthy Park, he is put under “a kind of martial law.”

All written language has a ghostly aspect — the disembodied voice speaking to you from the page — but Dickens’s paternal signs are also oppressive, fickle, and drained of meaning. When the fathers speak, they use the language of a mad king on a distant mountaintop issuing directives that merely confuse the poor subjects below who are expected to act on them. There is no dialogue with the fathers — the talk runs only one way. It’s easy to understand why Kafka admired Dickens so much. K.’s peregrinations through alien corridors inhabited by dirty bureaucrats and invisible authorities resonate strongly with Dickens’s bewildered children trying to locate and interpret the mysterious despotic signs hurled down at them from above. These are the words of dead languages that disguise rather then delineate reality. When Podsnap is told that six people have starved to death in London, the bourgeois patriarch makes the familiar argument that they deserved it. Twemlow, modest spokesman for the child’s position, objects. Podsnap swiftly accuses his guest of “Centralization.” Twemlow manages to reply that “he was certainly more staggered by these terrible events than he was by names, of howsoever many syllables.” Centralization is a word like freedom. In the mouths of politicians, bureaucrats, and ideologues, it is used to disguise the dead bodies that lie beneath it and the particular human stories that belong to each of those lost lives. At its worst, this language is only noise. The twentieth century and the new century we have now entered provide us with countless examples of ideological terms used to hide and distort the politics of neglect and murder.