A Plea for Eros: Essays

“There Was No Such Thing as I”

Wegg’s labile, necrotic I reflects an anxiety he is able to express perfectly: “I should not like — under any circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here and a part of me there, but 1 should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.” Mr. Dolls, a minor character in the novel and a shuddering alcoholic wreck, cannot collect himself at all. His I doesn’t wander like Wegg’s. It has disappeared altogether. “Circumstances over which had no control,” Dolls mutters repeatedly, and, resorting to the third person, “Poor shattered invalid. Trouble nobody long.” Faithful to the book’s logic, the narrator refers to Dolls as it, not he. And, like Headstone, Dolls has a mechanical aspect: “The very breathing of the figure was contemptible as it laboured and rattled in that operation like a blundering clock.” Dolls’s I has gone underground, buried there with his real name — Cleaver, another word among many that suggest cutting and shredding. Mr. Dolls is a nickname given to him by Eugene Wrayburn because the ruin’s daughter is “the dolls’ dressmaker,” Jenny Wren. Mr. Dolls’s first-person pronoun has been drowned in drink, and without it he can’t engage another person directly. Dolls is a grown-up who behaves like a child. His daughter Jenny never calls him “you” or “father.” She prefers the infantile and more accurate “Bad Boy.” Young children often refer to themselves in the third person before they master the mysterious flux of the I, and Dickens’s novel is uncannily perceptive about this pronoun. In its pages the I is never taken for granted.

How does a person lead a coherent life with a stable self, whatever that self may be? Our Mutual Friend proposes a route to a whole or more or less whole self through memory, mirroring recognition, dialogue, and finally telling and fiction. As the connective tissue of time, memory is certainly essential to the internal narrative we create for ourselves. When I was hospitalized for a migraine in 1983, I was in a bed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital across from a woman who had suffered a severe stroke. She spoke rarely and only in fragments. Every day her husband came to visit her, but she had lost the ability to recognize him. She was a tough old lady who escaped the fetters the nurses bound her with every night, but she had no self that existed from one moment to another — no story over time. That had vanished. A number of years ago, a woman contacted my husband and told him the story of her husband, a gifted composer and musician, whose memory was destroyed by meningitis. He kept a notebook, and in it he wrote hundreds and hundreds of times the same exclamation, “12:00. Where am I? 12:01. Where am I? 12:02. Where am I?” And on and on. Trapped in the nightmare of eternal repetition, he was unable to connect one minute to another but retained enough self-consciousness in those isolated moments to feel his disorientation. It is hard to think of a worse plight than living in a state of continual agony without any context for it. For this man, time had lost all meaning.

One of the most moving accounts of a man’s struggles to regain a continuous identity is recorded in A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World. Luria’s patient, Zazetsky, was injured during World War II. Shell fragments damaged the left occipito-parietal region of his brain, leaving him with severe amnesia and aphasia. His field of vision was destroyed, and he had great difficulty recognizing objects, and even when he did recognize them, he often couldn’t name them. He also lost both sight and awareness of the right side of his body, suffered from severe body-image distortions, and discovered to his horror that he could no longer read. Despite his grotesque handicaps, he relearned the alphabet and attained a level of literacy. Remarkably enough, he was still able to write — especially if he didn’t lift his hand from the paper. Despite the fact that he had tremendous difficulty both remembering and reading what he had written, he recorded memories and experiences from his life. “It’s depressing,” he wrote, “having to start all over and make sense out of a world you’ve lost because of injury and illness, to get these bits and pieces to add up to a coherent whole.” Zazetsky clung to the idea of a whole, and he worked doggedly to try to create meaning from his memories despite the excruciating slowness of his task, but both his doctor, Luria, and Zazetsky himself make it clear that the fragmented reality of his daily life didn’t improve with time. He worked on the project until his death.

Unlike the stroke patient I met in the hospital, Zazetsky was painfully aware of what had happened to him — his self-consciousness remained intact. He had a recognizable self, but it was in tatters. Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms write about a patient with Wernicke’s aphasia in their book Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis, a woman who, like Zazetsky, was keenly aware of her affliction. “Oh yes,” Mrs. K. is quoted as saying, “I am in bits and pieces. I am in bits and pieces throughout my mind.” These morbid “bits and pieces” and the attempt to rebuild them into a coherent structure through language reverberate strongly with the central drama of Our Mutual Friend.

Drowning or almost drowning in the Thames means entering a frightening broken space that has slipping borders and in which things and bodies can’t be distinguished from one another, a place that is metaphorically connected to epilepsy in Headstone and to delirium in Eugene Wrayburn. After Eugene is saved by Lizzie from the Thames, the narrator tells us that his face has been so mutilated that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. While he is unconscious, Eugene’s feverish utterances are compared to “the frequent rising of a drowning man from the deep.” But then, in a moment of clarity, he says, “When you see me wandering away from this refuge that I have so ill deserved, speak to me by my name, and I think I shall come back.” This calling of a name echoes Mr. Venus’s tour of his articulated bodies and again has a parallel in clinical experience. In Awakenings, Oliver Sacks describes what he calls “lucid intervals”:

At such times — despite the presence of massive functional or structural disturbances to the brain — the patient is suddenly and completely restored to himself. One observes this, again and again, at the height of toxic, febrile or other deliria: sometimes a person may be recalled to himself by the calling of his name; then for a moment or a few minutes, he is himself, before he is carried off into delirium again.

In Our Mutual Friend, the act of calling someone by name is invested with this same restorative magic, one that promises at least temporary cohesion. Because a proper name is the symbolic site of the self in language, it is the linguistic marker of a collective, not private, reality. As such, it serves as a way out of unconsciousness or, in terms of the book’s literal and metaphorical drowning, a way up to the surface and from there out to other people. A word is essentially distinct from a visual image inside us because, when we speak, we hear ourselves speaking. By crossing the border of the body, a word is literally inside and outside us at the same time. The names our parents gave us mark us for life, providing a sign of continuity that yokes an unlikely pair — infant and old man. Names are powerful, and Sacks is right: Their utterance can bring you back or keep you awake.

Immediately after my car crash, I looked to see if I was whole and miraculously discovered that I was. Nevertheless, I froze. I didn’t move. I think I could have, but I didn’t. I knew that my husband and daughter had managed to get out on the other side of the car, and I must have been relieved that they were okay, but I don’t recall feeling this. Instead, I felt entirely empty, very, very calm, and after some time — I have no idea how long — my vision dimmed and grayed and I felt myself going under. Then, as if by magic, there was a man speaking to me. He reached in through the broken window from the side, put his hands on my face, and told me not to move my neck. I remember he said he was a paramedic who just happened to be walking by and that he had seen the accident. “I’m losing consciousness,” I said to him. “What is your name?” he said. I told him. “What day is it?” I told him. He asked me my name again, and I told him again. I am convinced that this simple dialogue, combined with the stabilizing touch of his hands, kept me conscious until the firemen arrived.

Eugene is repeatedly called back by Lizzie, but in his semiconscious mutterings he seems to be searching for another word he can’t find. Jenny Wren gives it to Mortimer Light-wood, who then passes it on to Eugene. The word is wife. Eugene’s movement is from unrecognizable near-corpse, a not-I, to being named and identified as a person who belongs to other people. Exactly the same threefold movement occurs in two short sentences spoken by Lucy Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. A door is opened onto the broken figure of a man, a man who has been confined to darkness in a tower cell for many years, a man who has forgotten his former life and his own name, a man with a voice so thin from disuse that it is “like a voice underground.” When she first sees this ruined person, Lucy says, “I am afraid of it,” and then a moment later, “I mean of him, my father.” The Dickensian shift from it to him takes a third step to include my father. Like wife, father articulates a human connection, and through this spoken bond a process of reclamation and recollection begins. This is the mutuality announced by the book’s title. The words Our Mutual Friend go beyond duality. They imply at the very least three people.

A crucial moment in the novel occurs when the hero, John Harmon, tries to piece together the story of his own near death, a story that took place before the novel begins, and after he has been living a painful pseudononymous existence for some time. “A spirit that once was a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier going unrecognized among mankind than I feel.” As the son of a punitive but indecisive father and a long dead mother, Harmon lives a ghostly borderline existence because he is unwilling to claim his rightful name by accepting his father’s will. He can’t be called back into a family. He returns to England “divided in my mind afraid of myself.” The self he fears is incarnated in the double, Radfoot, a man with whom he has been confused on board the ship that takes him home. Headstone’s inner division ends in death. Harmon nearly drowns, but he eventually manages to reunify his torn being. His monologue marks the beginning of that reconstruction:

Now I pass to sick and deranged impressions; they are so strong that I rely upon them; but there are spaces between them I know nothing about, and they are not pervaded by any idea of time.

I had drunk some coffee, when to my sense of sight he began to swell immensely … We had a struggle near the door …. I dropped down. Lying helpless on the ground I was turned over by a foot …. I saw the figure like myself lying on a bed. What might have been, for anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed and my valise was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard the noise of blows, and thought it was a woodcutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon — I could not have thought it — I didn’t know it — but when I heard the blows, I thought of a woodcutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.

This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot possibly express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.

It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and then a great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the consciousness came upon me, This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon struggle for your life! John Harmon call on heaven and save yourself! I think I cried it aloud in a great agony, and then a heavy, horrid unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there alone in the water!

Harmon’s telling is an agonized re-collection of the events that led to his near drowning, during which he loses himself as subject of the story he wants so badly to remember: “There was no such thing as I.” The monologue includes more wood and cutting imagery and a bizarre slide through “a tube” that precedes his regained consciousness. At first, Harmon is divided between the mirrored figure like myself (Radfoot) and the I. After the birth-like slide, his name returns to him, but he calls out to himself as if he were somebody else and addresses that other as you: “Struggle for your life!” Only after he has recognized himself as another, a separate and distinct whole being, does the corpse vanish, and he is able to assume the first person and his own story. In order for the self to exist, it must be able to represent itself as another, a mirror image, and the recognition of that whole self gives birth to the subject.

The fear of contamination Dickens’s traveler has for the dead body that keeps returning to him in his imagination has escalated in Harmon’s speech to the terror of complete annihilation. The abject weight that disappears underwater is no longer “1” or “you” but “it”—the not-I, or no longer I, not an other but an otherest. Harmon’s speech is the account of a man trying to pull himself together by remembering, despite the fact that his memory is both marred by the distortions of hallucination and filled with the holes of unconsciousness. The telling takes the form of an internal dialogue during which the speaker interrogates himself, “This is still correct?” As with Zazetsky’s need to record the fragments of his life on the page, Harmon arranges pieces of the past to articulate some kind of order despite his unstable state of mind. Drugged, beaten, intermittently unconscious, and then thrown overboard into the water, Harmon admits that his reflections are “deranged.” He has carried these sick impressions or memories around with him for some time, and remembering them isn’t enough; it’s the telling or reconstruction of the pieces that is therapeutic and eventually reassembles an identity.

It’s important to stress that the absence of a continuous self-narrative isn’t only pathological — the result of psychotic breaks, brain damage, drugs, or near-death experiences. Normal life includes making sense of fragmentary memories. As Henry Adams writes in The Education, “His identity, if one could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seems to remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces.” We all collect and re-collect these pieces through self-image, memory, and language. I have long felt the cleft between my inner memories and the telling of them. My own recollections usually appear as images accompanied perhaps by a sentence or sentences spoken by another person or by me, moments that for one reason or another are entrenched in my mind, but fuzzy patches or large gaps remain. Yet am-other corpse story will serve as an illustration. I remember seeing Mao Tse-tung’s preserved body in China in 1986.1 have a picture of the waxy dead man in my mind, but it is no longer perfect, and I can’t recall exactly how he, or rather it, was displayed. It was a peculiar experience but not a scary one. The body looked too unreal for that. I have a visual impression of the people around me — my sisters, friends, our Chinese guide, and others waiting on line — but they are not precisely drawn. I do remember clearly that my friend Eric said to me, “Why are hundreds of people waiting for hours to see his body?” Without thinking, I replied, “They want to make sure he’s really dead.” Our guide, who had suffered a humiliating and painful exile to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, started to laugh, and in her hilarity she began to pound me on the back. I remember the feeling of her hand hitting my lower spine, but I could no longer give you a description of her face. When I tell the story, however, I rely on the context of the experience and on the conventions of language, on syntax, to turn the bits of memory into a narrative that has the appearance of something far more whole than the various pictures in my brain. After I had told the story several times, the telling began to supplant the images. I had learned how to tell it, and my narrative of that little incident has taken on a solidity that my real memories don’t have.

It is interesting that this new fixity arrives only through the task of giving the story to another person. Memories that have never been told aren’t yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon’s monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the “I” addressing a “you,” because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener. Zazetsky wrote both for himself as an other and for real others. He hoped that his descriptions of his illness would be of use to those studying brain injury, and in this he triumphed: His writing has proved invaluable to researchers. It is this dialogical character of speech and storytelling that Dickens insists on as living, not dead, language. Through his telling, Harmon recovers the I Headstone loses. The only time Mr. Dolls says the word I in the novel is when he asks Eugene Wrayburn for a few pence to buy a drink. However pathetic Dolls’s request, he is engaged in a real dialogue and receives an answer. For a brief moment, he has situated himself in the axis of discourse and emerges as a subject.

Harmon’s full rehabilitation will come later in the novel. Mrs. Boffin, who acted as a surrogate mother to Harmon when he was young, is subject to strange visions of faces in the decrepit mansion where the boy grew up with his sister. One night Mrs. Boffin sees them everywhere: “For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a moment it was both the children’s, and then it got older. For a moment it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.” The strange face belongs to the ghostly hero of the novel, and when Mrs. Boffin fills in that blank, she brings the unrecognized spirit back from the dead and is able to call him by name. She also situates him in a narrative that is beyond himself, one that includes his father and images of generational resemblance that link parents and children in a mirroring vision over time.